Nicole Field's Blog, page 22

122trees:This mornings final Confest sunrise!#sunrise...

122trees:

This mornings final Confest sunrise!

#sunrise #confest #homewardbound (at Confest)

Confest 2016.Part Four.As we were leaving, I went for one last...

Confest 2016.

Part Four.

As we were leaving, I went for one last sweep through the market with my last $15. There was a stall that had wall hangings that I’d been interested in. They were $25. I politely asked the store owner whether he’d be at all willing to part with it for the $15 I had.

He looked towards me, looked behind him towards who I presumed was his wife, then, with the air of a drug deal in process, passed me the hanging while I passed him the last of my money. It completely made for the best last memory of confest 2016. And now my ceiling now has a new decoration!

However, confest is gone but not forgotten. Ludo, for one, won’t let me move into a different room without watching me for signs that I’m leaving again.

My hippy wardrobe has increased, now with fantastic pockets to include in my already existing wardrobe.

I have various crafts and gifts that were made for me, as well as several pages of scrapbooking to otherwise physically commemorate the event.

I’m happy and content, happy for the quiet if I little lonely for the community.

And, in Spring this year, we get to do it all again!

Part One. 

Confest 2016.Part Three.On Sunday night, the music went mad. For...

Confest 2016.

Part Three.

On Sunday night, the music went mad. 

For the whole festival, our camp was right across from this camp of about a dozen musicians tagging in and out almost without end. The music coming out of their camp went from Scottish bagpipes to Irish Riverdance to djamba drums, to celtic folklore featuring soprano vocals and violins, and even a guy who was able to make didgeridoo sounds come out of his own mouth. 

It. Was. Amazing. 

On Sunday during the day, their camp was kind of quiet. I thought this was kind of reasonable, given the performance they’d had going on for three days straight by this point. But, no, they weren’t tired, or worn out. It turned out that they were just holding out for a huge performance. As soon as it got dark, they amped it up 1000% and just kept going all the way into the night. I stayed up well past dark this night. Sadly it was also around the time that everyone else decided to get up and dance to the amazing troupe of pied pipers of the festival.

I got up in time to watch the sun rise on Monday, the last morning of our confest. It looked like the sky was on fire. But by the time I went back to get a camera to capture it, the light had sadly shifted.

Pancakes and tent cuddles were the way of the morning. Read: none of us wanted to pack and it was far more fun to take silly photos in the tent. 

Is it any wonder, after all that, that I didn’t want to go home? (Also, however, this marked the first time I’d ever seen my own face when I’m pulling a grumpy expression, and I can totally see why people have laughed at me all my life when I do this.)

Part Four. 

Confest 2016.Part Two.Around a third of the way through the...

Confest 2016.

Part Two.

Around a third of the way through the trip, we realised that all the photos that had been taken of me had one thing in common. You betcha. 

Yet, at least I wasn’t the only one.

Things had to change. Of course, after that, the majority of photos taken were of me crafting…

Because we arrived by midday, Friday felt like a whole Confest day. I spent it looking at all the pretty people, listening to all the amazing music, eating all the wonderful food and, yes, reading. 

It had been my concern that having a partner along for the trip for the first time would harsh my buzz; a concern that I found out later we both shared. But, no, he wandered off and did his own thing, I likewise did the same. We wandered to the market and I ear-marked some clothes and bangles that I would later come back to buy. 

As the afternoon soaked into early evening, “confest time” well and truly settled in. I was zen, slowly wandering, in my own head, my own thoughts, breathing in the beautiful energy that’s so much a part of so many likeminded and friendly people all just there to have a good time. Intellectually, I’ve thought for ages that it should be just as conventional for women to wander around shirtless as it is for guys. But intellectually and emotionally are two very different things. Then I remember thinking that no one here was going to judge me for what I was or wasn’t wearing. They weren’t even necessarily going to objectify or even look. And just like that I began having conversations with everyone there that were no different to those I had with a shirt on.

