After reading the interview with Gender Critical Dad  over at 4th Wave Now this morning, I found myself a bit dismayed (again) at the lack of … how to put it… lesbian guidance for young lesbians and their parents. I’ve often mentioned how frustrating it is that being a lesbian doesn’t come with a handbook, and I started to wonder if, hmm, maybe one should be written – at very least as blog post or a PDF!

So for all my readers who are lesbians, or if you identify as something other for whatever reason but “AFAB exclusively attracted to AFAB” could describe you, I would love some input as to what could have made accepting yourself as a lesbian easier for you – anything parents or family members or friends or even society in general could have done for you. I have a few points in mind already, but I’d love to get as many perspectives from as many different circumstances as possible.

I don’t think a day goes by I don’t read about internalized something. Internalized homophobia. Internalized misogyny. At first it wasn’t an easy concept to get my head around – you mean, I hate me like other people hate me? How could that be when I hate them for how they hate me? But it’s not a conscious choice, really, not like someone saying “Well, the Bible says gays are bad so I guess I’ll hate gays.”  It’s much more, I’ve found, about conditioning, about long years of the same behaviors and responses being reinforced until yes, I hate me just like other people hate me.

I’ve found myself down in a hole for the last couple months. Sure, it was stressful adjusting my life to help my mom out with her hip, and it also is that frustrating time of year between seasons that always gets me down. November and March/April have always been difficult for me. In November I just want winter to get on with it so I can enjoy Christmas, and by April I’ve had enough of winter. Around here, our trees are bare six months of the year.  Although there’s beauty in them naked in the snow, by this time of year when the landscape is dead yellow, burnt orange and gray every single day, week after week, a person begins longing for green.

But those two factors can’t quite add up to the black wall of unhappiness I’ve felt lately. I don’t like to say “depression” because I’ve never been formally diagnosed, and I certainly don’t have anything so bad that I can’t get out of bed and do things. But it’s a low key feeling of hopelessness and despair, mixed up with irritability and a touch of anxiety, and a noticeable absence of motivation. I can do things that are scheduled without too much difficulty (though it is difficult sometimes) but this blog? I’ve had three or four ideas since January I’ve never gotten down. It’s no wonder I went grasping at trans-straws at this same time last year.

It’s been really, really frustrating, and I’m getting tired of it. Because I look back years ago and though I’ve had some ups and downs I haven’t felt this great big black wall of immobilization and fear just stopping me like this. Like this feeling I can’t go forward. I mean I gave up and let go of a lot of stuff in the past year or so, threw my hands up and said, “Welp, the world ain’t fair!” but that kind of resignation shouldn’t lead to this. One would think the world would be more accessible and more beautiful without trying so hard to make it something it’s not.

So I thought back to this cognitive behavioral therapy do-it-yourself course I went through several years ago, and the question came up, “How does this serve you? How does your depression or anxiety serve you?”  How does feeling stuck in a black morass of cooling tar serve me?  The answer came while outlining my book, focusing on a scene when these two reluctant lovers finally have to face their feelings. The one who has been so cautiously hands-off the entire time just blurts out, “I don’t want you to hate me.”

I don’t want you to hate me like I hate me. I don’t want you to hate me like other people hate me which has taught me to hate me. And I’m not going to give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe you won’t hate me so I’m just going to sit here in my black morass and be fearful and feel sorry for myself.

That kind of rang a bell.

 

When I started learning about radical feminism and what it really means to be a lesbian, I started following a lot of radfem and lesfem blogs on Tumblr. And overall, it’s been an education, with highlights of touching base with some remarkable people I feel truly encouraged by. But on a daily basis, because of these blogs I follow, I read the messages over and over again: Men hate women. Everyone hates lesbians. Lesbians need to examine their sexuality. Lesbians need to consider lady dick. Someone is going to attack you in a bathroom, or someone is going to scream and have you thrown out for looking like a man. Everyone is going to fetishize you, and libfems aren’t any help at all.

