decolonizingmyfeels

[decolonizingmyfeels]

Defund 12: contacts & scripted letters to govt officials & council members

nothin like some good ole fashioned uprisings to get you back on your OG social media platform. who has thoughts on the effectiveness of copy & paste emails? http://mvnt.us/m1123195 #blacklivesmatter #defundpolice #abolition #embodyit 

[decolonizingmyfeels]

"Why cant they just Not dress that way?”

It's not as simple as avoiding the abuse by not 'dressing to attract it' when you must feel the abuse anyway every time you dress to make yourself smaller. Every time you have to feel yourself choose between hiding - 

from the dress under the beard, the 'street' clothes on black skin, the kinky hair at the office, the miniskirt at the party, the hijab, the indigenous man's long hair; the hoops, tattoos, bralessness, and unruly body hair of a brown "girl" in a rural town..

and violence. 

Threatening one's job cannot be separated from violence, public mocking cannot be separated from violence, police interrogation cannot be separated from violence. Yet we are in the habit of naming these things reasonable reactions to unreasonable personal 'traits.' We blame people for their difference and expect them to quiet it, because we did so our own. But when we blame people for the violence they experience when they didn't, we are effectively - might as well be - threatening them with the violence ourselves.  

[decolonizingmyfeels]

Audience turns out a wonderful prompt for my own writing, when I can remember to treat it as such.

The process of trying to imagine how to quickly and efficiently, perhaps even catchily, convey what I've been writing about, is helping me write about it, to cut together more clearly the connections I've been exploring in answer to the riddle of my own body..

It's been snowing outside, I'm in a puzzle kind o' mood, and I've found the ones that happen also to help with my pain.

Even if I never write a book - whether by my own depression, or fear, or some "external problem" I can easier forgive myself for - the process Itself is healing.

For Me. and that is enough.

I do not owe that my healing reach anybody else other than in the ways it does naturally. If my healing comes to you only in the form of my own well-being, I'm sorry that is not proof enough to you of your own benefit in it.

Colonialism thrives on keeping a distinction between the two.

For must of us our well-being Comes in the shape of sustainability and mindful consumerism, in the shape of awareness of the experiences of the marginalized, in the shape of self-assurance enough to not want to destroy what we don't understand. In the shape of things that ripple.

The trick is clearing way for access to Education and Resources enough for Everyone to "self-care" Knowledgably and Effectively. 

For those for whom a community is healthy, self-care naturally BeComes caring for that community. For those for whom it is not healthy, we have no choice but to trust them on that. We may be surprised how much more temporary the need for withdrawal becomes when it is Allowed to exist.

And the rest of us are left to trust our own selves just as much.

The paradox of decolonial activism is unlearning our moral motivations for it.

Colonialism IS the moral binary - and we as queers, as people of color, as mentally "ill," as identities silenced - are in preparation to stop punishing ourselves, and our communities, with the notion of "bad," and let empathy be simply hedonistic pleasure. 

We cannot shame people into caring. We cannot shame them into understanding the pleasure of breaking yourself open, and wider; of making space for diversity, and therefore dissonance.

We cannot survive trying to convince abusers that we matter.

But we can educate those who are willing, about pleasure. We are growing ready to stop distinguishing between it and art. Between activism and art. Between careers and art. Between education and art. Between healing and art. Between mythology and art. Between play and art.

.

Art's beauty is that there is no correct kind, yet it will always crave empathy when encouraged to flourish.

The illness is forgotting that this does not make it special.

[decolonizingmyfeels]

I love, or am at least learning to love, that my physical body parallels my emotional one. I am hypermobile, I medicate bipolar symptoms. I've been flexible to the point of endangering myself. I can swing through too wide a range too quickly. Some bodies too rigidly prevent themselves entering into new spaces; I can enter them too easily. I can enter where it is not safe for me to be. I get to float through a diversity of experience but not without dissolving myself. I become an observer not a participant. I can sense more than I can hold.. I become your cliche "highly-sensitive" introvert, and I require patience.

