When I finally decided to transition, and especially as I started HRT and faced taking my first estrogen pill, I stood on the brink of the change fearfully. I felt that to take that pill, to truly commit to transition, would be the end of everything I had ever known. It felt like death, to me. It felt like I was about to take a great leap off a cliff not knowing whether I would fall or fly, trusting only in hope. It was frightening in a way I had never known, and have never known again since.

I made that leap, and yes, the old me died. But the new me that was reborn was the true me that should have been all along.

There is a poem, The Lady of Shallot, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is his own telling of an Arthurian legend. The Lady of Shallot lives upon an isle in the river upstream from Camelot. There she has a magic mirror in which she sees the world, and she weaves the images into her tapestries constantly. But there is also a prophecy that if she ever looks to Camelot, then a curse will come upon her.

One day, she sees Sir Lancelot in her mirror as he was riding down the path to Camelot. He, in his gleaming burnished armor with his flowing dark hair, draws her attention like no other ever has, and she stops her weaving to look upon him out her window as he rides down the road on the banks of the river, the road to Camelot. When she does this her weaving comes undone, and the mirror cracks, and she knows the curse has come upon her. She goes down to the shore of her isle and there finds a boat, upon the prow of which she writes her name.

And then comes the pivotal moment when she has to decide: turn back and live on her island in misery, never knowing what it is to be loved, or to let loose the boat and drift down to Camelot hoping to see Lancelot face to face. To live on without joy, or to risk death for a chance at true life.

This moment was captured on canvas by the painter John William Waterhouse. It shows this moment when she holds the rope in her hand ready to cast it loose, but you can see the fear on her face. You can see the difficulty in this decision that she must make, to risk death for a chance of joy.

This is how I felt when I had that first estrogen pill in my hand. I was risking death in order to embrace a chance to have true joy for the first time ever in my life. I loosed the rope and took the pill, and my boat drifted to Camelot, and the curse did take it’s effect on me. The old me died that day as I let go of everything I had ever known and embraced an unknown future.

Unlike the Lady, I was reborn. I became someone new and wonderful and the light and joy and renewal that filled me has carried me forward ever since. And though my life is now what I always dreamed of, I will never forget that terrible moment of decision when my fate could have become completely different if I had not had the courage to let go of the rope holding me to the shores of my old life.