99 Days of Something #7 – Pride
As Pride month is about to start, and there are a few Pride marches and celebrations happening this weekend, I am once again reflecting on my relationship with Pride. I haven’t been to many. I have never thought of Pride as somewhere I really wanted to be or something I wanted to be part of. I love seeing the pictures of the events, I love reading about them and I love that Pride events exist in a form that is celebratory, full of joy and love. I also understand the importance of visibility and protest and we need that now more than probably ever in my lifetime. I love seeing social media feeds from friends and colleagues who are involved somehow. I love Pride looking in from the outside. I just don’t want to be there. So I feel conflicted about Pride because I feel like I really should want to be part of it. I feel like I should be seeking out those spaces, be visible, take up space. I feel like I should be able to find fun, joy and power in those spaces. I also feel like I should be there to acknowledge that Pride is not just a celebration of love but that it is also a protest, that it is intensely political and a really important form of resistance. But somehow I also feel like I just want to watch Pride from the outside. I absolutely want it to exist, I want to be part of it in the same way that I want to watch some sport on TV – it’ll be fun as long as I don’t actually have to be there or participate.
I realise that is possibly selfish. I also know that it comes from a position of privilege. I don’t need Pride. I never have. I have always had support, I have always been seen for all of me. I never had to hide and have always been able to just be me. So finding and being part of a community and express that through events like Pride have never been important for my existence or my well being. Couple that with my dislike of big crowds, indifference about a lot of the music played and acts featured and generally having other things I’d rather do at the weekend, Pride never makes it to the top of the list of priorities. And then I feel guilty about that. I was vaguely thinking about joining the Leeds Pride march in July because it feels like I should, but I no longer have to worry about that as something else has come up on that date.
I have become increasingly aware of the importance of visibility and of resistance. I am conscious that as a pretty successful out gay woman I have both power and responsibility and a certain vulnerability. I don’t know if it is just getting older and wiser (ahem) that gives me some of that perspective or whether it is more to do with the political climate and all our rights being under threat in a way that I haven’t really experienced before. My consciousness of s28 for example was limited maybe because I didn’t go to school in England until I was 16 and I remember sex education, for example, being way way more useful in Germany. I don’t actually remember anything about ‘non traditional families’ but then there was already a lot on the school curriculum that I thought was nonsense. For example, I remember being one of only 2 kids in my class at grammar school whose parents were not seemingly happily married and together. And that was positioned as the absolute norm. All this talk of perfect nuclear families versus problematic single parent families made no sense to me because I was quite happy in my ‘broken’ family. I was surrounded by diverse family structures and living arrangements. In other words, I already understood that curricula in some ways are always political and always tell a particular story and that story might not at all reflect mine. I might not have been able to express that but I knew there was so much more to the world than the things we were talking about at school from a really early age. So because in my life outside school I was exposed to lots of different ways of living and thinking and because I was also encouraged to read a lot and to think and to not just accept what teachers or authority figures said, I was not looking to school to teach me anything about how families worked or who I was or should be. More and more I realise that while I am sure I have my share of internalised homophobia, it’s pretty limited and I have been incredibly lucky to have experienced exclusion, non acceptance, hate etc as rare exceptions rather than as something that is a constant in my life. In addition, for a lit of my adult life the story has sort of been one of progress. It saw s 28 abolished, it saw the introduction of civil partnerships and then equal marriage, it saw equality in adoption rights, the Gender Recognition Act was introduced, discrimination was outlawed. I am not saying that things were great but we seem to be heading in the right direction. I think taking all of those things together, resulted in it taking me an embarrassingly long time to realise that protest, resistance, visibility and using my voice are really important. Just because being gay and out has not been a struggle for me, doesn’t mean I am not part of the struggle.
But what does that actually mean in practical terms. What can I do that feels meaningful and doable. I am working on that and through June I want to really consciously think about that and maybe explore more queer literature, art and film (suggestions always welcome). I will continue to share snippets of my life and while I never hide and think I am fairly open, maybe I can be more explicit about who I mean when I see ‘we’ or about how I think about the family and life Kath and I have build. I will make more an effort to seek out queer spaces or queer owned businesses. And I will keep showing up as authentically as I can and I will try and really notice the occasions when I hesitate to do that, where the inevitable ongoing coming out that just happens when you chat with new people about your life (‘What does your husband do…, erm, he doesn’t exist) feels awkward or not really safe. Because those are the moments that require resistance and challenge. Those are the moments that doing it anyway is more important than ever – particular in my position of privilege and almost always physical safety.
Anyway, Happy Pride month. Let’s celebrate and protest in equally powerful measures in whatever way we can. I’d love to hear your plans or suggestions for other things I might like to try. Oh and also, here’s my ‘we’:
99 Days of Something #5 – Still resting
I have written something today – a running blog post. That’s something. I was toying with the idea of turning on the work computer and getting myself organised a bit, catch up with some stuff and maybe stop feeling like I am just falling further behind with every day. And then I remembered that I don’t do that anymore because that’s a slippery slope. Work can be organised, sorted and prioritised in work time. I did have a little burst earlier of checking recent case law of the Court of Justice of the EU for two different pieces of writing and making a note of the ones I need to look at in more detail.
