ae-to-ze

[ae-to-ze]

Z: Ze, Back to Ae

If you search the entire alphabet, I’m everything in there. I can’t be confined to one word. I’m a person, and people are messy; simple as that. And yet, not simple at all, so complex that my mystery of an identity spills over onto the page and bleeds ink into an alphabet of trying to explain who I am. I’m everything and nothing. I’m the alphabet. From ae to ze back to ae.

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#ae/aer #ze/hir #neopronouns #gender shit #prose poetry

[ae-to-ze]

Y: Yom Kippur

The High Holy days, Yom Kippur in particular, brought formal clothing for their services. Blue button down shirt, likely taken from a younger version of my father. Baggy green pants. And then I approached my father’s closet. Having missed out on this male coming of age experience, I asked him how to tie a tie.

He handed me a grey, striped necktie and showed be each loop and twist and tuck. I repeated the motions, over and over, fascinated by the way the fabric moved until the knot looked right. The clumsily tied knot didn’t look anywhere near perfect on me. But I looked in the mirror, and I didn’t want to change a thing. I couldn’t look away. Didn’t want to. If I weren’t so dehydrated, I would have cried.

I have never felt at home in my appearance. Looking in the mirror has never exactly repulsed me, and sometimes I’ve found the reflection nice to look at. But I’ve never made the connection between the nebulous concept of the “self,” and the image before me in the glass. There was always someone, but I’d never seen that someone as me.

On the day of atonement, something clicked. Lying to myself about who I was and what made me happy felt like one of the transgressions I had to apologize for. I hoped the book of life would hold a year of feeling at home in my own body, and all the years after that.

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#yom kippur #jew crew #gender euphoria #religion tw #gender shit #prose poetry

[ae-to-ze]

X: XX

X is a variable for the unknown, and I am X. Most likely, I am two X’s. And although the very nature of X is mysterious, everyone seems to think they know exactly what XX means for me. They think they’ve solved the equation.

They haven’t. No one around me ever solves for XX, they simply guess and feel assured they’re right.

They aren’t. They did their math wrong.

I suppose their classes skipped the lesson in gender algebra.

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#math #gender shit #prose poetry

[ae-to-ze]

W: Words

I have never had the words to describe who I am; I just exist. I am always changing and shifting and growing into myself a little more, and if someone tries to put me in one rigid box of girl I will claw my way out. I am a little bit feminine and a little bit masculine and very queer, and above all, I am myself, even if I don’t have the words for who I am.

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#labels #gender shit #prose poetry #genderqueer

[ae-to-ze]

V: Violet

Calling me a girl wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it oversimplifies everything. It takes a part of who I am and rounds it up to the whole thing. Calling me a girl is like calling a rainbow simply violet.

Technically true; rainbows have violet in them.

But also a lot of other colors. Rainbows have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Why reduce it to just the one? Why even try to squint and identify each? Why name every part, when you could just call it by the whole?

I am a girl and a boy and something between and something separate and a million other things, so why not just call me genderqueer?

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#hehe rainbow that's gay #gender shit #prose poetry #genderqueer

[ae-to-ze]

U: Uncertainty

I don’t have most of the common fears and phobias. Heights? No problem, I love those. Spiders? I don’t care for them, but they’re usually just… there. I’m not really afraid of needles either, or clowns.

The only one I really have is claustrophobia, and even then, it doesn’t manifest itself in the usual way. I’m okay with elevators, I like small rooms. I only get freaked out if I’m packed between people.

If someone asks what I’m afraid of, I’ll give claustrophobia as my answer. Or, if I’m feeling bold, I’ll grin and call myself fearless. Because I am. Most of the time. For normal things.

Except. Except, my brain’s chemicals decided to align just perfectly so, so that my life seems golden from the outside, but being left alone with my thoughts usually ends with me wanting to tear my brain out of my head.

I’ll touch a spider. I’ll get a shot. I’ll go skydiving. I’m fearless, I’m fearless, and my worst fear is uncertainty.

There could be a 99.9% chance that everything will work out alright, I won’t get hurt, that natural disaster won’t occur. And yet, that 0.1% chance will wail and blare like a fire alarm until I can focus on nothing else. I once got a nosebleed, read that 4 in 2,400,000 deaths were caused by a nosebleed, and concluded that I would die.

Because there wasn’t absolute certainty that everyone who got a nosebleed survived, that no deaths had ever been caused by a nosebleed.

And a nonzero chance may as well have meant 100% chance, to my uncertain mind.

