I'm building resilience. (Welcome to the journey. )

But i recently got these tarot cards designed by a qpoc. And I've always kinda been into that shyt, but not /really/ yknow?

Okay wow. Theres a lot. Lets start with mentorship.

Ive made a full circle. I need to learn to support the part of myself that so desperately wants someone else to protect him. And /had/ people for over a year to protect child unicorn. Still sort of does? But im back tracking because my intuition is telling me to run. (Is that trauma or self preservation?) I cant tell and im gaslighting myself really bad. I cant tell if they want me to leave or if i should just leave because i need to learn to trust myself now. I know something has changed but i dont even know what. And it doesnt help that this other friend told me that these people told them that they didnt actually wanna be there in this persons life it was 'obligation', and im fucked up & so im like 'omfg does this mean they dont wanna be in my life' and regardless of whether thats true or not, thats sucha fucked up thought process. So i need to put that on pause and figure out what it means to trust myself and be my own fucking savior. Not like project onto someone else, even if its consenting that doesnt mean its healthy if im constantly gaslighting myself. My heart has broken so much this year, but also this doesnt feel like heart break. This feels like i know what i need to do to protect myself, knowing these people are prolly gonna be in my life forever in some capacity, even if its messages like "hey thinking of you today", but knowing that somehow theres some energy or vibes or something thats telling me to disappear for a bit. And thats scary. Im 26 but part of me is still that traumatized child who finally found per "forever home" or whatever. But we find home in moments. Me from last year will always have a home in those spaces and conversations. And me now in may 2018 needs to build a new house that can fit the slightly more grown version of child unicorn.

Im trying to conceptualize this as a positive thing. I love these people more than anything, literally id do anything for these people and i dont think thats ever gonna change. And also, even if my intuition is accurate, that doesnt mean im not loved or im not worthy of love or i fucked up/made a mistake etc. I existed in consenting relationships i needed and thats okay.

I also need to cry about this. Just let myself cry. And also while im at it, cry about my platonic ex soul partner who i miss months later. And cry about all the fucking heart break. Even if its passive. Even if its me just pulling away because im traumatized and dont trust the people i trust most in the world. (And dont even trust myself to make that differentiation between trauma & intuition).

Idk. I wish this was easier. I could just ask for more validation that we are okay and it hadnt changed. But i need to start validating myself and actually being in control of my own emotions. Basically for the time being, im not letting myself communicate w these people in the same way i did before even if its fucking hard. Its fucking me up. But i know i have to do this to ensure i can survive. And to show myself i can take care of myself. Maybe im running before they hurt me. I dont know. I dont fucking know. Im going in circles now. This helped. Processing helped. I am okay. Everyone is okay. We are all still worthy of love. I can still send them love. Love multiples and therefore when i send love, i feel love back. Trauma/child brain is like "theyre done w you, they dont love u anymore, run", the child part. The part of me that got abandoned and neglected by my dad. I will hold that part of me and tell per that no one is abandoning me. That specifically /i/ am not abandoning me. That im still right here. That im gonna protect little child unicorn. This is what activists mean when they say "show up for yourself". This feels okay. This is healing. My eyes teared up when i typed what child brain thinks. Im letting myself tear up. Its okay. We are human and healing & its powerful. <3

damn abandonment trauma is real. 

like i got a workbook. i started taking notes. i mean, in classrooms we’re taught to take notes with the hopes that our brains will finally absorb some of the info. maybe if i memorize the symptoms of complex ptsd, i’ll finally stop thinking all my friends hate me. but there’s a difference between legitimately acknowledging changes in friendships and that perceived abandonment shyt. there’s no reasoning with the latter ; 

my personal fave is, ‘maybe i made a mistake with getting too close’, and it’s like boi. what is the literal point of having friends if you’re not gonna get close to them? and when i can’t answer my own question, i talk around it in circles. but i keep thinking theres a utopia somewhere. i mean, gabby rivera’s instagram is probably not the best source of ‘real life’ considering she writes America Chavez - the superhero comic books but she seems to have so many qpocs in her life, and I feel like she probably doesn’t deal with ‘perceived abandonment’, but I also have so many qpocs in my life, and this is actually why Instagram doesn’t work as a reality check and why I never downloaded the app. 

Do trans hindus from the indian diaspora even exist? Is there a tag for that? The person who taught me the word diaspora also tried to convince me that my friends hated me.  we work together now. i would spend some time discussing dual relationships, but i’m still a trans boi with anxiety regardless. 

Hey tumblr,

I am wondering today, what does it mean to exist? Why do we need to see ourselves represented in someone else to feel like we’re real?

