Meaning-making. Answer seeking. Question querying. I feel these ideas in my bones.
“I try to still look with wonder on the world” – Florence + the Machine, Cassandra
“I come from a long line of people who believe in things like flowers that grow in the cracks in the streets. Here I am.” – The Crane Wives Here I Am
These are two song quotes that speak to how I want to move through my life and consider true about my history.
Music has always been a key component of how I experience the world. Too technologically un-savvy and neurodivergently unsure where to start, I really missed out on what could have been years of personal mix tapes and cd’s. But with the advent of streaming, I am now constantly making playlists to capture or define one experience or another. I’m also always taking pictures or saving screenshots on my phone or computer. I love to document, and my devices for doing so struggle to keep up with me. Some songs fill me with such desire to get up and move it is physically painful to resist. I used to think everyone was this way, but over time I learned it is more unique. Diagnosable, even.
I am autistic.
I have been accused of looking to closely, of feeling too deeply, though it is not always easy, and often painful. I pray I never stop. I see that it is the world that is torn and broken, not me. I know, also, that I seek and perceive connections others overlook.
I am a lesbian.
I resist the prescriptive story of what love looks like, and instead embrace my queer magic. For me, lesbian is sexuality AND gender. I am not a woman, not in the way this broken world defines it. I am a performer but I will not perform this. Queerness was my first consciousness crack, the first time I experienced the ritual of seeing myself in a story and, though I didn’t understand it at the time, knew exactly who I was.
I am Jewish.
The story of my Jewishness was first told to me by my father, a hazy Mythos about great-grandparents in vaudeville. It took a long time for this story to grow in me. I began to write the tale of my conversion at thirty years of age, and after two years of study, prayer, reflection, connection, and even, yes, magic, I immersed in the waters of mikvah and emerged, as from the waters of a womb, not a new person but a changed person. It is my deep belief that there is no one Judaism, and that what makes one a Jew is a desire to practice and carry forward Jewishness. And so I will not tell you what it is to be Jewish, only what it is for me to be Jewish.
Judaism for me is an inheritance of a liberatory, resistance-rich faith, that perceives the world as broken even as it is beautiful, and commits to the endless, aching, yet wondrous work of tikkun olam: sacred repair. My Judaism is wrapped up in my sacred, multi-religious partnership with my wife, Olivia, a Muslim. Going on parallel conversion journeys led to lots of curiosity that continues today, and a desire for crafting ritual in partnership and community. I do none of this alone, but through the sacred concept of Shekhinah – the internally felt sense of the divine, called the in-dwelling in the Hebrew Priestess tradition. Shekhinah is present “where two or more meet.” My Judaism is co-conspiracy with the Divine and Divine-made-flesh – my luminous fellow humans, and the rest of this world so beautiful yet so in need of repair.
I am a homemaker
Do not let this conjure for you an image of coiffed hair, clutched pearls, and cleanliness. For me, homemaking as vocation was born out of the necessity of disabling work environments that consistently left me sobbing, in physical pain, and unable to function anywhere but a jobsite. I reject the idea that “homemaker” means I can handle it all alone. Instead it is an acknowledgement that I cannot. Homemaking for me demands an ever-changing answer to two questions: What is home? What does it mean to “make” a home? As a white settler woman I am an inheritor of white supremacist attitudes about it being beneath me to cook and clean. I consider it sacred work to resist this narrative by developing skills in cooking and cleaning and recognizing what a blessing it is to be capable of keeping my family and our residence clean, fed, and feeling safe under at least one roof.
I am an expansive fan(girl) scholar
Too disabled to thrive in the academy as it now exists, I was permanently damaged physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually by my university education. It didn’t help that there were many chapters of the story of who I was that I had yet to read while attending university. Chief among these was that I had no idea I was autistic, and therefore no accommodation. I got my degree, but at a steep personal cost: I will never again have the verve I did in undergrad.
Nearly a decade later, with two artistic/scholarly conferences under my belt, I would try for grad school while also formalizing my conversion to Judaism with a required class (don’t worry, there will be a multi-post project on my experience of conversion and this class in particular.) I caught on quicker this time. That chapter of my life is marked by quitting. Both my institution and my Intro to Judaism teacher failed to provide the basic accommodations I required, creating hostile environments that ate away at me, and I consider it a victory to have left both behind. I hesitantly thank the divine for the clarity of Rosh Hashanah in making these decisions, and the food poisoning I immediately came down with which kept me off my feet and stopped me from pushing through “just a little longer.” I now do my work in a way that expands beyond academy in a number of cultural studies fields, but largely it all comes back to fandom.
I see Fandom as a font of counter-culture with sacred potential for owning our stories. Fandom can be a source of empowerment, teaching us to shape our world as we do the worlds of our favorite characters through fanworks of all kinds. A world we can shape is a world we can repair, no matter how broken.
I am a performer
But not in the way you might expect. In the same way the academy is not a place am capable of succeeding, nor is the theatre industry as it currently exists. I thrive in a rehearsal room and on a stage, but getting there by the means currently available to me is not accessible. And so I remain on the outside, and yearn. But I find ways to tell stories with my body when I can, because at the end of the day
I am a storyteller
On a page or an a stage or even out loud if the place and people are right, I am at my most me when I am telling stories or letting them rush over me through written or spoken word, in music, in movement. I’ve been in the, shall we say, awkward planning phase of developing a writing class for some time now, and it got put even farther on the back burner after I was blessed with the opportunity to bring some of my stage movement expertise to a middle school classroom. I felt so alive after doing that work (despite knowing that teaching young people full time is not my calling) that the idea of a creative life for myself that was mostly writing instead of moving and performing outright disgusted me.
But on the outside of industry, what was I to do?
Recently, I think I’ve hit upon the solution. I’m still sorting through the ideas, but there is something in the concept of finding stories with and in the body. I am hopeful this will be a way to offer what is so meaningful to me, by which I mean the whole of me. I want to give others what I myself need: A space that engages all the senses and all of the body as sources of creation and fonts of creativity.
I am still figuring it out
The story of “Me” is one I am still writing, still performing (the longest improv performance is life), still exploring and opening myself to. I’ve laid out a number of identities above, and I wonder often what my life would have been if I had been open to these definitions of “self” sooner. I’m still learning what it means to be all of those things and more. Octavia Butler in her book Parable of the Sower speaks to the concept of the Divine as change. I have seen Jewish teachers note this as well. Rabbi Toba Spitzer shares in God is Here: Reimagining the Divine notes that when God speaks to Moses as the burning bush, the text often translates the message as “I am that I am” but a more accurate translation is probably “I am Becoming that I am Becoming.” This is my favorite way to think of the Divine and how magic moves through us, and so I look with a quaking but hopeful heart toward who I will learn to be in the future.
I’m curious, if you feel called to share, what labels do you claim for yourself? What are the words you write your story with? You can tell me in the comments, or tell your journal, or a trusted friend or loved one. Maybe you even simply take a deep breath and speak out loud for those who have passed on or any other worthy ears to hear:
“I am…”