Sparks to Flame, the Inner Journey of Ember

Sparks to Flame, the Inner Journey of Ember
by Ember Leonara

“Haven’t you known this your whole life?”
“How did you survive so long without telling anyone?”
“Well, she thought she married a straight man”
“Why did it take you so long to come out?”

This piece will answer these confusions.

My name is Ember Leonara. Now the name leaves my tongue like fire, a flame set against the cold to warm your soul by. But it wasn’t always this way. My name used to fit like a jacket that was too tight, the type that if you stretch too far might rip, and did in fact, many many times, as my sewing kit became worn beyond use.

What many people don’t seem to understand was that this wasn’t so much a secret I kept close, but an Ember kept barely smoldering underneath the ashes piled on through a lifetime of conditional love, transactional relationship, and the associated heavy mask that came as a result of my attempts to survive in such circumstances. Like the distant feeling of heat, only discoverable upon enough digging through every attempt to relight the fire.

The first feeling of heat came through my softness, my authenticity, and my honesty. For the longest time, I thought everyone was playing the same game in life , just trying to desperately have a moment of being themselves in a torrential downpour of familial and societal circumscribed behavior. Anxiously waiting for the one moment they could breathe above the surface.

There was some tangible recognition earlier on that I was different. I even questioned as a young child whether I was gay, was in many ways back, then was the catch all phrase to suggest somewhere beyond the way everyone else felt. I remember having playtime with soft friends and girls and feeling like I could connect better than I could in the dominator-inclined, competitive blade of the world of many boys and men. I grew up at a time when people used the word gay as a slur against those on the outside. And I grew up in a family that made fun of gay people, and trans people, with a couple of patriarchs that on at least a few occasions mentioned that if any of the children turned out gay or trans, they would disown them. Partial jest or not, and beyond my comprehension for a long time, those familial spoken and unspoken rules imprinted my young mind, clung to my soul, like a past bath in used motor oil.

I escaped and dissociated early on deep within the cyber world of video games. I’d often choose the healer and support character, always preferring the role to support from the rear of the group rather than rushing in with armor and weapons. I often felt my identity in these cyber and later online worlds felt more real than the role I was being molded into in my default life. I’d bring video game instruction manuals to school to read after finishing my work as an intelligent student that never had much trouble with grades. My friends and I would focus on which quest we would complete and speak about them over lunch, or a dinner paid for with the spare change our parents gave us. We quickly shuffle back to the game world, and if possible, I’d stay up all night, searching for a quest to once again find myself. Unlike many trans people, I now remember, I was deathly afraid of choosing the female characters and only chose them a few times, even though they were my favorite configurations. Almost as if the walls of containment kept my truth chilled, even when no one was looking.

From an early age, I played soccer. And from an early age, I remember not wanting to play soccer. There began one of the major splits of the conditional love loop in my life. I always wanted to make my parents proud, and for a long time I felt closer to my father than I did my mother, both of them having trouble with soul-to-soul conversation, and as a result, it was my achievements, my mirroring of their wishes for me, that resulted in the connection I so desperately sought. As often cited by my dad nowadays, and rebuttal to my pointing out of his lifelong cold distance, he was my soccer coach for as long as he could muster. For me that meant the best way to connect with him was to make him proud on the field. Even from an early age, the cracks in the split became visible in the way my feet shuffled and stuttered when I was about to kick a ball. My father hired trainers to help steady my gait, to shout at me until I walked and kicked and performed in the correct manner. I never stuttered anywhere else in my life, this being the result of the pressure my nervous system was under even before I was a teenager. I remember crying a lot when on the soccer field and after the soccer field and the night after the soccer field. As if every little misstep, every mistake, counted against me in my ability to be loved by him. To be clear, it wasn’t that my father would often shout at me, it was more that that was the singular channel of our connection, playing or watching soccer, and that his dismay at my mistakes or my softness or my nervousness meant that I was broken. Even through college, I would cry on bus rides home, shaking, wondering how I was gonna explain to him the mistakes I made on the field. I’d have to hide my tears from the other very masculine soccer players, feeling like my softness itself made me less of a person, deserving of being on the outside somehow. And when the game was finally over, from childhood to college, all I wanted to do was escape back into the video game, the world where I could be accepted as me, as whoever I projected myself to be from the core that came authentically and was not so much conditionally bound.

