I’ve always had principles. But like any teenager’s principles, they’re a bit vague and wishy-washy. I wear a jacket covered with political buttons and I listen to the music of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon. I write my opinions down on paper, but it’s rare that I’m sufficiently motivated to carry them far enough to effect any real change. In fact, I can think of only one time in my life of seventeen years that I did so. I let “Give Peace a Chance” become more than a rhythmically monotonous strum pattern and actually walked the walk.

It is summer in one of the primary school classrooms of Arbor Montessori School. I am six years old and I am thrilled because summer camp this session takes the theme of “Camp Castle.” All the boys take turns being king for the day, and the girls take turns being queen. There are fancy dresses and hats, authentically medieval bread and cheese for snack, and a large cardboard castle.

On the first day of Camp Castle, the procedure over the two-week session is outlined. If you, the humble serf of Camp Castle, perform a certain number of chivalrous deeds over the course of the session, you will be promoted through the anachronistically egalitarian system to the rank of knight. You will be accorded a plastic breastplate, shield and helmet, and you will fight against other knights come the end of the session and the last apocalyptic battle.

Maybe the teachers aren’t absolutely clear. Maybe I’m just not paying attention, off in my own little world as usual. But I assume that only the knights will be rewarded with the culminating bloodbath. At six years old, I am more passionately anti-war than I have ever been. But I believe it doesn’t concern me, so I stick rigidly to a self-interested behavior pattern and say nothing.

As this foreshadowing might suggest, however, the final conflict comes to concern me very much. It is the last day of Camp Castle. We are seated in a circle on the floor. I am, as is necessary for this to be a classic episode of my childhood, very much off on an imaginative flight of fancy. I am not paying attention. And then a cardboard dagger is dropped in my lap, crudely cut out and colored in purple Crayola marker. I slowly come to my senses and hand it back to the boy distributing them. He presses it on me, insistently. Everyone has to have one, he says. This is my instrument of death.

I don’t pick up the cardboard toy; it sits in front of me and I stare at it, transfixed. The teacher starts to explain the rules of the conflict, but I am not listening. I find myself standing up, and I don’t really even know why. I am not, as I recall, much taller standing than I am sitting, but my action is noticeable. Calling on me is unavoidable, and so I speak. I say that I feel betrayed. War is wrong, end of story; I will accept no opposing arguments. I do not understand why the teachers would condone this battle and I do not understand why I was handed a purple cardboard dagger. I say this, and then I sit down, not understanding why I am being conscripted as Montessori-school cannon fodder. I am crying.

I am not aware of what must have been hurried, whispered discussion between the teachers, but I am yanked from further reverie by the news that the battle will not occur. I am not joyful; this is not a victory. It is only as it should be, and I am still hurt that violence was even considered. The rest of the day, though, is passed in peace.

My parents come to collect me, and the teachers tell them what I have said and done. So do I, between righteous sobs. My parents are proud that I have stood up for my beliefs. Once I am over the shock, so am I. I draw a picture of the event in first-grade art class.

I continue to gloat about this one occasion. I relate it for an assignment in eighth grade, I joke about it when I tell stories of my childhood. But never again do I protest against war or resist the draft. My only act of civil disobedience was before I entered first grade.

Perhaps it is true, what they say about teenage apathy. It is certainly shameful to think that a girl of six could have more courage and integrity than a girl of seventeen. Sometimes it is necessary to discard self-consciousness and apprehension, throw caution to the wind and let words pour out without checking their flow. When all is said and done, we must stand up and do whatever we can to uphold our principles. Perhaps now I am sometimes a coward. But I upheld my principles eleven years ago in Camp Castle, when I stopped the battle.

Picture me in third grade. I am nine years old, and I have principles. I believe in following the rules — I am more or less the class snitch — but only if they make sense. I am uptight and want to live like the little English boarding-school children in the books I read. I wear pleated skirts and white, collared shirts and black Mary Janes. I am very opinionated and bossy.

My sister is in kindergarten. She goes to the same school as me, but the preschool and kindergarten are on a different campus from the elementary school. The elementary school is let out fifteen minutes earlier, so every day I and some other older siblings ride a small, white school bus to the kindergarten campus so that our parents only have to come to one place to collect us. Every day, my sister and I each play with our friends on the kindergarten playground while our mother talks to the other mothers. The day in question is no different.

My friend is Meredith – a name which a hundred years ago would have belonged to an English gentleman, but which in 1999 belongs to an eight-year-old girl who lets me dictate the imaginary game of choice. We run back and forth along the hill at the side of the playground, lost in a fictional universe where we are devotees of a religion of which I am the inventor and high priestess. We think highly of ourselves, because we are third graders and everyone else on the playground is much younger.

That makes no difference to Patrick. He is in kindergarten and is the playground bully. He menaces more or less everyone, but Meredith and I, because we are third graders, believe ourselves inviolate. We turn a corner, and he is there. He carries a plastic bucket, the sort one plays at the beach with, that is filled with mud. (It has rained the night before.) He carries a shovel, too; he is likely building a mud castle or some such thing. He demands that we move. We do not; he has no authority over us. “This is my territory,” he says. “It’s a free country,” I say. He goes away, muttering dire threats. We pay him little heed and carry on.

We barely have time to congratulate ourselves for our bravery when he comes back, armed with both the mud and now a small branch, which he waves menacingly. Meredith runs. I stand my ground. “We were playing here,” I say. He threatens to attack me. “Violence is not the answer,” I say self-righteously. That is all it takes to provoke him. He comes at me with mud and stick. I stand still. Before I can regain control of the situation, there is mud on my shirt and there are welts on my arms. I run crying to my mother.

