identity

There are several terms that come to mind when I think of how I define myself as a person: activist, woman, and believer. Yes, I could label myself as a teenager, a vegetarian, or an atheist, but they only describe what I am, not what I believe in. These labels, in their own right, are both more complex and simpler than they would appear.

The most defining of these labels is my identity as a woman, which impacts my life on a daily basis. Being a woman may only mean that I do not have a penis and that, yes, I bleed, but it is also so much more than that. Being a woman means that I have seen and can identify with the oppression that women around the world face by dint of being women. Being a woman means that I have to deal with the conception that women are weaker physically and mentally. Being a woman means that, historically, I must do things twice as well to be considered half as good as a man. There is nothing more empowering or limiting than identifying yourself as a woman. In accepting the label of femininity, I have accepted the challenges that my gender faces in the search for equality in today’s society. In the past, women were almost universally perceived as being the weaker of the two genders, which led to the assertion of “male dominance.” These conventional stereotypes make it difficult to identify as a woman in that they project the historical view of the female and do not celebrate the individual strengths and weaknesses that each woman possesses.

I came out to my mom (and, consequently, probably the rest of my immediate family).

My friend R had been poking me to do it, telling me to "take the drama down about twenty notches," but that hadn't stopped me from curling up in my computer chair and wanting to throw up at the mere thought of doing it. After all, I am the girl who spent hours creating elaborate alibies to hide her trips to Giovanni's Room (especially when it meant meeting Alison Bechdel!), carefully choosing outfits that were "appropriately feminine," even if she really would have been more comfortable going about in drag that day and calling herself Andrew, etc.

I'm sorry that I haven't been as active as I'd like here. Right now's just been a pretty rough time, and every time I try to explain how I feel, it comes out very emo. We're talking "Stab My Heart Because I Love You" emo. Probably because I really don't have anything to be complaining about, but I do it anyway.

College has been an odd transition. Somedays, I am utterly beyond happiness about being here. I think to myself that my job for the next four years is to read and write and learn. And I love that. I love love love my classes, even if I wish I had taken an extra one. For example, I miss mathematics with the firey hot intensity of a thousand suns. (Please come back to me darling, even if it's just for a brief but passionate fling in Calculus!)

And sometimes I wish that classes were the entirety of the college experience. But they're not.

My husband left me because I was too fat. I guess it doesn't matter that when I first dated him I was thin, and he wasn't and that never mattered to me... but people can be like that. I know, it used to be so easy to get help at the grocery store. People went out of the way to be nice to you, friends came more easily because you looked "cool" and they would often be the ones to strike up the conversation.

Things were different after I gained all that weight. Friends dissapeared when things got bad all the more quickly, boyfriends got more sparse, people ignore me at the grocery store when I ask for help...I'm just a bother to them now it seems.

I am now offically 19 years old.

Which means I am only 11 years away from turning 30.

My birthday was mainly uneventful. My boyfriend bought me flowers, cake, oreos, cream soda, a sappy card and a sewing machine. We then headed out to dinner, rented some movies and spent the rest of the night cuddled up on the coach, until one of his friends came over and insisted on talking over one of the movies I was trying to watch.

Over the past year I have actually done alot. I completed a semester of college, moved twice, got pregnant, got my first job, quit my first job and did alot of other stuff too. I feel complete with what I have accomplished so far.

“ Dragonfly out in the sun
you know what I mean, don't you know
Butterflies all havin' fun
you know what I mean
Sleep in peace when day is done
that’s what I mean
And this old world is a new world
and a bold world
for me”
-Nina Simone, Feeling Good

I have just returned from my journey to the Old World.

Experiencing my homeland again was absolutely magical. They say that absence from a place will make it a stranger when you return, but that notion bore no truth for me as I reconnected with the old spirits, listing to those who had witnessed the eruption of new buildings and businesses complain about how everything was different…

I talked a while ago about being a slut, and thanks everybody for your comments!

I am a nerd. I loathe this label as well. Anyone in high school who is passionate about something other that sports is a nerd. I happen to have a few passions, and I find myself ashamed of them every so often.

