On pain and rage and school shootings.

This most recent school shooting has caused a lot of hate-filled writing about the young man who did shooting.  Sensationalist media are looking for any kind of oppressed minority to which they can attach his name, so that they can further demean and ridicule him, and incite further hate, it is sickening.

He had a mental illness. Yes, that seems clear, and that he wasn't being adequately helped is also clear.

He was autistic / had aspergers. So do many, many other people who do not perpetrate violent crime. Yes, people with autism spectrum disporders sometimes have sensory overload, but so does everyone else. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by your life, and yelled about it? That's about it.

He was a masochist. Well, this is based on anecdotal evidence that he burned himself with a lighter. So did I, so do many many other young people.  It is one of two things.  1.  Adolescent male rituals of strength and endurance, or self harm by those who don't know any other outlet for the pain and rage that they feel and do not want to take it out on others!  If someone noticed it, they needed to talk to him, and get him help, not identify him as a masochist. 

I'm writing a lot on liminality lately, those moments where we are held suspended in between firmly-rooted states of being.

Liminality is a vulnerable space, if only because in not-fitting social categories we challenge others' perceptions of their boundaries, and make them uncomfortable, but also, because in those moments we can be, or can feel unable to, move forward without the reassurances we are used to having.

An illness is a transition, from a state of wellness, through uncertainty, to something else, perhaps full health, and perhaps, a new (lesser or different) state of health. 

So too, a change in gender, or becoming aware of one's sexual orientation.

For me, being "mixed race" was a site of liminality in my life, and something which could not be avoided, although I found myself trying at various times to move more clearly into one or the other "category" simply to divest myself of the discomfort and difficulty of negotiating the world as someone outside of clearly defined categories.

Ramble

At the Spirit of the North Conference, which was incredible, i found myself in another conversation defending the right to have queer space without allies.  I feel like sometimes it matters that there be in my life people who exactly get what is going on, and that there is room for queer only, or gimp only groups, and that is also space for larger groups which include partners, friends, and allies.

I still find myself feeling excluded though, and I was wondering why, because it wasn't anything anyone else was doing, so I thought I should take a look at what it might be that I am doing and I think it is this:

I am so used to having to fight for the right to be accepted in spaces that I find myself on a kind of automatic pilot at times, caught between these two polar opposite modes of being.  One, a kind of silent defensiveness, waiting, and hoping desperately that I will be welcomed and acknowledged in that space for who I am and allowed to speak and participate; and the second a kind of defensiveness which states that this isn't a space where I would want to participate anyway.

It is partly about feeling like I do not belong or fit in, so insecurity, but it is partly about a history of systemic bias, of being rejected on the basis of things I could not change.  Being female, being fat, being queer, being too black, or too Estonian, being an atheist.  I have built a layer of defense against institutional rejection which is now hampering me.  It is interesting, because I do not like to think of myself as tender hearted.  I think I was initially, but inequities really cut me to the quick, and being unable to change them really became something to innure myself against. 

Tough Night...November is a shitty month.

I've been working on some necessary art.

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