The Audacity to Exist

The air in the room is stale, thick with the scent of expired milk and the metallic tang of neglect. It is February 2021, and the cold of a Canadian winter has seeped through the poorly insulated walls of my apartment in Laval, settling into the marrow of my bones. If you were here, standing in the corner of this dimly lit kitchen, you would see dust motes dancing in the sliver of streetlamp light cutting through the window. You would hear the relentless, maddening drip of the kitchen sink, the dirty dishwater leaking onto wood that is slowly rotting away, a metronome counting down seconds I no longer wish to spend.

You might want to look away. I don’t blame you. It is uncomfortable to witness a human being at the precipice of their own erasure. But I am asking you to stay. I am asking you to breathe in this stale air with me, to feel the grime on the floorboards against your bare feet, because this moment—this jagged, ugly, terrifying moment—is not the end. It is the violent, necessary prelude to an audacity I didn’t know I possessed.

I stand in the center of the kitchen, my makeup smudged, a chaotic map of despair painted across a face I barely recognize. I am laughing. It starts as a low rumble in my chest, and then it fractures. It isn’t joy; it is the sound of a mind snapping. A wet, jagged gasping that tears out of my throat. I am laughing because there is a butcher knife in my hand, and the cold steel is kissing my pulse.

I can feel my pulse, fluttering like a trapped bird against the blade. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It is the only thing in this room that feels alive.

Survival is not a cinematic montage. In the movies, the hero hits rock bottom with a certain aesthetic grace; the lighting is moody, the music swells, and the epiphany arrives in a neatly wrapped package. But here, in the grime of my first apartment, survival is messy. It is snot and tears and the heaving of lungs that feel too small for the air they need.

I am twelve floors up. Invisible. My parents live twelve floors down in the same building, yet we are separated by oceans of silence and unsaid words. I am jobless, money draining away like the water from that leaking sink. My lungs are burning from a respiratory infection, my chest tight with the chronic ache of heartburn and stress that has calcified into a physical weight. I look around at this place—my so-called freedom—and I see nothing. Just black. A void where a future should be.

I press the knife harder. A small, stinging bite. A drop of blood beads on the skin, a stark red against the shadows.

And then…

A jarring sound pierces the bubble of my hysteria. It rings again. And again.

RING….RING…RING…

Inside the dark, gloomy, dirty hole, where I lived with my quivering knife at my throat, perhaps a sign, perhaps a warning. The sound echoes against the rotting wood. My hand trembles, the steel tapping erratically against my skin. Who dares to trespass on this ending? Who has the audacity to demand a heartbeat from a ghost?

I lower the knife. My legs feel like water as I reach for the phone.

“Allo?”

It is my mother. Manman. In Creole, mom is manman.

Her voice is thick, laced with a tremor I have never heard before. She doesn’t know what I am doing. She doesn’t know about the knife or the laughter or the blood. But she knows. Maybe not all mothers possess this, but she has a terrifying, mystical radar for the precise moment her child is slipping off the edge of the world. She tells me she loves me. She tells me my father loves me. She repeats it, a mantra against the dark, a lifeline thrown across twelve floors of concrete and steel.

I don’t remember what I said back. I think I just breathed. I think I just let the sound of her voice anchor me to the floor, stopping the float toward oblivion.

When the call ends, the apartment is silent again, but the air has changed. The spell of the void is broken, replaced by crushing exhaustion. I walk to the bathroom, avoiding my reflection in the mirror, and wash the smudged makeup from my face. The water is cold. It wakes me up. I crawl into my bed, curl into sheets that smell of sweat and fear, and I close my eyes. I do not die tonight.

But make no mistake: someone did die in that apartment last night.

Michael died there. The boy who wore masks to please everyone, the boy who played the clown to keep the peace, the boy who was terrified of his own shadow, he took his last breath in that dusty, lonely room. He had to. He had carried me as far as he could, his back breaking under the weight of a world that didn’t understand him. He died so that I could survive.

The next morning wasn’t a miraculous recovery. It was a tactical retreat. I called my aunt. I found a job. I found a room in a shared apartment. I packed two suitcases and a single box, the sum total of a life that was ending—and I called an Uber.

As the car pulled away from that building in Laval, I didn’t look back. I left the dishes unwashed. I left the rotting wood. I left the ghost of the boy I tried so hard to be. I was in survival mode, yes, but it was a different kind of survival. It wasn’t just about keeping the heart beating; it was about clearing the debris for what was coming next.

