8,730

& why each day is everything and nothing at all

“To live is a choice that is made every day, without fanfare – and to be a woman is to focus on the small things of life, to view each day as a site of exploit, as beginning and end and everything else.”

— From Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel 

8,730

As I write this, that is how many days I have been alive. 

302 

This is how many days I have been living as a woman. 

There is a reason why this blog parenthisizes the words (who has yet to see it all) in its title. My heavy eyelids lift and are have not yet seen it all when it comes to being a woman, or even a trans woman, in this world. But the last 300 days have undoubtedly been the most curious days of my whole life. 

˚　　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　 . ✦　　　 　˚　　　　 . ★⋆. ࿐࿔

I wake up on my tender breasts and roll over to meet the crack in the curtains that always lets in too much light. It’s better than the light from my phone, though. I pick myself up from the mattress as my conical chest now creates space between myself and it. Or rather, maybe we are just now meeting for the first time. My nipple and my bed… No longer laying flat, but in a way that allows the curvature of my earth to rest. Waking up is new and I am now finally refreshed. 

Refresh: a verb that implies being invigorated again, not for the first time. I am refreshed because I am simply calling back to my child-like bones, when I was fresh and in my body, a young girl playing with the boys. This feeling of being a girl is not new, however being a woman, with breasts and hips and sexuality, is. 

Everyday, I start my day the same: peppermint tea with lime. During 2020 when everyone was picking up new hobbies like baking, drawing, reading, Tik Toking, I was picking up food. I wanted to be at my strongest in the face of a threatening virus. So I read online that every morning it is good to rinse out your system, which lime and peppermint do. A sort of cleansing myself from the day before. This way everyday feels like a new one, rather than some sort of continuous neverending blend that creates some sort of ghastly confusing concoction of everything that has ever happened. Sometimes, it is the small transitions that are just as important as the big ones. 

So I sip my tea and usually burn my lips, or pucker them at the sourness of the lime juice that cradles the bottom of the ceramic mug. I scroll through Instagram and usually think about the trans girls who transitioned before puberty and now have the smoothest voices and the softest skin and the most natural boobs and the least amount of facial hair and the best style and the biggest modeling contract and the and the and the… 

And being a woman shouldn’t have to be about comparison, but I’m learning more and more that the world really wants it to be. My friends say that I already am one of those girls anyway, even though I started hormones ten years after most of them. The beauty of being a woman is that any day that you realize that you are one is the day that the world should realize that you always have been one. 

I try to get off my phone before my brain begins to rot, but it’s usually too late. I walk to the shower and always look at myself in the mirror. Hmm… maybe my boobs grew a little bit? Maybe my hair is a bit longer now? Maybe I am closer to looking how I want to be? Yes, no yes, definitely the last one is true. 

The truth is that I still shave everyday. I lather up my baby soft skin with light oil and thick cream and drag the dollar blade across my face. I’ve been doing laser for as long as I have been on hormones (302 days) but that is only once a month, so I have done it 7 days (I’ve missed a few months here and there). My technician told me not to do it through the summer because of hyperpigmentation and burning, so my mustache is starting to come back. Most days I now take the blade the wrong way, against the grain of my hair, as if to say STOP you are not welcome here! But it usually doesn’t listen. I’m probably the only one who really notices it anyways. One day I won’t have to shave my face ever again. 

Salicylic acid, moisturizer, and sunscreen. Every single day. While estrogen makes my skin so soft and smooth, I still need a consistent skincare routine to get glowy skin. Skincare really changed my life. Being able to remove all of the layers of dead skin, the shaving ailments, and the deep seeded testosterone oils, has made my face a beaming light in this dark world. My skincare is one of my favorite parts of my day. Being a woman is focusing on the small things in life, afterall. 

Getting dressed used to give me incredible stress. I would want to dress femme, but I felt dysphoric at how my womens clothing fit me. It never felt right. Then wearing masculine clothing was always just enough to get me by, but it never made me happy, inspired, or empowered. For me, being out as non-binary gave me language to be in this in-between stage of not having all of the burdens of being a man, but protected me from being who I knew I really was deep down: a woman. I love non-binary as an identity that resists the restrictive and archaic hands of gender norms. At the end of the day I am a woman with non-binary experience. That is to say that my tale of womaness as a trans person exists outside of a cis binary framework… And I really wouldn’t want it any other way. 

Nowadays, I put on my skirt and let the denim caress the curves of my founded hips. The estrogen has found its way all the way from under my tongue to my thighs, my breasts, my fingers, my toes, my face, between my legs, and everything in between. It has filled in the cracks of what once slipped through. When I wear women’s clothing now, it feels right. It hugs my body just like I hug myself. 

Despite the days where I feel regret for coming out multiple decades into my life, I have been alive for all 8,730 days. My transition was not some sort of somatic suicide, it was a return to the person that was inside of me all along. I was founded on the belief of truth and honesty. Hand to the wind, I solemnly swear that I will not follow its direction, but only my own. I step out the door and let the air flutter the overpriced mascara on my eyelashes. My lids are lifted, as are my cheekbones. I walk… no, I float, down the building stairs and assert myself onto the sidewalk. One foot after the other, I am re-learning how to walk, like I did as a baby. This time, as a woman, with the ribs of an apple and feet of a ballerina to hold me up. 

One day, each day, is everything and nothing. A new day in my transition into womanhood. Another ordinary day, but with the miracle that is my body and my soul. The days that I did not live like this may be grieved, but they are not lost. Every day has led to this one. One where I am a woman, in transition, like every other woman in this world. 

Hand on my heart, fingers interlaced around and about to my sacred sacrum. Today, I am not a missing body. One of our societies greatest lies is that woman came from the rib of man. However, in my case, maybe there is some truth to that. I was never a man, but because I was told for so long that I was, I began to believe it. I found myself in my own ribs that they called Adam. Only her name wasn’t Eve, it was Elle.

It all had to start one day, even if that day was everything and nothing at all. A day amidst almost 9,000 other days, cosmically floating as an anchor through the space and time of me. A million dust particles that came together to say: I am.