I spent most of Saturday in a kind of meditative trance. I remember disappearing from for hours, but for the life of me I can’t remember who I came across or what I got up to. By the time I got back, much of the rest of the camp drove into town for supplies and more alcohol. I was happy for the peace and alone time. 

Our camp was made up of 8 people between 3 tents, so alone time wasn’t all that common, given that outside of my camp was upwards of another 3000 people. I was most commonly the first to rise and the first to go to bed, so mornings on the banana lounge were often spent in quiet solitude. Up with the sun, down with the sun. Didn’t stop me getting just as tired as the rest of us by Sunday. 

It was another meditative day, with me moving on from camp after everyone started to rise, finding my way back up into the market, across to the chai tent, back down via some Chi Gung and eventually winding up with afternoon Kahlua drinking. I mean, it was the last night of the festival, for us at least. 

Part Three.

Confest 2016. Part One.This is the third time I’ve been to...

Confest 2016. 

Part One.

This is the third time I’ve been to Confest. The first one was A-mazing. The second one not so good. 

Both times, I had no camera, and therefore, no ability to photo blog thereafter. 

This time, that was not the case. :D

We left at 7am. It was still dark outside but, thanks to the wonders of coffee, milo and travel mugs, we were good to go. I even got to drive the first part of the trip! 

By the time we hit the Macedon Ranges, it was a little bit more light. Just light enough that the truly awe-inspiring amount of mist all around us was quite evident. 

5 hours and an accidental trip through Swan Hill later, we rocked up. Confest. Welcome Home. It’s amazing how much this site looks like a desert after only three years. I remember it being green when I was here the first time. 

We wandered through the winding tracks between the Gypsy and White Trash car-and-caravan camps till the point where we reached Arts. Immediately, there was more green. Less dust. Well, slightly less dust. I was busy pointing out all the sights, from the info tent, to the toilets, to the Open Stage. We curved around the back of Arts, still just meandering, and there was a tent in front of us. This was a particularly magical tent cause, just by coincidence, here was the rest of our camp, and we had just happened upon them. 

Confest magic had begun.

Part Two.

Romance

I am no stranger to romance. Among the favourite romantic moments I’ve lived in my life, I’ve seen the love of my young life fly halfway across the world to tell me he loved me. I’ve experienced the rom com moment of surprise engagement as the ring came out of the waistcoat in a restaurant on Collins Street. I’ve had someone use “As you wish” to tell me they loved me. I’ve been handed a bouquet of red roses at the release of the magazine I’d edited and published at 23 years old. 

But last night was the most romantic thing that I’ve ever had happen to me.

From the point I read The Fault In Our Stars, I loved the idea of someone writing and leaving me a letter to read that brought tears to my eyes and laughter to my lips and made my heart soar. The poignancy letter that closes The Fault In Our Stars is something that’s stayed with me since I read it in 2013.

Last night, on the cusp of leaving my girlfriend’s house, I was asked to quickly read a four thousand word autobiographical blog post that she’d been putting together for the last two months. We’ve been seeing each other for just over that time, kind of seriously but not so seriously at the same time, and I’d read parts of it before, but this was the whole thing. Finished. Not a word out of place. (Except that part she wanted to add over dinner but couldn’t remember once we got home…)

Her writing is a piece that stimulates the intellect, offers something to the music lover, discusses personal identity and even introduced me to a brand new word. 

This, then, was my letter, the one I’d craved, written by a person who didn’t even know I’d wanted one written. 

In my arms, I felt her trembling as she read over the words she’d written, at the same time as pretend!calmly sipping her wine. I took my time to read the parts that weren’t about me specifically, but read over the paragraphs describing our shared pasts as quickly as possible so that I could reassure her that my response to her words was positive, and that she didn’t need to worry.

Towards the end, I thought I saw something coming, but thanks to a fantastic misdirect, and my own feelings that it couldn’t be leading where I thought it was leading, I was treated to another 595 words that I read back now and wonder how the hell did I think this was a misdirect?? 

