October 05, 2006 - 1:53 p.m.
being normal isn't easy either.... there is a fine line between attraction and envy. I've been saying that since I was about fourteen. when it really mattered, as a mantra, because it was the only way I could figure out that I was queer. and I should have known when every ISU became 'narratives of female resistance''politics of police brutality' 'pussy palace, bathhouse raids' 'sociological implications of race and religion on the homelife of newly-out (or not) gay teens'
any excuse to use the word "cunt". resisting a language that was frought with confusion and violence. not enough ambiguity to explain the difference in me. so different from the 'difference' they perceived. it wasn't just being super tall. being super normal. excessively book-in-love. defiant, yet so so insecure. being pretty good at mostly everything. those were the most obvious things that set me apart from all the other normal people. I was the hyper normal, embodiment of the 2.5 white picket fence aesthetic. the one that freaked me out. i have always been destined to become my mother, accepting that happily (for the most part), as a fact with several footnotes. which explains why there are times when i hated myself as much as any other teenager hates their parents. I had it too good. too easy. so i made it impossible in my head. impossible to live with myself. to love myself, as a challenge of 'in spite of' rather than because.
now, i sit here, thinking about those interviews, the ones i had with other people to find out something about myself. I wonder where those tapes went. All I have left is the vague memory of throwing out evidence, not other people's, like the tapes of me at four or five singing phantom of the opera and annie into a tape recorder with the vacuum cleaner going in the background. It was no hard-knock life, aside from all the normal ways that life just inherently is, but still you wonder why it's so hard to just be happy. which pisses you off more. why can't you just be grateful in a way that doesn't complicate itself? oversimplifying your lack of adversity, feeling as though it disenfranchises you from authentic reasons to feel. Or maybe you've just gotten good at telling yourself that since you're so good at churning-out peachy hues and optimism that you should open your own line of optical aids, a rose-coloured glasses accessory line, to colour all those shitty things that you forget were grey, and bruised and swirling in the bottom of your white, white toilet bowl. Cut knuckles, crossed knees, eyes up, two way mirror face that never let on because sometimes you didn't even know that you were entitled, or that if you were, someone else surely had it worse and wouldn't it just be so, so ungrateful if they knew how your perfect life sometimes wasn't?
I remember the girl who had changed the spelling of her own name (her own way of cutting her perfect parents from inside of her head). Renamed, she could own her downward spiral, leaving her parents holding the bag, punctured and leaking all the potential they bought and bred into her. She told me, 'your life is just like a movie' like it made her sick, never realizing that it made me sick too. The director's cut wasn't so pretty. I would have liked to show her what that movie looked like to me, from behind this lens, but there was no way to edit for coherency and integrity without scraping the whole project.
It was nice to know that i was fooling someone. It was nice to believe that somebody bought it.