The thing is, I hate uncertainty. I wish, more than anything, that we lived in a world of absolutes, and accepting that we don’t is one of the hardest things I’ve had to cope with. I’m still coping.

With this in mind, it seems like a cruel joke that my identity, my gender, has been a mystery months and months, and I’m nowhere near an answer. I don’t like questions without answers, and yet, that’s what I am. Who I am. A question mark, with no answer in sight.

And maybe accepting this will be the hardest thing I have to do, when my mind goes back to this impossible question any time I think about it. As time goes by, it seems more and more likely that I’ll always be wondering, and that sounds like a nightmare to me. But it’s a part of me. This question mark will always be a part of me.

I’ll always be a question without an answer, a variable without a solution. I’ll always be uncertain.

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#death tw #uncertainty #✨ocd go brrr✨ #gender shit #prose poetry

[ae-to-ze]

T: Three Point...

My gender is like π; something infinite that just keeps being discovered and added to, and you could just round to three point one four, and say genderqueer. You could round to three and say girl. Or you could go deeper and deeper into what’s after the decimal point. Three point… on and on, for fifty, one hundred, one thousand digits. Still, there's a part of that number that’s unknown. No one will ever solve the entirety of what comes after the decimal point. I’ll say “three point,” and let myself feel the rest, even if I can’t recite all the digits.

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#pi #math #gender shit #prose poetry

[ae-to-ze]

S: Saturn

I orbit around this thing called female, this group of people I am so close to but never within. If femininity is the Earth, then I am the moon; if it is Saturn, then I am its rings. I'm pulled to it by gravity, spiraling around and around and around. Sometimes I'm closer and sometimes I'm farther but I'm never there.

I'm always close.

But it's hard to see, through my telescope. Am I really Saturn's rings? Could there be a glitch in my vision? Saturn is so far away, after all, so difficult to understand. How can I be so sure? How can I know, for sure, that I am not just on Saturn and confused? How do I know that I'm not an another solar system altogether? How do I know that my eyes aren't playing tricks on me, find one hundred percent certainty that this is all true?

There are a million stars in the sky, a million different words to use, and it's so difficult to find the right one. I have some semblance of category, searching my constellation, but the stars are still overwhelming and infinite. What if I choose the wrong star? What if I meet all the darling aliens in that solar system, only to learn I need to leave?

My body is on Saturn, and my mind is somewhere in the stars, and I am somewhere between them, not quite on either one. All the curves and ridges of my planet feel wrong, somehow, like I'm a stranger observing it rather than someone who belongs here.

And how do I explain to Saturn that I am a part of it, yes, but I am not on Saturn? How can I make them understand, when I don't understand myself? Everyone on Saturn is pulled to the sun by its gravity. I am not pulled to the sun. I am pulled to Saturn. I am too different from the rest of the planet to quite fit, but they will say I'm confused. A girl exploring the world around me until I come back home, to the planet where I belong.

But I don't belong there. I'm close, but I don't belong there.

Do I belong anywhere? Dancing between constellations and labels, little shooting stars of realization before I lose sight of it again. I find groups, people who feel almost like me, but I'm still out of place. I am too close to Saturn to fit with the stars; too close to the stars to fit with Saturn.

I am rings, orbiting around this Saturn called female, and I am an alien in my own body.

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#saturn #space!! #gender shit #prose poetry

[ae-to-ze]

R: Redacted

Hello, my name is [Redacted]. That’s the name I was given, and it’s never belonged to me, not since the day my parents placed the burden on my back and on my birth certificate. The letters of this name can’t seem to fit into my heart. Every time I say it, the syllables sound foreign on my tongue.

Hello, my name is Shai. That’s a better name, I think. It’s a name I can slip into like a glove, and feel comfortable and warm inside. The name Shai means gift, and I think that’s appropriate. After all, this name is a gift I chose for myself, a salvation from the shadowy wrongness of the old name. A name that makes the world burst into color.

Hello, my name is Saturn. It’s a name I borrowed from the sky, because I understand the sky more than I will ever understand myself. Saturn is so far away from this world, and so am I. I will never fit in here; the best I can hope for is to orbit in the same solar system. But Saturn is bright and beautiful, and maybe someday, I will be too.

Hello, my name is Stav. It’s a name written with the history of my family and my life. This name means autumn, so I will shed away the old name like orange leaves. Let the dead parts of me fall, so that something new can grow. I can grow into myself.

