why ftq? ---entering 2010

So the movie mean girls is based on my high school, well not my high school experience, but Tina Fey's experience when she attended my high school. She has said in interviews that she based the character Damion on a boy who attended the catholic school down the street. When I think of the boys I know who attended that high school it makes me laugh, one in particular, we worked together, life-guarding at the Y near both our schools. The homophobia, sexism, antisemitism and racism he could poses was sometimes shocking at at the same time, we had a thing going on. Mutual flirtation, which worked out well until I told him that his personality made me not want to spend time with him and that ended things pretty quickly. I think about the life that I lead as a straight girl and what that was, the webs that I wove and the ways that boys hurt me.
Repeated patterns of what had happened before over and over. Spun me into cycles of pain and depression. Never physical violence when I was a straight girl; but oppression hurts.
The pain that I have spent years running away from I begin to confront in myself as I journey into the blury lines of transgender-whatever.
I say FTQ because I hope and pray and feel, that there is something out there that can fit me, without me replicating the pain that I have felt. There must be a place outside the borders and lines and divisions we create for ourselves that will allow me to find myself. Until then I don't know.

I have lived many lives, I have experienced things through viewpoints that now seem so strange and foreign, but at that point seemed the only answer. Moving foward I do what I have always done, I take the best parts of the lessons I have learned and the truths that I have found.

I move on in a way that respects the former aspects of myself, because I cannot turn my eyes on myself, I need to have my own back, or who else will?

And yet respect for the connections, between myself and others, the struggles that we share and the ones that others carry that I do not even know. If I only stand up for myself, then what am I?

There is no good time for me to come to an answer, there will never be a convinient time, the only way to live is to understand that we cannot wait for change, we must start it, within ourselves. It must be now.

The new year brings a new decade, it brings the end of a project that has taken me on intense and long journeys of self reflection, years of growth have changed me in the last decade and the new year brings a time of cleansing. For myself, for my community, for my country, for my people and for everyone, I hold out that there is something good that we can create.

to the next decade, and all that it brings.
to life, לחיים

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I am only for myself, who am I?
If not now, when?

אם אין אני לי, מי לי?
וכשאני לעצמי, מה אני?
ואם לא עכשיו, אימתי