My early relationships mirrored the poems I had written about love and romance since before I was a teenager. At least from my perspective, it felt like a storybook. It wasn’t until later that I realized I never acted like any other guys did. My relationships formed like platonic friendships that through enough time chatting, moved into laying in sheets within parks, sharing love songs and picnics, confessing love through long, long shared notes in school, and the safe haven of cute pet names to create a bubble of softness that the world couldn’t touch. I’d sing love songs on every car ride, with all the power in my lungs could muster. And when I gained enough courage, I would ask to be a little spoon, a plea to be seen that at first felt like a violation of who I was supposed to be, yet began to slip through the cracks as the years went on.

My first year of college let more of the light through the cracks that were forming in the mud that had crusted over my soul. The first Halloween I spent in the dorms, a girl in the room down the hall suggested she had some fairy wings that I could use when I mentioned I did not bring a costume. Somehow, the soft part of me reached and went shirtless with a pair of tight underwear, not as costume, not as jest, but as the truest part of me, finally getting a space to breathe away from the control of my previous life.

The college I attended was picked purely on reasons of being able to start on the D3 soccer team, something that to me felt more like I was on a moving walkway at an airport to a destination I never chose. Thrown into the bundle of the men’s soccer team, somehow I survived by staying in my own room when we traveled, by being the shyest one in the locker room, always wondering why the coach was yelling that we had to crush the other team when all I wanted was to shake their hands and appreciate them for allowing us to even have a soccer game in the necessary polarity of gamesmanship. When the game was over, after my tears were wiped, all I wanted to do was return to the video games. There was even one instance, where my roommate had two girls over in a party situation, asking to borrow my strobelight so they could give him a lap dance. And even though I still chuckle at this, there I was in the corner of the room still playing a video game while it all went down.

I met my ex, Shauna, very early on in my college experience and we moved in together immediately. I think for her, she found a fountain of love that constantly spurt out of me, never before having had a true place in my family to land. In her, I found a place where we could call each other cute names, “ree” and “baber,” dress up in the same cute Halloween costumes, and snuggle under blankets while watching endless episodes of whatever show while sipping matching Boba tea. I was planting the seeds of my softness in a way that I still had no idea where they would grow to.

Experimentation in college meant the circumscription of my previous two decades began to unravel, albeit slowly. Much of this began when my early psychology professor in this private college announced in class that used in the correct manner, psychedelics were safe. Instantly my brain recognized my favorite musical artists that had clearly been associated with the use of psychedelics and plant psychoactives, and so the first time I dove in, not for kicks, but to heed the call of that little voice beckoning from the back of my soul, the canary in the coalmine of my becoming.

With the doors of perception knocked off the hinges, the light began to pour through. One friend joked that I began the rave scene at my university. We’d throw these parties right off campus that I dubbed underwear dance parties, that could only be birthed through the type of shameless connection born of the MDMA experience. I suddenly found myself in an environment where I could be cute, soft, expressive from my core, and no one would blink an eye. Where cuddle puddles were common, and gender bending clothing didn’t stick out as weird. Experimentation led to beginning to define myself in the only ways that I could at the time, in the only ways that my mental bars that I was peeking through would allow, “soft” and “bottom.” They didn’t have to do with kink, it had to deal with the only chance I had found to feel like myself.

Despite my constant curiosity of interactions with men, it’s like no matter what I tried here and there nothing ever felt like a click. Even when I got brave enough to engage in some small way, mostly at some sort of open psychedelic-fueled party, I’d almost instantly recoil, not only from a lifetime of shyness, but also just feeling like the male on male configuration wasn’t honest to my soul. Later I would discover this is common amongst trans women, who only felt the click once they had stepped into themselves.