I'm not usually the kind to get away with moving quickly without literally tearing the seams of my bones, maybe folds of my brain, a little looser. I cannot strengthen superficial muscles without first learning how to feel the deepest ones.

Shame for my slowness has taught me I don't deserve to be seen because I am not "healthy" enough yet. Shame for my slowness, just like so many other self-fulfilling prophecies of fear, is ironically what made me "too" slow. It taught me to be afraid of moving quickly because I learned to be pummeled with everything I'm not, and forget what I am. It taught me I don't deserve to take up space in crowds, like I don't deserve to be self-aware when there is an Everyone Else to keep up with. It taught me to forget I am allowed to be part of a whole, that I am allowed to let others fill the spaces I can't without negating my worth. I am allowed to be an apprentice without negating that at which I am master. I am allowed a community. I am allowed participation. I am allowed embarrassment. I am not a burden. I am simply the work in the soil: the silent, uncomfortable compost. Not the flower for your pleasure, but the labor behind the curtain. Not a stage for your glamor, but the process of learning to climb onto one, though already sweaty and undone.

it serves us little to build a hierarchy between opposites, beyond in response to our own needs per moment, per experience. We cannot exist without an ability to switch directions as needed.

Speed is the beautiful and sacred stage, it is the offering, the sharing and transfer of information, but slow is the internal gestative blending of it into something new. It is the fire we fetch to race home from the gods. It is the void in which our emotions get to process, in which we get to root ourselves in our own Why. It is withdrawing to reimagine what we want to embody and reanalyze our approaches.

And neither extreme exists without the other. There is nothing we can slow down without speeding up something else. Moving slowly and tenderly is how I learned to speed up my emotional processing. I am now choosing to speed up a practice of sharing, which means slowing down my focus on the Silence.

I've let the feelings simmer in the dark (somewhat) patiently, and am starting to see something I'd serve a guest. I am learning how to have an audience. So cheers to blurring the distinctions, and letting Slowness take a Stage - working with, not in spite of one.

[decolonizingmyfeels]

Defining Whiteness, and Redefining Feminism

There’s an uncomfortable dissonance squirming in my belly when using the term ‘whiteness’ - it feels impetuous to approach such a personal and human concept while there remains such visceral lack of agreement on what it implies - and it's an inconvenient hindrance when whiteness is one of my more favorite things to talk about. I work in healing, and though many healthcare providers would prefer to believe otherwise, we can't talk about healing without talking about privilege: whiteness, power, trauma, shame. None of these things are extricable, if even different. But even outside of that particular niche, I don't think I need to argue that whiteness is now a prevailing topic in a growing variety of spaces around the globe, and it frightens me how often we continue to attempt its subsequent conversations without first laying a solid foundation through the bare minimum of defining our vocabulary. I don't believe we must all agree on the same definitions, but that we have at least the responsibility as individuals to know what we mean by a word if we are going to use it, and to communicate thusly.

For my own attempts at doing so I have a fondness for starting with James Baldwin's work, for he made the crucial clarification that what we have “is not a racial problem but a fear problem,” effectively blurring the imaginary lines between institutional/cultural oppression and emotional health.

The fear, he argues, is that of an imaginary ‘Other’ that doesn't exist, at least not in the bodies of color it's attributed to, and it is a fear of a lack of power over that Other. His essay, ‘On Being White. . and Other Lies’ explains that whiteness, a concept originating primarily in the foundation of the modern Americas, relies simply on not being that Lesser Other in order to exist at all. It was defined as not black or not brown or not Polish even, while it itself was shapeless, thereby allowing it to later decide that Poles, and others, counted as Not Black Enough too when mutually beneficial to do so. So if whiteness relies on an Inferior to know what it is, I think we can simmer the substance of it down into the belief in a hierarchy, and ones’ own right to elevated status within that hierarchy.

