Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Making Choices

Hey there, I haven't written in a while, quite a long while. It's been a time of finding myself again, choosing the battles I want to bring to your screen, evaluating how public I really want my life to be, sorting out career goals, breaking relationships and rebuilding them, and being a witness to struggle and victory. It has been a hard year for us here – watching a friend tangled in the confusing and painful web of an abusive relationship; watching another essentially lose their father; a third, fourth, and fifth redefine themselves and create new spaces within and without; a sixth stagnate, somewhere in between. Throw in some deaths, course scheduling, graduations, and fire alarms and you've pretty much got it.

But I have also spent a year learning about myself.

Anyone that knows me know one of my least favorite activities ever is making choices – I won't choose what to eat for dinner, what to wear, or where to go. In my Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Theory class last week we talked about the difference between feeling born into an identity and having your experiences shape you into that identity. Some people spoke about how they feel their experiences have made them who they are and others talked about having always felt different.

But me? Am I who I am because I have always been this way, or did 20 years of fighting for a "me" shape what they would ultimately become. My class decided that it is different for everyone and both experiences should be respected.

Not me. I don't want to defend or justify who I am or how I got here or that it might change. I have no fucking idea whether I was born me or became me, and, frankly, I don't care.

The last year has been about choosing to not choose things and just be present and experience them. I learned that I don't want to be the center of attention – I enjoy bearing witness to the experiences of others, but I also wonder from what spaces I can do that.