Ellen Page, Gaycation Ep. 02: Brazil
The fourth frame is so important.
A few weeks ago, while reading an excellent DA fic - Exit Light, by dragonflies_and_katydids - I was struck by the following lines:
“I didn’t used to fall apart like this,” he says to the papers scattered before him. “Why now? I’ve been carrying it around in my head for ten years. Why have the last few months been so hard?”
“Maybe because you’ve been carrying it around for ten years?” Dorian asks dryly. “It is possible to get tired, you know.” His hands flex but stay where they are, pressed to Cullen’s stomach. “Just because I can pick up my staff without thinking twice about it doesn’t mean I want to carry it around for a decade without ever putting it down.”
When I say I was struck by this, I mean I read it and basically stopped breathing. I cried, because this, right here? This is what happens when you grow up internalising a fucktonne of toxic bullshit about your gender and sexuality and personhood: you don’t always realise the magnitude until later, when you finally have a healthy yardstick against which to measure it all.
Once, as a kid, I crashed a friend’s bike in such a way that my momentum drove the bare, welding-spiked metal handle into my stomach. It ripped open an entire circle of skin, a shallow sort of impalement, but I vividly remember that it didn’t hurt until I lifted my top and looked at the damage. It wasn’t looking that injured me - the fall did that - but actually seeing the wound is what catalysed my awareness of the pain I was already in, and twenty years later, there’s still a scar on my ribs.
A common refrain in our culture is that adults ought to easily get over everything and anything that happened to them in high school, or university, or at any younger point, as though time alone is capable of healing wounds we haven’t yet plucked up the courage to examine. And often, I think, repressing that fact, or leaving it unacknowledged - that’s our way of trying to get to relative safety first, to a place and point where we finally do have the luxury of self-assessment. And then we look, and it’s like, Oh. OH. So that’s why I’ve been hurting all this time. I thought I was just meant to feel like that forever.
And if you have to take time to deal? That’s not you being a bad adult. It’s just you being a person.
(via atthelamppost)
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PREACH
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