It is easy to dip into hyperbole when making a statement such as that of the above title. How often have we said “this is the best day ever” in our lives? Despite that, I can say with definitive clarity that yesterday (as of this writing) was the best day in my adult life, and rivals even the heady, innocent days of my prepubescent youth.

By coincidence, it marks a full year since coming out (to myself at least, to everyone else, they found out in stages) but that is but one factor. I had the best day wrapping up my shopping for birthday prezzies for a precious new friend in my life. I met up with a buddy I hadn’t seen in way too long (buddy is too weak; I see him as a little brother) and we had an amazing skateboarding session despite being blown about by what felt like high seas winds. I turned frowns upside down and made an amazing female hero in my life have a great, squee-filled day when she expected it to be dismal. I felt well and truly alive, which, this may shock you, has up until the past year been an extraordinarily rare thing for me and before came in only the most timid and short-lived of doses.

How do I describe how I felt yesterday, when all emotions were at their zenith? Shall I compare it to having lived an entire life only being able to see two colors, having only a vague, indeterminate understanding of the others that existed, to then wake up to not only see every other color permutation in existence, but to intuit their purpose and implement their nuance in your life? That is as apt as I can be in analogy. I felt every feeling I’d ever experienced in my life, having come to grasp the twisted, gnarled road that led me to that exact moment, to being alive with my friends, especially the women in my life that I adore beyond the capacity for verbal expression. I felt every feeling in my life and then ones I hadn’t before. If ever I had experienced a third eye opening in my life, it was then. The floodgates were opened.

Although I can pick it apart and attribute this visceral trip to several factors, a major component that cannot be denied in this is being on HRT (hormone replacement therapy to those not in the know). I am not going to be one of those toxic bitches who condemns men or testosterone or masculinity as a whole, but for me, the male hormones I was forced to process were a perpetual, destructive blockade on my emotional intelligence, my understanding of myself, and the ability to perceive and understand all nuances of feeling. My rationality is at last fully freed and enabled. I can feel everything and tell you why and how.

Even if, like how Data might never become fully human, I am not able to be a woman to the fullest extent physiologically possible, I am grateful at last to finally be free, to finally be me, to be connected to the universe and to the people I cherish to my dying breath on this planet, our Terra.

FIN