#side b stuff

 I’ve never felt like a woman. When I was a child, I didn’t feel like a girl, either. I doubt there is a single point in my life in which I have actively felt and identified with what the world deems to be female. I was never distressed, but I did feel different sometimes. Not in the way that one might feel wearing pants in a room full of other girls in dresses, but in the way that I was myself and they were something else. I did things differently, I acted differently, and people could tell. “Quirky”, “Bold”, “Different”, “Confident” are all descriptors I’ve heard many a time, and I’ve been lucky that they’re positive. These aren’t bad things, and I am in no way complaining—just explaining that even people around me could see that I was different.

 Not once did I question myself until I reached the age that the internet became a larger part of my reality. The most I’d ever done was watch my testimony play on the screen in the green room at church, on the day I was baptized, noticing how my mouth moved funny when I talked. Or perhaps, observing my spindly limbs in a photograph, suddenly and uncomfortably aware of how differently my body moved in the world. But later on, as I immersed myself in our society, observing its movements in order to understand, I began to feel further and further away.

The only people I saw who were like me, were not women.

 To the tiny part of my lizard brain, this had to mean something, and my OCD latched onto it like a moth to a flame. Any suggestion to this end sent my mind spiraling. I felt an intense need to define who I was by a label of some sort, in order that I might fit in, or perhaps prove myself, or maybe, to truly find rest.

 I had to discover what being a woman meant, because if I didn’t, I was afraid I might not be one. I had to know what a woman was in order to be sure I was one. But finding no connection to what I saw femininity to be, I had no choice but to leave my questioning in the dark, unanswered.

 When I tried to think of the things that defined femininity, I could only think of the warped things I was bent upon rebelling against. Besides being generally uncomfortable with my anatomy, I hated that women were reduced to the sicky-sweet, seductive, rose-tinted narratives I saw all around me. So what was left? Nothing, except my own feelings and how I perceived myself. And when I thought about it, I didn’t perceive myself as a woman, just as myself. There were no “female” feelings to be found, either.

What I’ve finally come to realize, however, is that those two concepts can coexist. Woman, and me—that is, everything that makes me myself.

 If, say, I were to come out as nonbinary, or, agender, the more specific microlabel for those who don’t identify with gender (discovered during one of my obsessive internet searching phases), to be honest, I’m really not sure it would help me. Because I know that no matter what I did to change myself, even if it was no more than try my best to continue being genuine, being myself—the reality of womanhood would always follow me. I would still be seen within the binary of male and female, and my sex would always affect how I was treated by others. And beyond that, I would merely be stepping outside of one box into another—just as society pressures women to be feminine, I have seen how nonbinary people are pressured to be androgynous, to be not female, or not male, or a specific mixture of both that has to be palatable to others in just the right way. If I pursued this path of fitting into boxes, it would undoubtedly be a painful one, because to me, I fit perfectly in neither.

 Soon I realized that the problem, for me, is with the warped stereotypes associated with being a woman, and not being a woman itself. Woman, as a term, was not the box I had always thought it to be—if anything, it was more like a garden, and the garden grows what it will, no matter what I choose to plant.

 I have always been myself. Woman has always been a part of that, subconsciously, as a reality of my existence. But it never did, and doesn’t have to, hold the weight I thought it did. I am a Christian, but if I were to ask myself if I felt like a Christian, that would in turn raise the question of “how do I know what being a Christian feels like?”. I am also 20 years old. I do not feel like I am 20, but the reality is that that is the amount of time I have existed in this world, outside of the womb, for. (Quite frankly, most days I still feel like a teen.) I am also 5.9”, or to be specific, 175cm. But if someone were to ask me if I felt like I was 5 feet 9 inches, I wouldn’t be able to answer that, because I don’t feel like it, it just is.

To me, womanhood is the same. I am a woman, and it doesn’t have to mean anything more than it already does. It doesn’t mean I have to conform to what the world says a woman is like to be one—as a matter of fact, it doesn’t mean I have to act any certain way at all, since it is nothing more than an immutable trait of my flesh. I can ignore it, but I cannot avoid it. Regardless of anything I do or say, it is there, and it is what I was born with. I do not have to hate it, nor do I have to find joy in it—because it simply is, the way it is true that I have arms, I have hair, I have a face. I have a woman’s mind, a woman’s body, a woman’s soul, and to reject that would only hurt me further.

 Don’t get me wrong, femininity is important. I’m still on a journey to find out what it means. But my feelings aren’t the most important aspect of that, and to give them weight would only enforce the very things I sought to avoid.

 When God met Moses in the desert hundreds of years ago, He gave this response to being asked His name—“I am.” God is God. He simply is. He does not prove Himself to anyone, nor does He change Himself to fit one box or another, or force Himself to sit outside of them entirely. He rests in His identity and His way of being, perhaps like a cat stretches out and lies in the sun, its decisions not at all swayed by the musings of man.  

I don’t identify as a woman, I just am one.