Therapy Tactics on Gender Identity and Gender Roles

Coming out as transgender or genderqueer is similar to Coming Out as I mentioned in last week's post. What's different is that there's a lot more transphobia than homophobia even within the gay community as well as there being a lesser understanding of gender compared to sexuality. Gender is who you are. Sexuality is who you want to fuck.  It's sad that we understand and accept lust more than people. The world today is such a hyper-sexualized place that everyone understands what homosexuality is because we're all horny as fuck and don't know how to keep it in our pants. You don't have to agree with it to understand why someone would want to fuck someone else regardless of gender.

Explaining Non-Binary Systems: Gender Identity

Explaining Non-binary systems: Sexual & Romantic Orientation

10 Things Christians Have Said to Me About Being Gay

This sums up my coming out experience in high school in 10 quotes. I plan on sharing some of those stories more in depth.

Soul Sharing: I'm not straight, but I'm also not gay

So yeah, this poem is basically my way of coming out as asexual after having already been out as gay. Not much more to say about that, so here's my coming out video.

Coming out as Pan-kAce (Panromantic-Asexual)

(pronounced "pancake")

Artistic Tips: Word Selection

Last week I talked about the basic structure of a poem (meter) and how it's not as important to follow those rules. This week I want to talk about the most obvious and important thing about poetry: words.  You can't have poetry without words, but you can have words without it being poetry. The structural difference is poetry consists of rhythm, meter, and rhyme while prose for the most part does not. The difference is in format, but they both require proper word selection. Prose is limited by the audience of what words are appropriate and recognizable. In an ethics paper, you probably wouldn't debate the economic benefits of distributing mass quantities of two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to a single oxygen atom to the needy. In poetry you can. Well, maybe not exactly like in that example. Poetry uses considerably fewer words than prose which means every word should be carefully considered. This is where a thesaurus comes in handy.

You don't just want to find the right word, you want to find the best word. You want words that can have multiple meanings or certain connotations And then you want those words to be in synch with the words around them. You want them to either compliment each other (easily done with alliteration) or contrast each other to make them stand out or make people do a double take (like seemingly oxymoronic phrases). You want words that you can repeat and that can have a slightly or drastic different meaning depending on the words around it. Most importantly you want to be clever. You want to come up with a new or different take on how words are usually used, something that makes it uniquely yours. From there you can build your metaphors, and of course you should use puns and other poetic literally devices which I'll explore more in another poem, but if you want a head start on those, there's a link under Poetry Resources labeled Literary Devices.

So now I'm going to go through and highlight some of the word choices I made in this poem.

Therapy Tactics: Understanding Poetry and Therapy

So the straightforward theme that can be talked about in "Apathetic Artist" is cutting or self-harming. But as I revealed in the Soul section and my video post, the more subtle maybe even invisible theme of the poem for me is being polar. A mental illness that's invisible to everyone else, in my case at least since I've always had to hide my real emotions for other reasons which I'll talk about through other poems. So poems like this one made it possible for me to write down how I felt about deep personal shit that I wasn't ready or wiling to openly share with anyone because I didn't want to be seen as damaged or broken even if that's how I felt. But I can post my poems on Facebook and have my friends "like" it and comment on it. I can share the emotion without sharing the specifics.

Well, it's always a challenge trying to think of the best way to start about talking about a single issue of mine since I'm so complicated with so many issues that overlap and intertwine. I've been through so much in such a short amount of time. I'm only 21 so it's been a whole decade since my problems manifested in a significant life changing way. It's taken me some time to look back and see what was cause and effect and what was independently compacting my problems. So I'll try my best to focus on my bipolar issues for this post. Like I said in the last post, I knew something was wrong with me mentally when I was 15.