This essay is part of Stories Within, a campaign* by It’s Ok To Talk and queerbeat that features personal essays from young people about their experiences with queerness and mental health.
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Recently, I was going through my scattered journal entries—all the diaries and notepads—I had filled during my teenage years. My mother had meticulously arranged them into a neat little stack in my room. I am unsure why I wanted to relive my thoughts and feelings from that tumultuous time. Perhaps I wanted to get to the bottom of the unease I still feel sometimes—as a 22-year-old student, navigating the depths of my queerness.
However, none of the journal entries provided me with any clear answers. I had forgotten that I used to write in coded language that only I could understand to evade my mother’s constant intrusion. Still, I discovered something. This sadness—the desire to cry without knowing why, feeling the weight of despair, fear of facing new things—is not new to me. Neither is the state of confusion I have grappled with about my identity—to recognise and understand my ‘correct’ or ‘true’ sense of self.
Reading the journals only reminded me of the feelings of loneliness and alienation I felt throughout my growing-up years. And how they followed me into adulthood.
Growing pains
For as long as I can remember, I have lived my life—if not in comparison, then in competition—with other people.
It started at home. My parents always expected me to be the best at everything I did—from studies to extracurricular activities—from an early age. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, I went to Kathak and Bharatnatyam classes; Thursdays were for my singing lessons; and Sundays were spent with my art teacher.
My parents had this unsaid, though always apparent, expectation of me: that I would excel in all these things.
Somehow, I let those expectations dig so deep inside me that that’s all I could think of before beginning anything new.
For instance, I would erase and re-erase my drawings, correcting every perceptible mistake until they looked ‘perfect’. Failing to score the best marks and stand first in school would lead to silent treatment from my parents for weeks—a sign of disappointment in me.
I developed a simple logic in my head. My parents were doing everything possible and more for me. They had given up personal opportunities, worked overtime, sold their small strip of land, and pushed their finances beyond our lower-middle-class means, for my education and growth. The only way, for me, to repay them was to be the best at everything possible.
At the same time, I also faced bullying from my peers in middle school. I remember a classmate—over whom I had a crush—whispering to me that they would never date someone as repulsive-looking as me. I was just 13 years old then. And it was no surprise that these comments had a deep impact on my self-image.
My ‘girlhood’ was a constant question among my peers. Some friends told me they didn’t see a ‘girl’ when they looked at me. “Oddly shaped,” they would call me. I was too tall, too wide, and too ‘masculine’ to be classified as a girl in their eyes.
My mother told me that it was okay for me to be “different”. She said that some girls have beauty, others brains. And I was quite obviously the latter. But even when I tried to make peace with my appearance and how others perceived me, my classmates and teachers often asked me, “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be a normal girl like the rest?”
I sometimes wondered that too. When I looked at girls on screen in TV shows and films, I wondered why I could not be like them. I remember looking at the female actors in Disney shows—they were thin, had straight hair and smooth skin, and most importantly, a certain kind of grace that seemed unattainable to me.
Somewhere along the line, I felt I could relate to the boys more than the girls around me. And this question struck me like never before: “Why didn’t I look like the boys either?”
I wanted to blend in, either way. I wanted to belong like I thought other people did, tied to a gender. Trust me, I tried. I tried really hard.
For some months, I decided to dress very feminine—relegating myself to kurtis [tunics] and long dresses. I tried emulating the girls I had seen on screen—pitching my voice higher than needed, acting “coy” to get attention, and putting on excessive amounts of lipstick.
In hindsight, none of that helped. I was taller than the other girls. Five feet and seven inches when puberty hit me. Then another two inches by the time I turned 18. I also had excessive body hair, contrary to the image of girlhood I had idealised.
So, when acting like other girls didn’t work out, and I still stuck out like a sore thumb, I thought, “Let me try and look like a boy.”
I cut my hair short and wore baggier clothes, sometimes stealing my father’s shirts, and pressing down my breasts (sometimes with my hands, sometimes with self-devised contraptions that would function as binders) till they disappeared under pressure. Despite all these efforts, I didn’t look like the boys around me either.
