control during the uncontrollable

a snip here... a snip there.. what even is gender???

When everything feels out of my hands,
I feel the urge to change something about myself.

This has always been a habit of mine.
Even when I was small, I’d feel overwhelmed—
the room too loud, voices overlapping,
chaos humming in the air.
Or when too many people had opinions
on how I should be, how I should operate.
Or when nothing in the world felt like it was going my way.

To find some sense of freedom in the waves,
I’d see a pair of scissors.
Snip here.
Snip there.
Until I had a bob.

That bob became my signature in adolescence.
Of course I got the “you look like Dora” comments.
But no matter how many times I grew it out,
this length is the one I always returned to.

Eventually, I treated it as a kind of challenge:
Could I resist this urge to cut it when life got too heavy?
And for a while, I could.
In adulthood, I let it grow—to my chest,
the longest it had been in years.

At first, I liked it.
I liked the attention.
The validation.

But then I met people who colored outside the lines—
and I started noticing what was happening beneath the surface.
The long hair wasn’t freedom.
It was a shield.
A cloak of invisibility.
Something I could hide behind
when the idea of being perceived felt unbearable—
like a dream I couldn’t wake from.
A kind of sleep paralysis.

So I cut it again.

Found some scissors,
snipped it back to that familiar length.
But this time it was different.
This time, it felt like reclamation.

Like I was returning to a part of myself
that had been trapped in my body—
afraid to be seen,
afraid to be rejected.

So I cut it.
And I started shifting how I dressed.
Not to blend in.
But to reflect how I felt.
And I felt—free.

For the first time in a long time,
I leaned into the uncomfortable feelings
I had learned to drown out.

Like the quiet anger
that simmers when I look down
and see two things on my chest—
making clothes fit wrong,
making me question who I am.

Because the unfortunate truth is:
I still desire men.

And that complicates things.
It makes me envy those
who can pursue gender euphoria
without wondering
how it might affect their desirability.

I’ve spoken to others with similar dysphoria.
For some, the answer was surgery.

But for me?
What helps—at least for now—
is going braless,
double-layering my tops,
minimizing the shape.

And letting my gender identity remain
a soft, open question.
Because I still don’t know exactly where I land.
And maybe that’s okay.