This is Chapter 1 of my story about femininity, sexuality, and faith.

Since I was a young girl, I always felt something about me was different.

It wasn’t the fact that my personality, interests, and play style were unique among the girls I knew. Luckily, for the first decade of my life I had almost no exposure to the concept of gender roles. I never thought twice about my passion for digging in the dirt in search of worms, my unending itch for adventure, or my fascination with science and history.

Neither did it seem unfeminine or unladylike that I tended to play rather dark games, like having my toys engage in wars against monsters, or sending them on wild escapes from evil slave traders.

I was indeed a strange child, but none of this seemed strange to me at the time. All my favorite fictional heroes were brave adventurers, standing boldly for what they believed in. My role models were Kaya, Kit, Felicity, and Molly from the American Girls, along with Millie Keith from A Life of Faith.

They were all girls. They all climbed trees and got dirty and spoke their minds. They were passionate, courageous, and kind. Why shouldn’t they be?

No, this wasn’t why I felt different.

It wasn’t the fact that I resented the word “lady”, either. Perhaps the closest I came to experiencing gender roles was when I was forced to wear loathsome, itchy stockings under my dresses for church on Sundays, or when Mom corrected me on how to properly sit… whether I had a dress on or not.

“Don’t sit like that,” she’d say with a frown. “It’s unladylike.”

Begrudgingly, I’d straighten my back and draw my knees close together again. Why couldn’t I just relax and splay my legs however I wanted? Whatever “ladylike” meant, I knew right away it wasn’t something I wanted to be.

As a young girl, I had long, thick brown hair that could nearly always be categorized as a “tangled, curly mess”. Four words I hated to hear were:

“Brianna, brush your hair!”

Ugh! I couldn’t fathom why brushing my hair mattered for anything. If I had it my way, I’d spend all my days running around barefoot, biking down the street, collecting pet bugs, reading books, and writing stories at my catastrophically cluttered desk.

“Brushing my hair”, or looking in the mirror for any real purpose, fell under exactly zero of those categories.

This, still, wasn’t why I felt different.

I was a girl. I was fully a girl, and I loved being a girl. But I had an innate sense that I wasn’t like other girls. It had absolutely nothing to do with being adventurous or messy or imaginative. These seemed like perfectly normal traits for kids of my gender.

No, there was something else, something always in the background, like a hovering shape in the corner of my eye I never bothered to look at directly.

Though I was completely a girl, there was still this subtle sense of otherness I always felt with fellow females. The way they communicated, the things they valued, and particularly as I got older, the way they talked about boys was just hard to relate to.

Oh sure, I noticed boys. I started having crushes on boys when I was ten. Still, I was far more likely to see them in a brotherly way. Perhaps this was because I had four younger brothers and four male cousins that felt like brothers, but only one sister and one female cousin I saw much of while growing up.

I was used to boys. They made more sense to me. Their simple, direct sentences. Their loud mannerisms, their goofiness. I felt more comfortable with them.

During my teens, I dismissed that otherness I felt with girls as just part of my unique personality. Subconsciously, I still searched for other females that were like me in this indescribable way, but I never could identify one.

As it turned out, the answer was right in front of me the whole time. But I was too ignorant to see it.

Next: Read Chapter 2.