A Midnight Rant about Punches and The Sixth Sense 

 A Rant about Being Bisexual 

 I have hated myself for being bisexual as long as I have known how to hate myself. I learned to hate myself right at the beginning. No. I learned to hate myself long before I learned I am bisexual. "Learned" is a funny way to describe it. It wasn't like I was reading a book and saw the word bisexual and stood up and closed the book and went on my way. No, it wasn't like that. Because I knew the word a long time before I plucked it out of the book and attached it to myself. I know a lot of other self-hating bisexuals. Maybe we should start a band. We wouldn't be a very popular band, because it was other people who taught us to hate ourselves after all. I had a girlfriend who said, I don't think people actually are bisexual, I think that we've just been programmed by society to consider men as a possibility. I should have said, but maybe you were just programmed by society to hate bisexuals. But I said nothing, and a couple of months later I made her my ex-girlfriend because she kept saying stuff like that. But then I took her back. So she became my ex-ex-girlfriend. But then we broke up again so now she's my ex-ex-ex-girlfriend and this time I hope she stays like that. 

A Rant about Punching

 The thing my ex-ex-ex-girlfriend said really stuck to my skin.  Because back a long time ago, when I first opened my mouth and said "I'm bisexual" the word didn't have the oomph that I wanted. I'd imagined it like a punch. "I'm bisexual". Kick, kick, punch. That's how it felt on TV when a character said they were gay. "I'm gay." Punch. The other characters opened their mouths like "O" like the punch had landed right in the soft of their stomach. Like the punch had punched the air right out of their bodies. "I'm gay." Punch. Later I realized that this is other people's problem. If I punch hard, it's not my fault if they choose to accept the punch into the soft folds of their stomach without feeling the impact. If they say, "That was barely a punch, it felt like being poked by a chipmunk," that's not my fault either. In therapy I learned that I cannot control other people's reactions, I can only control how I feel about myself. Which is great, because I hate myself. That's why I go to therapy, by the way. 

A Rant about Being Non-Binary 

The "Non" is what I knew before I knew anything else. Before I knew how cars worked or what people really mean when they say "I need space," I knew I was non-girl and a non-boy. Unfortunately, my parents slept in their bed each night dreaming about the little girl they had placed in a little girl bedroom in a little girl bed. Parents spend a lot of time placing their children. They place them in rooms and place them into clothes and place toys in their hands. That's why my parents gave me dolls so that I would learn to place like them. 

A Rant about Women 

I like women. God, I like women. In high school there was a girl in my volleyball class with dark hair and whenever she was near me I crumbled up like the Ritz cracker in the bottom of the box. Her hair, her lips, the freckles on the back of her arms. I even got a B minus in Volleyball, because the teacher said I lacked focus. She was incorrect. I had incredible focus, on bigger, greater things than what fits within the confines of a high school gymnasium. Women, I am talking about women. Have you seen them? Have you touched them? Women. 

A Rant about Men and The Sixth Sense 

I like men too. Not as much, but I do like them. I like their shoulders, and I like the way their chests feel, flat and wide. I especially like when they cry. Let's not go into that. I really do like men, though. The problem is, sometimes when I gaze at men and I am seeing God, they stare back at me and see a Woman™, which is strange because it's me there, just me. And I want to shake them by their shoulders and say, who are you looking at? There is not a woman here. No woman, no girl, no she. It's me, silly. It's me. But the men don't always understand that. They understand a world where you can mold hips, breasts, and soft hands into the shape of a woman. Which is funny, because that world does not exist. But everyone walks around thinking it does exist, which is funny for the people who know it doesn't. It's like tapping on the glass at the pet store and the hamsters startle, but they are not sure from what. The hamsters don't know you are there, they can't see you through the glass. 

I feel like a pet-store-glass-tapper around women sometimes too. Not all women. But sometimes I will be with a woman who just loves being a Woman™ with a Woman™, and it's like, who are you talking about, who is the second Woman™? Because I'm looking around and I'm not seeing anyone here. I understand these women though, I understand how they feel. When you grow up with Barbie and Ken, it brings a special pleasure to have Barbie and Barbie. The only problem is that I'm not a Barbie and they don't make a doll that isn't Barbie or Ken. 

 All of this feels like I am in the movie The Sixth Sense. I haven't seen the movie, but I know what happens at the end. (That is only partially true because my brother watched The Sixth Sense on an airplane while I was sitting next to him and I saw part of it, like the scene where the little ghost girl throws up). What I know about The Sixth Sense is that Bruce Willis was Dead The Whole Time© and that the little boy sees ghosts. Which is funny, because that's what I feel like. Like everyone else in the world is the little boy. And they are seeing this Woman™ but she isn't really there. And one day I will get to the end of the movie and my friends will turn to me and say "She wasn't there the whole time!" and I'll say "Duh!"

A Rant about being Bisexual and Non-Binary 

Being non-binary and bisexual sometimes feels like being in the middle of a middle that's so middle that it ceases to exist. I'm not saying that I don't exist. I'm saying that there are so many contradicting rules that the rules cancel out and suddenly there are no rules. When I was in third grade, my teacher showed us how to make shadow puppets. She helped us cut animals out of sheets of construction paper, animals with long ears and pointy snouts. And when one kid shined his flashlight in front of the animal it's shadow was projected onto the wall. He made the shadow dance up and down. But then all of us turned on our flashlights all at once towards the animal and there were so many projections that it turned into nothing, no shadow at all.

A Rant about Love  

When I go to Therapy, I sit down and put my head in my hands and say, "I just want to be loved, I just want someone to really, really love me." Then my Therapist says, "Remember. If you can't love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?" Which is a line ripped straight from RuPaul's Drag Race. And I say, "What am I even paying you for? Maybe I should just re-watch RuPaul's Drag Race." And she says. "You don't pay me, your insurance does." (A lot of people are jealous when they learn this about me, that I have very good insurance. But I think it would be a better use of their time to be jealous of people who don't have to go to Therapy). (Also, I don't speak that way to my Therapist because I am a very good Mental Health Patient™ who treats Mental Health Professionals™ with respect). 

I had a boyfriend once who really loved me. He loved loving me, the Woman™ he loved. He did things like write me little notes and hide them around my room. And if he was at the grocery store, he would buy me flowers, flowers for the Woman™ he loved. And I loved being loved. Except when I didn't. Except when it felt like this one time in class when my binder was too tight and I wanted to wave my arms around and scream that the room was caving in, but I didn't because I couldn't really move my arms since I was too focused on breathing, breathing, breathing. And I never told my boyfriend about that. I never told him that I wear a binder, because if the Woman™ he loved didn't exist, then who was he loving? And that about sums it up. All of it. How I feel about my body, how I feel about sex, about being loved, about loving myself, about punching and hamsters and ex-ex-ex-girlfriends and Barbie and The Sixth Sense. And if you want to know more, then you'll have to wait until I figure it out. 

Linnea Cooley is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their work appears in McSweeney's, Pif Magazine, and The Roadrunner Review, and in 2020 she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. More of Linnea's work can be found at linneacooley.weebly.com or on twitter @linnea_cooley