five gems from the allied media conference

I plan to expand these into more full posts later but for right now I just need to get them down on the digital page in rough form.

1. Being at the Allied Media Conference filled me with such hope, with the knowledge that we can and are building another world because I saw it happen. I saw amazing fierce beautiful people come together across the differences the system tries to use to separate us and instead we built a space of love and radical possibility and deep dreaming and shared joy and power.

2. After leaving the AMC, a deep swell of sorrow swept over me. Some of that I’m sure is due to crashing after the high. But not all of it. I feel lonely because I’m not connected to that radical, beautiful, powerful movement in my day to day life or even in my weekly or monthly life. I want to live with the magic and music and fierce creative love and open dialogue and empowerment of marginalized voices and honesty about the super fucked up state of the world and inspiring courageous work for healing and liberation. I want that to be my life. But I feel scared that I’m not good enough or strong enough or cool enough or or or.

3. One of the obstacles which I have hardly named or spoken about is an invisible disability. I haven’t spoken of this partially because of my fear of the word “disabled” and what that means or implies about me. But the truth is this: for the past five years I have had difficulty walking and standing. I can walk and stand, but for much less time than most people.

I didn’t want to call myself disabled for multiple reasons: my own internalized ableism, not wanting to be defined by a weakness of problem, needing to believe that my condition was not permanent, the fact that I haven’t seen a doctor in about five years and so don’t have some official medical diagnosis, my sense that the concept of “disability” was all tied up with the Western medical perspective, the fact that I see the problem with my knees and hips as part of the wreckage caused by my father’s sexual abuse and not caused by something else.

At the opening to the AMC, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha shared some amazing and inspiring words about disability justice. Part of what she said (and I’m paraphrasing) was that people with disabilities carry the weight of legacies of violence and domination in their bodies. This resonates with my story, with my truth about the pain in my body: my father’s violation of my sexuality has caused my pelvis to be dislocated.

I still know and believe that I can become stronger and healthier. But right now I am dealing with limited mobility, with a disability. I do not have to be ashamed by that. I do not have to attempt to hide that, to be silent, to pass as an able-bodied person, to carry around this weight of shame. Doing so has exhausted me.

4. I also need to come out as genderqueer. I’m semi-out, but for a long time I’ve thought that I was comfortable enough in the assumed identity of male that people place me in but I’m not. I don’t really have models for people who are out about the fact that they are neither men nor women. But I need to find and cultivate and create spaces in which I can express the totality of my gender in all its complexity and shifting nature.

5. I’ve also been hiding my gifts, my own songs, my own fierce love, my own tears at the violence tearing apart the world, my own wild dreams. I have hidden these even from myself. Doing so has hurt me, but it has also hurt the world, the movement, the beautiful people I long to be connected with, who are also longing to be connected with me. These words are the beginning of a bridge, a road, which connects me to the world, the life, the movement we are dreaming and building together. So mote it be.