There are days lately when I wish I was a news blogger, writing about current events with a concrete pseudonymous identity on a regular basis rather than a rarely-updated vague identity project that concerns maybe 0.5 people besides yours truly.

Two of those reasons have come up lately: the can of worms regarding media coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting (regarding Asian-American identity and mental health patient rights), and the thing I am going to talk about right now, news that a no-periods-ever birth control pill is likely going to be approved by the FDA soon.

Although it has not that much to do directly with the issues I'm dealing with now, that provoked the creation of this blog, the pill after all has quite a bit to do with my self-identity as a chick, and so I think it's fair game in a broad sense.

Full disclosure: I have always hated getting a period. Historically I have suffered from debilitating cramps around that time, not to mention dramatic mood instability that I can only guess is directly related to my having bipolar disorder. The only "mental health" medication that I've found to have a consistent, if small, pallative effect is extended-cycle oral contraceptives (and to a lesser extent, regular old OCs).* But I hate having to drag out these "health reasons" as if there is no legitimate reason for just hating having to deal with a period. I am never going to have kids, by choice, and I don't particularly care about fertility or motherhood. So why on earth should I be comforted by something like a visible sign of my own ability to procreate? Why should I want to put up with an unpleasant experience on a regular basis if I don't have to?

So I would say that despite my "legitimate" health reasons for choosing the no-period route as much as possible, my main reason for being on extended-cycle oral contraceptives is so I never, ever have to deal with hormone-related mood swings, and have a period as rarely as possible.

When I saw that a no-period-ever pill is coming on the market, my heart leapt up in joy. You have no idea: this is absolutely the stuff of dreams for me.**

Then I kept reading the article on it. It was packed to overflowing with quotes from women who consider their periods "natural" and "a part of being a woman," as essential to their female identity. They went on at length about how "women shouldn't prevent periods" because they personally valued theirs. Their reasoning was largely "it's natural" and "it's a reliable indicator that you're not pregnant, so reduces anxiety." I agree with them wholeheartedly that biological women often (but not always) have regular periods as part of their non-pharmaceutically-modified lives, and that periods indeed tell one she is not pregnant.

But.

Those women do not speak for this woman.

This woman could not care less about what is "natural" (given the problematic nature of the definition and use of this term in the first place - no pun intended). I do not consider my period any more a part of my essential female nature than shaving my legs. (Which, incidentally, I also choose to not to trouble myself with.) But when I think about it, there is not much about my identity - which necessarily includes my identity as a woman, given that I in fact am one - that is based in my natural, fertile potential for child-rearing, or anything related to it. It's a bothersome biological function with no more importance to me than farting. I cannot identify with women who choose to make that part of their biology a defining factor of their existence.

I realize, only too well, that we do live in a society that values women more for their child-producing than anything else. I do realize that we cannot help but to be affected by this. Trust me, I have dealt with this every time I reveal that I am not going to be a breeder. "You'll change your mind!" Sure. Once my womanly essential nature kicks in. It'll be any day now.

What frustrates me so much is the fact that this pill is a fucking godsend to women like me, and to women who for any reason don't want to put up with the bullshit that is inconvenient biological functions, and yet it is being framed as an insidious threat to women who (over)value their "essential female nature." My answer to them is not to take it. No one's forcing anyone. In fact, it will not even be that widely accessible, since one needs to have access to a doctor to prescribe it, and the cash to purchase it (since it won't be generic for a damn long time).

The article talked about a documentary being shown about the question of getting rid of one's periods. It's apparently being posed as some kind of ethical dilemma that needs to be dwelled upon at length. I am calling bullshit on this because from my perspective (a cranky one, I know, but it's all I've got) it is a personal choice, and it's only a dilemma if you somehow do not understand whether you, personally, like having a period or not. If you do, then stay the hell away from this medication!

And for fuck's sake, stop trying to speak for all women, and stop trying to eliminate choices for women that don't value their god-given natural feminine biology, and who choose to value themselves for something more meaningful.


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* The number of mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic drugs I have gone through are legion. I neither want nor need your advice on this count.

** Yes, I realize that one can do this with regular OCs by never taking the placebos (or taking a week off), and that the packaged fewer-periods or no-periods pills are a total rip-off. Still, I have never found a doctor who will actually prescribe OCs for me in this way, so I'm stuck paying for the ones that are marketed in this way.
posted by m 0 comments 15:52

In just about a week, it will be four years since I left college, the same amount of time I spent there.

It doesn't feel like it has been that long since I was there, in a different city, with different friends. With different priorities and a completely different outlook. Another personality. Another life.

I have been horribly homesick for my friends there in the recent months. I have been nostalgic for the first two or three years I was there, for warm rainy days in late spring, afternoons spent sitting on my second-floor balcony talking on the phone. Many of my memories are sensory rather than events, and it's the smell of wet black spring earth, the color of shockingly bright new green grass and small leaves against dark wet branches, that I've been daydreaming about so much. It is always afternoon, and I think of walking down the street after these rains. Everything is wet and lukewarm, and there is a smell in the air of something changing. The brick houses are wet and old, the sidewalks are broken and uneven, and bus engines are echoing through the concrete cavity of the wet busway below my street.

