Dear, guys – welcome back to Letters From Liz.
In the midst of the blog being very music heavy this month due to my interests, I wanted to take a step back and reflect on what this month was like outside of the Kpop music world; it was a month of hardships, fights, awareness and pride for those who’s voices are silenced, misjudged, and stereotyped due to society’s backwards way of thinking once.
I think back to how life was just a decade ago when people still thought LGBT+ jokes were funny and racially charged comedy was something that was huge. I think back at even my own actions and my own racially charged/gay insults or jokes that I told when I was a kid in order to hurt someone that hurt me. It’s the oldest tale in the book when we say “we are not those people anymore and I apologize for the things that I said in my past” but it’s the truest. We all said some pretty fucked up shit in our past. We didn’t know any better and us as an society didn’t realize it quick enough to know that these ideologies and “social trends” cost people their lives and undervalued their struggles to be seen and heard. People that look different and love different (which is it really any different?) are not the center of your jokes, and we as a society know that and practice being better people in society.
Here’s this month’s installment of:
In November 2019, I wrote a blog post about my romantic attraction and how I realized it changed throughout my self-discovery. I don’t talk about it much these days because I’m very much learning a lot about this identity of mine and I also believe that there are louder and more important stories to tell than my own. For those who don’t know, I am a demiromantic; it’s when you don’t feel any romantic attraction for a person unless you develop a deep, meaningful and emotional connection with someone. For me, that meant that my lines of romantic love and platonic love were sometimes blurred, and I end up being romantically attracted to my closest friends; no matter how they identified. To this day, I find myself still being romantically attracted to my friends but of course I am learning how to build up boundaries with them so that my mind doesn’t confuse friendship qualities and romantic relationship qualities.
Although this is the perfect time to talk about something like this since it is bringing awareness to a sexuality that is fairly uncommon or overlooked as “something everyone does, duh” (I don’t think everyone falls in love with their friends of the same sex though…) I am still not an oppressed person. I am a demiromantic/heterosexual white girl; nobody targets me on a daily basis due to the color of my skin or who I choose to love. Nobody is chasing me with bats trying to beat me up because I don’t follow their beliefs. I don’t have a family that kicks me out of the house for being anything different than what is considered “normal”. I’m not living the hardest life being a demiromantic person, and so I chose not to openly express it to the world because, well, there’s more important things we should be talking about.
It’s the fact that for June to be LGBT+ Pride Month, so many LGBT POC are either getting murdered for what they are and who they love, are being excommunicated from the rest of their family for going “against the Bible” and who are constantly the target for people to rage out on just because they are LGBT+. For a world becoming more and more progressive as the years go on, we still have people out here calling the LGBT+ Community slurs. I remember I had to correct someone close to me for calling a transgender woman “a t****y” because it’s a damn slur & for being a sister to a sibling who is trans, I felt the need to correct them for my sibling’s behalf, just how I would correct someone for saying the N-word that wasn’t Black.
I am very grateful that my family was understanding enough when I told them I was demiromantic. I am very grateful that even though they might fully understand what it means for me to be demiromantic, they were still able to love and support me for who I was. I am very grateful that I’m able to be so open and honest and still feel like no matter what, I don’t have people looking at me or targeting me for being this way.
I am also very grateful that I get to use my platform and my white privilege to educate those who don’t know or understand the many things of the LGBT+ community.
So, yeah, Happy Pride Month to this demiromantic person. But even more so: allow the voices who are constantly silenced to have this time to finally talk and express themselves.
Letters From Liz. 