finding a voice

Silence

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

The news tells me to take a moment of silence at 6:00 pm.

And I will do so, in honor of the 50 people dead, and the others still fighting for life.

But I can’t remain in silence.  Not this day.  Not in this moment and after this event.

I need to cry.  I need to scream.  I need to freak the fuck out!

And so do you.

This cannot happen anymore.  It needs to end.  Gun control vs. protecting yourself needs to be seen as what it is:  Complete Bullshit!  50 people died, with an officer on site … apparently after the officer already fired shots at the gunman.  That gunman bought guns, legally, after being considered a possible terrorist on multiple occasions, according to NPR, and only days before this terrible event.  And that should not have happened.  That should not be able to happen.  That should never have been possible and it should never be considered acceptable.

Look, you can argue all you want, but that won’t make it necessary for anyone in the United States of America to own an assault rifle—EVER.  And your excuses of hunting or protecting your family are not valid.  No research shows that you are safer with a gun.  All of it says you are more likely to die from a gun if you own a gun.  Some studies say four times more likely.  And hunting I have done.  You need no more than a shotgun to make one hell of a dead beast.  And a shotgun is actually preferable if you hunt different sorts of game. If you can’t manage it with a shotgun, you are a shitty hunter anyway, and should probably just give it up.  And, for that matter, you don’t need a gun at all.  If you wanted to remain true to the hunting roots of the country, then you would fashion yourself a bow and some arrows.  If you are hunting for meat, great—as long as you are doing so legally and as safely as possible.  If you are hunting for sport, you are a disgusting excuse for a human in the first place.

Yep.  I said it.  Said it all.

And I am going to keep on saying it forever.

But the thing I need to say even more loudly than the gun control things. (And that shocks even me, because I am a champion of gun laws and constantly telling you that my neighborhood needs you to care about people being shot here, not about hunting or protecting from imaginary threats somewhere else.)  What I need to scream and cry over is that this happened at a gay club just days before my own city begins to celebrate Pride.

And there has been no official connection made at this time between the gunman and the gayness.  There is not, it would seem, any information to state that this was anything but a randomly chosen Latin Night packed with people who may identify in some gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, asexual, queer, gender-queer, pansexual, sapiosexual, intersex, or other than strictly heterosexual way.  (Feel free to add your identifiers in the comments if I missed you.  I’ll make sure you have representation next time I approach the subject.)  But the fact that there is no known connection doesn’t mean it isn’t connected for me.

It is connected for me.

It is connected for me, because while I am not an “out and proud” anything, since I have yet to fully define what my sexuality might be, I identify as something other than strictly heterosexual.  I identify with this group and this cause and this marginalization and this struggle and this attack whether the gunman intended to target me or no.  Because how can you not see violence against a group you identify with or as in a way that makes you feel like a target?

My first real “introduction” to gayness came in a sad form.  My cousin had contracted HIV, and he was dying of AIDS.  I’m not sure if having AIDS gave him the strength to come out, or if coming out was legitimized by him having AIDS.  But I don’t think that in the early 90’s he would have come out to his hyper-religious, right-wing relatives without the HIV being part of the equation.  I can’t imagine a scenario where he would be treated with anything but disdain if he didn’t have the added “bonus” of being near to death.  You can’t be mad at somebody while they are dying.  You don’t scream at people who are dying and accuse them and call them names.  The dying part outweighs the gay part.

But the fact is, when I was a sophomore in college and would tell people at my Christian liberal arts college that my cousin was dying of AIDS, the ONLY response that I ever heard leave their lips upon hearing that news was, “Is he gay?”  Nobody who didn’t know the man seemed to give a crap about the dying part.  They wanted to know if he was disgustingly, salaciously gay.

And he was.

And I loved him no less at any moment because he was gay.

He still holds the title for favorite cousin on that side of the family.  And my daughter was named in his honor.

At that time in my life, sexuality was not the only way that my religious leanings and my life were crashing into one another in annoying and disturbing ways, so the situation with my cousin wasn’t something that I would dwell on.  But it wouldn’t be many years later that I started to wonder what the heck was wrong with me, because I felt in love with women.  And that couldn’t be right.

I’m not sure why I thought it couldn’t be right.  I didn’t mean that in a good vs. evil kind of right, but just in the sense that I didn’t find it believable.  I liked men.  I liked sex with men.  I had lots of sex with men.  And yet, I fell deeply in love with a young woman.  She is still counted among the most loved and most influential and most important people in my life’s history.  She was everything.  She was amazing.  She still is, I think.  And until/unless she reads these words, she might have no idea that she was my first and truest love to date.  We never had a sexual relationship, but I was never afraid to curl up next to her and be held, or to kiss her lovely round face and rub my hands over her bald head and feel all the good feelings that could ever be had.  She meant the world to me.  I sacrificed much for her, and I would do it again a thousand times over. And I never knew that I was in love with her until many years later.  And I never voiced it until now.