Crochet. I love to crochet. It's fun, and practical. I make purses, hats, and some clothing. I'm making a skirt and an afghan at the moment. One of my best friends crochets, too. But I feel like a dork doing it in public. All the women at both my parent's offices think it's so cool, but they aren't there when I'm passing time at rehearsal, and some guy calls me an old lady.

"We can talk about anything you want, as long as you're naked." – Striptease (1996)

In the Christian Bible, Job was a man who was tortured by his God as a test of his faith. Poor Job ended up being the pawn in a heated argument between God and Satan. Today, we use the word "job" to refer to a torture that we endure as a test of our sense of irony. We're pawns in a heated battle between very different gods: corporate masters, enslaving the masses in a whole new social division known as "the middle class."

We middle classers don't have it too bad. We are expected to possess proficient English skills, but only moderately so, and may still engage in some enjoyable slang without fearing reprimand from our fellow MC'ers. We are expected to dress in a humble Wal Mart wardrobe, and can do better if we please, but don't have to wiggle into any corsets. We can afford fairly amusing entertainment, with a constant flow of Hollywood blockbusters to satiate any discontent amongst the masses. We even get to paste little patriotic stickers on our cars, so that we feel connected to our leaders. In general, we're a fairly well-taken-care-of population.

Feeling a lack of identity reading that summary? Sort of swallowed up in a mass statistic? Read on…

Today, for the first time in a few months, someone asked me, straight out, "Are you a lesbian?"

My gender identity falls under the slim category of "tomboy at a family function." I wear clothes I'm not necessarily comfortable in, that don't necessarily suit my personality, and that certainly don't suit my actions. What kind of girl wears a frilly pastel dress to jump fences and go jogging? Me, that's who.

Normally, I'm tickled pink when my sexuality is called into question-- on the queer side-- but today I got to thinking why it hasn't happened so recently. Is it because I'm passing? And what does my passing say to other queers and especially lesbians about gay sexuality?

I am a Chinese-American female living in New York. Having spent much of my life in New York City, I was exposed from an early age to Asian women of all varieties, from little girls with topknots to grandmothers with lined faces, weighed down with burdens not always physical. Just like any other race or ethnicity, Asian women display immense phenotypical variation.

So why is it that the media presents such a limited view of Asian women?

I love Amy Tan, but really, how far did "The Joy Luck Club" push boundaries on what Asian women are like? To me, it seemed that it helped reinforce the stereotypes that most already hold of Asian women.

When I ways in first grade, a friend of mine and I got so bored during class one morning that we started dividing our crayons into genders. Blue was male, yellow female; black was male, purple female. It was a no-brainer until we got to orange: Conny said it was definitely male, while I was convinced that it was definitely female. I was completely shocked that she'd think otherwise.

I don't remember how we resolved the problem of the intersex crayon, but this scene is the first thing that pops into my head when I think about gender stereotypes and how easily they come to all of us. Our culture is so steeped with gender stereotpyes that sometimes we don't even see them anymore and we are confronted with them every day.

I had the absolute delight, during this year's Seattle International Film Festival, of seeing an amazing film, writer/director Lynn Shelton's "We Go Way Back."

In the film, the lead character Kate, a woman in her twenties, is confronted with her 13-year-old self via letters she had written back then to her older self, one for every upcoming birthday.

On the website for the film, Shelton says: "I once heard a writer refer to the 20’s as a woman’s “geisha years”. Feeling a little lost, she seeks direction from those around her and expends enormous amounts of energy fulfilling the needs of everyone but herself—particularly men. I certainly went through this phase in my own life and what breaks my heart about it is that it was not a lack self-direction and self-respect but rather a loss. At thirteen, I possessed a clarity of vision and a degree of self-confidence that I marvel at today. Somehow, the experience of adolescence stole it all away and it took me years—decades, really—to get it back again.

Feminism is such an interesting and controversial issue.

At fifteen, many people would call my feminist ideas typical teenage rebellion. Well, it’s not.

When I was seven, my parents divorced because my mother is homosexual. I did not know this until the next year or so, because no one particularly thought it pertinent to tell a seven year old why her family is being ripped to shreds. But that moment, when my sister and I were sitting on top of a concrete drain tube in the woods on our property, I realized so many of the injustices in the world, and I began to see how many of them dealt with women in general.