my name is nicole, but who the fuck am i?
i can’t stand writing about myself pages on the internet. it feels ridiculous and always fake, forced. but knowing me doesn’t work the same way on here. i feel i have to say something, so here goes. it isn’t eloquent or thought about for much longer than the next few moments, but this is what comes from me.
-i am a seventeen year old and i am an only child in a white lower middle class family living just outside of philadelphia.
-i am a dual citizen. my mother is canadian, from vancouver, and my father is american (army brat but from the eastern shore).
-my mother is religiously liberal as well as politically (although she is a alien and doesn’t go to protests or sign petitions because she doesn’t feel she should as she isn’t a voting member, her personal decision, and won’t become an american because it compromises things she won’t compromise) and my father is slightly religiously liberal but not politically. he comes from a very bill o’reilly loving family, though i don’t think they know he hates it all really and think palin is in fact an idiot (and not the best things since sliced bread).
-i was essentially raised (since i was five) in a unitarian universalist community. it defines me, i think, more than any of my other identities. my uu ubringing and my faith is everything. it is carved into me and i could never be separated from it. i’m aware my relationship with god/dess or creator will change over my life, as it has already (pagan to atheist to i’m not really sure if it matters but somedays it kind of does).
-i have a complicated relationship with education that is full of tangled emotions. i’m a recovering cynic. i left public school in 9th grade for discipline issues (i was very vocal in my opinion that if i have no passion for it, i shouldn’t put my time into it. i was very impatient. i was spiteful. i was hard.) and it has been a rough ride ever since. i pretty much went underground and am just now figuring out how to bring the sun back into my life. i’m figuring out how to get comfortable fact that my experience will be different and that i cannot (and that this is OKAY) expect myself to go down the same ‘normal’ path of education and growing up. it won’t happen, but it is okay. so, i’m behind. its okay. i will make it work. i will move forward ignoring where everyone else is. because if i pay attention to their journey, i’ll forget mine.
-i have, however, figured out what i am passionate about. i want to study gender studies in college and then, somehow, move into some sexuality studies. all of it interests me. i grew up believing that all love was an acceptable kind of love. aunt mair and her partner susan’s love was just as valid and true and wondorous as my mother’s and father’s. and then at some point, i guess i realized that it wasn’t a belief, a truth known to all. at some point, this entered my life in whatever form, maybe it was that once and last time when i, five or something, used gay as a derogatory term. and now, i want to be an advocate for all kinds of love. i want to understand how people love i want to understand all of it because it is so important. i know i kind of went off base there, but i think that was the base of how i became interested. it also goes into my times at our whole lives and at public school health classes.
-anywho! other things, i really really love my cat (and dog, i guess).
