Year Five/28

A lot of inadequacy and year end fatigue being processed here. Some heartbreak too. I was watching a Katrina Kaif interview after the awful movie 'Zero' and when asked, at a high point in her career, what her biggest fear was, she said it was the fear of not being in a relationship...of not having a family and being married and love (before it's too late). She feared it at sixteen and she feared it at thirty and then it happened, she fell out of the relationship that she thought was 'it'. Of course she was referring to the strange celebrity creature that continues to roam untamed, roving past, ensnaring every woman who might seem on top of her game, leaving her with tattoo imprints and feelings of not enough. Of course, I also very personally wove these stories into my own, asking what or who could be enough for (some) men. Their stories and mine seem to indicate this is a futile quest. But as someone prone to approach things analytically, treat it as a problem, even with some degree of detachment, I find myself swinging between efforts to fix men (sometimes women) and then withdrawing. The withdrawal times have gotten longer, the paean to selfhood has gotten stronger. Sometimes I even offer my own karmic justifications for my bad feelings (hearts broken must be accounted for with equal number of heartbreaks, it's only fair). There are also Warsan Shire, Beyonce, Solange, Beth Gibbons - each accompanying a stage of grief, disappointment, realization and then return to the productive contentment of being self-contained and re-centered. It will happen in time but, to go back to the Kaifkaesque (hehe) heteronormative anxiety of 'family before it's too late', I can safely say that 28 and the year 5 of PhD is probably my year of Inversion, the year when queerness has seemed like so much effort and the year when I have resolutely, statistically fallen off statistical heteronormative charts (your friends are getting married, some have babies, where will you work and when does the phd end, who will wait for you, why have you cut your hair). Queerness doesn't just mean not being straight, a queerness of being, a path of life praxis that you are either put on by what you read and who teaches you, or your own realization that you couldn't fall in line (in time), like many others do. The accompanying warning you don't get is that it is incredibly hard to stand still in uncharted territory. You have to build and rebuild, develop tentative rules and rewards for what is going to feel normal within queer.

Unfortunately I don't have much new to offer by way of this post, if you gave me space I'd start writing about love, self, men, women all the time. I am slightly proud that I have had this blog for ten years now. It's okay, the earlier stuff may make me cringe now but that's okay. If someone asked me for my movie of the year, it would be Una Mujer Fantastica. For a brief teeny bit after I cut my hair I felt something like dysphoria - who you love gender wise is closely associated and sounded off of who you think you are gender wise (fluid or binary). This movie rarely ever lapses into self-doubt, takes the performance of gender (whatever it takes to feel a stable gender identity for the moment, to be alive, productive and to survive) so much as a matter of fact, and then it starts showing the world that  a well adjusted transwoman has to navigate despite her own adjustedness, despite having her priorities and tendencies to give love, draw boundaries, right. It's been a year of gender play and a year of being incredibly close to fantastic, inspiring strong people, including these wonderful online groups where hundreds of queers come together to build survival on a daily basis. I couldn't tell you the details even if I wanted to. But as always, I want to celebrate these things, these acts and individuals of endurance in a hope that I can overcome my own feelings of inadequacy.