Poem on my trans journey (took a longgggg time to write 😋🎀)

Recognition

For years she had been translating herself.

Not from one language into another,

but from herself into something easier to understand

a vocabulary with fewer dangerous words,

sentences that could survive dinner tables,

answers that did not require anyone to stop

and ask what she meant by I.

There were words she learned to leave untranslated.

Girl.

Daughter.

Sister.

Beautiful.

Her own name.

She kept them somewhere behind her teeth,

where language goes when it is frightened

of being spoken aloud.

And for a long time, the closest she could come

was a sentence that never quite belonged to her:

I wish I could be her.

She said it so often it became almost grammatical,

a harmless little construction,

something she could carry around without

having to examine what the wishing was hiding.

Wish was useful.

Wish kept a distance.

Wish meant the girl was always somewhere else—

in photographs, in imagined futures,

in clothes folded inside an online cart,

in the quiet fantasy of Navratri arriving

with the right version of her underneath the lights.

Wish never demanded a verb in the present tense.

Then, gradually,

without announcement,

the sentence changed.

Not I wish I could be her.

Something more frightening.

I think I am her.

She remembers how strange the word am felt.

Small.

Almost embarrassingly small

for something that had rearranged so much.

No thunder.

No revelation descending from the ceiling.

Just a word changing tense

and suddenly refusing to move back.

After that, everything she had once treated

as unrelated evidence began speaking

in the same language.

The dresses she'd tried on privately.

The makeup wiped away before anyone could see.

The earrings held against her ears,

not because she needed to look beautiful,

but because for a few seconds

her reflection seemed to stop arguing with her.

The saree she once draped alone,

six safety pins and a paused tutorial,

laughing at how badly she was doing it,

until the fabric finally fell into place

across her shoulder.

She had expected excitement.

Instead, there was recognition.

Not I look like a girl.

Something quieter.

Oh.

As though her body had understood

something before her mind had found the words.

She learned that femininity was not the lipstick,

or the bangles hidden beneath sleeves,

or the nail polish removed before dinner.

Those were only dialects.

The language itself was somewhere deeper.

And sometimes she could speak it

in an oversized T-shirt

with nothing feminine about her at all,

and sometimes she could dress herself carefully

and still feel like she was performing

a translation for an audience that wasn't there.

The difference mattered.

She began learning that she did not have

to earn the word girl by looking enough like one.

She only had to stop arguing with the person

who had always been saying it.

There were other words, too,

that began arriving with a strange tenderness.

Sister.

She had always known what the word meant.

She simply hadn't known what it would feel like

to imagine it attached to herself.

A daughter.

Not the abstract kind

not a character in someone else's future,

but herself, someday, occupying that word

without mentally stepping outside it first.

And somewhere farther down the road,

a word she lets herself approach carefully:

wife.

Not because she has some perfect scene

waiting for her in her head,

not because she knows who will stand beside her,

but because the possibility itself

feels newly available.

There is something almost shocking

about realizing that the future can contain

ordinary feminine nouns.

Not a girl as an idea.

A sister who calls home.

A daughter who grows older.

A woman who has her own life.

Perhaps, someday, a wife.

She had spent so long imagining femininity

as an escape hatch

that she hadn't realized how much of it

was simply wanting to participate

in ordinary life as herself.

And then came the message.

She does not remember every word

that came before it anymore.

Only the hesitation.

The cursor.

The terrifying little knowledge

that once a sentence leaves your phone,

it belongs partly to someone else's understanding.

She sent something small.

Something that, on a screen,

looked almost unbearably ordinary.

Her cousin answered without turning it

into a spectacle.

A few questions.

A little care.

A promise kept close to the chest.

And then, somehow,

they met again and life continued.

Tea.

Relatives.

Chaat.

The same stupid arguments

about which stall was better.

Nothing cinematic happened.

That was the miracle.

The world did not split open

to reveal a new person standing underneath.

She was still herself.

Her cousin was still herself.

And yet there was now one person outside her own mind

who knew something essential

and had not stepped away from the knowing.

One person who had heard the word

before she was ready to hear it echoed back.

Sometimes acceptance is not an embrace.

Sometimes it is simply

someone continuing to talk to you

as though the truth has not made you less lovable.

She carries that with her.

Especially on the difficult days.

Because being known by one person

does not make the rest of the world suddenly fluent.

There is still the family photograph

with an old version of her name underneath it.

Still the dinner table.

Still the uncertainty of what her parents might know,

what they might have seen,

what private things might have travelled farther

than she intended.

There was one night when the possibility

felt enormous enough to fill the dark:

Do they know?

Not even the answer frightened her as much

as the thought of everyone else knowing something about her

before she had decided how to say it herself.

She lay there rehearsing conversations

that might never happen,

trying to prepare explanations

for a truth she was still learning

how to explain even to herself.

And beneath all that fear

was a simpler ache:

Please let me have some say

in the moment I become visible.

Because there is a difference

between being discovered

and being known.

She is beginning to understand

that she wants the second.

She wants someday to walk into a room

without translating herself first.

To hear her name

and not have some old reflex

quietly correct it in her head.

To be a daughter without the word feeling borrowed.

A sister without having to explain

why the role feels so natural.

