Saturday, March 8, 2014

Identity part 3 (Happy Women's Day - everything will be all right)

Identity - noun

2. the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another:
3. condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is
4. the state or fact of being the same one as described.
5. the sense of self, providing sameness and continuity in personality over time          


This is the third of 3 posts called Identity.

Part 1 talks about the effects finding out you're gay has on your marriage and your perceived future.
Part 2 will talk about suddenly realising you're gay, and how that feels.
Part 3 (this one) will talk about where I'll go from here, and also explain why I'm going to be all right.

Happy International Women's day!

Today is the first day in  a very long time where I've seen the sun, and it feels like a perfect day to write this final identity post. The only one to really touch on my identity. Because here is the thing - no matter how hard and weird and rough this half year has been, I've always known one fundamental truth deep down below everything else:

I have not changed. 


Now, this might seem like a trivial fact, but I assure you it's not. You see, I wondered for a while how all of this would affect my life and prospects. I remember thinking that my chances of doing the things I want to do, and to achieve the goals I want to achieve had seriously diminished. I read statistics on LGBT-authors, about publishing of LGBT material, about discrimination of LGBT people in the work place.

Yes, for a while there, I did the same thing I've been talking against for years - making everything to do with an LGBT person into LGBT-stuff. This anxiety did perhaps have a role to play, but it didn't last long before it was completely burned through by the argument from deep inside my gut   -  I haven't changed. My voice is still the same, and my passions are still the same. My opinions haven't changed, nor my skills. I am the same, I just know myself better.

This does somehow highlight what I find are the main misunderstanding around both LGBT and feminist issues, and I'll spend a minute on it here because it is, after all, March 8th.

The goal of both LGBT and Feminist groups should always be (and mostly is) to eliminate themselves. There shouldn't have to be anyone advocating for LGBT rights, because we should all assume LGBT people "people" and rules for "people" should therefore apply. The same way there should be something blatantly obvious about women having the same rights, and being treated the same way as men.

However, this somehow seems to get a bit lost in translation, often due to non-feminist feminists and aggressive LGBT-fighters. I'll leave the LGBT issues here for now, I'll bring them up later. Feminism is for me the fight for gender equality, and I do think most feminist would agree. This does, however, mean I am as in favour of rights for men as I am for rights for women - or people as I like to call them.

This means I find it equally wrong that girls are raised around how pretty they are, as that boys are raised by the phrase "be a man" as a reaction to crying, complaining or worry. I find it as wrong that women get less pay for equal work, as I find it that men get harsher sentences for equal crime.
I want to get rid of the arbitrary differences in treatment between the sexes, not make women put in a stronger position than men.


The problems for women today isn't the same as they were 100 years ago - at least not in the west. One of the major problems is how women treat each other. How we seem to act as if there are only so many positions available for women and that we have to fight each other to be the one left on top. This is, in my opinion, accepting a "women's quota" in the wrong way. All measures to up the number of women in the work force and higher education etc, should be seen as temporary measures. They are necessary at the moment, but we are all aiming for a day where they are not necessary.


In the mean time, we should also lend a hand to our sisters in parts of the world who haven't got the same basic rights as we do. Because we do, after all, have an increasingly good deal here in the west. If you have the strength to stand against a never ending parade of stupid, you can get pretty much anywhere you want, and have an awesome life.

And that is why everything will be all right, because my life is quite cool. I have my writing, my illustrations, my travels, my photography and my passion for language. I have my friends, my family and my always true saying: most people are nice people.

And finally, I have this blog. And I miss this blog. I miss using it for big and small things, and I'm ready to start doing that again. I'm applying for an MA, I'm starting my new company, I'm taking pictures with my new cameras, I'm working to achieve some of my long term goals. This will be a fun ride. Are you still with me?

Everything will be all right.



Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Wordless Interlude

It takes a skilled surgeon to separate conjoined twins.
Yet, I have to make my incisions with trembling hands,
while separating two lives,
one absorbed by the other.
How do you make two functioning lives, when they both have grown,
but grown as one?

