Picture this.
You are sitting in your bed late at night, and there is a pit in your stomach or a great weight on your chest. You are careful not to let your mind drift too much because you fear the places it will go. There is something about, well, you, that doesn't sit right, and you can't really put your finger on it.
Or you tell yourself you can't put your finger on it anyway. Truth, you know exactly what's wrong. You don't feel like what everyone says you are. I won't spend my time here trying to guess at the specifics of how that feels for you, I think that would be cruel of me to do and a waste of time.
For me, it was the nagging feeling that I was not 'boy' or 'man.' I had been with that feeling all my life, I think. At first, I thought it was one of those NLOG things. I like poetry and dressing androgynous and sailor moon and romcoms. I want to pamper myself and do my nails from time to time and flirt with these ideas of femininity, these surface-level expressions of self.
I did this because that was all I had really. I think about Lacan and how he looked at fashion as an expression, a means by which we (poorly) communicate how we feel in our own inner world. Because, let's be honest ya'll, language is sort of shit at communicating how we F E E L, so we supplement.
There are a lot of different roads I walked down to be comfortable calling myself non-binary. A lot of people in my life, some of them dear friends whom I asked awkward and leading questions, and some public figures I know literally nothing about. There were also other forms of media, shows like Steven Universe or, for a young, baby version of myself, Looney Toons in an odd way.
But one of the most impactful moments was when I read The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon (their name is displayed as JY Yang on their books, but they have chosen Neon as their name. Here on, we will refer to them only as Neon).
I've had trans and non-binary friends for the majority of my adult life, so I'm not totally lost on the concept of not feeling at home in your own skin. But, even though I felt that way, I never really applied it to myself. On the one hand, I felt like maybe I was trying to steal the spotlight, or that I was faking it for attention. I thought it would be uncouth or unfair of me, someone who had lived so many years as a man, as cis, to suddenly shout out that no, this is not me.
I buried how I felt because, well, I didn't think it was real, and, on some level, I don't think I wanted it to be. Because I was afraid my friends and family wouldn't accept me, which is shitty for a lot of reasons, but it was a deep-rooted weed in my heart that I just didn't have the strength to yank out.
And one of the things that Neon's book, The Black Tides of Heaven, the first in the phenomenal Tensorate series, helped me realize is that that feeling that questioning is okay. When Akeha begins his struggle to grip his own identity early in the novel, I found it intensely relatable. There was a sense that Akeha had always known, deep down, that he was he, but had stuffed it down, down, down, and that realization in the book was eye-opening.
This isn't the first time Neon has done this to me. In their short story, Tiger Baby, the protagonist's feelings of being uncomfortable in their own skin, in their society, in their home, also resonated. And, much like in the Tensorate series, the act of transformation comes and is met with a newfound sense of self-love.
Neon is no stranger to the social systems that bend and break us and the hidden strings that work to force us to fit into a kind of binary. One of the things I love most about their work is the intersection of the personal and the political, the internal and external. However, the sheer power that comes from being able to declare, if only for yourself, who you are, is awe-inspiring.
There is a lot more to say about Neon's work. And I plan to write about because they have a talent and insight and experience that deserves to be looked at. But here, at the beginning of all of that, I think it is important to mark what, I feel, may be the most essential thing in Neon's work.
What you are is what you feel. The world outside of you may not like it, and there may be a thousand voices telling you that you're confused or wrong or that it is all an illusion or sickness. But fuck all that, because you know yourself best, so be honest, be true, and claim who you are and bask in the love that comes with that proclamation.
