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19 somewhere sometime in the past to me, years ago: I stopped remembering the moment you realized you are queer. Because you shelved it so far back in your head, compartmentalized it into a box you never wanted to open up again, shoved it in a place so out of reach that I literally cannot remember. But it doesn’t really matter. In retrospect, there were so many moments you could have realized something was up: when you picked a random boy every year throughout elementary and middle to school to have a crush on, when the ends of your femme friendships made you sob for days on end, when youtube coming out videos made you sob even more, when you were just a strong ally. Language will be your love and enemy. Identities, labels, words will constantly be around you. It’s like that time that you were so excited to play in a ball pit until a bully pushed you into and you struggled to move, struggled to find your balance, struggled to get out, and the rainbow colors are fun until they’re into your face and onto you. It will feel like the time that you threw up in uncle’s car because you felt so dizzy and disoriented. No one ever lets you live that down even 17 years later (I wonder if no one will ever let me live it down if I came out as queer). Disidentification, as José Esteban Muñoz theorized, has already become your survival strategy as you make sense of labels, identities, and representations that maybe if you dream and try hard enough, will become a utopic reality. You think that you like science (spoiler: you don’t) and you spent too much time on tumblr, and so you carry with you Carl Sagan’s little adage “we’re made of star stuff.” something about the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our bodies were created in previous generations of stars over billions of years ago. Yeah, you and I are made of dead stars and broken universes, and forged from distant debris and inscribed onto our body is a history of the universe. Understanding stars to understand yourself, sure. But, what’s the point of using dying interstellar dust as a form of connection when your body is also inscribed with history and pain and difference and deviance and marginalization and distance and subordination and consumption and erasure. You will be, one day, twenty two. Strange, ikr. And yet, at this age that you think is so adult and so far away and so stable, I still do not feel totally comfortable using or owning any descriptors to define yourself. I mutter bisexual, queer, asian, femme, immigrant, nonbinary, woman but not really but also really, when ultimately to you and me, nothing will ever feel like it quite fits. Yes, you are queer. Trust me when I tell you that you will thrive in ambiguities, carving out the space between. Trust me because I know it feels good to let myself write into the unknown, to allow my imagination to move from emulation into disidentification. tbd on gender, if you find out let me know. much love, you, years in the future
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