Red: Life

Hello and Welcome back to my Blog!
I hope everyone's 2020s are off to a great start.

Before we dive into what this new series of blog posts is going to involve, I'd like to offer my usual overview of the past month:

January

• I kicked off the new decade surrounded by love! Thank you to Liz J., Liz B., Mikey, and Rachel for being wonderful, supportive beings. Thank you for wanting me to be in your lives in this new decade. Thank you for being there for me. I love you so very much and am so thankful to have y'all in my life.
• The next day was my mom's birthday! We celebrated by going to Red36 for the first time and downing a couple dozen oysters between the two of us. I love sharing space, energy, and food with my mom and I'm glad that we were able to do that together. 
• I drove back to Great Oaks the night of the 2nd back to our "new" apartments. There was debris everywhere which was not great to return to, but y'know- if every porkchop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs. 
• Coming back to my students on the 6th reminded me why I dealt with this job in the first place. I'm so glad they were placed into my life to challenge me and to help me grow. I genuinely love them so very much. 
• Going back to therapy was also great! Really helping me in the troubled mental state that seemed to plague me throughout January :)
• On the 11th, we had our Strategic Planning Meeting at my church focused on each individual member's goals to grow spiritually within the community. It fostered a lot of conversation, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to feel heard and seen in a place that has watched me grow up. 
• The following week was a rollercoaster! On Tuesday the 14th, Mikey offered his free Christmas ticket to a hockey game between the New York Islanders and the Detroit Red Wings to me. I'm so thankful for his friendship and yearning to share this experience with me!
• On Wednesday, the 15th, when addressing an email that I had sent to a higherup of the organization I work for, that resulted in a disciplinary meeting, the conversation between myself and one of my superiors ended with: "The fellows have options here: they can either leave provided housing or choose to exit the program." It felt like my service the whole reason I was there was undervalued and not appreciated; I felt like I was undervalued and unappreciated. I didn't think that signing up for a year of service would result in being treated poorly consistently and being moved into unfinished housing, but that's unfortunately the reality. For right now, I'm choosing to stay in the program because (1) I genuinely care about my kids and want to continue making a difference in their lives, (2) I genuinely love my coworkers and can't bear to leave them right now, and (3) I'm one of the luckiest people in this situation- I'm able to go home on the weekends, and while home isn't necessarily the most emotionally and mentally healthy place for me to be in, it does still offer a respite for what's going on at work. 
• On the 16th, we had the opportunity to chaperone the kids on a trip to the Palisades Mall in New York. While I spent my time being a support for one student in particular.... I still enjoyed this trip very much and am so happy to interact with my scholars outside of academic work. 
• On the 18th, I organized an Emmaus Reunion that wasn't the most... successful in terms of community engagement, but did produce 108 sandwiches for the New London Homeless Hospitality Center. I'm thankful for the ability to organize individuals for a common cause and to be able to provide to those who need assistance or who are less fortunate than I am. 
• On the 19th the Southeast Emmaus Weekend #31 team met for the first time to prepare for the Weekend in March. I'm so thankful for the opportunity to serve this team, and the community, as Assistant Rector and I'm excited to see what I'm able to do while being AR. Here's to re-engaging the whole community, inspiring kids to explore themselves and their faith, and showering individuals with the love that God has shown me throughout my life. 
• Over the course of the month I was also able to: 
• Start a Newsletter for the Southeast Emmaus Community 
• Submit my fourth graduate school application
• Spend quality time with friends and family 
• Get back into going to the gym regularly and reinstating my commitment to my physical health. I'm proud to say that I was able to go to the gym 14 times this month. Here's to going more in February!
• Prepare for Invierno con Fuego: Fire & Ice- a dance, coming soon to Great Oaks as well as other Student Council fun things!

And now we're here. It's already the last day of the month- which is crazy- it went by so quickly!

Red: Life, as you may know by now, is the first post in my new blog series, titled PRIDE!