To become, perhaps,

someone's wife someday

without having spent the years beforehand

wondering whether she was even allowed

to imagine herself in that sentence.

She wants the boring things.

That is what surprised her most.

Not some perfect transformation.

Not a life that looks beautiful from a distance.

She wants to complain about homework.

Lose earrings.

Argue with family.

Buy something unnecessary.

Paint her nails badly.

Be late.

Laugh too loudly.

Study for an exam she is terrified of.

Fall asleep with unfinished thoughts.

She wants the ordinary grammar of a life

in which being a woman is no longer

the most extraordinary thing about her.

But before she can reach that life,

there are other versions of herself

she has to negotiate with.

There is the girl who wants the lehenga

and the long hair

and the earrings

and the little rituals of femininity

she once treated like contraband.

There is the student

who has written AIR 1 inside her notebook

as though ambition itself might become a passport.

There is the future girl

she imagines in a college room,

surrounded by books,

her handwriting everywhere,

her life finally beginning to resemble

the one she has rehearsed in her head

so many nights.

Sometimes those selves fight.

Three exhausted hours:

differentiation on one page,

a dress on another.

She feels guilty either way.

Study, and she worries she is postponing herself.

Dream, and she worries she is abandoning

the future she worked so hard to build.

For a while she thinks she has to choose.

The topper or the girl.

The ambition or the becoming.

The future everyone can understand

or the future only she can see.

Then, slowly,

the sentence changes again.

Not which one do I become?

Why did I ever think they were different people?

The girl who wants to study until sunrise

and the girl who wants to wear earrings

are not competing for the same life.

They are both asking for it.

She is not chasing a rank

to prove that she deserves to be herself.

She is chasing it because she wants options.

A college.

A room of her own.

Distance.

Independence.

The chance to become more honest

without having to ask permission

from every person who once knew her differently.

She imagines arriving there sometimes.

Not dramatically.

She simply walks into a classroom.

Someone says her name.

She answers.

And nothing inside her stops to translate it.

That is the future she wants.

Not a miraculous new life.

Just a life that does not require subtitles.

There are harder thoughts, too.

She knows some choices about the future

can carry permanence.

She knows becoming more fully herself

may not be simple,

and that wanting something deeply

does not make every decision surrounding it easy.

She is learning to hold desire

and uncertainty in the same hand.

To say:

I want this.

and also:

I am allowed to think carefully.

Those sentences can coexist.

Fear does not always mean no.

Sometimes fear is simply what happens

when something matters enough

to change the shape of your life.

And she has already changed.

Not visibly, perhaps.

Not in ways strangers would notice.

But internally,

some old vocabulary has begun falling apart.

She no longer wants to describe herself

using words that feel like borrowed clothes.

She no longer wants to spend every feminine moment

wondering whether it counts.

She no longer needs every outfit

to testify on her behalf.

The saree does not prove anything.

The nail polish does not prove anything.

The name in the margin does not prove anything.

Even the fear does not prove anything.

They are pieces.

She is the whole sentence.

And then, because apparently

one revelation is never enough,

another room of herself opens.

A dream about a boy.

A hand imagined in hers.

A warmth she hadn't expected.

She wakes with the strange realization

that this, too, might be real.

She has known what it means

to notice girls.

Now there is something unfamiliar

about noticing boys.

For a moment she wonders

whether she has somehow broken

the neat little story she had only just managed

to tell herself.

Then she laughs at the absurdity of it.

Of course.

She had spent years believing

self-discovery was a door:

open it once,

learn the answer,

go home.

Instead it is language again.

A word she didn't know.

A meaning she hadn't considered.

A sentence becoming longer

without becoming less true.

She does not need to solve it tonight.

Maybe she never needed

to solve herself like an equation.

Maybe some things are meant

to be learned by living them.

So she lets the question stay.

Not as a threat.

As a possibility.

There is relief in that.

She thinks now about the girl

who first whispered her own name

where nobody else could hear.

How carefully she held it.

How little she trusted it.

How impossible it once seemed

that the name could belong to her

without explanation.

And yet here she is.

Still uncertain about some things.

Still frightened of others.

Still studying.

Still dreaming.

Still hiding pieces of herself

in places no one thinks to look.

Still becoming.

But no longer mistaking becoming

for invention.

She is not creating a girl from nothing.

She is learning to stop interrupting her.

That is different.

Maybe that is what recognition really was:

not a lightning strike,

not a perfect answer,

not a single night when everything finally made sense—

but the slow realization

that the voice she kept calling strange

had been speaking in her own accent all along.

A name in the margin.

A saree slipping from one shoulder.

Nail polish drying in the quiet.

A message sent with trembling hands.

A cousin who stayed.

A daughter imagined differently.

A sister imagined naturally.

A future wife,

somewhere beyond the horizon,

not yet a promise,

only a possibility she is finally allowed to name.

A notebook with AIR 1 written inside it.

A college room she has never seen.

A girl walking into it.

Her.

Not the finished version.

Not the fearless version.

Not even the version who knows exactly

what every word will mean.

Just herself—

finally using the first person

without flinching.

And perhaps that is enough

for tonight.

She has spent years

trying to find the right word.

Now she is beginning to understand

that the word was never the destination.

It was the permission

to speak.