[The Real LJ Idol Season 10] [Second Chance Idol] Week 1: Not Throwing Away My Shot

This might be a shot in the dark itself. It took me forever to find my word for the year, but I came down with VISIBILITY (which had been my first mental inclination but then I waffled because a Facebook friend had cautioned last year that visibility is a big and scary undertaking for an introvert). For me, I'm defining visibility as an acronym of several powerful words and phrases, somewhat overlapping with the Feelings I Chose (LJ) [Stable, Creative, Flowing, Accomplished], though: Vocal, Imaginative, Stability, Intuition, Being, Integrating, Learning, Identity, Together, Your own value.

I'm finding for me, right now the hardest thing I'm trying to learn from visibility is where I fit in with IDENTITY, in particular. I get suggestions, but then I spend a long time waffling on them because I don't fit into the neat little boxes people expect based on appearance and paperwork.

I'm taking big steps this year into areas I don't usually look at as an expansion of who I am. I'm taking a lot of shots and I'm not sure how many of them will go in, but it feels important this year to step into the messiness of "I don't fit".

I've been going to antiracism workshops at my church and wrestling with the complications of being a mixed-race person who generally sees herself as more white than of-color, even if objectively I know I place in the category "person of color". I mean, even growing up as half-Asian, we never really addressed race, except in light-hearted self-depreciative joking (I always identified more with my White dad than my Chinese mom, even if I looked more like mom -- there's a recurring story that as a kid we'd be at dim sum in chinatown and me and dad would look at each other, say the Cantonese word "lofan" and ask for forks while everyone else used chopsticks [including my younger siblings] -- lofan sounds like the word for "white rice", but basically means in slang "white person" in a derogatory sense).

Plurality also makes identity complicated. I may present female and legally use a female identity marker, but when given the option, I'll check a fill-in-the-blank box and say I'm genderfluid polygender, which is a nonbinary identity, and I use the definition of "gender changes AND goes between all the genders" for that. I don't feel right calling myself trans* because of my presentation, even though nonbinary is technically considered a trans*-umbrella identity.

I'm struggling to figure out how to balance all these identities and make them into the me I feel I am in my head.

To the point where I have completely fallen in love with The Orbiting Human Circus and am planning on using Julian the Janitor for next year's Halloween cosplay at the day program I go to. Because I see so much of Julian in myself. I'm in my head a lot, weaving stories and sometimes it's hard to tell where reality and fiction begin and end because of how much my plurality and attachment to characters plays out in how I see the disparate things of the world in one much greater web. The messiness of those connections is a part of who I am. Even when it confuses other people.

Plus, I really love his song as someone who struggles with mental health and is trying to learn how to speak up and step up:

Oh, here you are
and you’re all you wished to be
you’re alive and you’re
not alone
not alone in this.
- The Music Tapes (Julian Kostner) - "City of Lights" from the Orbiting Human Circus EP

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This was written for therealljidol Season 10's Second Chance Idol Week 1 Topic: Not Throwing Away My Shot.