Carry Yourself with the Confidence

It's not that simple.

I did it in my kitchen, mostly—though sometimes curled up in my reading chair, and sometimes in bed. I gathered what I needed, let the mess of the work surround me, put on music. Then I sat for the space of an hour or more and stabbed and stabbed and stabbed the plane of the fabric. I eked out a message someone else had devised.

This was the first year of the pandemic, when outrage felt not only justified, but requisite. I started the project in February—upside-down everything right on the edge of arrival—and finished it in May, just before George Floyd was killed. The timeline traced almost exactly the span of my first relationship with a woman; our romance had been short but swift, and flavored by so many tragedies. I left her house for the last time on the precipice of summer, hauling a trash bag full of books I’d brought over. Their sharp corners left bloodless dents in my calves.

Back at home, the books spilled out of the flimsy, stretched plastic; they sprawled like an ersatz lover across my bed. Here I was again in my downtown Portland apartment. I’d signed the lease less than six months before, ending a long season of wandering—though it soon would have been ended by the virus either way. Outside the century-year-old windows, the city moved along in its now-customary quiet, breathing as shallowly as it could. I stared at the exposed brick and time-polished hardwood the Craigslist ad had coded as VINTAGE. This small set of square feet was most of what I knew of Oregon. A pandemic is a great way to shut down an impulse to explore your surroundings. So is new love.

And this one had been new in so many ways. Though I’d known I was attracted to women since high school, I’d never acted on the impulse beyond some scattered physical encounters. Allowing myself to fall in love with a woman was a revelation: along with discovering her, I was discovering myself.  

One January day after waking tangled in her bedsheets—they were stamped with peacocks, an ode to Flannery O’Connor—I sped home on the highway, the sudden and unexpected sunshine setting the river aflame. Usually taciturn with my parents about my love life, I called them on speakerphone, crying. This feels like the beginning of everything, I said.

So I leaned in hard to this newfound fact about myself, this detail that dovetailed so easily into the open groove of identity. I plastered my home with bodies—nude women whose depicted figures defied the meant-for-men standards, whose flesh rolled and gathered sumptuously. I collected every thong I owned in an armful and gleefully threw them in the trash. I stopped shaving my armpits. I traded in my pick-up truck for a Subaru (which, to be honest, was kind of a lateral move gay-wise, but better than parallel parking the F-150 I’d used to haul around my travel trailer).

I let myself ease into the comfort of this category—and so many of its pre-arranged, somewhat arbitrary features—without thinking about it too hard.

And I started working on this cross-stitch.

For one thing, it felt like a way to make something out of almost nothing—to put to good use the forced idleness of my hands. (I’d already churned out two loaves of dense, unrisen rye bread and mercilessly killed a sourdough starter.)

And the design—a pattern I purchased on Etsy—felt like a timely call to arms. It was true that overconfident white men had caused a lot of the world’s problems. Still is. True, too, that such men often land by default in positions of power that could be better filled. That consistent disregard, or worse, can make silence and invisibility too easy. That we might fail to reach for what the world shows us we’re unlikely to get. 

But there was also this other, more insidious thing, unnamable to me at the time: the statement’s anger, simmering and nebulous, aimed at a sweeping group of people. Its tacit acceptance of a zero-sum worldview. Its reification of exactly the kind of division I was nominally against.

In my fervor to slip myself into the slot of lesbianism, I was quick to dismiss all my previous relationships with men, never mind that I’d loved them. And as a progressive and a feminist, I was amenable to dismissing men—white men especially—almost on the whole. I’d talk unironically about a man being “one of the good ones.” It didn’t seem like discrimination, or even unkindness, when we were so clearly on the right side of history. When it was so obvious that white men were a problem—just look around.

But there’s no such thing as the right side of history. There are only people—and the stories people hold. Defining and disparaging an over-generalized out-group doesn’t make your in-group any safer or more enlightened. It just saps the world of nuance and creates more ill will.

Cut to three years later and I’m again schlepping piles of books, this time in boxes. My partner and I have signed the lease on a house. We spend the better part of a week unpacking together, watching the weird-perfect meld of our tastes assemble: my pin-covered, color-coded map of the world alongside his whiteboard full of neighborhood restaurants to try; an anthropomorphic, smiling, stuffed slice of brie (mine) dangling its legs from a bookshelf beside a baseball cap (his) that reads, simply, SALAD.

We’ve both lived full, separate lives before this, so in the good-strange space we’re co-creating, there’s not enough room for everything—or desire. One cardboard box is held back, is kept undisassembled. A to-be-curbed collection accumulates. And alongside a pair of since-replaced kitchen scissors and the ancient, too-easy sheet music that came with the piano I found for free online, I tuck this cross-stitch and all its invested hours.

It’s not just because the lover in question this time is a man. At the start of our relationship, I’d kept it hanging in my apartment alongside all the graphic, sapphic art. And it’s not that I suddenly wholesale disagree with its maxim, however undercomplicated it may be in this form.

In all honesty, I didn’t think about it too hard at the time—just like when I started the pattern in the first place. I held the decoration in my hands with the intention of hanging it, examined it closely, and cringed.

I’m sure spending a year beside a man has been part of it; seeing all his human softness. And realizing I could want to be with a man after all: reconciling with the truth of my multi-directional heart. To rethink the category I’d been trying to smash myself into. To rethink categories.

I know, of course, it’s not that simple. Constructing categories is human: doing so makes it easier to see the world—or at least, in collapsing complexity, paints a more digestible picture. The category that fits you best can feel like homecoming when you find it, can offer safety even as it fails to really hold you. Oppression exists—and is cut along categorical lines, constructed or not. Anger is, truly, so often justified. It can be motivating; it can make change. But it can be dangerous, too. It feels good and it makes us stop listening. And everyone thinks their anger is righteous.

So, precisely: it’s not that simple. It’s all far less simple than a snippy, 10-word slogan—or a one-word description of political alignment—can say. The hours I spent slowly sewing those words into existence, they felt like my own creation. But the design was a template. And a life lived in templates misses so much richness. Even when it lands on the truth, it forecloses the truth’s fullness.

At least that’s what I think today. Because I guess, to some extent, that little prayer worked: I’m working towards a new kind of confidence—the confidence to listen, to be wrong, to speak my own sentences. To build my identity from scratch; to keep both the boy and the unshaven armpits. To construct my worldview whole cloth.

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