Why Was I Doing This Again?

Working on a post about the journey of my life told through clothing, and what it’s like dressing for my gender identity these days. This is more interesting then I make it sound, I hope. However, that post just keeps getting longer and longer, so I thought in the meantime I’d try to answer a question I asked myself before I started this blog.

Why am I writing this?

Part of it is simply because I love to write, and I have ever since sixth grade. I have no idea why my brain flipped over from loving math and numbers to loving words, but I do know that being able to put my thoughts on paper (or what have you) and having someone else read them is still thrilling to me.

Part of it is because I have a job where I spend an average of six hours a day (sometimes shorter, sometimes much longer) staring at products on a shelf, counting them and entering the information into a inventory computer that’s hanging off my belt. It’s a job where you have to be very fast (Example, I’m supposed to count 7,000 units an hour in grocery stores.) and it’s, quite frankly, mentally tedious. On one level I’m counting and on another my utterly bored mind is composing things, fiction or theoretical blog posts and such. I need to be creative just to maintain a sense of balance. My work doesn’t make me feel fulfilled, but writing gives me a wonderful sense of accomplishment.

Quite possibly the biggest reason though, has to do with the sense of loneliness I felt when I first started coming out. I’m embarrassed to admit that most of my ideas about what it meant to be queer came from the vast amounts of erotica I read, and watching the L Word (Which is going to be a whole other post, believe me) and not from actual, you know, real life.

I’d like to think, if I write about myself, and my journey and feelings and whatnot, that maybe someone will read it and find a piece of themselves reflected there, and know that, in some small way, they are not alone.

~ by anoccasionalgirl on August 12, 2011.