Issue #6
Hello hello!
Are you all still with me? I really hope you are!
I’m still constantly overwhelmed with the support this newsletter has received over the past 3 months, whether it be from feedback or pitches or messages from some of the readers. I just needed to put that out there.
We’re in a really strange time (because you haven’t heard that at all in the past 7 months) and it’s confusing, irritating and upsetting in multiple ways. There’s an undying sense of feeling lost and directionless. This thought indirectly fed into the curation of essays for this issue.
I thought about the ways in which we think or speak of our identities and our journeys not only outwardly but also inwardly as queer people. About how feelings of being lost, directionless and maybe-not-quite-there-yet have often proven to be the catalysts for how so many people have leaned in even further into their queerness. Issue 6 attempts to address these feelings head on and I can’t wait for you to read it.
One last thing, mush strives to publish narratives that are meant to be sat with and absorbed over time. So slow down and take as much time as you need, we’re not going anywhere, we promise.
x
Veer Misra (@v.eird)
You Don’t Have to Know You Hold Someone’s Heart In Order to Break It by Pranav
Whenever I come out to someone- rare as that is- they all ask me the same follow up question- “When did you know?” it’s understandable, I suppose. Everyone is curious.
I usually just make up something, mostly involving Disney’s Tarzan or Prince Caspian, because the truth is, I do not know; or perhaps I always knew I was different, so I did not know I knew. They say knowledge is power and they also say ignorance is bliss, but no one tells you of that other thing in between knowing and not-knowing – denying.
Denial and queer folk are reluctant bedfellows. We get to know each other intimately well. But I had a problem with denial- I knew it was useless. I had always been smart, but now it seems I was too smart for my own good. So, I went about complicating it even further. I would not outright deny being different, I would tailor my difference to suit normality.
Did I not want to play cricket with the boys? No, because sport is something purely physical and I prefer to exercise my mind and think cultured thoughts; that playing meant getting close to boys my own age, being judged by them and involved the kind of camaraderie that seemed to come so easily to all the boys but me, was immaterial.
I was different, but the way I put it meant I was different in a good way, a more mature way.
What I was, was a fool; but hey, what teenager isn’t.
I think it’s because I used to read a lot as a child; and that often meant I had a lot of questions, about everything. Who else to ask these questions to but my parents?
But contrary to what the young mind thinks, parents are not omniscient. I realized this when my parents quickly ran out of answers; there’s only so much an Indian engineer knows about ancient Egyptian burial rites.
I still remember what my dad used to say to me then- ‘don’t ask why, go find the answer yourself’. Now I have not a right to comment on parenting, but I will say this led me to learn early on to resolve questions my questions by myself. So, when I had a lot of questions that I definitely couldn’t ask them, I was already accustomed on ways to find my own answers.
Two things saved my high school experience- getting my own phone and YouTube. I did all kinds of ‘research’, saw every video on anything to do with queerness. Not because I thought I related to them- I did of course, but that’s not what I told myself- but because it was an interesting subject, it was a fascinating community of people with different experiences.
This was also, around the time I switched classes and first met with him. Ironically enough, he was a cricket player. His name was close enough to mine that we ended up being lab partners.
But we had already interacted before that first practical class, well he had; I’d just stared.
On the first day of class, he arrived late. Not very late, just late enough that most of us had already settled in. I sat at the third bench, because I didn’t want to be the nerd who sat right up front, but didn’t have the confidence to go any further away.
I was chatting with my friends about this and that and in walked this taller boy, with a small scar on his forehead and our gazes met. I remember marveling at how light his eyes were, in the sunlight slanting from the windows, the boundaries of his iris almost looked blue. It was just for a second, but I remember tensing up.
He didn’t though, he was supremely confident. I know this because he caught my look and winked.
The audacity, I tell you.
It was so thoroughly unexpected and, in my head, I was spluttering incoherently. To me, what had just happened was ridiculous, impossible. In reality however, I managed to keep my cool, for long enough to watch him saunter back to the last bench, high five some of the other guys and toss down his bag- that looked like it had all of three books in it- before sitting down himself.
Immediately I resolved to have nothing to do with this boy; that lasted about a week.
I was drawn to him. Never had I wished more for someone to just be an irredeemable jerk-face, but alas, he was a decent enough human being, to me anyway.
He’d smile and wave if he saw me, pleasantries would ensue and he’d even seek me out and talk to me on occasion. Conversation- though mostly about school work- flowed remarkably easily. I decided we were now friends, and when he didn’t disagree, I shifted benches and sat next to him.
