Some transformations are visible, others happen quietly, beneath the us people see visually. Before transition, survival often looks like performance, a daily rehearsal of someone the world finds easier to understand. This poem lives in that space between roles, the version of me that endured, and the version of me that finally stepped forward.
Becoming the One Who Stayed
You would not have liked me
if you had met the woman I was
pretending to be.
Playing her part cost me a lot.
She wasn’t full of whimsy.
She didn’t know the
happiness I have found.
So how could she be full of positivity?
We spent a lot of time together, trying to
share our misery with anyone else,
until we knew it was time for her to
leave and for me to emerge,
changed.
Poet’s Note
This piece reflects the emotional distance between who I once had to present to the world and who I am now. Transition changed more than my gender marker, it changed the way I experience joy, community, and the possibility of being fully present in my own story. The person I used to perform was not false because she lacked meaning, she was necessary for survival. Letting her go was not an act of rejection. Simply put it was an act of becoming.
Transition did not simply alter how I am seen, it reshaped how I exist within my own life. It gave me permission to stop negotiating with survival and start building something steadier, something honest. The person I am now is not separate from who I was, but proof that endurance can become arrival.