But by that definition, can bodies of color experience whiteness by their belief in superiority to another group? What about when the belief in a hierarchy remains, but is instead combined with a belief in ones’ own inferiority within it? Can we talk about whiteness only as it applies to white bodies without overlooking the power of internalized racism? Or internalized sexism, homophobia, or simply the existence of shame? These inferiority complexes are byproducts - manifestations - of whiteness. It is whiteness having inseminated itself into the minds, hearts and bodies of people of color and the others marginalized in a hierarchical culture. And by this understanding, the definition of whiteness does not rest cleanly at belief in superiority, but a belief in the presence of hierarchy at all. It means we have to look at whiteness as it exists in everyone rather than particular groups, and to expand the dialogue to include a larger human history in which social hierarchies have always existed under different names.

Without doing so, or by fixating too heavily on the current ‘white’ empire, I fear we only continue through this cycle of toppling empires just so new ones can be built in their place. Whiteness is the word for power in this day and age only because of modern context, but it is a certain relationship with power, which has been passed down through human culture for millennia now, that allowed the concept of whiteness to be built at all. It is a repetitive pattern in which a group of people creates an identity for themselves upon which to justify their right to conquest. And upon conquest, they bring with them not just their economies, politics, etc. . but the culture of domination itself, which then inherently continues to control and spread to the point we have to come up with a new word for it: globalization.

So what is a culture of power? What is it about those, or about the culture and mythos of those, who began the 'white' empire that is shared in common with every other empire in history, or even with those who tried and failed to build one? What is it that drives that need, or a belief in a need, for domination? What is it that drives anyone to want to convert, control and conquer their surroundings, and how does that culture manifest itself in the everyday lives of those under those empires? By which I mean, the everyday lives of ourselves?

What's frightening about asking these questions is that it means the problem of ‘power’ stops being confined to certain bodies, or to modern day ‘white’ bodies specifically. It stops being about individuals in power, but about the mythologies and ideologies in power. It becomes a more sinister idea in that it is omnipresent. We have to acknowledge the extent to which it has raised each of us and is visibly present in every aspect of our culture. In a globalised world, colonialism is in our medicine, our education, economy, spirituality, our romantic relationships, our notions of success: all are at least influenced by the same idealizations of control and power.

And we of course can't talk about control without talking about masculinity - not just because we live in a patriarchal empire, in which masculinity becomes interchangeable with whiteness as a socially constructed claim to superiority, but because what is masculinity in its essence? To first clarify: although pedestalizing masculinity does often mean a pedestalization of male assigned bodies, it is not they I'm referring to when I use the term masculinity. I am, again, referring not to individual bodies, but to a set of abstract qualities and adjectives. Masculinity, since the more ancient human history we have record of, just so happens to most commonly bear associations with concepts like domination, physical strength, conquest, power, and so on. So is it coincidental that those cultures that built empires also happened to be patriarchal? Sure, we can't be surprised that a culture of domination manifests in multiple kinds of hierarchies, including gendered ones, but why is it specifically and repetitively masculine traits that are favored? Is there something in our conceptions of masculinity that is perhaps not just a result of hierarchy but part of a feedback loop or even a causal factor in relationship with power and fostering a colonialising culture?

So to continue the domino chain, we can't talk about patriarchy without also talking about science and intellect, our pedestalizations of which are deeply entangled with those of masculinity. Logic is another trait traditionally attributed to the latter, while the feminine represents emotion, sensation, creativity, etc. I see no happenstance then, that this globalizing culture is one in which we've come to believe logic is meant to control sensation. It is a tool to keep the feminine ‘in its place’ - we are told emotions get in the way of ‘clear headed,’ logical thinking. That strength is in one's ability to tend to the practical rather than to be emotionally forward. Objectivity is more ‘useful’ to the economy and your success than emotion. Intuitive healers are brushed aside compared to those who use the mathematics and clear cut boxes of ‘science.’ Inherently, I see nothing wrong with recognizing masculinity’s ability to temper femininity away from excess or provide support where femininity may struggle to. I see nothing inherently wrong even, with masculinity’s need for clean cut lines and control. What concerns me is the fact we do not also give credit to its opposite. It is the extent to which we do not consider when it is that intuition has its role and duty to keep logic ‘in its place.’ It is the extent to which we struggle to accept even the idea that sometimes trying too hard to think logically inhibits our ability to see what intuition sees as obvious, and that intuition and even emotion are as crucial to our scientific accuracy, innovative efficacy, and most importantly, personal empowerment, as our ability to ‘logic’ is.

