When you listen to stories from people who are not straight, you tend to hear about a moment they knew, clues – actions, words, preferences, beliefs – that later went on to mean something, to signify an inner truth, an innateness to the experience of gender and sexuality, that those identities are born with us, held within us, and only mistaken due to social conditioning.

(Disclaimer: I just got back from watching Disobedience, so I’m a little emotional)

Conditioning meant that I never had to question my sexuality, because my world, pretty much until college, was heterosexual.  I suppose, sure, I knew a few people who weren’t straight, (if you’re reading this and you were out in high school, I’m in awe of you, honestly.  I did not know myself that well and I was not that brave),  but the way life functioned was that girls liked boys and vice versa, and I knew this truth even if I hadn’t experienced it.

I didn’t even think to consider this one of those ‘clues’ until recently, until I knew what I was looking for inside my own story.

I remember, as young as kindergarten, deciding to have a crush.  I remember – vividly – at my 8th grade continuation dance, talking with my friends who were trying to get up the nerve to hold the hands of the boys they liked and picking out of the crowd a boy I could ‘like’ too.  I remember dancing with him and telling myself it meant something.

I remember the first boy I dated in high school, and how I spent three months waiting to feel something akin to what I’d heard about and finally calling it off just before Thanksgiving because this gave me a feeling of unease that I could not explain and that I blamed on the boy himself (you’re not reading this, but I’m sorry anyway.)

I remember trying to verbalize this to my mom, who replied with something to the effect of, “Well, you don’t always know right away.”

I remember trying this again and again in college, the boy I dated for a month freshman year, a week, the boys I went on a single date with and said, “let’s do this again sometime,” (because isn’t that what you’re supposed to say when it wasn’t awful?) and then dreaded hearing from them again.

And I remember a bulletin board in the hallway of my freshman dorm, opposite my wing, about different sexualities.  I don’t know who put it up, but I owe them so very much.  It was here that for the first time, I saw the word demisexual.  It wasn’t an immediate revelation, but it clicked somewhere within me, something deep enough that it lodged in the back of my brain for over a year.

When, sometime sophomore year, I fell in love, this world unwrapped itself to me, and these words that people had said, these feelings they had talked about, these realities became true to me.  I returned to the word ‘demisexual’ as an explanation for feeling attraction for the first time in 20 years.

Demisexual: experiencing sexual attraction only after establishing an emotional bond or connection — this is a difficult definition for people to grasp, I’ve found.  As a largely allosexual society (meaning people who do experience attraction), the idea that some people operate without attraction or with attraction only under certain circumstances, is foreign.  Allosexuality is for many, without realizing it, the same thing that heterosexuality was for me when I was young — not only default, but the only option.

People have told me that demisexuality isn’t real because, “of course you wouldn’t want to have sex with someone you weren’t emotionally invested in,” but it isn’t about the choice to want or not want sex.  In reality, for me it means almost never being attracted to someone.  I do not, for whatever reason cannot see people that way.  It would be like accusing a colorblind person of just choosing not to see the color red.

I’m going over these stories because I’m trying to explain.  I held this word inside me like a tag on a garment, rather than it being a part of the fabric itself.  I didn’t know how to answer the sexual orientation question on forms because ‘straight’ felt like a lie, but even to me, ‘demisexual’ didn’t feel real enough to merit consideration.  After my first real relationship that involved ‘feelings’ ended, I kept forcing myself to go on dates, even though I knew I hated it, even though I knew I’d feel nothing, even though I’d be waiting to go home the whole night, and I kept hearing from all around me, “Give it time and the feelings will come.”

Of course, imagine my surprise when I realized most people go on dates because they already like the person they ask out.  The feelings — the attraction at least — already exists.

I have been lucky enough to fall in to a group of friends who are also ace (and varying degrees along the asexual spectrum), and honestly — Lizzie, Marcus, what would I have done without you?  Do you know how much you being yourselves has meant to me?

This year, I’ve thought a lot about myself and my sexuality.  I’ve been questioning that, while being ace, I might also call myself biromantic.  I had another conversation with my mom, and was disappointed to find none of the evidence replete in coming out stories, to prove that I might be interested in women.  I took it as a heavy blow, I think, not only because of my lingering confusion, but also because it robbed me of that narrative that opened this piece, the one where there are hints and the realization comes as a natural arrival.

Until I adjusted my thinking.

Looking back on it now, I can provide myself that story, the one where I can thread my identity throughout my entire life — only it isn’t a story necessarily about being bi or being straight or anything else — it’s the story of me being asexual.  My story.  The crushes I made up to fit in.  The pain I felt around classifying myself.  Even my aversion to and slowness to accept intimate physical touch (even platonically) fit within this worldview, this story.

I’ve had bad experiences online when it comes to asexuality and the ace-spectrum and been told by members of the LGBTQ+ community on the internet that I’m very clearly  not welcome.   I have felt hurt and betrayed by the people who I hoped would take me in. I’ve been told that aces are people who want to cash in on victim status and invade a group that isn’t theirs.  I’ve been told that being ace is essentially the same thing as being straight since you aren’t attracted to someone of the same gender.  To this, I say: when your definition of self stems from being the opposite of something else, you create a binary predicated on the purity of that opposition — not only do you invalidate the experience of people not even within that binary like me, but you also begin to create a hierarchy that devalues bi, pan, and trans people for their relative and possible proximity to straightness.

Luckily, I’ve also found positivity, solidarity, acceptance, and support in the LGBTQ+ community and ace groups and blogs that reaffirm the reality of my own and others’ experiences.

I’ve come to a place in the last few months where I can honestly say to myself that I’m proud to be ace or demisexual or gray-ace or whatever word I’m feeling that day.  Where I’m growing comfortable with it.  Where I can say the word and feel it inside of my chest and know that it means something about me and my story and my identity.  And as we come to Pride Month this year, this feeling, it means something more to me, and I feel something more, something that makes sense: the desire to celebrate it.

 

Film Thoughts: Tarantino’s Borrowed Vengeance

Even without knowing that he is a classic scumbag, it can be hard to know what to do with Quentin Tarantino.  From where he began as an indie-darling ‘auteur’ to now, his films have developed an undeniably unique voice, primarily with the aid of ‘chapters’ segmenting the film (also common to Wes Anderson) and most recognizably, highly stylized violence (Wes Anderson, not so much).  The ease and lightheartedness that Tarantino brings to blood and gore make it difficult to distinguish if you’re enjoying yourself or if you’re disgusted.  And perhaps the point is that he lures you into both.

I first watched a Tarantino flick (Pulp Fiction) in the dorm room of a group of boys I knew in college.  I enjoyed it, but I knew immediately that this was a film not only not targeted to me, but I would go so far as to say that it is a film that indulges everything masculine and makes that the point from which the world unfolds.  (Is this the way that straight white men see things by default?  Because – oh god, that’s a terrifying thought.)  Odds are, even 23 years later, you can walk into any odd dorm room inhabited by a man (a boy?) and find Uma Thurman staring off mysterious and lustful on a poster.