Survival isn’t just the act of not dying. That is too low a bar. Survival is an act of rebellion. It is the audacity to look at the void, to feel the cold blade of erasure against your skin, and yet say, “Not today.” It is the gritty, unglamorous work of packing your bags while your hands are still shaking. It is the realization that if you are going to stay on this earth, you cannot stay as the person who wanted to leave it.

I arrived at my new place with nothing but my luggage and a terrifying, fragile hope. I was starting over. I was learning to breathe again. And in the quiet space left behind by Michael’s departure, something else began to take root. A seedling pushing through concrete. A white rose blooming in a graveyard.

Maii was waking up.

***

Have you ever looked in a mirror and seen a stranger? Not just a bad hair day or a tired face, but a fundamental disconnect, a glitch in the matrix of your own existence. For twenty-six years, I looked into the glass and saw a costume I couldn’t unzip. I saw broad shoulders, a flat chest, a jawline that society read as “him,” while the consciousness screaming behind the eyes was undeniably “her.”

I am a trans woman. I am gender-fluid. I am a being of stardust and flesh, trying to reconcile the two. But in the early days of my rebirth, after the night in Laval, the mirror was a battlefield. I was safe from the knife, yes, but I was not yet safe in my skin.

I decided to stop hiding. If Michael was dead, then Maii had to be brave enough to exist. It started with the physical, the tangible cartography of the body. I wanted to be less hairy. The hair on my face, my chest, my legs—it felt like barbed wire, a constant reminder of a puberty that felt like a betrayal. So, I started laser therapy.

A snap of heat, a sharp sting, a smell of singed hair. It hurts. But to me, that pain was exquisite. It was the pain of excavation. With every zap, I was burning away the mask. I was carving myself out of the marble block of expectations.

I started to walk more. I put on my headphones, drowning out the city noise with music that made my blood hum. I walked down the hill from work, the drizzle of a spring rain cooling my skin. I wasn’t wearing makeup to hide anymore. I wasn’t contouring a mask. I was trying the “clean girl aesthetic” fresh face, moisturizer, and a little gloss. Simple.

There was a moment—a fleeting, microscopic moment—that shifted the tectonic plates of my self-perception. I was walking, music swelling in my ears, feeling the rhythm of my own stride. I wasn’t shrinking. I wasn’t hunching my shoulders to take up less space. I was walking with a prowess I didn’t know I had. A gentleman passed by. He didn’t look at me with confusion or disgust. He didn’t look through me. He looked at me. He smiled.

“You have a beautiful smile,” he said.

It was such a mundane compliment. But to me, it was a benediction. For the first time, I felt beautiful. Not “handsome.” Not “presentable.” Beautiful. It wasn’t a beauty that came from a specific feature, but from the alignment of my soul with my body. I radiated the energy of the woman that I was, and the world finally reflected it back.

But let’s be clear: this isn’t about passing. It isn’t about tricking the world into thinking I am a cisgender woman. I am Maii. My body is ambiguous. I have a penis. I have curves. I have stretch marks and scars and hair that sometimes grows back despite the laser. I am a mosaic.

Society wants to put me in a box. They want to label me “experiment,” “monster,” or “fetish.” But the violence of these labels isn’t just theoretical; it’s a physical weight I carry into every room. 

I remember shivering in the ER, my body wracked with pain from an infection, waiting for help that felt conditional. A nurse with purple glasses looked down at my painted nails, then at the ‘M’ on my medical file. She didn’t look at my face. She just fired a single word like a bullet:

“Monsieur.”

It wasn’t a mistake; it was a correction. A deliberate, icy dismantling of my identity that hit me harder than the infection in my blood. In that sterile cold, surrounded by the mechanical beeping of life support, I wasn’t a patient in pain; I was a bureaucratic error she resented having to solve.

I want you to sit in that discomfort. Why does my ambiguity threaten you? Why does the fact that I flow between the binaries make you feel unsafe? I am not asking for your permission to exist. I am not asking for you to understand the biology or the sociology of it. I am asking you to witness the humanity of it.

I am learning to be the “baddie” in the mirror. Some days, the dysmorphia doesn’t just win; it devours. I look in the glass and the reflection warps. The jawline sharpens into a weapon; the shoulders broaden into a cage. I see the ghost of the boy clawing his way back through the silver, suffocating the woman trying to breathe on the surface.

But more and more, I see her. I see the ethereal beauty my coworker Fani talks about. I see the fierceness of my mother, repackaged in a form she never expected.

