Oh.

It's been too long, but finally, while going over a friend's old battle over self-definition--

(Tangential: you cannot disagree with self-definition. You can think it silly, you can fail to understand it, you can find it alien, but you can't disagree. It doesn't involve you; it says so in the word itself, for crying out loud.)

--I finally understand the itch that lodged behind my skull when, years ago when I first realized my sexuality, I read about a woman who called herself lesbian for political reasons.

I know now that that's called a "lesbian separatist." At the time, it simply seemed wrong. I couldn't quite articulate why--I could mumble about how politics don't come into it, about how it doesn't work that way, but I couldn't put a word to it.

Now I can. It's called appropriation.

Oh.

Finding religion in all the wrong places.

Over two years ago, curled up in bed, I had a fever-vision.

Something is running through a desert in my brain. I've had that happen occasionally recently, but due to a combination of my own mistrust of my brain and that very special Jewish guilt (how dare I contemplate cheating on Hashem, even though I've never had a meaningful relationship with Him!), I've tried to ignore it.

It's a jackal, or some kind of strange dog. After tonight's hallucination/conversation, I'm inclined to believe the latter. In any case, I was sufficiently tired and fevered that this time, when I saw it with my severely astigmatic mind's eye...I zoomed in.

He/it started looking more like a strange...dog than a jackal, and he (He?) said, "You. Mine." I shied away, but he kept saying it, and I suddenly, almost wordlessly asked him to break me so I could put myself back together.

I haven't seen Him since, but then, I haven't gone looking. I still don't know if I could live with the Jewish guilt.

The point is this: it is past time for me to start putting myself back together, and that is what I will be trying to describe here; that and the bits of the world around me that I want to help put back together.

I am twenty-one going on twenty-two. I dropped out of high school at seventeen. I have no job and have never had one; I have never succeeded in going to college for more than a semester. I have a lot of guilt over this, but, in fits and starts, when I'm not too scared of failure to even try, I work on changing it.

I will talk about that here: about the trouble with fitting a self that's not very cooperative into a world that's even less. I will also talk about the things that bother me about that world and the people in it.

And someday I would like to find my center. Maybe there I can talk to that strange dog again.