On "Softness"

"A girl should be soft."

This is something that my father told me on the drive back home from Waterloo, his first instinctive response to my detailed plans for future involvement in student politics, plans for change, and in the excitement for the continuation of my double major and to go onward in the field. He hesitates, gives me that sideways half-smile that he always gives when he doesn't take me seriously.

"Amy," he says, "Don't you think that's a little too intense? A girl should be soft."

This is far from the first time he's told me this, but it was absolutely jarring-- this was the first real instance that I really paid attention to what he was telling me. I know he tells me this because he cares for me, because he thinks that my ambition and intense goal-setting are a flaw to my character that should be changed-- he believes I should be "soft".

This is nothing new. I've been hearing this my entire life, but the fact that I only realized this recently, in my 19th year of life, frightens me. This means that I've been absorbing my parents' words, sometimes ignoring them as children are apt to do with their parents, but otherwise accepting them, and this frightens me.

And I know this is not something that happens under my own roof. I know this happens in hundreds of thousands of millions of households all around the world.

This offhanded comment, which I'm certain my dad forgot almost immediately, became a worm. It ate away at me for days and days and it took me a lot of time to understand and articulate why exactly it disturbed me.

It's because my parents have characterized something that is an adjective as a noun. It's their belief that I, and the legions of other beautiful beings of my gender, are first and foremost "girls" or "women"-- everything else is an afterthought, an addition or a detriment to this base identity. They've characterized "girl" as a noun, when, to me, it's really an adjective.

I am a girl, yes. I am a woman, and I am fiercely proud to be one, but I am more than just a woman. Whether or not I am hard or soft or ambitious or determined or empathetic or compassionate extends beyond my gender and is instead representative of the person that I am, not my sex. Therefore, my dad's belief that "girls should be soft"- that I should be soft because I am a girl- is, to me, horribly close-minded.

What he should have said is that people should be soft, that I shouldn't forget to be compassionate and empathetic to offset my sharp-toothed ambition and intense drive. What my mother should have done instead of comparing me to other girls and chiding me for my "masculinity" scaring people away was to celebrate the friends that I have, who didn't care for the outside appearance of my persona and person, and who instead care for me as a person.

And there's the context in which these comments are made: gentle chiding for me trying to change things for the better.

My father genuinely believed my drive, my ambition was too "hard" for a girl. It doesn't matter whether or not I'm a girl. I would do these things regardless of whether or not I was a girl.

Being a girl has nothing to do with how ambitious or how driven I am.

And it's this sentiment that frightens me so deeply, that colours a lot of how I live.

I live in continual fear that these comments, though meant so honestly and so well, will one day wear me down.

I am constantly aware of these sideways comments being tossed so gently to me, but only because I've made the conscious effort to open my own eyes. How many other girls have succumbed to them without realizing the full weight of their worth? What if, one day, I wake up in the morning and I find the sun duller, the future less bright, and myself utterly exhausted, left to succumb to their well-meaning, poisoned wishes?

I have such enormous dreams, and even bigger visions of change, but I am weak. I am so weak. I am so afraid that one day, I'll wake up, so plagued with self-doubt and questions incited by these words of so-called well-intention, and actually hear and agree with what my parents and the rest of the world whisper so faintly. I'm afraid that I'll make the decision to declaw myself, but in that careful, near-invisible way that files them down slowly each day until, suddenly at the end, I realize with a jump that I am completely powerless.

When the opposition is obvious, it's easy to combat. But when the opposition is subtle, hushed, whispered, coming from the mouths and hearts of those you love and admire, it become infinitely more difficult to find where their opinions end and your beliefs begin. It becomes infinitely more difficult to stand opposed to those you love, because they truly have your best intentions at heart.

I should mention that I absolutely love my parents and that they have gone to such enormous lengths to provide for me. I am eternally grateful for everything that they've done. I'm not calling them out specifically on this, rather on a specific instance that just really shocked me.

This extends beyond my own little familial circle, beyond this comment that my father threw lightly at me in the fading evening light, racing against an ice storm-- it goes to the guy on twitter who retweeted the interview with Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland with nothing but a line about showering with Justin Trudeau, taken absolutely and completely out of context, minimizing the seriousness of both candidates. It goes to the girl in my English Class last semester who came to the conclusion herself that women were too intimidated to apply to scientific research opportunities, and failed to see anything wrong with that.

This extends so far beyond me, and we need to open all of our eyes to it-- we all need to be softer to each other.

- A

On Home:

This was an original post on my tumblr that I felt belonged here as well. This is less about my physical home, which will always be Ottawa, but my emotional home, which is eternally shifting and changing.

In Puppycat and Bee, Bee has translucent magical-girls ribbon flow out of a cut that Puppycat claws in her, and the camera pans out; she becomes a small glowing speck in the darkness, and her voice echoes loudly in the emptiness as she says, “Why does this make me feel so sad?”

Why, indeed? I feel like I’m going to spend the entire last week of summer sad, sad that the summer is over, sad because I’m going to be homesick, sad that this is literally my last free week, ever. From next Saturday, I will either be working or in class for the next four years, and then it’s into the workforce for me. 

