love note 07: on gender and boxes
Hey folks, I have a lot of news to share so bear with me.... this week's all about me. A love note to yourself every now and then is okay, right?
First, Stranded on Earth, my graphic short story is apart of the anthology Incoming! and they are kickstarting to get it published. This was a huge milestone for me that made me believe in my own artistic talents! Please consider backing the project and on the plus side, you'll then get a PDF copy of the anthology that includes my work. You may have seen me post about this a few months ago but after some consideration, the editor decided to lower the funding goal and opt for a PDF only version. But hey! If we get over our goal maybe we'll be able to get a print version too!
*Daryl portraits i and ii* (2021)
I did 10 hours of life drawing last week which was intense but by the end of it I was really finding what I liked in my drawings and discovering how to show more with less. I got to draw Daryl again and had such a nice time.
I'm going to use this week's love note to come out as nonbinary with the preferred pronouns of they/them. Gender is such a weird thing and our systems for dealing with it are so imperfect. I hope one day we will be able to truly see it as a spectrum or better yet just see people for how they are individually expressing themselves. Anyways, I’m not going to get into the weeds there, I still have a lot of thinking to do on the subject but instead have written a love note to the journey.
love note 07: on gender and boxes
Self-portrait, 2021
I decided to switch schools my senior year of high school which raised a lot of eyebrows. I got lots of questions about why I would want to switch schools the “one really fun year” of high school. If I remember correctly, I think I made the decision a week before my old school started and the new school had already begun. I came in late. But I didn’t care, it felt like freedom.I remember so clearly thinking about a box when I heard that one of my friends was switching schools and then I asked if I could as well. Sometime between that moment and years earlier when I was a loud, expressive middle schooler who wore brightly colored skinny jeans, I’d had a box sketched around me of the way I was perceived (or thought I was perceived) by classmates, an image of a quiet, studious, rule-following person. This developed probably in my sophomore year where I fell into such a depression, I can count on one hand how many times I hung out with people outside of school.
When it lifted the following year, I felt out of place and friendless. People would say things that put me right into my place in that box, not inviting me to parties because I didn't fit the image of someone who would go to parties, or acting surprised when I would make a joke. I mean, who knows, it was high school, everyone was involved in their own issues, it could have all been in my head but the overwhelming feeling I had was that I couldn't step out of this preconception of myself. And I remember as I was riding in the car with my mother, talking about switching schools, I envisioned the cardboard box with the idea of me others had thrust upon me being lifted so that I could finally step away and breathe again.
And I did feel freedom in the new school, a much smaller community, where I knew no one save two people and felt there were no restrictions on me. But of course over time I again felt stifled. With every move and "fresh start," which I've done a lot of. Typical Sagittarius.
*Pictured Above*, 2019
It's funny how revelations dawn both slowly and all at once. When I finally embraced my identity as queer, it felt like a lightbulb going off in my head somewhere between getting the mail from my mailbox and going back inside. I had been giddy after finding out a new poet I’d found and loved was queer and the somehow in the intervening moments I realized the excitement was probably indicative that the uncertainty I'd had over many years about my sexuality wasn't so uncertain anymore. Yet at the same time, this coming out to myself was after many years of sort of identifying as bi but not really.
This time, it again hit quickly on Saturday. I woke up from a dream about coming out as nonbinary and, without really processing that dream, attended an early-morning “women’s only” art session. The session felt really strange to me for several reasons. One because the organizers didn't really get into the breadth of possibilities of someone identifying with woman enough to join the group and it overall just had a sort of strange vibe of "we should be connecting because of this nebulous word trying us together." Some time in the processing of both the dream and the strange experience of the art session, I was suddenly with an overwhelming feeling of affirmation.
Yet obviously it had been a longer thought process. For Christmas I asked for four different books on gender theory and have been reading them ever since. You can even see threads of the internal conflict in one of these newsletters, the one about body horror as a way to explore identity. Stranded on Earth has underlying themes of abandoning different systems of classification, especially gender.
I’ll be using they/them pronouns or you can simply just refer to me as Krista or K. In one of the life drawing sessions I attend, it is reiterated every time that, hey, if you don’t know someone’s pronouns you can just use their name there’s absolutely no need to use pronouns. And I didn’t realize how nice it was to hear that as a guideline in a space full of strangers. But it meant a lot over the past few months.
*Self-portraits,* 2021
For years now, the times I’ve looked in the mirror and been happiest were the times I felt like the image staring back looked totally foreign. Not like the box I felt I was stuffed into in high school nor any ideal of beauty I’ve been bombarded with ever since I can remember. It's a feeling of looking out from within and not trying to align what I see in front of me with any idea or concept.
readings
I watched a donation stream raising money for AAPI organizations in the wake of the really terrible shootings targeting the Asian community in Atlanta last week. (If you're looking to donate, here's a link to the crowdfunding campaigns of the victims' families or search for your local AAPI organizations.) In the stream, there were a bunch of activists who came on to talk about various issues (you can watch here if you're so inclined) and they recommended a ton of books. I'm going to start making my way through them. and I thought I would share the list this week for anyone also inclined to become more educated about these issues.
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Asian American Dreams by Helen Zia
Disability Visibility by Alice Wong
Native Speaker by Chang Rae Lee
I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom
Love, Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
This essay by Ocean Vuong is also terrific and one of my favorites.
poetry nook
The Cuckoo Cry by Chen Chen
Lost the milk, spilled my marbles, our thoughts are fragile
says the Russian prof, & I try to gather, hold tender
both spilled & lost, my ugly diptych of spring,
every spring my windows open & ugly happens,
I try to hold it together, though maybe should let it go,
gush, let spring bark & heat rain from pit-stained
clouds, let the lark, no, the cuckoo cry.
Let spring say (the truth) I called my mother
a bitch. Said everyone in the neighborhood knew.
She had almost struck down my door, asking who
was on the phone, who, she had struck me,
called me names, forbidden me from talking
(WHO) on the phone, some boy wasn't it,
sick boy spreading his sick musky spring,
American spring, beastly goo of wrong wanting.
Spring says I told my mother she was living in
a dream, could never go back to the way things were.
& she said, Not even here? I can't say what I feel,
here, the one place I have in this stupid country,
I can't just be, rest, I have to fight, even at home?
Spring says it doesn't want to be personified,
wants to be forgotten. Doesn't want to be trigger
for memory. Spring says it & fall are retracting
their contractual smells & birds, their unlimited
catalogue of liminal spaces. Fall says, Stop
naming children after me. I say, People name
their kids Autumn, not Fall.
a note on platform:
You may have noticed this is coming to you from a different service. I've moved away from Substack after some unsavory news came out about how they run their business. I hadn't been on Substack too long and since there are other options for newsletters out there so it wasn't too hard to make the switch. You can read about what happened in this post by Jude Ellison Sadie Doyle that started the whole conversation or in this more broad overview of the problem.
It comes down to the question of platform or publisher but in this case Substack is totally lacking in transparency, always claiming it was solely a platform until it started coming out that they were paying huge sums to certain writers, amongst whom are several anti-trans and other reactionary writers. As Doyle pointed out in their post, Substack lured a lot queer and trans writers to their platform, touting the success that writers were finding there without disclosing that some of that growth wasn't organic and then taking parts of the money those queer writers earned to pay TERFs, etc. And again all with a total lack of transparency, even when they responded to Doyle in a statement.
So farewell Substack. Please bear with me as I refresh some of my very basic coding skills to get this to look how I'd like it to.
That's all from me this week. I'm sort of trying to use Instagram again, if you want to find me there, or more of my work on my website.
x,
k