Tag: social issues | A Banana Peeled

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More about In My Ideal World…and beyond

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

One of the weird things about my brain is that I never can just let things be. By things, I mean ideas. Part of it is because I’m heavily influenced by others (though I try not to be), but most of it is because my brain is constantly churning. In addition, I know that I don’t know everything, so there is always more for me to learn.

In this case, my learning is about–well, let’s get there the long way, per usual. My brain connects thins that most people wouldn’t think are connected. Or rather, everything is connected in my brain. It used to frustrate me when teachers wanted to talk about one thing, but not another. Such as feminism (in a feminism class), but not racism because ‘we don’t have time for that’. Which, on the one hand, I get. On the other hand, though, fuck that shit.

I realized in my early twenties that I contained multitudes. We all do, but I am talking about me specifically right now. I was Asian, bisexual, a woman (then), agnostic (then), and just Weird with a capital W. Now, I’m still Asian, bisexual but not liking that label, agender, areligious, and still fucking weird. I’m also aromantic and ethically nonmonogamous. I don’t want a long-term relationship, and I’m more interested in sex than dating at the moment.

I see all these things as connected. I was feeling interconnectivity before it was a thing. In yesterday’s post, I outlined a series I wanted to do called, In My Ideal World, in which I would take a topic and explain what I would would like to see related to that issue. I am verbose, which means I’d spend several posts on each topic. The thing that bogs me down, though, is that I don’t know how to talke about one without bringing up another.

Let me group it like this. Gender identity is linked to sexual identity loosley. Sexual identity is linked to monogamy/nonmonogamy and being aromantic. Gender is related to race. Religion is related to nothing in particular, but it’s something I could write ten-thousand words on. I have some deep wounds because of religion, and it’s taken me a long time to heal from it. I’m not completely there, but I am so much better now than I was when I first left Christianity (early twenties).

I want to find a hook that will bring them all together, but I’m not quite there. I don’t have a problem writing several disparate posts, but I would like to find a throughline.

A new series called In My Ideal World

Posted on September 30, 2024 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I have a thought running in my mind that I have revisited from time to time. It’s about how I would like things to be in my ideal world which is very different from how things are actually happening in this world. In the RKG Discord, there are two other people who identify as agender, much to my surprise and delight. There was a discussion happening about gender, and I said I could write a 5,000-word treatise on how I realized I was agender. One of them stated interest in reading said treatise if I ever wrote it, and that’s what cemented this series of posts in my mind.

Even stating the paragraph above, I feel an immediate impulse to explain myself. I didn’t realize I was agender so much as I realized that I didn’t care about gender. That the more I thought about it, the more I got confused about it. How if I had thouught about it thirty years ago, I probably would have called myself nonbinary and been done with it.

Now, however, it doesn’t fit any better than any other gender does. And I would love to explain why that is and how it’s not so much that I chose agender as much as I rejected all the other labels. Which is how I work in general. Nothing fits, so I choose the label that least doesn’t fit. Or to put it another way, I choose the label that fits the least worst.

I’ve had this issue with many different aspects of my being, and I would love to delve more deeply and thoroughly in each of them. Those would be religion (areligious), sexuality (bisexual), and gender (agender). I have thought about each of them quite a bit, and in the end, I threw up my hands and said, “That’s good enough.”

I get frustrated because I think so hard about each of these issues. With religioun, it was pretty easy for me to say that I wasn’t religious, but to which degree? I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I can say for sure there’s nothing out there. Plus, it’s hard to believe there’s absolutely nothing when the fact that humans exist speak to the contrary.

I believe there’s some kind of greater being/entity/collective, but–and I’m going to leave that there because this post is about the structure of the series, not delving into the isuses themselves. Consider that a teaser of things to come.