I can’t say those things don’t all have a note or two of truth to them. I was asking myself why I still get emotionally caught up in reading about trans-activism when I’m no longer personally caught up in being trans. I mean yes, I care about lesbians accepting themselves as women, I care very much about young girls, but that’s what all my creative work is for.  But the trans-activist discourse is still bothering me, and it’s still bothering me because through it all I still feel the pressure that I’m still wrong, that someone is going to insist I should be a man, that someone is going to tell me that loving women just as they are isn’t a real thing. No one actually is telling me these things, but I’m taking in the messages day after day after day and it keeps echoing off all this internalized shit left over from before.

I can’t begin to say how empowering it has been to learn the words to name the problems this past year. But in naming them and coming to know them, and recognizing them within myself (Why can’t I appreciate the female lead of the new Star Wars Rogue One movie? Why do I think she’s less interesting because she’s conventionally pretty?) I find I’m overwhelmed. Deep down inside I want to sit and petrify at the bottom of my nice dark tar pit and not have to deal with any of it – not all of it out there, and not all of it built up in layers upon layers in me.

 

So I’m going to do some touchy-subject writing here in the next few weeks. I’m putting it down like that as a promise to myself. There’s some relationships I need to get off my chest; I need to feel I have the right to stand up and describe things that have hurt me, the people who have ground all this hatred and shame into my psyche. It’s not about blame – it’s just the unfair experiences of this world, the ways we trip and fall into each other and end up a mess with ourselves. Somehow, I think – I hope – getting it all off my chest will let in a bit of daylight.

I’ve always said we can’t begin healing until we’ve found all our wounds. And maybe in order to heal, we have to name what hurt us as well. A bullet hole isn’t the cut of a knife after all, and one can hurt me more than it might hurt you. So for the sake of diagnosis and repair, it’s time to put it all out there, in the hopes the exposition alone does some good.

 

 

When we think about behaviors people insist on, the question is, does this behavior substantially limit this person’s contribution to the world? If you had a friend who was a great artist, and they picked up a heroin habit, you’d say, “Hey idiot you’re denying the world great art by this dumb thing you’re doing! And yeah, heroin makes you happy, but you have value to the rest of the world beyond you being happy!”

A lot of my anger at the people who were cheerleaders for my transition is their enthusiasm for all these limits I was placing on my life- the black hole of time and money and energy transitioning is- revealed that they didn’t think I had much value. They didn’t say anything like, “What you could do with that time and money and energy if you directed it towards a goal beyond changing your body is so profound that this pursuit seems like a massive waste of what you are capable of.”

I mean, if they had said that I would’ve called them transphobic. But I still wish they had said it.

via The Adult Baby Story — Words by Maria Catt

I’m currently going through “Oh, where I was last year at this time” and it hasn’t been easy to remember.  On March 28th last year I announced to over a thousand tumblr followers (and a bunch of close friends) that I was an agender aromantic asexual who is going to explore their masculine identity and possibly transition and a new male name is coming soon.  That lead into months of basically spending all my time and energy on thinking about my identity and transition. Nobody ever questioned what I was doing, what I was so obsessed with, why I wasn’t doing anything else.

I got through it quickly enough and started looking for other ways of handling being me in this world, which is still always a big question. But after giving up on the trans identity and the focus on transition and so forth, you know what I did?  I started writing a long overdue novel that is now around 150k words. I started an intensive drawing course that has brought my art to whole new places. I started reconnecting with the gaming/writing community I’d lost touch with online, started interacting with them again. I started living and enjoying life, as scary and uncomfortable as it can sometimes be.

It seems that with these things, people are so focused on individual feelings that they don’t look critically at these identities and decisions. Thank you, Maria Catt, for once again picking it apart for us through your experiences and perceptions. You’re a treasure.

 

I love words. I truly do. I love finding just the right word with just the right meaning, splicing it into a sentence to communicate just the right perspective and nuance. We are addicted to words, I think, from the time we learn to speak them, when we realize shouting “Yes!” or “No!” gets a reaction from those around us. We call out names and people come. We declare our favorite things for others to note for birthdays and Christmas presents. We pick and choose and scrabble and scramble to find the words to best define ourselves.

Every time a new face appears before us, a dictionary opens in those complex language centers of our brains. How can I communicate to this new person who and what I am? What words can I use? These days, such statements wax poetic like some new form of haiku on our social media profiles. Feminist. Artist. Loves cats and birds. Let me tell you who I am and what is important to me in the best words I know right now.