But I carried on with this experimentation—some kind of performance art in front of all the spectators in my life. It was terrifying.
Every day, I would bend my body in different shapes to look more feminine or masculine. Like clenching my jaw and pulling my cheeks in to make my face resemble those of boys I saw in films and TV.
Sometimes, I would try different vocal pitches to imitate other people and fail at it. Over and over again.
When nothing worked, I would imagine unzipping my skin and letting all the flesh fall off my body. I would think of cutting myself into pieces and reassembling them into something I could make sense of. That the world could accept.
Everyone had read a book I didn’t know even existed, it seemed. They already had their answers about who they were. They all seemed so at ease.
What was natural to them—their gender, their identity, and how they carried themselves in the world—seemed impossible to me. Whenever I took the train and sat in the women’s compartment, I would gaze at their flowing hair in every direction and think: how do these women go about their day?
Looking at the boy I liked in school, I wondered how he walked about with such confidence. Why did shirts hang on his back so casually and gently, like they belonged on him? But why not on me?
Why did they all know something I did not?
Voice of queerness inside me
I do not remember exactly when I realised I was queer. My privileged class and caste identity meant that I already belonged to circles where people spoke about queerness with relative ease.
I had read feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s books on queerness far earlier than many. However, I never meaningfully engaged with my gender identity. I think I had this constant fear that if I delved too deep into it, it would unlock something. Something I could not bear to hold in my already stressful life.
I could not shake the fear of being perceived as something that did not fit the clear-cut binaries—this or that, man or woman.
I knew there were limits to my mother’s kindness in accepting the personality traits that made me different from many others of my age.
I believe she might have had some knowledge of my queerness, even before it became apparent to me. I do not know when and how she first developed an inkling. Perhaps it had something to do with my erratic, random outfits, often transgressing the gender binary.
During my teenage years, without any provocation, she sometimes told me that she would kill herself if I ever dated a woman. This happened multiple times. I responded mostly with silence.
But one day, I told her that she was being unnecessarily dramatic. In her reply, she simply said that if that ever happened, i.e. if I turned out to be queer, she would kick me out of the home and disown me.
So, even though the voice of queerness existed within me, I was afraid of what acknowledging it at my home would mean. Especially when it came to my relationship with my family.
The cost of silence
Things remained complicated when I went to college in Delhi, thousands of kilometres from my home in West Bengal. From the confines of a small town to a big city, I was lost.
People around me in college spoke in codes suited to their metropolitan tongues that I could not understand, visited places I could not afford, and dressed in ways I desperately tried to attain but never could.
I was constantly trying to assimilate. And become like them.
What followed was a period of imitation, like during my adolescence, when I tried to be like other girls and boys in my school. Again, I looked at boys and girls around me whom I found attractive, measuring them up and asking myself: How could I become like them? What could the possible steps be?
It was especially disorienting due to my deteriorating mental health and continued struggle with my identity. One day, I would feel comfortable and even happy about a visible line of moustache that had been a by-product of my long-suffering relationship with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
(PCOS). On other days, I felt like peeling the skin off my face.
When I talked about it with some friends, they told me they never felt that way. Unlike me, their teenage years weren’t spent navigating the maze of gender.
The deep fear and embarrassment of not being normal (or not being perceived as normal) also pushed me away from making any meaningful queer friendships.
I don’t think cisgender and straight people around me were hateful or homophobic. They just treated queerness as this faraway, distant reality, where gender dysphoria was a theoretical construct they could tweet about. It was not something real to them, something that I constantly felt in the pit of my stomach.
With a few queer friends I found in my college, I only talked about my feelings of dysphoria on a superficial level. I avoided it altogether at times, replacing it with easier topics like dating, boys, and the prospect of sex.
While I often came across posts on the internet celebrating queer safety nets and friendships, I was oddly resistant to engaging with these posts and sharing more of myself. It was perhaps partially owing to my own internalised homophobia and my fears of not being queer enough.
I had this nagging fear: what if I was not queer, and all of my discomfort in my body was about something else?
And what if I were queer, but not in the right way, not in the way that counted.
