[Guest Writer] Intersection by Josh Luffred

It’s the sense of being an outsider, I think.

An odd, directionless haunting that tells me I do not belong.

There’s a new awareness of intersectionality in my life lately, with more than too many big, complicated feelings trailing off of it.

The friction on the seam where two facets of identity knit together.

And in that awareness I’ve grown to understand the vague, faceless sense that has followed me through life:

That I am an interloper.

Spending time in male spaces I’ve always felt vaguely repulsed: the machismo: the casual objectification of women: boasting about and embracing their emotional trauma — hiding in habits and socialization that I fought for years to unlearn and outgrow. “My parents beat me and I turned out fine.” Men talk about work. Men talk about hobbies and productivity and video games and sports and drinking and women and casual violence and anything to distract from the black, sucking emptiness where their capacity to feel was ripped out of them when they were boys. Men never address the palpable sense of “I am a watch that was wound one too many times, and if anything touches me I may just break – irreparably and entirely,” never admitting the need for a moment to just be weak. And so men dare the world and themselves and each other to wind them one more time, just to prove they can take being broken. Until they can’t. I’ve never quite fit in.

I’ve always felt more at home in my circles with women. I relate more to them, I feel more comfortable around them. My friendships with the women in my life are leagues deeper than the ones with almost any of my male friends. Even with coworkers I only got to know for a few months before moving on. The emotional openness and vulnerability, the depth of conversation or connection, is just so much more there than so many men are really capable of.

Weeks ago a friend of mine confided in me that my name came up in a positive light with some mutual friends on a girls-day river float. Somewhere in there she joked that - “proper vetting permitting” - I could be one of the girls. Something that gave me the warm-fuzzies in a way I wasn’t really expecting.

A week after that, in an unrelated conversation, I made a joke about most men being emotionally useless, to which she clapped back with “Easy now, you’re still one of them. The call is coming from inside the house.” Don’t get me wrong; it’s a genuinely funny comeback. The ache in my chest resulting from it, less funny. “One of them” and my stomach rolls, and there’s a knot in my throat that wasn’t there a moment ago, and there’s a tiny voice somewhere in me that says “please, no, I don’t want this, that’s not who I am.

I don’t want this.” And I understand why, looking the way I do. Dressing the way I do. Presenting the way I do. And credit where due, I will never be “one of the girls,” whether I want to be or not. There will always be a wall there. Elements of growing up as a woman that I can sympathize, but not empathize with, and things that are absolutely not mine to claim. Experiences – beautiful and horrible – I’ve never had, and never will, that shape the way they interpret life, in the same way mine do for me. Even if there’s a window, there will always be a wall there, and that’s genuinely ok.

Again, I’ve never quite fit in; perpetually feeling, I imagine, something like the one closeted lesbian at the sleepover.

And so I’ve lived my life feeling like I have each foot in a bear trap on two sides of a border; feeling that I will never not be an outsider. That no matter who I surround myself with I’ll never quite find my place in the puzzle. Never quite find a place to claim citizenship.

There is a fear I can’t quite bring myself to look in the eye; that maybe there is no space shaped like me. Maybe something close, but the corners of my puzzle piece will always need to be crushed down to fit into a space. And that maybe I deserve that pain for being raised the way I was. I don’t deserve community for discovering myself this late in life. Especially not from people I refused to accept when I was young.

For me, intersectionality — personal intersectionality — is scar tissue.

It’s the dissonance — the discord — around the wound of the Thing I was raised to be, and who I’ve worked so hard to grow into.

It’s my parents screaming at me until I threw up over the boy I was experimenting with in my tweens, before dragging me to the police station to give an officer my statement.

It’s being backed into the corner of a gymnastics locker room and walking out with sleeves of bruises to a chorus of “faggot” and “queer” in middle school.

It’s my father glancing at my hands in college with vague distaste before stating flatly “you should cut your nails.”

And it is also me telling a muslim girl visiting our church that her religion was wrong, and if she and her family didn’t convert they would all go to Hell.

It is me staring with open contempt at people who didn’t fit into the neat, tidy, God-fearing, christian-conservative box set out for them. It is me telling one of my closest friends, when we were in high school, who I would learn years after falling out of contact came out as queer, that gay people are subhuman. More than once.

Intersectionality is some cyclic ritual of karmic realization; being the abuser’s victim and the victim’s abuser.

It is me realizing that I passed a wound — the same one dealt to me — to another soul.

And the horror is that I know it for sure; because I was scarred the same way. I know too intimately how deep the words of someone close to you can cut.

And so the weight of silent and spoken sins grip me like clammy, damp hands beneath my clothes, and I struggle to allow myself to explore these repressed facets of my identity. Because claiming even the thought of belonging with the people I once rejected feels like arrogance: Contaminating a space I should have given up claim to. So I find myself here, instead. Filling blank pages with words like footprints in snow; trying to make out the ground underneath.

Angsting on whether I grate against masculinity — resonate with femininity — for gender reasons or social ones.

Ruminating on intersectionality and the child raised on the virtues of Good, American-exceptional, White, Masculine, Christian-Conservative Traditionalism, and what I won’t yet allow myself to call the adult contemplating his/her/their queerness. Fearing that I can never atone for the former, and as consequence, never truly fit into the latter.

Intersectionality is scar tissue.

It is the butchered stitches in the surgery I’ve been performing on myself since I was 12.

It is penance and responsibility.

It is not quite daring to hope.

It is loneliness.

It’s confusing as hell.

It’s sitting in an unfamiliar town at the intersection of I Was Socialized Male and Whatever I Am Now.

And I can’t yet find an answer to the question, “Where the hell am I going?”

Josh Luffred is a journalist by trade now working toward becoming a therapist. You can usually find them burrowed into an armchair under a blanket with a sketch pad and cup of tea, or vanishing into the woods for ambiguous lengths of time — with very little middle ground. They started writing fiction early, and were inspired by John Green’s talent for soul-baring personal memoir to share their own life experience for anyone it might resonate with.