While I was mulling over my identity and coming to reflect on the decision I’d made years ago (largely out of self-defense, given how absolutely locked-in I was to my parents’ vision of who they wanted me to be), I was listening to a lot of Friends at the Table. A lot of stuff they said there informed the way I think about my place in contemporary society and the way my identity fits into the world I inhabt. Not because I was entirely unfamiliar with those ideas, but because the thinking they explored as a part of their science-fiction themed seasons (especially Twilight Mirage, their fourth season) helped build on what I’d learned in some of the classes I took in college, in the research I’d done on my own, and the helpful things I’d coincidentally read along the way. One the things that stuck with me the most was the GM, Austin Walker, talking about how he wanted to push the boundaries with their fourth season. I don’t remember the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of “we need to imagine the most radical thing we can and then take it one step further.” The idea being, he explained, that all of us are limited by the world we live in, by the society we’re used to, and that a civilization that had progressed to the very edges of what we could conceptualize would be able to imagine modes of being/ways of life/etc that we couldn’t even conceive of because we are so anchored by the world we know, and that the society he wanted the group to attempt to represent in this season should have progressed beyond even that.

This idea got stretched even further in their sixth season, even as it was dialed back in some ways. The civilization most of the player characters was from in that season, The Divine Principality, was far more restrictive than that of their characters from the fourth season. The notable exception to this galaxy-spanning empire’s restrictive modes of being was a civilization that they were at war with. This civilization, a post-human one called in a territory called The Golden Branch, was full of people (The Branched) who had evolved beynd the need to maintain a humanoid form. They’d evolved even beyond robotic forms, instead being able to become whatever they liked, be it something as specific as a creepy hallway that makes you feel like you’re being watched, a tangled mass of cables at a specifc tension, or the effect of erosion over long periods of time. One of the players eventually plays a character from this civilization, who had been caught and forced to be a labratory at one point, before returning to being the mass of wires they wished to be, albeit in a form adapted to be more comfortable for the other player characters and NPCs to interact with. It was an interesting, enchanting idea, that one’s entire being could be something else other than a body as we know them. It need not be robotic or made of meat. It could be an idea expressed in the world. A situation. An experience. It really appealed to me, given my own lack of strong feelings about gender as a whole and my general distaste for being embodied as humanity currently must be. It wasn’t exactly mind-blowing, but this concept as it was played out in their sixth season is what pushed me to reach further, to imagine beyond my then-limited scope of being, and actually try to exist in a space beyond the bounds of my previous experience.

Since then, as I’ve slowly felt out my identity and worked to understand myself better than ever, I’ve come to really comprehend what Austin meant when he said that we are limited by the world we live in. The things I can imagine for myself, while entirely fantastical, are bound up by the way my life has gone. My goals, my expectations, even the things I wish I could be if I could snap my fingers and change myself instantly, are all tied to the life I’ve lived and the world I’ve lived it in. I am working to define myself, yes, but I am also defined by the society I live in. As creative as I am, I can’t come up with the perfect pronouns for myself, so I default to the gender-neutral they/them since it’s as close as I can get. Neopronouns are great and all, but none of them fit comfortably. And while I’m comfortable with the Agender label, I still feel a great deal of satisifcation when I can put “N/A” or “Prefer Not To Specify” down in a gender field while filling out a form, even if agender is an option. The absolute pinacle of expressions I’d had so far is the time I got to respond with a “none for me, thanks” when someone asked me “gender?” Agender’s a great label, but it’s one defined by a world that has largely been hostile to people who don’t fit in the supposed binary and yeah, counter-cultural movements are doing some great work out there, but they’re definitionally tied to the culture they’re combating. All of that exists in opposition to something and while I appreciate the work being done in those spaces, I don’t like defining myself by something I’m not. That’s half the reason agender doesn’t fit as well as I wish it did. It is definitionally “no gender” or “without gender” and I don’t care to imply that I have no gender identity. I have one. It’s just not any of the others I’ve found and my sense of it is strongly characterized by a distinct disfavor for any gender descriptions I’ve found so far.

