This article previously appeared at Ravishly, republished here.

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I’ve been on testosterone for two months now. And while I do not believe in fate or in some kind of intelligent design, nothing in my life has felt closer to fate than this.

I find myself saying, “This was supposed to happen to me.” When I meet myself in the mirror, and I feel this electric and palpable ecstasy that travels across my body, I am convinced that this is the truth – my truth.

I have never savored something, loved something quite so deeply as this: The hairs on my hands, the contours of my face, the shapes and the smells and the erotic energy that swirl around in my brain.

“This is right,” I find myself saying, and my friends look at me, bewildered and happy, as if I’ve said the most obvious thing that could ever be said, and they tell me each and every time, “We know, Sam. We know.”

Two months on testosterone – while it may not have been fate, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

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Do you know the feeling of falling in love?

Where suddenly your world is bigger, brighter, beautiful in a way that it never was before?

Transition has been a slow, steady fall. Every day I see myself more clearly and I feel love in ways I haven’t loved before; I find flowers growing where they never grew before.

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When I was a college student, I wrote a research paper on the idea of “lucid dying” in Tibetan Buddhism – the notion that, if we were enlightened enough, we could be aware as we came undone and transitioned from life to death.

My transition, not of death but of gender, has given me a kind of clarity of mind. I feel aware of every inch of my body. I swear, sometimes I can feel the choreography of my cells as they shift and grow and divide.

And I start to wonder if my body was never wrong. Maybe this transition is somehow a gift. The gift of lucidity, maybe. A kind of connection between body and mind that is so rare that some of us go our entire lives without feeling it.

Maybe the pain of being transgender is not random chaos in the universe, not my shame nor my mistake, but instead, the pangs of a deeper awareness.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m enlightened, but I am wide awake.

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A hairdresser mistook me for a woman the other day and I laughed.

I laughed.

I’d never laughed about being misgendered before. But somehow, when she made the mistake, I found it funny because I thought, does she not see that I’m glowing? Does she not feel what I feel?

Because I could’ve sworn that this light that I’m carrying inside of me could be seen from outer space.

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