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#names #deadnames #name change #gender shit

[ae-to-ze]

Q: Queer

Queer. Adjective. Strange; odd.

Sometimes, I am told that queer is a slur. An insult. A word that should pierce me like a knife, dig into my skin until all the rainbows bleed out of me, and how dare I use it for myself, for my gender? How dare I?

But how could it possibly be a bad thing to be strange, to be odd?

Queer doesn’t feel like a knife. Queer feels like home.

Queer says, I am different from you, and that’s okay. Queer says, I don’t need to be like you to be worth something. Queer says, I am beautiful not despite my strangeness, but because of it.

And yes, true, my gender is strange. It’s odd. I don’t know what it is, not really. Most of the world is solidly pink or solidly blue. Any other colors are an abnormality. But I think I’m a little bit colorblind. Not to most of the world, just when I look at my own heart. Still, I know what pink looks like, and I know what blue looks like, and I don’t look like either one of them.

I’m a color that no one recognizes, a color that even I’m not familiar with. Wildly different from the two shades that make up most of the rest of the world.

My color is unusual, yes. Strange. Odd.

My gender is queer, and that makes me beautiful.

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#queer #queer is not a slur #queer is such a good word 🧡 #gender shit #gender queer #prose poetry #knife tw

[ae-to-ze]

P: Perception

Other people’s perception of you, and your desire as to how you’re perceived, factor in a lot to your gender identity and expression.

It seems fairly straight foward. If you want to be seen as a boy, odds are you’re a boy, or masc adjacent. If you want to be seen as a girl? Probably a girl, or femme adjacent. Even people outside of binary genders and presentations do this. Androgynous, intentionally confusing, or just plain queer; how you want to be read matters to your gender identity.

I don’t want people to look at me and interpret me as any kind of gender, from binary and gender conforming to deliberately rejecting the concept of gender. Trying to perceive my own gender is difficult enough- how do I decide how I want others to perceive me as?

Truthfully, I don’t want gender on anyone’s mind- conscious or subconscious- when they look at me. (At least not any further than pronouns, or until I open the conversation.)

Why gender? Why is that something our brains automatically think about, register about a person’s appearance? Gender is just one, mostly shrouded in confusion, part of the whole self. It isn’t everything. Why do people fixate on that one thing when I’m a million other details,a million labels they could ascribe to my identity.

Maybe I just want people to perceive me as a person. As me. As a silhouette with a smile and a vague personality. Don’t see me as a gender, or see me at all. Just get to know me.

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#gender shit #prose poetry

[ae-to-ze]

O: Off-Key

Womanhood is a song.

It's the most beautiful song I've ever fucking heard in my life. Something that plays over and over in my mind and I'm not even annoyed. No matter what, it'll drift back into my thoughts. I could listen to it on repeat and never get bored.

Womanhood is my favorite song.

It's not a song I can sing.

When I was in eighth grade, my music class had an assignment where we would hear a note and then determine which note it was. I was horrible at this; guessing randomly often worked better than actually trying, and it did not work well.

Singing in general is not one of my strong suits. But hearing a note, understanding the note, and replicating the note, is not something I can really do at all.

It was supposed to help that womanhood is a very complex song. There are so many notes, all singing along for harmonies. So many different ways to be a woman, to contribute to the beauty of the song.

When I try to join in the song from my seat in the second row of the choir, I don't contribute to the beauty of the song. I annoy the conductor, but that's about it. There are many different notes I can sing, and I can't sing any of them.

Sometimes, I get closer than others, but I can't sing any of them.

I'm always at least slightly off-key. Usually, more than slightly.

No matter which note I try, I can't hit any of notes to be a woman. There's always something a little bit wrong.

I'm always a little bit off-key, and I never seem to form the harmonies.

So I shouldn't sing along. I shouldn't sing in a choir I don't belong in. I shouldn't be somewhere I don't fit, where I feel a little bit wrong. A little bit off-key.

And I don't have to stay in this slightly out of tune world of pretending to be someone I'm not.

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#gender shit #i am a bad singer so this metaphor works lmao #prose poetry

[ae-to-ze]

N: Neon Sign

Sometimes, it hits me that I will always, always be perceived as a girl. I could get "ze" tattooed on my face and I would probably still be perceived as a girl, except now I would be a girl with a face tattoo.

When I was born, the doctor flipped me upside, saw a vagina, and labeled me a girl. The rest of the world just blindly went along with it. Me, for most of my life. My parents, even though they mean well. Friends. Teachers. The cashier that called me ma'am without a second thought.

