During those desperate moments of looking for empathy in any form, I called myself to task for all the times I turned up my own headphones to avoid the sounds of another person’s pleas for aid. The daily requests for kindness become part of the scenery after five years in this city. It wasn’t until I was asking for help that I realized the resentment New Yorkers experience towards the people brave enough to request a helping hand. Strength, in New York, is measured by the ability to master pain in solitude, and vulnerability is the biggest threat towards this notion. Our self imposed isolation keeps us from salvation.
Assembling myself for the daily interrogation of my femininity is a careful procedure. As a woman in New York City I must be desirable enough to navigate public spaces of transportation comfortably, but subdued enough to be left alone. As a trans woman, getting catcalled is the relief of my gender being read correctly muddled with the fear of my name appearing on social media in honor of my life the next day.
Part of the reason I comment on being cool/attractive all the time is because I don’t really see that shit anywhere else. In order for me to hear it, I have to say it.
Brittani via I Demand to Be Sexualized | Autostraddle
It’s hard to know what to say about this because what hasn’t already been said about the many, many other unarmed people who have been killed by police this year? Jamar Clark was killed less than a week ago and already this story feels familiar. The inconsistent story, the confusing police explanation — a seven-year police veteran fatally lost control of his gun and also accidentally dropped his handcuffs on the ground at the same time? — the powerful grief and rage, the disappearance of the evidence, the fact that we’re already resigned to probably not seeing any justice come of this — in the first 439 cases seen by Minneapolis’s police conduct review office (which doesn’t seem to have even existed before 2012) not a single one ended in discipline for an officers. It’s exhausting, and many people are exhausted, and Jamar Clark doesn’t have the chance to be exhausted because he’s dead.
This winter, I’ll be talking about my battle with Seasonal Affective Disorder in a biweekly column called Diary of a SAD Girl. This is the second (mostly wordless) column. You can read last week’s (very wordy) column here. I don’t know where this column will end, or which path we’ll take to get there, or what forms of media I’ll be using along the way. This week, it’s a cartoon. Next week, maybe I’ll write you a poem in the sky from inside a hot air balloon! Or, you know, just use my typey fingers to make words on the internet. It’ll be an adventure. Me, you, and my Philips GoLITE BLU Energy Light, slogging through the snow and sunless days together.
Game Over: Diary of a SAD Girl #2
I believe deeply in floral print. I’ve been hanging onto these tropical flower print wedges for five years, I used to own a vast array of obnoxious flower cocktail rings and pins, and a good chunk of my wardrobe is swathed in petal prints. Flower patterns can brighten up every area of our lives — our linens, our laptop cases, our wallpapers, our pet beds — but today I wanna take a minute to focus on floral print apparel so that we can all give and live our best garden life this holigay season. But also, does anyone know how to keep houseplants alive. Asking for a friend.
Holigay Gift Guide 2015: Flower Power
I think a lot of punks and queers and activists KNOW what capitalism and colonialism did — it clouded the raw, clear human connection to the universe with oppressive religious values that centered around white supremacy and class war. I definitely understand that not all punks are going to believe that Malachite and Rose Quartz have special healing powers, or even that astrology has validity; but I do understand that there is a large number of people who have connected to their culture and their gender and their mental health through accessing magic. Plus, I never deny anyone a Tarot reading, so all the haters are welcome to try me.
I know there’s something completely uncool about my approach here, but that’s also part of growing up in small towns. Those gender expectations are so hard-wired, so unquestionable that even buzzing your head and wearing men’s clothes isn’t enough to get you much more than looks of sympathy and once, insultingly, an offer to go clothes shopping together. Fuck you, well-meaning coworker.
I decided not to try and wrap my head around the idea that I would be presented to an audience as a cool crushworthy badass. Honestly, my first thoughts were that people would say, “That’s not a guy?!?” Which, you know, is usually pretty chill for me. Personally, I don’t mind being accidentally misgendered during my daily going ons. I DO mind when people say I look like/am trying to be a guy as if that’s a bad thing or an accident or there’s something wrong with a grown ass woman looking however she damn well pleases. The comments are never really that I’m ugly (because, I mean, who would they be kidding). It’s that I’m doing IT wrong. I’m doing being a woman wrong. And if I’m doing being a woman wrong, I’m certainly not succeeding at being an attractive woman, right?
Brittani via I Demand to Be Sexualized