Each side of this spectrum can keep the other in check without needing to maintain power over it. But to trust this is to tear down the framework that hierarchy so desperately depends upon: the conviction that in order to thrive, or even survive, one must control. And so far, it seems, we have chosen that masculinity be the one to win this zero sum game of duality. Andrea Smith argues, specifically with the example of Europeans in the North Americas, that "in order to colonize a people whose society was not hierarchical, colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through naturalizing patriarchy." Whether this holds true or not, I think it speaks to this fact that for hierarchy to exist within a society, it must then also exist within ourselves, whether as cause or result, so we then must ask: what parts of ourselves is it that we deem lesser than the rest of us, or than other human beings? We cannot separate our own distrust in ourselves from the perpetuation of institutional oppression - the two form a codependent loop. And it is likely that most under the power of this current empire, which at this point is most of the globe, would answer this question with things like: physical weakness or fragility. Emotional sensitivity or neediness. Not smart (by which is meant: logical) enough. Not powerful enough. It is the existence of femininity within ourselves we have learnt needs to be disciplined out of us, and the notion it might serve its own purposes is a consideration we've forgotten is even an option.

To me, all work done in the name of healing from oppression and prejudice, or the undoing of hierarchy, whether racial, economic, political, sexual or gendered, etc. (the list is fairly infinite) has a root in our relationship with gender and could perhaps even find a new kind of efficiency in being aimed more directly at feminism; but critically, I do not mean just the elevation and empowerment of specifically femme and woman identified individuals. I like the term feminism because its root is femininity, not women. I use the term to mean the elevation of femininity as a concept, an embracing of the parts of all of us, not only some bodies in particular, that for some reason make us so afraid, and so ashamed.

It means accepting that, if hierarchy does not exist, then there must also exist a strange yet harmonious contradiction of gender within ourselves, and that individual bodies can at once embody opposing opposites without either one being inherently better than the other, but merely with a different set of strengths and weaknesses that may even complement each other - if we can allow this collaboration to exist within ourselves, we may find ourselves better able to allow it to exist in our communities.

By pushing culture to reconnect us with a universal feminine, we organically tear down the systems that have subjected all of us to subjugation, humiliation, and violence. We become more patient with our natural environment and its limited resources rather than decimating it for immediate gratification. We become more compassionate and willing to learn from and about those who differ from us, and those who have been systematically silenced - people of color, queer and gender variant folk, those with fat or disabled bodies, those in poverty, and those of different nationalities/ethnicities, etc. We humble ourselves to the possibility that we do not know everything, nor can we control it - that there are things that cannot be 'fixed,' only adapted to. We treat mental health more holistically by nurturing respect for, rather than the demonization of, emotion. We embrace the frequent existential crises that come with being willing to admit when we're wrong, when we've fucked up, and when we have no choice but to face the frightening and difficult task of pushing ourselves to change.

But this means also doing the terrifying work of trusting femininity, in all its gentleness, patience, subtlety, receptivity, and compassion, to have its own kind of power against the violence of oppression. For if we continue to fear that by embracing our femininity we remain weak, the people in power may change of course, but the culture of control, what I am referring to when I say whiteness, will not.

[decolonizingmyfeels]

LET'S TALK ABOUT THE GENDER COMMENTARY IN MOTHER!

There's been criticism abound for Requiem for a Dream/ Black Swan director, Darren Aronofsky's latest emotional roller coaster, but the vast majority of it is founded upon a refusal (or inability - who knows?) to note even a snippet of the allegory to be found in it. Were I to have taken this movie literally I'm sure I'd have been similarly frustrated, if not downright annoyed, by the subsequent apparent lack of coherent plot and sudden, drastic, unexplained crescendos and denouements in its pace.  Without acknowledging the metaphor rooted in this dizzying presentation however, these criticisms, I feel, hold little relevance to the movie and my intent here is not to exhaust them any further.