Is just /being/ and /surviving/ enough? i am a trans hindu and thus far, i havent met another human like me. I barely know /any/ hindus and when i meet them, they’re never trans. 

And this morning, i had an existential moment where I considered for a second just not being hindu because it’d be a lot easier. but for me, hinduism isn’t a choice or a set of things i have to do , it’s my world view. my way of conceptualizing life and everything around me. my way of making sense of the earth and trees and the sunlight.

so i obviously cant change that, because ive spent my entire life finding /this/ world view and have integrated it with who i am. so i need to continue to /exist/. because i. need. to. exist. i am real, no matter who represents part of my experience.

honestly though and this is some fucked up real talk, i dont write this shyt anywhere. while i love identifying as a qpoc and a person of color, i miss the days before i knew what that was. i felt a lot less alone then. like, i dont feel /alone/, but i feel like im the only trans hindu person, which like, i literally am in this city at least. but like, before i knew any of this, before i just knew ‘LGBTQ’, it was easier because i found ways to identify with white people, and there are so. many. white. people. to identify with. exclusivity is sucha trigger and the moment i see myself as ‘different’ from them, i get triggered. or ‘other’ or on the ‘outside’, but i AM all these things, and its fucked up. and now, i find myself pushing away the people who love me, so deeply. and i dont wanna do that anymore. i dont wanna push the people in my life away. love has gotta be stronger than that, right? like i just miss not knowing that qpoc was a thing and hindu was an identity because it was easier than now -- trying desperately hard to see at least one person like me and knowing thats not real life.

im excited to go to san fran and see my two aunts. like, im so excited, theyre not queer, but they love me, and i think i need to not be here for a while. but also trauma doesnt let me be excited for anything til its happening and even then it doesnt feel real.

idk. ive posted some fucked up real shyt here, like, i need to keep doing that i think. this is good. this is a good place to be. like it hurts ,but it feels good to have this space. 

Hi tumblr universe,

I’m wondering -- when do we feel safe? What even is safety?

I think that for myself, I spent a long time feeling unsafe. I was trying to drown my emotions, and cover them up and paint over them - but in reality, I have felt unsafe and scared for a long time. I don’t even feel real most days - it’s like, time sorta stopped when the trauma began, but somehow I’m 25? Somehow I’m still growing and learning? I asked my prof if trauma symptoms could result from systematic identity erasure. She said she has no doubt in her mind that  they can.

I want to share that knowledge with everyone, because I think not feeling safe is actually a legit response to the shyt queer and trans folks, esp qtibpoc go through every fucking day.

But how do we heal from this? Alok Vaid Menon (poc trans femme artist/activist/celebrity) wrote, how do we heal from PTSD when there’s no post? That question resonated with me, because there’s no answer. How DO we heal from trauma symptoms when they are ongoing? How do we let ourselves just /be/. How do we trust when we aren’t getting constant reminders? How do I go home at night, like we do in these individual societies, how do I lay in my bed without spiraling back to where I was when I was 12. 

Hello!

It’s been a while since I posted here.

CW, isolation, race, etcetc

So, a lot of stuff has happened since I posted here last and I don’t really want to re-hash it all out. But, I have been reflecting a lot on extended family lately. 

So people of color are kind of known for their large extended families. I mean, it’s a bit of a stereotype, but growing up, you’d see Indian movies on tv with all these people dancing together in one giant house. I was always confused why my biofam didn’t seem to ressemble the stereotype. I mean, growing up in colonial england, all I had were fucking stereotypes.

So, as I got older, I started to understand that seeing as all these relatives lived so far away, I never got to see them and they didn’t play /any/ role in my life. As well as this, my biofam didn’t really want to maintain connections at that time ,and I sorta got isolated. I don’t have any biosiblings,so growing up was always incredibly lonely. As I started to understand my queerness, I found chosen siblings and family members, to sorta replace the people I used to see in bollywood movies. I mean, most of my queer chosen fam were white, (because, lets be real, i live in edmonton, alberta. ), but they existed (still do!). as i distanced more and more from biofam, because i was told indian people would never accept me, I connected more and more with my community, and I did some radical shyt. Ran an org for a while, have facilitated tonsss of education sessions and conversations and community healing spaces. I mean, this was more than a community to me. this became my family. these became the people i would turn to. its not like i believed theyd stick around forever, (amatonormativity - the idea that romantic relationships are the most important - is real, and therefore relationships we have with people change.), but, i believed they were there in moments that i needed /someone/. 

