1.) People aren’t going to like you.
When you talk to people at school you’ll be so conscious of controlling your voice and body it’ll be difficult to pay attention to what they’re saying. You’ll have to remember to keep eye contact, but not for too long; tense your lips and cheeks into a half-smile so you look neither overly serious nor deranged; keep your hands and body still; modulate your voice so it shifts up and down the way most people speak. Still, after all this care, people will not like you. Your silences will make them uncomfortable and, when you speak, what you say is too ‘weird.’
So you’ll practise smiling over and over in the mirror so your eyes don’t look dead, then decide you want your eyes to look dead. You’ll put off showering because you hate the sensation of the water pounding onto your body, but your hair will look so greasy that you cut it short. That makes people even more unsettled. You’re not light and bubbly and cheerful enough to be a girl, nor strong and broad and subtle enough to be a boy. Their shorthand for it is ‘lesbian’.
2.) People are inconsistent.
Sailing will be the only thing that brings you calm; wind direction and speed and knots and sails, so precise and clear. Shouting to other people while you work eliminates the need for facial expressions or body language, and a life jacket will obscure the curves that feel so uncomfortable. Every other weekend you’ll go sailing for exactly 5 hours. You’ll need to map out your time like this, so you’re sure about what will happen next.
Just like you need time to be clearly mapped out, you’ll feel the same about rules. This doesn’t mean you’ll want to follow the school rules to the letter. In fact, it means quite the opposite – you won’t understand why they are so inconsistent. You won’t understand why the girls have to have different Health Education classes from the boys, why the boys are allowed on to the football field at lunchtime but not the girls. You won’t understand the difference between girls and boys – everything you can think of has exceptions to its rule. You won’t understand why using a different pronoun is impossible for an English teacher that spouts hyperbole all day long. You won’t understand why wearing skirts is essential for girls under 16 and optional for those above it. You won’t understand why a teacher sends someone to detention for talking to their friend but doesn’t react when two girls stick a mocking sanitary towel to your friend’s back. You won’t understand why some lives matter more than others – why everyone mimeographs a French flag filter onto their Facebook profile pictures but not Nigeria’s, Syria’s, or Palestine’s. Then you’ll understand and the dissonance of it will drive you mad.
3.) Therefore rules are arbitrary and there is no obligation to obey them.
You’ll scrawl on the ceiling of your classroom with a pen. You’ll let off snap-bombs during the school song at the yearly assembly. You’ll hack into a teacher’s email and send ‘Happy April Fool’s’ to every student account. You’ll get detention and your parents will be called into school. Yet you’ll still get good GCSEs and go to college, then university. But you won’t make friends. You’ll watch Pride, sitting on the bottom of Nelson’s column. You won’t understand why going to university is essential for most higher-paying jobs when the subject you study has no relation to those positions. Then you’ll understand and decide to spend your time on other things.
On the weekends you’ll hire a boat, discover a quiet cove off the South coast that’s always deserted and you’re sure no one else knows about. In the week you’ll start volunteering, cooking vats of beans and soup in a house for refugees. You’ll learn more about immigration, immigration law, and how people have to prove their sexuality, prove their gender, provide dating profiles, photos, experiences at gay clubs. You’ll go to a gay club and leave early because all the people touching you makes your skin shudder. In winter you decide to buy pasta and sleeping bags and drive through the channel tunnel to Calais to drop them off at the refugee camp there. In the soup-kitchen warehouse you’ll stay for a few days, play cards with the stranded men and realize how pitiful cards and pasta are. You’ll meet children whose eyes weep from tear gas and look at the pictures they show you of their families in the UK, just an hour away, so close you can see it from the beachside cliffs. It’ll make you realize how lucky your childhood was. You’ll think for a long time on the drive back about borders, what they are and why they are, trying to figure out their ‘rules’. You won’t get anywhere.
4.) There is, in fact, sometimes a moral obligation to disobey them.
Before you hire the boat you’ll take off your binder because you won’t want the man behind the counter to assign you the label ‘weird’ or the label ‘lesbian’. You won’t want him to assign you any labels, just let you use your credit card then slip away, forgettable. You’ll make sure to get one nice and big, with a few cabins and wide, white marshmallow sofas. You won’t stop checking and re-checking the route, down from Calais, past the Isle of Wight, back to your cove again. You think they’ll like the cove, somewhere peaceful, somewhere you can’t get ‘moved on’ from. You’ll wait until darkness.
Then when you’re gliding towards France, leaving behind those cliffs that aren’t quite white, more speckled like a crème brûlée, you’ll realize you’re unsure what could happen next. There will be a feeling of joy and fear so pure it feels like you’ve been struck by lightning.
But you have to make it through school first.
'Rules to Live By' won a special mention in Teen Belle's online competition, the Sappho Writing Competition (held throughout June 2020), sponsored by feministstickerclub.com.