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I am scared .
I am a young queer girl.
I don’t have much of a community, only two people who are also LGBT+ and three or four more who are even slightly liberal. Only the former know I actually am panromantic.
I long to be in the sun, to know in the future I could have a girlfriend, or even just be open, but that longing makes me cautious.
I feel I must temper my argumentative side, make myself likable, and yet still try to hold all those around me accountable and challenge their preconceived notions. I want, when they think back on me, them not to feel revilement or fear I may have been deceiving them. I try to compliment all the other girls in my grade but I fear if I truly say how aesthetically beautiful I feel they all are, they will look back and see me as perverse or fear I had a crush on them and not understand I see them as beautiful in the same way I see the mountains and the trees. Rather than understanding I had hoped for them to see themselves as an innately beautiful part of the beautiful universe or even just to slightly improve their abysmal self esteem, they might look back and see “corruption” in my words.
I don’t know why I even fear it.
I fear how I see those around me not understand the necessity of queer rights and one of my own best friends wrinkling her nose in disgust every time a queer character even appears.
I feel helpless to explain how the eradication of trans rights in not only a sign of the tragic repeating of history to come but isolated from that simply a slap in the face, more harmful to my community and to feminism than I can properly articulate.
I feel like I’m drowning when I check the comments on a video of an explaination of the difference between WGM and GM in chess. Dread haunts like the reaper as I see the large number of replies, each with people claiming the very existence of the WGM title is either unnecessary or proves how women are inherently inferior at chess, lacking any nuance on history.
I dispare as the community online I am forced to view from afar, sipping and skimming, attempts to repeat the same patterns that threaten to or try to rip our spaces in half.
I am wrecked with terror at the prospect of not being able to escape for college to another country. Gnashing at my heels as I run from the disintegration of my country is the fear that every place I look to is headed in the same direction, that no progress will ever truly be made as some proudly stuff cotton into their ears and put megaphones to their uninformed words.
I am young but I do not feel young. I fear I will never feel old and I fear what will become of me and my friends if I do reach past 55.
I am afraid
But even as the storms now wash away the footprints I follow, laborious, repeated efforts will carve a path into the dirt.