This blog post is not just a restaurant review, although the restaurant whose name is the title of this blog post is certainly worthy of one. My girlfriend and I went to eat there twice when we were in Penarth recently, and we can highly recommend it. The spaghetti with prawns and asparagus was particularly delicious.
No, the main point of the post was to muse on the nature of pressures on relationships; things that can cause them to fail. Our relationship is subject to a lot of external pressures: we're not in a financial situation to live together at the moment (and so can only see each other very occasionally - this was the first time for five months), we both have health issues - I have spoken about my epilepsy and depression already - and neither of us has any clear idea of our future lives.
But our relationship has a great deal of internal strength. We've been together for 2½ years now, and although all the stuff I mentioned in the previous paragraph is straining our relationship, the times when we're together are so much happier than the times when we aren't. So we're carrying on making it work together as best we can.
As some of you may know, I used to write Neighbours fanfiction. Although many characters found their way into my stories, some of them were more persistent than others, and two were by far my favourite muses: Lisa Jeffries and Zeke Kinski. These characters had very little in common, other than being about the same age, but they both spoke to something in me in some way.
Zeke did so in a way that was utterly straightforward. Academically very intelligent, but socially always a bit of an outsider (to the extent that there was widespread fan speculation that the character was intended to be on the autistic spectrum), somewhat in the shadow of his more extroverted friends... he was very similar to what I was like at his age, and my habit tended to be to cast him as a self-insert character.
Lisa is an altogether more curious case. She was a bit-part character who appeared in a handful of episodes over a couple of years, and was mostly there to be a bad influence and a nasty piece of work. The thing was, despite this, there was something oddly sympathetic about her, which compelled me to bring her into my stories and keep her there. And as I kept writing stories with her in, the characterization kept changing until although you could see how the original had inspired it, there was effectively nothing of it left. The Lisa I ended up with was bitter about the world and her place in it, deeply in the closet, and someone who would hardly open up to anyone about anything. (The one exception to this was Zeke, who she never actually met in canon.)
I suppose that means that when I wrote a fanfic consisting mainly of Zeke and Lisa having a conversation, that I was talking to myself.
(Note: this post is nothing to do with my identity issues. It is a piece of social commentary on a current event. Feel free to skip over it if you like.)
Just imagine, if you will, the following counter-factual scenario. Milos Raonic, the world #15 men's tennis player, does not, as he did in reality, have an early exit from Wimbledon. Instead, he has the tournament of his life. In the semi-final and final he faces two players who have wowed the crowd in earlier rounds by beating the likes of Federer and Djokovic, and who, moreover, meet a popular current perception of male beauty. He beats both of them to lift his first major title.
This does not meet with universal approval. Scores of internet tough girls descend on Twitter bemoaning the fact that a man they consider unattractive has dared to win a major tennis tournament. Some of them couple this with irrelevant speculation about his sexual orientation. A few of them take it to the level of issuing death threats. Even the BBC's commentary team get in on the action, with commentator Lindsay Davenport making a "joking" comment along the lines of "Do you think Raonic's mother told him when he was young: 'Son, you'll never look like Nadal, so you'll have to work extra hard to make a name for yourself in tennis'?".
~~~
The whole scenario is clearly absurd, and not just because Raonic is a long way off the standard of the game's top players at the moment. But substitute - as I'm sure you mentally already did - Marion Bartoli and John Inverdale in for Raonic and Davenport respectively, and you have the scenario that unfolded this weekend just gone. The difference? Men's tennis is universally taken seriously on its own terms; women's tennis is given a surreal coverage style with overtones of a beauty contest.
Serious sportspeople like Bartoli must find this grating; both the difference in coverage in general, and the objectionable comments of unfunny know-nothings like Inverdale in particular. I don't know what response I would have made in her shoes; I suspect, however, it wouldn't have been anything like as good as this:
"It doesn’t matter, honestly. I am not blonde, yes. That is a fact. Have I
dreamt about having a model contract? No. I’m sorry. But
have I dreamed about winning Wimbledon? Absolutely, yes."
Classy, to the point, and an excellent reminder of what's important and what's not. Marion Bartoli, I salute you.
Who am I? Well, I'm not Jean Valjean; I'm not hiding a criminal past or anything of that ilk. But perhaps I'm not everything I appear to be on the surface. I appear to have the standard "life on easy mode" setting of white able-bodied cisgendered heterosexual male, and while none of that is entirely false, it's also not entirely true either. So let's unpick it.
White: In terms of skin colour alone, yes. However, my cultural background is another matter entirely - I have an English father and a Trinidadian mother, and both of these are vital to my identity. In fact, I discovered to my amusement in 2006 that I failed the Tebbit Test - when England were drawn in the same group as Trinidad and Tobago for the World Cup, I supported the latter team in their individual match.
Able-bodied: I have no obvious physical health problems. However, I'm a long way from able-bodied. I have Asperger's Syndrome, an autistic spectrum disorder that could fuel a whole blog in itself. I have an ongoing tendency towards clinical depression, a condition which I am managing mostly by trying to avoid situations that will cause it to occur. And I have epilepsy, a condition I am managing with medication. (It is epilepsy, by the way, that gives this blog its name - in Dungeons and Dragons, a Blue Dragon is a creature with an electricity-based attack.)
Which leaves us with the gender and sexuality elements here; I was already wondering to some extent before 28th June, but Transpose made me realize I probably needed to work things out about myself. (Transpose, by the way, was an absolutely fantastic event, and I really want to go next time. I don't often feel really at home among a group of people I mostly don't know; it requires a really special event to make this the case.) So let's see:
I have a really great girlfriend, who I love and plan on settling down with, should circumstances permit.
All my lovers so far have been cisgendered women, although I can't say I would necessarily rule out relationships with men. Treating me as a cisgendered male for now, I'm probably somewhere around 1 or 2 on the Kinsey scale.
My body has developed as male, although I don't think it's exactly flooded with testosterone; I don't have much in the way of body or facial hair, although the hair on my head is standing up well to the passage of time.
I don't think there's anything particularly wrapped up in my self-image as "male", though I might just be internalizing privilege there. I strongly suspect that my answer to "what would you do if you suddenly woke up and were you, but in a female body?" would be "the same things as I always do anyway".
All this adds up to a big piece of identity questioning. Not a crisis, as such. I don't think I'm unhappy with the current state of my identity so much as uninformed. I think, at 34, it's time to start taking the first steps to learning more about myself.
