Hope is a dangerous thing. To grasp onto a lifeline, to reel yourself in, to be reborn under surgical lights. Then to wake. Oh my, to wake and feel the bliss of knowing one’s true self. They say that to be me, to be in this body, is pain wracked and fever tree, yet what could be more beautiful than knowing one’s true self and living that to the end of your days?
To be me, this person shape thing flowing through and around the world like a spring flood. To exist in this form of mine, this body shaped by chemicals old and new. I am formed from the love of many hands, moulded by many minds, curated and cared for by compassion and hope. From the cradle I was loved, my parents fused me with joy, nourishing me with tenderness. The say to be trans is a cross and a scourge, I stand sentinel against that to show that no matter the mark on your birth certificate you can be your own person reborn in your own hope.
It takes a leap of faith to become yourself, for me featherlight and gentle breeze. I was born, reborn, and incarnated thricefold. In become this person I stepped outside the protective walls of gender surety, entering this vast hinterland of options and language yet to be claimed. Being trans, being this woman I became, is more than body, more than the form mutable to knife and chemistry; it is something so innate, so wrapped in hope, that it defies logic. It becomes its own thing, I become my own unicorn, a thing of pure imagination writ as large as anything Wonker could create.
Being trans, coming out, is a promissory note to your future, an understanding that hope does indeed conquer fear. To be me, to be things beyond what they say we could or should be, is a statement of self-truth, nothing to do with anyone else. My joy is in the moments of self, the frisson of understanding wrapped in whatever fabric I choose to wear. My shape, my joy, my body, hope.
In all the years of being me that hope, that understanding, has never dimmed. My promissory note to my older self was settled years ago, not under some Thai sun but on a quiet afternoon with a cup of tea. I knew, in that pit of the stomach gut feeling sort of a way, that I am me. Not a shadow, not a fake, not a pastiche of anyone or anything. My totality is me. My hope, that hope the young me cried and yearned for, was never squandered. Hope is indeed a dangerous thing, but somethings it is the only lighthouse we have to keep going, and the safe harbour at the end is the older self looking back and thanking the younger you for getting there.
