theatreofsin

I'm not convinced by the popular image of children as innocent. Partially because my own childhood, even growing up in a safe, accepting home with no major traumas to think of, was anything but. I devoured stories with blood and betrayal and trickery and death. I made my friends play war. I was fascinated by martyrdom and playacted torture and control.

Humans, human emotion, the human body – they're all still animal. Or perhaps it'd be better put that there is an element of the animal in the active realization of the human or human-form being: an indelible element, which some people spend their entire lives trying to tame. More power to them, if that's how they're best fulfilled; I can respect that. What I can't respect is the urge to deny that element entirely, to insist that "human" somehow means wise and cerebral and untouched by that primal part, the part that scares people. I find it a misleading ideal, dishonest and harmful.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a warrior when I grew up. I wanted to carry a sword and wear armor and exert myself through the moving and countering of blades. I wanted a true induction, a rite of passage, a stature. I craved the asceticism of the march. I didn't want a pony, I wanted a warhorse, and I wanted to sleep against its side under a rough pelt on the plains under the stars. And through that qualic landscape I navigated much of my noninnocence.

Even before I hit puberty, I had issues with sex and gender. I used to have daydreams of cutting off breasts with my sword. All the women of the world would line up and I would induct them into some unexpressable something with a glorious sweep of sharp steel. I understood it as a liberating act; it never crossed my mind that breasts might be something people would find desireable to, themselves, have. My picture of womanhood was of people stoically dealing with a body that wasn't pleasurable to be in, that leaked blood and grew children like parasites or tumors and was awkwardly shaped and hung wrong in all the wrong places. Going through highschool and college was something of a revelation to me in that people actually did want this.

(Before anyone asks, I now regard womanhood as something a bit like sexuality: something I don't find desirable, but fine enough for other people and not inherently better or worse than most options. Different aesthetics suit different people. Or, as George Elliot wrote, "souls have complexions too; what will suit one will not suit another.")

I didn't have a complete understanding of these things, but I had some understanding. I certainly had enough to know what I did and didn't want. I didn't want to be a woman. I didn't want to be a man either, but that non-want was less than my non-want for womanhood. I would rather have been a king than a queen, but what I most wanted was to be a warrior, which, for me, wasn't a gendered term.

I never understood the practice of compliments or congratulations at menarche. Who would want their body to ache and leek unseemly blood? Blood from a wound, to my mind, was cleaner, better. I understood bras to be items used to keep breasts out of the way and as out of mind as possible. To this day I can understand the social reasoning behind things like breast implants, but I can't grok it – I can't reconcile with it, on an emotional level.

From a young age, though I didn't have the word for it, I had a neutrois identity. It's been a constant, in my life. Before being told that this did or didn't exist, I grasped it as the thing which best suited me. I knew what I was.

I've just recently discovered the word which describes it.

:)

Once when I was a child several of my friends turned on me. Given that I was in middle school at the time, a time when all children are universally horrible to each other in one way or another, this was to be expected, but as I was not well-acquainted with this truism of child development and/or the American public school system, I developed an entire mythology around the injustice.

Here's the thing about children: they're not innocent. They have a natural curiosity about life and nature, and the more taboo a subject is, the more they might be interested in it. Sex, violence, death, sadism, children are in no way immune to any of this. As for myself, appetite whetted on classics (have you actually read Shakespeare? sex and violence all over) and fantasy, spent long hours envisioning how I'd kill them if I ever had the power of a despot at my hands. I can remember long, delicious ponderings devoted to how the tips of my fingers would first strain into, then break through, the skin of their throats. I wanted that sort of visceral, absolute victory, that shared moment of physical intimacy, that power over another living thing that had wronged me.

Naturally, I never acted on it. On the whole I'm a surprisingly nonviolent person. I've only been in one fight, and during it I sat down, put my arms up to shield my face, and didn't make a noise. I didn't regard that as weakness. It was another kind of strength and, on reflection, a different mode of control. But that moment, that element I craved, the malicious and unreasoning force against a vital spot, didn't disappear from my mind. They just came at me from a different direction or two.

Because at the one hand, that's what I perceived myself as suffering. And as much as it was a refuge then, it's endured as something I fear now.

People having power over me, or having power to hurt me when I have no means of fighting back, terrify me – not in any form of screaming dismay, but in a way that makes me feel as though my own stomach has turned against me. An element of my life or self becomes foreign territory, leaning toward the enemy, and I'm caught in its grip without a last recourse. It's the moment right before the fingers touch the throat, when you can see it coming and can't get out. It's the point at which you know any screams will choke before they make it to your mouth.

And it would be nice – really, it would – if I knew of a strategy to fix that. But I don't. So my reaction thus far is usually to curl up into a tight burnt weed of anger and snarling hate, imagining some fantastical vengeance, which even to my mind is another display of defeat. If sitting and taking blows without acknowledging weakness or pain is a mode of control, this is a mode of submission – and to those people I least want to submit to.

But I am a quiet person. An internalized person. And resorting to hate is easy. And so long as it is the quiet, internalized hatred, with no expression or evidence, at what point will I ever be compelled to change it?