In my youth, what started as electricity, a faint current running through with lights being turned on, became a systematic hammered and hawed sense of self until only some sparks popped out on occasion for a few careful viewers that there was something more running behind the scenery of pleasantry.
I lived in movies, dolls, books, chat rooms, and video games to recover this lost sense of self. I imagined myself as Princess Peach in a very remote way, and no one questioned it. On Yahoo, I imagined myself as a woman with long, flowing black hair and wearing a jade and leather outfit. In the 90’s I watched The Birdcage and saw myself somewhere in this club, but not sure exactly who. This is where the sparks shined a momentary glimmer.
I had no clue why I felt different, but I knew I had left some breadcrumbs for myself to seek shelter and safety when necessary. It was as if I lived in so many other dreams other than my own. My parents want the dream of a safe upbringing with as little discomfort as possible. My brothers live their own dreams of masculinity and what it means to be an individual. And then there were the tender dreams of partners who imagined me into their lives and cast me in a role that complemented their own.
I found myself in many of these dreams throughout the years, and found so many of them to be lacking a sincerity to who I am. As I get closer to my own true dream, I see two children approach it. The boy I felt I was expected to be, and the girl whom I had to suppress. The dream itself was of an edible and sweet confection, and what lie within that was a truly loathsome creature, or so you’re to think if the fairy tale is to believed.
With Hansel and Gretel though, they ate the house and destroyed the witch. But why destroy anyone here? Why pretend one exists over the other. In my own personal nightmare it turns out Hansel is the witch. He holds untold power over the other two, and his trick is that his magic works. He is assigned conqueror and enlists Gretel to assist in destroying the other, effectively replicating himself in a feminine form. There’s no real change here, just a power structure fulfilling its own commandment. Man above all else.
I see the ending only in compassion and forgiveness, in the empathy of many Others coming together. Lost children and a seemingly ill-intentioned solitary figure, these constructs represent those of fear and desperation. Who are we? When are we both? And how do we let them examine each other without one consuming the other?
How does Hansel get to bow out peacefully and allow Gretel and the witch teach other? I want to live within this agreement without replicating the values of an outmoded concept of gender or be dehumanized because I refuse to live by a measure created to divide. I want people to understand that that hope, a dream of my own, I felt as a child lives on and builds with each day, and is not an unattainable fantasy.