Binaries

Ok, so after eternally struggling with my sexuality, here comes the part where I begin to confuse gender with gender roles and the binaries that we have yet to transcend. There is this sinking feeling, like being submerged in a tub of cold smoothness, the bubbles tickling as they escape, and my body just floating. But no matter how many times I try to scrub my skin until it's raw and rosy I can feel the uneasiness crawling over me, I can't scrape it off- the feeling of not fitting comfortably into the gender I was assigned at birth.

It feels like the summers where my mom used to take my sister and I into the dressing rooms at Sears. I'm not talking about clothing, I'm talking about how they fit, it was never about the material or the color or whether it was a good piece of clothing, but how no matter what I tried on it had to be for girls- plastic glued on flowers with fake jewels to make the skirts pop out, bright neon plastic sandals that hurt to look at your feet, and don't forget those amazing swimsuits that had zebra strips running down your butt and mismatched faded brown straps that just did the body favors (I'm being super sarcastic if you haven't caught on yet). Nothing was ever just clothing, everything was scrunched up under girls and I was never allowed to look at the boy section just to see if there was something not covered in pink, pink, pink.

It's not that I didn't like going shopping for rosy and bright colored clothes, it's the idea that buying this meant, "this is what it means to be a girl". I couldn't yet process my feelings on this at the time so I would just drown the sound of panic out with pleasing whatever gender role I had to play. I would have enjoyed life a little more if buying certain clothes did not determine gender expression/ role. It confused me a lot as a child, and so whenever a person like my sister did not dress like I did, it created a bigger confusion as to who I was supposed to be rather than who I wanted to be and the choices I made. She constantly made fun of me for being 'girly' and liking pink things but yet here I was with a mom making faces at me whenever I didn't do something that wasn't 'girly'. What the hell was I supposed to do?

I wanted how I chose to express myself and my gender to lead two completely different lives. But I just didn't know the secrets of the universe at the time. Until I began to walk around splitting apart, leaving pieces of me in places and spaces I had yet to create for myself. Sometimes I'd feel like the person I was assigned to be, a girl, but also the words "assigned at birth" as if there's some kind of checklist to define who we were by "looking for the parts" rather than wait a couple years and see what kind of person we began to show, made me a little worried. What if I wasn't assigned properly? I don't feel like a boy and I don't want to be a boy, I just want to exist somewhere between nothing and everything.

They say we're made of stardust, the same kind that exists when a star explodes. I want to exist in that space, of all the ingredients in our bones, but without a name, except the kind I choose for myself. I love being a girl, there's so much empowerment and xingonismo- a term I have yet to discover fully, but sometimes I want to just exist. As nothing and everything. As someone who leaves dirty laundry everywhere and loves being alone at home just long enough to clean everything and give up halfway and watch tv shows from upside down on the couch, leaving dirty dishes everywhere then getting up and cleaning every dish in the house, to pretending the bathroom has great power to give me singing abilities, and hiding my bras under my stuffed bear and forgetting about em, and always forgetting to turn off the bathroom light, chugging down leftover orange juice while nobody is watching, and sitting on the kitchen floor crying because it's cold and it's 11 pm and I'm thirsty and I'm too lazy to get up and get myself a glass of water. Oh god I'm terrible, and I'm messy, but you don't need to give me a gender to tell me that.