I’m Still Here
9/5/25
Being coherent doesn’t mean always perfect or happy or tolerable. Love can hurt, honesty can ostracize, and vulnerability can estrange. That’s the wedge I’ve been walking. I wouldn’t be breathing if I wasn’t honest, if I didn’t have to turn my inside on my outside and make authenticity a lifeline.
I’m a trans woman. You know, the type everyone loves to hate, to belittle, to judge, to project upon, and to disqualify. I started transition on the verge of 36. That’s the type of age that immediately gets wide eyes, the type of stares that whisper “oh, well good luck,” or “its too late for you,” or “why’d you choose that, especially now?” But I didn’t choose. I was honest. I was true. I was bushwacking through a familial and relational field that threatened my life since I was a teenager. Forcing me to force myself down, mute my softest parts, and never burn bright enough to feel my own heat.
“Do you feel better now?” The question hanging off the lips of past relations that look at me like the strangest science project in life’s gymnasium of presentations. They hear my response but don’t see the endless nights of survival I cried alone, the times I was told to die from those I had built my life around, the thick morass of sovereignty-siping environments that tested my ability to hold the Ember of my heart through every possible suffocation, learning to hold my breath while walking the bottom of the ocean. “Yeah I’m finally me,” they receive from my brightening smile like a sunrise finally crowning after the darkest, longest night.
“Well your family will come around in time,” they always suggest, not hearing echoes of my screams driving home alone, every door having been shut in my face repeatedly from everyone around me. They don’t feel the heavy ash blankets of gaslighting, accusations, manipulations, and organized silence that have been tossed again and again in attempts to douse the only ember I’ve kept lit. “It can’t be your whole family right?,” they suggest, sometimes puzzled, but often already judgemental of my testimony, glazing their stare into the type of judgement that lands like a dart into my heart already full of myriad holes from the years my own loved ones used me as the dartboard of their own fractured projections and loops.”You must have some friends, right?” Now staring in disbelief at the magnitude of the situation, cresting into a inability to truly grasp the width of the sorrow, the heaviness of the ash that was thrown upon me, the lies, the monkeys set to fly at their behest, their resolute war to make sure I’d never rise again, the poisoned waterway of stories now fed into the entire village.
I’ve been alone for nearly my entire transition thus far. Not one knock from anyone beside one uncle, my godfather, who has walked a similar path in some ways but fights his own intense battles. From the outside, the lies, like a smoke screen, allows for those who knew me to believe that the same family that wished me to perish somehow supports me, that the same lineage that holds the erasure like a weapon against my identity couldn’t possibly be hurting me if they say they support me in small public comments and rebuttals to my tearful confessions. I’ve screamed sorrow into the void night upon night, rebuilding myself from whatever Flame I could still muster to gather from beneath the dump trucks of ash my family, my ex, and my ex’s family keeps on the 24/7 hiring clock.
The most insidious part is that the same bravery that had me cracking through the ash, the judgement, the calculated coldness, the countless nights I had to hold the image of my children’s faces as the final tether to this life, the tears that filled an entire room and floated me above the fake transactional version of love and support I finally was freed from, is the exact same courage they flip into madness, instability, and proof that I deserve to be separated from my children. Where I had to learn to burn clean, more honest, more vulnerable, into a softness that saved my life, they took my tears to mean failure, a need for institutionalization, and a reason to scream into my face that I should perish from this Earth. All the while they shoveled more ash into the grave they already dug for me, never recognizing that was just another layer for me to claw through with bloody nails and the wellspring of tears that melted the ash to alkaline dust, a testament to my unyielding resilience and ability to live through every dismissal, deflection, and attempted deletion of my womanhood. ‘You’re crazy” says their cracked mirror at the Flame that refused to extinguish.
And still, when I manage a smile, walking around in a dress and tights, iced coffee in hand, I know in my marrow I’m walking the only path that leads to life, love, vitality and coherence. The only path I could walk for my children. A saunter into softness. The same softness that refused to die, that I can finally recognize not as a dim ember in my heart, but the Ember in the mirror, smiling back for the first time with full depth, full presence, full tone.
I’m Ember, and I’m still alive. And even if they can’t say it, I’m so happy and proud to be me.
