Breaking Out of the Box

BY Lauren Mallett

Art By Aleks Carney

If my ninth-grade self could see me now, she’d be rolling her eyes, utterly confused, asking one question: why do I not look gay?

In the past few years, I’ve given up on labeling myself as anything more specific than queer, because there doesn’t seem to be any term that encompasses my identity in a more efficient way. Sure, I could say I’m bisexual, and that would be accurate from a definition standpoint—I am attracted to people of any and all gender identities and expressions—but the label doesn’t feel right. It’s like a shirt that’s too small on my chest but awkwardly hangs off my shoulders. For years, my pronouns have been a puzzle, and despite publicly using she/they the past few years, that doesn’t always feel right. I haven’t found a suitable label to stick on. So rather than spiraling over little words to make other people more comfortable with my identity, I’ve simply decided that I am me, and I am queer all over. I don’t want to settle for a label that doesn’t feel authentically me, just to get stuck in a box, feeling like I have no space to explore. 

Refusing a label works for me, but that isn’t enough in the eyes of some people.

When I was in high school, I wore my sexuality on my sleeve. I unabashedly had bright red hair, giant winged eyeliner, and wore massive platform boots at 8 o’clock on a Monday morning. Now, it’s a miracle if I can get myself to put my contacts in instead of throwing on my crooked glasses. 

So I wonder: Has my laziness left me looking straight?

I know style and physical appearance aren’t all-encompassing facets of queerness, because my identity goes so much further than that. However, it can be disheartening to feel unwelcome in your own community, to feel invisible and unnoticed, purely because you aren’t fulfilling the stereotypes or expectations of people who identify the way that you do. 

As I've grown more comfortable with my own identity, I feel disconnected from the queer community, almost ousted. I feel invalidated, like my queerness is somehow not enough, that by having become comfortable, I have given up. My own community feels like a room full of strangers when it used to feel like coming home.

Since beginning college, I’ve allowed myself the space to explore my identity in regards to gender, something that I shoved deep in a box in high school, hidden away to collect dust. It was enough for me to like girls, I didn’t have the capacity to unpack why I didn’t always feel like one. In coming to terms with being kinda-sorta-not-really-cis, I’ve felt a pressure from those around me, an implicit demand for proof. My word is not enough, I have to be the visual representation of what my pronouns look like, of someone who pairs gender with queer and disregards the binary. But on a lot of days, I don’t have the energy to live up to those expectations. I am often hyper aware of my appearance, and even one tiny flaw will plant seeds of discomfort about an outfit, and, by association, my body.

Why must I choose between my comfort and my visibility? On days where I feel comfortable in my body, where I choose to present more feminine, my identity vanishes from sight. I am only visible when I shroud my body in baggy clothes, mimicking a masculine silhouette, or raise myself high off the ground in giant platforms and intense eye makeup. My default form, my ready-in-five-minutes appearance, is not accepted as an adequate portrayal of queerness. Instead, I must reach to meet the high standards of presentation. I must try harder, I must perform.

Being queer in a predominantly cishet high school wasn’t always easy, but for whatever reason I think I felt more confident. I was leading by my own example, making my own rules, and so I didn’t feel as though I had some arbitrary framework to contort myself into. But at a school where queerness is the norm, suddenly that framework is tighter. The roles of identity constrict like ropes around my wrists, and I am pulled in multiple directions at once. Do I lean into what is expected of me and enhance my queerness, perform a role to fit into what people want me to be, or do I attempt to stay authentic and drift from the community I cherish so dearly? 

And so when the “they” in my pronouns goes overlooked and ignored, when my identity is erased because I don’t fit into a neat little box, when I feel invisible in a room of my peers, I ask myself, what’s the point? Why do I bother to repeat myself when I am not taken seriously unless I perform this caricatured version of my queerness, complete with a label and a cherry on top?

The answer? 

The light that sparks in my chest every time my boyfriend refers to me as “they.”

The subtle but intimate connection when you discover someone else uses your same pronouns in their Emerson introduction.

And yes, the euphoria of when you put on an outfit and think to yourself, man, I look so gay right now.

So, as I walk down Boylston Street, questioning whether my peers see me for who I truly am, I realize that it’s enough to just be me, that I don’t have to force some label on myself to appease others. I’m just one girl-adjacent person trying to make it through the day, breaking out of any box that people try to put me in.