A Decade in Reflection

While people are digging up photos of them from the beginning of the decade to post next to photos of them ending the decade, I find myself combing through my writing. (Mostly because I didn’t find any “good” pictures of me from 2010, but also I realized some major shit went down in my life at the beginning of the decade:)

2010 was the year I’d fully come out to myself and started to accept who I am. It was also that summer I went to my first pride parade and celebration – by myself – because I wasn’t really out to any of the friends I could go with. I remember it so clearly like it was yesterday, strangely enough. I had lied to my mom about having a “overnight weekend rehearsal so everyone is sleeping over at the rehearsal studio”, and arranged to stay with friends (both of them queer) who lived in the West End then. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what I was discovering within myself, and how attracted I was to people who are of the same-sex. I remember feeling free, and I remember feeling like I was myself for the first time.

That summer was also the first time I (half-jokingly) asked someone of the same sex out. She was the director of a show I had stage managed just before the summer, and rumour has it everyone who’s worked with her had a crush on her (I was no exception, evidently). I remember waking up after dancing the night away at Oasis (who remembers when that club existed on top of the Denny’s on Davie?), I was steaming buns for breakfast in her kitchen. She remarked on my ingenious method of steaming the bun, and made small talk. I, feeling courageous and silly, asked her if she’d like to go out with me. Even though she didn’t give me a direct “no”, my crush didn’t last long enough for me to ask her out again at the end of the year, when my studies have finished and she wasn’t a teacher of the school I attended any more.

At the beginning of the decade, I struggled to reconcile my faith and religion with who I was. I couldn’t fathom how I could be a Christian and lesbian at the same time. (Actually, according to an old blog post, I identified as “bi” then). I didn’t know where to go for help. I didn’t know if I’m even allowed to feel what I was feeling, let alone talk to someone about it. The more I thought about it the more trapped I felt. I couldn’t deny who I was and follow my religion blindly, when my church clearly rejects the “types of people” I was becoming.

So more events of note that started my decade:

-I worked at my first real theatre job in 2010, at the newly finished SFU Woodward’s, before any of the students were allowed in.

-I made a short film with three of my really good friends called Straight Forward that I bill as my “coming-out film” (embarrassingly, because I wasn’t good at story-telling with moving pictures yet).

-I was super productive in terms of my writing/ blogging, producing an average of almost 6 blog posts per month in 2010!

-I wrote about having a girl crush for the first time (and then many more posts about my feelings for her in the following months, including one where I wrote “I’m sorry” like 10,000 times)

Here’s a brief summary of my decade by the numbers:

-graduated from SFU with a BFA

-worked on 12 short films, maybe more?

-stage managed 19 shows

-designed lighting for 12 shows

-dated 6 people, slept with 11, and married 1

-travelled to 23 countries (and counting!)

-attended 3 high school best friends’ weddings

-gotten 4 tattoos

2010 launched me into a decade of self-discovery, love, and growing up. I wouldn’t have traded the last 10 years for anything, and I’m excited to step into the new year to see what the next decade will bring.

Beach Talk

There are lots of really great conversations that happen at the guest house. Most are small talk, but some days you’ll end up having epic discussions on feminism, politics, representation of groups of minority in the media, social media and its effects on people, etc.

A friend asked the other morning, while I was writing a new entry for my blog during breakfast, why I blog. The answer was simple: writing is my creative outlet as well as a way for my brain to reorganize itself and refresh the thoughts the keep swirling around. But she scrutinized the fact that it’s published on the internet for people to read. Yes, I said, I’m aware of that; but that does not affect my writing. I don’t write for an intended audience, nor do I really censor myself when I write (arguably choosing what to write is already censoring in a way). I write for myself so that I can come back to it and rediscover what I was thinking during that particular time. It’s a record and collection of my emotional journey that I can look back on, if I desire to do so.