The old saying – five words in itself – lingers in the background: Actions speak louder than words. Most of the time, it’s a condescending piece of advice or a criticism of someone whose proverbial bark is worse than their proverbial bite. Don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk. But underneath it is a greater truth, one too often shied away from in favor of words. Words have certainty. Words have a kind of familiar comfort we can cling to. Action – experience – is always so variable, surprising, undefinable, indescribable.

Sometimes we need surprises.

A little background: I live with my mother. I’ve lived with my mother, well, all my life, really. But after a certain age you have to use those words differently: I am an adult living with a parent. Since my father and brother moved out of the family home when I was sixteen, my mom and I have made our way through the various phases of being here together. Until my mid-twenties it was understandable, and then I started getting the question, “Do you still live at home?” To which I always wanted to answer, “Yes, don’t most people live at home? Don’t you?”

By thirty everyone deemed me a failure at life and my mother dependent on me because that was their interpretation of the words “Yes, I still live at home.” Let me tell you this: not everyone has the opportunity to live in a large two-story family home with just one other person on two acres of semi-rural woodland with a nice town down the road and major highway access five minutes away. Yes, there have been compromises and knots to work out – and we still have our moments – but I’ve been able to live in a beautiful, comfortable place where I can afford to concentrate on creative work, and my mother has not had to live on her own. Now that she’s into her 70’s, friends and family are finally beginning to tell her, “It’s a blessing you live with your daughter!” How interpretations of words change over time and circumstance!

It’s a blessing for people – especially family members –  to be able to share their lives, care about each other, and have a mutually beneficial relationship. That’s probably the least sentimental way I can put it.

Anyway, three weeks ago, on a cold, icy morning, my mom went out to get the newspaper, making the trek across our snowy yard and long driveway. I thought she was taking an awfully long time, and even went to the window to look for her. As soon as I did, I heard the door open, and she stumbled in with terrible slowness and dropped into one of the dining room chairs: she’d taken a bad fall on the slick icy snow.

For years now she’s told her doctor she doesn’t want to treat her osteoporosis with anything except calcium supplements, because she’s tough as nails and rather proud to boot. Tough as nails, she denied breaking anything – certainly not a hip! – but at the same time couldn’t walk without support. She took to her usual healing methods of intense resting (she does everything rather intensely) and I took to taking care of everything that needed taking care of.

This kind of thing shakes you up. Drop everything; we have a health concern in the house. Nothing is ever more important than easing pain and healing injury. I immediately took over the morning chores of getting up at 7AM to feed the cats and so forth. And this action, undertaken out of necessity, swept all the words away.

The second morning after her fall I woke up to the cats crying for breakfast, fed them, cleaned the kitchen, then as it was garbage day I went about gathering up trash – all the trash – to take outside. The morning was crisply cold, down in the teens, white with a fresh fall of snow and blue with a clear sunny sky. Long gold sunbeams beams struck through the trees, little crystalline flakes sparked in the wind. I put on my barn coat and boots, trudged out with trash to burn and compost for the pile and a bag to put out by the road. It was so cold my legs grew numb through my jeans; it was so beautiful I couldn’t close my eyes. I checked on my little oak sapling, covered with netting to keep the deer away. I stood and stirred the burning trash, soaking up the heat and the smell of the smoke. I poured out seed on the deck railings for the chattering chickadees who came to land on my fingers. And I hadn’t felt so happy and alive in ages.

Words get in the way. “I’m not a morning person,” I’ve said since my teenage years. “I’m a night owl.” I had a reputation attached to those words and I clung to them, long after I’d grown out of staying up until two or three and lingering in bed past ten. I let my mom do the morning chores and would linger in bed looking at the Internet. “I have a hard time getting up,” I’d tell her. “I’m not like you.”

And maybe I’m not the dynamo she has always been, bouncing out of bed at 6:30 AM for as long as I can remember. Or at least, as long as she’s had to, as a wife and mother taking care of a family and getting to work. It’s taken her until now to ease back from that definition of herself, to stay in bed past seven, past eight. And it’s taken me until now to reconcile my love of mornings with an old, rebellious definition of myself. Now, even as she’s back on her feet, I’m still getting up at 7 to feed the cats and do the morning chores. And I love it. I love feeling alive.