The second Tarantino film I saw was Django Unchained (2012), for a history class focusing on violence in pre-Civil War America.  We were meant to watch it and explain our thoughts as they related back to the course, particularly in relation to Tarantino’s revenge narrative.  I remember watching it with alternating confusion and horror in the library on the 3rd floor, totally baffled by what I was supposed to be getting out of this.  With due respect to Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington, (and a little to Leonardo DiCaprio’s dedication in that one scene, I guess) I hated the whole thing.  I had a hard time articulating why, other than the feeling that movies about slavery are supposed to be somber and important.  Especially as a white American, I knew that slavery is the thing you are supposed to hang your head and be quietly sad (or, actually, sadly quiet) about.

The reviews raved that Django was a slavery revenge fantasy.  We could all delight in Foxx destroying the unquestionably evil Calvin Candie and his plantation because we know slavery was wrong and bad.  No moral gray area means you can get on board with the blood and guts with no qualms.

On the one hand, this is totally legitimate.  Slavery is and has been and will always be an incredibly heavy part of American history.  What one can argue Tarantino is doing here is providing a recourse, an alternative history, wherein the enslaved recoup the power and literally take back the agency denied them in real life.  By making it over the top and unthinkingly, amusingly violent, it can be said Tarantino takes that pain and translates it into power, confronts the traumatic past and owns it, sort of like the idea that if we can face our suffering, we can overcome it and tackle it into place in a narrative of our choosing.

I don’t mean to say on some level this isn’t true, or that there are no redeeming qualities to Tarantino’s depictions of slavery and the South, or whatever fantastical, exaggerated facsimiles he created thereof.  But for me, it rings hollow.

The reason is because Tarantino is a white man.

It’s one thing to have and to create a revenge fantasy, but it is another entirely when the revenge is not your own.

Tarantino’s Trio of revenge

Tarantino’s politics are another thing that make him a bit of a slimy character.  I recently rewatched Resevoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), and I was admittedly taken aback by the language that he used – not just the prolific amount of f-bombs, but also the liberty he took with using the n-word and the word ‘bitch’.  He has argued in the past that his lexical freedoms are a way of representing historical accuracy, which, maybe he could get away with in Django (although please call up Steve McQueen for a lesson on tact, pronto), but really doesn’t hold water for Resevoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, set as they are in the present (or, now, the 90s).

Some have accused Tarantino of wanting to be Black and/or acting it out, somewhat farcically.  But the truth is, Tarantino is not black, and Django is a revenge fantasy appropriated to earn him nearly $450 million worldwide.

I have a problem with Tarantino, a white man, making a slavery revenge film because (and do I really need to say this?), he has never had to deal with the cultural baggage and the historical trauma inherent in this period of American history.  It means almost nothing for him, again, as a white man, to make light of the past.  White people have been trying to claim slavery ‘wasn’t that bad’ since before slavery even got going.  Tarantino can disregard the complex systems that have continued to oppress African Americans in present times and make up a slave revolt that is more ‘bloody romp’ than ‘righteous revenge’.  And the really skeevy thing, of course, is that he is making money on this, selling shallowly entertaining, ultra-violent, surface recreations of stories that are not his own.

Additionally, Tarantino is neither Jewish, nor a woman, and yet we have Kill Bill (2003) and Ingloious Basterds (2009), another set of revenge narratives.  (Full disclosure, I actually liked Inglorious Basterds and in light of recent news, do not ever see myself watching Kill Bill).

What I mean to say is, there is a double-edged sword to a white, Gentile man making a film that not only avenges the Holocaust, but in its insular timeline, erases it altogether.  Punching Nazis is good.  Assassinating Hitler is great.  Alternative histories are tricky because they’re just that, raising the question of how much of reality we can eschew without disrespect to the past.  Can violence and alternate narratives, then, be cathartic?  And if so, does it matter who the retelling is coming from?  Can Tarantino trim the narratives of others (specifically, marginalized groups to which he does not belong) to fit in his spaghetti western package and sell them back, whether or not they’re fulfilling/cathartic to watch?

I don’t know.  And obviously, many of these are experiences I can’t really speak to.  I do believe it’s a problematic little set-up though.  Especially now, with TimesUp and #MeToo, and literal physical violence Tarantino committed against Uma Thurman on the set of Kill Bill.  Or the comments resurfacing in which he defended Roman Polanski’s assault of a young girl, claiming that statutory rape isn’t real violence (see the link to Jezebel above).

Oh, Mr. Tarantino.

Have you considered that the villains in your films are really just you?

Film Thoughts: Reflections on Moonlight and Hype, One Year Later

A year ago, when we were gearing up for the Oscars, I don’t think anyone truly believed Moonlight – the vignette re-telling of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,  the heartbreaking and poignant story of a young gay black man’s struggle with masculinity, poverty, and internalized homophobia – could win Best Picture.  Nobody saw it.  And by nobody, I mean, for all of the “importance” heaped on it by the media, people didn’t flock to the theaters.

If you’ll excuse the presence of Aziz Ansari, this SNL sketch basically sums it up. 

La La Land was the big film of the year.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I  love La La Land.  I saw it twice in theaters.  It makes me so happy, I’d even go so far as to use the word ‘giddy’. And everyone expected La La Land to dominate at the Oscars, and to very likely win Best Picture.  Everyone saw it.

And then came the Oscar ‘flub’.

(I mean, at least Damien Chazelle and everyone was gracious about it, but.)

Here’s the thing – Moonlight was the better and more deserving film by far.  It is beautiful and thoughtful and carefully paced, but more than that, it commits to film a story that is almost never told, one of a queer black man coming of age and how the intersections of his identities are compounded into invisibility.  Not only does he contend with toxic masculinity, but he must do so in a way that also deals with what it means to be a young black man.  This film fleshes out the stereotypes of black poverty and refutes them, showing us humans where caricatures reside – Juan deals drugs, but takes care of Chiron when he is Little, makes painful small efforts to protect him from the homophobia he is already beginning to feel.  Teresa is warm and self-sufficient.  Paula, Chiron’s mother, realistically swings between attentive to Little and frantic in her drug use, to ultimately on a path of redemption as Chiron becomes Black.  None of them are one note characters who inhabit the mythos of black criminality and primitivism America likes to sell.  This movie struggles with what it means to be visible/invisible, to suffer the internal conflict of self versus society, this movie is so, so, so, so important and beautiful and painful, and words cannot even express the significance of its having been made, much less having been awarded Best Picture.  (Just listen to the end credits suite. This music encapsulates the feelings of the film so well) ( Also, as you’re listening, give a thought to the three part structure of the suite and the three part framing of Chiron’s life.  Damn, that’s powerful.)

