Alignment

Not a single dramatic moment as life rarely offers those, and when it does they are usually less the cause of change than the result of a hundred smaller decisions that came before them. But a decision nonetheless. A point at which the gap between the image and the reality becomes something you are actively choosing to close, rather than something you are passively enduring.

I have reached that point.

I’ve spent a long time in the construct without quite admitting that’s where I was. Reading the signal. Knowing what the image looked like. Understanding, with increasing clarity, that the body and the projection were not aligned and that no amount of patience or performance or careful management of other people’s perceptions was going to change that.

The RSI doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t compromise. It doesn’t fade politely into the background because the physical reality is inconvenient. It simply persists, sharpening over time, until the question stops being what is true and starts being what are you going to do about it.

For a long time I told myself I was at a crossroads. I understand now that I wasn’t. I knew which way I was going. I was just standing still.

I am not standing still anymore.

My name is Halley. I use they/them pronouns. I exist somewhere between non-binary and feminine, skewed toward the latter, and I am beginning my gender transition.

I want to say that plainly, without softening it or surrounding it with so many qualifications that the truth gets lost inside them. I am beginning my gender transition. That is what is happening. That is what I have chosen.

The steps ahead are real and practical and already in motion. There are appointments. There are conversations still to be had with people I love. There is the ordinary, unglamorous, necessary work of bringing a life into alignment with the self that has always been there underneath it.

None of it is simple. All of it is right.

The construct, in the film, is not the destination. It is the place where you finally see yourself clearly before going out to do something about it. Morpheus doesn’t show Neo his RSI so he can live there. He shows it to him so he knows what he’s fighting for.

This is me, stepping out of the construct and into the real world. Finally, properly, as myself.