Mirror

I've always been the girl that never quite fit, the oddball of oddballs, and while my ideas aren't radical (to me at least) they aren't common. It's been like that as long as I can remember. Where most girls in grade school drew their personal foundations from Barbie and their mothers, I drew from strong feminine historical figures. My mother wasn't overly pushy about what I should do or who I should be, she went overboard on how I should be independent and self-sufficient starting way back before I was even walking. It took, and now I'm more stubborn and proud than most men. My thoughts and ideas are pretty much androgynous, I'm a feminist, a little femmy, a little more butchy, and just a little odd.

I've struggled with that for most of my life. I didn't understand how I was different, or why I was different, why I would be the one overjoyed about a new book when any other girl would be overjoyed about a new doll or bow or ribbon. It took me years to understand that there really is no reason. I'm different. Not better, just different.

I'm the girl who will have to be dragged, forcibly, down an aisle to be married. I'm the girl who likes children, in small doses, but don't really want any of my own. I'm the girl who will choose a career and a passion for sex and the world and culture over the white picket fence and raising a family any day. I'm perfectly content being the spinster with too many cats and even more stories to tell. I'll have more lovers over time than I will serious committed relationships, and even those relationships won't be the 'traditional' set-up.

There has always been this pressure to do the "woman thing" and set your goals to be a wife and mother. Even among all of the leaps and bounds that feminism has had over the decades, that pressure is still there, stoked by traditionalists and also by people that simply believe that a woman's place is in the kitchen, raising a family. While that may work for some, while being a homemaker may be their fulfillment, it would be my shackles.

Aside from marriage and child-rearing, women are also traditionally boxed-in sexually as well. Culturally we are told as a gender that we should be delicate, and submissive to our male partner's desires. Our needs come last, if our needs are even recognized at all.

I'm not saying a woman's needs should come first in a relationship, far from it. Whatever genders come together in an encounter, there is always a symbiotic balance in which both people can be entirely satisfied without compromising the other's position. We are all puzzle pieces with many different sides, varying appendages, varying indentations, and it's all constantly changing. Human sexuality, especially female sexuality, is very fluid and organic. No two people are exactly alike in the same way that no two people are exactly complimentary.

Again, though, society leads us to believe otherwise. There is an unwritten standard of what is normal and acceptable and we are pushed to attain that standard instead of simply finding our own way. Female-born bodies are pushed to be feminine and maternal, while male-born bodies are pushed to be strong and masculine, with an unyielding emphasis on machismo. That pattern just doesn't work for some people.

It has taken me years to stop trying to be that standard of what is believed to be the feminine ideal. It's still a struggle, I still have to recognize when I'm trying to push myself into a box that I just won't fit in to, but my personal choice is to not be that standard unless it's something I'm contented with, unless it's something that I choose for myself. I enjoy my fluidity, I enjoy being able to float between delicate and aggressive, between power and submission, between feminine and masculine, and anywhere else I choose to go.

I used to use the world as a mirror. A reflection of what I should be based on the opinions of society and specifically those around me. I would reflect what they wanted to see, and it showed. I still didn't fit because I can't change who I am to fit someone else's idea of who I should be. I need to be happy to change. I need to want that change for myself and once I attain that change I have to be content with it.

I will change, over time, in a slow process of learning and doing, but it will be the lessons I choose to learn, and the things I choose to do. I will be my own mirror.