Being raised, we were handed a box to remain inside. Be polite. Don't be prideful. Stay cautious. Practice your piano pieces. Wear a suit. Get good grades. Sit in the first rows of the classroom. There were cracks in the box, to be sure but we were expected to keep ourselves contained. We knew, compliant though we were, that pieces of us stuck out, but we held ourselves in enough. Told ourselves that we held ourselves in enough.

We were lucky enough to be spared attack for our parts that stuck out.

...well, for a while. Did you know that being trans stuck out of the box? We didn't know being trans stuck out of the box. We thought that fit in just fine.

I don't know if that was a turning point. Connecting our dots, we can see holes in the box from before that. I do know it was impossible for us to accept being contained that far. Surely that was allowed. We knew we wouldn't stop being trans - not for anyone.

I don't know if that was a turning point, but it meant that we knew what it was like to have a wall pressed against us, and we knew how to break it.

We're nonbinary. We're not a woman. The world isn't a sphere, it's an oblate spheroid. We're nonbinary, and there was a wall pressed against us, a wall beyond which was neopronouns, beyond which was expressing gender through language more resonant with ourselves than "they" and "it", and it was a wall we knew how to break.

Nonhumanity ... took more force, to break a wall to reach. Plurality, not as much force but more time. Disability, mostly took us time to name and tentatively claim. By the time we knew the thickness of the wall blocking the way to asexuality, we were already well past it, and we easily explored aromanticism, polyamory, and relationship anarchy from there. The person who showed us our autism, years before the rest of these, was happy to do it and happy to see it, and so were we - the box wasn't even on our mind.

The box is on our mind sometimes. That fear that we are somehow inexcusable for being outside it, leading to dread as we look at how far our wings span and see that we will never fit back inside it.

But also fuck that box. It was a prison. We'll never go back.

Thinking more about that boombox we got out to look at its cassette deck and the feeling we were enjoying of having sound in our physical space from it instead of in our headphones, and we ended up having a couple more thoughts.

You know that Brian Eno quote? "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"? I think one of those weird and uncomfortable things about radio is that you don't control what you listen to, when you listen to the radio - whatever the broadcaster decides you will hear, you either hear that or you don't listen to the station at all.

...and that can be fun? We have to be in the right mood for it, but it can be cool to make the soundtrack to our day be someone else's musical choices for a while. It ends up being surprising and novel, and encourages us to find what we appreciate in music we'd never've sought out.

(Admittedly we're currently listening to the web stream of WRUC 89.7 FM instead of a local station over the airwaves, but the principle applies.)

We ended up digging out our old boom box because we wanted art reference for audio cassettes - fortunately, it happened to have one in it - and we're having a little bit of fun playing with it again. We don't usually listen to music in the space around us rather than through headphones, and the last time we listened to a radio station, we were connecting to their Internet stream.

Also, thanks to the aforementioned cassette, we discovered that Los Lobos has a lot more variety of music than we were previously cognizant of. Also that roots rock is a thing.