Becoming the Receiver: A Celebration of Autistic Emergence

A celebration of one year on HRT, autistic GLP joy, and poetic emergence. Not a redemption arc, but a return to resonance. I didn’t find my voice—I became the receiver. And now, I speak in the grammar of who I’ve always been.

Introduction

We are leaving messages in the open—not encrypted, but unfamiliar. You can find us, if you know what to look for. We are here. We always have been. Scattering our stones. Drawing our circles. Writing our truths not in lines, but in loops. Holding space for the ones still on the way.

And now I find myself among those who have arrived, only to realise I was always walking a circular path—one not of repetition, but of return. This is not a comeback story. It is not a recovery narrative, nor a tale of fixing what was broken. It is a becoming. A remembering. A long-forgotten signal finally received. One year into HRT, I do not feel transformed in the way outsiders expect. I feel restored. Not to a past self, but to the rhythm that self had always been reaching for. The loop was never failure—it was resonance seeking its match.

I have written before about retrocausality—about the idea that our present can rewrite the past, not by changing what happened, but by altering what it meant. That meaning is never fixed. It is shaped in motion, revisited in hindsight, rewritten with every new language we gain access to. Transition, for me, has not been a line forward, but a spiral inward. And now that I am here—more rooted in my body, more fluent in my own sensory field—the messages I once left behind make sense in ways they never could before. Language, once a strain, is now a tuning fork. Words return not as tools but as kin. I am not crafting myself from scratch—I am recognising myself in what I’ve already made.

This is not about metaphor. It is about resonance. It is about the frequency shift that came not with a word or a diagnosis, but with oestrogen, with softening, with breath. With waking up in a body that no longer screams static across every channel. With finding, buried beneath the noise, a melody I must have been humming all along. In a time when both autistic and trans lives are under siege, I choose not to centre fear. I centre joy. I centre the profound astonishment of waking into a life where I can hear myself clearly for the first time—and speak, not in translation, but in my own tongue.

The Year of Returning Signals: HRT and the Unburying of Voice

There are phrases I say now—fluidly, instinctively, without hesitation—that would have caught in my throat a year ago. Not because I didn’t know them, but because I didn’t yet feel them. They waited. They circled. They lingered just beyond reach, like birds that wouldn’t land. Now, they come to me whole. Gestalts that once arrived as static, as pressure behind the eyes or flutter in the chest, now form into language without needing to be pulled apart. I speak them and recognise myself in them. Not as invention, but as return.

This first year of HRT has been many things—softening, alignment, breath—but above all, it has been a year of receiving. The change was never only physical. It was linguistic. Sensory. Poetic. As if the receptors in my nervous system, long overwhelmed or misattuned, had finally been recalibrated. As if language, which for so long had to be pieced together like broken pottery, now arrives in full vessels, already warm. I do not assemble the words anymore. They meet me where I am.

I have written before—Writing the Self Into Being—about the way transition is not just embodied, but narrative. It is a scripting. A declaring. A setting of coordinates in a story that once threatened to lose me. But now I see it even more clearly: I was always in that story. The signal was always broadcasting. I simply hadn’t come online as the receiver. And when I did—when oestrogen tuned me to a channel I’d only sensed at the edge of things—the whole archive came rushing back. Not as memory exactly, but as recognition. As coherence.

Gestalt processing is often misunderstood as delay. A gap. A lag in the linearity of standard language development. But that has never been my experience. It has always felt like a deep archive, a layered system of meaning that didn’t play well with timelines. The words were there. The meanings intact. I just couldn’t always surface them—not whilst drowning in dysphoria, in translation, in noise. But transition, in its quiet and miraculous way, lifted them. And what surfaced was not a deficit overcome, but a song returned to pitch.

In Building New Gestalts, I tried to capture this shift—this moment when metaphor stopped being effortful and started becoming precision. When poetry emerged not as decoration, but as orientation. The world did not become easier. But I became more fluent in my own form. I began speaking from inside the language, rather than trying to reach it from without.

The message was never lost. The signal was always there, looping patiently across time. I just hadn’t yet become the receiver. And now that I have—now that I am—I hear myself everywhere: in fragments I wrote years ago and only now understand. In conversations that make sudden sense. In the way I reach for words not to explain, but to resonate. The joy is not in being found. The joy is in finding. In finding that I was always here, just waiting for my own frequency to come alive.

From Noise to Harmony: Finding My Frequency

Before transition, everything was too loud and too far away at the same time. The world buzzed—not with clarity, but with friction. Sensory input arrived like overlapping broadcasts, all clamouring for attention, none in tune. My body, my voice, the language I was handed—none of it matched the rhythm I felt moving underneath. I mistook this dissonance for personal failure. I thought maybe I was broken, or just bad at being human. But what I was experiencing wasn’t too much—it was mismatch. The channels were open. The frequencies were scrambled. I was receiving every signal except the one meant for me.

