I used to think becoming myself meant eventually arriving at a destination.
For many years, that idea made sense to me. I had spent so much of my life trying to understand who I was that I imagined there must be a point when all the uncertainty would finally disappear. I would transition. I would become comfortable with my femininity. I would find a spiritual path that made sense to me. I would look into the mirror and recognize the woman staring back. Then, somehow, I would have arrived.
I don’t believe that anymore.
There was no finish line waiting for me. There was no final version of myself hidden somewhere in the future, patiently waiting for me to catch up with her.
Becoming is the path.
That realization has changed the way I think about both my transition and my spirituality.
For much of my younger life, I didn’t understand myself as a woman. I knew I was different. I knew femininity felt natural to me, and I knew I was attracted to men. For a time, identifying as a feminine gay man gave me a way to understand feelings I did not yet have the language to explain. Eventually, however, I came to recognize something deeper about myself. I wasn’t simply a feminine man attracted to men. I was a woman.
That realization changed my life, but it didn’t instantly answer every question.
Transition itself can easily be imagined as a journey with milestones. There is coming out. There are names and clothes and hormones. There are changes to the body and changes to how we move through the world. Some of us pursue surgeries. We celebrate anniversaries. We remember firsts.
Those milestones matter. Some of them have mattered enormously to me.
But none of them marked the moment when I became “finished.”
At some point I began to understand that I was asking transition to provide something life itself never promises: permanence.
Cisgender people change throughout their lives, too. Their bodies age. Their relationships change. Their understanding of themselves evolves. Their dreams at twenty may bear little resemblance to their dreams at fifty or seventy. Why should transgender people be expected to reach some perfect, completed version of ourselves?
There is tremendous freedom in letting go of that expectation.
I don’t need to become the perfect woman. I don’t even know what a “perfect woman” would be. I only need to continue becoming this woman.
My spiritual journey has followed much the same pattern.
I grew up Catholic. Later, I became a Humanist. I eventually found community within Unitarian Universalism while still longing for some of the ritual and sacred practice that had been part of my childhood. Then I discovered Faerie Wicca and found myself drawn toward a spiritual language of transformation, sensuality, ritual, beauty, and faerie energy.
At each stage, I could have told myself that I had finally found the answer.
Instead, each stage opened another door.
That is one of the things I have come to love about the Faerie Way. Nature doesn’t seem particularly interested in finished products.
A flower blooms, fades, produces seeds, and returns to the earth. The moon waxes and wanes. Summer gives way to autumn. A forest is constantly dying and being born at the same time. Even the landscape beneath our feet is changing, although sometimes too slowly for us to notice.
Transformation isn’t an interruption of nature.
Transformation is nature.
Why should I imagine myself as an exception?
There is something especially meaningful about this idea as I grow older. Our culture is obsessed with youth, and women receive particularly relentless messages about aging. We are encouraged to treat every wrinkle and bodily change as evidence that something valuable is slipping away.
For transgender women, that pressure can become even more complicated. Some of us lost years in which we were unable to live openly as ourselves. It can be tempting to mourn the girlhoods and younger womanhoods we never experienced.
I understand that grief.
But I don’t want longing for the woman I might have been to prevent me from discovering the woman I am still becoming.
There are experiences I couldn’t have had at sixteen or twenty-five because I didn’t yet understand myself. There are also things I understand now that my younger self could never have known. Becoming works in both directions. We leave possibilities behind, but we continually discover new ones.
My femininity today isn’t identical to the femininity I imagined when I first transitioned. My sexuality has evolved. My spirituality has evolved. My understanding of relationships has evolved. My writing has changed. Even the way I understand the Pink Faerie Way continues to grow as I live it.
That doesn’t mean the person I was yesterday was somehow less authentic.
She was simply an earlier chapter.
I think this is where becoming itself becomes sacred.
We often perform rituals to mark transformation: marriages, initiations, births, deaths, coming-of-age ceremonies, name changes. We create thresholds because human beings instinctively understand that change deserves recognition.
But perhaps we sometimes concentrate so much on crossing the threshold that we forget life is made of thresholds.
There is always another doorway.
There is always another question.
There is always another opportunity to become someone we couldn’t have imagined before.
Faerie energy, as I experience it, lives in those spaces of possibility. It is playful, sensual, creative, and resistant to rigid boundaries. It invites me to remain curious about myself rather than trying to carve my identity permanently into stone.
That doesn’t make my identity uncertain. I know that I am a woman.
It means womanhood itself is alive.
So is spirituality.
So is sexuality.
So am I.
I no longer need to ask when I will finally arrive. I don’t need some future version of myself to appear and announce that the transformation is complete.
Instead, I can honor the woman who exists today while remaining curious about the woman who will exist tomorrow.
Perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things about being alive.
We are never finished.
We are always crossing another threshold, opening another door, discovering another piece of ourselves.
I used to believe there was a destination called myself.
Now I understand that there is only the path.
And I am already on it.