Boy-ish

An introduction to the inevitable

I envy boyhood. I think that’s where my intimidation from boys comes from. Boyhood is strange and unfamiliar, it is my foreign neighbor, my mirror, my opposite, my link, my answer, but it is not me and it isn’t mine. We always hear all this bullshit about manhood and what it means to be a man, and how you have to do all these things that women don’t do, like be a leader and be brave and be adventurous. Men However are not intimidating, not like the way boys are, more specifically the way boyhood is, adults aren’t intimidating. As an only child I grew up with them always kind of being there, and they never scared me. I can’t imagine being intimidated by an adult. They would always have a lot of questions for me, which is good because I’ve always had a lot to say. I think they were just curious of other little people and how we functioned and communicated, I think they were really asking themselves how the fuck we work, and tried to remember what being our age was like. Even now I am curious about children and how they think.

Thats kind of how I look at boyhood, just asking myself How the fuck does this work? You just play in the street and get into trouble and people tell you that you can do anything and then you do, and then you tease girls and fall in love with them and you conquer the world and that’s it? You get to ask the big questions and make up the answers and they’re always right? Maybe my estranged relationship and curiosity of boyhood is not so far away, how much more different would my life be if I was a boy, if I grew up being a boy or even just with the confidence of one. Would I be a better version of myself or would I be the same, would I be worse? I think if I was a boy I would be bullied for being poor at sports, but I still would be more confident and somewhat sure of myself. I think that it would still take me a while to come out and I would still have a prolonged relationship with my sexuality, but I would be more confident as a straight person for the majority of my life. I would still make friends easily, and would be much cooler a lot earlier. I wonder if I would be intimidated by girls and question girlhood. I definitely would have a very complicated relationship with femininity, because of my upbringing and the male gaze. If I was a boy, I would get myself a girlfriend and watch us break each other’s hearts. I would wear jewelry and be praised for breaking down gender roles, like the rest of the depressed white boys. I would become too arrogant and it would bite me in the ass. I would learn how to play the guitar. I would write about boy things, I would write about womanhood. I would learn to be better. I would have different friends, I would be safe.

When I think of replacing my childhood with boyhood, I think of only that, during my adolescence I become more of me, I feel like I can now play in the street and fall in love with girls, and I could learn guitar if I wanted to. I am not in the same place that I was when I was a girl. I am older and wiser now, and I know who I am (sort of). But you couldn’t expect me to know who I was before, kids don’t know who they are, they are only told who they should be. I was supposed to be a girl. I learned how to shape my body to fit into a mold made for me, but it was awkward and confining because it wasn’t actually made for me. I would have learned to become myself sooner if I didn’t have this standard to comply with, if I could just take up the space around me rather than settle for a corner in the back of the room. I lived with a silence that only grew louder and when it was loud enough it wasn’t too late, only disappointing to realize that it took so long for me to hear it. My ears were clogged with noises that were muffled, but was that because I refused to listen or were there too many things being said, drowning out the silence?

Now that I am self obsessed and certain, I cling more to the idea of being a boy. Being confident like a boy, cursing like a boy, speaking like a boy, laughing like a boy, even dressing like a boy. I find that androgyny is like walking a tightrope if I lean too far to the left or to the right I will fall, and even walking down the middle I can still slip or stumble. I sometimes look at the way I present myself compared to my friends, tallying off how we differentiate ourselves from each other and the rest of the world. It’s all observational, it doesn’t make me feel worse or better about myself, it only makes me think, should you be more feminine? Do those T-shirts make you look like you are hiding your body, or do you look cool? How do I feel comfortable but also look like a girl? Do I look like a girl? Am I putting in too much effort, am I overthinking? Yes, probably. But isn’t this how it’s supposed to be, always second guessing myself walking on the eggshells of self expression and confused sexuality? Is it always this complicated?

I find boyhood to be intimidating because I imagine it to be so different from what my childhood was like, sheltered and small. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, not in the slightest, I went to sleepovers, and I liked school, and my parents never got divorced nor did anyone in my family die. I got to experience a lot of wonderful things, like adventure and heartbreak, but never boyhood. And that bothers me because I will never know what it was like, ever. And it looks so fun, I was always, and probably still am, too shy to ask, is it fun getting in trouble but not getting scolded? What does it feel like to run bare chested with nothing slowing you down? Do you like being a boy, or is it isolating? And then I ask myself, is it normal to want to be what you are not? Being a boy isn’t good or bad, but I can’t help to look at it as freedom. What am I escaping from?