Writing Sample for Hidden Voices
BY MICHAELA
What do words mean to me? Well, words to me are like bread crumbs.
They lead us in a direction. For a long time, the only words that led me were those of my family and our community, mostly our church.
I was told over and over again how to be “good”.
How I should stand, how I should speak, and how I should act.
They even went as far as leading me in the way I should think.
Fire and brimstone, and I feared stepping outside of their ideals and damning my soul, or worse, for disappointing my family.
But there was something inside of me that wouldn’t quit fighting.
It turns out that it wasn’t something, but someone. Me.
In a chat room these words changed me: “I was technically born a boy.” I didn’t know how exactly to feel right away, but there was a part of me that latched on to a notion I had never been told existed. This is the power of words, but it is also the importance of other voices.
When I think of “other,” I used to think “bad” or “wrong”.
Where I grew up, anyone who was “other” was bad.
On the bus or driving with my parents through the city, we would see them: the drug dealers, the street walkers, the addicts.
All the people who had “turned their back on God’s way of living,” my mother would say, and my father would just shake his head and say, “And they will get what is coming to them.” Every now and then, we would see what appeared to be a man walking in heels.
When I pointed one out to my parents one Sunday in the car, my mother said something about them “doing anything for money” and my dad made a disgusted noise.
Whatever flicker of curiosity or envy that stirred inside of me, I tamped it down.
They were others. They were the forsaken.
But I also had a small fear that I was an other, too.
“I was technically born a boy.”
When I read those words, said so openly in a chat room, I was floored.
This person had said it as if it was a casual random fact.
And so, I went to the only place where all my life it was safe for me to explore: the library.
There I discovered more words from others.
I first found Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, and the idea that gender is a concept to be questioned was mind-blowing.
Butler is a professor here, the number one reason I wanted to come here for school.
I hope one day I can take one of their classes.
I found Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, and I am pretty sure this book has changed my life.
The more I read, the more my world shattered and was rebuilt.
That is the power of words for me: the ability to reshape and understand.
To offer language where there was once clumsy feelings and a language of grunts.
There is a lot of pain in the book. Leslie does not dance around the tragic nature of being queer in a society that does not understand you and therefore fears you.
Torments you. For so many, kills you. This has always scared the shit out of me.
Always. But in those pages I also found a voice that had made me feel more at home and less alone than I have all of my life so far.
In those pages there is also joy. The book opens with pain but also a tender love.
And that’s the thing – this book opened up possibilities to me.
Some of them are horrible. But some of them are really beautiful.
I think of Leslie leaving home at fifteen, with thirty-seven dollars in her pocket–the bravery to navigate the horrors to also access the beauty.
So, I decided to come here, to school. To learn, yes, but to also explore and try my hand at being brave.
That’s the power of words. This entire reflection. This entire gift that was given to me. The ability to explore and learn and live, for as long as the world will let me. Maybe one day these words will reach someone else who has yet to find other voices.