Turning Point

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

the men in my life are good men. recently at a hardware store one of the men in my life let me stand behind him, just a little, in that ghosting way that girls can learn. the disappearing technique we master of shadowing behind our Good Men. this was to protect me from a man who was not-being-good.

i fall down. one of the good men in my life offers me one arm like a knight, we are laughing while i clamber back onto my feet. i give the good men in my life piggy back rides because i like to show off how strong i am. i give the good men in my life run-at-them hugs. i let the good men in my life pick me up like i am a sack of grain; i get the good men in my life coffee, i make them sandwiches, i teach them dancing.

i am a man-hater, obviously. i am gay enough the insult is sort of funny. waiting for the bus, where there are men who are not-known-to-be-good, i google how to make a fist. i can never remember if the thumb goes on the outside or the inside, only that it is imperative that i do not fuck it up or i will break my thumb at the same time the man tries to break me. 

i walk my dog around the track only-at-dusk and-no-later. i made that mistake once, in august, hoping i could take a later run and maybe see the stars - i romanticized the idea of being able to skulk like a fox. the man that followed me across three lawns, two road-crossings, and back to my car - he spent the whole time whistling. the good men in my life say - oh, do you need me to come with you? and are actually asking - do you feel safe?

i fall down in a supermarket. a man i do not know grabs the inside of my knee. i do not know if the man is good, but i am supposed to give men the benefit of the doubt, so i laugh while standing. a man trying-to-be-in-my-life says what, no hug? and i have to decide if it worth it to just take off or put up with it. a man who-might-not-be-good stares at me while i walk by - i have to calculate if he’s just looking or if he’s watching. other men have badly hurt me, physically. the casual remark made is that those men are not real men. but they were real enough, to me.

there are many men who are mad at me. an entire reddit thread once was dedicated to how to dox me for feminist ranting - it was kind of funny, when it wasn’t downright scary. i have been stalked and harassed and treated horribly. they are all good men, in their own lives, you know. they are not violent, usually, unless provoked, and all it takes for a man to be good is for him to not be violent unless provoked, and i am, of course, always provoking.

a man in my life rolls his eyes. “i am sick of hearing this. we get it, all men are fucking evil. get over it.”

a man who-is-not-good shouts something unwritable at me. i have to tell the good man i am standing next to - it’s okay, this is nothing compared to what-could-be, this happens, it’s really not that big of a deal to me. 

first we must understand: there isn't a "wrong" way to be queer. i know this and you know this, we both understand this logically. the secret is that i still feel i'm often wrong in my queerness, somehow.

for a long time i identified as bisexual. i heard it a lot, then, about how to be queer the right way. i had multiple partners imply that i would eventually "choose" another gender. i was constantly inundated with requests for sexual favors. my queerness wasn't taken seriously by either straight people or other queer people - the assumption was that my queerness was temporary. even when i began exclusively dating women: when i called myself gay, i genuinely received hatemail about how the word gay was reserved for real queer people, not for bisexuals. i was invited to the party, essentially, but i wasn't invited warmly.

even now i see it. that any "straight appearing" couple is, in some way, not being "queer enough." that bisexuals shouldn't speak about their own queerness, that would be taking up too much space. that to be a real queer person, you must have some kind of list of (usually sexual) credentials.

so maybe that is where i learned it.

i've been out as a nonbinary lesbian for a while now; but i wonder about this a lot. i wonder if i would have figured it out sooner if i'd felt less pressure to act a certain way. heteronormativity versus my own community. maybe it is that i am on the spectrum but - there are moments where it feels like i'm not doing gay the right way. i think it's an observable truth that there are people who are more accepted in the community. that the community does shun others while still paying lip service to "diversity." that there is a visible in group, and an invisible out.

in part i know i do not "look" nonbinary. in part i know i do not "look" gay. yes, i know this is not technically a thing i am supposed to say - i am supposed to remind you that gender and sexuality has no true appearance. but this also just... isn't my lived experience. i know people do not look at me and see "they/them," and i know people do not look at me and see a lesbian. i lack a certain type of aura, i suppose.

and i want to have that, desperately. i want it to shine out of every pore of me. it just doesn't.

maybe it's because i was not raised with the same cultural touchstones that seem to pervade the constant narrative of what queerness "looks like." no i have not seen the L Word nor really any of the "queer media" legacies, but thank you for suggesting them to me. no i don't really know how to do carpentry. no i was not on a softball team - i did ballet, actually.

and i just do not have the same interests as often pervades every "queer event" in my locality. with all due respect, one can only do so much drag-bingo-brunch-drinking-trivia-comedy.

it is as if other queer people - cooler, more interesting, doing it correct effortlessly - are behind a glass door. i am allowed to watch. i am allowed even to be in the room. i just always feel like i'm a strange visitor, and unwelcome to it.

for the record, i want queerness to be bold and brassy and wild and free. i want rainbows and banners and shouting. i want us to remember the names of every person who worked for our freedoms, and i want us to do so loudly.

i go to these events and i can't help but feel: they're very lovely, but somehow, they're not for me.

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

24. The Queen with Three Cursed Children

25. Tiny Dragon with one coin hoard

26. Haunted house

27. Shark hero was about to go rogue

28. Grandma lives in the woods comic

29. A Different Aftermath comic

30. Battery (microstory but I love it so much)

31. It’s A Date comic

32. Supervillian kidnaps rival’s kid and they want to stay

33. Narrative Town

34. I have been hired to clean the wizard tower comic

35. Robot Apocalypse

36. The Statues That Do Not Weather

37. Kushiel

38. Tooth Fairy

39. Alien abduction

40. Felonious wish-granting

41. When humans met actual space orcs

(also, she was never judgey - if my meal was a single potato chip she would simply say good job eating a potato chip today <3 )