Author's Note: Fun fact. Whenever I picture fem Ichigo, I always picture Jessica Chastain, with long, loose, wild, wavy reddish-orange hair. Unfortunately, Jessica Chastain is not Japanese. Anyone got any Japanese actress, musician, or model recommendations that fit the picture?

Essay Two: It Started With Mix Tapes

I had a friend in junior high who got me into music. His name was Chad - or, well, it was Yasutora Sado, but I called him Chad and it stuck. He was a big half-Mexican guy with a tattoo who played in a band, and we'd become friends after getting into some pretty nasty fights together - me because of my bizarre orange hair color, him because Chad's always had a problem with staying out of fights where other people are getting hurt. He's a good guy, not what you'd think, usually gentle, quiet, and kind with a love for animals.

But he's the one who got me into the punk scene.

Maybe it was just because the first time he'd met me, I'd beaten the shit out of several people, I was bleeding from the lip, and I was grinning with bizarrely colored hair. Maybe it was my cheerful, fuck-you demeanor. But Chad was an old-fashioned guy, so he handed me a portable tape player and a bunch of old fashioned mix tapes one day at school. "Here," he said simply, "you need to listen to this."

And so was I introduced to punk. And it was beautiful.

The music was really what got me first. I had an instinctive love for the sound, from punk rock to pop punk, electropunk, and gothic punk. Punk was all about making a lot of noise and individualism and fucking over the establishment, and those were three things I was really into, so punk and I were a perfect fit. I loved satire and the idea of tearing down the sacred. Punk and I were meant to be.

What I really loved most about punk, though, was that - unlike in a lot of other types of hard rock music - punk liberally included women. I think that might have been one of the only reasons why I got as into it as I did.

Immediately I went out and bought about ten thousand albums of music, slowly progressing to the level where I basically had headphones in all the time. I didn't believe in doing oldfashioned things for the sake of sentimentality, so I just used plain ol' mp3. I bought hundreds of black and red punk rock posters. Eventually I saved up enough money to buy myself an electric guitar. Chad played bass guitar in his band, and he taught me enough that I could start to go off on my own. Sometimes we played together, or wrote songs together, and that was a nice feeling.

I started joining him and his band at gigs, which basically consisted of shitty bars and tiny, sketchy clubs full of some really freaky people. I had fun, grinning and heckling the band from offstage, laughing off the weirdos who tried to approach me. One thing about punk guys? Most of them are actually super gentlemanly. If someone was bothering me, some big guy in a studded leather jacket would get all up in the asshole's face and the asshole would back down.

I would join Chad and his friend for drinks and smokes afterward, playing one of the guys, and I became a social drinker - not a really intense one, but I'd clutch a drink or two throughout the night - and a smoker. I found I was good at taking shots - tequila, vodka, that kind of thing. Not enough to get totally wasted, but enough to get buzzed. I would throw down the shot glass and grin at the guy I'd beaten.

"You have a strong constitution," Chad would tell me after crazy nights out, impressed. (He was of course always there to make sure I never got hurt. Chad was naturally ever protective.) But it wasn't really that. I just never let myself be pressured past my comfort point. If someone didn't like that, they could fuck right off.

I tried to hide my smoking from my Dad. He tolerated me coming home after having some drinks, and he was actually pretty easygoing about me leaving a pre-prepared dinner for everyone in the fridge and being out somewhere mysterious for the night, but as he was a doctor I didn't think he'd be too impressed by smoking. I wasn't a chain smoker or anything. I didn't have an addictive personality. I had maybe one or two every couple of days. But somehow I got the suspicious feeling that was kind of insignificant to a parent.

I only smoked when I was away from the house. If I really wanted a cigarette while at home, I'd make the excuse that I was going down to the local corner store to get a bottle of juice or lemonade. Breath mints and gum became my best friends. Just in case, I started building up arguments in my head, all of them going something along the lines of, "You used to smoke. Including as a med student and a younger doctor."