Because it seems wrong to not say it.  It seems wrong not to tell you this story of my life and my development and my movement from straight to queer after what happened in the early moments of this day in history.  It seems wrong not to align myself openly, distinctly, and deeply with every person who has other than the heteronormative standards our society espouses as correct and righteous and good.  Because any society that can still hold on to judgment against love and hold on to personal safety over and above the safety of all others, is shit.  And I want no part in it.

But this is the society I live in.  I can’t leave—I haven’t got the means to get to Canada or the Netherlands, much less take up residency there.  So, if I can’t leave it, I must change it.  And I start by ending my own silence.

I have alluded to the fact that I am queer on several occasions, but I have never been overt in claiming the queer as my tribe.  I have deliberately been vague at times, because there are places and people who are not open to a lifestyle that isn’t heteronormative.  And because I pass as heteronormative VERY easily (some would even call me a hedonistic, man-devouring, slut!), I don’t need to be out.  I don’t need to use the word “partner” and make you question my sexuality.  I don’t need to hold hands with a woman, or get married to a woman, or even date a woman, ever.  And that is because I have the choice.  I’m not a lesbian.  I’m not gay.  I love men AND I love women.  So, I could live my whole life without ever expressing any interest in women.

Except I can’t not express it today.  I can’t pretend that I am “normal” and go on living while 50 people die while others celebrate Pride.  I can’t stand by and watch that happen and not be broken into shards and weep.  I can’t stay in a closet of convenience while my best friends in the world come out to me, because they don’t have the choice I have.  They don’t love both men and women.  And in the eyes of the religious or the right-wing or the tea partiers or the whatever, they love the wrong gender.

So, I am taking a stand today.  I am voicing it.  I am making my public declaration and letting the world know, in no uncertain terms, that I am NOT strictly heterosexual.  And whether I am pansexual, or bisexual, or sapiosexual, or something entirely new and different doesn’t really need to be flushed out and finalized for me to take this stand and make this declaration.  All you need to know for now is that I don’t stand with the LGBTQIA+ community because I am empathetic, though I am.  And I don’t stand with this community because I am committed to equal rights and human rights, though I am.  But I stand with this community because I am a PROUD part of this community.

My darling Kaytebug, I was in love with you.  Rachel, I spent half of yoga class lusting after you.  Kate, your brain made me want to hold on to you and kiss you for a lifetime.  Jess, I would marry you.

And I didn’t know all of that at the time.

There weren’t any models for lesbianism around in my sphere until Ellen. Willow came along too late for me to have had a teenage breakthrough based on her love life (though many of my friends loved that Buffy character best primarily because they could identify with her love life).  And I am not a lesbian, so there was no reason for me to consider why I only liked women, because I could just spend my time dating, marrying, procreating with, divorcing, living with, and having sex with men.  I still can (excepting the procreation part—I’m almost 42 and haven’t a uterus).  But I am to the point where I won’t.

Not that I won’t be with men.  I absolutely will.  But I will also allow myself the freedom to be with women.  Or smart people.  Or dog lovers.  Or whatever qualifying aspects I might wish to place upon my sexual preference at some time.

But the thing that I needed to say today—the thing that ached to be said—was that I am one of you/them (depending on where you place yourself on the Kinsey scale).  I am one of you, LGBTQIA+ community.   And I am not one of you, hating-upon-people-and-judging-love-as-sin community.

I am queer and proud.

And I will not keep it hidden and will not be silent.  I will speak my truth in solidarity and strength.

And I will mourn and rage and fight against attacks like the one today with my full voice.  I will chant and sing and march and yell and I will refuse to stop until change comes and lives are protected and the NRA is not.  I will refuse to stop until it is no longer shocking or disappointing or strange for anyone to come out—and coming out won’t be a thing, because we will all be able to live in our truth, and see models of our sexuality, and accept ourselves as we are without being questioned and without being attacked.

I won’t be silent until my friend can bring the love of his life to weddings.  I won’t be silent until everyone I know has safe access to the bathroom of their choosing.  I won’t be silent until the disabled and queer intersection is recognized.  I won’t be silent until people accept my sexuality as equally normal with heterosexuality—because it is normal.  It isn’t weird or wrong.  And you cannot find an argument strong enough to discount what I know in the core of my being and experience every day—that gender and sexuality are fluid for many of us, and fixed for some of us, but never a reason to hate or berate or discount or deny the rights of others.

