The Resiliency of Flowers in Spring

On Sunday it snowed in Boston and my heart broke a little bit.

Daylight’s savings has passed, the sun has set after 6pm, and in the cemetery where I work flowers have been sprouting up in irregular patches, surprising me with glimpses of white and purple on my lunchtime walks. I spent an afternoon on the Boston Common in a dress and no tights, and came home with a light sunburn, marking the shape of my sunglasses on my face.

And despite all that, on Sunday it had the audacity to snow in Boston.

When I woke up on Monday morning to the sight of 4 inches of snow carpeting the ground, I immediately thought of the snowdrops and purple crocuses that had been so eagerly growing as the temperatures had begun to rise. “Goodbye little friends,” I thought. “Maybe you’ll come back again in a few weeks.”

And yet today as I walked from my car to the office I saw something remarkable.

My little flower friends had survived! And even more impressive: there were more of them! Not even a mid-March snow storm could keep them down.

The resiliency of flowers in springtime astounds me every year. Emerging from the long, dark season of winter, where staying in bed feels like a better option than everything else, where we put on layers and don’t let skin touch open air, hearing more dark weather is coming is pretty soul crushing.

Similarly, being a queer femme committed to social justice and liberation, waking up to hear the North Carolina passed a bill that would allow discrimination against LGBT people, or that Kourtney Yochum has become the 7th transgender person to be killed this year, after a winter of hearing vitriolic racism and sexism coming from presidential candidates and watching 1/4 of the queer women characters on TV die, it can feel a little hard to not break down and cry for the state of the world. It can feel like the injustices are piled so high, that there is no way to break through. Like maybe we will never see the sun again.

But the flowers do it. They survive the thing that should kill them over and over again, and they come back, as beautiful and necessary as ever. They rebuild a world that seems to have died and announce that spring is here at last.

So much of my femme identity has been inspired by flowers. They are fragile but resilient. They are vibrant and beautiful, but also necessary to our ecosystem. Flowers have seasons where it’s their time to grow and when it’s their time to go back to the earth, and protect themselves. Also they grow in groups, which is never a bad idea for femmes.

It takes a lot of strength to be able to be vulnerable with others in a way that allows you to take in the sun, but might also allow you to get hurt. It can be challenging to take up space with vibrancy and color in a world that wants you to look or be a certain way. It is hard work to put beauty and love into the world when you know someone will call it frivolous and there is a chance that it might put you in danger. It is scary to dream of a better world when you feel like you are surrounded by hate.

Luckily we have springtime to remind us of what it means to be resilient. To show us what a beautiful world is coming if we believe in it, and keep believing, no matter how long the winter.

I Went to Texas and All I Got Were These Great Outfits

I am a true clothes-loving femme. I love dresses and button-downs and comfy jeans and t shirts. I can go from high femme to tomboy femme and be perfectly happy. I like to plan my future in terms of the outfits I get to wear. Maybe it’s being indoctrinated into a consumer driven capitalist agenda, but it makes me feel happy to dress in clothes that make me feel good.

As a plus size girl in a skinny fashion world, however, shopping often sucks.

It sucks to try on clothes designed with smaller bodies in mind, just made a few sizes bigger. It sucks to not be able to button shirts over my ample chest when the rest of a shirt fits fine! It sucks to try on dresses that cling or hang baggily on my body, as if I don’t get to look good because I don’t fit into ideals of beauty. There are a lot of style trends that are created around smaller bodies that make other women look cool and effortless, but when I try them out I feel like people see me as sloppy and lazy.

Last week I made my first foray into the American South. I visited Dallas and I saw many things for the first time, like long horn cows and bedazzled rhinestone hats that said “USA.” I also found several different stores that sold clothes that actually fit my body! I don’t know if it’s true that everything is bigger in Texas, or if it has to do with Southerner’s penchant for putting sugar in everything, but it seems like people in Dallas, Texas know what a full-figured woman wants to wear!