It's like I'm carrying around this blinking neon sign that says girl every moment of my life, and every time I try to put it down, kick it away, smash in with a hammer, it'll come back to hover over my head. I'm 5'2" and slender and I have breasts and curves and long hair and a feminine name. Of course I’m a “girl.” Why wouldn’t I be? Why would anyone assume otherwise?

And I will have to carry this with me for the rest of my life, because no one else knows what's happening in my head, they just see the blinking neon sign. The fucking neon sign.

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#cursing tw #genital mention tw #gender shit

[ae-to-ze]

M: Mirror

What’s in the glass? A spiderweb of cracks, condensation from my warm breath, a figure so warped it’s nearly unrecognizable. There’s something in my head, and there’s something standing in front of the mirror, and supposedly they’re connected, but I’m not sure about that. I don’t understand this body at all- veins and skin and muscles and bones. Then again, it’s not as though I understand my head either.

I have a face, apparently. My skin is pale, almost gaunt, slightly freckled. Eyes sunken deep. The eyebrows are orange, when they’re there. Long nose. Thick lips, rounded jaw. A mess of auburn extends from my head like a cloud, hanging until my chin. Everything about it seems wrong; wrong angle, wrong proportion, wrong placement. My features are too sharp to be feminine, too soft to be masculine, and too wrong to be androgynous.

Sometimes I like it. Sometimes, I wonder how I could ever feel anything other than revulsion.

But it doesn’t matter what my face looks like. It isn’t me.

What is?

Body. My shoulders are too slender. Chest too large. Waist too thin. Hips too wide. I like my legs, the way they’re shaped and toned, but it’d be nice if I were taller. I’m too short, slight, small. I look small, and for this, at least, my body matches my head. I’m too small for the world, I think. Just the right size for the universe, but too small for the world. Too small for the pretty girl in the library, too small for the laughing group of friends, too small to stick in anyone’s memory for long.

And what’s inside?

I… I don’t know.

Something angry. Something fiery, and furious. It wants to scream, but the screaming never leaves my own head. I don’t know how much longer my mouth will stay quiet. Just beneath the anger, something hurt. Raw. It’s like there are knives inside me, tearing me apart… and then, if I dig beyond that, I find sorrow, hanging over me like a cloud. And fear. Fear is everywhere. For all that I am bold and fearless, I’m scared of a million little things. Hurting someone. Someone hurting me. Hurting myself.

Never living.

Always living like this.

And there’s some good too, I think. There are fireworks, listening to loud music and laughing as the clock ticks past midnight through the earliest hours that can barely be called morning. There’s a car with sunlight streaming through the window, and I’m badly singing along as I drive to nowhere. There are the people I can give a little piece of myself too, and maybe, if I wait long enough, a little more. There’s some love, and ambition, and a desire to do good in the world.

I have emotions, I think. Is that what an identity is? Just a mixture of emotions, piled on top of each other? Because maybe happiness is different for other people. Maybe they’re not in a car driving to nowhere, they’re at a party, or at a beach. Maybe the ways you feel your happiness give you an identity.

Because if not, I don’t know what an identity is.

It’s so hard to look inside myself and see what’s there. Sometimes there’s nothing. Sometimes there’s very distinctly something, but I can’t seem to decipher what it is. Sometimes it’s all clear for a second, just a second, then I blink and it’s gone.

So far, scientists have explored about 4% of the visible universe. I think I’m even more of a mystery than space.

What’s in the glass?

Someone. That’s all I know. Someone.

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#identity crisis #gender shit #gender crisis #prose poetry

[ae-to-ze]

L: Language We're Taught

I am born, and a doctor sees XX written out all over- the only letters he knows are X and Y- so he thinks that spells out that I am a girl. This follows me my whole life, even as I learn new letters of the alphabet, new parts of our language. I learn about clothing, and hairstyles, and sexuality, and behaviors, and so much more, because those two letters spell out my life.

I learn that, much like in Spanish, every word in our language forced into a masculine or feminine box. I get the feminine words; pink, dresses, kind, beautiful, vagina, breasts, girl. Every word has its gender, its box.

Sometimes I feel like the only word in this entire language that doesn’t fit into one of those boxes is me.

I learn about gender roles, gender expressions, gender equality; I learn to become fluent in this language called gender, even though the dialect I learn feels restrictive and heavy.

I learn about Leslie Feinberg. “Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.”