The parents try to apprehend Patrick, but he is nowhere to be found. There is a general shrugging of shoulders on the part of the adults, but I am left bewildered. Why is Patrick not being put to trial there and then?

I am upset that Patrick has transgressed the rules of expected playground decorum, and I am upset that my high-minded display of civil disobedience failed. I cannot decide which is worse: the painful lacerations covering my forearms or the fact that my favorite shirt is now ruined. I go home with my mother and my sister, left unsatisfied by the injustice of it all.

There was a boy who I used to hang around with who’d always say to me, “You’re such a guy!” This was usually when I held open a door for him, when I discussed my dislike of makeup, and in other circumstances of that nature. It was seemingly his favorite joke, but it grew quite annoying — being patronized and pigeon-holed on the basis of one’s appearance and personality is never pleasant.

I am not usually treated as such an obvious source of entertainment, but it’s still a rare week that I’m not mistaken for a guy. My short hair, androgynous style of dress and the fact that I often hang around with guys lead people to lump me in with the real males at a quick glance. It’s usually subtle — “All right, gentlemen, what are you doing?” “Do you guys want to go join the girls over there?” — though once a guy apologized to me for greeting me with “Hey, dude!” before realizing my female status.

I’m never trying to look like a guy — if I were, I’d be doing a much better job. I know the stereotypes people are judging me by, and I know how I’d work them more effectively if I wanted to. But while there is little value in attempting to be something one is not, it would certainly be nice to be treated with equality: if I have to pretend to be someone else in order that guys might treat my opinion with the same value as they would one of their own, the prospect suddenly becomes much more tempting — and yet I am rarely successful at insinuating myself among all-male groups. Despite some confusion on the part of the less observant, the fact remains that I am still female, and I think it must be difficult for those who usually operate on the basis of stereotypes to know what box to place me in. Many guys refuse to talk to me about “guy stuff,” but many girls assume that I would not understand their romantic dilemmas or pop-culture interests and choose not to confide in me either.

I am not very offended by such confusion, because in a way I am rather proud of my ability to transgress traditional expectations and make people think about how outward appearance informs the way we treat each other. But sometimes my own decisions are called into question, and I find that far more upsetting. I see myself as the epitome of what the modern woman can be: I feel sufficiently empowered to make my own choices about my clothing, my cultural tastes, my hobbies, and my friends. And if some of these happen to coincide with those that a typical male would choose, so be it. One of the most positive things about the 21st century is that it is more possible than ever before to transcend stereotypes. Yet not everyone would agree with my analysis. One woman with whom I have discussed the subject believes me to have “deep-seated gender identity issues.” A girl once told me that my “rejection of my feminine side” seemed like sexism and made it seem as if I hate myself — not to mention that this perceived sexism hurt her feelings. When I added a couple feminist quotes to my instant-messaging profile, a boy told me he was shocked: “I do not believe that you are a feminist.” I’m inclined to let people reserve their own opinions of me, and the last thing I want to do is hurt anyone’s feelings, but it still seems that some of the people I talk to are, for whatever reason, missing the point.

All of these concerns aside, I am usually comfortable with who I am. I have made friends who are both male and female, and while I tend to feel less awkward in a group of guys, that hardly means that there aren’t amazingly nice girls out there. I have no need to be sexist towards anyone and I’m also very glad that I don’t feel the need to rely on traditional feminine sex appeal to attract attention.

However, because I was once much more outwardly feminine and have become more androgynous over the years, I am sometimes concerned that my personality is being corrupted by a need to belong somewhere. Yes, I am less depressed and more self-assured now that I have found a niche, but I often wonder: do I enjoy watching (and playing, in my own inept way) soccer because many guys do, or because I do? Did I take up the guitar because I enjoy playing the instrument, or because it is a favorite pastime of a few male friends? Do I gain the usual juvenile entertainment from dirty jokes only because I got used to laughing when everyone else was?

I have occasionally been asked point-blank whether I’m male or female, and when I say “female” people believe me. But I fear a day when I won’t be believed, because then I really will have lost my androgynous, line-straddling identity to a society of binary gender roles. People ask me sometimes if I wished I were a guy. Though I’ve occasionally thought about what that would be like, I always say I’m perfectly happy as a girl. In the core of my mind I know that I am female, just as surely as I know that I feel comfortable in my lifestyle choices. I know that “my life as a guy” is nothing but a construct, and I know it was only a bout of cynicism that caused me to dress up as a girl for Halloween.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…”

This is the first line of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” and it thrills me every time I read it. “Howl” is about the “generation” Ginsberg refers to, the Beat Generation of the 1950s, and what they symbolize. They were the heralds of the most powerful, youth-based counterculture movement that America has seen, and the values of the Beats, and their successors in the 1960s and ’70s, have come to influence my own perspective on our world.

My high school has none of the youth activism that I read about in accounts of days gone by. It doesn’t have the underground newspaper my mother’s high school had, or the student protest my father took part in. I constantly find myself in the position of looking back 40 years to rediscover the questioning attitude that seemed to embody adolescence a generation ago.

It might seem like I’m living in a fantasy world. In the 21st century, young people often see “the ’60s” in a romanticized light: as a decade spent holding hands in a circle, singing “All You Need Is Love.” But Ginsberg, in writing “Howl,” left the “grit” in. The first line of the poem is its most striking, and yet it’s a line of desperation, of young people washed out by the repressive sameness of postwar culture. It’s this desperation that drives the rest of the poem, and indeed the next two decades.

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I’m desperate now: to strike out into new territory, to stand out from the mainstream, to pursue my myriad dreams and desires. I look at what developed from the desperation of Ginsberg’s generation as a promise that I can do something real with my tumult of adolescent emotions. “The best minds” of someone else’s generation have given me all the hope in the world for me and mine.