Dear Harper,

I don’t know how many times I’m going to watch your documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRZ1ELeGepo) because I’m trying to memorize your face, seep myself in your will to live, (and also, no small thing) because of the sheer delight I feel in watching the scene with you and Will at dinner in Vegas.

I want to memorize your face because you are teaching me what it means to be beautiful. I want to seep myself in your courage because it is like watching a flower unfold. Life saying yes to life, which, when observed, brings forth awe.

You spoke about feeling like a girl when you were a child. You showed us the picture of young you with your unicycle, your girlish self, your happy face. The girl who could not exist because, in the world in which you lived, you were not a girl. You were a boy. To have the body of a boy and the, what? spirit? soul? of a girl is a terrible burden to walk with in a society that sees things in black and white. Boy or girl. Not both. No fluidity. No change.

In the documentary, you are Harper. One time you were someone else, but he is no longer around because the truth was allowed to rise. You are a female negotiating what it means to express yourself as a woman in a body that has made a decision: she/her. You are a human being who longs to connect with other human beings in a world that has not caught up with you and your choices yet. To be ahead of the curve can be terrifying as people often find change terrifying and react to it with fear and sometimes hatred.

To be different and still be loved. Oh, is this not the yearning in so, so many hearts?

To be a woman in a culture that is determined that we hate our faces and bodies so that we spend endless amounts of money trying to be different: smaller, bigger, smoother, tighter, -er, -er, -er, -er, is complicated. What does it even mean to look like a woman, to be a woman? I struggle with this. My mom was uncomfortable with her own femininity, and I am uncomfortable with mine. My mind wants my face to look other, and my face wants to look like itself. The older I get, the farther I get from the distracting energy of youth, the more my face reveals the bones of me, and the harder it gets for me to look at myself with anything but fear and dismissal. When you are adopted and when you are told that people to whom you are not related to by DNA are your parents, the more your face becomes an issue. Is this not comparable to presenting as a boy as a child but carrying a girl inside of you? The older you get, the more the female is going to emerge—it’s inevitable. Thomas knew this when he said, “If you do not bring forth what is within in, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Watching you sit with yourself, watching you allow the female you are to express herself in your face, is helping my brain accept that maybe, I, too, can teach my eyes a new way of seeing, a new way of understanding that what they are seeing when they see my face is me, not wrongness.

I think you are stunning. When I look at you, I see life energy saying yes, saying, I am here, saying love me because I love myself and you enough to show up even though it is so very frightening. I see femininity delighting in itself and in the world. I see play. I see seriousness. I see beauty. I see love.

When you brought Will to the house in the desert you had bought so you could have a place that felt safe in which you could wear women’s clothes I felt like you were bringing a witness, Will—but also others: the film crew, us—to see what terror and self-hatred and the will to live looks like: it looks like creating a safe space that is not actually safe where you can be yourself. But can you really be yourself and not feel safe at the same time?

You cried briefly in the documentary when you told Will you had to fight not to kill yourself at one point because you felt like a monster. I understand this feeling, I think. I hope this is okay with you to make this comparison, but when you are an adopted person and internally you carry the person you would have been if you hadn’t been adopted, the person that is not allowed to exist, it’s easy to feel monstrous inside. If the people who become your parents quite possibly have not only no interest but active resistance to see the person you carry inside, how can you not hate that self just to survive? You reject who I am inside? Okay, I’ll reject her, too, so I can (sort of) live.

When you brought Will (and us) into that vandalized house, I felt like you were laying all your cards on the table. Okay. Look. This is the hidden story of me. I surrender.

Instead of shooting yourself, you shot through the wall of secrets that separated you from those you loved.

Here I am.

At the end of the documentary, Will gave you diamond earrings. Of course he did. You’d showed him your darkness, and he reflected back to you its beauty, its treasured light.