Things I like about myself

1. I have a more or less healthy body. I can walk, I can talk, I can laugh, I can see, I can feel. I can even dance!

2. I am often in touch with my innermost feelings and thoughts. While I cannot always honour the deepest parts of myself, striving to do so means that I’m often there.

3. I have confidence in my own perception.

4. I have chosen a partner who treats me with the dignity I deserve.

5. Poetry comes easy.

6. I have a keen sense of anti-discrimination activism.

7. I have a strongly developed sense of aesthetics. This comes out in everything from what I wear, o the photography I make, to the formations I make with my body.

8. I believe in building women and non-binary people up.

9. I have a can-do attitude and moral fortitude. 

Pushing through

It's been refreshing to note the 2019 Oscars Best Picture race was chock-a-block full of queers and POC (sometimes at the same time). It makes me feel like things have been shaken up to some extent, even if the faux-camp veneer of the sociopath running America is still intact. (Honestly, I get so tired of people in Sydney walking around mimicking the foul tyrant's facial expressions.)

Here is Oz, too, I'm witnessing a flourishing of queer and POC culture. The 'Feminist Shorts' of the Mardi Gras Film Festival all forefronted brown or black women - a bold celebration of how people from the margins can rise up and dazzle all with their perspectives. 

I am thinking, too, of Laurie Penny's tweet about more and more women refusing to take part in heterosexual partnerships, in which they are almost always worse off in some way, while the man benefits at their expense. This is not news to me: I have been excluding cis men from my pool of potential partners for at least four years.

Laurie and her followers have highlighted many facets of the sacrifice women make when they partner up with the oppressor class. There's the emotional labour you are expected to do endlessly, and for free. The domestic labour you are expected to do endlessly, and for free. There's the discrepancy between the male supremacy's comfort with rampant inequality and the utterly inadequate counter-actions men can be mobilised into enduring. It just doesn't sit right. 

I don't loathe myself adequately to take my chance on cis men. This polyamorous, gender non-conforming person can be found cuddling up to the finest of the non-binary and cis/trans women folk... even if right now what I have looks very much like a monogamous relationship. My polyamory isn't much advertised, just something I list on my dating profile, and hope potential lovelies can puzzle out the nuances of my desires.

Being single turned out not to be an ongoing phenomenon once I redirected myself towards people who hold me in higher esteem. Queerness now soothes more than startles.  

Self-Compassion

This is where it gets interesting

This is where opportunities lie in wait

This is where old mes shatter

And they have truly been aching to break

Looking to my strategy for self-acceptance

Comfort mingled with acute sadness

It’s okay to feel it all

Let the facade shatter

Speaking the truth

Gets me in trouble

Sullenly mulling over

The texture of truth

Reclaiming it now

Or trying to cope

A once luxurious connection

Exposed as bare bones