It’s interesting how “feeling like a girl” and “feeling human” are basically the same thing for me. I had no idea how much pain I was in until it started to lift.

Gender is such a weirdness. People take it as a noun, as a thing that is, when nearly all of it is read in terms of doing: how one holds one’s self and moves; one’s vocal timbre and tone and speech patterns. Just posture is this absurd, huge signal. I got into this recently, when I tried on that dress and bracelet and realized how different my face looked in a different context. It’s not about the fact of things; it’s about what they have to say.

To change how I sit or stand, it changes how I breathe, where I hold my tension, and sort of shifts the wiring that tells me who I am, to myself. (And based on how people have reacted to me the last few months, I know it changes the signals to others—mostly but not entirely in good ways.) I feel so much more well, and so much more me, and so much more feminine, when I tend to my posture.

We are all verbs, right. We’re never static. We exist in the doing. Who we are is a matter of procedure: our thoughts, our actions, our feelings, in response to our environment. Change the way you do things, you change the person you are, in your own perception and in others’.

Who we are is a matter of software, not hardware. (And what we are is a matter of opinion, which is its own process.) Act as the person you want to be, and that’s who you will be. The more that you do it, the more that you’ll feel it—and the more that will reinforce what you know to be true.