It’s made me wonder how often our words keep us from fully experiencing our selves, our lives. Every word, every sentence, has limitations built in to every syllable, compounded by every individual’s unique interpretation. How can you love mornings if you’re a night owl? Are you butch or are you femme? Masculine or feminine? The word queer is reclaimed with its history of insult covered over by the hipness of the Huffington Post, and everyone is grasping at identities that will somehow communicate who and what they are, who and what they love, when what is their experience? What are the actions behind the words? What is the truth of existence that in the end, can’t be served by being strictly defined?

How many words could I use to describe the rightness of being pulsing through me like a heartbeat as I stood in my boots and my barn coat in two inches of fresh snow, staring at the sun through the trees?  Saying everything is right, everything is just as it needs to be, but damn why did I cut my hair so short six months ago to be a “lesbian” again, why did I buy all that men’s clothing believing I was “trans”, why did I immerse myself in words and definitions and what could I be and how could I say it when everything I ever was lay right here at the tips of my fingers? We are vast and unique and undefinable, indescribable. We could use all the words in all the books ever written and still only begin to explain our experience.

I still love words. I still love trying to use them the best I can, and I still love the words others write that I can relate to, that describe experiences near to my own so I don’t feel quite so alone. We have to use words, especially here where our actions and experiences go unseen. But always, always, it must be remembered: the words on the surface are just a fraction of the whole. The words are a mere humble attempt. They are a beacon, a flash in the night, but the light itself is blinding.

Sometimes we need to be blinded, to go back and sense and feel, listen, touch life without trying to explain it. Truth lies there, without language, between our thoughts and our selves, between each other. The definitions drop away and suddenly we just are what we are, in freedom and relief, simple and silent and more real than anything we could ever say.

But oh, if we could say it. And so we keep trying. 1,605 more words.

I hadn’t listened to Dar Williams in a while but today this song came up. I found I had a much deeper perspective on it than I did when I first heard it years ago. Seems like it needs to make the rounds to a lot of kids these days.

I wont forget when Peter Pan
Came to my house, took my hand
I said, “I was a boy”
Im glad he didnt check

I learned to fly, I learned to fight
I lived a whole life in one night
We saved each others lives
Out on the pirates deck

And I remember that night
When Im leaving a late night with some friends
And I hear somebody tell me
Its not safe, someone should help me

I need to find a nice man to walk me home
When I was a boy
I scared the pants off of my mom
Climbed what I could climb upon

And I dont know how I survived
I guess I knew the tricks that all boys knew
And you can walk me home
But I was a boy, too

I was a kid that you would like
Just a small boy on her bike
Riding topless, yeah
I never cared who saw

My neighbor come outside
To say, “Get your shirt, ”
I said “No way, it’s the last time
I’m not breaking any law”

And now I’m in this clothing store
And the signs say less is more
More that’s tight means more to see
More for them, not more for me
That can’t help me climb a tree in ten seconds flat

When I was a boy, see that picture? That was me
Grass-stained shirt and dusty knees
And I know things have gotta change
They got pills to sell, they’ve got implants to put in

They’ve got implants to remove
But I am not forgetting
That I was a boy too

And like the woods where I would creep
It’s a secret I can keep
Except when I’m tired
‘Cept when I’m being caught off guard

And I’ve had a lonesome awful day
The conversation finds its way
To catching fire-flies
Out in the backyard

And I so tell the man I’m with
About the other life I lived
And I say now you’re top gun
I have lost and you have won
And he says, “Oh no, no, can’t you see

When I was a girl, my mom
And I we always talked
And I picked flowers
Everywhere that I walked

And I could always cry
Now even when I’m alone I seldom do
And I have lost some kindness
But I was a girl too
And you were just like me
And I was just like you

Gorgeous.

“If you think you’re trans, you probably are.”

“Can you imagine waking up as the opposite sex and being okay with it? If so, you’re probably trans.”

