The First Time I Questioned My Gender
I was 18 years old when the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine began, a mere month away from graduating high school. Bored out of my mind and open to taking advantage of this unforeseen free time, I decided to get high for one of the first times in my life.
I had smoked once years before, but it was such a strange and disorienting experience that I kept away from the stuff for a while afterwards. Now, I was going to be alone while I did it, and my hopes were high (pun intended) for a great second attempt.
Thoroughly toasted, I waltzed around my bedroom aimlessly for a while until coming up my mirror. I’d previously heard of people saying to never look at yourself in a mirror while high, but my curiosity was just too overwhelming to resist. Sat criss-cross-applesauce on the floor at one in the morning, I gazed at my reflection deeply. Little did I know, however, just how impactful this choice would be.
I studied my face, noticing small details I’d otherwise have ignored or missed my whole life. I figured out my right eye was more hooded than my left, reminisced about old scars from childhood, and even noticed a freckle on the very tip of my nose! But as I kept staring at myself, I fell into a rabbit hole.
I thought about how I was perceived by the world around me my whole life — both the pleasant and painful examples. Digging deeper and deeper, I thought back to how my tomboyish-ness first began around puberty. Up until 12, I was all in on the pink and purple princess fantasy, yet seemingly flipped overnight. Old band tees, ripped jeans, and worn flannels became my comfort clothes, topped with some baseball cap or beanie nearly every day. I cut my hair short, and painted my room blue, and never really looked back. Why, I wondered?
Then, I started thinking of what else came alongside puberty: body insecurity. It’s a normal part of the process of growing up, and I was convinced the occasional restrictive diet and obsessive exercise was no more than a rite of passage for any teenage girl living in this messed up world. Yet still, I had unique experiences that never left my memory, instead staining my recollection of my own life with question marks.
At one point in my middle school years over the course of about three months (and in complete secret) I was convinced I was supposed to be an amputee.
Sounds… strange? I know.
I simply remembered myself standing in front of my bathroom mirror, feeling an incomprehensible dissatisfaction with my body. I couldn’t put more words to the feeling other than that I felt that something about my body was wrong. Faulty, defective. For some reason, the only sense I could make of that feeling was that I was meant to be missing my right leg below the knee.
I would tie a long scarf around my bent leg, holding the pose together long enough for me to stare at myself in the mirror to see if I felt more “correct” that way. I considered sneaking out one winter night and burying my calf in the snow, causing enough damage that my vision could be fulfilled. I never ended up committing to the idea, much to my current-day relief.
About a year after this incident, I was re-aquatinted with that familiar dissatisfied feeling towards my body. This time, however, I put a lot more action into my beliefs.
I wanted to slim out, gain muscle, and then hopefully find myself to be… myself for once. This led me down a dark path of restricting (or just entirely forgoing) my diet, binging and purging, and lying to everyone I knew more than ever before. At no point during this time did I want to be deathly thin, but I did want to look drastically different. This continued for years, sending me repeatedly to eating disorder treatment centres and psych hospitals. At the point of being high and staring at myself in the mirror alone in my room, I was still in the thick of that mindset.
All of these repressed memories swarmed me in that moment, and I watched my own face look back at the person I had become with more curiosity and appreciation than ever before. Suddenly, the question I had been avoiding for nearly half of my life finally appeared at the forefront of my mind.
“Am I happy being a woman?”
I mentally recoiled, defensively asserting to myself that I was just high and probably needed to go to sleep. Instead, though, I asked it to myself again. And again. And again.
Growing up, I was always the angry vocal feminist who was unafraid to embrace my endless support of gender equality. The idea that I wasn’t even a woman the whole time scared the crap out of me. Was I a fraud? A liar?
But an even more perplexing question came shortly after this, that being whether I was a man or not.
Okay, I thought, if not a woman… then I’m a guy? There’s no way! How could someone who grew up playing barbies in their pink tutu be a boy in denial? A chorus of gender stereotypes and prejudiced rhetoric swirled around my head as I tried to make sense of what I was feeling.
But I knew about being nonbinary — a close friend had come out years before, and I had been a huge supporter throughout their process of coming out and changing their name. How, then, could I have missed this in myself?
I avoided this conclusion for a while, shameful of the lack of clarity I assumed that answer could provide. What kind of peace of mind could I ever achieve under the guise of something so misunderstood by a wider society? Misunderstood by even myself?
I wish I could tell you that I came to some crystal-clear conclusions that night, because part of me wishes I had. Instead, I spent the next year of my life researching, analyzing my experiences, and playing around with the idea of myself being outside of the gender binary.
I learned a lot about how I perceived gender expectations, and what those expectations even were. I learned about how I wanted to be perceived by the world for the first time, rather than focusing on what would please the most people. I learned a lot about what it meant to “feel right”, and I learned even more about just how often I had felt “wrong” my whole life.
As I write this, it’s been 4 years since I first sat in front of that mirror and asked myself the question.
Every single day I learn something new about what it means for me to be nonbinary, and I can happily promise you that I will never stop learning. Half of the battle has been making peace with the uncertainty, and the fact that we can, will, and occasionally have to change as we grow. So caught up in trying to find one singular truth to please me, I had missed all the small truths of my life that didn’t fit my narrative of expectations.
If I can give any advice to people in similar positions to mine on that lonely quarantine evening, it would be this:
You are allowed to contradict, to make mistakes, to expand outside of the lines we draw around the unfinished paintings of our lives… you are allowed to be unsure! The journey is a long and intimidating one, but entirely worth the effort. The answers only come once you learn to live amongst the questions.
