I realised I might be different in the 9th grade. But not for the reasons you think. 

In the library one day, a pretty blonde girl with a Nordic nose and her hair pulled back tight asked for help with English homework. What exactly is a satire, she wanted to know. It’s the only conversation I remember having with her. 

“It’s like a way of expressing something you don’t like about society. A way to make fun of it or criticise it.”

We had to write one for class. A satire, that is. Her face tightened, bewildered.

“What are we supposed to criticise?”

This girl wasn’t dumb, but she was genuinely baffled by the idea of a satire. There’s a peril to letting others know that you’ve got a brain at 14—especially if you’re not using it to punch down. So I shrugged. Played dumb, the way I learned how so that someone else could be the target instead of me. 

It was a moment of clarity, a dawning realisation that I was different because I saw the world in a different way. That I stood on the outside looking in. 

And it scared me. I don’t remember if I was still praying to be popular at that point in my life, but if I wasn’t, I had only just stopped. It’s an age when we’re so desperate to belong that most of us barely know who we are. In fact, if it appeals to the people around us, we would much rather be somebody else entirely.

Do you remember sleepovers? The ultimate way to signal your belonging at that tender age before drivers’ permits and part-time jobs to pay for gas. Friday after school, you get a ride home with your friends before coming back Monday morning with stories to tell about trampoline flips and how angry someone’s parent was when you were still awake at 3 am, and—if you’re lucky—maybe a new inside joke or two. 

Friday nights, I was happy to sit around, knocking back cherry-red Kool-Aid and cans of pop, watching my friends hack their way through Hyrule, or go head-to-head in Smash Bros with the perfect moves they had memorised by heart, while I mashed at buttons and hoped to get lucky when the controller came my way. We’d stay up as late as we could—usually until someone’s parent poked their head in and, exhausted, told us to turn the TV off and go to bed. The morning came with sugared cereal and Saturday morning cartoons. I don’t know how to say it, but I hated those morning rituals. The night before, Link’s quest had felt like a shared journey, something we were experiencing together. Even if I was only spectating, we were laughing, talking, reacting. In the morning, the experience was nothing more than that of a waiting room. How many episodes of Two Stupid Dogs will we get through before my name is called? Before my parents pick me up? 

Then there were the jokes I didn’t get. The way boys seem endlessly able to commit lines to memory from their favourite films and quote them back and forth, but incapable of having an actual conversation. To be fair, I wasn’t either. Once, at twelve or thirteen, I mused how amazing it was that we could afford to live our middle class existence in the suburbs—how grateful we should be. 

Rediscovering my high school journal has confirmed it: until the age of 14, my personality was basically “Victorian school girl.” 

I guess quoting other peoples’ words keeps us from fumbling our own. 

But now that I think of it, the girls I tried to befriend did the same thing—but instead of Star Wars or Napoleon Dynamite, they quoted British television shows or novels or Stargate. Clueless but craving their approval, I laughed along. But I’m shit at faking it. 

They would give me a sad smile and say, “It’s OK, we know you don’t get the reference.” A switch flipped and an invisible force field hummed to life between us, and, my heart sinking, I faded to the background, certain I would never belong. 

But the code of teenage boys obliges you to laugh when a joke is told. If you don’t, you get a thump on the shoulder and a good-natured but insistent, “Stop pretending you’re better than us. You know it’s funny. Laugh.” 

You know it’s funny. Laugh. Prove you’re one of us. Laugh. 

Maybe I’ve always thought that men were full of shit and so I didn’t bother trying to comfort them with hollow laughter. There are still times when I sit and stare, uncomprehending, as the people around me bare their teeth. And you know what? It’s almost always when a man is trying to tell a joke. 

I tried to sort things out with therapy sessions the summer after high school. They didn’t last long. One session—maybe two. I have no memory of the conversation except this gem: Maybe you just need to relax. 

Just relax. You need to. Relax. 

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work, it doesn’t work, it’s shit advice. Sure, I tried it. Briefly. I spent the final semester of undergrad going out to clubs and making friends with the crowd I had shunned ever since I realised I was on the outside with my too-big nose, shaggy, dark hair, and opinions on society. For a brief moment, though, I was in. Accepted. A bunch of white people’s token gay friend. Someone they knew would be down for a good time, who pushed the line and said what everyone else was thinking but wouldn’t dare say out loud. 

It worked for a couple years. But I was treading water without land in sight, trying to understand myself in a world without destinations, without role models. The only available trope was to be skinny, listen to Lady Gaga, and tolerate straight women calling you sassy. But it’s a hollow thing to build your existence on the expectations of others. 

The truth is that I knew I was different long before that 9th grade conversation confirmed it for me. I still knew it years later while I was doing tequila shots, pretending to like music I hated, making friends with straight women who promised to hook me up with their gay best friend (they never did)—all in the name of a good time, in the name of learning to relax.

There was also the time when I was six or seven and my sister was four or five. For a brief, shining moment, we liked each other—it must have been an act of God, because it wouldn’t happen again for another decade. We had the idea that it would be fun to share a bedroom, and somehow convinced my mom to move my bed into her room. 

It came crashing down in spectacular fashion one day when we had friends over, probably to go swimming in my parents’ pool, and I walked in on my sister and her friends changing. I hadn’t meant to see them changing. I wanted to be in my room. I wanted to be part of the group. I wanted to be on the inside. 

I can still picture their shocked and angry looks. GET OUT G E T  O U T   G  E  T    O  U  T. Well, that was the end of that. No more sibling kumbaya, no more rooming together, no more sharing friends—no more being friends, period. 

I got the message: girls over here, boys over there. Freak. 

So I got out, went back to my lane, even though I didn’t really understand what it was. I liked dinosaurs. I liked cars. I liked Legos. I liked outer space. If only that’s all there was to being a boy, I could’ve been pretty good at it.  

And yet, there is a happy end to all of this. I’m friends with my sister, who, years later, was the first person in my family to ask me about my experience as a non-binary person. I’m friends with some of the boys whose sleepover invitations I craved—one of them is a dad now, and I got to meet his 1-year-old son this summer. And I’m still friends with almost every one of the girls from high school whose friendship and approval I had been so desperate for. 

Yes, there is a weary way in which I feel like I never quite fit just the way I want to. But being on the outside isn’t something to fear or shun. It’s a source of strength. It’s a point of connection—a way to empathise with people, precisely because you can understand difference. 

And by the way. The friends I made during my stint learning to “relax”? I haven’t heard from a single one of them in years.

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