Today is the six-month anniversary of the day I woke up and said to myself there has to be another way. There has to be another way to handle this “gender dysphoria” thing; there has to be another way to approach and unwind the confusion and discomfort I’ve struggled with since my childhood. It took me a while to find that way, to sort through a lot of outside perspectives and a lot of personal pain, but it did eventually all unravel. Last night while I was putting on my pajamas and catching glimpses of myself in the mirror I thought, “I would never want to be anything but a woman. There is nothing anyone could do or say to me that would make me want to change into a man.”

I was struck by that thought at that moment – you know when you think something that surprises you?  It made me pause, because a little more than six months ago I believed wholeheartedly in those two statements at the top of the page. I wanted to wake up in the morning and be a man, because I had thought about being trans so I probably was.

It’s amazing how our thoughts and beliefs can change once we step back and look at them objectively.

My last post here brought up some interesting commentary about childhood escapism, fixations and fantasy worlds that helped us cope with growing up a little different in such a homogenized world. It made me, to use an old and perhaps oddly related turn of phrase, “lie back and think of England.”  I’ve been in love with England since I was eleven-years-old and read James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small. I’m not sure exactly what it was, some passing similarity to the things I loved most about my own home – the green fields, the Sunday dinners – with less of the things that rubbed me the wrong way, like American gun culture, pressures to be a girly-girl and “date boys” (I put it in quotes because of the way my Midwestern mother always says it, that draws to mind images of 1950’s boys buying milkshakes for girls in poodle skirts in chrome diners.)  I watched British sitcoms about intelligent and funny old people and built models of spitfires to the Two Fat Ladies on their motorcycle with their pounds of butter; I was frightened by the daleks AND Tom Baker’s Doctor on PBS, intrigued and amused by The Hitchhiker’s Guide and spent a few months asking my friends to call me Zaphod. Later on I read books about Nelson and wrote about the Royal Navy and painted pictures of sheep on hillsides of the Yorkshire Dales. Several years ago I made 300-some tea sandwiches for an afternoon tea for my mother’s church, because I insisted they be authentic and not bastardized American versions. I perfected the scone and the plum pudding even though it was hard to find the right ingredients. And then I actually went over there for three weeks, stayed with a friend and tasted real cask ales in a real pub (and back bacon and sausages, mmm) and never, never, never wanted to go home.

I really can’t tell how much I love it without going on for another few paragraphs. I know it’s not some perfect utopia – I’ve seen poor parts and ugly parts and have read UK news and politics – but there’s something about it all that has been so precious to me for so long that makes England such a dear, beloved part of my life. In my perfect vision of the future, I end up in a nice little cottage in a nice little village where I can go have a pint every day and buy phenomenal cheeses at Sainsbury’s, and there’s a great place for curry that delivers nearby.  But that’s an escapist fantasy, isn’t it?

I asked myself last night what I would have done if, at a low point in my life – like last year, when I was out of work and directionless, embarrassed about leaving the only really lucrative job I’d ever had, battling with terrible depression about that, lonely for my friends who had moved on to other pastimes, socially isolated, anxious about my health and everything else – someone had come to me and said, “You could be English, you know, if you wanted to be. You could just BE that, if you love it so much. If you could just wake up tomorrow and live that life, wouldn’t you? After all, you sure do think about it a lot.”

It seems like a ridiculous comparison, but in all honestly, the angst I felt when I came home from those three weeks in England to my middle-class American life was not unlike the angst I felt when the trans narrative promised me I could live comfortably if I just identified as trans. Sure, it would take hormones and name changes and surgery and all this other stuff, but I’d be happy, right? After all, I could imagine it. I thought about it a lot. It lined up with so many things that were already a part of me –

And if I had five million dollars I’d pick up and restart my life in England. Bacon and sausages, here I come.

But both of those things are pure fantasy, pure escapism. One of the most painful things I experienced after July 20th was sitting down and admitting to myself that I’m a lesbian and I’m going to have to live with that. I’m going to have to deal with people not liking me because of it. I’m going to have to deal with there always being this chasm between myself and my straight friends. I’m going to have to deal with homophobia, internal and external. I’m going to have to deal with being one of those gay people myself.

