Violet

Optimist: The glass is half full.
Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Physicist: The glass is full: half water, half air.
Pedantist: Actually it's more like 55-45%.
Essentialist: Who cares about measurements? There is water in the glass.
Chemist: What glass? It's polyethylene!
Existentialist: Is there actually a glass, or is it a construct of our collective consciousness?
Surrealist: The nectar of the clouds has yet to fill its prison of sand.
Realist: Who cares? Let's just... What the hell?
Opportunist: *swallows and sets down the empty glass.

I wore my new bikini to go tubing this week and noticed these lines on my stomach...

I read a thread by @Impossible_PhD@hachyderm.io that made me think. I'm writing my own post rather than adding to hers because I don't think what I'm going to say (which is still forming in my sleep-craving brain) fits there.

I consider myself to be extraordinarily lucky. Blessed. Hit the effing jackpot in life. The moment I was reborn, around 3:45 pm on August 10, 2023, it felt like two halves of me, which had started to drift apart in the tumultuous week since my egg cracked, slammed back together, forming a complete person for the first time in my life. I still had a lot to figure out, but I was mindfully pursuing the nature of my essential being, not just shouting "why me?" into the void, like I had done for the previous five decades.

Dysphoria hit me like a hammer over and over, *wham, wham, wham!* (Now where have I seen that before? 😉) I covered it well and maintained my joy because every hammer blow, no matter how hard it hit, was a Virgo Supercluster better than my previous existence. My face was too masculine, but it was *my face,* not just a foreign mask in the mirror. My body was too muscular, but it was a body I had worked hard to build and maintain into my fifth decade of existence. My voice wasn't the resonant alto I desired, but it was a clear-as-a-bell tenor from years of singing. Despite my size and shape, I could find affirming clothes that fit me and looked damn good on me. My hair... Well, I'm still dealing with that dysphoria, but it's slowly growing and filling in. The fact that I will most likely never have any affirming surgery... That will always hurt, but my recent epiphany puts that into perspective.

That epiphany had several components:
- Fully internalizing the attitude that I don't owe it to anyone to "pass," to fit anyone's image of what a woman has to be - not even my own ingrained image, beaten into me by a ruthlessly binary world.
- Fully internalizing that my gender is something I create continuously as I live my life. My physical sex defines nothing. My chromosomal sex is irrelevant. In the dipolar fields of sex and gender, I'm the best of both worlds, but bound by neither.
- *I* am *me.* Any other descriptor is merely a label. And as I say frequently, a label is merely an incomplete attempt to describe a complex being. Even my five-part label is just a tiny crayon sketch meant to convey the most basic concept of a vast, multi-dimensional, dynamic fractal masterpiece.

I'm not singling myself out as a masterpiece; you are too. We all are.

But perhaps the greatest realization was the meaning of life. Because everything *does* happen for a reason. My best friend came into my life so I could give her the spiritual support to realize that she loves her life, and loves the beautiful being she is. I met another friend so she could realize that it's okay to let go. Another friend gave me a concept to describe my primary drive; she called me a light worker. Even my current job I found to be there for a young coworker who is on their own gender journey. And while scrolling through Facebook of all places, I found an opportunity that may help me brighten my light and share it with more people in a more significant way.

And all of that meaning is real because I create it.

Each one of us may merely be a complex set of chemical reactions that exist at this moment in the history of the universe, but those chemical reactions are so complex, they create a *self.* And that self creates its own meaning.

I am extraordinarily lucky. Blessed. If life is a game, I've won, and I intend to continue winning. But this isn't a game where one player wins and everyone else loses. When a winner shares their prize, they help others achieve victory.

To me, that victory is being completely, irreversibly, unapologetically my *self.* In the face of my being, even my lingering dysphorias don't stand a chance.

Found on Facebook. Attributed to James Baldwin.

@WrenArcher@beige.party
Funding might be a challenge, but I'm on EI (employment insurance) right now, and they often provide assistance for education.