Unmasking My Identity by Bex Pendrak
I sat nervously on my porch, staring out across the backyard at the line of trees shielding my house from the rest of Ithaca. What if I had made a mistake, if my impulsive decision would lead to months of regret? My legs began to bounce in a futile attempt to release my mounting anxiety. I tried to think of something else, to focus on the light streaming through the leaves as the sun began its slow descent below the horizon. No matter how hard I tried, all I could focus on was the soft hum of clippers shaving a new identity into my head. I hadn’t had a short haircut since childhood and I certainly had never rocked a buzz cut. Well, I guess there’s a first time for everything, I thought as my hair gathered in larger and larger piles around my chair. When my housemate told me she was done, I was almost afraid to look at myself in the mirror. What if I didn’t like how it made me look? What if I wasn’t able to defend my decision to my mother, who already thought I looked too much like a dyke? What then, as I wait for my hair to grow out? I wish I could say that all these questions disappeared when I looked in the mirror. I wish I could say that I loved my haircut instantly. My appearance had gone from feminine to fairly androgynous in under an hour, which at first made me dance around the bathroom in happiness. But later that night, as I was getting ready for bed, I felt quite a bit of dysphoria. I wasn’t sure how much I would like presenting to the world in this manner for a long period of time. I had always presented as a female that dressed androgynously, bordering masculine, rather than a person of ambiguous gender presenting as slightly masc. And even if I enjoyed presenting this way, how would it be perceived by others? I went to bed that night on the verge of tears, questioning my gender presentation more than ever. Prior to quarantine, I had never seriously entertained the idea of drastically changing my appearance. Maybe it was a function of attending an all-girls Catholic school my entire life or members of my family being strongly averse to androgynous gender presentation. Growing up, I always felt that no matter what, I needed to present myself as recognizably female. Despite the fact that I was never 44 • zooming out
femme growing up, the critical gaze of those around me helped me convince myself that the only way to exist in society was not to challenge the gender binary. The communities I was a part of obligated me to telegraph my gender assigned at birth, even if it made me uncomfortable. The comfort of others around me took priority over true freedom of expression. This feeling persisted, even after coming out as queer. My “baby gay” self was worried about appearing too queer or too outside of the societally accepted queer presentations. So I experimented with clothing, but not too much, and I cut my hair shorter, but not that short, and I let myself feel placated with the barest minimum of self-expression. And because of my upbringing and a carefully curated skill of repression that most queer people know well, I was satisfied with the limited freedom of being queer within the gender binary. Then quarantine hit. There’s nothing like the complete and utter destruction of all forms of routine to prompt introspection. Normally, I was too busy for serious reflection. I would simply go to class, then cram in homework around activities and hanging out with friends, then go to bed and do it all again the next day. Cornell has a sneaky way of convincing you that you aren’t doing enough even when you’re spread so thin you hardly have space to breathe. And perhaps our capitalist society teaches us that self-improvement is only valuable when it’s adding value to things outside of ourselves. Nevertheless, the sudden and immediate shuttering of society left a massive void in its wake. When you can no longer turn to external places to occupy your time, you’ve got no choice but to turn within yourself. In a way, quarantine marked a return to childlike exploration and discovery. As a kid, you don’t have a full-formed perspective of what society expects from you - how to act or how to dress or what hobbies you should like. For a brief window in time, you experience life and all it’s potential exactly how you want to. Unfortunately, this sense of exploring your world without the intense pressure of societal
