The first thing I do when I wake up is assess what I’m going to be capable of that day. I check in with my body, how much pain I’m in, and where the pain is most intense. I check in with my nerves: how anxious am I? How exhausted? And I check in with my mind: how coherent are my thoughts? Sometimes my brain fog prevents me from doing anything that requires much thinking. Sometimes I’m simply too tired or fed up to consider ticking anything off my perpetually growing to-do list…
I carried out an interview with Door Ajar Comics after reading their first publication, WHEN I DREAM IT FEELS LIKE DROWNING. Their fascinating, heartfelt and brilliantly insightful answers explore inspiration for the work; personal experiences; narrative development; horror as a genre; readership, and much more.
first thought that came into my head when I realised I was non-binary was fuck, I don’t want to chop all my hair off. This was swiftly followed by a succession of minor panics: I don’t have the face for short hair, I don’t have the shoulders for androgyny, and everyone knows that my arse is simply too big to pass as anything but a woman. These thoughts accompanied thousands more over the next few months as I embarked on an excruciating – but ultimately liberating – internal journey.
This year, throughout Pride month, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own journey as a queer teenager, then a non-binary adult, and how I’ve changed throughout my life. As with the metamorphosis we see in nature, my identity and self hasn’t changed – in the way that a butterfly is never not itself, even as a caterpillar.
Anger is an emotion that has defined most of the past year for me. It presents itself in many forms: pure rage, frustration, powerlessness, a strong sense of injustice; but also anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, hopelessness, fear, and sometimes complete shutdown. It gets so overwhelming at the moment; it feels like I’m just not equipped to be thinking about all the things that are going on. And as soon as I reach my absolute limit, something else happens to pile on more anger and more of all the things that come with it.
If someone asked you about your relationship with the environment, what would you say? Would the image that comes to mind be one of a vast, far-off entity, perhaps embodied by burning rainforests and polluted oceans, or would it be of your local park, maybe the nearest nature reserve? Does it matter?
Meet the Clitbait Team: an interview with Meg Reynolds, our Environmental Editor…