This post has been a long time coming, I know. It was never my intention to abandon this blog; but for a time, I believe I lost my voice.
Not my physical one, of course. But written? Absolutely. It was a gradual process, and one that I think I believed I deserved in some twisted way. Several years ago, I became involved with a feminist group on Facebook (I know, I know...) that was, at the time, a vibrant and active community, as supportive of all of its members as it could be, and one in which people new to various feminist concepts could learn and ask questions and make mistakes. It wasn't perfect, because the people involved weren't perfect, but it didn't need it to be.
And then, as progressive communities so often do these days, it went toxic. I'm not going to go into the details here, but suffice it to say that the group's creator and a number of the moderators left, a new crowd took over, and suddenly things weren't so good anymore.
The group's death throes were painful to witness, particularly when I saw people who I knew to be kind and gentle being called out as toxic trash because they'd accidentally misused words that were new to them or had simply stepped on the wrong nerve at the wrong time. People who had every right to be mad were summarily kicked out of the group for pointing out that more than one marginalized group of people in the group had been hurt. Apologies were blasted as "making somebody else's pain all about you" and those who made them were also heavily encouraged to leave. If someone in the "in crowd" called out someone who wasn't as educated/informed about the group's new focus as they were, and that person responded with confusion and expressions of hurt, that person would be told to sit down and shut up and listen while the real marginalized people had their say.
I learned, gradually, that voices like mine were not wanted or needed, even in attempts to encourage people and especially in attempts to learn anything at all. (It always came down to "shut up, too many people like you are talking already and marginalized people are not your educational opportunity.") I learned that because of certain demographics that I fall into, I need to just sit down and shut up and let the important people do the talking. Doing otherwise meant that I was being a hateful oppressor and I was allowing my voice to drown out the ones that really needed to be heard.
Eventually, as these things do, application of that lesson gradually ceased to be exclusive to that Facebook group. It bled through to this blog and my (friend-locked and under another name) LiveJournal as well. I stopped writing fan fiction. I stopped writing original fiction. I stopped writing poetry. I stopped writing, period.
And so I lost my voice.
Reclaiming it isn't going to be easy. I still halfway believe that I don't deserve to be heard. That the colour of my skin means that I need to sit down and shut up because the world is already too full of white women with opinions. I've been complicit in my own silencing for so long that it feels as comforting as it is restrictive. But there are things that I need to say, and this is my own space; who am I oppressing if I speak here? I don't get many pageviews anymore, it's been years since I regularly updated, and anyway, I'm not exactly forcing anybody to read what I'm writing here.
So here I am. I'm still alive, still bisexual (though that is still a serious oversimplification of terms), still Christo-Pagan, still a little bit silly, still perhaps more than a little bit smart, and still perpetually surprised by life and all the wonderful, horrible, and downright bizarre things that it has to offer. And as I go through the process of reclaiming and refining my voice, I hope that I can offer anyone who reads this something to think about, even if you don't necessarily agree with me.
