I AM THE BOY

A Guest Post From Writer Shawna Kenney

When I was a little girl, all I wanted to be was a boy. My Girl Scout troop knitted potholders, decorated Christmas ornaments and sold cookies while the Boy Scouts were camping in the woods, learning how to build fires. When I decided to quit, my mother made me write a letter to the den mother, explaining my decision. A good girl has manners, after all.

It wasn’t about genitalia or sexuality. It wasn’t gender dysphoria; it was something more like envy. It was about the privileges seemingly bestowed upon the opposite sex. I wanted to be feral. The kids in the narratives I was reading and watching were all having fun, many finding camaraderie, roughing it through poverty and class issues threatening to hold them down, the group of them against the world. The Outsiders. Rumblefish. My Side of the Mountain. Stand by Me. White Fang. Where were the realistic girl adventurers? I looked toward far-fetched fantasy and fiction: A Wrinkle in Time, Nancy Drew, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Pippi Longstocking. It seemed many young women became mothers and then the adventure was over. I loved reading the Beatniks, but the women were always left behind with the kids—a burden. That was the message in many of our houses, too. I wasn’t the only one laughing uncomfortably at a child abuse P.S.A. commercial with a mother screaming “I wish you’d never been born” (born, born, born, echoing in horrifying special effect).

(me as a kid, upstate New York, 1975)

And when I found my mother’s high school yearbook as a teen, underneath each name was printed: nurse or teacher or housewife. It was so uniform, I had to ask my mom, “did you all fill out some sort of a form and have to check one of three boxes?” She shook her head no and said, “That’s all we thought we could be at the time.” This was 1960s in a small town in upstate New York.

No wonder I romanticized the me-against-the-world narratives played by the likes of Matt Dillon and James Dean types.

Like my father, who came from alcoholic abusive household, who taught himself to work on cars, whose mother died young and brothers lied about his age to get him into the military at 16, who went to Vietnam willingly, coming back to an extra mouth to feed—me.

It’s no surprise I was attracted to hardcore music, an angry male-dominated genre of punk opposite of the bubblegum pop flooding the airwaves in the 80s. The young men I was attracted to – the kind I read about, the kind my father had been — toured in bands, raced in triathlons, fought with their fists and came home with bloody noses.

(me in the pit at a hardcore show, '97)

After one bad break-up and a flirtation with suicide, it’s like older, wiser me—what Tara Mohr calls the Inner Mentor—whispered in my ear, “stop by being the side character in your own story!” So, I applied for college, even though walking on campus made my knees shake. I answered weird ads in the back of the city paper, taking risks I would not recommend to a young person now. During freshman year in DC, a friend in Texas invited me to come see her over spring break. I whined that I had to work, that I didn’t have the money. After she shared her theory that “you never regret travel,” I put the $100 plane ticket on a credit card, flew for the first time ever, and have tested her theory enough since to say that it holds true for me. (This I do recommend). It took me awhile to learn there was nothing preventing me from going out and getting my own thrills, whether through physical activity, travel or plain old bad decisions

Women’s lit and world literature classes introduced me to new narratives, but sometimes I still got stuck in my own. In a screenplay class I wrote a story about a boy from Queens whose dad was a cop and mother a Santeria priestess, loosely based on a true story, friend of a friend’s. He runs the streets with his gang until he gets stabbed and his father comes to see him in the jail. The script is long lost, and I can’t remember what happens after that, but there is some great turnaround, a come-uppance for the hardscrabble kid. The boy who came from nothing makes himself into something.

Risking rejection, I started pitching stories to magazines and to my surprise, some of them got published. A few years later I would write my own memoir, a story of figuring things out the hard way, seeking adventures, finding my people. My favorite review came from writer Heather Corrina, who called my work, “Like Hunter S. Thompson, if he’d had a sober moment or an ovary or two.” Now I was star of my own story.

Over time I learned I could have my own adventures by living a creative life. Get married or not. Be a child-free or not ( I met some mothers who brought their kids along on adventures). And I read of other women’s real-life adventures—Maya Angelou, Martha Gelhorn, Susan Orlean, Michelle Tea, just to name a few. I have mountain biked, hiked both coasts of the US, swam in many rivers and seas, written books and toured other countries thanks to my words. As a journalist I have interviewed so many musicians, extreme athletes, entertainers, innovators and big thinkers, much braver than I. Part of this is being lucky to live in this time and place where women become astronauts, doctors, doulas, professional athletes, scientists, soldiers and anything else they want to become. Part of it was the decision to take leaps, not knowing where I would land.

My life is not a glamorous fairytale, but it is all mine. My younger self just had to live long enough and make bold enough choices to get the kind of life I wanted, even better than I dared to dream.

I am “the boy” I always wanted to be.

I am the woman I could not imagine.

I am me, having a full human experience, given my unique set of circumstances.

I just had to center myself in my own story.

We all do.

(Shawna Kenney)

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Check out Shawna’s Substack, POSER and listen to Shawna’s fabulous and inspiring interview on the FILTHY MILFS Podcast, episode KEEP CALM AND BE A DOMME. And in case you haven’t heard, WE WON THE WOMEN PODCASTERS AWARD FOR BEST COMEDY!!! You can see our acceptance speech here. Woo hoo!!!

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