if anybody still remembers me, i still do exist. i’m not going to return to writing on here but i do have a blog if anyone is interested in seeing it. if you send me a message i can give you the URL.
things are going alright for me these days. i’m going to be moving out of this horror house in july, to move in with my sister. i am in the process of applying to some philosophy summer programs and if those go well, i will be applying to graduate school in the fall-winter. my mental health is fairly stable due to medication management; i’m no longer seriously suicidal nor am i self-harming to any significant degree. i was also diagnosed with ADHD- inattentive and will be attempting medical and behavioral intervention for that.
i’ve stopped hiding my tattoos and my septum piercing. this precipitated a meltdown in my mother but she’s settled now. it has been surprisingly liberating to be open about something so small, and to tell myself i can tolerate my mother’s (and other people’s) intolerance of my body and self.
i came out to my sister as bi and it was fairly anticlimactic. i think my mother, though still awful about everything, is privately coming to terms with the fact that I am probably LGBT.
i’ve been talking to a lot of people who understand themselves as dysphoric women (AFAB), or women under patriarchy with a particular sort of bad relationship to their bodies. i relate to these women very much, and i think adopting this lens with regards to myself is helping me manage my dysphoria and heal from the constant misogyny that informs my relationship with my body.
i’m very slowly coming to terms with my own embodiment, and learning to view myself from the inside out, or maybe not “view myself” at all, but to have an implicit sense of self through the way i experience the world, rather than a constructed set of horrifying images that were injected into me by patriarchy.
i’ve stopped thinking about gender identity, mostly, since i’ve removed myself from tumblr and other spaces where identity comes first and foremost. my issues are not a matter of which gender i am but a matter of being a person who and living in a body that is subject to forces of misogyny. if i have to understand myself as a woman to make sense of this, then i will do that, but it is not really an “identity”, just a pragmatic means or tool through which i can understand myself.
i generalized a lot of these realizations to be better in tune with myself, or my not-self, i guess. i realized i was hanging onto a type of reified self that was built out of and subject to evaluations by other people, where i was constantly buffeted by questions of what this or that “means” for my essential self and how i was to move forward if i was the X or Y implied by my actions and thoughts. i am in the process of letting go of such a self. i finally am able to approach my life and other people from a place of caring and valuing, a place of some sort of autonomy, rather than frantic, solipsistic anxiousness.
i decided to write this today because i am now comfortable with committing to eliminating men from my sexuality, for at least the time being. i realized i cannot have a healthy sexuality that includes men, and that a lot of my current (solo) sexuality revolves around basically obsessively insisting that i must follow heteropatriarchal norms around responding to and being attracted to men. i think this will give me the space i need to finally heal in this domain, and maybe have a relationship with some woman sometime somewhere.
i hope all of you are well. my time on here was stressful, but i learned so much from many of you and your personal and political struggles. good luck to everyone. i hope all of you can achieve growth, meaningfulness, and peace. i have yet to do this myself, but it looks more and more possible every day.
blakekathryn
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