Posing Naked

I’ve been getting this one certain feeling a lot lately, a wash of infinite sensation crawling up from the base of my spine, up into my neck and down my arms, warm. So strong an emotion that it escapes my head and works out into my body where I have to confront it face-to-face, eye-to-eye. What is that feeling? An emotion at all?

In the past few months, I have been exposing myself to new stimuli. Putting myself in uncomfortable situations where, even though I do feel a tacit connection to feminist thought and intent, I also feel an outsider, and a certain degree of shame for my privilege as a white, male American. And this feeling, this beautiful vibration which fills me up and out, it arises when I look my shame and discomfort in the face and realize that I am not these things, whether or not you might look at me and say that I am. I am a human being and the circumstances of my birth can only go so far in determining the events that compose what I call MY life.

Although I have, for as long as I can remember, inwardly yearned for equality and harmony among all people, a voicethat rejects heteronormativity has only recently found its purchase within me. That rejection alone is enough to make me completely uncomfortable with the reality I inhabit. This feeling is the realization that it is not myself that I despise, but the perpetuation of inequality, injustice, and hate in a society that I have been taught to call my own; a society whose shortcomings I have to some extent projected onto myself. This feeling is my entire being calling out to be seen and heard and confronted for what it is and not what it seems to be, and it is the knowledge that I am getting closer to being able to express it. “It” being me. “Me” being uncomfortable. This feeling is elation at the unveiling of my heretofore faceless oppressors, and the fruit of the knowledge that I am not alone. It is the beginning of the understanding that there is something worth fighting for, and it feels really fucking good.