I’m going to have to deal with my real life. Accept it and deal with it, everything about it, from my lack of work and financial success to my living arrangement with my mother to my sexuality to my gender non-conformity and the way I can’t always trust my mental state. I’m going to have to look at this and accept this for what it is because there ain’t no quaint English cottage in this American girl’s future.

(Well, let’s not write that off just yet -)

The funny thing is, eight years ago when I finally came to terms with being a lesbian, when I finally climbed out of the denial built on years of a conservative upbringing where it wasn’t an option, I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t go online and google “Am I a lesbian?” and nobody offered “If you think you’re a lesbian, you probably are.”  Nobody asked if I would be happy if I woke up a lesbian tomorrow.  I watched Helen Mirren kiss Kyra Sedgewick in a clip from the movie Losing Chase (just a clip mind you!) and said to myself, “Oh my god, yes.”  I’d been thinking about it, roleplaying a more definitively female character than any I’d ever had, and gosh, she wanted to kiss that other female character just like that. Just like that. There were no questions or doubts. It was crushing and terrifying, yes, but also expansive and wonderful.

I remember years later going to sleep at night after roleplaying or writing or just watching a certain movie or tv show and thinking, man, no matter what happens, nobody can ever take this away from me. Nobody can ever stop me from loving women and I will love women until the day I die because it is just that true and pure. It was just an essential fact of my life, no fantasy, nothing to escape to, nothing else to try to be.

And I felt that last night, for the first time, really, about being a woman myself. As corny as it sounds, I felt proud to be female. I felt rich and powerful in my own skin, with nothing but pajamas on, on a cold night with no partner to go to bed to and no money coming in and no trips to England planned. It just was some clear, essential fact I’d finally come to terms with. Maybe I got “sir’ed” at the grocery store the same day, maybe I had a slight panic attack because an old man insisted on kissing my cheek, but at the end of the day, I was all right. I was all right, at last, with this body, this life, this existence as a female human being. I could finally deal with this.

Six months, or six months and thirty-eight years later. Finally. I just had to write about it today.

 

It’s strange to be a woman who doesn’t want to look pretty. It’s strange to be a woman who doesn’t own a skirt or a dress or a pair of women’s shoes. It’s strange to be a woman who doesn’t wear makeup. It’s strange to be a woman who doesn’t care for the company of men. It’s strange, at times – very strange.

I say these things knowing that many women who read them here might very well say, “That’s not strange! I’m just like that, too!”  And thank heavens for that, thank heavens I’ve finally found some kindred souls. But I say it’s strange relative to the women I see every day out in the world, on TV, in the media. Every time I leave the house I keep my eyes open for any woman like me, but seldom find them. I grew up without any female role models I could identify with. I grew up thinking I was strange and alone.

Not that I didn’t try to find role models, especially when I would run into a woman I found attractive and appealing in some way. We could even call it the League of Their Own Narrative. I was in high school when A League of Their Own hit the theaters and liked it so much I had the soundtrack on cassette (with James Taylor’s lovely It’s Only A Paper Moon) and the movie on VHS. We all remember Geena Davis in that movie, right? Before she got into archery and telling Hollywood to put more women in films. This wonderful woman:

I admit, I swooned. And not only swooned, I saw a woman I could relate to. Like her, I was a little taller, a little broader, than the girls around me. I too had big features (though I rounded out the set with a big nose, too) and was very good at throwing and catching baseballs. That movie – bless it – was designed to provide heroes for girls, and I so badly wanted that hero –

And then Bob came home from the war.

For those unfamiliar, Bob is the incredibly nice husband to Geena Davis’s Dottie, and she gives up her incredibly promising baseball career to go home with him. Nothing can change it or alter the storyline. Bob comes home and at that moment my heart would sink and I’d lose interest in the rest of the movie (except, of course, the part where the little sister yells at her for it. Good on you, little sister. I’m right with you there.)  She wasn’t my hero after all. She wasn’t really like me.