I've always said that I wanted to better explore my queer identity, and when looking at one of the hot people I followed on Instagram, I noticed, during the summer, that he posted some photos dedicated to the colors of the pride flag: 

Red for Life
Orange for Healing

Yellow for Sunshine

Green for Nature 

Blue for Serenity 

Purple for Spirit. 

This series will follow each of these colors and their associated topics from now until Pride Month, June, and will also include an extra blog post at the end, in July, modeled after the colors Brown & Black, ones I'm dedicating to talking about Progress & Pride: a reflection on the progress I feel I made through writing this series and on being Prideful in general.

Throughout this series I'm going to attempt to articulate a lot of thoughts I haven't shared with very many people because I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready to talk about it. If you're a friend that I see or talk to in my more regular life, please feel free to talk to me or ask me about any point in this series, and I'll be delighted to share conversation with you. If you're a friend who I don't see or talk to as frequently, feel free to strike up a conversation. I will communicate my level of comfort sharing that conversation with you. 

This post is going to focus on my Queer Life so far and when I first identified my queer identity. 

Before I begin to talk a little about Life, I would like to review a bit of history first. 

There are a few suggestions on how the rainbow flag came to be known as a symbol for gay pride, but one of the first instances of a gay pride flag was flown during the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade celebration on June 25th in 1978. Before then, the Pink triangle, which was created by Nazis during World War II to identify and oppress queer and trans people, was used as a symbol for the LGBT Movement. It was decided that, while reclaiming a symbol once used divisively is powerful and beautiful, it still highlighted a dark moment in history. 

The flag has gone through many different modifications and situations to better suit how people identify and has inspired a variety of flags for many different subgroups of the LGBT+/Queer spectrum. The 6-stripe flag has become the most common flag to represent gay pride. 

Personally, I best identify with a revised version of the flag that the city of Philadelphia adopted in June 2017. This version of the flag adds black and brown stripes to the top of the flag in order to draw attention to the, sometimes more specific, issues of queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) within the queer/trans communities. This reason is why I'm choosing to include these two colors in my newest version of my exploration of self- an exploration through the lens of my queerness. 

Thank you for indulging some intentional artistic reasoning and a brief history lesson. 

I wanted to challenge myself to write this series, because being queer is the identity I'm most uncomfortable with. I'm very much the type of person to want to have everything figured out and according to a plan and have that plan ready to be evaluated and analyzed and.. y'know decidedly be a... something. My journey in finding pieces of myself through realizing and accepting my queerness has been long and filled with quite a bit of internalized homophobia and fear. 

@alexand_erleon tweeted the following earlier this month: "Queer people don't grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we've created to protect us." 

This statement is extremely salient to my struggles with my queerness. This is one of the many reasons I've needed something like this- like my blog- to reflect and sit down and actually write down and process the things I'm thinking and feeling, because I am at a point in my life where I need to unpick which parts of myself are truly me and which parts I've created to protect myself. My Search for a Purpose must include this undertaking. Therapy, my lived experiences, and my trusted confidants are the best tools in helping me come to a better understanding of who I am as well. 

I want to breathe life into this part of myself because if I just continue to sit there and ignore it, it's only going to fester and mold. It's only going to hurt more and more. I'm only going to feel more and more lonely. 

Coming out of the closet has been a classic motif in out queer people's lives- the moment in which they "finally" strike up the courage to reveal a hidden part of their identity with the public, whether that be with a close friend and that friend only, or with family members, or with the whole world. A prerequisite to this, however, is the point in queer people's lives when they realize they're queer. 

I say this is a prerequisite to highlight some of the disparity that comes with holding the marginalized identity of queerness. In such a heteronormative society, that is influenced by religion, prejudice, power, oppression, and privilege, among other socialization authorities, cisgendered heterosexuality is seen as the norm while non-heterosexuality, in all its diversity and many different iterations, is seen as deviant or a perversion. 