All of this has been on my mind lately because there was a moment, during an episode of the eigth season of Friends at the Table, featuring that same character I mentioned above (spoiler warning for Pallisade Episode 22 and further). They were part of what might have been a season-ending suicide mission and the player took a move that signalled that the character wasn’t going to make it out of the mission alive. It literally said that, in exchange for dying at the end of the mission, the character could get three complete successes in the mission. The way the GM (Austin Walker) and the player (Keith Carberry) had worked it out such that, each time the player used one of these three automatic successes, he had to describe how his character used a form/body for a purpose other than what they would have liked to use it for. The first instance was when they became the darkest, coldest section of space that was experientially like the time during the apollo moon landing missions that an astronaut was the furtherst from another human being any single person had ever been. This incredibly intimidating concept was warped to protect the character’s companions, forcing them to use a representation of their self that they’d always wanted to be in order to serve a purpose in a war against an empire that wanted to destroy them, their people, and any person who would stand in its way. Yes, it was a noble cause, but it was a tragedy in that moment to have to use a fundamental part of your identity as a tool. To exploit yourself for personal gain. It was horrible to hear because it resonated with a feeling deep inside me and I still knew that, in the fiction, the way I felt couldn’t compare to how awful it must have been for this character.

I’ve felt like that for most of my life, if I’m being honest. I was forced to fill a role by my parents, with my identity fundamentally tied to a set of behaviors and expectations. I was expected to be the protective brother. I was supposed to be the Catholic ideal of a male child. I was supposed to be responsibility, concern, and protectiveness personified. I was given no space to be myself. I was constantly told, as I grew larger and broader than all of my siblings, that this meant I was supposed to protect them. To sacrifice whatever was asked of me on behalf of those around me. That I was responsible for those that I was bigger, stronger, or smarter than. To have an indentity forced on me, to have a purpose shoved under my fingernails for my entire childhood… It meant that even when I finally got free of that influence, it took almost a decade for me to shake off the hold it had on me. Even now, four years later, I still feel it calling to me, pulling at me, and influencing not only how I see myself, but how I can imagine my future self. I still can’t tell if things I’m feeling about my identity are my genuine feelings or just a result of me feeling like I can’t be anything other than what my parents told me I was, so why bother trying? It’s infuriating and horrifying and exhausting all at once.

Still, there are moments when it falls away. Moments when a stray thought, a line from a song, a character in something I’m reading manages to break through to me and make me wonder if maybe that’s something I want for myself. To imagine what it could be like if I was that or felt that way. Things like the refrain of a song that has meant more than I care to admit to me since I was a teen, meaning I tucked away and have kept to myself in order to protect the idea from anyone who would tell me that I’m wrong or the feeling is wrong or that, really, they can answer that feeling in the way they think it suggests. Like a specific mental image that comes to mind every time I imagine what kind of moment I would like to be if I could be something so esoteric as an experience. Or the way it feels to be able to fill out a form that asks questions of me but that never tells me that my answers are incorrect because they don’t sort into a neat table someone wrote somewhere. Or a list of descriptive lines in a book someone wrote that was meant to push the idea of indentity and gender beyond the tired spectrum of masculine/feminine/neutral that most people seem tied to. Things I’m going to keep to myself, at least in their specifics, because I am not ready to hold them up to the harsh light of this world and its need to pin things down like a bug on display. I’m fine with a lack of accuracy. I don’t mind being nebulous. I’d rather be undefined than pinned down in a way I don’t like. It’s just really difficult to explain that to anyone, even my therapist, because how can I define myself by refusing definition?

At least I’ve got a framework for it in the future, now that I’ve written this. Writing these things is always the first step for me. I have to get it down on the metaphorical page before I can work it out in something as ephemeral as the spoken words and no, the irony of that is not lost on me.