(Image Credit: 3888952)
Last night, I was pulled from my virtual-hazed stupor and rushed to the campus bar; a friend’s text messages seemed a little too familiar to my past for my liking, so I wanted to go check on them. Three hours later, we were both a little tipsy and very smiley, because we’d actually, for once, sorted something. Healthily, like adults do.
Right?
I want to talk about our generation— we’re a very special one. We’ve brought about understanding and sympathy of a kind that’s as open and progressive as it can be; we’ve opened up expression and on the whole part became very cunning about our mental health. In a revolutionary and reactive way, we’ve looked at mental illness and its causes and said ‘Huh, no. Fuck you,’ while maintaining a care and affection that’s really quite staggeringly nuanced.
We’ve seen developments in spirituality and emotion that are indicative of a whole new set of people working out what’s right for them, and that’s special in a way I can’t describe. A whole plethora of my friends and family practise witchcraft, religious and secular paganism, and a veritable crowd of differing spiritual and religious views, with the knowledge that they don’t have to be anything more than what it means to them. A personal idol came into a pagan society group and said once, to paraphrase heavily, “We might well be fucking insane, but we like it and it makes us feel good, so fuck it.”
I want to talk about how people like me, who maybe lack the faith to subscribe to positive spiritual and religious ideas wholeheartedly, about what’s so special about how we sorted the shit we sorted out.
My friend from the bar and I went on a walk and we talked. Holy shit, I know— secrets of the universe uncovered!
Go find what makes you feel vulnerable but safe; if that’s a blank page, so be it. If that’s the sea at dawn, so be it. If that’s the forest at night (even though really it’s just the campus grounds) so be it. If that’s a cafe, so be it! Once you’re in that space, be open with yourself and talk while focusing on what you want to be. We have something very few other generations have had— the ability to know ourselves.
I’m a trans, poly, pan, queer-aro-ace non-binary young woman who’s cool with QP relationships. When I’m in class and even in my own room that’s who I am; I’m a series of labels, a set of identifiers, a whole variety of checked boxes. We can be proud of those checked boxed and should be, but we also benefit from spaces where we can escape that. Not a space to dissassociate, but one to associate almost concretely. One to focus and meditate on oneself brutally, yet positively. No matter how you find that, whether a pagan moot, a festival, while making lattes on a coffee machine, or with maybe too many toys and a tonne of lube in your own space. We also need to be aware of how other people find that spirituality, personal respect, and affection and engage with it to support them. This is a space where they can be a whole person irrespective of labels; that’s not only cool, that’s revolutionary. That’s a knowledge of self that inspire people to fight with and alongside you for who you are, what you value, and for who you love.
So please, don’t be scared of things you don’t understand, or things you feel you understand too much to value. Yes, I know the pain of trying to hold people’s opinions to the same regard as my own who use the words ‘before’ and ‘the big bang’ in the same sentence, but these are the people who have the self-love to fight an entire set of prejudices and self doubts to be themselves.
We didn’t solve our problems like adults, we solved them like young adults. We took them somewhere special and safe and even shared them with the people we needed and worked out how we could move on from there happily, in a healthy way. We didn’t drink, bottle it up, or even incorporate social norms and moral values; we said, “fuck it”, and made it fixed, instead of forcing it into the way society would want us to solve it.
Remember, you’re a revolution.