The two other friends I had previously sat with, moved with me and settled down one bench in front.
They’d shuffled all the students in the last two years of high-school and this was a great chance to re-invent my image, is what I told myself. That was me all through that year, finding perfectly reasonable and logical explanations for my irrational actions.
Anyway, there were three of us in that bench- he and I sat in opposite corners with another friend in between. My happiest days in tenth grade were when that friend was absent. It meant I could put my bag to the corner and sit closer to him. I’d notice things like his jaw and the planes of his collar bones that barely stuck out of the open collared shirt, open collared because he refused to button it up fully, claiming it was too stuffy; not that I was complaining.
I didn’t button up the collar either.
We hung out a fair bit; but during break, his other friends would come over without fail and they’d start chatting in that easy way straight guys do and I’d feel small and alone. Those times made me realise I didn’t really know much about the things they spoke about and that I’d pretty much always eaten alone.
Not that that bothered me, I usually had a book with me, but this was the year I resolved to interact more with people. So after about a week or so, I would slip off as lunch break began. Take my lunch in hand and talk to other people- mostly girls, because I didn’t have much in common with many of the guys. We became very good friends, those girls and I, we still talk.
But in school, not many guys talked to girls and certainly not with the ease I did. That of course earned me the nickname of ‘the flirt’ which is ironic and hilarious for so many reasons- the least of which is that no fifteen-year-old in my entire school would know flirt if it whopped them upside the head with a heart-shaped pillow.
Sometimes I just read.
As the weeks passed, I got more and more frustrated because I couldn’t answer that question, you know the one- does he like me, or is he just friendly? Because he would do things like slowly touch knees when we were in a particularly boring class, meet my eyes and smile; or put his arm round my shoulder and make little circles with his fingers.
I did not know how to read into this. I was a touch starved teenager looking for signs everywhere.
It didn’t help that we ended up being forced into the same teams quite a lot, especially in practical class. We had to share a microscope in biology. That was painful.
The twinkle in his eye and his lopsided smile tied me up in more knots than a sailor’s rope.
My only escape were the extracurriculars I did. We spent that time very much apart. He’d have cricket practice and I’d go to quizzes and literary competitions. I stood in the school elections- not talking about that- and even started a band for a while.
But I really got busy when the annual-day celebrations rolled along. I spent hours in the library, writing and scripting introductions to the performances and almost never saw him for longer than half an hour or so, a day. I was good-ish.
It was around this time that I came out for the first time- not to him, that would have been a disaster, I’m sure- but to my oldest and best friend at the time- who lived a thousand miles away on the very bustling island where I was born. I left hints and worked up the courage, finally deciding to tell her the next time I saw her face to face, but she being the smart, sensible individual she was, guessed.
She took it well and I’d liked to have believed nothing had changed, but it’s hard to see someone’s expression when they’re so far away and you communicate through e-mails and Whatsapp messages.
I had spoken to her about him of course, but he had been a her. Which meant I had to warp the story- more tailoring to suit normality on my part- but now that the cat was out of the bag, I could finally tell her the truth. It was in doing so that I was finally forced to admit two things to myself-
One, that I was most definitely not just academically interested in being queer, I was queer. Saying it out loud- well, over text but you get my point- had made it undeniable, even to me.
And Two, now that I objectively talked about him, I was forced to confront reality. We were friends, not even by choice, by circumstance. Circumstances that, on occasion were partly engineered by me. Our names were similar, we sat together and we were lab partners. Come end of the year, we would probably grow apart.
It was a hard yank back to reality. I put it off until my board exams ended, but after that all I had were the endless days stretching out before me. He stopped texting, I tried to stop myself from starting conversations, tried to keep myself busy and I succeeded at one of those things.
It was not his fault, no more than it was mine. I knew that even then. In my first queer experience I realised you don’t have to know you hold someone’s heart in order to break it. We all dismiss unrequited love as something petty and superficial, the stories state it and gloss over it. But love is not an electric current that requires two terminals to flow between, it is from you and for you. It’s powerful and it changes you forever; and change by itself might not always be good, but it’s never bad.
I’ve met him again a few times since then and over the years, what I felt for him faded. Memories of events, timelines and conversations fade; but memories of feelings felt don’t ever really go away.
But on the bright side, I can now relate to break-up songs, which broadened my musical taste a fair bit, so there’s that.
