When I was in high school, I was left home alone for the evening, and there were weird sounds coming out of the heat vents in the floor.
I owned several swords—one I’d bought from a Klingon table at a Trek convention and also presents from my mom who gets me.
So I armed myself.
When my parents got home, we established that the sounds were actually coming from beneath the heating ducts.
A family of raccoons had moved under our house.
Raccoons were not uncommon in my neighborhood. My ridiculously bold orange tabby got into fights with them regularly.
However, we didn’t actually want raccoons living under the house. So, we got a live animal trap and planned to relocate them, under advisement of animal control.
When the raccoons came waddling up and out of the access panel in our porch, they were huge.
It was clearly a momma raccoon and her litter of nearly full-size babies. My dad and I—each armed with one of my swords—watched and guided the big ol’ fuzzies into their trap.
It was awesome.
The next day, I was eager to tell the boys I hung out with in calculus class about it.
Chatting through calculus class with these boys — because we were too smart to need to pay attention — was the closest I came to having friends in high school.
So, I told them of my glory with the swords and raccoons. I felt so cool.
And they… didn’t react how I expected.
They weren’t blown away by the coolness of wielding real-ass swords at huge ol’ raccoons.
They were just puzzled.
It didn’t fit their image of me. See, I’m a girl. And apparently they’d been picturing me as soft, pink, floral, and delicate…
Which was nothing to do with me.
Anyway, I still think sometimes about the time I waved my broad sword at a family of raccoons and then learned that my friends couldn’t see ME through the obscuring lens of GIRL that they’d laid over me.
It had never even occurred to me before then that others saw me that way.