What is queerness if not simply gender and sexuality? The word is defined as deviating from the normal, being strange, but has been adopted as an umbrella term for everything LGBT+.

How much of my queerness is simply neurodivergence? That is a question well above my paygrade as there simply isn't any research to understand that connection. Am I queer because I am neurodivergent? Nobody can really know. But I definitely feel that the two are connected.

Identity labels are ultimately arbitrary to some degree. What I am describing here in my queerness is an attempt to excise a neat category from the tangled mess that is myself. The fact is that everything within me is connected, and it is well impossible to know where every little thing came from.

So that's where the label queer comes in. As mentioned above, it's an umbrella term that is intentionally vague as to describe that someone feels they don't belong in the world of the normal.

The first time I ever heard the word queer was when I was about to enter middle school. Some of the kids I knew who were older than me advised me to call people "queer" or just drop an f-slur when harrassing people. I didn't hear it thrown around that much, the f-slur was much more popular. I didn't think much of it until I met someone at a social justice leadership camp while I was in community college, who used queer as a label. I was a little scandalized, being unaware of its reclamation.

But if you hang out in queer spaces long enough, you'll see it used and ultimately I think it's a good label to sum up things that are hard to sum up. There are a sizeable number of people who think that we shouldn't use the word queer, that it's the world's word for making fun of us, and I have been unsold on the arguments, but ultimately respect anyone's choice not to use it and I try not to apply it to them in conversation.

I think the queerness sums up a lot of other things that don't clearly come up in a discussion of my own queerness. I sometimes have bouts of asexuality. It could be due to my diet, it could be due to a lot of different factors, but there are times of my life (usually times of extreme stress) that my sexuality simply... shuts off. Does that factor into my queerness?

Like I asked before, where does my queerness end and my neurodivergence begin?

Ultimately though, all of this is about my relationships with others, isn't it? Sexuality, gender, queerness, they're all identity components within me, but they ultimately require another person to have some kind of meaning to it. Even queer as a label is defining itself as strange in comparison to others.

I spent a lot of time thinking about all these things most of my life, and I haven't really come up with a lot of great answers. I like to think I know myself pretty well, though there is always more to explore.

I feel like that's what my life is, an exploration of the world through myself, so it's kinda an exploration of myself also. Labels help a bit, but as I said in an earlier entry, labels are usually just a good place to start.

I'll definitely never figure out everything about me, never have all the answers or a clear answer to the question "who am I" but I guess I don't have to.

All I am at any given moment is who I am right then and there.