bodlon | Work and Shamelessness (Reply)

This past weekend I got to escape my usual space for a morning writing retreat at my friend Ann's place. Getting out with intention, and meeting up with some folks I've been writing with off and on for the last few years was fantastic, and helped me start doing some real work on an unexpected project that I honestly don't quite know what to do with.

It's satisfying work in a seat of my pants and trusting my muse sort of way. Whatever happens with it, the nature of the project means it'll be at least a year before anything comes of it. That's another piece of peace, honestly.

While I was there, though, I realized that while my intention was for June to be a month of rest and play after the heavy load of the first five months of 2011, there's a lot on my plate. I've got Hold Something, novella edits, a secret thing not due to anyone until the fall, the not-quite-secret thing I've been toying with for a couple of months, and now this new mystery thing. Oh, and I'm working for about an hour on my poetry skills on Tuesdays.

For a month that's left me feeling stressed out and unproductive, I'm apparently doing a fair bit. Perspective is my friend.

Speaking of perspective, this fundraising for surgery thing is harder in some ways than I expected. It's done a lot to make surgery feel more real and less aspirational, which is wonderful, but it's also meant really coming to grips with the idea of this thing that's been important to me for a long while actually being possible, and that's a strange thing to get my head around.

More amusingly, it's required me to tap into a certain kind of shamelessness that I don't often utilize. I'm the sort of person who prefers to work on his own, to power through, and while I love to ask questions to make sure I understand a thing before I really engage it, asking for help is sometimes not a thing I'm good at. It's very much one of those self-worth things.

As a writer, I have to cultivate a certain degree of audacity in order to actually create, submit, publish, and promote. There's a huge undercurrent of "how dare you?" in our culture, and being creative kind of requires one laugh in the face of it. A lot.

Raising money to get gender affirming surgery is like audacity boot camp. I have these truly epic moments of self-conscious anxiety, or feel super naked posting things on eBay because wow, this is my stuff! In public! People will draw conclusions from it!

At the end of the day, I've just got to smile. This whole experience of being who I am sometimes feels like...well, it's a lot like Space Mountain, actually.

Toyota's doing a 100 word "essay" contest -- is 100 words really an essay? -- with a $1,000 dollar prize, and I've entered it because $1000 would help the surgery fund a lot. As far as I can tell, I need votes to get into the top ten for consideration to win. As slightly ridiculous as the whole thing is, I suppose it couldn't hurt to pass the link along. So here you go. Any support in the form of voting, boosting, and so forth folks might like to give is welcome.

Also, I'll have actual fundraising updates at the end of the week.

~*~

- It's often said that one of the most important things we can do as members of the LGBTQ community is to be out. Having just discovered Ian Harvie today via The Advocate, that feels really immediate. Here's a guy who's funny, successful, good at what he does, and is open about his gender identity. He's a real, complete individual, and he's out. Very cool.

- Bulgarian monument to the Red Army converted into epic pop culture tableaux. My ex who didn't think graffiti could be art can suck it.

- Have two and a half minutes? Robert Reich would like to share one of the major problems our economy faces, all in plain English. In a related (and more text-based) piece, Thomas Geoghegan believes small changes can not only save Social Security but improve it for seniors.

- Zombies take advantage of Leicester City Council's admission that they are unprepared for shambling doom.

- Japanese scientists synthesize meat from human feces. Mmmm.

- The CBLDF wants you to know about a ridiculous and slightly terrifying Tennessee law.

- Is your dog watching you? It appears to depend on whether you're wearing a bucket on your head.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com