When I think of that sound of the lightest rain on the balcony roof, sitting down there with the cat looking out between the wood slats at the tree branches even with the height of the floor, waiting for my then-boyfriend to get home from work on a Friday evening so we can cook dinner and fall asleep in the living room: it is so nostalgic that it hurts. It makes my heart lonely for an imaginary social world I had there, then. When I lived there, in reality, I remember being miserable. The place didn't suit me and I never felt comfortable. I was often feeling loney and displaced and unhappy. But I miss being on those streets with my friends, and feeling that warm easy comfortableness of just being together with them, with nothing needing to be planned or said.

I don't have that here yet and it is frustrating to feel like I have no one to call when I just want to talk for no reason; or worse, when I want to talk for a reason that is weighing on me.

Anyway.

I have been so nostalgic for this sensory moment and this assumption of a safe network of friends, and yet when I stopped to think about it, I barely recognize myself then. I try to remember what I had been thinking; I go back and read my old journals, my old emails, try to imagine my old mentality. I am surprised to find that I am nothing like what I was four years ago, two years ago, even nine months ago.

What surprises me even more is that despite the fact that I feel so separated and detached from my past, like I have been dislodged so thoroughly from the environment of my childhood, is that I feel closer emotionally to who I was as a teenager than who I was last summer.

Why?

I turned this thought over and over in my head as I fell asleep last night, and came back to one of the reasons that I began this project in the first place. I have felt profound loss lately, in many respects: loss of love, loss of support, loss of my family and my home. But the biggest loss by far is a loss of identity. It is not a recent loss, but one that I have only recently realized consciously. The loss began so long ago that I hesitate to call it that, only because I am not a big believer in a constant core of self that one carries along over a lifetime. Loss implies that I had that core, I misplaced it, and I have retrieved it. I think it is rather that I have returned to a situation and an emotional place that I have not felt in nearly ten years.

The situation is one of loneliness, and I mean that in the most neutral way possible. I am in a loneliness that comes from not being in a long-term relationship that automatically colors my plans, my day, my desires, my fears, and my self. It is a loneliness that forces one to stop and think: what do I want to do? What do I want to do with today, with my summer, with my evening, with my life? And unlike the past eight years, I no longer have the determining factor of a significant other. I am the only one who can make these decisions, and this is not something I am used to anymore.

I realize more and more that, as I wrote already, the fact of a long-term serious boyfriend has meant that I change myself according to my view of what he would want, before he has a chance to ask. I am not blaming anything on the people I have dated, that they tried to change me. Rather, I did it myself out of fear that what I was already was not enough, or it was not right, or it was too much. I did this completely without realization of what I was doing. It was only after the fact, when I was suddenly alone and found myself utterly destroyed, that I realized it was not just the relationship that had done it. It was my own desire to change, to be the ideal for someone else.

I was so subsumed in this, and it was so unconscious, that my realization now of what was happening has made me into a completely different person. I am becoming confident in myself again, in a way that I hadn't been since high school. I had been wondering for years: what happened to that confident girl? And it makes me scared in the pit of my stomach to realize that I had buried her underneath layers of uncertainty and insecurity, layers and layers of self-doubt.

Now that I am emerging from behind those layers, trying as hard as I can to push them off, I am forced to return back to a point before this had begun, and I think that is why I can identify with my teenage self, the one who had not yet developed an insecurity about being desired and being loved. And these layers of rotting detrius that I am trying to push away are so heavy that I don't know if I could do it without the knowledge that there is, in fact, a self-identity I can try to get back to (or go forward with) that is something other than the attempt to be someone else's ideal.
posted by m 0 comments 10:20

Another poster on the same blog: "...my new goal is to kill boners wherever I go with my radioactive feminism. Ha. Who knew you could do that just by speaking out loud?"

This reminds me that not only is this a deeply-cherished personal goal that I should live up to more often, but also that on my list of things to think about for myself (among my relationships to others, my life, my art, my sexuality) is feminism.
posted by m 0 comments 15:04

A poster on a blog I frequent wrote the following with regard to dating weenies who want women to dumb themselves down in order not to threaten them (and to be "sexy"):

"But I’ve yet to have sex that’s good enough to trade my self-respect for. Sure, it’s always risky, but you gotta balance whether the risk is actually worth it."

What disturbed me so much about this was the realization that this is likely what my last relationship was largely based on. Trading the entirety of my self-respect for the best sex of my life, that is. What a scary thing to recognize.
posted by m 0 comments 14:47

Every Tuesday and every Saturday, I am lost in depression.

Is it that these days are bad for some intrinsic reason in my lifestyle right now, or have I noticed a pattern and then convinced myself it would happen? Is it self-fulfilling?