The hat of my dreams.

I went to local businesses and chains I had only previously seen on the internet and I was surrounded by things that were made with me in mind! When I walked into Torrid (a store that exists in New England but that I had never actually seen before) for the first time you couldn’t pry the goofy grin from my face. It doesn’t matter that they lean heavily into the hearts and skulls motif, being in a store where the employees and customers all looked like me made me feel finally seen in a world I sometimes feel rejected from. Trying on clothes that were too big for me at times was a privilege because it meant other women were sharing in my joy.

I’ve spent a long time working on loving my body. For a while clothes meant covering up something that was too big. When I was a young college queer  I would go to stores with my friends and see feminine clothing that I thought was so cute, but just not for me. I lived in oversized men’s button downs, which effectively hid my shape and advertised my queerness.

Then I learned about femme identity. I learned that my body and my voice shouldn’t be afraid of being too much. That I could dress my body for myself and not for the consumption of others. That I could be feminine and queer. I felt good about playing with fashion, and with some much needed confidence (as well as the endless affirmations of my femme friends), I started feeling like my body isn’t something I need to hide. It felt like a one woman revolution. In a community that often privileges skinniness and masculine-leaning androgyny, I could make a little space to just be me.

For me being fat is intrinsically linked with being femme. It’s about taking up space and being unapologetic and making choices for my own happiness. It’s about finding community with people who share my size and affirm it. It’s about not being ashamed to eat in public or wear something that’s ugly or to use my style to make a statement. It’s about not letting overarching ideologies about femininity or size make me feel bad for being who I am.

It is a continuous challenge to unlearn the many “isms” we internalize over the course of a lifetime, but the work is infinitely rewarding, as we learn to love ourselves and each other in new, more complete ways.

Thanks @Dallas for the fun trip. Sorry I made fun of the cowboy hats so much.

❤ Marnie

 

 

Our Selfies, Ourselves

It may sound strange, but sometimes I forget I have a body.

Sure, I use it everyday. It’s part of everything I do. Without it I could not walk or type or even think. But often I forget about it.

(This is a privilege. You better believe I remember my body when it stops working the way I want it to, or when I’m suddenly faced with a world not designed for me. During the two weeks I spent on crutches after spraining my ankle in college, I was constantly aware of my body. And hills. And the insurmountable distance between my bed and the dining hall).

When I imagine myself, the details are blurred. Often I am a bit thinner and taller. When I look in the mirror, sometimes I feel jolted. I am surprised by the face that looks back at me. Who is that?

There are a lot of reasons I imagine. I’m a cerebral person, I tell myself. Having anxiety means that sometimes my brain can’t stop thinking, there is a whole universe of worst case scenarios and alternate endings in my head. I imagine it to be like a a highway of flying cars, like in The Jetsons. The thoughts swirl around in empty space, and sometimes collide without clear street signs. I can feel them in the space right beneath the spot where my forehead meets the bridge of my nose, a knot of twisted metal.

Thinking of myself in those terms rests the blame squarely on my own shoulders. It was inevitable. My brain is hardwired this way. Maybe if I just thought less.

But there is something else. As far back as I can remember my body has been under observation. Being called fat as a second grader. My older brother’s friend telling me he “liked a curvy girl” when I was in the fifth grade. Finishing my lunch in my seventh grade math class and a boy mocking me for “always eating.” My mom once asking me why I always wore my dad’s hoodies. They weren’t flattering. She didn’t understand that I had to cover my body up, hide it. It was too big. I was too big.

And this: I can only eat certain foods. It’s not an allergy or OCD, as has been suggested. Since I was a toddler I simply have not been able eat certain things without throwing them back up. There have been doctors and nutritionists, and half-baked theories picked up from Yahoo News and TLC’s “Freaky Eaters.” (Flattering title TLC, good going). The only thing that has stuck with me is something a school counselor told me in college. “Most eating issues that originate in early childhood are based in a lack of control over one’s own body.”

