I'm having a crisis.
No, not just one, I think...I think I am having crises. La plus grand crise de ma vie.
I'm not sure I know how to exist anymore. Everything I thought I liked, I just haven't liked for a long time, and I feel so gross about so many of the things that I'm seen as.
I hate that I'm a boudoir photographer. Like, don't get me wrong, I love photography. I've gotten really good at it, too. I'm really good at boudoir photography. But...I hate it. I have spent years...decades, even.. struggling with my body image. My shape, my face, my hair, the way I'm perceived at each decade I've lived through. Being assigned female at birth means I was commodified the second my vagina was seen by a doctor, and since my first breath, my agency has been tertiary to my aesthetics and my compliance. If it's even allowed at all. I know I have been rewarded for complicity and punished for non-compliance, and while the reward is patriarchal praise in the form of sexual desire and the lightest punishment is being socially ignored, I hate knowing how much it's stung in the past to be removed from the good graces of patriarchy. And I play into getting that kind of praise. In what kind of fucking shitbag universe is that ok? Because I don't believe in white supremacist beauty standards. I don't believe that people need to be attractive, and that our worth is tied up in our looks. That's absurd, and yet. I photograph people...women 99% of the time...being coquettish, in flattering angles, with make up on to make them look...but more important to them is that they FEEL...beautiful and sexy. To what fucking end? This is in service of fucking everything I fucking hate and I cosign this shit every time I have a shoot.
The rejection of these beauty standards does not come along with my job. I can't fight this shit from within. I am making the call, and I'm making it inside the house, and I have the fucking nerve to complain about it? And I do it under the auspices of making people feel good about themselves? What a fucking crock of shit. At BEST these photos will be some fucked up monument to a dumb standard of beauty my client never asked to be a part of but paid me handsomely to elevate their participation in, but at most realistic, their photoshoot will be a measuring stick that they will reference their shortcomings against for the rest of their lives. My most recent client, a 25 year old, told me she wanted to do this because she would never be this hot again, especially once she has kids, so she wants to honor her body. I told her I do not have the same body I had at her age, but I feel more at home in my body than I ever did when I was obsessing over my figure in the gym. She's 25 and already erecting her own pyramid in which to mummify and bury her self esteem in. And I fucking helped. This is what my profession does. We are all co-conspirators in the commodification of women/femmes as sex objects, and we fucking work our asses off to sell the idea that this is a necessary expenditure. I have a blurb on my website where I talk about this very thing. How a lot of boudoir photographers emphasize shadow, and that I take umbrage with this because blah blah blah we should not be hidden, but like...is my gross objectification somehow superior because I help people bow to fucked up beauty standards with better lighting? It isn't.
I hate myself for this. I fucking hate it. I hate how I have twisted marginalized identities into a "too" marketing campaign. Are you Black? You are beautiful too. Are you fat? You are beautiful TOO. Are you queer? TOO. This is upholding the racist bullshit beauty standards and fucking demanding that marginalized identities see themselves inside of it. And like, this is not a new idea for me, I've been wrestling with this for years. I think at least five. And by pointing out how long I've been struggling with this, I am not trying to be like, marking myself out as " a good one" or some sort of revolutionary. I am pointing out my complicity in years since I was shown how harmful and burdensome imperial ideas of beauty are, and really and truly taking it in. Taking it in and STILL behaving in service of it. And I have been a hypocrite in the fucking name of monetary gain and kind of brushing off the implicitly deleterious effects because I have to survive in this system. But like...I also have to fucking live with myself. And in regards to what I do, it gets harder and harder by the second. I can't survive by throwing people into the gnashing teeth of the machine, however willing they think they are. If my being able to be comfortable comes at the expense of others, I cannot in good conscience continue doing it. But I am also not good at anything else. The more I refuse to mask, the more I see that the world isn't built for me to succeed in, and what am I supposed to do? It's evil. This is so fucking evil.