Sometimes I got a sneaking feeling he kind of knew but was only going to yell at me if I was too obvious about it. He'd give me amused sideways smiles when I made the corner store excuse. My Dad's always been weird like that. He puts on a good show of being stern and unbending, but deep down underneath he lets his stupid kids be stupid kids.

So it was almost a game we played. I'd hear him walking near me unexpectedly, and I'd hiss, "Shit!" and quickly stomp out my cigarette. Then he'd come around the corner and I'd laugh nervously. "Hi…"

He never said anything, but I suspected I was obvious.

At last, though, one of Chad's older bandmate's girlfriends insisted that I had to walk the walk if I was going to talk the talk. "You can't keep coming in here in sweaters, tights, and pencil skirts," she mandated. "It's embarrassing."

Secretly I'd been embarrassed too. Nobody else dressed like I did. I'd just been afraid of saying anything. I'd actually been interested in looking into the whole punk fashion scene for a while.

So I lifted my chin defiantly. "Well then are you going to help me?" I said sarcastically. "Please instruct me as to where you would like most to go."

There were some loud, "Ooohs" and the older girl grinned. "Now we're talking," she said. Once you get them going? In a teasing way, punk people can actually be super friendly.

She took me out shopping that weekend. "I'll warn you," I said. "I like slim fit clothes and I'm tall, skinny, gawky, and awkward. And I'm not dyeing my hair. The orange hair's staying."

"Why?" she said in surprise.

I grinned. "Because it's my natural color and everyone fucking hates it."

I ended up going between classy and edgy. I wore lots of plaid prints, alongside leather sleeved jackets, blouses, high rise mini skirts, tights, and booties (if I wanted to look fabulous) or Doc Martens (if I wanted to be able to run away from pretty much anything). The use of black was liberal, of course. Also I had an irrational love for messy plaid.

I had a tailored black belted coat that I really liked, too. Tights, booties, and that long, thigh-length jacket were tres magnifique, very glamorous. My militaristic army green tailored coat with gold buttons covered in sarcastic and political pins was a close second for favorite jackets, though.

A cool look for summer was see-through plastic-frame white sunglasses with purple tint, a black tailored blazer, a cropped black lace blouse, and purple skinny jeans. Preferably paired with a shoulder bag for shopping. Another good summer outfit with a shoulder bag was black leather jacket, black top, cuffed black leather shorts, and chunky ankle-length boots, preferably with dark hose.

My absolute favorite pair of shoes look was a pair of thigh-high matte black leather gaiters paired with chunky pointed-toe block-heeled boots, complete with silver chains.

My most embarrassing but beloved piece of clothing was a shiny silvery blazer. My defense was that it looked oddly good with my hair color. My favorite hat was a black driver's cap, which deliciously went with all my most boyish clothes and especially well with plaid or a jacket tied around the waist. I did have a short dark semi-sheer dress and a long silvery maxi dress, but absolutely no place to wear either of them. Sometimes I wore them to parties just as an excuse to wear them - double fun, I could out glamor everybody else in the room.

Next came the makeup and hair. The orange color stayed, as did the long length. Usually I did one of two things with my hair, at first with help from my friend's girlfriend. I either swept that long, wavy mess off to one side of my head, exposing the entire other side of my head using a comb, as if that side had been buzzed. If I wanted my hair up, I wore a messy bouffant bun right on top of my head, with long pieces of hair framing either side of my face.

I stocked up well on makeup. I chose liquid eyeliner to go for a bolder look, and subtle lip gloss so that the eyes popped. I typically dotted little teal and purple stars around the lower parts of my eyes, my love for astronomy coming out.

I also got tattoos - not for the fun of it. I wanted to make sure they meant something. My most intricate tattoo also meant the most to me. My late mother's name, Masaki, meant "tree." So I got a lower back tattoo of a detailed tree in memory of my mother. The trunk went up my spine, the place that held my lifeline, and the name "Masaki" was engraved up and down the trunk. A chunky, block-letter, shaded one and a five was displayed on either side of the tree, a play on my name: "Ichi" meant one and "Go" meant five.