This past Saturday was the first one since my loss that I have not felt it. I got out of bed and didn't immediately want to lie down on the floor underneath the couch. I could get out of bed. I could get something done. I went out of the house and went on a walk without feeling like the weight of the earth was crushing me.

I suppose that experience made me think that I would no longer have to waste my Tuesdays and Saturdays convincing myself that living is a better idea than dying.

In case it's not obvious from my talking so far, today is a relapse.

I have not written about these days much over the years, because for me this feeling is beyond words. Not only can I not bring myself to get out of bed, much less write about it, it's emotionally numbing in a completely overwhelming way. When I can't feel anything, how can I describe what I feel?

But depression a sick heart. It's my heart feeling physically like it's dying of a wasting disease, with a painful sour taste. It's my heart pumping poison through my veins instead of blood because it is unhealthy. I am unhealthy. I feel it in every inch of my body, this sludge being pushed around by a dying organ.

And I am sick of this sludge.

Labels: me-gazing

posted by m 0 comments 11:27

How did it come to this?

In other words, how did this project come to be?

There was a short term catalyst: losing someone I wouldn't hesitate to characterize as the great love of my life.

This loss surprisingly generated a number of larger thoughts within me about myself, my relationships, and my life. I couldn't help, in grief, to wonder at how I'd become the person I am now. I felt insecure, at times worthless or hopeless. I felt empty of distinguishing characteristics. I felt loveless and unable to love. I felt a total and cripping loss of what were once my creativity, my senses of self and of self-worth, my confidence, and my self-esteem.

In other words, I had become what I could only call a ghost. I wasn't a shell. I was a shade of a human being.

At the risk of sounding too full of self-pity, I would like to recount the rest of my process of realization about where my life had led me. As I thought more about my situation, I couldn't help but go over the past seven or ten years in my head, trying to reach back to some kind of origin I felt should be there.

I think I wanted to find the core or the kernel of my identity.

What I came to identify as an overarching issue over these years was my readiness to change or adapt in reaction to boyfriends and other love interests. This may sound silly or obvious, but the extent of what I had been unconsciously doing was, to me, somewhat shocking.

I remember a time when I was more self-assured; when I was deeply creative and devoted to my own projects; when I did what I wanted without much thought of what others would think of me. I related to others on my own terms. My approach to dating and to becoming involved with other people was very much based on them liking me the way I already was: someone who wanted me to change the way I looked or acted would be someone beneath me.

The thing is, I never found myself in a situation where a change was demanded of me. But I realize now that over time, when I became involved with people I deeply admired, I desperately wanted these people to return my feelings. I wanted to be liked by someone I looked up to and respected and ultimately was the kind of person that I wished I was like, whether or not I realized that myself. In anticipation of anything strange about myself that could scare off others, I became self-conscious for the first time. I examined myself critically: my style, my behavior, my hair, my clothes, my hobbies, my social interface with other people. I watched what I did, what I said, what I thought.

I did this for so long, to such a great extent, and so unconsciously that it is hard for me to tell whose body I inhabit now. Who is this woman that I see in the mirror? What are these things that I do as though they're habit, when they don't feel natural to me at all? What are these ways of thinking that I have now, which don't seem as thought they'd come naturally to me as I remember myself? What about that girl I remember being? Who was she, how does she relate to this person I've become?

These are the realizations that led me to what I'm doing here.

Labels: analysis, me-gazing, origins

posted by m 0 comments 15:54

A phrase occurred to me nearly two months ago, in January, when I was undergoing an earth-shattering change. I thought to myself: I am the ghost of who I used to be.

I've been thinking about it since then, and it's led me to an idea for a project that I would like to pursue. I'd like to see if it gets me anywhere.

Dissection: I am a ghost. Who did I used to be?

The questions of who I was, and who I have become, are ones that have remained in my mind for ages. I have gone back to look at journal entries from years ago and these same issues have kept coming up. Each time I start dwelling on them, it seems as though it's weighing on me for the first time. Each time, I forget; and each time, I keep coming back to these fundamental questions of very personal, individual identity. Clearly they have not been resolved despite my periodic attempts.

I wonder if a part of this lack of resolution, lack of progress in looking within myself, is because of a fundamental lack of organization or strategy in my wondering toward (potential) answers. There has been no plan of attack and no definite path ahead of me. This realization, among other reasons, is drawing me toward some kind of semi-public and organized project that could let me pursue these questions to more satisfaction than I have in the past.

This is a project, then, that will involve gazing at myself - my inner and outer selves - and at my past, present, and future, in the hope of coming to better terms with who I am and what I want. I hope that it will let me pursue some more interesting and broader questions of existence along the way, because I don't think I can fill an entire series of writing with only myself. I'm easily distracted and I don't think these are issues that are limited to my identity alone.

Labels: analysis, confusion, me-gazing, origins

posted by m 0 comments 15:36