I won’t be silent until my society is safe from both bigotry and gun violence.

And you shouldn’t either.  Because you should be empathetic, and you should be committed to equal rights and human rights.  Everyone should.

Make some noise for a good reason.

Stand in silence and solidarity for a moment, but then scream your solidarity from the rooftops.  And don’t stop until change happens, and we live in a society of equals, devoid of senseless attacks upon one another, and supportive and loving and caring and kind … and potentially hoarse, because we will have been screaming our solidarity and our identity and our passionate pleas for justice from the rooftops.

When The Pain is All That Is

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

When I was younger I used to write late at night often.  I was a single mother, trying to raise a child and finish college and figure out life all at once.  The late nights and the early mornings were the times I could write without taking time away from my little girl.  Early mornings were usually reserved for assignment completion, since my brain was fresh and unencumbered by the thoughts of the day to distract me.  But at night, the emotions were what flowed onto the page.

I used to write with ink pen and notebook … I suppose most of us did.  But for me it was an emotional expression that needed the feeling, the movement, the flow.  And you could tell whether I was feeling nostalgic or angry or confused by the way the letters formed and the speed with which they formed and the strength with which I pressed the pen to paper.  I wouldn’t have made it through those years without pouring thoughts on paper.

Now I rarely stay up past ten at night and can’t use a pen or pencil for more than a few minutes at a time, so that pouring out has largely disappeared.

But tonight is a different story.

Tonight I am letting it flow, in lots of ways.

The past few days have been an ongoing assault for me.  Early December reminds me of death, and death reminds me of my mother’s death, and my mother’s death reminds me of all the other deaths, and so it goes with grief.  The more loss you have experienced the more deeply each loss is felt, because they tie themselves to one another in some strange cosmic or cognitive way that none of us fully understands.  But I don’t need to understand it to feel it—deeply.

So, I am in the middle of this grief spurt, of sorts, where feeling anything seems difficult and feeling something means feeling loss and pain.  And of course, that is when I jump on the bandwagon of organizers everywhere and comment about the social problem that plagues my country now: gun control.  (I actually could have chosen from any number of social problems.  I wish that would have been a self-evident choice, but there are too many issues here to not name it specifically.)

And then the judges rule.

And by judges I mean people that are not at all qualified as judges or to make any particular judgments about the issue.  Some of them put out a string of falsehoods.  Some of them accuse me of “name-calling” because I use “stupid/classist/racist” as reasons one might think more guns would be better while simultaneously commenting on the number of shootings in Chicago.  None of them do, or have ever to my knowledge, lived in Chicago, mind you.  I do. In an area where gun violence is a constant. So, I am well aware and educated regarding what may or may not be helpful in ending this violence.  And when I tried to fight back and stand up for my views, I was called a bully and treated like I am being a terrible person, or morally corrupt, or some other form of bad.  Except those things arose after multiple people basically said a whole bunch of stuff about how wrong I am and how dumb my ideas are, and I responded with reasoned arguments and strings of facts.  The idea that I am being mean, or bullying others by stating facts and reasoned arguments is ridiculous. The idea that a bunch of people ganging up on me to say how wrong and dumb and morally bankrupt I am, for expressing factual information about gun violence, seems a lot more like bullying than anything I have EVER done, in my entire existence.

I am, by the way, the opposite of a bully.  I learned how to behave politely in the midst of great struggle and to pretend that my world wasn’t spinning out of control from a young age.  I was the one who was bullied, repeatedly and viciously, by others.  I was crying myself to sleep by age 9 and suicidal by the time I was 18.  I’m not the oppressor, but the oppressed.  I always have been.

I remember a time when my daughter was struggling with asserting herself, and in therapy this was something she was working on.  One day, on the playground, she called a boy a name and told him to leave her alone. That boy had been bullying her for months on end, and she finally stood up to him, and she was sent to the principal and I was called to come get her because she refused to follow a teacher’s instruction to apologize.  When I picked her up, I got angry with the principal, and said she most certainly would not be apologizing, and that we had been working all year to get her to voice her frustration and stand up to this bully.  This was a moment of triumph, not a moment of failure, for a timid girl who always ended up under the sole of someone else’s boot.

She learned that by watching me.

There are things you don’t mean to teach your children.  They are a part of you, so they become a part of them.  I always bent to the will of others.  I always hid the secrets.  I always played the part.  I tried and tried and tried to be the perfect daughter, and I failed.  Because perfection isn’t actually a thing. Nobody is perfect, we say, but then we try to force people to be exactly that, and we strive for exactly that. It makes no sense.  I taught my daughter to play the part too, and to not ruffle too many feathers and to not rock the boat, and I didn’t intend to, but she was subject to the same consequences I had been—being abused and manipulated and taken advantage of by others.