The Art of Flower Arrangement by Maitri Gautam
I like to think that once the writer does their job, the story leads a life of its own. Like a snail on an evening stroll in the garden, or a seashell that washed ashore. After that, they will show themselves to whoever picks them up.
My coming-out story, on the other hand, is a snail drawn up into the coils of its shell, a seashell buried twenty feet deep into the sand.
That is to say, I have never looked at the familiar faces, held my breath until the long-awaited words fell out.
I'm asexual, gender-fluid, and still confused about women.
My parents and most of my friends do not seem to speak the language in which I write. This ancient tongue that now many of us are learning to decipher, cuddling with the curves and playing with the sounds like a wind chime.
But sometimes, I don't even feel the need for them to know. My asexuality, my gender-fluidity, and this aching need to tell every other woman in the metro that she looks beautiful - all these feelings that come alive with every breath are mine. Must I explain them — need I justify them?
Don't get me wrong. Coming out of the closet is important, it is the moment you stop holding your breath, and let the body find joy. It is representation, acceptance, and self-love. But how do you explain love to a world where it is still defined by shirts for one and skirts for another? Rather than oversized gender-neutral kurtis with, say on a lazy Wednesday, pyjamas.
I do not blame my parents for not knowing this language, although they seem to be trying to learn these days. It is not their fault they were conditioned, or that they grew up in a time where people were not allowed to express love in every shape and sound.
To begin with, I was 11 when I started reading. With nobody around to recommend me titles, I judged books entirely based on their covers. And one time, I picked up a book that I had to later hide in the wardrobe.
This, and may I add stupid, book about demons who showed up on Earth as women and fed on men's sexual desires, put something into motion. Before going to bed, I'd replay the explicit sexual scenes, waiting a hundred heartbeats to feel something. Sometimes, I did; others, not so much. But every single time, I saw myself as the guy and not the girl.
At 15, I cyber-dated a 19-year-old American guy who was bisexual (the very first time that I was introduced to the sexuality spectrum). This man with a 10-years-older boyfriend, another girlfriend younger than me, never let me know that I could say no to every time we role-played. And so, I walked around the school with all the discomfort from the night before, waiting for it to transform into some sort of "sexual maturity” (that I was then convinced was a true sign of adulthood) in the middle of Math lectures. Not even once did I consider that maybe, all of us don't need to express affection in the same way.
Maybe for you, red roses work perfectly, but what if I tell you I've always loved carnations and champa more?
Two years later, I was still holding onto a rose, staring up at champa trees. So when I fell for someone new, I played a tape inside my head where the two of us made out, conditioning my body to feel comfortable with the idea of making out itself, even though it was making me feel ashamed and embarrassed of myself.
And then, I found this beautiful word. Asexuality. I think it started with Pinterest, when I found an illustration of a person saying, "I like sex the way I like my coffee. I don't like coffee,” which, in turn, lead to a myriad of Google searches.
Is it okay to not like sex?
What is asexuality?
Am I an asexual?
Is it okay to be an asexual?
Inside, I felt like a bubble about to burst. Who should I tell, who will understand? Will I be able to make them understand?
Outside, I kept quiet. I took all my feelings and questions and turned them into a bouquet. I changed the water, put them in my favourite flower vase, and there they were.
Champas, and carnations, and daisies - all blooming in my living room. Acknowledging them was the first step, accepting them the second. All by myself, it was somehow effortless. It was liberating.
For some reason, I pushed away the thought of dating completely. Everything was going okay, until I ended up in an all-girls' college, and somebody put their head on my shoulder, and I thought, Holy Shit.
That day, I added lilies to the vase but avoided the butterflies thereafter. Even when somebody told me about bi-romanticism, and I went around humming the tune of this new song — even then, I could not entirely accept my attraction towards women.
I never gave myself the chance to date a girl. I developed crushes and collected them like seashells, before throwing them back into the sea. In this process of decorating my house, I ignored the emptiness I felt in the bedroom while going to sleep, in the kitchen as I cooked a meal for one. And on top of that, one day, I realised I needed more flowers.
It was a kiss, you see. Two boys kissed in a book called Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, and I thought, What would I do to be a boy and kiss a boy.
Ever since I was a child, people told me I should have been a boy — an idea highly based on gender stereotypes. The way I sat even when I wore a dress, how my voice is a bit heavy for a girl, and the classic body-hair situation.
