The Problem With Boys When You Don't Know You Might Be One Yet, Between The Ages of Roughly Twelve and Twenty-Nine

1. GOD I LIKE BOYS!!!

2. God, I hate it when boys treat me like a girl.

3. Conversely, I wish boys would treat me like a boy.

4. Conversely, I wish boys would stop treating me like a boy.

5. Conversely, I feel humiliated and sexless when they treat me like a boy.

6. Conversely, I feel thrilled and special in my sexless humiliation.

7. Conversely, I feel desperate and overlooked in my thrilled specialness.

8. Conversely, I feel solidarity with girls when they are mistreated by boys.

9. Conversely, girls and I are mistreated by boys in different ways.

10. Conversely, I like girls.

11. Conversely, girls are suspicious and homophobic when I like them.

12. Conversely, I am jealous and resentful of girls.

13. Conversely, I feel humiliated and misunderstood when girls are nice to me.

14. Conversely, I feel slighted and condescended to when girls are nice to me.

15. Conversely, I feel sexless and humiliated when girls are mean to me.

16. Conversely, I feel ashamed and weak when I am mean and disloyal to girls.

17. I will sell out girls in private, and I will sell out boys in public, so that no one trusts me and I can feel consistently ashamed no matter who I’m with.

18. Let’s ignore the boys together, girls!

19. This isn’t working.

20. I like a boy who is not my friend, and I like a girl who is my friend.

21. I will treat the boy who is not my friend with a combination of rudeness and hero-worship.

22. I will treat the girl who is my friend like the only person in the world.

23. The girl who is my friend has told the boy who is not my friend that I am a “man in disguise” as an argument for why he should not kiss me.

24. The girl who is my friend knows things about me that I do not know about myself.

25. I will give the girl who is my friend my prettiest dress because she looks better in it than I do.

26. I will buy prettier and prettier dresses that I do not look good in, to make my failure to look pretty increasingly conspicuous, heightening my sexless humiliation, my thrilling specialness, and the threadbareness of my disguise that I do not know is a disguise.

27. I will encourage the boy who is not my friend and the girl who is my friend to spend more time together.

28. I will punish them for enjoying one another’s company.

29. I will punish myself for betraying my own desires.

30. I will punish everyone and worry about why later.

31. I will seek to introduce closetedness into seemingly-heterosexual relationship dynamics, to the frustration of everyone around me.

32. I will seek to heterosexualize my seemingly-gay relationships.

33. I will make elaborate, time-consuming, thoughtful presents for my girlfriends.

34. I will spend too much money on my boyfriends.

35. I will treat affection from my boyfriends with suspicion and hostility; I will also never say no to them.

36. I will say yes to things I actively dislike in order to better suffer in silence.

37. Conversely,

38. Conversely,

39. Conversely,

40. But on the other hand.

41. No, that doesn’t work either.

42. Solitude?

43. No, that doesn’t work either.

44. Maybe my thirties will be different!

So far, they have, which comes as a great and devastating relief.