I'm Alive

To get you up to speed with my current mental state, I'd like to share a Facebook post of mine from September 9th:

a selfie

CW: suicidal

First, I’m getting help, and am safe right now.

I’ve generally found that talking and being open about my shitty mental health helps, hence this post. (Apparently I feel the need to justify talking about my feelings.) My current situation has been going on for a few days and this feels like a good time to start talking openly about it, since I know talking openly will be part of recovering.

I have a long history of suicidal ideation (since I was twelve), but my relationship to suicidal ideation was always fear of suicide. On Friday I stopped being afraid, and was actually considering it. Fortunately, something convinced me to stick around for a bit longer. That’s when I took this photo; I kinda wanted to capture that “oh shit I have to deal with these emotions since I’m sticking around” feeling.

I went to a walk in clinic on Friday, and I went again today because the emotional pain hasn’t lessened and...I can’t convey how much it hurts. It just hurts so much. It’s so much pain that when I had flashbacks yesterday they were the same level of pain that I was already in, and am still experiencing today. It’s the equivalent of experiencing a flashback to trauma, but imagine that the flashback isn’t passing and I can’t get away form the pain.

I’m still working through what triggered this, and will talk to my therapist on Wednesday about it.

I experienced a paradigm shift on the night that I wanted to die and chose to stick around for a bit longer. (Now that's a sentence I never thought I would write.) This shift might be best described as "What's the worst that can happen, I already wanted to kill myself, fuck this bullshit." In many (good) ways I'm still the same person I was before, but this new attitude has also allowed certain changes that are allowing me to get closer to the person I want to be.

Most importantly, I know what it's like to completely trust myself now. It's somewhat ironic that I learned to trust myself in a moment when I was in such an irrational state of mind, but hey, at least I got something positive out of that experience.

My newly found self trust and "fuck it" attitude has allowed me to already start making positive changes in my life. I'm able to address old thoughts/beliefs with a fresher approach, so that I finally have a hope of moving on and healing. I feel like I've been able to shake some of the trauma that has been weighing me down and controlling me; certain trauma doesn't seem to have the same hold on me when my thoughts are "Yeah well I wanted to kill myself so how scary do you think you are?" I'm exploring new ways of self expression. And I'm finally having conversations about things that needed saying ages ago.

I'm still not ok. I'm still in an immense amount of emotional pain when I'm not numb. I'm still spending much of my time in bed, unable to do much. But I'm crocheting. I've managed to ask for help. I'm working on self care, which includes basic things like (ideally) eating when I need to. I've actually made myself a "care package" of sorts that I'll write another post about. I'm watching educational YouTube videos. I'm breaking down old ways of thinking and creating new thought patterns; which is a painful process that takes most of my energy, and brings me back around to the fact that I'm still not ok. But hey, I actively want to live again, and I can finally really see a way forward. That feels like a win to me.

semicolon henna tattoo

Part of why I stopped writing here is that I didn't want to make this blog all depressing by always talking about how depressed and anxious I am. Fuck that, this is my blog, and one of the things I've realized is that I can totally make this into a mental health blog. Hopefully the topics I explore will expand over time, but if my mental health is all I can find to write about for now, then that's ok. I've given myself permission to write about my fucked up head as much as I want to here.

Queer Questions

When someone asked me if I could clear up a few questions about the queer world for them, I was expecting something that I could answer in a few sentences. Instead, I got this:

Q: Why does the LGBTQ+ acronym include gender identities as well as sexual orientations? I know they aren't the same, and not all identities are included, so why are some of them?

I thought it would be easiest to type out an answer somewhere other than on FB Messenger, which brought me here. And since I'm typing it out here, I may as well hit the "publish" button when I'm done. So hey, new blog post!

Note: I tend to say queer instead of LGBTQ+. I personally prefer this because queer is more inclusive than LGBTQ+ since, as noted in the questions above, not all the identities are present in LGBTQ+. The downside to using queer is that not everyone is comfortable with it. I acknowledge that my preference here is an imperfect solution, and my choice is colored by the fact that I call myself queer.

1) Why does the LGBTQ+ acronym include gender identities as well as sexual orientations?

A look at queer history shows gays and trans people often working together. (I'm ignoring other identities for the moment because even though they've always been present, they often aren't mentioned). Trans people were present at the Stonewall riot, and it's often (incorrectly) said that it was a trans woman who threw the first brick. Watch the film "Paris is Burning," which is about Harlem drag culture in the 80's, and you see gay men and trans people working together to make a place they can exist in relative peace. If I had made a point to educate myself further on queer history, I have no doubt that I would easily list off other examples showing a close allyship between gays and trans people.

Additionally, many consider sexual orientation and gender identities to be closely linked, and the two are often regularly confused with each other. An example of the two becoming ridiculously confused is the theory of sexual inversion, in which it was believed that a gay man was simply a woman in their soul, and that it was that inner woman who wanted to be with a man. According to this theory, bisexuals would be part man and part woman. This was what sexologists used to believe and teach.

Whether people conflate trans identities and sexual orientation due to our natural close allyship described above, or if the allyship occurred because of people's confusing sexual orientations with gender identities, I don't know. Either way, it's there, and it's why gender identities and sexual orientations are in the same acronym.

2) Why aren't all the identities included?

Set aside everything I just said about a close allyship between the different queer identites. It's definitely there in many cases, as we see in the expanding acronym, but not everyone likes to play nice.

I wish we were one big happy queer family, but the fact is that we're all human and humans can really suck. Within our sometimes dysfunctional queer family, the "you're not queer enough" argument is regularly thrown at bisexuals, asexuals, and intersex people (some even outright deny the existence of these identities). TERFs deny the existence of trans people, and unfortunately plenty of TERFs are queer. Even trans people will sometimes deny the existence of non-binary genders. Many argue that pansexual is just a fancy word for bisexual, which is its own can of worms. Aromantic is a word that probably only those who make a point of learning about different orientations will be familiar with.

Basically, not all the identities are included in part because not all of them are welcomed by everyone.

But not all the identities will be included even when we want to be all inclusive. There are so many that people often aren't sure how to include all of them, which is where the plus sign in LGBTQ+ comes into play. It's an attempt to be all inclusive, although some letters are inevitably favored over others.

Special note:

Not all asexual or intersex individuals consider themselves to be queer, but many do. 

Brief definitions for words that might not be known or which are often argued about:

Aromantic: little to no romantic attraction
Asexual: little to no sexual attraction 
Bisexual: attraction to two or more genders (there is overlap here with pansexual)
Non-binary: genders that don't fall into the binary man/woman way of thinking
Pansexual: attraction to all genders
TERF: trans exclusionary radical feminist, a.k.a. someone who uses their idea of feminism to argue that a "real woman" needs to be born with a vagina

photo from a Pride parade, a rainbow made of balloons