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I knew I was destined for holy things when at age three, I knocked over the candle on Easter Sunday. My defense has always been that I wanted to touch the flowers on the other side of the candle. In that vein, my life speaks of those in-between places, those almost-there-i-want-that moments. Growing up in Laramie, Wyoming and Duluth, Minnesota, I now reside in Washington where I attend school at The Evergreen State College and is a tutor in the campus writing center. My emphasis at Evergreen are religious studies and creative writing. I am also thinking very hard about religious life. But that's the boring part, not the queer part. I came out as a lesbian when I was fourteen and proceeded to try and tell my entire town in ways that were both safe and unsafe. I've never really known for sure what I am in terms of sexual orientation, so I've stopped labeling myself, but I totally respect and understand both the need for people to have labels and the lack of rights that queer people have. So in that sense, I'm queer, "but I do like St. Teresa of Avila." I've also struggled with gender identity and believe that although I am not born in the wrong body, I am male, not female. However, for personal reasons, I guess I'm not male enough to give up my womanhood, so I don't deny my vagina. But I don't make a big statement about messing with the binary, honestly – it was just easier to deal with the rest of my life than how I should fashion my body, how the world perceives my body. I'll deal with that some day, when I'm older. So in that sense, I'm trans, "but I do like Rabi'a Al-Adawiyya." And at the end of the day, I'm my parent's child, so have always wanted to balance responsibilities to family with all of my beautiful self. I'd love to answer any questions. I'm really open to a lot of things, but good things to contact me about would be: gender identity, not knowing what you are, living in a place that is not a metropolitan area, queerness and religion, balancing family traditions and queerness, writing, queerness in Young Adult literature, harassment, being out in high school and middle school, and activism. But seriously. I'm open. |