The critique I do find interesting, however, is Dahlia Grossman-Heinze's at Bitch magazine, due to the sheer irony of what I had, until then, taken to be an explicitly and objectively feminist film being completely slandered by a feminist magazine, for feminist reasons. I had even assumed Mother!'s feminism played a part in its dismal reception, disgruntling the overwhelmingly white male demographic of powerful movie critics with its rare lack of regard for placing their priorities at the forefront.

Grossman-Heinze, on the other hand, argues she "didn’t need another pop culture artifact about the innate selflessness and nurturing qualities of women as they give and give and give until everything, including their hearts, have been taken from them;" and I’m suddenly wondering why more critics didn't hail this film as prime jerk-off material. Grossman Heinze is as sick as the rest of us of being forced to watch the white male's idealized conception of femininity dote on her man and take the bludgeoning for his mistakes. But I think such a vision of this film in particular fails to recognize femininity, specifically the western social and cultural conception of it, as a concrete entity able to be critiqued and metaphor'd; it instead assumes that to personify this conception is to claim it is a real one representative of actual persons. I personally felt Aronofsky is no more claiming Mother represents actual women than he is claiming that the 'Poet' represents an actual God. Mother!, to me, was a picking apart of a mythos, being of course the western Biblical story and its imagery. The story he is telling is someone else's story, not his, and these are not his characters or archetypes. It was not his fetish to put Mother through this torture. He is simply taking the already written story western culture has told itself for centuries and flipping it on its head. He makes Mother a caricature intentionally, asking - if Christianity's 'ideal feminine and mother' truly existed as she's been described to us, what would her story be? How are we treating her and how would she feel about it? The overwhelming majority of the film is shot as literally as possible from her point of view, from above her shoulder, or in close-up inspection of her face and emotional expression. This in itself is vastly different from the tropes Grossman-Heinze is referring to. What Aronofsky is doing is the equivalent of retelling the biblical parable through the perspective of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother, and in trying to recall the last time we saw anything of the sort, we realize just how radical Mother! is as a film, especially one that so sneakily found its way into standard theatres. He is framing for us our own imagery of womanhood, the one we ourselves constructed and have romanticized for so long, while we also spit on everything she supposedly cares about, considering her always an accessory rather than a full-fledged character with an experience of her own.

I understand the apprehension against just another male saviour complex in the case of Aronofsky: yet another man thinking he has anything to say about the plight of women or what to do about it. But it's a fine line to draw between checking that privilege, and tabooing men away from having their own experience of feminism. It can be difficult to draw the line between keeping feminist dialogue centered around women, and from designating the responsibility of it entirely onto women. The latter would only be a continuation of thrusting society's emotional labor onto women's shoulders, expecting them to be our saviors from patriarchal ruin by curating themselves into a new ideal. Yes, we are tired of the old narrative that expects women to prioritize doting commitment and motherhood above all else, but it does not make sense to reject that stereotype by rejecting motherhood and commitment as concepts. We have to make sure we are distinguishing clearly between expectations of women, and actual women, because it is the former, not the latter, that is problematic here. And yes, it is nice to witness women in media taking control of their bodies, and their work, and denouncing those who mistreat her - it is a woman's story that, for centuries, we've not been allowed to see, at least not in a positive light. But Mother's story is also a woman's story, and to deny hers for the sake of feminism is contrary to all that feminism is trying to accomplish. To do so comes dangerously close to declaring there is a 'right type' of woman to portray on screen. Even if not Grossman-Heinze's intent, I think it an important idea to address, for it’s not as if it’s rare to find people within the feminist movement rejecting ideals of womanhood simply by staking their flag in a new one. If it is not okay to depict quiet, docile, mother-oriented women in the media, we aren't liberating women to be themselves, but only perpetuating our connotations of femininity, as we imagine it now, as undesirable. Feminism can't only be about proving that women can be 'one of the guys' too. It can't just be about freeing people from adhering to gender expectations, but also about refusing to think of traditionally feminine traits as inherently shameful, weaker, or undesirable, for those women and men and others outside the binary who do happen to embody them (which is in some degree, all of us).