Last year, I was surprised at how angry some people got at the Best Picture flub, given that it was what I saw as an honest mistake.  But I’ve come to agree that there is so much more laden deep within these confusing 2 minutes that speaks volumes about the devaluation of black artistry in America.

First of all, consider the fact that everyone involved in announcing Best Picture took it so far for granted that La La Land would be the winner that no one even noticed at first that the wrong name was read.  This is the kind of movie that the Academy loves, with its Hollywood-darlings as stars, its inoffensive and accessible (for white people) premise.  People didn’t believe in Moonlight’s Best Picture potential, not because it wasn’t good enough, but rather because it is so far out of the ken of the people who reliably bring you #OscarsSoWhite every single year.  Moonlight is uncomfortable, particularly for white people, and it doesn’t try to make nice and end with a bow and wrapping paper.  It leaves serious questions asked and unanswered that force us to consider empathy and otherness.  So it seemed obvious, it seemed default, that even though Moonlight is the superior picture, La La Land would win.

In and of itself, this is deeply insulting, because it means we know as a society, that regardless of quality, whiteness wins.

And so, yes, it was a big deal that La La Land overshadowed Moonlight’s victory, because it is a symbol of our communal lack of respect for black artists.  It tells us that when we recognize black excellence, we do it tongue in cheek, a sly pat on the back that says, ‘Thanks for making that to be consumed by us white folks, now move along’.  We don’t allow it a platform to shine for what it is.  Moonlight‘s Oscar win will never be completely its own – it will always also be ‘the year La La Land didn’t win’.

Today (because somehow I’ve missed this until now) I watched the video for Jay-Z’s “Moonlight” off of 4:44.  

It rips on a fictionalized African American version of Friends for claiming to be ‘subversive’ (though, I’ll be honest, I’d definitely watch Issa Rae and Tiffany Haddish if they did do some kind of Friends sitcom reboot… but that’s way beside the point).  As it dawns on Jerrod Carmichael that what they’re doing is essentially acting out a pantomime of whiteness (what’s up, Patricia Hill Collins!), he walks off the set and through a kind of portal into a park under a full moon.  The audio of La La Land ‘winning’ best picture plays over the title card of both the song and the rightful winner – Moonlight.  The one to do the work and get little of the credit.  It’s intense.  And if you consider the sitcom Living Single, which featured a similar setup to Friends, and actually pre-dated it, with an all-black main cast, the point is pretty clear.  Look at this lyric:

We stuck in La La Land,

Even when we win, we gon’ lose

I’ve been thinking a lot about Moonlight as we’ve gone into awards season.  I watched it again recently, the first time I’ve seen it since I went to see it in theaters, and it impacted me more, if not just as much as the first time.

The thing on my mind has been how Moonlight was production company A24’s first best picture, but this year, Lady Bird became the company’s highest grossing film.  For some reason, I can’t get my head around that, because even though I think it’s spectacular to see a female-directed, female-fronted movie garnering so much support, it doesn’t tell a new story.  It’s white-teenage-girl-unpopular-and-misunderstood-grows-up-and-learns-to-love-her-mom.  Do I need to go see this movie?  Man, I’ve lived it, and it wasn’t even all that exciting the first time.  The movie version was… okay.  Mediocre.  I’ve seen it before.

I can’t find the article I read a while back, but essentially, it argued that Lady Bird, like La La Land, is a far less accomplished and significant film than Moonlight, but because Lady Bird centers around a white protagonist, it can get away with it.  Lady Bird, because it is about a white person, does not have to be as good as Moonlight in order to win.

It’s a common thread you see when you examine race and black success in any field.  To be considered good at what you do for a person of color, you don’t just need to be great or talented – you need to be damn near flawless.  This attitude of black exceptionalism destructively claims talent for white people alone… except for those few guys who did that one good thing one time.  But again, we move them right along.  It ignores that black excellence and artistry exists everywhere, and is often the precursor to something white people think is great.  (See: jazz, hip hop, rock and roll, Friends, comfort food, LGBT activism, etc.)

And this is why, still, a year later, Moonlight‘s Oscar moment matters.

It’s a white person’s world… even when black people win, they lose.

 

Gun Control Is About More Than Blame

I make it a general rule that I don’t get into Facebook fights with people I haven’t talked to in 5 years, if I ever did when I actually knew them.  But this piece of stupidity, out of all of the blog posts I have wanted to write recently, is the thing that spurred me into action.

I’m not going to argue with this unfriended-nameless person directly, but like hell if I’m letting it go.  She posted:

“No one blames the gun when a cop shoots someone.  Let that sink in.”

Dear fucking lord.

There are so many things to be addressed here that we need to break it down.  Obviously, this is in reference to the Florida school shooting that happened last week and the rightful resurgence it has brought in the debate on gun control.

The primary contradiction translates to this: “if liberals want gun control in the wake of a mass shooting, why not when a cop kills someone?  If a cop kills someone and is held personally responsible, why are we focusing on gun control and not the shooter themself?”

 

This post suggests we shouldn’t blame the gun.  Nobody, and let this sink in, is attempting to blame a gun as if it were an automaton or we were all living in a very messed up version of Toy Story.  Nobody is claiming the gun got up on its own one day and decided to murder some children.  What we are arguing, Karen, is that if access to guns was a little more restricted, people wouldn’t be able to pop over to Walmart any time they have a violent urge.

This post suggest cops do get blamed when they shoot someone (which… well… look at the conviction statistics on that.)  Here’s a fundamental difference though: cops literally have training not to shoot people.  It’s literally in opposition to their supposed purpose to shoot people.  When a cop shoots someone, they’ve made a judgement call to end someone’s life, hypothetically for the safety of the community at large.  We all accept that cops have guns, and when we talk about gun control, it is largely around public use and control of firearms.  So no, we don’t blame the gun when a cop shoots someone, because cops are the ones who are supposed to be able to use them responsibly.

No one blames the gun when a cop shoots someone, because the authorities in our society who are supposed to be able to use firearms responsibly primarily shoot people of color – overwhelmingly black and indigenous people, trans people, disabled people, those with mental health issues, etc., etc.  Guns aren’t the ones holding those biases.

(Side not on this person’s grammatical choices: when a cop shoots someone.  Smell that inevitability.  Not if a cop happens to shoot someone, but when.  Notice the lack of reflection on whether cops should be shooting people at all.)

Whether or not cops should have guns, the debate, and the point this post is missing, is that we’re talking the public at large.  The NRA has a loud and very public hand in politics, making sure guns are accessible and easily obtainable.  Gun control is about shutting down opportunities for mass shootings before they can happen.  We take it for granted in our society that cops will not commit mass shootings.

