“Describe yourself, in twenty-five words or less, without using any physical descriptors or naming any of your roles. Don’t overthink it. Just write your sentence in a minute or less. When you read what you’ve written, you might discover a simple truth about yourself—a mission, a vision, or a crucible.”
I am fighting daily and sometimes giving in; I am a hopeful romantic; I am learning to recreate; I break open instead of just breaking.
I’m not sure if that sentence still focuses too much on roles, but frankly, I don’t know who I am if it’s not through interaction with something. I don’t really build my identity around being a family member or someone’s lover. I do, though, build it around the act of loving, the things I love, how I love them. My passions are intrinsic enough a part of my nature that I can’t imagine disconnecting them, nor would I particularly want to. Mother Darling says, “You could make friends, but not everyone wants to talk about gay stuff or politics or religion all the time!” and I think, then what would we have to talk about?
Sexuality is not some fuzzy, distant theoretical concept for me; I realize that my mother and grandmother don’t enjoy sex, or at least, don’t enjoy it enough to “put in the work”, but I do. It matters who I let touch me and how. I’m not worried about disgracing my body; you can peel away my grace in flakes sometimes. I am worried about treating myself well and making sure, as well as I can, that I and my partners are getting what we want out of our exchanges. The fact that I am queer matters. What rights I do and don’t have affect me directly; how safe I am walking down the street with my hand in someone else’s is something I have to consider; whether I need to block my coworkers from my Facebook so the rumor mill doesn’t start and I don’t get released from my job for something-that-is-really-something-else is a stupidly big concern. These may end up being roles in my life, but the roles I am thrust into or choose to take on say a lot about who I am.
And even in the quiet, even when I’m by myself, I am interacting. I don’t consider thinking or feeling to be entirely passive acts; they form roles, too, that make up who I am. I understand the author’s intentions to have us not define ourselves strictly in how we look or how we serve the people around us. On top of my 25-word sentence, I guess I could add that I’m difficult…to love, to explain, to be. I haven’t figured out if that’s a bad thing or not. I only know that it's true.