At some point I simply stopped trying to find women like me and gave in to the prevalence of men. After all, there were men who were “not like other men”, who were sensitive and creative and interesting, who seemed to exist outside of the usual roles. Those men became my role models, and I loved them dearly, always working very hard internally to keep them separated from mainstream male roles. So dedicated was I to keeping them separate that when I would find one of them was married to a woman – and, mind you, they were all celebrities or fictional characters, of course – I would be crestfallen. He wasn’t, after all, something different, something like me. He was just another man married to just another woman just like everyone else. Once again I was left with no one to relate to, no person anything like me anywhere. Just always men, either overshadowing the lives of the women I loved or simply existing instead of any alternative.

It was like finding a pile of broccoli on your dinner plate every day when broccoli turns your stomach and makes you gag.

But I ate my broccoli, because it was all I had. And I felt I had to. I ate so much broccoli I thought I might just become broccoli myself. There was just so much broccoli everywhere I turned, always shoved in my face, always at the end of every pursuit of something else. I look at it now and it feels somewhat like being an atheist in a room full of Christians. Everyone else is seeing something, believing in something, touched and comforted by something I just don’t comprehend. In my experience, going to church as an atheist is boring at best and alienating at worst. Heterosexuality and the overwhelming, pervasive influence of men is, as lesbian, boring at best and alienating at worst.

But what else is there?

It took me until almost sacrificing myself to realize that if I have to live on crumbs I find under the table then I will go under the table and find those crumbs. In fact, if I can get enough of them to strengthen myself, I will go in the kitchen and start cooking with the ingredients I can find. Because no one else is going to provide strong female role models if we don’t provide them ourselves. No one is going to write authentic lesbians if we don’t write them ourselves. No one is going to embrace and support and nurture us so that we don’t feel so strange if we don’t do it ourselves.

During my teenage years, I spent a lot of time writing about a “strange farm girl no man could ever love” and the man – not like other men, of course – who proves her wrong. With a new perspective I revisited this story, this tome of wishful thinking, and I snapped my fingers: why not do what Geena Davis recommends, and make that male role a female role? If I did so, if I wrote the story of two women learning they are worthy of each other’s love, it would become the story I had so needed to read when I was fifteen years old and feeling so helpless and alone. I started rewriting the story (which, coincidentally or not, now made so much more sense) with Nanowrimo in November. I’m about halfway through now and nothing has been more healing. It’s like finally having good food and pure water and a warm bed to sleep in. It is a joy every time I sit down with it. If I try to express in words how inspiring and beautiful it has been I will take far too much of your time.

In my last post I wrote about wanting to center women in my artwork as well, and over the past weeks began to put that resolution into practical application. Could I practice figure drawing, for example, with no male models? Could I only draw and paint women – not as a creative pursuit but in everyday practice? It took some doing to find references of female nudes that weren’t affected by the male gaze, that weren’t pornographic in some way, all breasts and bottoms and arched backs and slightly-parted lips. I don’t want women who have been turned into men’s playthings. I don’t want men in any way involved.

Because now when I draw a woman I’m drawing a person I would love to love. I am drawing her in all her physical presence and all her expressed personality – and without makeup, without high heels, without men. I am drawing the women I needed to see when I was young. My art has never been better and I’ve never enjoyed it more or intensely cared about it more. I keep asking myself, can I get away with this?  Can I state as an artist that I focus my creative energy on female subjects alone? Will there be backlash?  Will there be criticism? Will there be someone telling me to eat my broccoli?

In the back of my mind, I still feel guilty about that broccoli. I still feel I’m doing something wrong, that I’m disrespecting all the good men out there, that I’m being selfish and indulgent, that maybe – oh, perhaps maybe – I feel they will always condemn me for succumbing to this “twisted perversion” called homosexuality. But if we don’t get selfish and indulgent and give ourselves what we need for the sake of who we are, who will?

I’ve spent most of my life feeling entirely alone, sitting in a corner sadly poking at the broccoli on my plate. And that diet of broccoli lead me down a path I never want to revisit again. Can a person be blamed for saying “No more”? No more broccoli, please. I have something else that nourishes me so much more.

This past week I saw a post on tumblr of Captain Phasma from The Force Awakens, claiming she is “genderfluid.” As if there is some part of her that might not be a woman, some broccoli wedged under her stormtrooper helmet, apparently because her armor has no giant breasts. Step off. Just step off. We will take back every crumb that is our own.

And in the meantime, I’ve got a few things cooking.