Be Yourselves

My favorite room is my sister's room. A glance through the door reveals a larger-than- life poster with neon-pink letters naively demanding unsuspecting passersby to "BE YOURSELF", along with a grid of dutifully arranged Post-Its, but there's much more than meets the eye.

On nights the family was gone, her closet would slide open, revealing gowns shinier than a knight's armor. The shoe rack became the throne for a snug pair of stilettos, and the drawer a treasury of makeup and jewelry. A chest of old toys hid the brightest rainbow wig. With the vivacious pulse of Lady Gaga's latest music, my world would prance to life.

This room was my fantasy kingdom , and though I hadn't known it then, I was the ruling drag queen.

But once the family car reared its headlamps outside, the idyllic magic vanished instantly. My sister always returned to ruffled dresses hastily restored, unnoticeably used eyeshadow, and the occasional loose strand of hair (much too colorful to blame on the cat!). Back then, there was only one resolute answer: I was a boy. As sure as physics, right? How could my identity belie the uncomplicated particles I comprised? Scurrying out, I collapsed into the innocently straightforward state I thought underlay reality. How could the universe accommodate anything more complex?

It wasn't until I turned sixteen, dressing up behind a mirror at my school thea ter, when everything changed. The funniest thing about drag is, no matter how often you've undergone the transformation, you never bypass that initial shock of seeing yourself amidst it. You feel vulnerable, disturbed, guilty. In a world with, quite literally, two strongly magnetized poles, you are drawn to becoming either a short-haired boy wearing pants or a long-haired girl wearing dresses. Nauseated by the liminality upon trespassing the gray area, you resist instinctively, fleeing to the safe binary you've broken from.

But with school bombarded by flyers emblazoned with "COME SUPPORT PALIS", I couldn't hide from everyone here to witness my debut drag show at the annual talent night. I shooed butterflies of anxiety , What-if-I-get-booed-off-the-stage? What-if-my-parents-turn-up? What-if-school-expels-me? , and stepped into the light as the emcee boomed, "WELCOME MISS PARIS!"

The stage began blaring my favorite song as students' thunderous cheering electrified the air. Instantaneously charged, I strutted to Born This Way by Lady Gaga. However, disapproving stares quickly permeated the crowd, from parents and teachers who didn't understand a boy dancing in a dress. That poured a different fuel into my fire. If I wanted to hear a conversation, I would have to start it.

It was my best performance before I had even delivered it.

As a physicist, I imagine a drag queen is quantum physics personified. Everyone hovers as a simultaneous combination of multidimensional personas, yet become obediently simplified into an unequivocal state when interacting with the world. We religiously chant "Be yourself!", oblivious this reduces our complexity to a single self. If physicists can accept nature as a coinciding entanglement instead of resolving for one fixed reality, why can't we do the same with our identities?

While removing my wig, I realized drag empowers me by bestowing strength that defies the force polarizing society into two. Just as physicists couldn't categorize light as a particle or wave, I'm neither a boy in a dress nor a girl with short hair. Instead, I'm unsimplified, unlabelled, uncategorized. I'm everything all at once.

That night, a sixth-grader approached me saying my performance inspired him. He asked what

advice I had.

My sister's poster flashed before my eyes, but its message is identical to her Post-Its: dimensionless and constraining. Drag and quantum physics confirm I'm happiest and truest as a superposition of all my immiscible selves. But now, unlike any wave function, unlike my past self, I refuse to apologetically collapse into some easy-to-swallow entity , even if the whole school observes.

"Never just be yourself," I started. "Be yourselves."