I don\u2019t like the idea of coming out, it just isn\u2019t for me, personally. So, once I realized I am queer, and that narrowing down to a more precise label felt tedious, I simply shrugged my shoulders and continued on. Looking back, I wish that I could say thank you to my younger self for many things, but mostly for that fearless moment of self-acceptance. Since that moment there has been doubt and fear and tears and courage and laughter. But there was a period of time where none of that existed. I just swam along, loving the heat of the sun and the feel of the water sliding around me\u2014the bubble that I lived in, which kept me close to the surface. Now that this is past, I find myself pulled back to this time, and to Diving into the Wreck. If I could show this poem\u2014and my interpretation of the slow, exploratory dive that allows the diver to swim down and face them self, a mirror at the bottom of the ocean\u2014to my younger self, I think she would say, \u201cWell, I haven\u2019t read the book of myths, I\u2019m not really interested in photography right now, and I\u2019m not sure what I would ever do with a knife, much less diving equipment. I\u2019m not prepared, I won\u2019t be going deeper any time soon, and that is fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The thing is, I was already swimming. I was already in the water, I had no boat to decide to climb off of, so I didn\u2019t really notice when I started to drift down. The moment I started to slide was, and it\u2019s almost too clich\u00e9, a two week long in-class reading of Romeo and Juliet. I was Juliet and another girl was Romeo and it was beyond embarrassing for reasons I did not understand at the time. I knew that I was queer and yet I did not apply that knowledge to my actual life. Romeo invited Juliet to the opening night of the play she was in, but Juliet was too nervous to go. I certainly wasn\u2019t looking for the wreck, for the unseen truths it would offer me, and therefore I only found the myth. The myth that absolutely nothing had to change about my life because I recognized my queerness. As wonderful this recognition was it was not the same as coming to terms with it, with the freedom of change. This myth was so captivating, but I had swum deep enough to understand that it was only one layer, a color gradient in the water.<\/p>\n
Through personal and academic study and lived experience I\u2019ve spiraled deeper and deeper, but I wonder if discovering the wreck is something that I will knowingly do. I definitely need to live a lot more before I even consider thinking that I am approaching it. Maybe, like my understanding of the importance of this memory which only came to me now that it is in the past, I will one day remember that I came looking for the wreck only to discover I\u2019m already looking back at it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t like the idea of coming out, it just isn\u2019t for me, personally. So, once I realized I am queer, and that narrowing down to a more precise label felt tedious, I simply shrugged my shoulders and continued on. Looking back, I wish that I could say thank you to my younger self for … Continue reading Not Looking for a Shipwreck and Romeo and Juliet<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4663,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4663"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}