I have this letter. I have this letter, and I can print it out to carry with me if I want. Or can just keep it in my bookmarks bar on my web browser. I can read it again and again, reliving the words that she spent two months putting together so that every nuance and word was exactly what she’d lived and wanted to express.

And, on top of that, nothing is ever going to take away the moment when I read the words at the end: there’s something I’d like to tell you… and turned around to look at her, seeing unshed tears in her eyes and holding her hands as she uttered the words. 

Amandla Stenberg Opens Up About Her Gender Identity

Amandla Stenberg Opens Up About Her Gender Identity:

knitmeapony:

profeminist:

“The 17-year-old, Hunger Games actor Amandla Stenberg has come out as non-binary.

Stenberg – who plays Rue in the adventure film franchise – says she feels like she’s not a ‘woman’ all the time, and non-binary is a term that she feels comfortable using to describe herself. (She is using female pronouns).

Writing on Tumblr, she said she is organizing a workshop on feminism, specifically how ‘mainstream feminist movements have continuously excluded women who are not white, thin, cisgender, able-bodied and neurotypical’.

Something we are struggling with is understanding the intersection of feminism and gender identity…

We’re both people who don’t feel like “women” all the time – but we claim feminism as our movement.

Basically, we’re trying to understand the duality of being a non-binary person and a feminist. How do you claim a movement for women when you don’t always feel like one?”

Read the full piece here: 

#1: THANK YOU AMANDLA FOR YOUR CONSISTENT AWESOMENESS AS AN INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST AND ROLE MODEL FOR YOUTH & EVERYONE ELSE!

#2: YOU DON’T NEED TO BE A WOMEN OR CIS TO BE FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS. Just like white people can and should advocate for racial equality, everyone can and should advocate for gender equality. 

I give Amandla a TON of credit for having to not only grow up in public, but grow up as a non-binary POC in a white / sexist / cisnormative society! She is young and figuring herself and society out.  I’m Team Stenberg and am not looking to call her out, I just wanted to make this crucial clarification. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, We Should All Be Feminists

HOLY SHIT THIS IS AMAZING.

Queering My Language, Queering Myself

queergirlcafe:

By Kayla Whaley

I entered high school at a time when the biggest debate around gay rights was if being gay was a choice, a lifestyle that one could veer from at any time if only they weren’t so morally depraved. Many activists tried for years to get people to recognize that there was no choice. Gayness wasn’t a “lifestyle,” they insisted, it was how they were born.

That was (and is) a completely valid narrative, but it became the sole narrative many of us ever encountered. (Lady Gaga’s gay anthem was called “Born This Way” for a reason, after all.) Gay folks—and the movement was still mostly gay folks in the mid-aughts, or seemed to be from a then-outsider position—talked about how they’d always known, how there had never been a question about their orientation. They had been gay all along and that wasn’t ever going away.

I believed their experiences. I believed that what they said was important, and that I had no right to question their own lives. But I should’ve questioned to what extent their experiences reflected all queer experiences. I should have questioned whether a single narrative could ever encompass the whole.

I wonder if I would have figured out my own queerness sooner if I had.

#

It was easy to call myself straight. It felt a true thing to claim. I liked boys. I’d never crushed on any girls, or been attracted to girls, or kissed a girl.

I thought about kissing girls—and doing more than kissing girls—when I was alone at night and had the dark to hide my blush and the movements of my hands, but that was easily explained. I knew what girls’ bodies looked like because I was a girl. It was easier to picture, I told myself, that’s all. (I didn’t know then that there were girls whose bodies weren’t like mine. I didn’t yet know that trans girls or intersex girls or nonbinary girls existed.)

I was straight. There was no hesitation. I knew I was straight for the same reason gay people knew they were gay: because we’d been born this way.

And then, at some point, that knowing slipped away without my even noticing. I knew I wasn’t queer, but I suddenly started to doubt I was straight.