So, here is how I know I am not the bully.  I can’t be that.  I never learned how, and I am still trying to learn how.  Every week in therapy we talk about how I deserve to be happy and I don’t need to care what others think and I don’t have to live up to any expectations and I get to choose whom I wish to be.  Every week.  I don’t know how to be a bully.  But I am learning to voice my opinion and not back down and say things without sugar-coating every single word.  And that is met with all sorts of opposition.

It occurs to me tonight, after enduring days of negative comments about me and my thoughts and my action and my words and my ideas and probably the size of my ass, when you get right down to all the comments I have heard in the past week or so, that maybe those other people—the ones making me out to be the bully–are actually the bullies themselves.  Maybe they are so accustomed to people telling them what they want to hear, and to me being polite and diplomatic, that they lash out the moment that is taken from them.  Or, perhaps the converse is true, and those people are the ones being abused by others, and my insistence on maintaining my views without any pandering or trying to be perfect opens up a view to their own insecurities.  I’ll probably never know (especially because I unfriended most of them on Facebook, and I don’t think they have any other way to contact me).

It doesn’t really matter why they reacted in the way they did.  It doesn’t even matter if how I was speaking made them think I might be a bully.  Because the thing I can see, even in the midst of much pain and loss, is that I am not the kind of person they described, even at my worst.  Anyone who knows me well knows this to be true.  My good friends have watched me in the darkest and worst moments, and they know that I am love to the core, and that frustration only comes with pain, hunger, exhaustion, or injustice.  It doesn’t live in my core, but it assaults me from without.  I have the best of intentions, and the kindness of a saint, and love enough to pass it on to even the most desperate and marginalized among us.  Hugging homeless prostitutes isn’t something that you do when you are a bully, or morally corrupt, or without character.  That depth of love and understanding and that level of acceptance is a rare gift, and I am one of those blessed with that rare gift.  And I don’t need someone else to tell me this.  I know who I am.

Even though pain is all I feel and struggle is all I can seem to find these days, I know who I am.  I am not what those people who haven’t seen me for the last 7 to 20 years believe me to be.

Even when the pain is all I feel, I am still looking inside for my value and my worth, not to the outside.  I am finding the voice within and letting it out.  I am the girl on the playground who is fighting back with her words against an onslaught of injustice and being called to the principal’s office for doing so.  And that is fabulous and amazing and good.  That is a triumph!

I know that few to none of my friends throughout the years struggle from C-PTSD, so I understand that they don’t get how important it is to find value in yourself and to let go of the expectations of another and to stand on your own, even if the other doesn’t appreciate you doing so.  But it is extremely important.  Earth-shatteringly important.

The PTSD mind is a mind divided, and often accompanied by a confusion or a lack of knowing the self.  You can’t always—or maybe ever, in the beginning—trust what you feel to be yours and to be true.  Those core beliefs that you have held for your whole life are false, and it takes so much work to root them out, recognize them, and respond in ways that help to break those down.  To find your worth and to let go of shame and to release anger and to love yourself are nearly impossible.

I’m doing those things.  In the face of all sorts of criticism, I am holding on to me, and letting myself feel what I feel and believe what I believe and stand up for both.

When the pain is all you feel, it is really hard to have breakthrough moments like this, or to find your footing at all.  Today I am stomping with confidence, not just finding my footing.  And if other people felt on the bottom of my boot sole, I suppose that saddens me a bit, but not enough to let up right now.  Because I didn’t actually do any intentional harm to anyone, but others did do intentional harm to me.

Earlier this evening I posted that you cannot offer violence and expect peace in return.  This is how I feel about my whole life, not just the past couple of days of comments.  I was offered year upon year upon year of violence, and it is a wonder and a joy to know that I was not so damaged by that to deliberately harm others, or to deliberately harm myself, or to end my life, or to lose my mind completely.  I was repeatedly offered violence, and ninety-nine of a hundred times, I respond with peace.  That is a lot of peace, under the circumstances.

I am not a bully.  Even when the pain is all that is.

So, I end the night and begin the morning having peace within once more.  The assault of depression might linger for some time, or it might lift in a matter of days or weeks.  Eventually I will find ways to feel joy again.  I know, because I do it time and again.  I always will.  But, I rest in the knowledge that my strength is being found and held and kept against that which would seek to define me against my will.  I am still me, even when me is a pile of grief and loss.  And I will keep on being such, no matter who opposes me.

And it is a triumph.