The cursor blinks like a heartbeat in an empty room. I sit at the desk with words inside me pressing against my ribs, begging for release, and yet the silence around me feels heavy, as if it is listening, waiting to see what I will confess next. Writing has always been my companion, but after coming out as transgender, it has become both lifeline and exile. Every sentence feels like carving myself open, like exposing a truth I carried for decades in the dark. And sometimes, when I press the keys, I feel less like I am writing for the world and more like I am whispering to myself, telling myself over and over: you are still here, you are still worthy, you are still becoming.
But there is a loneliness in it. A loneliness that comes not from the absence of people, but from the absence of those who can fully understand the weight of what I carry into every line. Friends say they support me. Family says they love me. And I believe them in the ways I can. But when I write, I know there are rooms I cannot enter anymore, voices that no longer echo back with the same familiarity. Writing, for me, has become a kind of exile and sanctuary at the same time: the one place where I can tell the whole truth, but also the place where I most feel the distance between myself and the world I once knew.
The pages do not judge me, but they do remind me of what I have lost. I lost the safety of invisibility, as suffocating as it was. I lost the ease of belonging in spaces that only welcomed a version of me that never really lived. I lost the comfort of silence, even as silence once nearly killed me. And so I write—long letters, raw paragraphs, prayers disguised as prose—because if I stop, I am afraid I will disappear again. Yet the words themselves are not company. They are mirrors. They reflect me back to myself, again and again, until the loneliness becomes almost unbearable.
Still, I write. I write because coming out did not cure the ache of isolation—it only shifted it. Now the loneliness comes not from hiding, but from standing in the light and realizing that so few people want to stand here with me. And yet I cannot go back. I will not go back. So I write. I write to remind myself that my voice matters even when it echoes into emptiness. I write because somewhere, someone might stumble across my words and know they are not alone, and maybe that will be enough.
The cursor keeps blinking. The room is still silent. The words keep coming, fragile and fierce all at once. And even in the loneliness, I write—because this is how I stay alive.
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