My optometrist told me I needed bifocals just as I turned forty. Right on schedule, he said. Your eyes will keep changing for a while, but by fifty, they’ll settle down. I winced. The prospect of new glasses didn’t bother me. At age three, I’d been diagnosed with astigmatism and juvenile farsightedness and bore the nickname “four-eyes” well into my teens. What did was the welcome into middle age implied in the optometrist’s words. My lips twisted; I would deal. I had no choice.

TThe prescription changed by small degrees but frequently enough that I needed new bifocals every few years. Fifty came and then fifty-one. And still my eyes continued to change. Then, around my fifty-sixth birthday this past October, I noticed something else besides the routine re-blurring of my world: small rogue particles that flitted across my field of vision. Worried that my eyes had entered an unforeseen phase of decay, I turned to Google and self-diagnosed the problem as floaters.

The vitreous in my eyes had begun to liquefy. Tiny collagen fiber bits were now floating free and clumping together, casting shadows on my retina. And that meant seeing the optometrist again to make sure I didn’t also have a matching set of detached retinas to start 2022. Then I remembered something my father had told me about a cataract diagnosis he received the not long before he died. It’s like looking through a veil. I laughed. Papa had seen his world through gauze. I was seeing mine through fine gray snow.

Perched on his rolling stool, the optometrist tested my eyes. They were healthy, except for the fact I was now in the early stages of cataract disease. Can I stop it? He shook his head. One day, perhaps in the next decade, I would need surgery to stop the white moons of full blown cataract disease from eclipsing my vision. Until then, I could only slow their development by wearing anti-glare lenses, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and wearing sunglasses outdoors. He didn’t need to school me on the benefits of shades. I wore them all the time already, mostly for the pleasure of feeling hip and young and only incidentally for the way they softened sunlight.

Though cataracts can develop at any age, they are one of the more predictable ills of those fifty and older. Live into your eighties and the chance of developing them becomes one in two. But when the disease runs in families, the risk of developing them is higher. My father never knew his birth parents nor did he know the predispositions of the genes he inherited from them. Even if it wasn’t in his DNA, I was convinced he had set himself up for cataracts. He loved the sun as much as I did. But he rarely protected his blue-white eyes from its damaging rays.

Papa didn’t live long enough to tell me what else to expect—blurry vision, decreased ability to focus and see color brightness, increased sensitivity to light—as the disease progressed. But I never forgot that veil. For years, there had been so much in his life he had refused to see. That his second marriage could not be saved. That his body and heart were failing him. That he needed a will to tell his family what to do with his belongings. That veil was his metaphor, the thing that revealed his denial. Snow was mine.

Like my father, I dislike the thought of my own finitude. But I have no veil to shield me from that fact. Instead I have snow—and my still-immature cataracts—to remind me that I am mortal. They clarify rather than obscure, reminding me how much I loved my youth, my former ability to withstand the changes and shocks of life with ease. While also forcing me to look at the truth. The snow is starting to fall; winter is coming. Though not old, I am nearing the precincts of age.

Psychology teaches that bodies often offer clues—physical metaphors—that hold the key to understanding the causes of emotional ailments. Alternative health practitioners take this idea and go one step further, claiming that all illnesses—not just psychological ones—are produced by negative emotions. Louise Hay, for example, famously claimed that everything from colds to cancer had precise metaphysical causes, which she listed in Heal Your Body. Curious, I looked up an online version of Hay’s book. Cataracts, she claims, are the product of an “inability to see ahead with joy,” the belief in a “dark future.”

Papa never tried to look beyond his veil. I think he wanted it that way, just as I believe he died willingly, no longer wanting to fight the weak heart that had nearly failed him so many times before. So yes, he had been unhappy. But would I say that this unhappiness caused his cataracts? Probably not. Or not entirely, anyway. Just as I cannot say that my own too-frequent pessimism did the same to me. I had no empirical proof, only the ambiguity of bodily metaphors.

What I can say is this. The January day I was diagnosed, I did not feel upset. I could not; outside, the day was sunny as a promise. Whatever the cause of my disease I had a chance my father did not. One day my lenses would be replaced and I would once again be able to see with crystalline clarity. All I had to do was embrace the snowfall and my cataracts. And walk into the light.

My elementary schoolmates, boys mostly, used to play a recess game called Smear the Queer. Teachers banned it because it was rough and had no rules. The kids still did it anyway, mobbing up on the small triangular playing field on the southeast corner of my school, elbowing each other as they chattered and giggled. Someone would toss a ball in the air then the free-for-all started. If the ball landed near you, you became the “queer,” the one who picked up the ball and bolted, trying to avoid the hard-boned tackle that would eventually take you down like hunter’s prey.