But it was a kiss, and reading more accounts of boys expressing love for boys, that made me see my gender-fluidity. I never felt hatred for my body, only for my sexual identities. After all, why oh why could I not be just one thing?
One pretty flower waiting to be held.
It took me a long while, yet it won’t take more than a couple of sentences, but one random day I thought, if it is ultimately love that I feel for people, if it just love I want to express, why am I worrying so much about it?
That day was like looking up at the sky and realising it was not blue anymore but pink. Pink with all the cherry blossoms that I have never once seen in real life. Pink without any gender notions, pink that feels simply, like love.
So, here we are. I’m asexual, gender-fluid, and still confused about women, but not about love. I love, love people, and life, and all the things that come in this beautiful bouquet. If I want to kiss a boy as a boy, it is still a kiss, and he does not have to know. If I feel butterflies when a girl puts her head on my shoulder, I'm just a pillow, and she does not have to know.
It's okay. If I fall in love with you, I'll tuck a champa behind your ear, smile, and get back to arranging my flowers.
Engaging With My Completeness by Shivang Sethi
“You smelled great today.”
“Thanks – I do like experimenting with my colognes,” I responded.
Twenty-five years in and I was still conflicted on whether I should return a compliment: I like to think that my words should be intentional and possess weight. In my opinion when it comes to words less is more and the silence in between is what gives them gravitas. I don’t return compliments often, and it’s not because I don’t know how but I don’t think I should – I’m more authentic if I don’t. If I felt an intrinsic need to compliment, I would. Not speaking is as much an action as speaking and though silence is universal in every language, it’s misunderstood universally. I believed all this and yet I was insecure in my behaviour. The more I liked somebody and the more somebody liked me, the more paranoid I would be about my beliefs, my words, and my presentation.
I liked this person in a manner that I had romantically liked 3 others in my life and so I wanted to leave no room for interpretation. Shortly after expressing gratitude, I apologised explaining that I am not one to give compliments often and especially not out of courtesy; this was not to be misinterpreted as a lack of interest. In response, he said
“You have nothing to apologise for, you just express your affection differently. Your hugs are every so slightly longer, indescribably warmer. The light sideway shoves that come so out of the blue while we’re walking – I feel happily imbalanced for a couple seconds. The quick arm-grabs that jolt me alert in the most wonderfully electric way. The fact that you kept your entire evening for me with no doubts that we’ll seamlessly fill up the time. You keep me close. I would take those things over any compliments you could give me so don’t feel like you need to.”
When I was apologising, it was to protect what we had by protecting him from parts of me. In the midst of my self-doubts I was focused solely on what I didn’t do, rather than what I did. All I could think of were things I wish I did, or remember things I wish I didn’t do or say: insecurity enveloped me as soon as I felt affection from somebody I liked. But the response I received was a brilliantly timed revelation – in a moment in which I felt deficient, I suddenly felt abundant. I thought that I understood and valued my communication style, where I placed emphases and where I was silent, how I existed and presented myself under a romantic interest’s gaze, but clearly many things flew under the radar. In trying to step into my interest’s shoes and see how he saw me, I had completely stepped out of mine. I was neither in my shoes nor his, but in this middle space that only a fantasy, not a person, could occupy.
While he wasn’t the first person around whom I attempted to be likeable, he was the first to unwittingly show me what I was doing and why I was doing it. In an extended moment of insecurity he reminded me of my completeness. I appreciated many things about him – but especially his characteristic candour and boldness, which necessitated an underlying sense of his own inherent value. He appreciated my inflections, expressions, humour and body language, because whenever we would meet in person he created an environment in which I could get out of my head. We reminded each other of our individuality – we opened each other up to our different and separate totalities, and I had never felt freer and more complete in myself.
In seeing how he saw me rather than how I wanted to be seen, I felt my completeness. To engage with completeness, I realised, does not look outwardly like curtness, briskness, or arrogance. It also does not like apologising for how or who you are, or performing either respectability or palatability. To experience and grow into your totality is to experience an ineffable freedom that flows outwardly like compassion, a warm confidence, and loving kindness. Whenever I describe this freedom itself, it’s always through apophasis: I can only seem to describe what it feels like in negation. This freedom feels like not having this subtle yet pervasive paranoia that I began to think was normal. It feels like not thinking about a hundred ways you could be misunderstood. It feels like not having to have your weapons always at the ready. Language cannot seem to capture it quite precisely and it slips like quicksilver from the constraining bounds of terminology.