Many people, while feeling comfortable and protected in their hatred against those different than them, seem to lack the basic emotional understanding that those who are different than society- those that deviate, are treated worse because of this difference in ways that those that hold dominant identities can't begin to understand. Coming out is not only a process of acceptance, understanding, and bravery. It's a process of deep emotional understanding and compassion for oneself. It's a process to ready oneself with the armour to block out possible disgust, hatred, or violence. It's a process to heal emotional traumas. It's a process of liberation- to no longer live a lie, to no longer live as something that is ultimately not yourself. Shedding the skin of a false identity is powerful and has the potential to be beautiful when one is supported by those around them that they know love them. 

For people who identify as queer, I think they would agree that their current lived experiences and realization of their identity have led them to label or further realize some of their actions in their childhood as queer. 

Like when I would pretend I was Carmen Cortez from Spy Kids in elementary school because I didn't so much mind playing the girl of the two. I wore my jacket on my head to pretend I had long hair and would often run with it tucked behind my ears or tied up in a "ponytail." I've been made to feel shame from doing this. 

Or when I was really into cute Disney boys like Ryan Merriman and Chez Starbuck because their characters were "cool role models"

Or when I'd be really into male friend's heights and abilities to grow a beard because omg I wanna be taller than you or omg I wanna grow a beard like you

Or when, in a few of the stories I wrote in middle school and early high school, I included characters that when through radical physical transformations that included become more virile and masculine

Or when I came out to my mom in 8th grade as bi, but retracted it because I thought I was being influenced by my friends around me, but openly talked about it (and being "25% gay"?) with VERY select people, most of them not even being my close friends

Or when I cuddled my best friend and thought it was platonic 

Or when I stumbled upon content on the internet and thought I was into the stories I was reading because the men in them were examples of what I wanted to look like and sound like and act like and feel like when I got older- if I worked out more, if I somehow got taller, if I somehow got hairier. 

I was lying to myself. I was lying about what I was attracted to. I was lying about who I am. 

There's a scene in Love, Simon where the titular character is talking to his mom about coming out:

Simon (S): "Did you know?"

Mom (M): "I knew you had a secret. When you were little, you were so carefree. But these last few years, more and more, it's almost like I can feel you holding your breath. I wanted to ask you about it, but I didn't want to pry. Maybe I made a mistake."

S: No. No, mom, you didn't make a mistake.

M: "Being gay is your thing. There are parts of it you have to go through alone. I hate that. As soon as you came out, you said, 'Mom, I'm still me.' I need you to hear this: You are still you, Simon. You are still the same son I love to tease and who your father depends on for just about everything. And you're the same brother who always compliments his sister on her food, even when it sucks. You get to exhale now, Simon. You get to be more you than you have been in... in a very long time. You deserve everything you want."

Like I said: coming out is a liberating experience. I felt seen when I watched this movie. Lying to myself surrounded me with an intense loneliness that has only lessened through figuring my shit out. For so many years I didn't allow myself to figure it out, and, while I'm thankful for who I've become despite this, I wish I didn't spend all that time holding my breath. 

I've talked before about what might have been the causes of me holding my breath like this- the toxic masculinity that plagues my family, the idea that my God would not accept and love me because I hadn't yet come to understand that God is Love. I don't know why I was so wrapped up in fear and shame and guilt for literally existing. All I know is that, in October 2016, when I had told my close friends and my mom how I identified (at the time biromantic demisexual), I was ready to accept this part of myself and no longer allow any part of myself to stay hidden and kept a secret. I've come so far since then and I have so far to go still. 

No one deserves to feel the intense loneliness that I, and many other people that have spent time in the closet, have felt. No one deserves having to figure out how to best love themselves, and this is part of the reason why I want to make meaning-making and individual exploration accessible to marginalized youth- so that they don't feel the way I felt, ever.

I'm breathing life into these. I'm verbalizing them and articulating them because they are part of my truth. They're part of my journey toward deeper realization. It makes me so uncomfortable to put it out here, but I know it's a part of my growth and that if I felt truly unsafe or not protected or not supported, I would not have said all the things that I've said. 

Here's to this new chapter in my journey in self-discovery, here's to articulating queerness, and here's to the future people that may one day be inspired by my journey. I hope this brief look into my life has helped some people feel seen, understood, and a little bit less alone. 

As always, thank you for reading.