But you can write, say in a document, and not have it published on the ‘net. Hmm. Yes, I could do that. But it’s just not the same. I couldn’t pin-point exactly what the appeal of blogging is when I was questioned.  I told her that it’s always been how I’ve written. This box and this formatting. So it had become sort of a habit. It’s harder for me to write otherwise.

If no one really reads your blogs anyway (or you don’t know who is), why bother putting your thoughts out there for the public? So that it’s there for people to read it if they want? I don’t post a link to every single post I write, nor do I shamelessly promote it. But people do have access to my thoughts. I make them public in the hopes that people will understand me better because I communicate better with writing.

She still wasn’t satisfied with my answer. She couldn’t get past the fact that it’s PUBLISHED on the internet for everyone to read. But what’s so bad about that? There’s nothing wrong with sharing my life, or wanting to share my struggles and happiness so people can perhaps connect with them and know that they’re not alone in the world. There’s no possible way to know IF anyone is indeed engaging with the content I’m putting out there in a way that’s helpful to them, but do I need to know?

Yeah, but you can CONNECT with people in person, on a face-to-face level. Yes, and I do. I connect with people in person every day. But somehow it feels empty. I’m not the “express my feelings verbally” kind of person, so I seldom participate in a conversation unless I have something positive to contribute (I make a really good listener though!). I write to soothe my soul; to declutter my brain. Perhaps it is also to show how lonely I sometimes feel in this world. At the end of the day, if I need to unload some grey matter, I don’t know who I feel comfortable enough to call. My blog is like a silent audience. It will listen closely and be still for however long I intend to write. It’s unprejudiced, unbiased, neutral.

Now that I’ve had more time to think about the matter – about why my thoughts are published on the internet, I can only honestly say that it’s part of my artistic expression. What that means for me, is that to be an artist is to create and show people your work. Even though something as streamlined or conventional as blogging is, it’s still part of my identity and artistic practice. So it might not look like art (nor is it intended to be “art”), it’s a way of showing people my “work”. And everyone knows that to be a successful artist you’d have to put yourself out there and have people engage in your work.

To further expand on sharing my life with the interwebs, I’d like to quote a TED talk by writer Andrew Solomon,

If we live out loud, we can trance the hatred and expand everyone’s lives. Forge meaning, build identity. Forge meaning, build identity. And then invite the world to share your joy.

I don’t think I can provide a better explanation than that. Sure, he’s not talking specifically about blogging, but the idea of connecting with people and sharing your life with them is there.

FOUR YEARS!!!

HOLY SHIT GUYS, I’ve kept this blog for 4 years now!  WHAT!

At first it started out as a school project for my Women’s Studies class to talk about queer cinema. But now it has evolved into a queer-content dedicated blog (which is basically my life – because I am queer, therefore all parts of my life are queer). But man oh man, I did not realize that it has been that long since I started blogging here instead of my old blog (I still write there some times though). And to think – when I started writing here I wasn’t out to my family! Strange how things can happen in such a short amount of time.

All in all, I’ve been blogging since 2006: from Xanga to MSN space, then finally moving to and calling wordpress home for the last 7 years! Incredible, isn’t it? I am rather proud of myself right now.

an attempt at a comeback

It has been forever – really, so long now – since I’ve last written anything that starting again now seems almost surreal, or more regrettably, impossible. I’ve always found comfort in words, but for quite some time I’ve been so preoccupied with life; that life happened so fast and so quickly that I’m still trying to wrap my head around what has occurred made writing seem to take no precedence anymore. In fact, I have kind of been avoiding it because I hate half-hearted posts, and the drafts which I save and finish another time due to an interruption or lack of time to complete it won’t sound coherent or concise. Perhaps I am unconsciously putting off things I do not wish to reveal to the world; things that writing could potentially evoke and change my life, once again.

But here I am, braving it for another time around. I’ve excused each period of absence with the fact that “life happened”, yet it is the time when I should have been busy documenting my journey the most. So, here’s hoping that I have a chance to clear my head, spare a few hours a week, share my thoughts with the world and start my love affair with writing all over again.