In regards to the romantic relationship between Lawrence and Aronofsky outside of the film, it doesn't feel appropriate to me to play it as evidence of Aronofsky's inherent martyring of women. To assume anything about the power dynamics at play between them, and implying Lawrence's only role within the relationship is as 'muse' to her man, is to deny Lawrence agency and her own vision of this film as an artistic piece, just as it does to assume that embodying femininity is only the result of having had it forced upon us (read: it is so abhorrent, who would want it otherwise?).

And I can't take seriously a claim that stories about the subjugation and exploitation of femininity are “old hat” and unhelpful to women when, in a possibly narcissistic argument that I'll stand by anyhow, I myself spent days after watching this film reluctantly acknowledging how much I emotionally identified with Mother and with having had my body, investments, and creations shat on by patriarchal values. I was eventually forced to reconcile with the places in which I still allow these things to happen in my life despite all my feminist ranting and literature. It was reaffirming to see a protagonist with whom to identify with over the struggle of knowing when and how to hold boundaries without denouncing the 'femininities' of nurture and patience, especially when so often given only dismissive disrespect, at best, in return. Patriarchy isn't going to end simply by teaching women to embrace masculinity. We must also be willing to have an honest relationship with how we, as a social entity, treat femininity, and that is what this movie is trying to establish.

Jennifer Lawrence did express frustration that Aronofsky refused to be up-front about what this film had in store for us while instead selling it as another, mostly inconsequential, fun-time Amityville-esque horror that would pass through our systems easily some relaxed Friday night, only to leave us choking trying to swallow it down the wrong tube. She knows that in planting false expectations and not warning us of the allegory, we were more likely to miss it, and thus Aronofsky ensured the bombed ratings and criticism that might not have been quite so poisonous otherwise. But as he giggles in the background of the interview, I feel comfortably certain that ratings are not his priority here. He recognized that in disclosing the intent of Mother!, he would have attracted only a self-selective audience already interested in having the dialogue he's starting, rendering the film less impactful and frankly, less entertaining as a cultural phenomenon. Critics claim "we get the message; I sympathize with what he's trying to say. But did he really have to cannibalize a baby?" rather than admitting bluntly '"Did he really have to say we cannibalize babies? Did he really have to ruin the memory of my communion? Did he really have to be so harsh?" Whether he did is, of course, debatable. It could even be argued as a debate about the merits of femininity vs. masculinity, gentle patience vs. blunt force.  But regardless of the answer, the method was certainly intentional, and in Aronofsky's history, nothing new. His body of work pretty blatantly reveals a conviction that emotional horror and intense discomfort is the way to hit home with an audience, or is, at least, the fun he gets out of directing.

He leaves us at the finish of the movie with the face of a new woman whose innocent concern juxtaposes the doomed fate we know comes her way, having been forced to witness the Poet's insistence that the cycle must repeat itself, that he has no choice, that his fans have no choice, and that the only one who does is the woman who can choose to surrender the only thing she has left. Aronofsky gives us a new face whose treatment we can again allow to befall her, knowing full well its cruelty, or for whom we can look back upon our own mythos as a lesson in what we could change for the future. He asks if we can dare let go of attachment to our idea of womanhood and instead see actual, real life women, with wishes and needs that may not cater to our own.

[decolonizingmyfeels]

Machismo is girly af

We assign gender to things without regard to their genitalia, or lack thereof, every day - cars, animals, hurricanes, gadgets, presidents. It is not at all a new phenomenon that gender be used to represent concepts not seen only in our sexy bits. The yin and yang, astrology, the tarot, the latin languages, etc. all recognize two genders outside just the representative shapes of human bodies. They instead find also an abstract flexibility of personality traits that exist outside the realm of who or what embodies them.

Yet we hold ourselves as human beings to a double standard of fixed gender that the 'nonliving' get to avoid - outside of ourselves, gender might not just be believed, but allowed, to change over time. A river, for example, when calm and still, has long represented strong feminine qualities: subtle, passive, receptive, nurturing. But as soon as rains come and the river becomes white water, then its masculine qualities have been revealed: fast, undulating, destructive, penetrating.

