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27 March 2014

To be nobody but yourself

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.  -- e. e. cummings

A thing happened today.  Though it inspired me to sit down and write this blog post, this post isn't about the thing that happened, which was frankly triggering for me.  Instead I want to talk about what this thing triggered, why it's a trigger for me, and then probably my general thoughts for a bit.  

From probably the day I was born, I have felt as though who I am, who I want to be, and what I want have been never enough, unacceptable, and/or not real.  I have been told that what I suffer isn't real; I have been treated as though I am worth less than people who made different choices than I did, or who were physically different* from me; I have been ignored; my voice has been overridden or trampled over; I have been ridiculed and abused because of my gender; my wants and desires have been ignored, or twisted for someone else's purpose, or used against me; I have been called disgusting, whore, bitch, merely for being true to who I am.  
I have been searching my entire life for who I am and where I belong, and it shows in my writings and the stories I tell myself**.  

I have fought all my life to be myself and nobody else.  It has been the biggest struggle of my life, and so when the choice is to be myself or to please someone else, my answer, every time, needs to be: be myself.  (It isn't always, of course, old habits being hard to break--but it needs to be.)  For my own sake, but also for the people around me: being happy makes it easier to make others happy, and I am never so miserable as when I'm repressing parts of who I am.  

That is what goes through my head anytime I see something that from the outside looks like someone repressing parts of themselves to make others happy.  Of course, it's likely more complex than that (I understand conflicting desires), but this is still my immediate reaction.  

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* Mostly, they had penises.

** I'm a changeling, stolen from my home, taken to Faerie, then left in some other human family after the Fae got bored with me.

06 March 2014

Fiction Magazines

This week I've spent some time sending stories to magazines.  It always amazes me how quickly some magazines can tell you they don't want your story.  Alas.
I've got four stories that I'm currently sending out ... Two came back after one day; one of those I sent out again.  The other, I saw the email right before breakfast, so I'm about to send it back out somewhere else, but first I had to eat breakfast and watch an episode of Buffy.
Anyway, I'll be getting on that now.

I don't know why it's a difficult, emotional thing now, when it hadn't been a couple of years ago, when I was doing this regularly.  But it kind of is.  Ah, well.  It's part of being who I want to be.  I just hope that someday, I can sell a story to a magazine, because that would be really awesome.

Wish me luck.