I'm not brooding, I'm just thinking.
Hellohello! Wahida reminded me of the existence of this newsletter, which I haven't been posting new things for since MAY despite having so many unfinished drafts in my folders and also despite me posting/writing different things in different places instead. I've been drafting a lot of LiveJournal entries, too, mostly still in Private because they're not complete.
Anyway I guess I'll share some of my unfinished thoughts, which by now I'm accepting I probably won't finish. I'll be choosing only a few (a bunch of them are on similar themes anyway) and I'll be sharing them in different posts maybe.
Maybe I won't even READ these before sharing, so that I won't end up throwing them instead :p
Unfinished Draft From July, 2023
Hello. See, the thing is I have this super long ranty review post in my drafts that was supposed to go out on the last week of Pride Month aka Hellfire Gala Month (except they've postponed the Gala to July this year WTF Marvel??) aka Month of Extreme Public Homophobia. As usual, I started the month depressed af and barely able being to get out of bed, let alone brain at work - I even cancelled/postponed some games because I was too depressed to do DM prep, which was the thing that usually gets me OUT of my head and keeps my intrusive thoughts away from me.
The intrusive thoughts are getting stronger and stronger, by the way. I honestly don't trust myself sometimes. But, anyway.
As the month went on and I read books that filled in the spaces in my head that needed filling, I was starting to get in a routine of sorts, and I began to write my end-of-month post thing. Then I got busy, and before I knew it it was JULY and I was watching Nimona???
Ah, Nimona. I watched it in my living room when my family was visiting, so it was weird because it made me cry so much, it was bringing back all the feelings inside of me from the beginning of June and also the feelings of pure queer joy and community and haha, the cluelessness of being a complete egg when I was reading it for the first time, in real time, as it was being updated online.
First of all, Ambrosius. I loved him as much as I imprinted on/related to Ballister (or maybe because I imprinted on Ballister), and he is just so much more in the animated movie? I really cannot express how much I love him and how much I want to be him.
Nimona was this creature I was both in awe of and I was jealous of, when I was reading the comics. If only I could change forms like that!* Although I didn't relate to her the way I did with Ballister, because I was never a feral child - hence the awe and the jealousy, because a part of me believed that if I was more like that, perhaps I could be as magical.
I feel like I need to reread Nimona soon. I know the queerness in the comic is nowhere near as explicit as in the film, and I understand why, but I remember that the comic felt like a giant blanket wrapped around me and the comment section felt like what Ally Beardsley was saying in one of the Tales from the Closet episodes I was watching the other day, how when we're in that closet, whether or not we even know we're in that closet - because even when we know we're mutants we don't necessarily know what kind - it's hard to tell, and a lot of the times we look back at that time and realise that there are so many other closets and sometimes all we needed to do was knock? That's what the Nimona comment section felt like, like for once I was surrounded by my own people.
"Can you just be you, please?"
Oh... the times people have stopped talking to me just for being myself. And the amount of people not believing that I am who I say I am, instead holding on to whatever idea they have of me and asking me to be myself when I don't conform to that. The amount of people who wilfully ignore my current pronouns and include me when they talk about their "girl friends" or worse, use female honorifics when referring to me. (I hate this more than the pronoun thing. Also, forgetting my pronouns is fine, and not what I mean when I say the above.)
"Easier for who?"
Again, the amount of people who dismiss my desire to look more like how I feel, or those that invalidate my dysphoria or think I can just "not feel it" as I chose. At the moment, yes, I choose to live with dysphoria, mostly because I can't afford not to, but also partly because it's "easier". And I know queer folk who claim to have chosen to erase their queerness because they have the ability to pass, and I can't claim that I know what it's like for them. It's "easier" for me to present as female, but it still pains me when I'm seen as one - I think playing D&D, and reading N.D. Stevenson's and Charlie Jane A's newsletters, and seeing/listening to Jay Edidin
"They grow up believing that they can be a hero if they drive a sword into the heart of anything different. And I’m the monster?"
"I don’t know what’s scarier. The fact that everyone in this kingdom wants to run a sword through my heart, or that sometimes I just want to let them."
Oh how I feel these words. Especially when I overhear idiot office chatter at work.
- when I read N.D. Stevenson's newsletter ("Hindsight") where he goes "OH BUDDY" at younger egg him, I felt that.
I had every intention to finish this one, and then I got busy at work and didn't have time, and by the time I got back to it I've lost whatever it was that made me start writing.
It still feels so weird to be that this was way back in July and it's already November and I still feel as tired and dysregulated or even more so. I don't even feel like a person anymore, these days.
<3 Marin
The title for this issue is from Nimona, of course.