It's a potent memory: being a child and wobbling about on your first bicycle, focusing so hard on coordinating all the actions required to keep it upright — and failing — until you stop fixating on each individual movement and suddenly "Oh my god! I'm doing it! I'm doing it!"
And then you become self-conscious again and promptly topple over. But that momentary success renders what had seemed a futile pursuit potentially fruitful.
I raise this as a metaphor because when you're a child who is trans and/or neurodivergent, and has no way of knowing that these are perfectly commonplace ways of being, you will find yourself confronted — typically within a year or two of school — with the apparent reality that there is a fixed and very limited number of legitimate kinds of human being, and that you aren't one of them.
Whereupon your own mind and body become the most elaborate whirligig, with a profusion of all manner of component parts furiously spinning, tilting, and wobbling. It is your job to keep it running down the path that statistical normality, or some creator's ineffable design, has laid out for it. You cease to be yourself and become your own overwhelmed overseer.
Recently, I've been finding myself in situations where I'm not on the outside, exclusively concerned with making the machine function according to foreign specifications. I'm on the inside interacting with real people in a real world, and it's beautiful.
Occasionally, I'll stop myself and think "Oh my god! I'm doing it! I'm doing it!", and promptly topple over. But I get back up, because the exhilaration is worth all the grazed knees and elbows.
When you are constantly fine-tuning your behaviour to what you think others expect and can comprehend, you don't ever really see, much less appreciate, anybody but yourself. It's exhausting and lonely.
I will get the hang of this, because it's so magical.