heya, folks. lilith of magical-mogai here, to talk about something i made. a flag, to be specific.
for the past four years i've struggled with the words lesbian and dyke. at first i felt connected to both! then dyke lost its appeal and i became just a lesbian, and i was... fine with it for a while, i think?
then about two years ago, i started to distance myself from the online queer community. i still had an off-and-on mogai hyperfixation, but i was just so sad, to put it bluntly. i couldn't find where i belonged, even in the community about belonging. even when i made my own labels, i'd never be able to check off all the tiny boxes that made me feel seen. i never was what i expected to be, in any way.
overall i started to slip from labels, as a whole.
i called myself a lesbian in front of my friends who i knew wouldn't get it, but in private i tried the words "queersbian", queer, "lesbiqueer", about every combination i could make without having to call myself a dyke.
then for a while, i just let the question go unanswered. what am i? gay, i guess? i think? i let it be a question, and i found comfort in that.
eventually i came back to the word dyke. and left. then came back again. and again. and again and again and again until i couldn't deny its presence in my identity anymore.
and even then i still did. so i called myself bi for a bit. tried it out, worked through the preconceptions i had of bisexuality, and tried to ignore the weird feeling it always left in my mouth to call myself bi.
i met other queer people in the real world. old trans people, those who dont call themselves anything, a lesbian married to a man, bi girls who only date men, trans men with husbands who call themselves straight, everyone who i at one point (shamefully) tried to recategorize in my brain to fit my view of the world, and i just accepted them as they were.
so eventually, i too tried to accept that i was just bi, but i realized that i was just... wrong. all of a sudden i knew that i was going off a label i THOUGHT should fit, not the one that did.
and i looked for a dyke flag, something to proudly display on my wall, but found lesbian flags. and gay flags. and queer flags. i didn't find anything i felt myself in.
using a light pink, purple, and blue color palette, and featuring two interlocking venus symbols, here it is. my dyke flag.
use it if you want, or don't. or design your own, or don't. make yourself feel seen however you need to.
so here it is. my dyke flag.
maybe in two years i'll come back and laugh and go "wow, she got it WRONG." but for now, here i am. here it is.