The rave scene and later Burning Man became my haven. It was a place where I could dress like I wanted, dance like I wanted, and discover myself through deeper and deeper layers of the onion process of my individuation. The scenes were free, free in a way I’ve never experienced before. Not the type of false free choice given to us in our choice of sports team or political party or college path or brand choice, but rather a temporary autonomous zone of free expression, bending rules beyond figmentary dichotomy and binary. Even through the hesitating chains of my previously circumscribed life, I began to purchase women’s sparkly and holographic leggings, expressing my softness through shaving my body and wearing what pieces my own clutching to my softening masculinity my ego would allow. After the party, I would dance in my room alone, to revisit the same type of allowance and reception in the freedom that I had found expressing myself through the cracks of a Flame that was just beginning to set ablaze.

After college, I went straight to law school, not because I wanted to, but because I still was stuck on that airport walkway that just wouldn’t let me off, to a destination that felt so predestined I could not feel another way out. There is an evening where my father yelled at me that I just had to go immediately to law school, that somehow I’d burn in eternal regret if I didn’t make that choice. Choice. Funny, I was a grown adult, and seemingly could make my own decisions, but that’s how deep the conditioning went. In the end, I truly felt like I had no choice. Acceptance, love and success were a lifelong imprint handed down in a manner that my mind could not waver from. Maybe just maybe if I achieved what I knew that I could, they’d really love me, they’d really accept me, and I would finally find some fabled version of success.

Somehow, I was the one to walk through law school thinking, this is just what I was doing for now before the next stage of my life would break through. That is, despite working tirelessly to achieve the grades to maintain scholarship, and later to pay for student loans, something would have to break through from beneath that would allow me to finally be free. I never knew then that what I was waiting for was me, my authenticity, and the chance to finally spread my wings and fly from the nest that had kept me corralled my entire life. When I finally graduated, I remember the man who gave the graduation speech saying “Remember why you did this,” and the only thing I could think was: to support my family and to make my dad proud. Later, the moment I came out as trans they would both drop me like a sack of potatoes.

I survived by holding my breath as long as I could before the next event that I could show myself and feel myself. Eventually, I found Burning Man. And instantaneously upon my first steps on Playa, my first memories were noticing the way women dressed, held themselves and expressed themselves. Still, the fog was so thick and my becoming that I would utter phrases like “ just because I have XY chromosomes, can I not act like that or dress like that or express myself like that?” I’d mirror the softness I saw on women, the way they wore their outfits, or their molten expression of femininity dancing on stage.

Overtime and with enough bravery, I began to mold my life both on and off Playa into what I had soaked up into the most honest part of my soul. Outside of work, I would never wear what I thought were male-coded clothes, eventually changing immediately after work or even sometimes bringing clothes to change into right after I got done with court. I’d revisit those expressions as many times as I could in the default world, constantly daydreaming of my next time to burn and fully express myself.

Eventually, the dancing that originally sparked by watching the women come alive on the Playa, led to my own burlesque performances. I danced to the girliest songs as possible, and still didn’t see what was right in front of my eyes. I’d question with half-thoughts in my brain whether certain moves would be too far for my cis-presenting appearance. Still each song was like a silent prayer to the deepest part of me, and I figured if I performed it on stage with my full heart, with choreography I had planned for weeks, there’s no way someone could make fun of me, at least not in the same manner. Shauna, my ex, came to a couple of my burlesque performances, but would later describe me as pressuring her to watch my dancing. What she never saw and still doesn’t realize, is that I was trying to let her into the softest parts of me, within the only ways that still felt acceptable, even from my broken, emerging frame.

Other women would notice my softness at the Burn in small ways, calling me soft names like “sweetie” or “angel,” and something would click in me that just felt right at the deepest level, something that I couldn’t even fully grasp in those small moments. Still, I began to notice what I called “the click,” an emerging softness, a change in my gate , the way I held myself, the way I communicated with others, how comfortable I was in my own skin. One night within Burning Man 2022, I broke through my own hesitation and performed my burlesque on Playa. I danced for two women who to my mind had to be dancers, because the moves they showed me after I gave them my dance clearly displayed a high level of passion and skill that came from the same root. At the end of the experience, one of the girls looked at me in the eyes and told me “Honey, the world needs your beautiful expression.” And that was one of the first major keys. I told her that beyond whatever sexiness we had shared in our dances, she had truly given me the greatest gift at the burn, seeing me deeply and sincerely.

