Alex

Identity is ephemeral. Constant yet ever changing. The fire flickers but it’s never still. The smoke billows but it’s never the same shape twice. When we explore our sense of self, it’s important to hold onto consistency and multiplicity. You are fundamentally you. You always have been. And… you are continuously growing.

Everyone has a temporal relationship with gender. Not only do our gender roles change with time, so too does our experience of gender itself. Consider the mind-body relationship between a girl at age seven and a woman at seventy-seven. Everyone has a conceptual relationship with gender, too. Consider how masculinity changes, not just between cultures, but between generations.

It is often argued that gender is a social construct, and this is largely true. Gender roles, gender norms, and gender expression are all cultivated by culture. Yet if gender was just a social construct, then we would all follow the script we’re given. We’d play the part assigned to us at birth. But some of us can’t, even if we try! Even if we’re ostracized for being authentic or exiled for being honest. Why? Because there’s something in us that’s been there from the very start. The spark of it all that ignited the fire. The sense of self we entered the world with. The identity forming within the gender.

Only later does someone label our softness, or ruggedness, or grace, or strength as feminine or masculine, and only later do we begin to internalize the script. Fortunately, scripts are often printed on paper and quite prone to catching fire. It’s a strange thing, to try and be what society tells you to be, only to see it curl black around the edges and flutter away into ash.

Let it go.

Identity is ephemeral. Constant yet ever changing. The fire flickers but it’s never still. The smoke billows but it’s never the same shape twice.