But I don’t even feel like it’s that finality that has me so sad— it’s just the fact that I’ll be homeless for the first real time in my life, and this both terrifies and kills me. Not homeless in the physical “I have no place to live”, for I’ve forever been a lucky one, and good fortune is the blood in the veins, but because I’m home when I’m with my friends and my family.

There are two real, very different pains, attached to the two of them.

With my family, though my love for them is solidly eternal, time passes for them just as it passes for me. I’m going to miss seeing my brother grow, and where I could previously shade him from the sun, there will now be no one there for him. I’ll miss teaching him not only about English and Math and Music, but also about my own mistakes and how the world goes round and why people are heartless and why they still have the power to change. Yesterday, as my mom and I sat outside on our suburban cobblestone stoop, I watched my dad water the grass. He’s always been a slender guy, especially since he does sports, but I noticed how his spine curved a little bit more than he used near his shoulders, how he stooped a bit more. Time passes.

With my friends, I am home. They’re the family you choose, and in a way, sometimes that much more precious because they come into your life by chance, by accident, by fate. Sometime earlier this summer, my friend and I were complaining because there was nothing to do in our suburb, and we meandered to Starbucks for two hours, where we did nothing, and then wandered around aimlessly in Wal-Mart for another hour. We complained: she complained, I complained, but in all honesty, it was enough for me— just being with her was enough. 

My friends are home, and I slip out of all the other skins that I’d been wearing through the week, the month, the year, and my pores open and drink and taste and cry the comfort of being with people who you love, the freshness of air. Home is how her entire upper body shakes and her fingers expand outward like flowers in her open exasperation. Home is how his full, entire laugh, not the gentle one that crinkles his face, takes over and rocks his entire body and slaps the ground in front of him eagerly. Home is how I can just lie on the ground for an hour, covered by an afghan, close my eyes, and listen to them call anxiously for help on Unchartered, how she never puts anything upon facebook until months later and shows up to parties exactly an hour late. I am home when we just crowd into someone’s basement (without alcohol), congregate and just talk for hours, our voices harmonizing in a euphony of opinions and recollections and hopes and dreams.  

I am a highly visual person: I have scenes that stick in my head, like song earworms would remain embedded in one’s brain for days on end. One was a winter dusk, when I escorted some friends out of my house after a party. The sky was a pure sheet of colour, of which the azure had so deepened by the time I turned to walk back to my house that the entire snowy outer layer of the Earth had become a shadow: there was little to distinguish between my own shadow and the rest of snowy road. It was horribly chilly (this was the height of winter, which I remember I used to crave because there’s nowhere for the temperature to go but up) but there was no wind, which in a way, was worse because the cold penetrated subtly and made you numb without you knowing until you reach a warm spot, and then you would spend an infinite time trying to heat fingers and toes and limbs that you’d feel like you’d never be warm again (with a boreas, the wind sting for moments, but there is quick momentary relief between gusts; the wind buffets you forward as well). There were no cars, no humans out at this time, which was strange because this was at the zenith of the hour when people came home: there was just me, treading through the packed snow that had become minuscule valleys and peaks, which become even small ridges under my clunkily-soled boots, under hundreds upon hundreds of snow tires. At the time, I stood still at the entrance to my street and the park, and marvelled at how stark the full moon appeared in the sky, and wondered whether it was the bite of the cold that sharpened its edges as it had mine own. 

That was a valued moment to me, one upon many in my huge storage of wonder and amazement that we are here and a reminder that we are, in fact, made of the same stuff as the snow upon which I had been stumbling, and the round glowing moon in the sky and the breath steaming in front of me. 

But sometime last year, the sweetness of this memory changed, and it soured to become unobstructed fear, and a sort of fear that I associate with my loved ones dying. This image would rise into my head, unbidden, and panic would crinkle its sleazy face into a smile and drive broken glass into every thought.

It was the sheer desolateness that turned me. I love being alone, and as an extreme introvert, I desperately need alone time in order to function in my day-to-day, but this scene coupled itself with sheer and eternal isolation. Being alone and being isolated are two intensely different things, as opposite as being silent in a crowd of people you know, still breathing the same air and hearing same human noises in one great mutual sensory experience and being trapped in a soundless invisible box in a mass of your loved ones, able to see them talking and laughing and living, but being eternally doomed to partake.

So goes my image of homelessness: being apart of from those you love, and in a way that seems to never end. Homelessness is a state of mind for me, but here goes the great challenge of life, where we gamble with the forces that be that we can, in fact, find happiness and light where the darkness is so putrid that it seeps in through your skin and touches you in the glowing corners that you kept to yourself, all this time. 

I am going to be homeless for a few more years, as I leave and go to school and work for an extended length of time, but I won’t be homeless forever. Home is where the heart is, and it’s simply a matter of effort to find it again.  

- A

P.S. I realize I've been a real shit and I've written nothing for about four months but whatever-- it's my blog, so fuck it all to pieces. 

On Europe (a photojournal):