So I pick the parts of the gendered language I learned. I learn new words; trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and words like butch, neopronouns, dysphoria, euphoria. I take the parts I like, and I discard the rest.

And I write a poem with the language I learned.

I am more than XX.

I am ae and aer and ze and hir and all the neopronouns of the alphabet.

I am lesbian and butch and colorful.

I am pink and purple and red and a whole rainbow I can’t understand.

I am kind, and beautiful, and strong.

I am genderqueer.

And I wear the poetry tattooed on my heart, because I get to write my own poem. Define myself. I like that a lot better than that doctor writing it for me.

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#leslie feinberg #my beloved #genderqueer #poetry #prose poetry #gender shit #dysphoria tw #genital mention tw

[ae-to-ze]

K: Key to the Closet Door

I’m locked in a closet deep inside my head. It locks from the inside, of course, and I hold the key in my hand. Cold metal digging into my palm. I’m here by my own choice. I’m not trapped, locked in a prison. I just…

How do I explain that leaving this dark, isolated safety, that placing the key in the lock and twisting it, makes my veins run cold? That the thought of walking outside inspires me to run in the opposite direction? Being anywhere but here turns my chest hot with panic, breath cut short, and I am trapped by nothing but my own fear.

I take the key out and hold it to the doorknob. What would happen if I went through with it? I let myself picture it for a second. I’ve never been outside before. I know there are stairs just outside. I don’t know which way they lead.

I could unlock the door, open it, and climb. Higher and higher, closer to the stars, until I’m floating on a cloud of euphoria.

(I open my eyes and am disappointed to find my feet still on the ground.)

Or I could open the door and tumble down the stairs. Unable to catch myself, only falling and falling and falling until I hit the ground. Or is there a ground at all?

I can’t risk an endless fall. With a sigh, I turn around and sit, back against the door. I look at the key in my hand. Small, golden, useless. Useless like me.

I throw the key across my prison and listen to it clatter across the floor.

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#closeted #gender shit #prose poetry #anxiety tw

[ae-to-ze]

J: Jackets

I stand in front of a wide closet, filled with millions of jackets. My eyes immediately gravitate towards one- after all, it is the jacket I should pick, given my chromosomes. Since birth, everyone has told me I need to wear this jacket, but I haven't been told it directly many times. It's just an expectation. The thought that I might choose something different is laughable.

So I grab it, and put it on.

It doesn't feel quite right. It's warm, and soft. I don't dislike it. But it fits just a little wrong, the sizing off in a way I can't quite describe. Is it too small? Too big? I don't know, but it isn't right. The fabric is the wrong sensation, too, pricking at my arms and making the hairs stand up.

But I don't want to take it off. This might be the closest thing to a good jacket I'll ever find, and it's close enough. The jacket is a little wrong, but it's not too bad. It's fine. And I don't think any of the other jackets are going to be better.

Besides, everyone thinks I wear this jacket. I've worn it for so long that it might as well be my skin, and I can't replace my skin.

So I'll keep it on.

But my gaze keeps drifting towards the closet, looking at all my other options. And some of them look nice.

Hesitantly, I switch the jacket I'm wearing now for another.

And I like it, for a little while. It seems to fit better than the first, and the texture isn't as offensive to my skin. But after a while, I notice that I mostly just liked the jacket because it was new, and different. It's still just a bit off.

So I go back to the first one.

That's almost worse.

I find a new jacket. Try it on. Like it. But this one is too different from the comfort of the first. I discard it.

I try jacket after jacket, hoping to find one that fits, but none of them do. Finally, defeated, I take a big jacket, oversize and soft, and let it drape over me. It doesn't hug me the way I wanted it to, fitting like it was designed just for me, but it doesn't not fit. It's the best I've found.

I want to keep it. But a part of me misses the first jacket, because it wasn't right, but it was... safe. Comfortable. And the new one fits better, but it's a new jacket, and people expect me to the old one, and I... want to be safer. I want the comfort the old one brought, even if it was wrong.

Why is this decision so hard? Everyone around me seems to be discarding their first jacket and grabbing a new one, twirling around and showing it off with ease. I feel like I'm the only one still struggling.

Why do I have to be, well, like myself? It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough. Why do I have to be so fucking neurotic, unable to accept anything that doesn't meet my impossible standards?

Why do none of the jackets fit me?

I sit inside the wide closet and sigh, leaning my head against all the soft fabrics.

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#cursing tw #identity crisis #labels #gender shit #prose poetry