It’s been a good day of balance – I had coffee in the garden, we went to Bolton Abbey and Kath went for a run and I went for a run/walk. We went to a farm shop, then home and had lunch with Kath’s mum. Then we had blackberry and apply pie we bought from the farm shot and watched TV trying to stay out of the heat. I had a short nap and then got on the Zwift bike and turned myself into a human puddle. We had scrambled eggs with spinach on amazing sourdough and beetroot bread (from the farm shop) for tea and watched the pilot episode of ER. I am about to have a bath and then maybe read.
I took this picture today. The smell of wild garlic was still strong, the sunlight made interesting patterns through the trees, it was hot but the woodland provided enough shade for it to not be too uncomfortable. I don’t remember thinking about much at all on my loop but reflecting on the day now, I feel like my brain is clearer than it has been. These last few days have done me good I think. I am not saying that I remember how to really rest, but I think it has been a good start to re-learning.
99 Days of Something – #4: More About Rest
Ah well, yes – I didn’t get very far with the 99 Days of Something series did I. But I do miss the discipline of writing daily and I do need a kick up the backside to get some writing bits finished and writing helps with balance and rest. So the aim is to write something every day and record it here. Sometimes that might be writing for work, sometimes that might be some creative writing and sometimes it might just be the blog. But write I will. When I did the 100 Days of Wonder series, I structured the post around photos and that seemed to work really well – so maybe I start there to see how it goes.
I took this picture of Storm this morning. I like it for all sorts of reasons – the blue sky, her looking into the distance seemingly ignoring me completely, the tree in the background. I also like it because it was a very brief moment in the middle of chaos – she was being a parkour cat round the garden and paused to catch her breath before bouncing out of the greenhouse guttering onto the glass roof that covers our patio and then running across the other side of the greenhouse and jumping from there to the summer house roof and disappearing across the fence at the back of our garden. And then she appeared again doing some sort of variation of that loop. Now she’s fast asleep.
That, and scrolling through the blog and seeing some of the 100 Days of Wonder posts and realising that I feel more rested after this weekend than I did when I had a whole week off, made me reflect on my last post and on rest. Storm is good at resting. Like most cats really. She goes bonkers, she eats well, she plays, she takes care of herself and then she sleeps. When she was running around the garden and bouncing off buildings she seemed so joyful. She was just having fun. And she was just doing her thing. The other cats stayed out of her way, watching her with a mix of fear, admiration and disdain. She doesn’t care.
So as I sat in the sun, tidying up one of our little alpine tubs and watching a tiny little bee on a heuchera flower, I thought about what was different this weekend. I had assumed I would be more tired. I didn’t sleep well all week. Stress levels were high, emotional energy was drained and I was frustrated about my calf still being niggly. I almost expected to feel worse. But I didn’t. So what’s different. Well I suspect the weather helps. It’s warm and sunny and has been all weekend. Sunlight helps. The second things is that I have actually done some stuff that feels productive in a none work way. I deep cleaned the kitchen on Saturday. While somehow cleaning the kitchen always feels future because it almost immediately needs it again, the deep clean was well overdue and it does look and feel much better now. On Sunday we went out for breakfast and had a walk round Harlow Carr gardens and bought some plants. We also did a fair bit of life admin organising ourselves a bit and that felt good. I did yoga and moved a little testing out the calf and just doing what feels good. I have drunk lots more water. I always have been terrible at drinking enough but over the last few days I have really tried and I do actually feel better. I went to the gym this morning, I pottered in the garden a bit and I have made plans for an outrageous LEGO purchase that will be silly fun. I have paused and noticed things, the variety of bees, the colours outside, the difference in temperature between the front and back garden… I have watched the cats play and lounge. I have done what Storm did in condensed form this morning – I moved, I had yummy food, I have played and been silly, I have looked after myself and I have slept better. This long weekend so far has been much more about balance, about doing and being in ways that support each other. No ‘all or nothing’ in sight. Less scrolling for no reason, more deliberate breathing and noticing.
I had coffee in the shady bit of our garden when I had finished the alpine tubs and realised how much I have got out of the habit of doing nothing at all. Just sitting and sipping my coffee almost felt alien. I, like so many of us, usually have my phone out when I am just sitting. That’s not doing nothing. That doesn’t let the brain drift and do its thing. Sitting watching, sipping, listening, breathing for 10 minutes was so much more restful than any amount of time scrolling could ever be. And I’m not saying there isn’t a place for scrolling, sometimes I find it helpful to stop myself fixating on one thing or to switch tasks but the trick is not to get stuck scrolling. It takes effort.
So what is actually different? Maybe it is really simple, I feel more present, more connected to myself (I don’t quite know what I mean either but that’s the closes I can come with words) and more open to seeing the joy and wonder in the every day and that leads me to a better balance and better prioritisation between all the things that make up this rollercoaster we call life. Let’s see how I manage balance when I also have to work. Achieving it during a long weekend seems a little like cheating but I have to start somewhere!
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