I Am Who I Am. Who Am I?

Allow me to preface this by saying that I consider myself more of a media consumer than creator (by choice), and so my perspective is somewhat passive. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy creating just as much if not more, because I certainly do - it’s just that even when I do make something I’m proud of, I have little desire to put it on display. Maybe this is partially a byproduct of already being a teenager by the time social media really started to take off, so I don’t see the necessity of it as much, but who really knows? After all, I’ve always been this way. Demure. Pensive. Quiet. Told that I should be seen and not heard on more than one occasion, even as a child. My anxious nature and preference for keeping things to myself is therefore unsurprising. My only saving grace is that I’m old enough to have avoided most of the social media game entirely when I was a teenager.

Regardless, media has always been a big part of my life. I grew up watching anime and playing video games, your typical “nerdy” fanfare. It played a huge role in my life as a kid, trying to escape my anxiety and depression and various hardships. Now, this is a common sentiment among women I know, but I feel the need to reiterate it here: “nerd culture” is an intimidating landscape to traverse when you’re a woman. You’re not taken seriously. You’re criticized for liking something, for not liking something, for liking something too much, not truly liking something (as much as a man does), and so on and so forth. As a matter of fact, to fit into certain social circles (mostly ones revolving around music and video games) and not be so easily dismissed, I presented as male for some time; it was rather easy to do, considering it was an online forum, and my hobbies and interests were seen as “masculine” anyway. It gave me a sense of authority and confidence I’d never experienced before. This went on for a couple of years. When I was finally upfront with the friends I had made, no one really cared all that much. I feel like I was extremely lucky to not be shunned for it, and you know what? I’d do it all over again, just to have that experience of being taken seriously. 

Needless to say, I don't look like this.

While I can’t exactly separate who I am from what I enjoy, I prefer to think of my personality and my interests as co-existing entities that feed into each other, but don’t exactly beget each other. I do have an identity beyond all that - who I am outside of what I enjoy, and how I come across to other people, both personally and physically. Despite all of that aforementioned consumption, I never see someone like myself anywhere. I do feel like my identity (in short: not a shining example of traditional heterocentric beauty nor femininity in any sense) is more or less invisible, in terms of being represented in any mainstream regard. Sometimes, it’s hard to even view myself as female in a space where women are continuously devalued, dismissed, and taken for granted, let alone women like me. Even “androgyny” is celebrated only to the extent that you're thin and still have explicitly female-codified features and prefer to dress in menswear. (For example, look at Ruby Rose or any other woman celebrated as the androgynous beauty, still filling the role of the conventionally attractive - just with short hair and a sharp jaw).

This is something that feels significantly more noticeable the older I get - yet it also feels like it matters less, as my formative years are well behind me. I will never meet the standard set for one reason or another, and I stopped caring long ago. Finding decent people who also don’t care affords me this apathy. But I do care in the sense that the standard needs to be changed (or rather, destroyed entirely). After all, years of being told I should look a certain way has me wishing that I did look like the ideal, even somewhat. We shouldn’t have to doubt ourselves like this. At the same time, in everything I read, everything I watched, I always managed to find characters to connect with on some level, even if we had only a very basic feature in common. I think it helped teach me empathy; I only wish that empathy were reciprocated.

Mass media is an almost inescapable part of life. We communicate about it, we form communities through it, we argue and fight and hate each other over it. It’s all-encompassing and for many of us, an external force internalized. With the onset of social media in particular, we became perpetually plugged in, virtually tethered to yet kept at an arms length from each other for better or worse (and for some folks, the worse unfortunately wins out). When something happens, we experience it together, and often on a grand scale. Like it or not, we’re in this together; it's too bad not everyone sees it that way, but as the tides turn, hopefully it won't be too much longer before media as a whole feels more inclusive.