Feeling alienated from everyone and alone in this struggle, I went into a depressive spiral—starving myself to the point of developing some temporary symptoms like an inability to eat. When I put food in my mouth, I could not get my jaw muscles to budge, chew, or swallow it. My muscles became stiff and atrophied, and I found myself unable to move. I was also self-harming.
I turned my friends away. Those who tried to reach out, I did not let them in, believing that I couldn’t explain what was happening.
I had no energy to explain myself. As I couldn’t even act ‘normal’ anymore, I decided to go to my hometown, taking a brief two-week leave from college.
Confined in the room where I grew up, I let myself be. I stopped doing anything. I was too exhausted to appear as someone I was not, to scheme and structure myself in ways that would be seen as normal. For the first time in my life, I was too tired to even compare myself to others.
My parents, feeling helpless about my situation, consulted our family doctor, who referred me to a psychotherapist. Earlier, I would have disagreed with going to one. This time, I did.
Emerging self-acceptance
As I started seeking medical attention for my mental health, something changed. Something opened up in me.
I believe it was around this time that an understanding just emerged—that I may be non-binary.
I was too exhausted to be afraid of what it might mean and how I would get through these uncharted territories.
For all these years, I believed that cosplaying ‘normalcy’ by pretending to be cis and denying my queerness would be the easiest way to live my life– without disappointing my parents and sticking out in the heteronormative society.
But after exhausting myself and still failing to fulfil these expectations, I knew this was not the way to live. There could be many, many ways to live. But this constant neutering of who I am was not one of them.
This new realisation was akin to acceptance. “Nonbinary” turned out to be the missing puzzle piece lying within arm’s reach—waiting to be grasped and put into its place.
I didn’t want to fight against my true self again, against what made me different in this world. What was the point of battling myself and resisting against who I am, if I found myself lost all the time? I had spent years debating abnormality and trying to become someone I was not. What did it give me? I was still desperately unhappy, bedridden, and feeling suffocated by my fears of rejection.
Letting myself come out as nonbinary to myself felt like coming home to my body. After an entire small lifetime of being in a state of confusion, I could finally, freely breathe again.
I felt liberated. A more complete person than I had ever been before.
Being nonbinary allowed me to overcome the confines placed on me by society. I could now explore the radical possibilities of my body and being, overcoming the pressure of looking, acting, and living a certain way.
Looking ahead
Over time, I have stopped questioning my body’s demands and started accepting them. I have let my body feel the discomfort with the idea of looking femme or masc on specific days.
I have also stopped punishing myself by forcing heteronormativity in my behaviour and way of being. I have started following my needs and making small arrangements for my convenience for a more honest gender presentation. I let myself play with my voice, outfits, and gait—modifying them based on how I feel on a certain day.
You know what? Sometimes, I feel I have my own gender, something that is just mine. Somewhere within the nonbinary umbrella. But shaped by my needs and demands. Gender is performance, gender is living, gender is being who you are, after all. And that’s how I am trying to abide by my gender expression.
Recently, when a friend offered me a kurti to wear when we were going out, I refused. Instead, I asked them for something that was not “traditionally feminine”.
It’s not always easy. My sense of selfhood is not always clear-cut. And I haven’t changed into someone completely free from the boundaries imposed by society. But this acceptance has made me gentle. Toward myself and others. It has also made me hopeful for a kinder future.
I haven’t given up on explaining myself to my family and loved ones.
So far, I haven’t been able to create that bridge of comprehension—to make them understand who I am and what my queerness means. But I have been taking small steps.
Earlier this year, I locked away all my padded bras because of how pronouncedly feminine they made me feel. I also told a friend from school about being nonbinary. When she asked me if I would ever medically transition, I told her I did not know. Not yet. It was a scary feeling, but it didn’t feel terrible—not to know everything about myself, for once.
Perhaps I can keep on exploring what it all means. Perhaps I can exist in the grey for longer, instead of confining myself again within some expectations: of being a certain type of queer, of being an ‘organised’ nonbinary person.
I am now willing to experience the full journey—of all that awaits me.
The author decided to remain anonymous to protect their privacy.
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*Campaigns are non-journalistic projects by queerbeat.