Nonconforming

This poem explores conformity, identity, and the subtle violence of becoming disconnected from ourselves.

It questions who conformity actually serves and what is sacrificed in pursuit of belonging, approval, and certainty.

At its heart, this piece is less about rejecting labels and more about resisting the idea that any external structure could ever fully contain a person.

Identity here is treated less like a fixed category and more like an unfolding experience.

An invitation to trust that becoming yourself may look stranger—and freer—than expected.

This poem came from noticing how often social expectations disguise themselves as truth.

• Not objective truth.
• Just repetition.

People are taught categories and then forget they inherited them.

As someone who is gender nonconforming—primarily nonbinary while also experiencing gender fluidity—this poem is also rooted in my own experience of moving through expectations that assume identity should be obvious, singular, stable, and externally legible.

But lived experience rarely feels that clean.

This piece intentionally challenges and moves further away from conventional logic as it goes.

Not to mock identity, but to reveal how strange it is that we believe a person could ever be reduced to a handful of visible traits or approved words, when identity can be felt in ways that resist neat explanation.

One of my favorite moments is:

“And the feeling of the color green”

because it stops trying to describe identity analytically and moves into something experiential.

Then somatic:

“And the smell of pine needles in autumn”

Then archetypal:

“And the freedom of the starry sky”

That movement feels close to how gender can exist for me sometimes—not always as something easily translated, but as something real, felt, shifting, and known from the inside.

The poem ultimately lands somewhere softer than rebellion.

Not “reject everything.”

Just:

trust that nobody else has enough information to be more you than you.