This post suggests then, that we should be blaming that shooter for the terror he caused in Florida, which is true, because he was the single perpetrator.  You want to blame the individual?  Okay.  But how’s your special snowflake approach to white terrorists going?  We are already treating school shooters like we treat cops by pretending we can excuse them on a one by one basis, primarily by putting it off on mental illness rather than access to firearms.  In other words, we treat each school shooting like a bizarre and isolated event, rather than a systemic problem.  And thanks to this brilliant strategy, we have had just eighteen (18!)  My god, aren’t we progressive?

I will make this simple: if nothing else, diagnosing these men with schizophrenia or autism or whatever condition you want to villainize this week, has not reduced the number of school shootings.  Do you know what would?  NOT HAVING GUNS!  

By all means, let’s have better mental health care.  But when we are talking about mass shootings, it’s beside the point and it’s a pretty shitty lock on the barn door after the horse has already escaped, and puts the tendency toward violence on innocent people trying to take care of their health, rather than on the actual reactionary, racist, terrorist organizations that shooters, like this one, have ties with.

Because if we had gun control, if the FBI had followed protocol (which is the least and most basic of job requirements, for god’s sake), the shooter would not have had access to a gun, which had bullets, which killed people.

The survivors, bless them, are not silent and suffering victims.  I’m so proud and so inspired and so determined when I see their immediate push back on those offering their ‘thoughts and prayers’, on those arguing that ‘we need to give the victims time before we bring up the politics of gun control’.  These brilliant, incredibly strong students know the rhetoric and have contested it, starting within hours of the shooting itself.

I’m sick of watching kids getting killed.  And I’m sick of backwards arguments like these that forget that having a gun is the first step toward using one.  We have to acknowledge the complexities and intersections that come with gun issues, whether it is police brutality or a mass shooting – but one does not cancel out the other.

A Letter for 2018

Hi Amber,

It’s 2018!  Wow!  Can you believe it?  Somehow you’ve survived this long, and maybe things aren’t looking too bad.  You’ve got new medication and a little more energy, and even though your last counseling session of 2017 wasn’t ideal, maybe now you and your therapist are on the same page.  So… that’s progress.  It’s scary.  I know it’s scary, because starting new is always unsettling.  But here is a new year and you are so very brave.  2018 is the year of venturing into the unknown.  It’s our first full year out of college.  We’ll finish AmeriCorps and then… well, I don’t know yet.  But you know where you want to be, and at this stage in your life, that’s in the classroom.  Already you’ve applied to two programs, and the odds are in your favor.

Listen, if you’re ever feeling uncertain or lost for purpose, let me tell you: you love the children.  You love them with all your heart.  You want for them to succeed more than you want anything else, and you can, and they can, because they are small but smart, and they are young and resilient and deserve every chance.  No, you can’t save them, we can’t save people, we just can’t, but hey – you can be there, you can be understanding, you can stand up for them and love them.  There are going to be bad days and hard days and rough days; there are going to be plenty of people who you think don’t love them enough or don’t believe in them enough or are in it for the wrong reasons or are painfully negative.  Keep your head up.  You can find your own balance and your own tune.  You don’t have to bend to the culture of any teacher’s lounge.  You can trust what’s within you.

You can trust what’s within you.  On a bad day when you’re reading this, or maybe any time at all, this is going to sound awfully cheesy.  Maybe it is, maybe it’s not, beats me.  But you can.  There is a voice in there and it’s sometimes real quiet, but I believe in you and I’ve seen you listening to it more and more.  Maybe we haven’t been perfect, but life is less and less about being faultless and more and more about being true.  You’ll get into fights.  You’ll let people down or frustrate them, and sometimes you’ll be angry and wrong and that’s okay.  You gotta just be, babe.  Be stunningly yourself.  Don’t be quietly polite to boys you go on dates with, don’t lie about having favorite things to seem less weird, don’t hide your way of being, and above all and in summary, please refuse to be small.  This is not a year for being small.  This is a year of becoming.  You’ve been building to this.  This year has no end goal, but it’s a beginning.

2018 is a beginning, and don’t you feel your life opening up in front of you?  It is, it will, I promise.  I know.  The world is not going to stop sucking, but you’ve been preparing and you’re ready; you’ve been building yourself up to fight.  Do not be quiet.  Life has become politics and there is no more neutrality if there ever was.  This is a year to not go quietly.  This is a year to spend in the streets, fighting and giving and being as kind as you can.  Your kindness is radical.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

Maybe the people you know are together while you start again on your own, maybe they are getting married, getting engaged, getting success in spades.  But didn’t anybody ever tell you that Facebook is a liar and a comparer and a thief?  Honey, this year, let’s practice being accepting of where we’re at and letting that be.  Let’s find joy and survival where we can.  So we’re using paper plates, alright.  But there’s really no wrong way of being.  Give yourself some breathing space.  Like your therapist says, “Meet yourself where you’re at.”  Demanding and demanding and demanding will exhaust you.

You’re brave and you’re strong and you have goals and ambitions and hopes and dreams.  There are no limits, but no requirements either. Feel it out.  Take it a month, a week, a day, an hour at a time.  Use your support system.  Love people.  Keep on.  Hold tight to yourself.  Everything you are is enough.  It’s everything you are meant to be at this exact moment in time.

I love you.  Be true.

Amber

January 2, 2018

The Solidarity of the Internet Generation

“Africa” by Toto is the greatest song ever made.

I couldn’t tell you precisely why, but it’s a fact that anyone born between, say, 1980 and 2005 has collectively accepted to be true.  Whether on twitter and tumblr and instagram and vine and snapchat, you can find this kind of discussion all over the internet.  The irony of choosing a song that came out early in (if not before) our lives reveals a lot, I think, about the zeitgeist of a generation entering adulthood.

Yes, this is yet another essay on millennials and their younger counterparts, but no, I’m not planning on listing all of the decrepit institutions we are killing off.  This is a generation being reported on in an unprecedented way – not because previous generations didn’t think youth culture wasn’t newsworthy, but because in the age of the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, there are more people saying more things about us than about any other age group in history.  They wonder why we aren’t buying (uh… no money ?), why we aren’t conforming to our parents consumer habits (again, um, please just think about that), why our priorities are out of line with the traditional American dream.

