There is something I feel must be said; 2024 has been a hell of a year for me so far and it has been the culmination of a decade long battle against myself. After leaving university in the heady late spring days of 2014, I made a promise to myself that I would focus on my true passion for several years before making a second attempt at having my doctoral proposal accepted.
My proposal was a discussion on the representation of queerness in art, and the manner in which specifically lesbian relationships are portrayed differently. I don't mind that I never had it accepted now, I understand now after a decade of self-reflection that my knowledge on the subject is middling and my actual interests are different to what they'd have expected.
For me, I found value not in the philosophical discussion but in the theming, framing, techniques and craft of how different people framed their sexuality. To some it was bittersweet, to others it was euphoric, joyous, alarming, dangerous, exciting, reds and pinks, blues and greens, sharp lines, hatched lines, bold, fuzzy. The world was expressing to me the allure of art framed against the banal, mediocrity of heterosexuality. I saw, and still almost universally do, see heterosexual attraction framed, themed and crafted with dull lines, limp techniques, stock characters and mundane colours. I see it as the conformist art killer of romantic and sexual attraction, the soulless automaton of captivity and toxicity that the heterosexuals cannot escape.
I don't think I'm the only one, I think this is why fujoshis and himedanshis exist. I think there are many straight people who feel the soullessness in heteronormativity that holds them down, crushes them, and tries to enforce conformity upon them, and seek queer art because it lacks that conformity.
I slowly gave up on the doctorate idea as I worked on being a writer. I had no friends, I was always a loner and a shut-in, but from the period of 2014 to 2016 I started prioritizing my writing over all else. My output at the time was exceptional, both in terms of quality and quantity. Three full novels, all of them I can look back on and say were technically well crafted but as with all things I was unsatisfied with them. Technical ability does not make for good art, art is about expression and technical ability is what one cultivates in order to more accurately express one's self.
At the time I didn't know why I was unsatisfied, why I threw them away completely and started struggling with every page. From 2016 onward I wrote very little, I completed a few full jaunts through stories but none of them were satisfying - technically speaking they were fine and expressively speaking they were flat. In 2018 I wrote "Lantern", an incomplete piece but one that to this day I adore.
"Lantern" was technically proficient, but it is conceptual and rough. What I adore about it is that it was the very first of an evolution in expression. I had made steps towards that position throughout 2016 and 2017, but had effectively arrived there by 2018. I was replicating the way in which I felt when I looked upon queer art. I was expressing the world through abstraction, through feelings and emotions. Unfortunately, 2018 was also the time when the war against myself grew fierce once more. I shut myself out of writing communities, I hid myself away, and I tried to kill myself to no avail. 2018 ended with me just out of hospital, and for nearly a year I did no writing. Then the pandemic hit, and I struggled to write as my anxiety grew worse. I developed eating disorders, my hands were constantly in agony from chemical burns caused by soap and disinfectants. Even as I write this now my hands are sliding back into the kinds of state they were in throughout 2020-2021 - cracked, dry, scaly, bloody and raw, covered in lye burns and micro-abrasions.
In 2022, I managed to write another piece I am proud of and through it reconnected with old philosophies I once new by heart. "Jia and the Darkness beneath the Fallen City" was intended to be another shot at a long series akin to what I had done in the past. Jia is a character I have years worth of stories to tell, and most importantly she is yet another embodiment of the queerness in art that I had finally discovered in my art. It is a piece that is heavily influenced by the emotions of the characters, evocative of their emotions. Jia's queerness emerges through her connection to rain, something that was to be explored later in the series as Jia and Xei shared their most formative memories together in the rainy seasons of the far east. It emerges through her connection to the colour green because her earliest awakenings were during the festivals in her home city where green was the colour of femininity and her earliest awakening was of her childhood friends dressing up for the festivals in greens of many shades.
Green to me is the queerest of colours. It has the taste of ocean mist and stormy skies and deep forests, and represents in a way not the disconnect of the human from nature but the experiences nature provides. Blue is relentlessly happy like the calm open waters of a pristine lagoon or a cloudless sky or the void between the stars at night. Red is the kind of colour that smells like strongly cooked food - barbeque perhaps, and is prosperous like the sun yet delicate as the sunset. White is oppressive but clean, black is comforting yet fertile like the shores of a desert river. I don't say this as a non-sequitur, I say this to tell you that I am proud of that story and what it represents - an awakening to my own queerness. I have been queer from the get go but it took me many years to accept it and it wasn't until this year that I fully embraced it.
2022 also brought "The Signal" another piece I am conceptually proud of, and it is the last piece I would write before I began the journey that would take me through 2023. All through 2023 I wrote little in the way of fiction, I had struggled endlessly with a sequel to Jia before finally shelving it, and worked to put myself back together. I built a dozen worlds and read a dozen books on the craft but coming into 2023 I was lost. Much of what I wrote was attempts to find myself in a blanket of depression and dysphoria and mental decline as I lost all sense of self.
And that is okay, the self is a goal to work towards and never obtain, as it finds its value in exploration and becoming rather than being.
2024 started with a sense of hope, not that I had things resolved but rather that I had room to grow. I did, I do, and I will. I started off the year exploring some ideas but ultimately discarding them because they didn't feel right. They weren't expressing the kind of queerness that felt natural to me. March brought along the first set back as I got covid for the first time, and then in June my anxiety around food grew so crippling that I started to faint and believed I was developing a new illness. For the past three months I have been dealing with the fallout of that event, and it has helped me realise who I truly am and who I want to be going forward.
It is a path, I may stray, but I will try to return.
I am an artist who wants to express my queerness in my own terms. I am a lesbian, I am trans, I am autistic, I am an anarchist. To me, queerness is the discordant buzz of guitar strings raising into a howling chorus as individual beats strike like metallic drops of rain cut through. It is the taste of early morning mist on the tongue mixed with the bitterness of coffee and a sense of longing to share it with another. It is the beautiful curl of smoke from a bright red fire amongst the darkness of an emerald green forest. It is the feel of sunlight warming on your skin cooled by the gentle caress of the spring breeze. I know I'm not alone.
Queerness is as inexplicable as the sense of foreboding, yet as beautiful as your veins being pulled from your still warm flesh. It is horrifying, it is bleak, it is gorgeous, it is hopeful. It is all things contradictory, without once contradicting itself.
My path is to try and express that no matter how much experimentation, how much stylistic alteration it requires. I yearn to return to where I was when I wrote Lantern and Jia, but those flawed early lesbianic sophistries aren't going to sustain me - couldn't sustain me. I need to recreate them in the new image.
May the two merge and become more whole expressions of what I feel. May I no longer be asunder, may I no longer drift. I want to be soft, vulnerable, scared, and not safe. I want to be reckless and hopeless and content with my pain. I want my soul to be free and no longer asunder.
I just have to keep trying.