I choose joy. Floating feels best.

“The body is only an instrument for the spirit.

The body is not hidden from the soul, nor is the soul hidden from the body, and yet the soul is not for everyone to see.”

-RUMI

As I was sitting in a waiting room until 3:30pm on August 7th, 2012, waiting to be called for surgery, I had a lot of time to reconsider my decision. So focused on the outcome, I didn’t wonder if I would someday have regrets. 

On this anniversary celebrating 8 years since that step of my physical transition, I had time to consider what to share, if anything. If it would be a picture...of some measurement of my “progress”.

Having fully processed my process, I realized no picture would be appropriate. Despite the temptation to reveal a body I feel really proud of, both for the heavy lifting I’ve done of late to be strong externally to counter the internal fortitude needed now, and how it has helped me move through the world these past 8 years. Despite the popular pressure to measure value and worth by the Form I embody. 

On this anniversary, I have very few regrets. But I do have some. And I relish them.

Ever since learning how Dalai Lama modeled this in one of his many teachings, as a Buddhist of 20 years, I’ve learned to relish sitting in my regrets as a means to more fully embrace the complex and miraculous journey of my Life. And while there have been many life changes and identity transformations, ranging from my religious identity to my career choices, my transition played a particularly profound role in my personal transformation. It allowed me to transcend beyond my physical form, which is ironic since it was the impetus of the whole process. 

Form needed to first matter for it to not matter at all. Growth happens in contrast.  

It allowed me to see Life so differently through the same eyes because of how I experienced myself through the eyes of other people. Unhooking from other peoples’ perceptions and projections happened only once I had allowed myself to be hooked. It allowed me to learn boundaries and my own limitations and develop more compassion for other people. It allowed me to feel contempt and resentment, so I could learn to overcome those dark human emotions. It allowed me to learn almost limitless patience and kindness and empathy and also experience profound, gut-wrenching grief. And maybe a small handful of people in my life, actually only two, know the actual depth of this internal transition and transformation. And while I feel gratitude of such gravity that it sometimes brings me to my knees, it is tempered with some realistic sadness when people think of my transition as “my story”. When they confuse my presence and purpose here. When they think who they see is the totality of my complex, dynamic Self. This is what we do to each other,  including ourselves, until we stop doing it. And we stop doing it when we learn our own version of what my transition taught me. 

So I understand. So much. In ways I know some people don’t think I do. And that’s because I either fail to find the words or don’t force myself to share them. As time has passed, the words I say often fall on deaf ears or, on a good day, right into the ones that need them most! I’ve learned to meter them out and manage myself as I go.

The right people get, as I do, that I have evolved so far beyond my Self and in such a way that wouldn’t have been possible had I never changed my physical form. 

That’s why I regret sharing pictures of my body publicly in the past and in the present. I regret focusing on the mere superficial aspect of such a massive spiritual evolution for as long as I did. I regret reinforcing that a body even matters. I regret aspiring to adhere to the ideology of the Hermeneutical cisgender male form. I regret not knowing these things until they were revealed to me through a painful, perfect process. I regret even having regret about any part of my transition. 

Because one of the many gifts of my transition has been distilling down, through my processing of complex interpersonal trauma, what it means to be a person moving through Time and Space. It allowed me to interrogate and revisit what I thought I understood and what I thought mattered before I identified, to myself first and then publicly, as trans and what has come to matter to me since. My rigorous Buddhist philosophical practice has enabled me to disentangle my worth or value from the body I inhabit. Only through this transition could my soul came to the surface. 

This is profound. And yet, with my soul still so unseen, my form continues to be what’s visible and, in these times, it is regarded as “Other” in a society that defines its population by a gender binary of Male and Female, despite research and evidence proving the existence of a viable and obvious spectrum.  Through my experiences inhabiting different forms, I learned inherent truths about how perception informs and influences human behavior. And what I’ve experienced has both upended and reinforced whatever concept of reality humans conceive they are perceiving. 

People fear and thus avoid Love based on what they think they see and believe they know, about themselves and likewise about others. But most of us hardly even know what we don’t know. And our lives are our lessons of learning and unlearning all of this. It is one of the greatest tests we’ve been given to evolve beyond Form into Love. 

This is my belief born of my transition.

My transition certainly didn’t begin that way. It began by wanting to change a body. And gradually I saw how all humans do this to some extent, struggling to accept the mold into which we are poured, and it became a profound spiritual process. It felt impractical for me to not wonder about the evolutionary purpose of a trans person. I don’t know how many transgender people share this experience because Spirituality is available to everyone but not always chosen. To some transgender individuals, and cisgender people alike, shifting and changing our bodies is all some people focus on or hope to achieve. And that’s what I did initially for two reasons. One, because I live in a social culture that perpetuates physical form as the supreme ultimate of our existence here. And two, because I had inhabited a body for 34 years and had no reference point for what moving through the world as another perceived gender, via my perceived sex, would be like. How would it impact me psychologically and emotionally? I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t ready to conceive of that answer. Are we ever ready, really, for the most profound moments of personal breakthrough?

