I was at a point in our generational definition of self where words had lost meaning. Gay, Bi, Straight, Pan-sexual, A sexual. Transgender, gender identity, gender equality, gender awareness, psuedo-gender, gender fixation, the more we as teenagers dove into this whole new form of identification the more personification and personal boundaries blurred into this watercolor mix of representational flags and signs and t-shirts and paraphernalia.
And what was I?
I didn’t know.
I didn’t dress like a guy, I didn’t like dressing like a guy, I didn’t dress like a girl either, I didn’t like dressing like a girl. There was no stereotype, haircut or wig that I could put on to show off the magnificence of me… whatever that magnificence was. I couldn’t decide, and I couldn’t let my circumstances or my environment push me into deciding. In a fast paced, information driven world like high school all anybody wants to know is “who are you?” And as bad as it was in the sixties with greasers, cheerleaders and jocks, cowboys, black panthers, soldiers and flower children the diversity was growing in multiple cliques with just a signature haircut.
Poof, yesterday Shane today I’m Shawna.
And if it wasn’t for the respective space you give newly identifying kids they’d be just as vulnerable to the peer torture as anyone wearing an off brand shirt or bad shoes. Sexuality and gender choice were a magic pass into acceptance because it was the new designer pair of jeans… but now… it was like a newly introduced collector card game. Non-binary I choose you! With all it’s flashy definitions of what powers you had as a gender select.
What was I wearing? Today I’m wearing A sexual boy with bi-sexual tendencies? No.
Seven a.m. I looked in the thin mirror on the medicine cabinet against the wall and saw two brown eyes under saggy eyelids, splotchy skin with a few red spots that were about to turn into pimples. Skinny, no breasts, no hips. Fourteen year old me. An image far from the curvy models on magazine covers laying on the wicker hamper lid in the corner. Thin knotted tangles of brunette hair that couldn’t be defined as either straight nor curly because it was both and in-between, a painful wreck to brush out every morning.
I turned on the faucet to brush my teeth.
In only one hour I would be in class facing all these classes of teenage wisdom and identification expertise. Irony being that the assignment in my first class was to write an essay on what Independence meant to you. US History. The beginning of our second semester. In a socialite environment like high school my peers sought to be independent by joining groups and clubs and teams that were dependent on aggregation. The silent philosophy painfully obvious that in seeking out individuality you were dependent on duality. The class assignment would then demand rhetoric from teens who had no clue that they lived and breathed a contradiction. They only wanted to be seen, heard, accepted.
Accepted.
Breakfast in my house was usually in silence. The white tile covered kitchen usually cold. My Dad left to work long before my Mom and I woke so it was just she and myself sitting at an older, small, fold-out, card table. The kind with a sturdy laminated top that looked like a yellow, brown and green acrylic seventies experience. I listened to the ringing of my breakfast cereal hitting the white ceramic bowl as my Mom thumbed through news articles on her digital tablet.
“Ugh.” Moaning as she lifted her coffee mug up to her pursed mouth. “Can’t believe this.” Her eyes still glued onto the tablet, she breathed out words into the air without intention. “Another brutality during a Black Lives Matter rally.”
And then my perspective changed. No longer was I sitting there listening to the rounded oats crushed by my teeth. I was much farther away, as if above myself somewhere looking down at myself and my mother at the table and the next thirty years climbed and climaxed around me where it was myself staring down at some device while my child sat quietly eating breakfast. The monotony of life and all of it’s garbage that we as humans devour and pack on as pounds of fusible anguish. I was catapulted into the obscenities and dire circumstances that claimed my innocence and ripped from me my joy as one heart break after another simultaneously tore into my soul and coated my exterior with callus.
The panic brought me back.
“Elise, you feeling okay?” With coffee cup suspended in mid air my mother stared at me, a look mixed of confusion and concern on her face.
Nodding my head, “Yeah,” I laughed halfheartedly, “oral presentation today. An essay in history, I’m a little freaked out.” And as I lied, looking at her, her face distorted into angles and abstract shapes.
Was this really all we were? Just skin and bones and memories? Actions and responses that incited more actions and responses from other bodies of memories? When inspirational videos, almost magically took you from the capes of mountains to the hallowed desert valleys cherishing life and existence, freedom and… independence.
“Independence.”
I whispered to my mother bringing myself back into the moment, spooning my bowl of cereal. “The essay is on Independence.”
“Don’t worry, honey. I’m sure it’s perfect.” Rising to refill her coffee mug she said. “You’d better get a move on, it’s almost seven thirty.”
