Toying with gender roles

Amused by the idea that dolls are "girl toys," and that action figures and puppets are somehow completely distinct from dolls and therefore acceptable for boys to play with.

It's not even as if they're distinguished by whether the doll is supposed to be masculine or feminine. There are action figures of women and dolls that are supposed to be boys. It also has nothing to do with the imaginary scenarios they're cast into. When I was little, my Barbies fought in a lot of time-travel wars and the Megazord hosted tea parties. (There was also a whole ongoing love triangle between a Barbie, the green Power Ranger, and Ariel, but that was another story.)

It's just weird how we create all these arbitrary barriers. Any toy that's modeled to look like a person is, for all practical purposes, a doll--and that's fine.

Reflections and echoes

In first or second grade, I came up with a fantasy about reflections and mirrors. It developed further throughout elementary school, but first came about when I was around seven. I imagined that everyone's reflection is an alternate version of themselves from a parallel world we see via the mirror—that everything in a reflection was really in that other place. And a reflection shows a reverse image because everything over there is the opposite of the way it is here, including ourselves. I decided every person had a polar twin, and their names were our names spelled backwards. Mine was Ylime (pronounced E-lime). These counterparts were necessary in order to understand ourselves because if we knew what we were not, than we'd know what we were. Windows and water surfaces were weaker portals into Opposite Land, because you only caught a partial view.

I'd sometimes study my reflection, watching to see if it blinked when I didn't blink or slipped up and moved in a different way. When there was a crack in a mirror, I'd pretend it was the Opposite People trying to break through from the other side. Part of me wanted to meet them, but I was unsure whether or not they could be trusted. When I did something I wouldn't normally do, I imagined it was Ylime influencing me. I thought the Opposite Peoples' goal was to come through and replace us because they hated being constrained to a life of copying our every move. They wanted autonomy. Whenever I had to turn around, I'd turn clockwise, because I feared that spinning counterclockwise would land me in the world behind the mirror and I would become my reflection instead of the "real me." If that happened, we would switch places and I'd become trapped.

At the same time, I wondered if the people in this world were really the reflections, and what we believed to be our mirror images were the original source. What if we were the ones trapped behind the mirror and didn't know it? What if truth and reality was the opposite of all we believed, because this was actually Opposite Land? How could anyone be sure?

When a mirror broke, I'd imagine what it would be like to step out into the other side and see everything for the way it was. And for a moment, I'd wonder whether that might be the way to freedom.