More recently, I have had the opportunity to connect with some biofam, who /somehow/ accept me as a trans person. I have nooooo clue how that happened, but somehow it did. Some of them don’t live in edmonton, but I mean, I can use a computer now and Im not that 8 year old kid sitting in a stairwell. But I realized that I waited so damn long for a biofam member to tell me they loved me for me. like, my entire life. but now, because i went through my entire life /waiting/ for that, i was able to do some radical shyt and question the institution that tells us that family and romantic relationships have to look a certain way. takyin is my family. (my partner) so is my queerfam. all of these people are my family. and now, i have a couple of biofam people who can be my family too. and neither is more important. ive been privileged enough to build powerful communities. thats what matters - the connections we have with people in our lives. ultimately, thats whats kept me alive. 

so i mean, the diaspora (settling/living away from one’s homeland) is complicated. home basically doesnt exist unless we create it, and the stereotypes never seemed to accurately portray the intense feeling of ‘longing for home’ that i kept feeling. longing for togetherness. longing for connectivity. but i needed all those things and i found them in my radical community.

so i am grateful. and i am healing. and i am hopeful for what’s to come in the future, now that i /have/ connected with some biofam. and im TERRIFIED. im so damn scared, because i was told my entire life not to say too much to anyone, incase anyone else finds out. like being queer is something to be ashamed of. like being queer is disgusting, or ‘less than’.

but, i deal with this fear by being radically visibly queer. i exist. WE exist, and the movement exists. 

Hello!

It’s been some time ,but there’s an important topic I need to write about here and literally just get out of my brain, onto a space I can look back at it. 

Honestly, POC movements in this city don’t include non binary or trans folks. And if they do, it’s super sporadic. The same way trans movements very rarely include POC folks.

Yesterday, I realized how deeply I can empathize with people on this, maybe it’s because I go through it every day.

Like, that NEEDS to be talked about. Exclusion of non binary & trans people in POC spaces is real. The other day I was in a room full of ‘woke’ white queer folks. Who understand why its important to include ibpocs and yet, there were none in the room. And i wondered, where do all the POCS go? They blend in for survival. And what if they can’t do that? What if ‘blending in’ isn’t a fucking option? There is no space for them. There is no space for us. 

I felt so intensely how necessary a whole conversation on that was, but it was sort of glossed over because the only people who feel it this intensely and understand how harmful it is, ARE the people affected by it.

I read this article by Kai Cheng Thom, expressing that people join these movements oftentimes because they want a forever home. Maybe some people are okay with amatonormativity (the idea that romantic relationships are everything), and like, if they are, great. But many of us who come from fucked up biofams are inherently seeking community and love that hasn’t existed previously. So we end up in these spaces, but half of our identities become erased, depending on where we are. Because I know we group queer and trans and non binary all together in a box labelled ‘qtibpoc’, or ‘qpoc’, but actually trans/nb experiences are so fucking different, especially as racialized people and we don’t leave space for that or even discuss it. 

Even IN qpoc spaces, we don’t discuss trans/nb erasure. And I deeply empathize with people who go through that because I live it every day. 

I think white queers need to be more aware of these issues, but I’m unsure what that looks like.

So, I have like an hour and a bit until I’m going out to a /bowling alley/ with my big bro (chosen family is essential to survival) and some other trans masc people. I don’t even know how to bowl, so this will be interesting. I have some time though, so I figured I would journal another self reflection!

A lot of people who know me often ask why exactly I’m a unicorn. Everyone knows I’m slightly in love with unicorns but I never really talk about why. I think that oftentimes, when we don’t see ourselves represented (even within the queer community in this city, there are very few trans people of color who feel safe being out & accessing queer spaces), & when our identities/experiences have been invalidated, we sort of latch onto archetypes to describe our experience in the world. Oftentimes,  the ‘dominant ideology’ doesn’t quite include us and neither does what we see represented in our communities. (I only know one Indian trans masc person, and everyone confused us for each other for the year before we met. We look nothing alike. )

(Refresher: I discussed dominant ideology in my last post. It’s basically beliefs and attitudes that the /majority/ of people hold in a given society.)

So for me, I latched onto the idea of ‘unicorn’ when I started to realize i was queer & trans & an Indian person all at the same time. People don’t believe unicorns exist, but I know I exist.  

See, a narrative approach to therapy & life suggests that we internalize the system around us. So for example, a ‘dominant ideology’ is telling me I don’t exist and I’m not real and this is a narrative that I believed for many years. The unicorn archetype is my way of re-authoring this narrative. What this means essentially is that unicorns are magical and healers & powerful as all hell. If I am a unicorn, I am also a healer & magical & powerful, rather than being ‘not enough’ and ‘not real’. The unicorn archetype empowers me to change the narrative in my head to something that can help me heal and grow.

