If You're Going Through Hell, Keep Going.

Hello kittens. I have a bad case of the Mondays today. In all actuality, it may just be a bad case of the early-20s. The judges are still out. Speaking of judges, are you all watching the Olympics? I caught the end of the U.S. women’s beach volleyball win against Australia. I hope you’re all playing Hannah Hart’s Olympic drinking game, because I’m not. Instead I’m working all the days and trying to be a good person. Not that drinking makes you a bad person. Well, it kind of makes me a bad person, but only most times… Anyhow! Onward and upward. My attempt to be a “good person” this week inspired me to create a list of most-likely-achievable goals. Are you ready?

            1. Exercise four whole days this week

            2. Write a short, fictional story (AKA thinly veiled autobiography)

            3. Edit one previously-written poem, to decrease the suck factor

            4. Drink 1 gallon of water per day

            5. Don’t eat anymore cookies, because I ate two today

            6. 3 blog posts! Hooray!

Seems easy enough, right? Right…

You guys, I am having all the feelings this week. And for once they aren’t all about me.

Since I apparently live in a mythical cyber land of rainbows, glitter and unicorns (AKA Tumblr), I was only recently exposed to the unfolding Chik-fil-A drama. I’ve never eaten Chik-fil-A and I think their commercials are chintzy, so I didn’t think twice about it. Obviously some part of my brain comprehends that bigotry exists, discrimination runs rampant and homosexuality is a social hot potato. Understanding this without fully comprehending it, I was floored to find public support for Chik-fil-A rearing its ugly head on my facebook. All of a sudden Those People aren’t just random, backwoods lunatics. They’re my friends. They’re people I admire. I’ve laughed and cried and attended boring Christmas dinners with them. I’ve spent the night at their houses, eaten their mothers’ cookies, shared a pillow and talked until the sun came up. These were my people.

Now somehow we’ve wound up on opposite sides of the picket line and I feel a lot of things. Namely a sizable portion of kick-in-the-teeth. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not interested in denying anybody the right to voice their opinion. I think everyone in this country deserves the freedom to nom a chicken sandwich in support of their moral code. And maybe most of the people who proudly eat at Chik-fil-A wouldn’t break into a woman’s house, carve anti-gay slurs into her body and leave her to burn to death. Or picket a fallen soldier’s funeral, regardless of his sexual orientation, touting his death as “God's punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality”. Or bully a child to the point of taking his own life just because he didn’t fit the parameters of “acceptable” society. But maybe they would, because at some point ideologies and actions begin to overlap. 

I whole-heartedly urge each and every one of you to support your beliefs. But please always understand the impact your casual words could have on somebody else. Never handle another person’s identity flippantly.

I’m just trying to say this: we need to be gentle with each other. We are all just organs, protected by bones, lashed together with sinew and tendon, supported by muscle and covered with skin. We are human being bodies in a state of constant rebirth, dead cells being replaced by new ones every six months in an endless cycle. You are not the person you were last year. I am not the person I was in February. We are repeatedly and consistently becoming ourselves. 

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

In the magnanimous words of Autostraddle...

I love you all. Did you see the ring around the moon tonight? Fucking lovely. 

-b

[Note: I discovered this too late, but it perfectly sums up my Chik-fil-A feelings! I enjoy feeling validated.]