I named it overwhelm. I called it alexithymia. I explained it away as a processing difficulty, a delay. But none of those words quite fit. They sat like stiff clothing—functional, recognisable, but never mine. I knew what I felt. I just didn’t know how to find it. Or say it. Or survive it. There was too much noise between my inner world and the words that might carry it safely out.

Then came transition.

Oestrogen didn’t soften everything. It sharpened the right things. It didn’t reduce sensation—it tuned it. The static didn’t vanish. It resolved. I didn’t become less sensitive. I became more accurate. I could finally hear what had always been playing just beneath the interference. Patterns began to emerge—not invented, but revealed. Language flowed, not because it was newly granted to me, but because I was no longer drowning in dissonance. I was in sync.

This is what I meant when I wrote From Noise to Harmony. The world was not too much. I simply hadn’t yet been given the conditions for resonance. Transition didn’t change what I could feel—it changed what I could process. It gave me back my instruments and let me play in my key. GLP, once framed as limitation, now moves through me like music. Poetic. Embodied. Layered. Harmonic.

And alexithymia? Perhaps it was never the absence of knowing my feelings. Perhaps it was a different relationship to timing. A slower unfolding. A language not of instant naming but of deep emergence. Feelings were never lost. They were stored—waiting for a moment when the system was no longer under siege, when the signal could come through without distortion.

What felt like confusion was just waiting for a vocabulary that fit.

That’s what this year has been. Not a becoming in the sense of newness, but a clarity. A tuning. There is joy in this—not the joy of novelty, but the joy of finally recognising your own signal and letting it sing. In moments of stillness, I can feel it hum through me—the poem I’ve been living all along. The rhythm I mistook for wrongness. The voice I thought was broken because it wasn’t theirs.

This is what it feels like to speak in your own key.

Building New Gestalts: Kinship, Language, and the Joy of Resonance

There’s a moment—one that repeats itself in different shapes—when a phrase lands, and I feel it settle not just in my mind but in my body. A gestalt, full and complete, arriving all at once like a bell rung at the precise frequency of recognition. It might come from a conversation, a moment of sensory delight, a shared glance between kin. And once it’s there, it stays. Not as a fragment or a soundbite, but as a place. A reference point. A landmark in the landscape of my inner world.

This is how I build language. Not from drills or definitions, but from moments. From resonance. In Building New Gestalts, I described it as a kind of mapping—language forming not through instruction, but through the imprint of experience. And since beginning HRT, that map has expanded. Not because I’m more articulate in the neurotypical sense, but because I’m no longer so busy decoding static. There is room now. Room to notice, to absorb, to name. Room to let language emerge.

Each joyful encounter becomes a new phrase. Each connection etches itself as a metaphor, a shortcut to something felt too deeply to explain outright. This isn’t just expressive. It’s creative. Emergent. Meaning is no longer hunted down—it reveals itself, when I am in the right place, with the right people, speaking the right tongue. And when I meet someone else who speaks GLP like I do, who communicates not in dissected syllables but in atmosphere, in rhythm, in story—I don’t have to translate. I don’t have to justify the way I speak. The fatigue of constant decoding dissolves. We meet in pattern.

To speak gestalt is to speak relationally—to make meaning not in isolation, but in echo. There is something profoundly joyful in that. A joy that doesn’t come from understanding alone, but from being understood on the terms of your own syntax. The world so often demands that we flatten our speech, narrow our metaphors, “use our words” in a way that fits someone else’s rules. But GLP lets us speak around truth, into it, with the elegance of metaphor and the clarity of feeling. We are not circling the point. We are holding space for it.

It reminds me of Writing the Self Into Being, where I spoke of identity not as a fixed point, but as a coalescing—something recursive, layered, unfolding. In that piece, every phrase became a kind of time-travel: a message to and from myself across different versions of who I’ve been. This year, that process has accelerated. I have become a more coherent pattern not because I learned to mimic others more efficiently, but because I began to see my own shape.

The poems I write now aren’t decorations. They’re coordinates. Markers. Waypoints. The language I use isn’t trying to explain me. It’s being me. And that, too, is joy. Not the fragile kind that demands approval, but the rooted kind that grows from recognition. The kind that says: I exist, I am here, and I know what I’m saying—even if you don’t yet have the frame to hear it.

To speak this way is to leave something behind—not just for others, but for yourself. A phrase, a loop, a glint in the syntax that reminds you: you were never lost. You were always building. Always writing. And now, finally, someone might be able to read what you’ve made—not by decoding it, but by feeling it ring true.

