On Struggling to Feel Enough

I’m hesitant to use the #OwnVoices tag even when I’m writing characters whose identities and experiences overlap with my own. It’s not because I’m unsure who I am–I know that I’m Jewish, bi, grey-ace, GNC, etc. It’s because I’m not sure I’m enough of those things to count.

Looking at that statement objectively, I can see that there are many questionable assumptions packed into it–the ideas that there’s a hierarchical scale of “it-ness” for every identity, that there’s some ideal at the “top” end of the scale who perfectly embodies that identity, that it’s possible not to “count” as something one is.

It’s easy to get sucked into the quicksand of policing identities, because the world is unfair. There are limited resources for those who are marginalized in any particular way (unfair), and so questions of who gets those resources are (fairly) scrutinized. Many marginalized communities have been deliberately harmed by people claiming in bad faith to share their identity (unfair), so individuals and institutions are (fairly) wary that strangers are misrepresenting themselves in order to hurt others. Privileged groups often treat marginalized groups as though they are homogenous (unfair), and so those groups have strong stake in which individuals get seen as spokespeople for the whole (fair).

We build communities around shared experiences and perspectives (often fair), and when those communities are hard to find or purposely minimized by those who don’t belong to them (unfair), it becomes more difficult to integrate those who share only some experiences and perspectives with the rest.

I know, rationally, that although there are edge cases and exaggerated situations where we’d want to say that even someone acting in good faith is simply wrong about who and what they are, by and large, we can trust people to know themselves best. And I believe that, in general, acting drastically to prevent the tiny minority of those who’d weaponize others’ compassion and generosity does far more harm to the sincere majority than those malicious few ever could.

I believe it without question when it comes to others’ statements of their own identities. I don’t get to tell anyone what’s non-binary “enough” or Black “enough” or… etc. I would never tell another bi or ace person that they aren’t really bi or ace because they don’t meet my personal mental model. And if I do have a knee-jerk “no you’re not” reaction for an identity I share, I recognize that reaction says something about me, not about the person who prompted it, and certainly not about what being that identity “really” means.

Categorizing people, places, and things according to strict rules feels good: that’s why, as a species, we love taxonomy and astrology and also YA novels that sort characters by innate characteristics. The fact that most strict rules don’t accurately capture either the real world or our understanding of it is why we spin our wheels over questions like “are hotdogs a sandwich?”

In some ways, feeling not-enough of a marginalized identity comes, ironically, from the experience of being marginalized. I’m already used to not feeling straight or gender-conforming or “normal” enough. I already know what it’s like not to count as a “real” Canadian or woman or white person*. And those feelings are validated by my experience, by people, environments, and institutions whose actions and words have reinforced them through my life.

Why not, then, take the feelings I’m so used to and apply them to who I am?

This fall, after discussion with my therapist and connecting very strongly with some descriptions of how it manifests in AFAB people, I got (and still am in the process of being, as of this writing) assessed for ASD. One of the main reasons I decided that the high cost–in money and in time–of medical assessment was worth it for me this fall was this persistent feeling of not-enough-ness. How could I be neurodivergent when I know that I’m fortunate to be able to survive and often thrive in a world designed with the assumption that everyone is neurotypical? When I see neurodivergent people who can’t pass as neurotypically as often as I do? When I can’t shake the inner voice that says “you’re being dramatic, just power through and be glad you don’t experience worse”?

How can I be bi when, on paper, my marriage appears heterosexual and I’ve only ever dated a man?

How can I be ace when I do very occasionally experience sexual attraction and haven’t ruled out every single possible other reason for lack of desire?

How can I be gender non-conforming when my pronouns and gender “match” the sex I was assigned at birth?

How can I be Jewish when I don’t keep kosher or go to shul or involve myself in the Jewish community?

I know that what comes after the “when” in each of those questions has nothing to do with what the identity I’m questioning–the one I experience–actually is. But when I sometimes feel as alienated from, say, Judaism as I do from, say, mainstream cultural Christianity, it can also feel as though I’m mistaken about who and what I am.

It seems insufficient to say, we’re all enough, that only we get to determine what we feel, that all of us, after all, are imperfectly trying to figure out and communicate who we are as best we can in the ways we can, though it’s true.

Or, to put another way, my #OwnVoice is certainly not straight, not gender-conforming, not allosexual or Christian or–regardless of the results of my assessment–completely neurotypical. If it’s so easy for me to feel a stranger to these identities, why is it still so hard to feel at home in the others?

* Although I benefit from white privilege and the whiteness that has been constructed in opposition to Blackness in order to marginalize the latter, and although I am not one of the many racialized Jews in the world–and for both these reasons, count myself as white–there are ways in which historically Christian/European culture has constructed Jewishness in contrast to whiteness that persist, conspicuously in neo-Nazism, inconspicuously in subtler ways.