When I wasn’t dancing in person, I began to dance in another haven that I stumbled upon, virtual reality. In VR, I found another temporary autonomous zone that dissolved cultural boundaries in a way that I could feel free. Still only partially conscious of the very circumscribed prison bars that kept me in, I began to spend more free time there, finding flight in virtual worlds. I more easily began to say, I’m not like the other guys, and that I’m a “soft bottom.” Around the same time I really began to open up to Shauna about my desires, to be held as little spoon, to receive, and to be seen in my softness. Where my quest was a constant opening, I see now she met my vulnerability with an encroaching iron curtain. Her reaction to the way I was opening was to close, and because this was a chain reaction that could not be stopped, overtime we grew more and more distant. Each request from me to connect in my openness was met more often with distance, delay and closed doors, defining my pleas to connect as “pressure.“

In July 2023, I wore a pair of tight shorts to a beach in Lake Tahoe. My father yelled at me with the type of vitriol that could be heard through the walls of the little breakfast restaurant we found ourselves in later. My own sister was brought to tears, and when I found her crying, I asked “ what happened, who hurt you?” to my surprise, she replied, “you, you can’t wear those shorts.” When I tried to find solace in Shauna she was silent. All I wanted was to breathe, to feel like me, but each time that I stepped out, the walls got a little closer.

Around November 2023, I finally found a key that I’ve been looking for my whole life. I was neurodivergent. As a late-diagnosed neurodivergent person does, I began a deep line of research that led me to the concept of masking. The question struck me at the deepest part of my heart, “what have I been masking?” Why was it that at Burns I found myself on tables dancing, crying, wondering where the realest part of me had been slumbering? I also began to wonder if I had ever truly been accepted by my family. So the day after Thanksgiving, when we all gathered, I tried to broach the subject by letting them in into my interior world, the decades of anxiety and depression, the rock bottom thoughts, even as a teenager, always wondering if there would be a day I could finally breathe. My family wrote it off, told me I was either faking, or that they never needed help, so why would I? My mother said she should’ve never had children. All I was asking for was connection, permeable, vulnerable, authentic connection. And at that time, I never saw that they were not capable of it.

Over the course of the next year and some months, I tried again and again and again to explain the softest parts of me. It wasn’t just my parents that were against me, shutting every door in my face, Shauna began to echo their same sentiments, telling me earlier on that she was “putting her foot down against this.” Against what? I thought, I was only trying to express the deepest parts of me, finally for the first time in my life. This began the hardest crucible I have ever entered into, being erased from those that I had planned my life around, not knowing that every time I step forward with more bravery, they would pack me back into the box they believed I needed to be in. Sometimes this came through silence, sometimes this came through disinterest, sometimes it came through telling me to perish from this earth to my face, or calling me a cockroach, or Hannibal Lecter, upon the presentation of softest self.

I’d plan for days or weeks a new presentation, often with charts or poems or new songs, not knowing that the very presentation of my softness, authenticity and vulnerability is what was triggering them to shut the door and burn every bridge leading to my true self. I would cry. And then in the crying I would plead, often loudly, not knowing why my most honest, softest, bravest presentations of my life where being met with the most vitriol, hate, and distance I had ever received. They called it instability. They told me I needed to be institutionalized. And eventually, they helped take away my children, leaving me alone to ponder if I could be brave enough to remain on this Earth.

As I opened, they closed. I lost everyone. My four siblings. My wife. My parents. Even extended family. The story painted onto my still smoldering Ember was that suddenly, even after working nearly a decade of criminal defense, it wasn’t that I was trying to express the deepest parts of me, it was that I had gone insane, and somehow instead of expressing care or concern, their chosen behavior was to close the door on me, lock it and throw away any key. Of course, in order to keep up their deepening distance, the story of my instability had to be spread. I began to lose every friend I ever had, as not only Shauna, but my siblings and my parents were telling everyone that somehow I was either dangerous, unstable, or otherwise not worth contacting somehow. All while I was a girl trying to set myself free through sleepless nights, oceans of tears, and yelling into the void until my voice tore.