It took almost twenty minutes to walk to the high school. Getting there was easy, filling my bag of my class necessities was easy.
But walking through the clusters of people was hard. It was hard to not stare and wonder, it was hard to not look them up and down without thinking about whether they truly felt their classification, identity. From the skirt yielding cheerleaders who huddled together with the one stray off to the side practicing moves to the gender fluid group who wore nothing but androgynous outfits to more distort their vulnerability in being awkward teenagers. If I stared and wondered I was questioning their decision in becoming more themselves and not supporting their choice. Or maybe curious?
Did the cheerleaders really want to cheer? Or was it as simple as needing an identity? Like a gang member armed with a bandanna as a flag, were these girls relying on the pack social dynamic for support and affirmation? The same would go for the newly androgynous or the newly non-binary, or the transgender.
Why was it so hard to accept yourself?
With my backpack tugging at my shoulders I slipped into my first period class and dropped my bag to the floor. After sitting in the large plastic chair behind a makeshift desk fashioned from one of those long, plastic picnic tables I pulled out my wire bound notebook with my essay written in it. My hands shook. I would probably be called up first. The entire class was dedicated to hearing all of our papers. Students of all different classes eased into the room as the first bell sounded.
Mrs. Front almost skipped into the room dressed in a mid-calf, brown skirt with an egg yolk yellow top. Loose, bouncy curls hung from above her thick rimmed glasses. “Good morning, everyone.” She chimed.
The class didn’t respond.
“Are we all ready for the presentation?” Mrs. Front pulled her chair out from behind her desk and sat down. “We’re beginning with-” she paused to look at her attendance sheet. “Elizabeth O’Malley.”
“Lizzy isn’t here today.” A girl named Rebecca called out from the corner.
“Mm-kay.” Mrs. Front said.
My palms were sweating. I hoped she wasn’t moving alphabetically because I would be next. Elise Orean.
“David Beckerman?” She looked up from the sheet.
“Yep.” David, a blond headed cowboy who often talked about duck hunting Rose from his seat.
Letting out a sigh of relief my chest fell into the table, rocking the plastic just slightly. The class quietly listened to David’s essay, dragging on about the historical events encompassing the ratification of the colonies. Two more students went up after David, Crest, a newly revealed transgender who’s name had previously been Priscilla and then Betty, one of the more popular girls in the class. Very clearly a heterosexual with well defined curves and make-up. One of the few freshman who wore make-up. Their essays were short, Crests was comical in his comparisons between communism and democracy.
All three essays were vastly different… Like mine.
“Elise Orean.”
My name. My heart pounded in my chest and suddenly my hands started shaking again. The closer I was to the chalkboard the safer I felt, as long as I held the paper up in front of my face I’d be able to speak without shaking.
“Elise, drop the paper please and speak up.” Mrs. Front smiled.
I looked at her in horror and then back at the class. Okay. I would just look down, then. I had one of those brain fogs where you wouldn’t remember anything after you finished. I tried clearing my throat, it didn’t work so I just started.
“What is Independence?” I read off the essay question to begin.
“Independence is the act of not being dependent. Dependence being a state of necessity depending on something or someone else. A person, a resource, a system any number of things. Erich Fromm indulges in the philosophy that human development has historically been dependent upon disobedience. That during the act of disobedience in evolutionary and Civic historic cornerstones man has made his most distinct and positive leaps and bounds. I tend to agree. By disobeying the laws of nature itself we as a human kind sent a man into space, walked the moon. We began one of several journeys toward equality with a disobedient passenger on a bus who refused to give up her seat.
Yet there comes a point where in the act of similar disobedience from a much larger group the disobedience then, by peer expectation, ethos or popular mechanics, becomes the obedient thing to do. Erich Fromm says it best in our textbook Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, “Whenever principles which are obeyed and those which are disobeyed are irreconcilable, an act of obedience to one principle is necessarily an act of disobedience to its counterpart and vise versa.”. Creating a trend or movement in effort to create disobedience or essentially independence from a culture defect, or environmental upset or a mal-designed system only demands obedience of another kind, another dependence. Freedom is the equivalent to independence and independence is the ability to break away from implied principles. Independence depends on disobedience until the scales shift and the new principles govern so heavily that that which was the ideal independence becomes dependence.
Independence to me is not choosing. Not choosing to be wrong, not choosing to be right, not choosing the path less traveled by, not choosing the paved road either. My independence is not choosing anything that makes my life extraordinary and in doing so I break the rules.
Thank you.”
And I sat down.
Ruminations of a binary teen
