Are you there God? It's Me, ________

yeah so let's get to this queer shit

I wrote a whole big thing on self determination and I ended up trying to do too much at the same time which is pretty typical, so what I do is, I take the stuff that I can’t keep because it’s Too Much (tm) and I stick it in a word doc and I come back to it afterward to see what coheres. In that case, I wrote a lot about choosing forgiveness instead of shame, and starting with oneself, moving outward to determine self, community, world. But I also wanted to talk about something else that I think everyone is: queer.

I guess I think it’s important to talk about the fact that the relationship between you and your nature is totally unique and that uniqueness is a divergence in being from the normative, you don’t — i’m sorry — you don’t need to be gay or nonbinary or black to be a minority and to feel like one. there is a way in which you are always a minority of one, and it matters. someone has to say it so here we are: the fact that you are unique in time and space means a lot of things, but one of them is that you are alone, and it’s okay to feel that way, it’s okay to say so. acknowledging this is how you avoid what I think of as being one of Holden’s phonies.

I am so fucking glad I am Joanna Tova Price, but I will not back down from the observation that sometimes that means I more alone even in a sociopolitical sense than the terms of political privilege allow for. I think it’s appropriate to appropriate “queer” to talk about this. The heart of it is not, ultimately, about who you want to have sex with or how you want to be seen, it is about the inescapably vulnerable experience of being oneself, unique in time and space. It is the queerness of being that makes self determination possible, that gives one something to determine.

Within the conversation of political privilege, we can ask how a hypothetical infinitely privileged person could experience anything negative except fleeting pain. The typical answer for why a person can have privilege and still suffer is that political privilege relationships change based on the social circumstance; you are a majority in some ways and a minority in others. If your political identity represented a majority in every aspect, then you would not suffer. This feels wrong because it is wrong - it narrows the scope of suffering to the realm of politics, to a consensus definition of what it is to suffer. This is consistent with an attempt to erase individuation, a process that makes us uncomfortable because it is queer, in the same sense that we already talk about discomfort around queerness. The it-doesn’t-fit-into-a-box stuff, to state the obvious, is hard to quantify, and there are a lot of reasons why that makes it inconvenient for larger efforts, even efforts that are nominally about justice.

So what’s going on is that you are something in addition to a political person, you are intelligible as something more than a political person, and that something more is not absent even when you walk into the politics of the world, which you must do. When we talk about the effect of political identity on experience, we often talk about what it’s like to have a certain political identity in a political world. But we don’t talk about what it’s like to have a self that isn’t political in a political world. So let me say it, for godsake: it’s miraculous. sometimes it’s very, very hard.

This is a better queer, “the inherent divergence from normativity that individuality engenders,” because through this construction, we arrive at a better understanding of a conflict that subsumes us - the anxiety of self determination.

It is also God (whatever you want to call God) that makes each of us queer— because the mutually constitutive nature of this dialectic is between something naturally human and something naturally divine (whatever you want to call the divine). It’s a thing that’s hard to grok, real difficult to say out loud. But we’ve known the idea for a long time under words like soul, now that we’re having a love affair with atheism, some of us seem to be calling it gender, but under it all is the weird fuckin weird true but actually true thing — the thing that makes one of us just us just uniquely us also makes us a little bit bigger than ourselves, makes us a little immortal, a little divine, but not in this blowhard new age way; in this other, scarier way, we would rather be maybe be just these political entities, because this thing whatever it is — i said i think it’s a dialectic of forgiveness, but whatever it is — is so incredible it almost hurts, its a tragedy but it’s the most beautiful thing in the world, you exist! holy fuck! and when you reach out into the strange universe, it hears you. that’s a lot, man, and you carry all that into every room, and it doesn’t matter if everyone in the room looks just like you, none of them are you. yeah it’s true, you didn’t make it up.

(you gotta ask yourself why you wonder whether you’re making it up, right? yeah see that other big thing on that.)

Just the fact that it’s there and it will talk to you is often given as the complete justification for why it will reach its hand into your life, if you figure out how to ask right — and if it doesn’t, then obviously, it never existed. but you believe there are animals you’ve never seen in places you’ve never been, and you do not expect by the fact of them that there’s a way to speak to them that will endow you with knowledge or love or prosperity. now this thing is so big those animals know it, too, and some of it, some small piece of it is you. NATURE what is it? Why is it a fact and a way and a voice? Why is it bigger than everything and smaller than anything?

and what are the terms? Every single thing is a miracle, but some miracles hurt like a bitch, so what’s it all mean anyway?

No we don’t really talk about this, because its hard to see, it’s hard to say, but the work is becoming intelligible, disclosed to the world, and that is a life’s work. No use trying to limit the scope of intelligibility or eligibility here, at last we are equal: each of us a minority of one. Who convinced you politics were the thing? Who convinced you the political and the personal were interchangeable? Forgive yourself for not mapping 1:1 to a recognizable script. Demand the world meet you.