 

 

Sometimes I wonder what could make a toddler feel their lack of agency so acutely that they would take it out in such a drastic way. I don’t know if it started as a preference or if I always had a physical reaction to new foods. I am missing some of my own narrative. I don’t know how to tell this story without it’s beginning, but I don’t know if it matters that much.

The truth is that no matter how unique my reaction might feel, I’m not the only little girl who ever felt like she didn’t have control over her body. I’m not the only person to feel disassociated from their own body. I’m not the only person who has taken drastic measures to get that control back.

Which brings me to the selfie. Omnipresent on social media, derided by many think pieces mocking millenials, the selfie is one of those things that “teen girls like.” Other things include boy bands and fanfiction (both of which I think are invaluable to young people trying to safely explore their sexuality and identity, but more on that another time).

Given the ubiquitous presence of technology in the U.S, I think it’s easy to forget that smartphones/webcams/ipads are relatively new, and have given most people an unprecedented access to cameras. Before the millennial generation getting your picture taken was a process that either involved expensive digital cameras, or developing film (not being able to see a picture before it printed!), and if you wanted a picture of yourself, someone else usually had to take it. It’s only in past decade or so that the subject of a picture could really be the photographer. No more “say cheese,” the selfie is not beholden to the gaze of someone else. A person can look at themselves and decide how they want to be seen.

I have been known to spend 10 minutes setting up the perfect selfie, then filtering it appropriately for social media. (Not photoshopping you’ll notice. The subject here is my own face, not an imaginary face). It may seem silly, but it allows me to have some control over this body of mine, and reminds me that it exists. It takes the time I need to be deliberate with my body. I test the shapes my face can make. I see how I look in motion through the mirror-like front-facing lens of my phone’s camera.

(To me selfie taking is an art form. A good selfie is one that takes time. There is staging and lighting to choose. This may seem artificial, but I think a bad picture is like pausing Netflix while a character is in the middle of moving. They don’t actually look like that you guys).

Through the art of taking a selfie I make something beautiful where once I only saw something ugly. The image in my head becomes that picture I took.

I’d like to be able to say I love my body all the time, but the fact is, I need help a lot of the time. I don’t always remember that my body is a part of myself. We’re more like awkward roommates. When I can use a selfie to show how I feel it feels like we’ve successfully merged, even for a moment.

I think selfies have the opportunity to be helpful in this kind of personal healing. They encourage us to be a little sillier, to find the beauty in ourselves, and to share this moment in a world constantly telling women, queer people, people of color, people with disabilities, and every intersection therein to take up less space. It can be brave to put yourself into the world and say “I am beautiful and I deserve to be here.”

There is a downside to selfies of course. They are fighting against the pressure to appear “perfect” on social media, showcasing only our best attributes. So much of our social life takes place online, another place we are disembodied, shrunk down to a profile picture or an avatar, where we can curate our own lives. It’s easy to start defining our value in terms of number of likes.

I don’t have any easy solution to that. I do think it’s easy to forget that the people we interact with online are real people. I think there is value in placing parts of our vulnerable selves online, and recognizing that as being a strong and hard thing to do. On more than one occasion I have been moved to tears by the kind notes I have received from friends on my Facebook wall or in my Instagram comments. I know firsthand the power that social media has for meaningful connection. I think there is also space for intentionally positive online communities that encourage us to support one another as well as ourselves, like #BlackoutDay and College Compliments Pages.

I do think the pros out-weigh the cons. Speaking for myself, as a queer femme woman I often feel like the expectations of how my body should be are completely unrealistic, or catering to someone else’s gaze. I spent years being afraid of being feminine because I didn’t want to be sexualized and then because I didn’t think I could be feminine and queer. Taking selfies gives me my agency back over this body which sometimes rebels against me, and which I often neglect. It reminds me to look at myself through my own eyes. I am not the subject of anyone else’s gaze but my own. My selfie, myself.

