Day 158 – April 30, 2026

April did not come to play. That is the first thing that needs to be said.

This month arrived in heels, carrying spring in one hand and a folding chair in the other, and proceeded to drag me through transition, visibility, family, my birthday, being seen, not being heard, grief, womanhood, identity, beauty, disappointment, and about seventeen separate emotional weather systems without once checking whether I had adequate snacks or a medically advisable amount of patience.

Rude.

Transformative. But rude.

And now here we are at the end of it.

I always think month end reflections are going to feel cleaner than they do. Like by the last day, the emotional furniture will have arranged itself into a shape that suggests progress, narrative, maybe even some tasteful sense of closure. Instead it usually feels more like standing in the middle of a room after a party, half-undressed emotionally, looking at everything that happened and thinking, well, that was certainly a month with opinions.

April had opinions.

April marked two years of transition for me. That alone would have been enough.

Two years of becoming the woman I already knew I was. Two years of fighting for embodiment, honesty, femininity, alignment, and a life that felt less like performance and more like inhabitation. Two years and still carrying the rage and obscenity of the fact that I was violated in the first year of finally becoming more fully myself.

That stayed with me all month.

So did the birthday. My Family and friends. The slumber party softness. The astonishing, sacred reality of being loved by women who are gorgeous inside and out, badass in ways that actually matter, and so good to me it still catches me off guard sometimes. Women who protect me, challenge me, encourage me, and make me want to become more myself, not less.

That mattered too.

Then grief entered. Gracefully, devastatingly, like it always does when the woman lost was real enough to leave evidence behind.

And somewhere in all of that, I kept circling the same questions. What is real? What does it mean to be seen? Who hears me? Who doesn’t? How much of what I carry is visible? How much of it still sits below the surface while the world keeps moving like it hasn’t committed some profound insult by asking me to continue existing around all of this as if it’s simply “life”?

That part remains true too.

April did not resolve anything. It did not fix the heartbreak. It did not make him less free. It did not make the cultural climate less exhausting. It did not suddenly teach the world how to hear women in pain correctly, and certainly not trans women, who are still expected to live entire lives while being argued about by people whose emotional intelligence should be court supervised.

But April did reveal things.

It revealed how rooted I am becoming. How much the women matter. How much beauty still matters. How much I want the real thing in every category now, love, safety, truth, friendship, atmosphere, selfhood. How little patience I have left for flattening. How much range I still possess. How alive I still am.

That last one is maybe the biggest truth of all.

Because if anything, April reminded me that I am still here in full color.

Still angry. Still gorgeous. Still heartbroken in places. Still funny enough to save myself from becoming unbearable. Still sharp eyed enough to notice the room. Still sweet enough to be easy to love. Still sharp enough that the wrong people should probably keep a respectful distance.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s me.

And if I’m being honest, I think April gave me more of myself back.

Not in one cinematic scene. In flashes. In women. In grief. In spring light. In better standards. In more honest language. In the deepening sense that my life, however chaotic, painful, beautiful, and unreasonably dramatic it has become, still belongs to me.

Roger, naturally, closed the month as he lived it. Deeply attached to me, casually magnificent, emotionally available when it matters, and wholly unembarrassed by his own need for comfort, love, dramatic opinions, and maximum proximity to anything important.

Once again, aspirational.

Maybe that’s the final truth about April.

It was not neat. It was not mild. It was not emotionally house trained.

It was real. And so was I.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, closing out April not lighter, not simpler, but more rooted, more exact, more loved, and much harder to forget.