The Four Acts of Being a Tomboy

by Sophia Indelicato

I.     The adjectives I'd use to describe myself when I was born

Are Purple and Screaming.

Everyone else in the hospital used

Baby and Girl.

Girl was good, because my parents had a boy already,

And was fitting because my father had had visions of me

In a dream before I existed:

A girl.

I had no expectations as a child of what this meant.

Personhood to me was nonbinary.

Just bugs and Legos and

Whatever else my older brother enjoyed.

I was a proud mother of roughly a million stuffed animals,

Image credit: Dwayne joe on Unsplash

Most of which I gendered as boys.

I liked how that implied fewer connotations. 

One day, my brother,

Around seven,

Declared that I,

Around five,

Was a Tomboy.

My father quickly dismissed this,

With an angered adamancy puzzling to us.

Neither my brother nor I understood why this mattered.

So I shrugged and went back to creating

Elaborate lore for my Littlest Pet Shops

And villains of unreasonable proportions in our Lego universe.

None of this gender identity hindered my upbringing very much.

In third grade, I left a friend group of girls

Because of their distaste

For my idea of being a polar bear

In their imaginary, peaceful, and entirely human domestic scene.

I was accepted into a different group of girls,

Seemingly more interested in worldly things

Like Magic Tree House and cracking acorns

On the blacktop for the squirrels.  

As we grew, their interests evolved to be more

Feminine,

But this did not bother me.

They showed me the architecture of malls

And the intricacies of attractive male leads

Like a group of scientists communicating to an

Extraterrestrial.

And in turn,

I traded them what my brother taught me:

Silly video games and crude jokes,

And it was symbiosis

Between two species.

II.    My period came later than everyone else's,

And still delayed was my sexual awakening.

I managed to escape having any crushes

For the entirety of middle school

By early high school, I had developed some form of attraction,

Though it was decidedly celibate.

I was fascinated with the idea of having someone

Who was entirely defined by just you,

And hung out with you constantly

And shared your life,

But I didn’t understand for years that this involved

Kissing.

I became a leader in our high school’s marching band,

In the drumline,

Which was almost entirely boys.

There was a spectacular showering of praise and amazement,

That I could be so good at marching with that huge drum,

Adults would say things like,

“She’s center snare AND she’s a girl!”

But I didn’t understand the connection.

It was just something I wanted to do, so I worked really hard.

I guess the praise was good anyway.

I didn’t realize why the other members,

Who I saw as brothers,

Said that I gave them “a reverse boner,”

Or why they dove to tickle me all the time.

When they gave me a “pre-show smacking” of my ass,

I laughed with joy,

Because receiving that smack meant I was an equal.

Sexuality meant nothing to me,

Other than a scary thing that a few of my friends encountered,

Slowly, then all at once.

A year later, it meant

Something that was done to me

In a car in a high school parking lot,

From a boyfriend I didn’t really understand,

In a situation I didn’t really understand,

But I was old enough that this stuff should be happening,

And I was glad not to be considered behind, anyway.

III.   When I left my hometown for the open fields of a

State College,

My goal was to meet a friend who’d teach me

How to write music.

Marching drums transitioned into drumset

In a band of all boys.

We practiced in a smelly dorm room

AKA, paradise.

AKA, the happiest I’ve been,

Perhaps to this day.

The first night we all hung out,

This one friend,

We’ll call him B,

Was adamantly persistent that I bring my roommate

Because I could not be the only girl in the room.

I didn’t understand why this mattered

But I complied,

And we watched Baby Driver on a microscopic TV

While passing around a raw can of Chef Boyardee.

This, to me, was la joie de vivre.

As the friend group became more defined, and more sustainably male,

I felt I fit in quite nicely.

Until nearly every member had a crush on me

At some point or another.

I tried to date two, both ending in casualties:

One touching my ass at an inappropriate time,

And the other, an unending crush

That lasted years

And destroyed our friendship.