That doubt started small, little more than a subconscious tickle buried under my many layers of active thoughts. Sometimes the doubt would stretch up, stretch until it coalesced from an inkling to a fully-formed question: what if I’m gay? The words would form in my head unbidden. My breath would catch and my face would heat and I’d glance around as if to make sure no one else could hear. But after a moment of slight panic, I’d swat the words away like gnats in summertime.

Eventually, the thought shifted. What if I’m bi? were harder words to ignore. They appeared more often, echoing louder and for longer no matter how hard I swatted at them. They felt bigger somehow. Heftier.

When I first voiced the thought to a friend, I phrased my words like a statement but spoke them like a question: I think I might be bi? There was still no surety, no knowing. Only more doubt. Always doubt. Always questions and fear and second-guessing. Maybe I was a straight girl who just liked to fantasize about girls. Maybe I just wanted to be queer for some reason: attention? “cool” factor?? special snowflake-dom??? Because even though I’d finally admitted my sexual attraction to girls, I’d still never crushed on one. I still didn’t feel queer, let alone queer enough to count.

I settled on “bisexual and heteroromantic” the first time I came out publicly. I talked about how our culture’s inseparability of sexual and romantic attraction had confused my own understanding of my identity. I said that thinking about two orientations rather than one helped me find labels—words—that fit me. And that was all true, for a time anyway.

I dropped the heteroromantic relatively soon after I’d claimed it. I didn’t announce the rejection to the world or even to myself. It was barely a conscious decision at all. The word was a sweater that looked good when I tried it on at the store, but that suddenly didn’t sit right once I got home. So I tossed it away, my last linguistic connection to straightness.

A funny thing has happened since I’ve stopped claiming “hetero” in any of its possible incarnations: I’ve gotten queerer.

For one thing, I’m much more drawn to and attracted to women and nonbinary folks than men now, but it’s more than that, too. Now when I consider dating, I think about dating women. I think about sharing a future home with a woman. I think about us unwinding with hot chocolate and TV. I imagine us holding hands at dinner and curling up together at night. We both wear dresses at the wedding.

#

Sexuality can absolutely be fluid, and maybe that’s what has happened to me. Maybe I’ve been slowly but surely moving further and further from straight. But I think there’s more to it than that. I think the language I’ve used at various points to describe my sexuality has affected my actual sexuality as much as my understanding of it. As my language has gotten queerer, so has my attraction, fantasies, thoughts, worldview, and very being.

Language is never neutral. The words we choose, the order in which we arrange them, the assumptions and associations we embed in those both heard and spoken: there’s power in language and how we wield it. The variety of labels I’ve considered, chosen, rejected, and worn have all impacted how I view my sexuality and how my sexuality manifests.

I still claim bisexual, but more often than not these days I primarily claim queer. I like who I am—who I’m becoming—now that I’ve embraced my queerness. But I’ve only been able to do that by embracing (and discarding) a series of words first.  

“Maybe I just wanted to be queer for some reason: attention? “cool” factor?? special snowflake-dom???

… As my language has gotten queerer, so has my attraction, fantasies, thoughts, worldview, and very being.” 

Oh fuck, this post. My life. Other peoples’ lives. 

So much love for this post, not just for its relevance to queer life, but also it’s acknowledgement of the power of language. 

Cautionary Poly: Nicole

polyrolemodels:

@polynbooks

My memory isn’t perfect for this anymore, but here are the pertinent details:

I’m sitting at a restaurant, being told by my (then) partner that he went out on a limb and told a dear friend of his that he had feelings for them, but that the feelings were not returned. On the way back from dinner, I give a sigh of relief and admit that I’m sorry that he’s hurting, but I’m actually glad that it turned out that way. I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of this particular person in his life becoming a loved one. A partner. Someone I would need to share my partner with. The idea made me uncomfortable for a number of reasons, none of which I’ll mention here.