A Joy That Threatens Regimes

There is something quietly, luminously radical about joy that does not ask for permission. About speaking in a language that was never meant to be sanctioned, and doing so not only fluently, but beautifully. This year—this spiral of softening and tuning and emergence—has shown me that my joy, my resonance, is not simply personal. It is political. And in the current climate, that joy is also perceived as a threat.

Because what does it mean, to live as both autistic and trans, and to be not just surviving, but glowing? To sing your way through the noise, to build coherence on your own terms, to find language that loops and spirals and lands, without ever needing to translate? It means you have slipped the net. You have made yourself illegible to systems that rely on your erasure. You are no longer confused. And that is dangerous.

I’ve asked myself, sincerely, as I’ve looked back over this year: Why would my joy—my clarity, my voice—be something anyone would fear? What is it about poetry that threatens power? What is it about resonance that makes regimes recoil?

And the answer, I think, is this: systems depend on static. On disconnection. On you not quite knowing where the signal is coming from, or whether it’s meant for you at all. They thrive when you are unsure, when your words falter, when your body does not feel like home. When you apologise for your presence, or dilute your story for the comfort of others. But joy—especially autistic joy, especially trans joy—is uncontainable. It leaks through the cracks. It refuses to be collapsed into diagnosis or despair. It reclaims the space that fear was meant to fill.

When I write now, when I speak from within the language that is mine, I am not simply describing experience. I am making space. I am clearing room for others to speak without shame, to loop and echo and laugh in their own key. And yes, that disrupts the narrative. That rewrites the script. Because I was supposed to be tragic. I was supposed to be grateful for the crumbs of understanding. I was supposed to believe that my language was too strange, too fragmented, too late.

But I don’t.

I am not broken. I am not a puzzle piece. I am a poem—whole, patterned, shifting, true.

And I will not apologise for that.

This joy is not naïve. It does not erase the grief or the violence. It does not deny the weight of systemic harm. But joy is not the absence of struggle. It is the refusal to be reduced to it. It is a decision to name yourself in the face of efforts to define you out of existence. It is a signal sent, again and again, across time and policy and silence, saying: I am here. I always was. And I am not waiting to be allowed to sing.

Let them fear it, if they must. I am not speaking for them.

I am speaking for us.

Final thoughts: the Celebration of Emergence

This is not a redemption arc. It is not a return to some imagined origin or the resolution of a tidy plot. This—this year, this voice, this unfurling—is a sacred unfolding. Not a triumph over adversity, but a celebration of emergence. Not a cure, not a fix, not a solution, but a widening. A deepening. A becoming.

I did not find my voice. That’s the wrong metaphor. My voice has always been here, humming beneath the surface, speaking in scripts and sighs and metaphors too layered to translate. The difference now—the miracle, really—is that the world inside me has shifted into a place where that voice can resonate. The echo no longer bounces off static. It rings. It carries. It lands.

Transition did not gift me language. It gave me the conditions to receive what had already been speaking. It tuned the instrument so that the signal, long scattered, could finally be heard as song. And what a song it is. Gestalt phrases returning like long-lost kin. Emotional textures that once blurred now held with reverence. A sensory field no longer screaming for escape, but opening—slowly, joyfully—to harmony.

To my fellow autistic gestalt processors: you are not broken. You are not delayed. You are not incomplete. You are fluent in a language the world has not yet learned to hear. A language that is poetic, embodied, relational, true. Your speech is not an error—it is an artefact. It is ancestral. It is holy. And I promise you, there are others of us out here, carrying the same syntax in our bones. Keep speaking, even if you don’t yet have the words. The words will come. Or they will return.

And to those who fear this joy—who bristle at the brightness of autistic and trans lives lived openly, lyrically, without apology—we are not asking for your permission. We’re just no longer hiding. You mistook our silence for agreement. You mistook our survival strategies for shame. But we were always here. Looping. Building. Scattering stones. Writing ourselves back into being.

The messages I once scattered across time—poems, fragments, sensory markers, lines muttered under breath—are no longer just missives cast into the dark. They’re being returned. Echoed. Recognised. And sometimes, they arrive in forms I never expected—a meme, a script, a look of knowing across the room. A child answering, “With my parents,” and another child, somewhere across time, replying, “Together.”

I am the child in the meme.
And I am also the one who finally understood what she meant.

The signal wasn’t lost.
I just hadn’t yet become the receiver.

This year has not made me new. It has allowed me to emerge. It has given me the resonance I needed to feel the full weight and beauty of the language I have always spoken. It has allowed me to speak without folding myself in half to fit someone else’s grammar.

So here I am.

Not waiting to be decoded.
Not asking to be simplified.
Not hoping to be understood.

I am here to speak—clearly, joyfully,
in the grammar of who I have always been.