There is a great article, on Thought Catalog I believe, that digs into why 90s kids are so unanimously and deeply nostalgic.  A tl;dr for you all: we were born in a moment of rapid change, where we went from cord phones to cell phones, dial up to wireless, a mixture of cultural elements drifting from the 80s while screeching toward the millennium.  It’s not at all surprising that we long for the days we grew up in, if not even earlier, when we have felt our lives accelerating non-stop, the exponential shrinkage of time combining with the compacting of a globalized world.  It’s not surprising, particularly when so many issues that have been simmering at the surface have begun to boil… perhaps because no one older than us was watching the pot.  This generation is more fluent (I write, perhaps idealistically) in the languages of social justice, gender, race, sexuality, mental health, and ability than our parents’.  It’s a blatant, useless, and potentially dangerous generalization to argue that this makes us more liberal as a generation, implying all young people are liberal (and I shudder to say this, but we can look at Trump’s supporters to see this is false), but I will argue that we are exposed to these dialogues far earlier and far more consistently.  I had never considered white privilege in high school.  Never had a conversation about sexuality, never even heard of a spectrum beyond the gender binary.  My dear friend Mia, who is a junior in high school this year, not only is aware of these things, but discusses and advocates for the rights of the people concerned.  At 16, she is learning to think critically about identity.  On the other hand, I didn’t go to my first protest until January of last year, at 22.

The thing that is important to consider here is this: our parents didn’t teach us any of these things.  Our teachers largely did not politicize their history lessons to bring us the stories of people of color or explain to us the endless variety of ways gender and sexuality can be expressed.  Some of us didn’t even get factual sex-ed.  And no one, no one, spoke to us about mental health, encouraged us to take care of ourselves, to find ways to create our own wellness.  Becoming an adult is hard enough, and sure, Boomers, giver yourselves a pat on the back for getting through it.  But we are coming of age in a time where information is compressed and coming to us in a constant bombardment.  Unlike anyone before us, we cannot get away from the news.  We are coming of age in a time where our futures seems increasingly unlikely, whether from global warming or the increasingly rigorous expectations from the workforce, or the threats being made to policies our parents have been able to rely on, and it’s hard not to feel like we’re being sabotaged by the people who promised to take care of us when we were younger.  Sort of like swearing there are enough lifeboats on the Titanic, but cutting empty ones loose when it comes time for the ship to sink.

So we’ve educated each other.

When Boomers report on this generation, they see sloth, entitlement, laziness, greed.

When I think about it, I am astounded because we have innovated and used the tools at our disposal to create communities where we feel gaps, discourse where our education is lacking, support for total strangers and causes that we can only know about because of the internet.  A study came out recently, claiming that millennials are the least charitable generation in decades.  And perhaps we don’t have the funds to give twenty bucks a month to ASPCA or the Red Cross or what-have-you.  But what I have seen is the intense effort to pass along strangers’ stories until they reach someone who can help.  What I have seen is crowdfunding to find the money for someone’s insulin, or their therapy, or a surgery for their pet.  We are compelled to reach toward each other.  And so I believe that study is bunk.  Our charity is the most interpersonal charity a generation has had in decades.

The internet has given us a shared language that can be understood around the world like never before.  Social media (with (sorry) the exception of Facebook) has become a place of cultural exchange and creation that is absolutely unique.  To whatever extent that people are involved with these platforms, most have an understanding, if not a direct participation in the shaping of humor, lexicon, discourse.  We enjoy and use fatalistic humor.  We know acronyms and understand variations on linguistics, even when we haven’t seen them before.  Millennial culture depends on a rich underpinning of interconnected jokes and beliefs and concepts that are often meta and self-referential and wordlessly complex.

And this, my friends, is why I love memes – because they are a distilling of years worth of references into a common expression; an in-joke between thousands and thousands of people.  Their implicit, rather than explicit, nature of presentation (for example, the collective decision that this year, “elf practice” would become a meme without any single person deciding so (and again, this relates back to the whole nostalgia thing)) means that they are enriched by background knowledge, but not exclusively decipherable because of it.  Nobody understands memes when they first come into existence, but we incorporate them into our cultural knowledge without needing explanation.  How cool is that?

And so, this is why, from time to time, I am in awe of our imperfect, fractured, sometimes downright fucked (or fucked up) generation.  We have created places for ourselves and a dadaist approach to meaning on a massive, collective scale, and that’s kind of amazing.  Because each time I laugh at a meme, I know I’m a part of a community larger than just me.  And then I go listen to Toto.

My Love/Hate Relationship with TV True Love

I haven’t written in a while, because of Big Life Changes… moving, working, learning how to be an adult in this strange, sometimes kind of apocalyptic world.

Life, personally, and on a worldwide scale, has not been easy lately. But early on in my journey with depression, I learned that sitcoms could be a great coping mechanism.  In sitcoms, things are funny when the news is devastating, love exists no matter what, drastic changes never disrupt life for more than 20 minutes.  I’ve been working my way through the pantheon of the modern greats: The Office, Parks and Recreation, Friends, 30 Rock.  I started with How I Met Your Mother (which is not in the list of the greats, because I have more than a couple of bones to pick with that show), but you get the point.  So, with all these recent Big Changes, (and because my building has pitiably terrible internet, Netflix on a regular basis is out of the picture), I’ve been watching The Mindy Project on DVD from the library.

It’s a great show – I love Mindy Kaling’s style of comedy.  Finding it felt like coming home, since she was the producer and writer of so many episodes of The Office.  The Mindy Project has all the stuff I love in a sitcom: original plots, heartfelt and dynamic characters, legitimately funny writing, and of course, the romantic subplot.

In The Mindy Project, the whole premise is that the romantic subplot is more of the A plot, as Mindy wanders her way through quirky relationships in search of rom-com perfection.  Except that somehow, despite Mindy’s search for a relationship being the entire point, the show still includes sitcom subplot staple, the true love plot.

Does that make it sound like I’m annoyed about it?  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I love the true love subplot.  The true love subplot is my bread and butter.  I only started watching The Office because I had heard of the magical wonderland that is Jim and Pam.  Chandler and Monica are uncontestedly the best part of Friends.  And it’s not just sitcoms… the smoldering Scully and Mulder, the originators of true Unresolved Sexual Tension, are half the reason I love The X-Files so much.

I love love.  I love true love, especially.  I love TV love because it’s so obvious, it’s so present, because the actors embody these characters created especially for each other.

Earlier tonight, I finished the second season of The Mindy Project.  I’ve been slow in getting through the last few episodes because (spoilers, I guess:) Danny broke up with Mindy just after they’d begun to date, and though I know it’s too easy to just let your leads get together without the whole dance of misunderstandings (it is called a situational comedy for a reason, you know), I was so mad.  I was so mad at Danny for calling things off because he was scared of commitment and then setting us up for several episodes of a confused dynamic and awkward “are we still friends?” game.  And as you do, he made some pretty poor choices, that, had this been real life, would have caused me several breakdowns, at least one anxiety attack, and a damn good screaming session.

Of course, they got together, and things ended well for now.  That’s how TV works.

