Lonely Intersectionality

Lately I’ve been feeling very lonely in the intersection of so many minorities so I wanted to share this piece with you.

I’m a female bodied, disabled, queer person of colour and sometimes it feels like it doesn’t matter how hard I try to surround myself with allies, I’m always having to fight to take up space in my tiny corner. The queer spaces in London are often very white and it makes me feel lonely in a place that I want to feel at home.

So here is a piece made of that feeling.

Continuing to paint my breasts

A continuing work in progress. It felt good to continue working on it after a hiatus because it’s a bit of a declaration of my intention to stop trying to fit in, to toe the line of what it means to be a respectable woman in western culture.

I’ve been told so many times in so many ways that if I just learn to play the game I’ll be more successful. By my teachers when I spoke my mind to often, by my family when I wore ‘immodest’ clothing, by my lecturers when I stood my ground about my disability.

The thing about playing the game is that it is set up for cis-straight-able bodied-white men to succeed. Not me.

I want to stop trying to toe the line because doing that props up the success of those people and not my people, the ‘minorities’.

I am afraid to work full time and I am afraid not to

I have a disability called Ehlers Danlos (hello any fellow zebras) which affects my joints and the rest of my body in a bunch of weird and not-so-wonderful ways. At the moment I work freelance part time and some weeks my body can handle that and more but others it just can’t.

I’m currently applying for full time jobs because I’m living with my mum and I can’t do that forever. There are a bunch of other reasons and complicating factors but at the end of the day, financially I need to work full time to live but physically I’m not sure it’s possible. And if it is, I’m not sure how much of me will be left at the end of it.

I’m going to try it out anyway but I’m scared. That’s what this bit of art is about.