We could argue that human genitalia may serve as fairly literal parallels for or translations of these qualities, penises being penetrative and vaginas receptive. It could perhaps even be true that there are in fact correlations between genitalia and personality that exist even outside of those socially constructed. But even if these correlations do in fact exist, we need only take a closer look at the individual realities of those around us to remember that not all bodies, if any, fit perfectly into these generalizations. We can acknowledge that it may not be so difficult to see the roots of our stereotypes, and perhaps even empathize with ourselves as a culture for having entrenched ourselves in damaging overgeneralizations. To continue our attachments, however, to the literal sources of these paradigms is to perpetuate violence upon those whose violations of our expectations frighten us. It prevents us from seeing the fluidity of gender as we would in the river, much like a mythology whose lessons are no longer understood simply because the imagery conveying them is anachronistic. When gender is not allowed fluidity we suppress our ability to connect with and represent the different traits of each within ourselves as suits our situation, or to recognize that it is still overly simplistic to deem any specific quality as having sourced from only one side of the gender spectrum in the first place. Fluidity itself, for example, would traditionally be considered a feminine trait: watery, soft, flexible, adaptable. But our ability to be fluid, in the context of modern culture especially, requires a faith in our personal right to change as we please and not need to hold ourselves at the mercy of those who expect us to be a certain way. And that kind of unapologetic and inflexible self trust, the kind that carves space for itself and its own needs before anyone else’s, is what would most often be labelled a masculine trait. So many times in my life I’ve become stagnant rotting water trying too hard to remain a feminine calm, not believing I had the right to be angry and tumultuous as a femme. So ironically, I denied my own feminine fluidity trying so hard to be feminine.

Similarly, we might consider the process of upholding what is considered respectable masculinity: stubborn territorialism and inflexibility, a lack of emotional expression, loud strength and the drive to penetrate and conquer. We know that, at least sometimes, to convey masculinity is a conscious choice, an act or show with which to prove one’s worthiness of respect or attraction. Yet this inclination to alter ourselves for acceptance, to be receptive to and nurture the gender expectations demanded of us as children, and the ability to adapt ourselves to fit into societal molds shaped by other people - are traditionally blatantly feminine qualities. So it stands that, to uphold social imagery of masculinity to these extremes, is in fact an extremely feminine thing to do. It lacks the unapologetic and disruptive qualities of pushing back against our environment and questioning its right to tell us what to do.

But this is not to say this kind of flexible 'softness' is in any way an inherently bad thing. It marks our ability to not senselessly attack others when we disagree with them. It allows us friendship, empathy, and subsequently stronger relationships within our community, and these relationships, ironically, earn us the respect and trust necessary to make us leaders and social symbols of strength.

I myself am prone to cravings for labels and categories, especially for my own identity. It is disconcerting to feel like you don’t know who you are, where you fit, or even how to introduce yourself; and labels, however overly simplistic, are an alluring place to find comfort in, even if temporarily. They are shelters under which we can hide to feel safe in our own bodies, in control of who we are and who we’ll be. They help us write our own obituary before we’ve even died, so we can revel in the comfort of feeling we know how we’ll be remembered. But the names stay the same even while we keep changing, whether we want to or not, and eventually the titles don’t seem to fit anymore. What was once masculine is now feminine, the words that were once an insult may now be a source of pride, and the organized structures that once helped us understand our world no longer make sense. But never before now have we had such a strong and global conversation about the frustrations of a restricting and rigid gender binary, which makes us ripe for a time of letting go, letting the ice blocks melt, and splashing in the puddled mess left behind. In order to do this, we have also to let go of our need to 'know' ourselves and where we fit. Language that could be merely a helpful tool with which to express ourselves has become instead a tool to erase the nuances of our experience so as to make us permanent and therefore predictable and safe. We have every right to claim our identity, to be acknowledged for who we are, and be loud about what that means to us. But we might also take care to prevent the concept of identity from being not just the expression of our experience but that which we frame our experience within and therefore oppress even ourselves with, whether conscious or not.