Opening my mouth

Let’s be personal first. Why am I writing this today?

In 2025, my grandmother died. It made me realize the urgency of death — the urgency of doing things — in a direct, visceral way. It opened my eyes.

On 15.03.2026, I came out to my parents as a trans woman. By text message, because I couldn’t do it live. I had wanted to for over three years. In that moment I realized, emotionally, that I had been keeping my mouth shut. This is my piece on opening it.

Mouth closed

Sometimes you live with your mouth closed. You can open it willingly — I sometimes did, said the weird take, held an unusual position out loud. But mostly I was scared. So I kept it shut. Mouths can also be shaken open. Mine was.

And you can react to being shaken open in many ways. Over the years I bound myself in endless duties. Not believing I could create or run, so instead tying myself to the mast and sailing slowly. My first response to seeing was: do legible good. Don’t say the weird thing. Don’t break anyone’s model of me. When something calls for you — when the phoenix calls ¹ — you can answer. Or you can stay still, and make yourself useful in sanctioned ways. I stayed still for a long time.

Finding direction

For years, I tried to find my direction by studying fictional utilitarians. Antiheroes. Antivillains. Characters like Kiritsugu and Lelouch, who pay enormous costs for ends that are maybe justified, maybe not. I was looking for something in that direction — permission to act on the world without apology, a model for wielding the “forbidden tools.” This was a wrong turn. Those characters are fictional precisely because their mode of action doesn’t scale to real human lives.

The real paths of light aren’t dark. They’re bright. They shine visibly. They might even burn — like the sun. You just have to accept that they look weird to other people. What I was actually looking for wasn’t permission to be ruthless. It was permission to be strange.

What I had to leave behind

The thing that needs to be abandoned, on this step, is not Good. It is deference — deference to norms, to authority, to what other people’s models of you can tolerate. You can take Lawful Good paths. They will just look weird. People will be confused. There is no space, in real action on the real world, for optimizing to look normal good.

Mouth, open

I now know what opening my mouth looks like in practice. I came out. After three years of silence. I committed to the Czechia seminar — the thing that scares me. I stepped away from the SaaS project to focus on AI work, the direction that actually pulls. These are the first sentences. There will be more.

I won’t ask for permission.