Intersectionality ...

 

I recently finished "Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed" a collection of essays exploring the complexities and intersectionalities of the Latinx Diaspora and the Latinx identity. One common theme is not always feeling like you fit within your identities or not being sure how you want to identify in the first place. 

While I am coming from a very different place I too have experienced this "identity uncertainty", this struggle with language, this questioning who I am and where I fit into the world and communities around me. Sometimes simply having an identity does not lead to a feeling of belonging.

In the essays there was multiple cases of the various authors feeling like they were looking in to, versus belonging to, a community. Cases of questioning if their experience "counted" or which of their experiences that should identity with at any given moment. 

I know I often feel like I am looking into communities, or enjoying them like I enjoy a good story. When I read a story I can connect to the characters or the writer but that is different from actually being part of the story. (I have yet to pull a "Thursday Next" and physically end up within a story LOL) 

I find I have created a whole support system filled with characters, and actors, and writers, and creative individuals who I can connect with but who I have never met. 

For example: I bring a Captain Cold POP figure in my pocket pretty much no matter what I am planning to do. My Captain Cold is there when people become too much (Combo of my introvert nature and a much lower tolerance for in person interactions after the past two years.) 

For example: Wentworth Miller lives in my head and my journal and I lean on him when ever my mental health goes a bit wonky since I know he understanding what I am experiencing. There is power in someone understanding even when you can not always put what you are experiencing into words.

For example: I have turned to a group of Wentworth Miller, Victor Garber (Professor Stein Actor), Russell Tovey (Talk Art, Earth X Ray Actor) and Robert Diament (Talk Art, King of the Gallerists) when I want to explore the intersections of my Ace identity and the wider LGBTQ+ community.

And I could go on and on since my support system is a multifandom, multiuniverse, multitimeline creation. In the end while the particular intersections of the Latinx community will never be my own I do understand how identity can be both really personally and be rooted, or not rooted in community at the same time.