There were the two of us, together forever, tattooed onto my back.

I also tattooed the names of all four of my family members in tiny letters on my wrists. They were right above and below the vital veins for life, a reminder to think of my family and never to harm myself, and they were just beside the hands I used to fight with. "Isshin" and "Masaki" - my mother and father - were on top of my wrists, an easily visible reminder, while my little sisters "Karin" and "Yuzu" were at the bottom, the biggest no no when it came to self harm.

Dad made lots of jokes about teenage rebellion, but yet again he let me do what I wanted with my life. Karin thought the tattoos were "cool," while Yuzu was impressed romantically by how "edgy" I had apparently become.

I didn't know if I really thought of it that way, but people at school seemed to. I got two reactions to my punk look: on the one hand were people who seemed admiring of how "confident and individual" I was, and on the other hand there were the teachers who made assumptions about me based on my appearance - in spite of the fact that I got good grades and always turned in my work on time, in spite of the fact that I never skipped school. They looked at my appearance and my performance in the school karate and kendo clubs, and they made assumptions.

That I was a rebel, gangster, Yankee - that kind of thing. Sometimes other students thought that, too. I guess I should add a third group - the people I intimidated with my appearance, reputation, and Angry Resting Bitch Face. It was sort of absurd, having tenderly cared for dying people in hospice for my father's hospital, then turning around and being called some kind of horrible gangster.

In reality, I was just participating in something I loved. It was the same with fighting as it was with punk. Fighters and punk rockers became my people as I got older. And there was so much more to me than that. I did drink carefully. I did only smoke occasionally. I never had casual sex. I never picked stupid fights - though I wasn't afraid of getting into one. There's nothing wrong with getting drunk, or having casual sex, or smoking a lot, or picking stupid fights - I'm not here to judge anybody's lifestyle choices. I'm just saying, that's what people would have expected of me, and I didn't do any of it.

I loved literature, poetry, and other kinds of writing. I had hundreds of big dog-eared old books, and often read quietly at a cafe in public over a cup of coffee, earmarking the pages and scribbling in the margins. I adored the classics, and for reasons that had nothing to do with angst and everything to do with my mother's death and my time working hospice, I was fascinated by themes of death and grief and by trauma literature. I had ink stains on my fingers from my writing, from my constant editing and re-editing and doodling in old pages of notebook paper. And did I write angsty poetry? No, not really. Most of my poetry was from a character's perspective, telling a fictional story, exploring social issues I saw in the world around me.

I attended school theater and arts performances in a defiant attempt to up their numbers. My social media was mostly art related and was darkly, quietly poetic, full of quotes and strange, dark, peculiar art pieces. I loved manga, videogames, horror, sci fi, and crime drama. I was a computer nerd who loved tea, wanted to travel, carried around a bottle of hot sauce, and ate weird food. I was a mother figure in my family. I was a best girl friend, I was one of the guys.

There was so much more to me than being punk or being a fighter, but that was all people saw.

Stereotypes can be good. I'm not saying they're always horrible. Human beings group each other together for a reason, so that like minded people can find each other and to make sense of the world. Stereotypes can comfort.

But that's also the nasty flip side: Stereotypes can comfort. That also means they can confine. They can relax other viewers and affirm their ideas about the world, suffocating the stereotyped person into a tiny box with no room for individualism.

Author's Note: Just to head off any comments... first, Chad has a Western style tattoo. I guess you could make the argument that he's half Mexican, but he was a child when he left Mexico and I doubt he got the tattoo as a child.

Second, Isshin used to smoke, and he did from a young age. Several young characters in Japanese anime do smoke, and it seems quite common. It's almost required in some business settings according to my research.

Third, and most importantly, underage drinking is statistically more common in Japan than it is in the United States, and is significantly easier to do. All you have to do is Google search "underage drinking in Japan" to come across these findings. If you want canon proof, Karin and Yuzu have alcohol as kids during a festival at one point in the series.