Here’s the thing though – I get so, so emotionally invested.  I live pretty much alone, I’m a quiet person in a new city, and I’m not ashamed to admit that these characters become my friends.  I think that we all feel that way to some extent, or else these shows wouldn’t work the way they do.  I love TV love because it’s comforting.  It says, yes, this does exist, yes, people do end up together, yes, everything is okay at the end of the day.  That’s why I watch sitcoms to cope with negative feelings.  I don’t expect realism, I expect safety.

I’m also demisexual/demiromantic, which means my romantic love & attraction feelings toward others are pretty minimal.  True love subplots provide me a way to feel represented or participatory (or something) within the heteronormative narrative, because they are characters I’m emotionally invested in “transcending” just physical attraction.  In most plots about true love, we see physical affection as an expression of emotion, as opposed to the ‘real world’ where (so I’m told) people feel attraction first and then go on to develop emotional rapport.

So when it doesn’t work out, if even for just a few episodes there’s no relationship resolution, it physically hurts me.  It’s actually devastating.  I cannot rewatch a good portion of season 9 of The Office because the out-of-the-blue conflict between Jim and Pam gives me such bad anxiety.

I take these shows (probably) way too seriously, but I do so because I’m looking for confirmation of love and happiness in the world.  I went through the break up of my first and only major relationship almost 3 years ago now, but still when I see a TV portrayal of a relationship I love put in peril because of a man who refuses to communicate, panic seizes a part of my heart.  Particularly when it’s uncalled for in the plot or is at odds with the tone of the show (looking at you, Jim Halpert).  Between my anxiety, my depression, and my weird defensive neuroses about love, what can I say?

This isn’t an article to say TV romances are good or bad, that they aren’t realistic enough, that they give impressionable young girls (ie, me) terrible expectations toward relationships or anything else even vaguely argumentative.  I don’t even know what I’m really trying to say, other than I’m trying to understand my own relationship with media & romance and why they are both salving and triggering to me.

This is not justice

It has been two weeks since Jeronimo Yanez was found not guilty in the death of Philando Castile.

He had been charged with second-degree manslaughter (specifically meaning the defendant caused a death through recklessness) and endangering safety by discharging a firearm.

And I repeat: Yanez was cleared on all charges.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when an officer uses a weapon and it results in somebody’s death, it seems like that somebody’s safety has definitely been ‘endangered’.

We should be enraged at the implication that the court did not even consider Philando a somebody.  He worked at a school.  People knew him.  People loved him.  I was teaching in Minnesota when the shooting took place, and some of my kids had had many interactions with him.  They lived just blocks from where all this took place.

But this is the thing with black bodies: the state does all it can to avoid recognizing them as human.  Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, was in the car when the officer shot him, and began livestreaming immediately afterwards.  You can hear her, sitting next to her boyfriend’s bloody body, saying, “You shot four bullets into him, sir.”  She says ‘sir‘.  She says ‘sir’ at the end of every one of her sentences.  In the midst of this traumatic and horrific moment, Diamond Reynolds had the presence of mind to use to term of respect and deference to the man who had just shot her boyfriend.  This shows both great strength on her part, and the depth to which people of color know that their survival depends on successful and defused interactions with the police.  You find this lesson again and again in black history.  To be considered even barely human, people of color must follow all of the rules of white society better than perfectly.  At the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, black students wore their Sunday best to sit-ins.  Women got their hair done each time.  And still, for all this ‘civilized’ behavior, they were spit on and attacked and screamed at.

Perhaps Philando had a gun in the car (which, under the 2nd Amendment, mind you, is perfectly legal).  Perhaps he had marijuana.  These ought to be irrelevant details, because had Philando Castile been white, they would not have gotten him killed.  At worst, he would have been fined.

A few months after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, I remember having a conversation with my mother about the officer, Darren Wilson.  He claimed that he had been frightened for his own safety when he shot Brown.  We sat in a Panda Express watching him speak on Fox News, and discussed how this murder was racially motivated even while from his own perspective, Wilson was likely telling the absolute truth about being afraid.  The stereotype of black men as dangerous and violent is so deep and so ingrained in the American imagination, that when Wilson encountered Michael Brown, all of these unconscious alarms started going off in his head.  I do not doubt his fear was real.  But its basis is a lie constructed on centuries of oppression.  As wrong, as terrible as his actions were, I could follow the logic that had motivated Darren Wilson.

I feel no such empathy now.

There have been too many acquittals, too many repetitions.  The precedent is now that police officers that kill people of color face no repercussions.  They are overwhelmingly found innocent and sent on their way, and nothing changes, and black people keep dying.  They’re often not even charged of murder.

Yanez faced the charge of second-degree manslaughter.  Recklessness resulting in death.  But keep in mind, Yanez shot Castile not once, not twice, but four times.  How can recklessness possibly explain pulling the trigger four times?  It can hardly be considered an accident.

I feel no such empathy, because we cannot keep explaining away individual cop’s motivations, their trains of logic.  The fact that this keeps happening, despite media coverage, despite protests, despite literal footage of cops shooting African Americans with zero justification, and that they keep getting away with it, is indicative of a far, far, far larger problem systemic in America’s policing and judicial institutions.  They are by nature, racially biased.

Philando Castile was guilty of nothing.  He was reaching for his wallet, like he was asked by Jeronimo Yanez, like you are supposed to do when you get pulled over by a cop.  For that, he was killed, and for that there has been no justice.  These are murders, straight up.  The longer we deny that, the closer we get each day to court-excused genocide.

 

(Mostly) In Defense of RENT

Here’s a story:

Our characters are a diverse bunch (although the leads are likely white men, but also we’ve got some variety in sexual orientation and race and gender) who don’t like paying for their living situation.  They’re kind of artsy and liberal across the board, maybe some of them do drugs, though certainly not everyone, and there’s a reasonable percentage of them who’ve come from a solidly middle class background, but who go around telling everyone how poor they are, and overall, you could say they’re pretty content.

But wait!  Here’s a kink in our plot!  Some authority figure who our characters thought they could trust wants to disrupt things and to build a bougie creative space it’s unclear if anyone actually wants, but goddamnit, they’re gonna do it.  Cue creative if ineffective protests, grumbling, name calling and displacement.

Now here’s the question: is this the plot of RENT, or is it about the “entrepreneur space” being built on the second floor of my college library?

Ha!  Trick question!  The answer is both!

You’re thinking, “Amber, where are you going with this?”  And let me tell you, just stick with me, it’s going to be great.

My school loves the hell out of a good controversy.  Our most recent and most vehement issue on campus is the creation of an entrepreneurship space, not just any old place, but on the second floor of the library, where, you know, people study and find books and stuff.  The administration seemingly dropped it out of the sky and put the wheels in motion before anyone had to much chance to protest.  When it did come to light, it became clear that at least 50% of the study body wasn’t pleased.

