Being Thankful

Disgusting celebration of colonialism aside, Thanksgiving has never really been one of my favorite holidays. I don’t eat meat, and don’t particularly enjoy lots of Thanksgiving side dishes, so it’s never actually been much of an eating holiday. Plus, the whole family togetherness thing….I mean, need I say more?

That said, I do enjoy the idea of stopping and thinking about the things for which I’m thankful. (I absolutely refuse to use the phrase “what I’m thankful for” because ahah! Ending sentences in prepositions!)

Without Further Delay:

1) My chosen family. These people have helped me through a tumultuous year. I am so lucky to have so many people in my life who are so wonderful, giving, and generous.

2) My college education and chance to study abroad. Thanks, MU Chancellor-I really appreciate your money.

3) Cheap red wine and the Saturday nights during which it is consumed at my apartment. These wine nights are wonderful outpourings of my love of my feminist family.

4) The fact that I have a roof over my head, fierce shoes on my feet, and need not worry about from where my next meal will come. I understand what a privilege this is.

5) Blogs.

6) The MU Women’s Center and everything it has taught me.

7) Free counseling.

8) The fact that I am more comfortable in my own skin right now than I ever thought possible.

Hope you all have a lovely day filled with Arlo Guthrie, football, and lots and lots of food.

Note: I really hope to return to some more fashiony posts soon. I've just been thinking a lot more about life than shoes lately.

Things I've Come to Know About Myself (Part 1)

I’ve been thinking a lot about a post I read on Suguarbutch last year. It was back when Sinclair was writing about Kristin’s homework assignments. One post, the holiday version, has stuck with me. Sugarbutch wrote about how Kristin was going home to deal with family things and her biggest homework assignment was to take care of herself and check in when she needed. (I would post a link, but it’s password protected so it wouldn’t do much good.)

I remember this so clearly because when I read it last year, I thought about how, like Kristin, this year I had someone to help me through the emotionally draining holidays spent with my family. I knew there was someone who was worried about my well-being and who would support me. I felt like I had someone on my side.

This year, things are a little different. I don’t have that person. I want to point out that I do have an absolutely amazing network of friends, many of whom would not hesitate to support me in whatever way I needed if I asked and I am so lucky and thankful for that. BUT, friends are not the same as having a partner. At least for me, having a partner implies a level of trust that I struggle to have even with my closest friends. It means feeling I can rely on that person for anything and moreover, that the person will probably be with me through most of the difficult things I face. Last year, the ex (I still don’t know what to call her here, so I’ll settle with the ex) helped me tremendously through my holiday season out to my parents. It was also the last few weeks I would be in the US and thus everything had an extra feeling of urgency.

But this year, I’m alone.

And because of that, I’ve been thinking a lot more about the ex than I have in awhile. I’ve been trying to really understand all the feelings I’m experiencing, and through doing so, I think I’ve discovered something important about myself.

I work better as a human being when I’m in a relationship.

The ex was really my first “real” relationship (and what a doozey it was) and it was an incredibly educational time of my life. I realized that I’m someone who will always experience high highs and LOW lows and who will hold onto things and feel lost and need reassurance, regardless of who I have in my life. BUT, when I do have a partner-someone with whom we have committed to be there, to take care of each other, to love each other, I recover better. I center more easily after those highs and lows and I find it easier to ground myself with the reality that I am loved.

Now that I realize this about myself, I’m trying to figure out how I feel about it. For a lot of my life, really my whole life up until meeting the ex and falling in love with her straightaway, I was pretty content with the idea of being alone. It wasn’t like a sad resignation of being lonely forever-it was more that I just thought I wasn’t someone who could ever make a relationship work. But then, I had one. And I realized how it feels to be loved and I realized that I do work better when I have that person loving me and now I don’t think I can go back. One part of me loves this because it thinks this represents major growth, but another part still hates the idea of relying on someone else.

I’ve got some more thinking to do about all of this and what it means. If I work better in a relationship, should I seek one out regardless of how much I actually feel ready to give that kind of commitment? Should I actively seek to not be in a relationship until I can feel the same kind of love and support without one? Etc, etc.

Self-discovery is hard, y’all.

This Happened

I met Andrea Gibson! If you've never heard of her, I suggest first listening to "Blue Blanket,"which might ruin your day, and then reminding yourself of the hope in the world with "Say Yes."

Here's a picture I grabbed with her. I was shaking so hard and professing my love of her and explaining to her that I'm a getting a plus sign tattoo because of the words she has written that I don't even remember much of the interaction.

It was incredible, y'all.

Floating

I've been in a weird place. Emotionally. Mentally. Spiritually.

I'm not sure why this semester seems so different than ones past, but it's taking all of my energy to just survive it. My grades are not what I want them to be. I'm not performing at my job in the ways I want to be. I'm giving the bare minimum to many organizations I run/participate in, and at the end of each week, I still feel incredibly drained and unsure of how to do it all again.

