My head is on fire. This happens with too much to say. We live amongst an endless amount of books, each authored by a chosen identity. Pseudonym or given name, they’ve made the choice that fits their story. 

Eero. Call me Eero, a name that earned my fondness long before I earned it. A name I suddenly remember chanting in the same way, in the same head, only at a different age. I would be the namesake of Eero Koskinen, stepbrother to grandpa Nils, whom I never met but whose name I always loved. Eero invented for the sky. He built experimental airplane models from the age of sixteen, calibrated jet instrument panels, brandished wit, and walked in the braces of a polio survivor.

I was a child riddled on the outside with evidence of inner daring. I had the mark of catching toads, racing go-karts, riding a banana-seat bike home all too quickly at dark, jumping from the tops of jungle gyms, and running like the wind through the sticks. I routinely woke up at dawn just to watch the sun pour through my tree fort window. If I sat still, I crafted spaceships out of Construx, or comic book characters on paper. I read the encyclopedia Britannica. I was often quiet but my head was often on fire. I lived in thought and ran on fantasy.

For this, I was swept under the category of tomboy, a taxon that didn’t quite capture me. It was a difficult task, like pinning me down to brush out the bird’s nests that formed in my unkempt hair. Was it that I was too similar to my dad? Was it that I “should have been born a boy?” Was it a phase?

Theories abound, none of them were privy to all the facts about me, though my parents got the general idea from the get-go. Still, I was preened for the sake of what’s “proper”; looking just so in a Sunday school dress, so that I could learn to repeat this formality throughout my womanly life.  Returning home caked in mud was a subtle dashing of that hope, as was dangling a snake in the air by the tail and blurting out “see, this looks like a Rattlesnake, but actually, it’s a Hognose.” A not so understated dashing would have been the fact that I liked to woo girls at the playground, or that I wasn’t a girl acting  like a boy at all; my gender was neither and both. And I refused to be polarized. Somehow, I had never found the words to say just that. It was a language of a distant country, a place where I belonged but had  never lived, save for in my head.

I passed through 20 some years as a foreigner, a foreign object, a foreign creature left to the assumptions  that come from the lack of full translation. I let people make their minds up about me even though mine had some different ideas. I let them throw rocks on the small-town soccer fields and food in the middle school cafeteria. I let them find comfort and common ground wherever they could, which in turn made me easy to talk to, but hard to know.

But what I’ve learned in my adult life, through the acceptance of people of all shapes and sizes, is that the story of who you are is the one that is most important to tell. And as one of those people aptly put:

“Maybe it’s not boy or girl, just humanity. I like to think so.”

Eero, call me Eero, a name that fits my story.