The name taunted as it warned. Be “queer"“—different or odd, as I understood it then—and other children, the ones with sun-tanned faces and limbs, long hair and surf shop t-shirts, would never let you forget it. I never played the game; tall and rangy, I was still a girl. More than that, I was the kid with the mother who insisted she had to walk me to and from a school just two blocks down the street. I had no wish to call even more unwanted attention to myself.

Like most childhood games, Smear the Queer taught lessons. Not the best ones, but ones that assured survival. Being part of the group, not sticking out in any way, meant security. Conform and you got by. But the conformity demanded went beyond having the right clothes and being the right level of cool. To conform—especially if you were male—meant being tough. No sissies or gay boys allowed. And if you were that rare tough girl who dared play, the message carried an extra homophobic warning. Play with the boys but don’t risk being taken for one because in life after puberty, girls are for boys and boys for girls.

If I remember that game now, that game I did not play, it is not just because I’ve spent the last ten years excavating my past for a book. Gender and sexuality, the struggle of being a woman who loved a charming, selfish runaway of a father but not the patriarchy that twisted his life and my mother’s, infuse the story I tell. A scholar of women’s literature, I probed stories for how female characters, straight and gay, cisgendered and not, navigated living among the men in whose image their worlds were made. My narrative was no different from the ones I studied and loved.

Some people may read the memoir as the story of a woman with a raging Electra complex…until they see Electra’s queer patina. As an adolescent, I gender-switched with abandon, slipping into dresses one day and clothes made for boys the next. It mystified my schoolmates but after a while they accepted it as an extension of what they saw as my general strangeness. The too-tall girl with the overprotective mother and foreigner parents who never mingled with their neighbors. All through junior high I crushed on boys and men, mostly my teachers; but in high school, I stumbled into platonic love with another girl who broke my heart with a devastation more pure and complete than any I’d know from almost every boy or man I who would ever enter—then exit—my life.

There was a boyfriend after that beautiful girl, but one who despite the intimacy and the love, sometimes turned my stomach for the way he felt like a brother. Other relationships followed. Yet the compelling connection that would make me want to stay was never there. Even when the emotional component existed, a connection of mind or spirit lacked. Once there was even a lover I did not want who came to me during a time of profound personal crisis. That was by far the worst of all my relationships for the role of victim he needed me to play and that I knowingly accepted because I had nowhere else to turn.

A beta reader told me he’d pegged me as a gender-bent demi-sapio sexual who could desire only when emotional and mental bonds existed. I hate labels but realized he was right. Though cisgendered, I have always been most comfortable presenting as a short-haired, hoodied androgyne in jeans. And when I desire, it is only when emotional and mental bonds are also present. In other words: I’m fringe straight. A gray-ace living between asexual and sexual, queer and not queer.

Personal traumas, many of them prolonged and co-extensive, have likely played a role in the “graying” of my sexuality, the remaking of Electra. Pain and loss pushed me at different times towards gay male friends and mentors. They were safe, they did not judge, they could laugh at themselves and were just plain fun to be around. And when a twist of fate sent Electra reeling, she remembered those friends and mentors and fled straight into heart of their community where she learned to embrace the maligned rainbow of difference she had carried with her since childhood.

Living in a post-climateric female body has no doubt contributed to my grayness. Simone de Beauvoir openly lamented the loss of desire in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; other women I admire like Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer have looked at it with some regret, but always with the idea that, as Steinem has famously said, “what we keep is what we need to support ourselves.” I feel no need as perhaps I did in my youth for the connection that would make me magically whole. To use a term Emma Watson once employed to describe her singleness, I am “self-partnered.”

What gives me hope these days is what I and others, like queer feminist scholar Llliian Faderman in her newest book, Woman: The American History of an Idea, have observed among members of Generation Z. They have been coming of age at a time when the “rules” to gender/sexuality naming (and shaming) longer apply. Like the transmen and women who took American by storm in the 2010s—Janet Mock, Chaz Bono, Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox to name a few—even if they are straight, they don’t like labels either. Instead they prefer to life off the gender/sex grid or by calling themselves genderfluid and/or non-binary. Some identify as LGBTIA +, some do not. Neither male or female, masculine nor feminine, they are simply humans who, in living their truths, smear straight with queer and queer with straight, obliterating boundaries.