The body and subconscious mind possess a wisdom that will help guide you, if you’re willing to listen. Accepting myself as non-binary was revelatory; a discovery of something that had been hiding in plain sight for an entire lifetime.

I was working on a Fulbright application, pouring out my soul for a high-stakes personal statement. That will bring out some shit. To make things worse, I had the reviewer from hell going over my essays. Leaving meandering comments in the margin, making novel-length additions in tracked changes, turning a two-page essay into five.

I’ve never defined myself based on my masculinity. So when she wrote in something about me being a proud Welsh-American man, I flinched every time I read it. After reading it a dozen times, I finally changed it to “person.” For anyone else, a forgettable moment. For me, revelatory.

Back when I was five, back before I was in elementary school and became subject to the gender gestapo, I remember seeing a woman with a pixie cut on the news one day.

There, I thought. That’s what I look like. But when I went to the mirror, I felt disappointment. My face and my body didn’t look as gentle and feminine as I wanted.

I wouldn’t say that I experienced gender dysphoria. I felt really comfortable in my body. What made me deeply uncomfortable were the strict, gendered expectations on my body. I felt suffocated to the point of policing myself, trying to lower my voice and not wave my arms around too much. Stiffening up. There’s a tension in my body that comes from not being able to simply be.

Which is what I’ve wanted: to be left alone to be myself.

I didn’t want to be a girl or a woman—then, or now. But I craved affirmation for the more feminine parts of my character and abilities. I wanted to sing with the altos in choir and be friends with girls in class who could openly talk about their feelings instead of hiding behind crass jokes, bravado, and quoting lines from Dumb and Dumber or Napoleon Dynamite.

My junior year in high school, I finally got the courage to be more of myself. I started growing my hair out and became closer friends with a group of girls in high school that I enjoyed spending time with. They were the smartest people in school, confident, and unafraid to be themselves and set their own expectations.

Of course, I couldn’t fully embrace myself and my place in the world until I came out as gay. Still, I felt welcome and included in a social group that—by and large—didn’t foist a set of gendered expectations on me.

Role models

Youth has a wisdom to it. Reflecting on my childhood, I am astounded at how many things I instinctively understood and appreciated about myself, even though I lacked a vocabulary to articulate them.

But your instinct can only take you so far when you lack role models and affirmation.

Probably the only man that I really felt comfortable spending time around was my own father. He wasn’t loud and his behavior didn’t seem calculated or like he was out to prove a point about how masculine he was. There’s no artifice about him—something I find all too often when it comes to masculine behavior and its performativity. I always felt safe around him. He was a silent protector.

But I naturally gravitated toward girls and women. I felt much safer, and more welcome, surrounded by feminine energy—maybe that’s a natural thing for many children, regardless of gender. I wondered, and sometimes still wonder, what I have in common with men. The overconfidence, the verbose posturing, saying so much without saying anything at all. As I grew older, I came to find it attractive but anytime I tried it out myself, it didn’t fit.

While I gravitated toward spending time with girls, the world didn’t want me there. I was breaking the rules of who I was meant to befriend and spend time with. I got teased for the girls I “liked.” The ones I was supposed to have a crush on. The ones who were friends and felt like sisters.

Nothing incensed me quite as much as an adult telling a friend of mine I had just made, “So, you’ve found yourself a boyfriend!” That feeling? It resonates with the discomfort I felt when my Fulbright reviewer wrote in a sentence about me as a man.

In my seven- or eight-year-old mind, I felt so upset by the assertion that I immediately ran away. Friendship be damned. For years, I faded into myself—and honestly, I feel like I’m still learning how to be more authentically myself now that I’m closer to 40 than 30.

The road back

When I was 16, I finally got the courage to start growing my hair out. I was devastated at the age of 20 to find that I had inherited my grandpa’s baldness and was quickly losing my hair. Baldness at a young age is a difficult thing for any person to cope with. As a quietly queer person, my hair had taken special significance as a token of self-expression and finding that I was losing it left me lying in my bedroom while my parents were away wondering how many pills I needed to take to kill myself.

This was the closest I ever got to killing myself. Despair has an incomparable chill, and I felt it to my bones that spring afternoon. Stepping out of line, pushing boundaries—it had a reckless feel to it. Growing my hair out was my silent rebellion, and it had failed. If I can’t see the person I want to be in the intimacy of my bathroom mirror, how am I supposed to be that person out in public, in front of the rest of the world?

Of course, gender isn’t just about appearance—but appearance is an important aspect. It’s the first cue that informs how people react to you. These days, I’m growing out my hair and dyeing it. The looks I get are occasionally confused, sometimes hostile. These don’t bother me. If anything, it’s an affirmation that my work to stake out my own space in the world is being recognized and it’s making the right people uncomfortable.

Admission that I’m non-binary was a revelatory act of affirmation. Coming out as gay at 18 was an important step toward authenticity, but it was just that: a step. A very complicated and rather protracted one as I learned to be myself. On its own, it’s insufficient. It speaks to an important aspect of my life and my being, but it doesn’t address who I am from a holistic perspective.

And as I came to discover in my 20s, gay men tend to adopt many of the same toxic behaviors of their straight counterparts.

I am letting go of the impulse to mimic behavior that I dislike, but am encouraged to emulate. When I get into conversation with people, I lead with curiosity and empathy and reject the need to direct it according to a particular end or to project my voice in a way that will (supposedly) inspire confidence or respect. My feminine qualities are my strength, and always have been. Learning to embrace them is liberation.