This introduced one of the greatest horrors of my life:

That I couldn’t feel safe with my own friends

Because of my body,

Something I couldn’t control.

People have always been people to me.

There were people I liked sexually, and there were those I didn’t.

There were (a lot of) friends I felt very close to, but didn’t want to touch.

But now I felt compelled to take on a practice of

Withholding myself,

Watching every word,

Every movement.

Suppressing any platonic affection,

For fear that they’d get the wrong idea.

I wanted to be a musician,

So, still, I hung out with the band,

And they showed me music, and we laughed

And it was nice.

And when B got high and put his hand up my shirt during

Over the Hedge in the common area,

After everyone else was asleep,

I didn’t say anything to anyone.

Because doing so would jeopardize my position as

“Friend” and make me something more than I thought of myself,

Something that was able to be touched

Under the shirt.

I was introduced to the term “non-binary,”

And I loved it, and empathized with it,

But not completely.

I felt more like a woman who had an ungendered social presence

(see “Human”)

And no disconnection necessarily from my body.

Thus, I remained she/her,

Though I wished very badly it was a fit.

How simpler things would be, in some ways;

Maybe my presence in these male-filled areas

Would make a little more sense.

If anything, I liked Tomboy,

Though no one used that anymore.

“Masculine woman” felt a little forced, and “Boygenius enjoyer”

Was yet to be invented.

So, I continued,

Despite everything,

To have sleepovers with these folks,

And stay up late drinking

To YouTube videos,

Striving to prove that my inclusion in these events wasn’t unordinary,

Until one by one they fell away, leaving me stranded,

A captain with no mates.

IV.   My biggest identity crisis

Happened after I graduated college,

A couple of years post-COVID.

I no longer knew anyone in my hometown.

And,

Disbanded from my musical connections

I found myself universally very lonely.

I ended up moving into a home with two boys.

I was nervous about history, but clung to the

These only viable options, friends of friends,

Who were looking to live somewhere.

Luckily, all remained well and platonic.

Artists, roommates and friends.

But thus remained a different loneliness.

Image credit: Adrian Swancar on Unsplash

While my circles grew, I found my inbox filled with

Demos, band invitations,

And flyers for local shows.

The fair-weather friends were nice, but,

Where were the dates?

Now that I finally wanted it,

Nobody, it seemed,

Wanted to hold my

Hand.

And I sweated.

Had I gone so far towards the identity as “person”

That no one wanted to cross that line? Did I become unsexual?

Unattainable?

Off-limits?

In my quest for being seen as an equal,

Was I now a god?

Worshipped from afar but

Never touched?

I got another roommate.

He was another man.

Road trips, late nights, gigs.

It’s good to have a musician roommate.

Someone to help record songs,

To play together.

I felt like Job. 

After the horror of my college friend group,

I had people I could feel safe around.

People to share my insecurities with,

To open up to,

After all.

So, after m o n t h s,

Of his secret pining,

When this roommate,

One of my most trusted friends,

A musician and

Business partner,

Asked to date me with unwavering confidence,

One random morning in my office…

I became irate.

Upset,

Exasperated.

Is no one safe?

I watched this friendship curl up

In a whimper,

Legs folding up,

Future sizzling out,

Gigs disappearing,

Projects caving in from within themselves.

The words echoed in my mind,

How could you make me go through this again?

Is this it, then?

A stoic isolation?

A successful woman, a lonely woman?

What part of me do I give up to have a healthy connection with a person?

My breasts?

My voice?

If it’s them, not me,

Why does it keep happening?

What do I choose:

A woman or a friend?

A woman or a friend?

This is the way my world ends.

This is the way my world ends.

***

Sophia Indelicato

Sophia Indelicato is a writer, filmmaker and musician based in Los Angeles, CA. When she isn't making stories, she's looking for salamanders in the woods. Her work has been published in A Moment Zine and The Yesterday Review.