WK5

 

It’s 7 in the morning on a sleepless night and I spent the last hour or so reading other peoples writing for this homework. It’s the 30^th of December and I’m doing everything last minute again as usual. With every post I read I felt a suffocating sorrow wedged somewhere in my chest behind my ribs doing a little dance. At one point I realized that dance was an uncomfortable sting in my lungs from the reminder of how painful identity can be, how constricting yet undefined, and how we all have faced similar scary and alienating experiences. How painful it is to try and understand it. I don’t really have five concrete concepts I can describe myself with. If I tried to list them they’d be concepts I’ve adopted to cope with who I really am underneath the need to survive and adapt, whether that be a bisexual woman, a cottagecore enthusiast, an improv comedian, an untalented writer or even my parent’s only child and future financial hope. Volatile. Volatile is the word that in all capacity I feel explains who I am from my conception to the day I decide to kick the bucket. It seems a little harsh but it’s true in whichever way you look at it – from my humor and my resilience, the need to procrastinate and panic but also overachieve, to my sudden shifts between mania and depression that are hard to escape even with years of medication at this point. I am in my identity exactly what makes life so hard for me in the first place and that something brands you as an “other” from the moment you try to grow among other people.

In his essay American Dreams, Kevin Jennings describes his experience growing up striving for the American Dream as a poor, gay southerner in rural America. In his journey to achieve it he felt the need to suppress the most important parts of his identity for other's convenience, a trauma that led him to a failed suicide attempt. From the very start, I understood Kevin’s need to shape himself to fit where he wanted to belong. His need to get rid of his southern heritage reminded me of my own struggle as the first person in my family to attend University, feeling like a fish out of water or even an imposter standing along with people that have all the qualities of an educated citizen. I felt like a mental Hick from day one. Because of that, I wanted to abandon what made up my parents’ rural and poor background out of a misplaced shame because I felt my heritage to be that of someone uneducated. His struggles with his sexuality felt relatable as well as a bisexual woman that experienced judgment from both family and classmates, but his main point of being accepting of your own identity regardless of how others view you hit the hardest. The idea that the acceptance of who you are is a dream in itself. When your identity is tied to how you feel it can be terrifying. Like Kevin I want my acceptance of who I am, even if it’s something as scary as being mentally ill (a boogeyman in any conversation), to be a stepping stone in a direction that is more positive. That we aren’t scary monsters, some evil creatures lurking around your neighborhood. As queer people, we are loving, as poor people we have worth and as in my personal case, we that are a bit volatile have a right to be heard, understood, and treated with hope and respect. We all embody America in a way, we are our own liberty and justice when it comes down to it. I know by the end of the day, no matter whichever identity I feel suits me that moment, I want to be a Kevin Jennings. Someone that evolved into freedom for himself despite everyone and everything around him telling him otherwise.