Resipiscence

There's a thread going on at a forum I frequent that asks for peoples' pictures, just so we regulars can picture each other while we're talking about whatever we always talk about. I defaulted to a verbal description, which probably doesn't do anyone much good. I'm fairly average, no outstanding physical traits or anything, and my knowledge of current pop culture fails to provide me with an adequate comparison.

Then there are the journals I've been on, where the journalist uses a picture of him/herself as an avatar.

See, all that kind of weirds me out. I can't imagine putting a picture of myself on the Net. Partially, this is just because I don't think I look like I'm supposed to look, if that makes any sense. I'm not unhappy with my appearance, just not entirely... comfortable with it. I dislike drawing self-portraits because as technically accurate as they may be, and according to other people they are, I never really think that the person depicted is myself. I mentioned a long time ago that I've always been uncomfortable around mirrors, or really anything that gives a reflection. There's always been this cognitive split between what I think of as looking like me and the picture I actually see looking back on me. It's a very strange thing.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to look like, per se. Personally, I always figured I'd be a bit taller and more coordinated, but I think everyone thinks that. No one wants to be a short maladroit. I could do without the family curse of round baby cheeks and permanent dark circles under my eyes, but very little short of major surgery is going to do anything about those. Adolescent bodily strangeness, wonder of wonders, seems to be developing cheekbones and a jawline. The circles, on the other hand... until the rest of the world figures out that my nocturnal internal clock is the way to go, they're probably not going anywhere.

I'd just like to add that I don't spend hours in front of the mirror obsessing over my nonstandard facial features. I don't even spend minutes doing it. Generally speaking, I just don't care all that much about measuring up to cultural standards. As for body image, I honestly have no issues in this area. When my brother used to tease me about being "fat," I'd just stare at him like he was a moron. His definition of "normal" seems to meet my definition of "extreme malnutrition."

My sister still tells me I'm fat and and ugly, but in her case, it's because she's mean and insecure, not stupid. She also tells me I'm a lousy artist and mentally retarded to boot, so I'm guessing you can see exactly how much credibility she has with me.

At any rate, all this actually leads me to wonder what people that read my journal think I look like, or if they even try to work up a mental image. I usually have mental images of the diarists I read. Sometimes they look like the actual person. Sometimes they don't. On the artsy side, all this leads me to do a small side project, kind of for my own benefit, I suppose. I've got the list of avatars on my homepage, so I'm doing character sketches of all of them. (I've been on a c.sketch kick lately. I've got about four done. I'm so proud of myself.)

I also wondered, then, if by allowing my readers (do I have readers? I think I do...) to work up their own conception of what I look like, am I undermining my goals in journaling. Recall the Christian diarists entry. "Christian realism." Or realism in general, I guess. My intent in journaling isn't to make some kind of little self-absorbed haven where I try to manipulate others' perceptions of what my life is really like. I usually try to give my honest opinions on things, and my honest perceptions of the way I saw or heard or felt something. First-person viewpoint is always limited, but my point is not to narrow or censor it any more than it already is.

I got an email or two about the whole coming-out business, and to be honest (noticing a pattern?) I'm still not sure why I did that when I did. Part of it has to do with the above. I really was tired of hiding things in the one place I shouldn't have to. This journal was always meant to show the full range of my viewpoint, and concealing that was, however justified it may or may not have been, essentially a betrayal of that original purpose.

That leads me to a new wrinkle in journaling here. It's tempting to make my journal "Liadan's Queer Christian Perspective On Things!" Reducing my writing to a few barbed rants against bigoted articles or whiny self-obsessed tirades about how Nobody Loves Me, Everybody Hates Me, Guess I'll Go Eat Worms would be easy. It would also be very boring. As well, I don't want to give the impression that being bisexual and being Christian, and the baggage that goes with both of them, are the sum total of my life and my identity. Sure, I got mad when my government teacher implied that I was a walking oxymoron, but I also got mad when my essay got lost, which makes it impossible for me to do the revisions. I got frustrated with a piece of art that didn't turn out the way I wanted it today, and the piece of art had nothing to do with gender issues or spiritual conflict. I don't want this to be a journal only about these things, essentially a long, drawn-out "And now, over to Liadan for the bi perspective, please?".

At the same time, I don't want to effectually re-closet myself by never saying anything about either of those things. I don't want to pretend that the process of figuring out where God wants me to go with this new discovery isn't incredibly complicated and fraught with peril, and that it won't take a couple of well-placed entries musing on it to figure it all out. And because everyone craves their little moment in the spotlight, I'd like to think that maybe the things I write about will affect someone else's perception of things are.

But I don't want to accomplish that purpose by manipulating what I write here, either by censoring myself or devoting all my energies to that one specific area. The balance might not be an easy one to strike. The obvious answer is that I'd just keep writing whatever's on my mind, whenever it happens to pop up along the road, but the obvious answers always sound a lot simpler than they actually are.

For example, the "obvious" answer to avoiding awkward situations with my blissfully ignorant parents is just to tell them The Truth.

Well, see, my dad's conservative enough to give Pat Buchanan a run for his money. And he doesn't like it when I have opinions. I've never gotten in any major trouble before-- the worst thing I can think of is the time I was an hour over curfew-- so I don't really know how he'd react, but i have a strong suspicion that it would involve a suitcase and a "henceforth I have no daughter!".

My mom has a lot invested in the whole "family values" thing. When my brother went on his first date, she said she was "just glad that [he wasn't] gay." When Michael Jackson came on television one night, she muttered that he looked like a "fag." She tells me that i'll change my mind about having children when I get married, not knowing that there's a better than average chance I'll be marrying another woman, wherein this would be, well, biologically impossible. And she was weirded out by the fact that when I did the Gay Report, I actually seemed to think that "gay is okay." Again, suitcase and disavowal seeming likely, with therapy with a "Christian psychologist" running a close second.

Yep, the obvious answer is always simple, neat, and wrong.

Labels: art, family, Teh Gay