The Question was never 'who you are'.

The question was always who you're choosing to become.

Ideas sometimes arrive so clearly they’re like discoveries you’ve unearthed, not thoughts you’ve created.

Sometime in my late teens, and somewhere in the book section of Ealing Broadway’s branch of WHSmith, my pen name appeared in my head. I hadn’t published anything then, beyond a short story in the school magazine and a letter to a Beatles fan club entitled I love Paul McCartney, but here it was. Fully formed, unarguable, a fact in the world. It hadn’t happened yet, but I knew it was going to. I was going to write as RS Knightley. S is not my middle initial; Knightley might have been from Austen, or it might have been from my favourite singer; probably it was both and neither. It was right. I felt its rightness physically. Three years – and one domestic violence incident and subsequent police report about the man from whom my birth surname came – later, I changed my name legally. It took longer than it might have done, not for legal reasons (I was by then over eighteen) but because my solicitor was my uncle and wanted to be sure that I was sure. So, three years of are-you-sure later, my pen name became who I really was. I became Rachel Knightley. The sense of liberation was extraordinary. I felt as I would discover we do when taking any step closer to our true self, not as we have been told we are but as we have grown into becoming: I felt more me than I ever had.

I was reminded of this last night at Union Chapel in Islington, where I was lucky enough to be invited by a friend with a spare ticket to see author, poet, comedian and public speaker Alok Vaid-Menon. I’d never seen Alok before, but everything they say as a gender non-conforming, transfeminine family member, friend, partner, writer and performer spoke directly to me as a person who has stepped away from the trappings of an identity that didn’t serve me, not just a name but a family situation that didn’t serve me. Alok has an incomparably harder, daily fight in choosing to invest in showing up as who they are: where they have death threats, the worst I got once I showed up as who I had become was a former teacher informing me I “had upset my mother, and future genealogists” by changing my surname (my mother, to whom she had not spoken, found this very funny: which ws a good example to set me in terms of how to react when people who are threatened by who you are have actually filled in their own version of you and present their fears to you as facts).“Life is not about finding yourself: life is about creating yourself” said George Bernard Shaw, long before we had half the vocabulary or emotional awareness we’re starting – starting – to develop now. The big skill here is listening – to yourself, to your own possibilities – instead of trying to block fear of change with established “should” of who we are, who we think our families and friends need us to be. When we’re ready to listen to what it’s like to be somebody else – without believing their differences are a threat – we improve communication with our partners, we grow closer to our friends, we create connection where assumption would have made a brick wall. We make better art, write better stories, live truer lives.

This December, it will be four years since a close friend of mine ended his life. He had not so long before been on the end of a violent transphobic attack that left him with broken bones; he’d been told when he asked where gender neutral toilets were in a famous London organisation '“we only have normal toilets”; his gender had not been accepted by his father or, two days before his death, by an optician who repeatedly misgendered him. I am not here to tell you that that is what killed him, or that I understand what it was like to be him. I am telling you, if you’re in any of the cities where Alok is performing, you’re in for a wonderful show and, whatever your background, life experience, thoughts or feelings, you’ll come out with a greater sense of permission to be yourself: to find out who is in you and who you want to be. Aside from the cumulative improvement to humanity, individually I can imagine no greater blessing.

I wrote under RS Knightley only once. Then I dropped the RS and have showed up as who I truly am ever since. Yes, I choose how much of myself I let out to my friends and family, to my clients, to whoever wants to come into my online space. But there’s never a lie, never a line between personas. I’ve been Rachel Knightley longer than I had the name that came before, longer than some of my friends took and returned married names (which, I suspect, my teacher did not think “upset their mothers or future genealogists”), and while those times of their lives are no less true or valid for having been a season and not a lifetime, I can absolutely say that the investment in who I choose to show up as every day has never stopped paying off in the relationship I have with myself. Here’s to giving us all – especially ourselves – every opportunity for that kind of relationship.