Oh god, why am I writing this?

Introduction

I’ll try to write a short article about this.

I came out for myself on 2023-09-27, I had suspicions but the egg was hard to crack.

In five days I’ll “celebrate” the end of my first year of being myself, truly.

Even though this year has been eventful it felt wildly different from what my past self could ever imagine to live.

I came out to my friends, my family, my coworkers, basically everyone where I had a relationship (work,friends,family).

I achieved some things, like dropping all my old clothes, starting makeup or getting my official name changed.
But still, I feel like I rushed some things and feels like I should have taken more time to think about it.

I got pushed into fem clothing while I wasn’t ready for that, so I spent the year experimenting with different styles.

In the end, I think I found something that I may like? We’ll see.

Life is a sine wave

Some other thing that I learned is that I’m not as stable as I thought I’d be, my life is a sine wave with highs and lows happening regularly. But at the same time, there is another sine wave at the same time in my life, that one is linked to my transition.

It means that there’s lows where I’m just reflecting on myself, taking my time, thinking, planning, considering options.
And there’s highs where I need to get things done. It’s on these highs that I got most of the stuff done this year.

Sadly, these two sines aren’t aligned which ends up at a weirdly shaped signal (I’m sorry, I’m using mathematical figures to illustrate because it’s something that feels the most representative, also check out the Fourier Series it’s awesome!)

While these sines are different, they have time when they overlap, which are the moments where I feel happy and productive.
There are also time when they don’t, so I would get forcefully pushed upwards but still feeling like shit.

Being alone is no fun

When I started, I only had my mushroom homie as help.
While it helped me a lot, I quickly ended in a roadblock where I felt issues about legitimacy and being lonely.

Coincidentally, I stumbled about the TDoR on the day that I came back from a trip.
I was tired, not fond of the politics surrounding the event (I historically had issues with politics, my current views are different from what they were not that long ago.) but I decided to give it a go with said homie.

We were around 50-75 people downtown.
It was a truly touching event, I cried there. Multiple times.

The people were taking turns at talking about different subjects, some were talking about aggressions in the streets, others about the 394 murders of trans people in europe in 2023.

Somehow it was a talk from a cute girl with really long hair about gender validity that made me cry the most.
Even though all the talks were impactful, that particular one was exactly what I needed at this moment.

After the talk we had to move the lit candles onto a “monument” which was a hand-crafted banner, somehow I managed to stain my overcoat with some candle wax, even burned my hand because liquid wax was overflowing onto my hand.
It burned, but it felt like nothing compared to the heat I felt from this event.

At the end of the event, we helped to clean out everything, managed to talk with the one with that impactful talk.
I discovered that she came with her wife from the vicinity of my grandparents home (the far right area) which was truly shocking!

I managed to get people’s signal IDs since they were exchanging them a bit earlier.

From this point onwards we kept talking. A lot.

Family Friendly

Eventually, one or two months later, with advices from that friend, I ended up at monthly trans-related meetings. We discovered a lot of people! We had a lot of memories altogether.
As of today they all feel like my chosen family ("la mif" as we say)

Pride

Around june, there’s a lot of events surrounding the main “Pride” event.

This year, there was a dedicated trans section, which we attended.

To this day, I don’t really know if it was a good idea or if I should have blended with everyone else to just enjoy the party.

The feeling for this part of the movement was more akin to a protest. I still liked it though, but it wasn’t the main reason why I was there.

The best memories (there’s two of them) were:

• Seeing a group of drag in front of everyone, standing at the entrance of the tribunal, rising their fist in the sky and seeing everyone in the event doing the same.
  It felt so fucking powerful.
• Seeing everyone singing about cops because they arrested someone during the event.

Summer

At this part of the year, I started shaving everything, I had a fixation on body hair and couldn’t sleep if I felt hair on my arms or legs.

I also started wearing shorts (never going further than the knees).

I became more confident with myself.

I even allowed myself to try out a dress and later, leggings.

Conclusion

Even though it was an eventful year, I’ve never been happier overall, I’m looking forwards to what’s to come!

I’ve been dreading to write this article since may-june but because of the complexity of how I wanted it to be and how I felt, never managed to do something productive before now.

Cover photo by Mark Harpur on Unsplash.