Dear Queer Diary: Journaling While Left-Handed
Adventures in non-normative handedness.
Adventures in non-normative handedness.
My family used to joke that only white people need therapy. Meanwhile, white academics told me that African-Americans merely fabricated ungrounded stigma around psychiatric help. No one ever tells you that the healthcare system is sick.
“Blaze squinted in the mirror and pushed her hair left, then right, then left, then right, then left, then right, then righter, then really left, then up a little, then all the way down […]”
“Sad cloud” and “naked Christmas tree” did not make the list. You’re welcome, makers of anti-depressant commercials!
“Of course I’ve heard of Smith! Are you fucking kidding me? Every lesbian has heard of Smith. It’s fucking Lesbian Hogwarts. God. They’re all there, with their hair always on point, studying sociology, and the leaves are yellow and filtering sunlight through them because it’s always autumn there because autumn is beautiful and the whole continent has conspired to make that place beautiful and lovely and gay. Gay as fuck.”
“Like Russia itself, my parents’ instincts are torn. My birth country can’t make up its mind whether it wants its culture to be a part of liberal Europe or conservative Asia, my birth parents can’t make up their minds between simply loving their only child and feeling like there is something fundamentally broken about me now.”
What say you, my dear queer diarists? Are your journals destined to go up in flames? Or are you already planning the exhibition on your journal-writing career?
“The night was deep and dark over Ellen DeGeneres’ Burbank mansion. Inside her mahogany themed living room, Ellen sat in a velvet high back chair and quietly sipped whisky out of a crystal glass.”
“I guess if I freak the fuck out so much at the prospect of someone reading my journal then I should probably stop doing the things I end up writing about but that seems unattainable at this point in my life.”
“I hated my body and punished it, and it hated me and punished me back. Is that what happened? That’s the thing about getting sick the way I got sick: nailing it down.”
“I did not intend to have any experiences outside the range of what I had previously proven to myself I was comfortable with or could understand. Scully and I both convinced ourselves that this was possible, that it had ever been a possibility.”
“The truth is always messy. I told myself I could be gay and I wouldn’t ever be hurt again. I needed to never be hurt again.”
“I was angry. Really fucking angry. Angry because Jenny Schecter was right.”
I finally feel safe enough to imagine the big queer family I never had. A home where gender is an option, not an obligation, where parents can apologize to each other as well as to their kids and where long, ongoing conversations about race, power and privilege exist.
“Netflix is kinda like my fag hag, the kind that wraps you up in a warm rainbow blanket with a bowl of soup when you’re recovering from a Cinco de Mayo hangover.”
How do I move past only feeling Native based on whether I fish or know the traditional ways? How can I push past feeling like my queer identity is tied to how much I listen to Uh Huh Her?
I imagine myself as not myself, at my grandparents’ apartment this Christmas, wearing makeup, a women’s blouse, long hair combed to the middle of my back: What he thought I would grow up to be, what my mom thought I would grow up to be.
I’ve been afraid to do so many things. This year, thanks to Autostraddle, I looked those fears in the eye, took action and started living my life the way I want to live it.
In 2013, who’d have ever thought I’d become so attached to a sociopathic meth king? Also, I love my skinny jeans and feel really conflicted about Pope Francis.
Can you sum up your year in three words? One song? It’s time to journal your year in review!