On Space, Self Love, and Margaret Atwood

“Last year I abstained

this year I devour

 

without guilt

which is also an art”

-Margaret Atwood, You are Happy

 

It was difficult to watch the news in the two months after I graduated from college, during the summer of 2014. News of the Isla Vista shootings came 4 days after my commencement, a month later the Hobby Lobby verdict rolled in, announcing that a corporation can deny contraceptive care based on their religious affiliation, the rape of a 16 year old teen went viral, and simultaneously the “I don’t need feminism” campaign began plaguing the internet.

Individually each of these events were heartbreaking, but when you put them together, the message being directed at women was impossible to ignore: women are not in charge of their own bodies, women should be punished for not having sex, women should be punished for having sex, and women who object to this somehow hate men.

It is incredible to me how quickly conversations that are specifically about women are derailed by someone who says “but are you thinking about men?” especially when what is being discussed is women’s health and safety. Or that, when we react with rage, we are told we are over-reacting or being “too emotional” a catch-all phrase which means “your emotions are inconvenient for me.” Similarly popular are “crazy woman” or “angry feminists.”

Actress Zooey Deschanel has been quoted as saying “As a woman, I feel continually shhh’ed. Too sensitive. Too mushy. Too wishy washy.” I think this experience resonates with a lot of women. When I was picked on as a little girl for being too chubby, too loud, too unfeminine; if I reacted with rage, I was told to suppress that. “That is the reaction they want.” What an interesting game, provoke a girl into having an emotional reaction, then tease her for her rage. It was often the women in my life who told me that I needed to react calmly, because they had gone through it before and learned to make themselves smaller, so that they would seem more rational.

Well I’m pretty over rationality. The concept is that rational people don’t make decisions with their emotions, but logic, as if logic is ever not tempered by our experiences or emotions. What I learned during my 4 years at a women’s college is that if I can trace my feelings to their roots, then I can often find the solutions to my own problems. If I can trace the emotions of others to their roots I can understand their motivations, and work with them in compromise and collaboration. My emotional reactions have become my strongest asset, and I will not hide them to make someone else more comfortable. Embracing the emotional parts of myself that I used to feel ashamed of has led me to stronger relationships and a braver self.

When Margaret Atwood wrote “this year I devour/without guilt/which is also an art” she wrote about the need of women to be able to take up space, to emote, to consume sex and food and love with as much skill as they had previously been taught to deny them.

Being femme is about allowing yourself to devour without guilt, to take up space, to cry like the world is going to end, and to laugh a little too loud in public spaces. It’s about yelling your rage and fighting for justice.

It’s about learning the art of speaking, even if your voice shakes.

femme for me, not for you

Of course being femme also means I get emails like this. Am I so transparent??

I feel like dressing in a “traditionally feminine” way gets a bad rap. By this I mean, skirts, dresses, make-up, jewelry, things you’d find in the women’s section of the clothing store. Of course there is nothing about wearing a dress that is inherently “just for women” because as my Mary Lambert crop top tells us:

We are brought up to think of masculinity as a neutral starting point. You can say “guys” to a mixed gender group and it will be accepted, whereas if you say “girls” it’s an insult to the men in the room. You probably have seen one of the many many tv shows where a women wears a button down shirt and jeans (that make her ass look nice) and the nice guy best friend tells her she’s “not like other girls” and means it as a compliment. She’s not vapid or silly, and she never takes too long to get ready because she’s too busy watching sports! She’s so much better than the evil current girlfriend who wears heels and lipstick apparently.

To quote my everyone’s favorite taco commercial “Why can’t we have both?” 

There is nothing wrong with wearing jeans and a button down and liking sports. There is equally nothing wrong with wearing lipstick and a dress and going to see a chick flick on Super Bowl Sunday. I’m pretty over the idea that dressing femme means being more invested in capitalism (did you barter your bowtie and suspenders for a goat?) or somehow more invested in the patriarchy. By devaluing femininity you’re also buying into the patriarchy! It’s almost like the patriarchy wants to pit all the genders against each other so they’re too busy with in-fighting to realize that we’ve all been fucked over.