I separate the souvenirs from Malta,
giving you the memory of the ridiculous security in the cathedrals,
keeping the old lady on Gozo for myself.

If I cut the Warren Ellis-collection as one limb,
will there be enough blood flow
to my stump of a stack
to keep a living interest in comic books at all?

Is there enough tissue in the DVD-collection
to cover the holes left from the ones I take?
And if I take our pictures down,
will you remember the summers at all?

I cut and slice, then rip and tear,
Frankenstein's monster had nothing on our new lives.

I try to connect my old love for music
with the music I own now,
across the gaping crevasse
left by the festival memories that belong to you
and the relics I do no longer own

What makes a board game yours?
A) Receipt B) Most recent memory of using it C) The highest number of memories of using it?
Time starts, pick an option,
3...2...1...

The film you brought with you,
but I watched 80 times,
is it a crucial part of your collection's bone structure?
Can it be replaced by two of mine?

Two wounded twins will stand up,
after recovery
and have nothing in common
but left over blood stains.

I hope you'll treat yours well.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Identity part 2 (how it feels to suddenly realise you're gay, when you knew you weren't)

Identity - noun

2. the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another:
3. condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is
4. the state or fact of being the same one as described.
5. the sense of self, providing sameness and continuity in personality over time          


This is the second of 3 posts called Identity.

Part 1 talks about the effects finding out you're gay has on your marriage and your perceived future.
Part 2 (this one) will talk about suddenly realising you're gay, and how that feels.
Part 3 will talk about where I'll go from here, and also explain why I'm going to be all right.

For the purposes of explaining this, I will use skin colour as a metaphor. Y'all chill, it will be fine. Deep breaths.

It seems to be the most asked question so far: how did you not know? And I've found an allegory that seems to work quite well for the purposes of explaining. Let me begin.

So, imagine you're white. A white person in a white family with white friends. Some of your friends are black too. For that matter, some of your friends are other skin colours, that doesn't bother you, at all, but it's also not something you think too much about. However, as everyone in your family is white, and most of your friends are too, there just doesn't seem to be a reason for you to ask "am I black"? Why would you? Surely, you would know. 

None of these butterflies ever thought to ask "Am I a snail?"


You have friends, you go to university, you learn things and you read things, you have interests and hobbies, you get married and buy an apartment. This is your life, and you're quite happy with it.

Then one day you notice a crack in your skin. This isn't the first time. It's happened before, a couple of times, but as any other little blemish, you've just let it heal. This time it's different, though. You flip a little piece of skin aside and find a whole new skin underneath. You peel and peel and suddenly your whole outer skin falls of, and what do you know - you're black.

No one quite understands what has happened. It seems you were put in a white skin suit at birth, and it has grown with you. Your parents are shocked, your friends various degrees of surprised, but no one as surprised as you.

Now, this shouldn't matter. You're still you. You've done the same things, have the same interests and hobbies, your knowledge and personality is the same. It shouldn't matter at all which colour your skin is. But it does.

Most of your friends are cool with it, some aren't. Some of them are a tiny bit racist, some just don't know how to behave around black people. Most of your family is fine with it, but you wonder if they now doubt you really belong. 
The snail was a bit confused as to how she had kept herself flying all these years

Other black people aren't necessarily super comfortable with you either. You haven't had a black upbringing, you don't understand the struggle, you don't know which part of black culture you belong to and you don't know your roots. All you know is that your skin is black, and somehow that has dislodged you from belonging.

Now, replace white with straight, black with gay and skin colour with sexuality.
That is what it felt like. 

I just suddenly understood. The truth of me being straight had never been questioned, I just assumed I was. I got married, and I did (and do) love my husband. But not the way I was supposed to, I just didn't know. I attributed a wide range of emotions I never had, to me just "being like this" and "not so romantic". And then, I was kissed by a girl.

I am slowly reclaiming my life. Filtering friends through their reactions, giving them time, giving my family time, most of all giving myself time.

But who would have thought someone really would get under my skin..?