I have fought viciously and desperately for most everything I have in my life, even though my challenges, as they are popularly defined, have largely been small. My physical ailments, although taxing now and defining in my youth, are minor. My mental health, while imperfect and frustrating, has always been something manageable with good food, good friends and an allowance for rage. My family situation, although complex and peculiar, involved no abuse and little harm.
What has been difficult, by and large, has merely been the lack of a blueprint. There is no map for non-specific otherness, no popular conception of how to navigate Society in a world that supposedly no longer functions based on class, no guide for raising yourself in the face of parents who are detached and whimsical but also often unpredictable and frightening. There is no advice for the ugly other than to get pretty, and no advice for the smart other than to stay silent.
And so my biggest challenge is and has been that almost everything in my life I have done, I have done alone -- out of necessity, out of choice and, even, especially these days, out of bad habit.
We do not live in a world that gives certitude to girls, but because I am an only child who was surrounded solely by adults for so long, it is much like I grew up amongst gods. Because of this, certitude was the only thing I knew or understood of my environment from a tremendously young age. What everyone around me said was fact, while what I said was merely errant.
I learnt to steal.
Not just dollars here and there out of my mother's wallet in case I ever had to run away (it is good, I thought, to be prepared), but this idea of certitude, this manner of the gods of my childhood: my parents and their friends, my cousins twenty years older than me, my teachers, the people on television, the men and women of books, the friends I conjured in my head.
I made myself actually exist while others just wished to make me certain ways -- straighten my teeth, style my hair. My father worked in advertising; art direction most certainly extended to me.
My willfulness was rarely conventional rebellion. It was insisting I go to undergraduate courses at Yale when I was 15 in their summer term, when my parents had merely wanted to see if I could get in. It was leaving private school and then one of the best public schools in the country so I could work full-time and get a degree for that because I was sick of waiting for my life to begin.
It was lying to my parents when I lost my scholarship at university -- they wanted me to stay home and get therapy for my failures and I didn't dare tell them I was gay and had to move out of the dorms for my safety and that was why I had not performed as expected. That summer I stayed at work late each night to write begging (and legally threatening) letters to my school until they gave me my money back; to this day, my parents don't know what happened, and I worked full-time to finish school on-time and without debt.
My willfulness, as you know, got me to Australia. It also got me home; I had wanted to run away, even without money stolen from my mother.
I have made myself exist in a life that felt like it wanted me to be little more than a pleasing shadow, and I may never know if this was a necessary act unique to my existence, or an act of will most people never bother to undertake.
But my willfulness makes it hard to ask for help and hard to be wrong. It makes the slightest error feel fatal and the world seem more unfriendly than it is, even now, when it is quite kind to me. And so my biggest challenge is nothing I've managed, nor any of the innate flaws I carry, but of being gentle with others and myself despite the way I will always, true gods be willing, press my teeth into things, raised as I was by the wolves of myself.
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