I hadn’t felt this freedom before. Growing up queer, I was thrown into the defensive from the day I became aware of my queerness – the world was not designed with people like me in mind and if it were, it was not to allow us to flourish but to either submit or assimilate. The world unrelentingly tries to fit a square peg in a round hole by ruthlessly dulling our edges – leaving behind an identity that could only ever be that of a phantom square, never of an actual circle. Thankfully, unlike some others I never had delusions that I could live a lie but I also didn’t know how to realise myself – or even that it was something to experience. This is hermeneutical injustice – something felt awry somewhere but I lacked the concepts or experience to locate it and know it. My coming out to any group had always been a defensive tactic, a warning. It was a disclaimer to the audience to know better than to engage in any queerphobia or heterosexism and think that it would go unchallenged: that my sharp tongue would slice through their vitriol and ignorance like a hot knife through butter.
To come out to an audience I always had to remind myself of my completeness, whether I actually believed it or not. In my mind I would repeat:
“I am complete. I am whole. I am valuable.”
Functionally, it didn’t matter if I believed it. I just knew that if I didn’t at least act like I believed it, I would not perform the confidence that makes others take me seriously. What I faced was a curious crisis – I was defending who I was without knowing who I was for I was hardly ever extended that opportunity to learn. This opportunity that comes to queer people via pockets of safe spaces and community, which takes the form of the whole entire world for those in power.
So for the longest time without knowing it, I was not constantly defending myself but a potential for myself. I was holding a seed tightly to my chest that was pulsating with energy but waiting for some nurturing soil to finally germinate. I was on a quest to end my personal dormancy, except I didn’t know it at the time. I was, however, equipped with the tools: my queer community had taught me and armed me well in the way of sass, the power walk, the image and performativity, valuing friends like family, and questioning every concept under the sun. However simply as a matter of fact, I grew up defensive-first and so I learned about my tools first and how to equip them, and little about the person who wielded them. Self-preservation comes first, self-actualisation later, if ever.
“Your hugs are longer – indescribably warmer”
“You jolt me awake – the most wonderful electricity”
“You have nothing to apologise for, you [express yourself] differently”
25 years and a few months in and I finally found this metaphysical nurturing soil. It provided a space in which I didn’t have to explain myself, and if I did explain myself nonetheless it gave me feedback that it was unnecessary; that it understood. I didn’t have any explaining or rationalising to do - all I had to do was to be. Being. When was the last time I could just be without explaining myself? I couldn’t remember. The tools, weapons, and armour that I never entered a public space without were also carried into the private-public – they felt like an extension of myself. But this time I sensed that I could leave these things at the door and I realised how desperately I wanted to. For once, I was rewarded for doing so and nudged to keep going. With every step I took towards my own realisation, I knew there was no going back: it’s impossible to make a sprout, that then becomes a sapling, that then become a tree go back to being a seed. What protected me now – my defence – was not the armour like the encasing of a seed that protected me while simultaneously trapping me, but like the firm roots of a tree: a deep understanding of who I am right now, what my future selves have the potential to be, and a desire to continuously grow along this path.
25 years a few months in and I feel complete. Completeness is not a static space – I’ll keep growing, but I’ll also feel complete along the way. This is not contradictory. I can engage with my completeness. I’m no longer holding a potential close to my chest, and the energy now courses through my veins. When I tell the room I’m queer it’s to tell the room that I have character, that I have struggled and grown because of it, that I understand nuance, intersectionality, and complexity, and that minority rights and voices are important to me. That I am always curious, I’m always questioning. That I’m always wondering if things have to be a certain way and that I have many other imaginations of how the world could be because I’m comfortable with who I am but often not where I am. That I have a healthy sense of paranoia but my goal is to drop it altogether and that this requires the world to change, not me. When I tell the room I’m queer, I’m telling the room that I feel my totality because only those who are comfortable with themselves don’t need violence to prove that they exist and that I hope my completeness helps them find their own. A complete person has seemingly become unusually rare and observably different, and so is queer by definition.
Before you leave, we just wanted to mention that a platform like mush thrives simply on more and more people reading queer stories. If you like what you just read, it would be wonderful if you could share this newsletter with your friends, families, lovers, pets as well as any sociable gremlins that you might come across.
A new issue of mush is released on the 1st and 15th of every month. To stay updated, sign up to our mailing list and follow our Instagram page. If you’d like to submit a pitch for a future issue, please email us at mushstories@gmail.com.