As it turned out, the individual in question needed time to process what my partner had said and, at the end of this processing, advised my partner that his feelings were returned. Months after the initial conversation above, I had to sit in the kitchen of my house, being told that my partner’s feelings were returned and that he wanted to pursue a relationship. I’ll allow that permission was given to me at this point to take some time to process, to ask them to slow down, but months of this being in the back of my mind hadn’t changed my mind on this relationship, and saying no outright wasn’t offered as an option. So I didn’t say no.

This tacit acceptance of what was going on led to more problems within the relationship, issues of trust and issues of communication. Neither of us were faultless, but there came to be far too much baggage for the two of us to be able to reconcile what had happened, and for me to feel anything other than that I had lost something vital: my partner’s regard.

Fast forward 8 months. I’m in a happy and committed relationship with someone new, and the strangest conversation comes up…

He says, “…So that led to T and I having this amazing conversation about boundaries, what we were and weren’t okay with each other doing.”

I goggle at him. “What? You haven’t had that conversation yet? How haven’t you had this conversation yet?”

He looks at me with this bemused expression. He’d had longer to think about this than me., but I realise my mistake only a moment later. “Shit. We haven’t had that conversation yet.”

“No,” he says. “We haven’t.”

So we do. We go through boundaries, what makes us comfortable, what makes us uncomfortable, people who are off limits, how we’d like to be told about potential new love interests.

I say, “Me and my boy have a veto rule, but we can only use it before love has been said.”

He says, “I’m not sure I like the word veto. Maybe for us we word it as more of something that we keep in mind out of consideration for each other.” Then he paused. “That’s just what you said in a slightly different way.”

“It is,” I agree. “With an added grey area.”

He harrumphs. “I don’t like grey areas.”

I say, “There is a reason for each answer that I have given you in this conversation. You can ask the reason for any of them, if you want to.”

So he says, “Okay. What’s the reason for that one?”

And I say, “I told my ex no regarding this particular person. Months later, I had to sit in a kitchen while he told me that he’d just found out his feelings for that person were reciprocated. I didn’t know how to say no to him again. So I just didn’t say yes, and hoped. I mean, he knew my concerns…” I shake my head, not knowing how to finish. “Consent is such a tricky area anyway…”

He looks at me a long while, then takes my hand with a crooked smile. “You’re right,” he says. “Veto is a good word. Let’s use that.”

Cautionary Poly: Teachable Moments in Polyamorous Relationships is a special feature of Poly Role Models. The goal of this feature is to highlight the fact that successful polyamory isn’t always free of mistakes…and those mistakes can definitely be gained from. Now accepting submissions. Just send me a message to get the ball rolling.

Later this year, I’ll have my first polyamorous novella published with @lessthanthreepress, and in the meantime, here’s my contribution to @polyrolemodels!

Things I am going to have space to explore in this upcoming novel:

polynbooks:

Queer life as separate to university “experimentation”
Trans issues, specifically ftm

Lesbianism

Bullying

Family difficulties

Things I will not have space to explore in this novel:

Non-binary issues

This actually makes me unaccountably sad. Like, why can’t this book be a 200k word epic or ode to the amazing wonder that is …. life? 

On the other hand, why can’t I just be happy with the issues I am addressing with this one book?

A month and a half ago, I lamented over the above post, but ultimately knew I’d made the right decision for reasons of pacing. But still, the thoughts plagued me.I want to write a story featuring a non-binary teenager.I want to write a story where my adult character goes through either HRT or surgery, but without a plot that just basically looks like a series of blog posts that other people with more right have already written. I want to write a story on a queer family that manages to be accepting of queer-ness in whatever form it takes. Yesterday, I managed to do a bunch of research on HRT medication and the process of how to get it through the Australian system.

Then, last night, instead of sleeping, with virtually no warning and no welcome, a follow up novel set 10 years later came me. Anyone who knows me knows that titles are often the hardest part of my writing process, so it was with great surprise that I started to pay attention when the title 

Passing By simply skated by my mind. 

It is also doubtless the reason why I’m feeling so hungover and sleep deprived today.