The Who

I am a writer.

I am a writer who hasn't written anything in about four years, really. But I'm still a writer. It's not really something I would tell people about myself if they asked for my personal elevator pitch, but it would be in  my mind, sitting there. Probably the word itself, "writer," written somewhere in my brain. Probably written on misfired neurons. That would make the most sense.

I guess I'm a writer who doesn't really write anything. Or a writer who doesn't really write through anything. Not so much a writer with writer's block as one with some sort of writers E.D. A writer full of false starts and premature exits. I've written on the first five pages of recycled paper of countless gifted journals. I've started several different blogs over the years that end after a couple of weeks of enthusiastic posts. Blogs about queerness and feminism. Blogs about food studies. Blogs about my relationship with my body. And, a handful of years ago, blogs about being earnestly in love and in lust and in pain with some beautiful boys. But the blogs quickly evaporated or lost any sort of arc because I wasn't always the person I was blogging as. Some days I'm hardly (just) a queer feminist or an amateur cultural anthropologist or a boy in-and-out of love with himself and the world around him.They're all nice identities to occupy for a time, for a purpose, but they started to feel limiting and dishonest and I felt I couldn't consistently fit the brand of the blog and I just fizzled.

And this is more or less what has been going on in my life lately. I feel as though I am without any sort of signifier to stand under and point at and say "this. this thing here. this is absolutely me, and when i say i am this, it really translates, it really means something." And without that designated label-- without that consistent brand-- I've felt identity-less. Unidentified. Misidentified. Drifting from half-assed blog to half-assed blog and not really being or saying anything.

I think it was easier for all of us a few years ago when we were students. I could say I was a student. I could say I was a student of history or gender studies. When someone asked me what I was doing, I could say I was researching the history of conversion therapy or leading a discussion group on body image or directing a children's theater show. And I felt I could be student-scholar, student-counselor, student-activist, student-director, student-anything because it was the world I lived in. And if it ever felt dishonest or like it wasn't enough, I could easily drift into the promise of a number of any possible futures where I would be a professor or journalist or revolutionary. But now I'm in a world where I feel like I'm supposed to be a certain kind of person, and I can't wander rosily into the realm of possibility because I'm 26 and the future is supposed to be now. Or so an entire generation of us find ourselves feeling.

Indeed, I know I'm not in a unique situation here. How many of us are living our lives right now inside our minds, bound by our anxieties, and by the absurd sense that we are not who we are supposed to be or that we are not who we are, actually? And who knows whose voice that is or who ever proposed that we had to be or were supposed to be anybody or anything or anywhere. Personally, I believe that the nature of being, of existing, is a constant journey of discovery and creation, but it's also just being what and who and where you are in any moment, at each exhale. That I'm simultaneously who I am in this blip of a second as well as the amalgamation of all my seconds lived and unlived.

And I think the reason I'm a writer is really just that I'm a chronic processor. I think big and knotted and beautiful thoughts and I have to unknot them and break free of them. And I used to do this through writing, through putting the thoughts on page so that I can see them, know them, and let them go. And lately I haven't been doing that-- I've either been living in my tangled brain or depending on other people to process things with me, and it has meant being less present and knowing myself less and hardly trusting myself. Maybe if I return to writing the things that are in my mind, I can see a little more of who it is I am, and I can have the comfort of believing that I'm being that person with myself and with the people I love.

The intention of this blog? window? mirror?, then, is to be whoever I am and to say whatever I'm feeling. It's meant to be a space where sometimes I will journal about these armchair existentialist "revelations," and sometimes will write about the things I'm passionate about, and will sometimes be a queer advocate or an angry feminist or a (movie) lover or an addict of most cultural products marketed at teenage girls. There is no brand. There is no message to stick to. It's me both being present in and creating a space to process the person I am so that I can be this moment and all the moments. It's meant to be a journey to know and grow grounded in myself and the many signifiers I can occupy. And it's going to be haphazard and messy and poorly stitched but I can't wait for the good that might come of it.

To thine own self be true, bitches.