Tough Night...November is a shitty month.

I've been working on some necessary art.

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/05/10/Bill-C38/

On space and acceptance.

Part one.
I went to a radical activist conference and realized that I stopped "putting the stick down".
I am still drawing lines around myself, holding myself at arm's length (or more) from everyone else, and refusing to be seen, terrified that no one will want to know me.

On love and objects

Like many poor people I have a habit of collecting things.  My grandparents were influential in my life, and they lived in wartime, and so, hoarded food and supplies against potential lack. I like to have extra of things. My childhood involved a fair bit f getting sent away, and so I developed the idea that love, too was something one could hoard and hang onto, in the form of gifts and momentos from loved ones.

Today I realized, for the first time, that I can count on both hands and keep going, the people who love me and would be there for me. It is remarkable. I do not think I need to hang onto all this stuff to try to keep that love and those people in mind.  If the relationships should dissolve, it is nothing a boxful of crap or a stuffed animal will solv anyhow.

It was an incredible lightening, and I am emptying my house.

Back

The runes say to keep journeying forward.

I am terrified.  K an I were talking the other day about a conversation she'd had with a good guy friend of hers the other day about the prevalence of violence in our society, and about how the threat of it is not absent from the lives of men, but that rather than the constant fear of rape, men live with the fear of getting caught in a physical fight that they cannot escape/win.

The conversation she had had was about being physically large and/or intimidating or imposing being something which prevents these fights from starting in the first place, and which, for some women, can be something which prevents sexual assaults, or at least offers a degree of seeming freedom from fear. 

Feeling like one can handle onesself in a fight or altercation offers a degree of protection.

As I enter into the beginning of this, it feels scary to be swapping one set of fears for another.  To go from being a strong woman, to a vulnerable guy.

I'm having a hrd time letting go of the girl. the "pretty face" - so long the only thing about my physicality that anyone was willing to validate - and I'm wondering if there's going to be anything left that anyone will want...

I'm used to being a pair of tits, a hole, a pretty face, a servant, a masochist. -used to trading on the body and the bits for the things I need - respect, honour, love, care, affection, a sense of place and belonging. 

I want a place to belong that has nothing to do with my flesh.

I am tired of waiting on others to tell me when I am finally good enough. Tired of hoping to pass the test enough times, to pass enough times, to finally look good enough,  or fit in enough, or somehow convince others, adn through them, myself that I deserve to be here - wherever that is at any given time.

I have passed as a girl a lot. For the family business, I spent some years as a "nice girl". Coming up north to do a teaching degree, I again passed as "teacher" - long hair, plain makeup, then got a more radical haircut for the Master's degree, but I cant do it.  I don't want to be a woman - never did - I could cope with being a girl, grrl was better, but woman was never something I aspired to or wanted to grow up into. 

 I would have told you that I was ok with being a girl, but that I want to grow up to be something else...