Because ‘liberal arts’ and ‘well-rounded education’ are not quite the buzzwords they once were, it’s become something of a trend here to emphasize the less ‘arty’ parts of ‘liberal arts’.  The STEM, economics, and comp sci departments have boomed over the past four years – more funding, more focus in recruiting, etc., etc.  When I arrived way back in 2013, internationalism was the name of the game.  But the selling points have changed.

The entrepreneurship space has been advertised as a ‘creative space’ for… well, we don’t really know.  Rumor has it there will be a sewing machine and maybe some Legos, and perhaps some fun shaped tables to be inspiring, I guess.  They’re taking suggestions, so I hear.  Part of the problem is that nobody really knows what’s going on.  The humanities side of the college, however, is feeling pretty PO’d because this project represents the growing privileging of business on campus and the diminishing support by the admin of the humanities.  And they’ve plopped it in the library, the spiritual home of the humanities.  Where are all the books currently occupying that part of the floor going to go?  What’s going to make up for the loss in storage and study space?  I’ve personally been to the dumpster where they’re chucking backlogs of journals and unused books, and can only speculate that they’re probably connected.

And now to return to where we began: RENT.

The similarities between the entrepreneurship center and the crux of RENT’s first act struck me one day when a group of friends and I were walking home from getting drinks.  We were complaining about all of the above, when I stopped in my tracks and said to myself, “Isn’t this the plot of RENT?”  I asked my friends this and they laughed and shrugged.

But one of them said, “No, RENT is about a bunch of people who have the unrealistic expectation that they don’t have to work to pay rent.”

I mean… fair point, honestly.

(Note: I swear this is the one and only time I’m going to pull a “well, technically….”: Mark and Roger (and presumably everybody else in that building) had been paying rent until Benny bought the building and promised them they didn’t have to.  It’s not like they just started refusing to pay out of the blue.  Then Benny shows up and demands a full year’s rent by Christmas!  Christmas, I tell you!  Nobody is going to be able to come up with a year’s worth of rent out of nowhere, especially when you were promised you didn’t have to think about it.  I’m just saying.)

It’s RENT’s 20th anniversary this year, and I’ve seen a lot of mixed feelings about it.  People argue that the music/the story/the characters are dated, or that it’s a ridiculous plot because of course you have to pay rent, duh (which is, again, true.  See note above).  People criticize primarily Mark (and to a lesser extent, Roger) for being a white middle class, heterosexual, all around pretty privileged man, who chooses to be poor and disadvantaged, who we know has a supportive and stable family situation, but who play acts at poverty for his art.  And you know what?  That’s also completely accurate.

But I find a kind of irony in the criticism my friend pointed at RENT, because no small percentage of us at this school are in a similar boat.  Majority white, majority well-enough-off, protesting a change to our holistic liberal arts, while professing the truth that I kid you not every college student has said at least once, “I’m poor, I’m a college student.”  It’s easy for us to say, because we don’t really mean it, forgetting that there are some who do.

RENT is not problem-free.  Not at all.  But I think it’s useless to get caught up on the “we’re not going to pay rent” thing (and as for Mark… we’ll get back to him), because the show was and continues to be revolutionary in so many other ways.  So let’s make a list!

• We have depictions of drug use that do not come with immediate moral condemnations.  Roger is a former user (and we can still see how it’s affecting him) and Mimi uses throughout the play, but neither are portrayed as evil or morally debauched.
• Speaking of Mimi, guess who’s super sex-positive and works at a strip club but isn’t shamed for it or denied happiness or inclusion?
• Not to mention Mimi is traditionally a Latina character.
• Maureen is canonically bisexual,
• And in an interracial relationship (albeit not the most healthy of relationships).
• But look at Joanne – a gay, black, female lawyer who rocks at her job and is powerful and smart.
• Collins is a black intellectual.
• And Angel, the darling of all our hearts – there is some disagreement as to whether s/he is transgender or a drag queen.  But I think of how much trans rights have entered the media since twenty years ago, and in any case, she is the radical beacon of love and hope and acceptance at the center of the play.  S/he and Collins have the most functional and powerful relationship of all.

This all goes without mentioning the running undercurrent of AIDS, which not only killed millions in the 80s and 90s when RENT came out, including the creator of RENT, Johnathan Larson, but was also horribly and tremendously stigmatized, leaving many to die in fear and shame.  They were kicked out of hospitals, denied treatment, and people quite literally were afraid to even touch them.

Mimi, Collins, Roger, and Angel all have AIDS.  But Johnathan Larson tells us they are all deserving of love, redemption, forgiveness, family, no matter their identity or their contraction point.

And yet somehow, despite the argument that the play makes for the validity of diverse identities, we’re still talking about how it’s stupid to teach theater goers that rent should be free.  I feel like somebody missed a point somewhere.

If you want to talk about rent, talk about how the play employs it as a metaphor for our limited time on Earth together, our inability to ever completely control the circumstances of our own lives :

I think they meant it
When they said you can’t buy love
Now I know you can rent it
A new lease you are my love
On life, oh my life…

— “I’ll Cover You”

Or how about the sense that the modern age does not provide us the means to ever truly own ourselves, how we must make meaning by fumbling through the actions, and expending ourselves for those little moments:

So I own not a notion
I escape and ape content
I don’t own emotion, I rent

— “What You Own”

Maybe Mark and the gang don’t pay literal rent, but they make up for it in emotional tolls.

(Get it?  Clever, right?)

And – oh yeah – there’s Mark, again, our problem child.  What do we do with Mark?

It’s true Mark comes from a lot of privilege.  He has the option to decide at any moment his suffering is too uncomfortable and then pick up and leave, which is something the other characters can’t do.  His mom calls – she gets him a hotplate – and it’s clear from the beginning that his ‘starving artist’ is more like a ‘dieting filmmaker’ kind of deal.  Mark thinks he can do this with impunity, that he can use poverty as an exotic inspiration for his art.  I don’t want to excuse this or diminish its problematic-ness in any way.

At the same time, I wonder how many people going to see this on Broadway had much, if any, firsthand experience with poverty and AIDS.  I could see Mark, particularly when the play first came out, as a sort of audience surrogate.  He is the entryway into the play, literally, from the first scene, and his camera work is a method of showing the audience a different world.  I don’t have any statistics on Broadway audiences, but I’m willing to bet that like Mark, it’s majority white, stable financially, and artistically minded.  My theory is that maybe his problematic-ness is intentional in some way.  (Whether or not this makes it acceptable is up to you.)

And it’s not as if RENT is blind of Mark’s privilege.  Several characters call him out on it, most notably, when he is attempting to film the police harassing a homeless woman. Once the police leave she turns to Mark:

Who the fuck do you think you are?
I don’t need any goddamn help
From some bleeding heart cameraman
My life’s not for you to
Make a name for yourself on!

