Foiled
It had been about two years since I shaved my head.
I was curious about what it would feel like to have hair again, so I bought a long, dirty blonde wig. The hair, styled with bangs and scattered with platinum blonde highlights, was wavy and dynamic. It captured how my lifelong hairstyle might’ve looked on its best day. I put it on, not knowing where to fasten the pins since I had no hair for them to grasp onto, and looked in the mirror. Instant, full-body friction. I sighed, feeling uncomfortable and confused, and said, “I feel like I’m in drag?”
just a story
about an emperor who didn’t want an empire
who always had to paint on their smiles
and dance around in desecrated drag
while the audience clapped and laughed
I now know I was attempting to play with my own personal archetype of femininity - the one I had curated, costumed, and performed for decades - one last time.
I tried on a lot of different wigs - some short, some long, some blonde, some silver, some brunette, some pink, some wavy, some straight. There was one - long, slightly curly, and brunette with pink ombre coloring - that felt euphoric when I first put it on. It was the exact hair I would have loved as a kid, listening to emo and punk music in the half of the parking lot that the girls were allowed to play in at recess. I thought I had arrived. I thought I had finally found the truest version of myself. I thought I had, after a long and arduous journey, summited my personal mountain of femininity and I was ready to plant my flag.
music theory, collage, 2026, woods.
I realized that the mountain’s pinnacle was, ultimately, only a single point.
If I stood there, on my mark, if I walked back to that x taped onto the stage to the sound of someone shouting, “Places!,” I would never be able to move again. And the point really only fit one foot. I would be in an arabesque penchée for the rest of my existence, trying and forever failing to turn myself into the plot line I was never scripted to breathe in anyway. An x-axis without a why. A princess never allowed to put her foot down without Prince Charming returning that damn glass slipper.
Consciously, the fool’s cliff was the edge of the stage. The one that had been built for only half of me to perform on and the walls of the box the other half laid buried in beneath. It was a magic trick - the “death saw” trick no one witnessed, not even me. I wasn’t ready to stop performing. Or maybe I was. I just didn’t know how. There was no where else for me to go with the role. I had given everything to it. It was enough to finally see that there was an exit door.
I started playing with the idea of a clown called, “The Horror.”
When I clowned as The Horror, in full costume, it became clear to me that boxing in lipstick and black stilettos with satin bows while walking across a wooden plank was not actually that ridiculous. I mean, maybe, but, what I mean was - and what I realized after doing that - is that the joke was not me. I was not The Horror.
All my life, the horror had been painted as the existence of a gender nonconforming person assigned female at birth, the simultaneous presence of masculinity and femininity in one person. But the real horror was the experience. I had been harassed, assaulted, raped, corrected, disciplined, and punished both as a femme-presenting person and when I dared to deviate from my femininity.
It was meant to be a commentary on the horror that is embodying masculinity as a feminine person, of being a gender nonconforming AFAB. I meant it from an outside point of view - the horror being the existence of a gender nonconforming AFAB person itself.
In theory, maybe. But as someone who has dealt with the reality of necropolitics as a gender nonconforming, femme-ish-presenting person my entire life, it made me feel a whole lot less ridiculous.
Instead of feeling victorious, it felt hollow. It felt like an anti-drop. Like I was walking away from the cliff. The horror wasn’t jumping it was staying.