Many of my friends have attached to archetypes too. I know people who connect to the concept of wolves, fishes, panthers, cats, dragons, magpies, trees, water, about a million aliens..etc. This is because we are literally all just trying to survive in a society that tells us we don’t exist every single day. 

So I usually discuss systems in facebook posts to my friends, but I can never keep track of everything I learn that way, and twitter doesn’t have enough characters. SO, I have decided to write that stuff down here so I can actually journal it & have a record of it.

Today, my lovely friend asked me what the concept of beauty even is, and why it exists. 

I have decided to take this opportunity to journal my thoughts on this.

Essentially, in systems theory, there is a concept called ‘dominant ideology’. A dominant ideology is the attitude and belief of the majority of people in a given space. So, just say the majority of people in North America like chocolate, then the ‘dominant ideology’ is that chocolate is good. In this case, the ‘dominant ideology’ is that there is one particular kind of beauty. Oftentimes, this beauty is white or tanned skin, symmetrical face, slim, tall, able bodied, hyper feminine/hyper masculine etc. Just think of who we see in the media...there are certain traits the majority of these people share. So this is a ‘dominant ideology’ of what is considered ‘beautiful’. 

Now, this ‘dominant ideology’ can also be called ‘western beauty standards’, because in other parts of the world, beauty looks different than it does here. Why do we have western beauty standards? Where did this ideology even come from?

Well, oftentimes, this concept of beauty is really difficult to attain. Many people buy certain clothes and certain makeup to attain this standard. They spend money on this, which then feeds ‘capital’ (another word for money) back into the system. People may feel insecure if they do not match the standard, and then they continue to spend MORE money trying to attain it. By creating a culture of insecurity, the system gains capital. 

Now, even if the /majority/ of people do attain this standard after buying x clothes and x makeup and x hair products, the more traits someone has that go against this ‘standard’, the harder it’s going to be for them to attain all the traits that I listed above and the further away they are from this ‘dominant ideology’.

So, for example, I am a brown person. My skin is brown, not white. I cannot change this. I am a trans person. I am neither hyper masculine OR hyper feminine. My body size is larger than the norm. Therefore I am not ‘skinny’ enough to attain this standard. I am not able bodied. I am not tall. And my face is not symmetrical. So all of these things essentially push my existence really far away from the ‘ideal’ which is the western beauty standard.

Let us look at this a bit further. If white people are consistently portrayed in the media, and seen as the ‘standard to attain’, this perpetuates racism. Brown people cannot reach this standard. If cisgender people or hyper masc/hyper feminine folks are always portrayed in the media, this promotes transphobia. Trans folks are further away from the ideal. If ‘fit’ bodies are always portrayed in the media, this promotes sizeism. Larger bodies are further away from the ideal. Does this make sense? 

This is important information. Racism, transphobia/queerphobia, and sizeism for example are all systems. They keep folks insecure and investing money to further feed the system. For example, they keep queer & rans folks marginalized because their bodies are not represented, and they keep people of color marginalized because they are not white. In this way, white cisgender able bodied fit etc folks maintain a sense of power, because their identities are not marginalized/excluded by these western beauty standards. As well as this, it’s predominantly femme people who have to buy into all these things to match the ‘ideal’ , and therefore keeping cis-passing men or masculine people in positions of power as well!

So these western beauty standards therefore perpetuate the systems that already exist. And the further away someone is from this standard, the more barriers they face. Aka, the more layers of marginalization they may have to unpack. As well as this, there’s this idea that we need to be validated by sexual or romantic partners to be counted as beautiful. So this reinforces something called amatonormativity which is idea that romantic relationships are central to a person’s life and other relationships that are not romantic and/or sexual are ‘less than’. So, if the only people whose opinions count are romantic/sexual partners in terms of one’s ‘beauty’ level (’tell her she’s beautiful!’) and other such garbage advertisements, then these beauty standards reinforce the system of amatonormativity. (explained above. ) Because friend love and other kinds of love suddenly isn’t enough. In this way, people are divided in couples or smaller groups, rather than connecting with a broader community. If people are divided, they do not have the resources available to resist all these systems I’ve been discussing in the first place!!

Oftentimes, as a trans person of color, i feel shitty about myself. I think i’m not good enough because we internalize these systems. I mean, afterall, I have grown up with them my entire life. But, then I remember that they exist to make me feel that way (example, racism/transphobia) etc, and I can fight that by thriving, & learning to feel good about myself and my queer poc body, regardless of what my partner or friends or community or chosen family say.