…
Just trying to use me to kill his guilt
It’s not that kind of movie, honey
Let’s go – This lot is full of
Motherfucking artists
Hey artist
You gotta dollar?
I thought not.

— “On the Street”

Much more so in the play than in the movie, RENT addresses poverty and recognizes the hypocrisy of its own characters’ beliefs.  Many of the short songs in between the well known hits are sung by a chorus of people on the street, often suggesting people who are homeless or sick or struggling to get by.  It isn’t one of the main points of the musical, but RENT is aware that Mark and the chorus inhabit different worlds and that there is conflict and condescension inherent in their interactions.  Perhaps by the end Mark is supposed to have learned something about this, or perhaps he continues in his ignorance.  It’s an ambiguous point.  But if we can say anything about it, comparing his first awkward-as-heck visit to the life support meeting and his deepening embrace of Angel and her identity (such as his pronoun correction in “I’ll Cover You (Reprise)”, or the featuring of Angel at the center of his film that ends the play), we can at least guess Mark might be getting somewhere.  And hopefully, so has the audience.

Another thing to add:  Mark is canonically Jewish, which in case we’ve forgotten, is a group also traditionally subject to intense and violent prejudice.

All in all, my point being, despite the fact that RENT gets shit from the exact same kind of person that they’re giving it shit about featuring, it’s a fantastic musical.  It’s beautiful and emotional, features acceptance and diversity, and negotiates the subtleties of class and status to a 90s rock and roll soundtrack while looking a lot like a couple of love stories.  It’s not perfect, but that’s the point.  We’re meant to accept it, like its characters, flaws and all.

Reclaiming Myself: Thoughts on Tattoos and Depression

Nearly anyone you ask who has tattoos will tell you it’s kind of addictive.  I can confirm this, because in two weeks, I have an appointment scheduled to start on my third.  I’m not sure what it is about getting one that is so magnetic, but I remember I’d barely left the shop after finishing my first before I decided that I would be back.  It was only a matter of time.  I loved the process, the hum of the needle drumming against skin and muscle until you’re achy and numb, the smell of the ink and the antibiotic ointment, the plasma, the plain soap and unscented lotion I use for months afterward.  I just frickin’ love the smell of new tattoos. And (although maybe that’s kind of weird), I know I’m not alone in this drive to fill my body with art and drop hundreds of dollars while I’m at it – I’ve had this conversation many a time.

Tat #1, back a couple of years when it was new

What is it about tattoos that’s so special?

Obviously, there’s no single answer.  But personally, my newest ink coincides with another major life change, meaning that as I’m counting down the days til that new tattoo smell, I’m also just a few weeks away from graduating college.

Let me explain why these are related: I’ve gotten a tattoo ever year since my sophomore year.  That was also the year of a deeply traumatic breakup that coincided with the manifestation of my depression and general anxiety (but just so we’re clear, the tattoo did come first in that sequence of events).  It’s not surprising, because statistics show that most mental illness seriously presents between the ages of 18 and 22.  But contrast this fact with the image we circulate in American society that your college years are supposed to be some of the best years of your life – see an issue?  Not only was I depressed and only just beginning to realize that anxiety was eating away both at myself and my interactions with others, but I have also felt deeply and grievously guilty that I was not having the proper college experience.  In fact, I’m willing to say that I hated it about as equally as I enjoyed it.  And that’s normal.

I got two tattoos, I got (and am still getting) help.  And now college, this symbol of my first struggle with major depression, is coming to an end.

A while back, I read this article by John Donovan, where he discusses the results of a study by Jerry Koch, a Texas Tech sociologist who studies body art.  Koch argues that women who have 3-4+ tattoos often have higher self-esteem, but also have struggled with mental health issues, namely suicide attempts.  And even though Koch acknowledges that by no means is this a fully comprehensive survey (obviously not every tattoo aficionado is horribly depressed), he says, “We’re speculating that there’s a connection there, that the acquisition of body art up to that point might be an effort at a sort of emotional restoration…”

To steal a little more from Donovan’s article, Koch goes on to speculate, “I would suspect that part of why people seek to attempt suicide is they get the idea that who they are isn’t worthy of life… and once they survive that, maybe they’re saying, ‘Hey, screw you, I’m worthy, and here’s the proof. I’ll adorn myself and present myself, maybe in a pretty dramatic way, just so you know for sure that I’m who I am.’”

(A side note: if you are now opening a new tab to Google something like “women + depression + tattoos”, stop what you’re doing and… no, just stop.  There are some fantastically misogynistic posts on this subject.  Be careful out there, friends.)

Personally, I’ve never attempted suicide.  I know and have known people who have, and I’m so thankful that most of them are still with us.  If you are looking for a sign to stay alive, right here, right now, I’m telling you: please, your pain means something, we care about you, and as much as it feels like forever, nothing truly is.

Personally, on the other hand, I have spent my fair share of time in passive suicidal thoughts, the sort of thing where I think, “I really would rather be dead right now,” or “If I could just not exist for a little while that would be great,” or “I feel so screwed up I might as well be dead.” (As I write this, I feel like I’m exaggerating – that I don’t want the folks at home to think things are this bad.  And they’re not – most of the time.  But given that these are all thoughts I have literally had, they don’t really qualify for the exaggeration realm.)

My main point is that when you spend all that time suffering, isolated by an invisible illness, besieged by the weight of your twisted perceptions of reality, battered by your brain into the belief of your own worthlessness, you don’t even feel like a real person anymore.  You get confused about who you are, why you’re even on this planet (or any other, not judging), what the value of your individuality is – what is the worth of my soul?

And so, Koch’s conclusion make sense to me, because they are the conclusions that I too have come to.  I have felt for so long that this body is not my home, angry that I didn’t choose it, didn’t choose to be alive in it, didn’t choose to fill it with strange and crushing sadness.  I have felt as if my life has been inhabited by a stranger who goes through the motions of day-to-day living, this gray, vague fog that has made this skin dull and un-enthused.

When I choose to put something on my body, I have chosen a little bit more of myself to voluntarily stay in the world.  It’s as if 90% of my body was taken hostage by this illness, and each tattoo, each quantity of skin I cover, I take back for myself.  I bump it down.  80%.  75%.  It’s like saying to my depression, “You don’t own me.”  These tattoos are the parts of myself choosing life, on my terms.  I would like to think of them as my movement towards a more authentic life, becoming braver and bolder and learning to stand up for myself and my enough-ness.  They are pictographs of the person inside of me, working her way to the surface.  Or I guess, from the surface, into my skin. (Ha, it’s a tattoo joke, get it? Because the ink has to settle… Never mind.)

Tattoos have been permanence when I am faced with upheaval, markers of strength when I don’t feel so strong.  It feels fitting to add another to my collection as I reach the denouement of my college career and turn toward the future.

Plus, they’re just cool.