Decomposing Femininity
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 discomfort. I sighed, felt defeated, and said, “I feel like I’m in drag.”
I now know I was attempting to try on my own personal brand of femininity - the one I had curated, costumed, and performed for decades - one last time. It was like I was both Cathy and Jamie from The Last Five Years, singing,
“Give me a day, Jamie
Bring back the lies
Hang them back on the wall
Maybe I'd see how you could be
So certain that we had no chance at all.”
I ended up trying on a lot of different wigs. 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 teenager. I thought I had arrived. I thought I had finally found the truest version of myself. But really, I think I just reached the peak of my younger self’s imagination. I had, after a long and arduous journey, summited my mountain of femininity and I was ready to plant my flag.
Unconsciously, I think I realized it was the fool’s cliff. That the pinnacle was only a single point - a dot. If I stood there, I would never be able to move again. And it 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. An x-axis without a why.
Though I’m having fun with these metaphors, the cliff had long been very material to me. I’ve sat at the top of tall structures, begging myself not to jump. I didn’t know why I was there. I didn’t know why I wanted so badly to die. Why I felt so irredeemably broken and ruined and shattered and grotesque.
At the peak of my death drive, I was in college.
I remembered
I started playing with that wig, creating a clown called, “The Horror.” I got a pair of black stilettos with a satin bow on the heel of each shoe. I used to have a similar pair in red, but I threw them out. I boxed in them, for all the times I was told to
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.