I began to survive completely on my own, and while Shauna suggested that I was “pressuring” her with constant rants about my identity, I eventually returned her dismay with a true boundary for the first time in my life. “I’m not fighting you,” I said, even etching the sentiment into permanency through song lyrics (a fight is a word to describe a contest, not a request for love). I began to sleep upstairs, and told her that I would continue to work for the family and await whatever time she finally felt comfortable enough to speak to me about my gender. That conversation never came. Near the end I took her out to a public dinner and she wouldn’t even lay eyes on me. At the end of the dinner, she told me “I don’t like the person you’ve become, and I don’t know if I can be with you.” This wasn’t a reasonable conversation in the best interest of the children, this wasn’t I can’t be with a woman so let’s talk about it as partners of 15 years, this was a door slammed in my face. Someone I thought I knew, now too afraid to even look through the peephole.

I would come home crying, after a whole day of criminal defense, giving my soft heart to people, wondering why my softness was never returned, never held. I didn’t want to have my kids see me in such a state if I could help it, so I’d go downstairs, cry on the floor, sometimes trying not to drown myself in my own tears. Shauna would turn her phone off, tell people that I was yelling, and that she needed to separate herself from me because of the way I was treating her. What she was really running from was my mirror. Authentic vulnerability is the kryptonite of someone who’s never truly looked into their own soul.

In an around the burns of 2024, I pled with Shauna to help me express my softness in front of others. What I couldn’t see then is that she never intended to. My very vulnerability was the friction that began to siphon any true connection between us, as avoidance had no room for my expanding authenticity. In an intimate setting with a couple of friends, despite weeks of trying to have her help me project my emerging identity, she mentioned nothing to them and later blamed me when I cried about my own anxiety over not fitting in. She would literally and figuratively run from each new opening of a deeper part of myself. And until I learned to truly stand for myself within that softest part, within my womanhood, I chased behind her in tears, begging to be seen.

At Christmas of 2024, I came out to my entire family in one of the bravest acts of my life. Later, my father would physically attack me, yelling into my ear in a desperate act to finally douse my Flame, “you’re insane, you’re insane, your not trans, there I said it… what everyone else wanted to say.” My siblings and mother, who witnessed this act, would later say that I triggered him, and that somehow his anger was my fault. But by that time it became more apparent to me, it wasn’t that I was broken, it was that they never wanted to let the light in. When I woke up the morning of the 26th, I found a text message on my phone from Shauna saying she had taken the kids to her parents house, as if I was a monster who unveiled the Manhattan Project rather than the truest softest part of me. My family must’ve helped her rent a car to take the kids away. I drove home alone desperately trying to breathe between the wailing sobs. I called Shauna’s sister Allison, who is transgender herself, who I know went through a long battle with her own parents, and she quickly hung up on me and called me the narcissist. I drove all the way home from Oregon, wondering how I would keep my Ember alight any longer.

I never wanted to lose my marriage. I never wanted to lose my family. I just could not survive any longer in the prison I was born in. I needed to breathe or I would perish. For myself, for my children. I tried for years to express this, and in the end, choosing love, choosing sovereignty, choosing truth meant walking my own path. No one would ever choose this path for attention, the type of path that people love to hate. I was a respected attorney, a tall cis-presenting person with a good job and family around me. I lost everything when I chose myself. But let me be clear, I never turned my back on love. I was rejected by those I loved most, while still loving them through the darkest times of my life.

I took my first HRT dose alone in a parking lot, immediately after picking up my prescription just days after the nightmare Christmas scene. Now I’m 9 1/2 months into transition. My family has weaponized silence. Shauna divorced me, wielding the legal system as an extension of her avoidance. “Talk to my attorney,” she would say each time I tried to open the door again. To this day, her and I have never had an honest conversation about my gender. Still, to everyone else they have projected that it was my fault, that I have gone insane, unstable, and too dangerous to be around the children. They can’t admit to themselves all I ever wanted was to be me. They’ve lived a life of never truly letting the light all the way through, to admit that I was telling the truth the whole time would be to let a light in that they’ve shut out their entire lives. To recognize me now would be the collapse of the scaffolding they’ve used as shields around their true authentic heart. Now, when I look into their cold eyes, if we ever do cross paths, I can see they’ve never truly stood up for themselves. Despite the pain of being ostracized from everyone I’ve ever loved, I’m so proud of myself for freeing myself from those bars.