But seriously there is this myth that people dress femininely to get attention, which is at best kind of a narcissistic belief and at worst victim blaming.

I wear dresses (and crop tops and skirts) because they make me feel good. And powerful. And because the world is sad sometimes and it is valuable to want to put a little beauty into it. Because for so many years I didn’t think I could be beautiful. And because I am a person and I am allowed to take up space.

So shout out to the femmes who dress from themselves, and take intentional time to make themselves feel good, and tell others how beautiful they are. Whether you wear pants or a dress or a jumpsuit or nothing at all, you keep doing you. I think you’re fly as hell.

Dear Hannah

Dearest Hannah,

It pains me to say that while I remember that day, when I was a CA and you a wee firstie, I don’t remember meeting you! I don’t want you to take it personally though, because I was a TERRIBLE community adviser. Some advice to my babes with anxiety- never take a job in the place where you live. Being judged on bulletin boards when you’re trying to hide in your room is the WORST. I know some larger schools compensate with free room and board, but not moho! We made $88 every other week for a pretty emotionally draining job. Don’t do it.

That being said, I wonder if we would’ve been ready to be friends all those years ago. I think about this sometimes with Katie, who lived down the hall from me during my first year in college, but who I didn’t fall in love with until my senior year. In the time between I fell in and out of love multiple times, went through some of the worst depression of my life, went to therapy for 2 years, learned how to take care of myself, and grew up. If I hadn’t gone through that, maybe I wouldn’t have been ready to accept the love and support she (and you) had to offer. I think the same holds true for my journey to identifying as femme. It didn’t come all at once, I had to work for it.

During my senior year of college I had a conversation with my brilliant femme friend Jessica about doing anti-racism work in the student orgs on campus. She was the chair of the QPOC student group, and I had just stepped down from my role as chair of a different LGBTQ org. I told her that I felt frustrated because while we came up with ideas to make the group more inclusive, I never felt like they were put into action. She offered me this brilliant advice that applied to activist work as well as my whole life:

Progress is very rarely linear. The idea that your problems have an all-encompassing, rational solution is a masculinist way of thinking.

She rocked my world by telling me that. As a newly identified femme I wondered, what is a feminist way of thinking? In my experience, when people are asked to describe femininity they will describe appearance and when asked to describe masculinity they’ll describe character traits. What, I wondered, are the character traits of being feminine?

For me, being femme means viewing vulnerability as a strength. We live in a world that privileges being “rational” over being emotional, but what would it look like if we listened to our joy and our anger and our grief? What would it look like if we treated others with radical empathy, and tried to view things from each other’s perspective instead of putting our opinions first? What would it be like if we made space for conversations that are are painfully honest, and instead of looking for a solution, just sat with our discomfort, knowing that to err is human? What if we made space for our humanity and the humanity of others?

Being femme to me means trusting that growth is a part of a process. There were times in the midst of going to therapy where I felt worse than where I started. I would cry for an hour and leave feeling like I had been ripped open, to go huddle in my bed. Those were the times when the real work was done. I had to look into the eyes of the grief at my center, and only by doing that could I take away some of it’s power over me. Being femme means trusting in your own resilience and throwing yourself heart-first into the world.

And femme means community. Femme means being the drunk girl in the bathroom who tells everyone else how pretty they are. Femme means making safe sober spaces (where you still tell everyone how pretty they are). Femme means calling your friend on their walk home, so they don’t have to be afraid walking alone. Femme means sharing and crying and laughing and validating and calling out and calling in, and taking care of each other.

I’m very lucky to have many amazing femme friends, whose constant love and validation has buoyed me on the daily. For me, being femme also means being grateful for all the love and light in my life.

You’ve got all my love Hannah, and I’m excited to embark on this blog-venture with you! So for you, same question: what does femme mean to you?

❤ Marnie