I think a part of it probably has to do with the breakup. (Gasp! This femme-inist has feelings, a lot of them, and sometimes they are a bit fragile) It left me with this feeling that I'm in this transitional space without anyone by my side to help me through it. Of course, that's not true-as I have some of the best friends a girl could hope to have, but the feeling still resonates. I also feel an incredible attachment to spaces and the current living situation I have (in which I live in the ex's old apartment...) takes its drain on me. I also thought for most of last year that I would be graduating a year early and starting my life this May, instead of 2012. That all changed, however, and now I have to figure out how make myself happy as an undergrad for another year and a half. I lived alone in England and I got used to it and learned to love it. When I lived in my parent's house, I was incredibly protective of my space. I didn't really allow anyone into my room and was very uncomfortable when someone was in my space. I was not hiding anything, but I felt like unwelcome intrusions into my room were like unwelcome intrusions into my soul. When I lived in dorms in college, I left behind a lot of those weird space issues, but they seem to be reemerging. I love my roommate dearly and she is one of my closest friends, but I'm realizing that I might be someone that needs to live alone.

If you're wondering at this point what the purpose of this post is, join the club. I think I am just trying to understand the feelings I am having and how they relate to my past and how I can incorporate them into positive moves in the future. Next week is Thanksgiving Break and I've never so looked forward to it before. We all (need a) break sometimes.

Fireside Chat:Identities

Identities.

We all have them. We all choose these words that would otherwise be arbitrary and try to make them have enough meaning to explain our existence. I think it's one of the most core essences of our humanity, a need to explain ourselves.

I thought it might be interesting (probably more for me than for you) to explain a little bit about my identities and why this blog is named as it is. Here goes.

In a very particular order:

Woman- I identify strongly, fiercely as a woman. Now, I'll be the first to call people out at attempting to universalize a female or woman experience, but it's still an identity that rings strongly with me. It encompasses my love of things considered to be feminine (baking, knitting, talking, caring) and my place within history.

Feminist- Every day, I attempt to live my life in the most feminist way I can. I struggle with feminist as an identity, as I'm much more sympathetic to the bell hooks idea of redefining feminism through doing feminist work, rather than owning an identity, but again, it's an identity I deliberately choose. Feminism truly saved me. It opened my eyes to a world I didn't know existed. A world in which there were other people who were angry about things in the world and who helped me learn to be angry about what happened to me. Feminism helped me understand the beliefs I'd always had and never been able to defend. In case your wondering, my personal brand of feminism fluctuates between third-wave and radical lesbian separatist. Feminism gives me a goal to live by each day-living intentionally and ending oppression.

Lesbian- It's funny that it felt pertinent for me to list this before queer, the word I actually use to identify my sexuality. Lesbian, rather, for me is about a life. Though I don't exclusively date cis-women, many of the people I am closest to are lesbians. The lesbian community is the one that most closely matches my life experience.

Queer- My sexuality has never been something I've really understood. I feel attracted (most times) to combinations of masculinity and female bodies, but have experienced attraction to almost everything in between. While I tend to be most attracted to butch(y) lesbians, limiting myself to that has never felt nearly adequate.

Femme- Through beginning to own my femme identity, I've discovered a lot about myself. I've discovered that there are some femmes with which I have nothing in common and some that seem to mirror my experiences and beliefs eerily. For me, my femme identity rings true because of the people I am typically attracted to, my love of feminine fashion/makeup/shoes, and the fact that I tend to take on the more feminine gender roles in relationships. But trust, I have a feminist critique of all of those things. Identities are hard, y'all.

What's striking when reading this over is that in all honesty, this is just how I experience my identities right now. In this moment. 11:30 on Sunday night in November 2010. Things change. Me especially.

Anger

Let’s chat about something.

Anger.

I have it. I have it boiling inside me most days. Just a constant, rolling, rage about the state of our society and things that happen in the world. I have it about being told I shouldn’t have it. I have it about more things that I could possibly fit into this blog post.

(I don’t have it about a lot of things in my personal life. It seems I have trouble transferring this emotion from macro to micro levels. Thanks, therapy.)

But back to the point.

I’m not sorry about my anger. I don’t care if it turns people off or is not relatable. People are turned off by it because they are scared of it. They are scared of tapping into their own anger and realizing the incredible amount of power it holds.

Audre Lorde wrote about this very thing, and my favorite quote about it is that “anger is loaded with information and energy.” But really, if you haven’t read her “The Uses of Anger,” go do so immediately.

Anger is what keeps me getting out of bed each day. Because let’s be real, there’s not a lot else out there to hold on to. I could choose to be dejected and saddened, but that’s an emotion that drains energy rather than giving it. I could choose to ignore all the shit that is fucked up and be happy, but that’s not a whole existence. So I have anger. Lots of it.

So no, I won’t apologize for it, and for people who are turned off by it, I don’t apologize. It’s their problem, and the day they realize the power of their own anger, they will be throwing tissue boxes right along side me.