Even though I’ve transitioned alone, while still paying bills and working as a criminal defense attorney, and despite surviving more hate than ever in my life, I’ve found moments that bring me to tears. Not tears of sorrow, but tears of the purest joy I’ve ever experienced in my life. Admitting finally who I am in the open. What I like. How I like to be received. And even though I’ve never truly been held by a man, I was taken out on a VR date early in April, where a guy took me to play VR mini golf. He let me win, he told me bad jokes, he held me from behind even virtually. And I sobbed. Sobbed in the joy I’ve never felt before. My insides were finally becoming my outside, albeit small ways. And the world was finally noticing.

My sister is now leading the Burning Man camp that I’ve been a part of and creating traditions within since 2016. She kicked me out this year and said that I was insane and didn’t contribute enough last year when I was crying to Shauna for days in my own trailer, trying to express the softest parts of me. Still I mustered the courage and financial scraps I could to attend Burning Man 2025 completely on my own. And even if I spent the entire burn alone, I was received in small but impactful ways. I was called stunning, I was called beautiful. Not only for the way I appeared, but the soul that I expressed as I poured it out on stage in Center Camp. And even if I watched the Man burn alone, I watched it standing as my sovereign self, instead of sobbing into cracked mirrors that had never stood in their own reflection enough to see me or hold me.

My connection to my children has been reduced to zoom calls, often without a sure position for them to actually see my face or even hear my voice. Sometimes I’m left on a shelf or the call is muted as I try to plead to be heard. In the background, I’m misgendered, left to explain my becoming through a tiny digital window, within an environment that’s already deadset on erasing me.

In the legal case against me in family court, my own blood has helped my ex take my children away, while they vacation with her, celebrate with her, and see my kids through her, while not once knocking on my door. They’ve twisted stories against me and made up lies like that I’ve been prostituting myself, while I am surviving against all odds as the most honest version of me I’ve ever strided within. They’ve put on court record my methodologies of my own coherence, soular topography and other engines of spiritual survival, as evidence of my insanity. They’ve tried to drug test me only to find out I’m sober. The judge set an order that said the only way I could see my children was through my father, my number one abuser, a man who the same judge later admitted that he knew, while at the same time misgendering me again and again. They continue to try to throw ash only to find out, I’m Flame. Even though I haven’t seen my children since April (this is written in September 2025), I’m burning in a way that will never be put out no matter what happens to me, and as such, my children will find every remnant of what is being burned through.

I’m still representing people in court as I wind down my private practice. Families and clients will tell me I’m the best attorney they’ve ever had, or they’ll tell me that they love me to my face, while my father walks the halls behind me as if I’m a ghost that never existed. Strangely enough, it was much easier, and I feel safer, coming out in Las Vegas in the world of criminal defense than to my own family.

Still, I’m finally me. Now I’m finally free. Now I feel myself embodied in every moment. If I was given a choice between $1 trillion and how I feel now, I would never ever ever choose the former. Now when I look in the mirror, I see myself. Now when I look for my beauty, it emanates from inside me, rather than being desperately clawed at from the outside. My body finally feels like mine. My softness has finally become embodied, no longer something to be hidden or masked. My attire finally fits not only my exterior, but also my soul. I will continue to stride not only for my own coherence, for the coherence of a world that never learned to stand in its own sovereign signal, for my children eventually read about and know my path, knowing I never let my Ember go out, no matter how dark it got, no matter how many ashes were thrown on top of me.

My name is Ember Leonara. I’m so happy to be me.

#TransAndStillHere
• #SoftnessIsSurvival
• #SheSurvivedThat
• #EmberDidNotBurnOut
• #TransJoyIsResistance
• #HoldUsOrLoseUs
• #ThisIsTransStrength
• #TheyTriedToEraseMe
• #SurvivalIsRevolution