I'm finding it harder to feel ok with being married to Derek. Every fucking day. Not because of Derek, per se, but because of what he does for work, and what that job means. Derek is in the army. Little a. ALWAYS little a army. Now, I have never ever been pro military. I did have a period where I was more than vaguely pro cop...I even tried to be a Colorado state trooper (a fact which is regrettable, but also very surprising to anybody who's met me in the last ten years, and the surprise always makes me laugh). But pro military? Never. And yes, you are definitely allowed to read me for filth for having approximately none critical thinking about policing and militarism. I was so anti-military that I ardently refused to rub groins with anybody associated with the military. I put it in my dating profiles, I was not about that life. I have this tendency...it's really pernicious...that if I dip a toe into something toxic, that I might as well just cannonball my whole body in. In for a penny, in for a pound....ing by the entire military, I always say. In meeting people organically in Colorado Springs, I understood how fucking HARD it was going to be to toss my genitals around and no fling them in the face of a soldier. So I acquiesced and then my next few relationships were with military dudes. Gross. It seemed like fuckin' every single person I fucked was in the military, except one record exec from Denver. I tried getting out from under the military, and then I met Derek. And I had no intentions of building a life with Derek, but here we are, 11 years later. And I love my husband. I love him real bad. But his membership in the military, and my endorsement of it by virtue of being his wife, fucking repulses me. I find it harder and harder to be ok with staying emotionally bound to what his country stands for. Has always stood for. Ideologically, Derek and I are mostly on the same page. Which like...disagreements aren't a dealbreaker. I love being challenged, and I love challenging the people I'm with. I know that so much of what's going on in the world upsets Derek in similar ways that they upset me. I know the laws being tossed around in America now are not things that Derek agrees with. But I'm finding myself asking him on a regular basis now, "so what are you going to do about it?" and he answers with a shrug. Or a "what am I supposed to do about it?" Or my least favorite, just ignores me when I tell him his military service is making him a complicit barbarian. A couple nights ago, I asked Derek what he's doing about the bullshit orders that trans people can't serve in the military. He didn't say anything. I was crying and telling him he has to do SOMETHING and he asked me what it is he's supposed to do. And I was pretty fucking grossed out that I married someone who needs moral fucking clarity laid out for him because he doesn't have the capacity to find the first step himself. I told him he needs to talk to people about this. Conversationally. A good ol', "come on, everyone, we're not really all ok with our fellow soldiers who just happen to be trans being run out of the army, are we?" I kept saying things he could say. Conversationally. One of the reasons Derek says I need to put my hatred of academic institutions aside is because I'm a disrupter. I can change things from within. I disagree with that premise for academia, but that's another conversation. I'm upset that Derek seems content to leave that to me and hasn'tt thought about doing it himself. He said he was, that he was talking to his students about the news of the day and applying it to lessons, but I'm inclined to disbelieve him, because when I started bitching to him that he had to find ways to include the erasure of marginalized groups from the military's own records in the current administration's heroic effort to defeat DEI, he said he didn't really see the need, everything would sort itself out, and what's happening is gross, but I was misunderstanding it. We got into a huge argument about it in the parking lot at Costco and Derek shut the entire conversation down. I did not ever envision a world where I would want to adamantly defend someone's right to join the military, but here we fuckin' are. If I want to fucking hate the military god dammit, I want to hate the military with trans soldiers in it. They deserve to be hated by me for being a part of the death machine just as much as Derek does.
To that end, where is the room for the nuance in WHY people join the army? Like, lurking just under my hatred of the miliary is knowing that so many people are left without a choice if they want to survive. The military is deeply exploitative by design, it knows that the bodies it uses up and throws at bullets will never largely be the ruling class, it's poor men fighting the squabbles for power of the rich men. I do not believe that the majority of the military is made up of nationalists, I think it's people who had no real alternatives and thought that they could combine economic survival with ideas about patriotism. And what am I supposed to do with that? I know exactly how predatory the military is. I know that this is 10000% the design, so that the "worthy" in society never get ground down by the machine, we keep people poor in communities we don't like or care about so they have nowhere else to turn but service or jail, and we rely on them picking service. We entice people to be soldiers by promising school and travel and good jobs, things that are generally denied to a lot of the people seeking economic prosperity, and it sounds so fucking GOOD, how can it not? You can learn a skill. See the world. Shoot at shit and people think you're a hero no matter where you go (except Vietnam, let's bring that energy back into society). I hated being around Dan when he'd ask about military discounts. I hate it when Derek does it. I never asked Dan why he joined the military, but I never was under the impression that it was for economic security, I always felt like it leaned more nationalism. Maybe I didn't want to know that part of who I fucked all the time. But I asked Derek. Derek said he didn't really need the money, either, what he needed was the discipline, because he was listless.
It isn't really an excuse I can contextualize in a way that makes me able to be ok with his continued participation. The more I understand how horrifying the world around me is, and the more I understand my complicity in those horrors, the more I think that the most ethical thing I can do...the ONLY ethical option...is to not exist.
We are complicated and messy by virtue of being alive. We are so full of hypocrisy and context for why our hypocrisy is ok, and how so often it just cannot be helped. But what are we supposed to do when we want to get out from under all of it? I'm reaching critical mass here, and I haven't even really begun to unravel the things that make me awful. The things that make life hard. I am not trying to make myself sound like some grand philosopher in a quandary, or romanticizing my own struggle with the human condition. I am really and truly struggling with what I do. What steps do you take when you hold the mirror up to yourself and you cannot stand the reflection, but you built the whole thing up around you? I did this, I created all of this, and I just don't know what to do next. How do I stop hating myself for what I sign on to by not like...fuckin' self immolating? I am doing my best in community, I am advocating, I try and educate people, but I am not doing enough and I don't know how to do more, I just know it isn't enough. I know I don't actually hate Derek. I love him so much. I hate his presence in the military, but right now it's keeping us afloat. I hate that I have to sacrifice my kids for his career. My happiness for his career. Put all of everything to the side so Derek can retire, because I know we need him to reach retirement. But it's so fucking toxic and I am god damn drowning in all of this. I had to beg Derek to say SOMETHING about the ban against trans people serving in the military by telling him that I shouldn't have to fucking humanize trans soldiers by reminding him that his step-children are trans/non-binary, he should want to stand up for that to his own fellow soldiers because it's wrong to deny people anything based on their anything. I don't even know if he has. Or if he will. And at what point do I say enough is enough? Is this my final breakthrough of upholding empire?
I don't understand. I feel really alone. I know this means I haven't ACTUALLY found my community, and to a large degree that is true. I love my FNB people, but I do not think they are where I'm at (through no fault of their own, they are all SO young and I didn't get to where I'm at until I was my age), and I have nobody to unwind all of this to except Derek and he dismisses me most of the time by telling me I need to get back into academia and start changing shit there. But that isn't the fucking answer.
I don't know the answer.
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