Zie Mueller

Zie Mueller (they/them) is a junior studying secondary education and English writing. They are a Venture staff member, helping with the marketing and nonfiction teams. Zie has always been a writer; they most enjoy exploring the intimate themes of identity, vulnerability, and the human experience through their writing. As a future teacher, Zie hopes to encourage young readers and writers to explore the limitless spaces reading and writing can bring to a person and enrich students’ experience in English class one page at a time.

“Look at me, I will never pass for a perfect bride. Or a perfect daughter”

These are the lyrics that begin Lea Salonga’s song “Reflection” from Disney’s Mulan. I was eleven years old when I sang them in my elementary school’s talent show. I was obsessed with the song, and although I knew it wasn’t a happy song, something inside of me resonated with it. The way Mulan navigated her inner identity, womanhood, and complicated family dynamics were struggles that I related to but didn’t have words for at the time. Seeing her story depicted on screen and those lyrics presented to me made me feel less alone in a world that I didn’t even understand I was lonely in at the time. 

Two minutes and twenty six seconds. The song runs for the length of a commercial break, the time it takes to brush your teeth, or to load and start laundry in the washer. For two minutes and twenty six seconds I was singing my soul out on the stage of our gymnasium.

I was awarded first place.

I was on cloud 9 about receiving such an honor for my singing abilities. But looking back on this moment ten years later, I wonder if my accomplishment was deeper than voice alone. I wonder if it was emotion. 

“Can it be I’m not meant to play this part?”

I always knew I was different. I would be jealous of the boys sections in clothing stores, I hated getting super dressy, and I always had a feeling like I was foreign to my own body. I never had words for these feelings, and I thought this was just a part of growing up. My parents told me about hormones and how there’s sometimes some weird feelings that come up when they start to change. They told me these changes mean that I’m becoming a woman, and that they should be embraced. 

“Now I see, that if I were truly to be myself, I would break my family’s heart”

Going through middle school with a weight on your shoulders as big as, “I’m a woman but I’m not a woman,” was one that I didn’t know how to process. So instead I took on all the roles that women were supposed to take on. I grew my hair down to my waist; I wore padded bras; I dated boys; I shaved my legs; I pushed down all my feelings of otherness; drowned them under layers of foundation and mascara, hid them under dresses and high heels, and lived the way I was supposed to live. I thought if I played the role well enough, I could trick myself into believing, 

“I am a woman.” 

“Who is that girl I see, staring straight back at me?”

But it doesn’t work that way. I found myself anxious and depressed, unsure of what was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I look in the mirror and like what I saw? I compared myself to all the girls around me, and questioned why I never felt as confident as they seemed. This feeling followed me into college. It crept up on me everywhere I went: the women’s bathroom, the assigned shopping sections for clothes, and even my Disney+ streaming profile. Gender was everywhere. It taunted me my whole life.

 Until I made the realization that I wasn’t looking at a girl in the mirror. 

“Why is my reflection someone I don’t know?”

I was twenty years old when I first said the phrase “I’m nonbinary” to myself in the mirror. And yet, as much as that felt like it fit me, I realized it wasn’t as simple as assigning another label to myself. It’s about getting to know myself. 

I thought I knew myself. I had lived two decades in this body already. But my true self was hidden behind a mask of womanhood. I had to learn what this commitment to being authentic meant. I had to re-introduce myself to me. 

“Somehow I cannot hide who I am, though I’ve tried”

I was twenty-one when I publicly came out to everyone—ten years after singing a song about needing to hide your identity for the sake of others, despite what that means for yourself. Ten years later, I finally see me.

“When will my reflection show who I am inside?”

When I was eleven years old I stood in front of a mirror and didn’t see myself in the reflection. I hid under a mask of makeup and make believe until I finally had the courage to know the person underneath it.

When I was twenty-one I stood in front of a mirror again. 

And this time it wasn’t just myself liking the reflection I saw; it was my reflection looking back and liking me.