I am reclaiming the words they used to hurt me. Whore. Slut. Bitch. I strip them of their venom and wear them as armor. I am a whore for life, hungry for every sensation. I am a slut for joy, opening myself wide to the universe. I am a bitch for my boundaries, refusing to tolerate the bullshit of small minds.

My body is not an apology. It is not a mistake to be corrected. It is a story to be read. Take me off the shelf. Devour the narrative. But do not think for a second that you own the book.

***

Growing up, I scanned the television screen like a radar looking for a blip of recognition. I searched for myself in movies, in books, in magazines. I saw white women. I saw thin women. I saw cisgender women. Later, I saw trans women—but they were always a specific type. The “passable” ones. The ones who had the surgeries, the ones who fit the mold of traditional femininity, the ones who could slip into the binary without causing a ripple.

Where was I? Where was the plus-sized, Black, queer, trans woman with the hairy chest and the masculine frame but the feminine soul? Where was the girl who didn’t want surgery, but just wanted to be seen?

I was invisible. And when you don’t see yourself in the world, you start to wonder if you are real. You start to feel like a glitch, a mistake, a ghost haunting a machine that wasn’t built for you. The media erasure of bodies like mine is a subtle, insidious violence. It tells us that we are not worthy of a story. We are not the love interest. We are not the heroes. We are, at best, the punchline. At worst, the victim in a crime drama, a dead body to drive the plot forward.

Then I found Sort Of.

I remember watching Sabi Mehboob, the character played by Bilal Baig. I sat on my couch, the TV’s blue light washing over me, and for the first time in years, I exhaled. Really exhaled.

Here was a person who was messy. Here was a gender-fluid, brown, non-binary person who wasn’t a tragedy. The moment Sabi stopped minimizing themselves for the comfort of others and started putting their own boundaries first, something in me unlocked. It wasn’t a big explosion; it was the quiet defiance of them simply choosing their own peace. Watching them refuse to shrink was the first full breath I had taken in years, filling lungs I didn’t know were collapsed.

We talk about “protecting the dolls.” It’s a phrase that circulates in the community, a call to protect trans women. But often, that protection is selective. It is reserved for the dolls who fit the aesthetic. The dolls who are skinny, pretty, and palatable. I want us to protect all the dolls. The fat dolls. The hairy dolls. The dolls who don’t pass. The dolls who are loud and angry and tired. The dolls who are messy. The dolls who are still figuring it out. If we only protect the ones who look like society’s definition of a woman, we are just reinforcing the same cage we are trying to break out of. We are just painting the bars pink.

Representation isn’t about vanity; it’s about education. It is about showing the world that humanity comes in infinite variations. It is about teaching the heteronormative society that we are not a threat to their existence; we are an expansion of it. It’s about showing the world what is possible when you refuse to be limited by biology.

Representation is oxygen. You don’t realize how vital it is until you are suffocating from the lack of it. I realized then that if I couldn’t find the representation I needed, I had to become it. I had to write myself into existence. So, I am grabbing the pen, and I am writing my name in permanent ink on the walls of this world.

This universe of words you are reading right now. This is my attempt to solidify my reflection. I am writing this so that the next person, the next scared kid in a dirty apartment in Laval, the next person crying in front of a mirror—doesn’t have to feel like an alien.

I am writing to say: Look at me. I am here. I am real. I am not a concept. I am flesh and blood and anxiety and dreams. I want you to witness me. Not just the polished parts, not just the “baddie” days, but the ugly sobbing days, the dysmorphic days, the days when I feel like a monster. Because all of it is human. All of it is valid.

So here we are. You, me, and the space between these words.

 ***

I can still hear the rain from that night in February, but it sounds different now. It doesn’t sound like despair anymore. It sounds like cleansing. It sounds like water washing away the dust of the past, feeding the roots of the garden I am growing.

Life is a bitter apple cider with a swirly sundae shake. It is sharp and acidic, full of pain and grief and the stinging memory of a knife at the throat. But it is also sweet. It is creamy and cold and delightful, full of strangers’ smiles and laser burns that feel like progress and the comfort of a TV show that sees you.

It is a mess. And I love the mess.

I have the audacity to exist. That is my superpower. In a world that wanted me dead, in a family that wanted me silent, in a society that wants me hidden—I am here. I am taking up space. I am loud. I am breathing.

I am Maii.

I hope you understand now why I asked you to stay. Why I needed you to see the dirty apartment and the trembling hand. You cannot appreciate the sunrise if you do not understand the darkness of the new moon. You cannot understand the triumph of my existence if you do not know how close I came to erasure.

Existing is audacious—if you’re reading this, you exist, and that is already a riot against silence.