When I was 5 years old my dad asked me what I want for Christmas and I said the number 7. It sounded like a smart alec remark coming from a kid who didn’t know what he wanted for Christmas but it was actually the end of an exasperated week of desperately trying to narrow it down to the one toy I could ask my parents to get me Knowing damn good and well they weren’t going to pick the right toy anyways. My dad recorded the conversation on a tape deck back when that was a thing you did we used to record our family game night and things like that and playing back as jokes. But the reality is that indecisiveness is the reason why I don’t have good relationships.
I’ve been trying to decide for 37 years if I want to live my life as a man or a woman and I don’t have a straight answer even to this day. My friends hate going to fast food restaurants with me because I’m the one who holds up the line I have to look at the entire menu before I decide that I’m going to get the same thing I got the last three hundred times I went because I’m always looking for something that will actually satisfy me and yet I never find it. That’s even worse at a sit-down restaurant. If I know that there’s a movie coming out that I want to see and I’m hyped for that movie I’m good to go but if there’s two movies playing that I want to see I stay home and play video games because I’m not going to be able to pick which movie to go to I don’t know if it’s fear of I’ll pick the wrong one or if it’s more why should I have to chew I want them both and if I can’t have both on I don’t want either, is that worse?
I’m a conundrum and I don’t know if I will ever be anything but. My favorite toy is Transformers but I also really like Gobots. When I was a kid I couldn’t decide which one I liked better. Whether you see it as a blessing or a curse Society made the decision for me by not promoting the GoBots line and letting Transformers live on.
I started life out down the path of becoming a Wiccan. I eventually got into the Baptist faith before growing up and joining the Catholic Church. Matters of Faith are the hardest for me because there’s so much that I want to do or want to know or want to question that I can’t get a clear-cut answer on. I started contemplating becoming a Catholic before I even settled on Baptist it took me over 20 years to decide I wasn’t happy as a Baptist and might as well give Catholicism a try and even then it took going to an Anglican Church to shake the Baptist off of me and the first time I went I was terrified of what I thought look like a Satanic ritual as I have been brainwashed to believe that. It was only after I went home and remembered that I actually used to be into witchcraft that I realized that what I saw at the Episcopal Church looks nothing like actual witch craft before I realized that I had been deceived.
The best I can come up with is I feel like a bicurious genderqueer unknown possibly trans may be bisexual individual who’s also a Catholic who identifies as a Christian who plays video games and reads comic books wants to be athletic but is too scared to commit to anything that will change the shape of my body because I am what I am. Decisions overwhelming if I had a guide if I had somebody telling me this is what you should do with your life do this life would be a whole lot easier for me but I suspect the truth is the same for most people.
I’m not like the Sheldon Cooper of the TV show Big Bang Theory I don’t have a routine I don’t wake up and have the same breakfast everyday on the right day of the week and have my set restaurant and my favorite activities or things I can really really like something one day and three weeks later have no interest in it. I went through a model train phase, break dancing hip hop DJ phase, tortured painter phase, fiction writer phase, blogger and podcaster phase, filmmaker phase, cinemaphile phase, nature photographer phase, toy collector phase, retro gamer phase, computer collector phase, CD collector and music buff phase, Nintendo Fanboy and Nintendo hater phase. It’s not like in none of these did I ever find some enjoyment it’s just I never stick with anything long enough to get good at it because I want to always try something else or I can’t decide what I actually like.
Anytime somebody asks me whether respectfully or otherwise what is my preferred gender or gender pronouns I was tell them just call me THE RAT, it’s the best I can come up with most days.
It even takes me about 45 minutes to decide what to eat for breakfast even when I only have a choice between waffles with syrup or waffles with peanut butter. By the way those are frozen waffles.
And I’m not going to be bogged down by my indecisiveness anymore I’m not going to let other people’s need to Define me Define me I don’t have a decision I don’t have an answer but if you ask me a question and I don’t have an answer right there instead of giving you a blank stare or not responding I think I’m just going to give you a I don’t know but I don’t care or let me get back to you because I’ve decided but I’m not letting people make decisions for me and that includes answering questions I don’t have an answer for. It only took me 37 years to make that decision.
Stephanie Bri 