As an initial blog post about who I am, I feel like I should take a moment to explain why I’m doing this – I have an interest for many topics of discussion which I would love to dedicate some time to write about rather than just think about and internalise opinions. This is a platform for expressing thoughts on current, future and past events along with life advice, creative periods, political debates and giving a kind of documentation of my life.
To start with, I have grown up in a household that has been female dominated; my mum, three little sisters and my dad which means that my life has had a stereotypical upbringing to a certain extent however my parents never insisted on putting us in fluffy pink dresses, forcing us to do ballet and doing all the typical ‘girly’ things which I am grateful for as I had freedom to make my own fashion and hobby interest decisions.
I went through a stage of rebellion at the age of 10 where I only wore black or dark purple as an attempt to distance myself from the pink lifestyle of a girl, despite not having a pressure of the expected female presentation of self.
Since then I have experimented with appearance and along with discovering more about myself there has been more of a chance to find what I feel most comfortable in. Clothes and makeup have been quite an important element of expression to me as I have always been quite a shy person who has been socially inept therefore a brief look at my choice of appearance gives a representation of my adaption of confidence. A random outsider would probably be able to see a clear change in personality once I hit the age of 16/17 when I joined Sixth Form, made a bunch of new cool friends and discovered how I really wanted to look. I’ve gone from wearing dark clothes that don’t show much skin and extremely long hair to bright purple short hair, piercings and rainbow striped shirts. I love this transformation and is certainly something I will look back on in years to come and think; woah, where did that come from?
Along with being brought up with so many girls you would expect to have some kind of sheltered outlook on life due to not having much experience with the male kind however, as I have grown up I’ve managed to grow confident in speech and construct my own opinions on things which I now dedicate my life to on educating others, and my family, on.
The whole boy thing has been a personal conundrum for me, not until recently have I had interest in relationships with anyone and that has also been influenced by finding out what my sexuality is. Boys have always been something that have confused me what with living with 4 females – I find their behaviour odd and humour weird, but that’s just because my mind is still separating them and not understanding that it is about the individual not necessarily the sex of the person. But since becoming more comfortable with myself and others I've had more time to come to terms with how I feel about different people whether that be through platonic friendships or romantic relations. It's been an interesting time but ultimately, understanding who and what I am attracted to has certainly been a learning curve.
Something that I should probably implore to whoever is reading this is that I am a rambler and whatever pops into my head will probably be written down which may not be the best for future reflection to see the level of professionalism of my writing but for so long now I have only written in an essay format and this freedom of writing is going to allow so much fluidity for me.
No plan, no essay structure which will be marked – just my thought process which may be problematic but let’s see where it takes us. :)