I was merely on my path where I needed to be. And back in 2012, gender transitions focused on physical transformation. All over YouTube, the early-adopters and trailblazers were posting videos of photo montages and updates at various stages. Attaining a cis appearance was the goal for many, not all, people who chose to transition. It was ideal to look as “male” or “female” as possible. Rarely did videos delve into any kind of existential inquires or speak to various social aspects of transition. Some people addressed these things but often it was adjacent to the primary focus: to look different. To pass. To pass to be normal. To pass to be normal to be safe. Because trans bodies are targets, in similar and different ways to all bodies. 

This was something I struggled with when I considered my own transition. I gave good thought to if and why I wanted to look differently after spending 34 years in a body I hadn’t despised or rejected for most of the time I lived within it. As my soul began to outgrow it, I was uncomfortable towards the end but I hadn’t ever felt unsafe or objectified in that form and didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t prepared. 

But because it was what so many people spoke about, because we were years ahead of non-binary and genderqueer being more widely accepted in our society, I just settled into that being what I should want and focus on when sharing about my transition, too. 

We trailblazers took a lot of the brunt of what has become more culturally commonplace and normative today. And I can’t even claim to be an early-adopter. There were so many braver souls who took on the process of public transition decades before I made my decision.

My particular transition was a perfect storm of public exposure and personal rejection in some primary relationships, a process unique to me but also plainly common. My new body was already wrong before it was even a thing. This body, as the temple of this Soul, because I shared about it, became everybody’s business. In 2012, people in my life were ignorant and ill-equipped to support the complex grieving process that my transition became—first as a physical shift and then the mental and emotional changes that ensued. Self-employed, enrolled in graduate school full-time and without any semblance of stability in the basic core needs for a human being, my daily existence was complexly traumatic. Many people didn’t understand this or seem to possess the capacity to care.

This is how we all co-exist.

And this wasn’t clear to me until several years in, when enough time passed to reveal deep core wounds and coping skills that served me in the short-term but were costing me some long-term side effects. 

I regret sharing something so personal when it was simultaneously and increasingly so traumatic for me.

I regret punishing myself when my trauma limited my self-expression and my desire to be kind superseded my own self-care.

I regret putting others’ needs and curiosity and comfort level before my own. 

I regret not speaking up more powerfully in defense of myself.

I regret internalizing the rejection of other people.

I regret feeling responsible for the grief and comfort and safety of other people.

I regret the time I’ve lost when I confused other peoples’ projections onto me with what my own identity truly was and IS and continues to reveal.

My process of transition, as a person, has been both publicly and privately deeply rewarding and very difficult, the latter always preparing me to hold space for the Human Problem, so not one moment of it has been in vain. I now understand how all people feel about their relative difference(s). I now know how many people feel alone. I now know how many people of all different identities relate to my process and feel seen and heard and valued and less adrift in their loneliness. Now I deeply understand how Difference doesn’t really exist but it certainly does until it doesn’t for us All. 

Once it became obvious, I began my deep and thorough healing process. It’s been a long, slow, intentional climb toward deep clarity, inner confidence and unshakeable self-acceptance that I want all Beings to know and feel and share—that feeling of being chosen as we are because we first choose ourselves. 

And from this seat of stability, I feel profound Joy and Pride along with these precious pangs of regret, which is only possible from masterful interrogation, reflection and introspection. It is from deep looking and inner wisdom that true transformation is only ever possible. 

Probably the most challenging part, because I am a human alive in this place in Time, has been trying to share my unique narrative vulnerably and authentically. To give my voice and lived experience power and purpose while speaking into the void of pain and prejudice of certain people who often patronize me from their own discomfort and perpetual projections of low self-worth, self-esteem or self-acceptance. People of all identities confuse my words with their own limiting beliefs. Instead of being inspired, many find it easier to pity or berate me. This is sometimes baffling but then I remember this is how internalized oppression plays out. There’s a pecking order to maintain among people who prioritize materialism and the physical form. 

Seeing things as they are doesn’t mean I’m separate from the collective suffering here. I’m living more fully among it than I ever was. There is no person here who is perfectly content but, if we’re lucky enough to see it, we get to push our way toward joy each day. 

Joy is possible. I hope that sharing my particular transition experience is proof of that, because it’s part of the whirlpool of the current cultural narrative that portrays trans people as victims of society based on their perceived difference. It’s a perfect paradox: our mere visibility, in an attempt to normalize ourselves, exposes us to further risk and the perpetuation of the victimized narrative. It’s not my narrative, partly by my choice but mostly by my privilege. 

For eight years I’ve been paddling furiously, trying to reach the shore of some perfect solution to share this. To spread the ubiquitous power of self-acceptance. Of late, I’ve stopped paddling. I’m simply sharing for the souls seeking something that exists only when we can See it by unseeing, which is a certain kind of consciousness.

After eight years of paddling against the current, I’ve simply chosen to float.