Something I’ve thought about for.. basically my whole life is.. how often I have to deal with the visible (or scarily, invisible) threat of influential individuals in groups making me a target of exclusion because I’m “too weird” for the given group. I’ve ALWAYS been an eccentric person since I was a toddler, but I’m also an ambitious professional, artist and community builder.

Somewhat lately, there’s been a possible instance of some people in a group feeling “uncomfortable” about my wolf tail that I now wear all the time. But 1) I wear it because it’s who I really am and after not having worn it for a good seven years, I realized I couldn’t be without it anymore. It’s who I am. I’ll also add that indigenous people since the dawn of time have incorporated animal attributes onto their person. The fact that people react in such a hostile manner to it is just a continual show of peoples’ racist tendencies. Lookism is racism.

But 2) The real point I want to make is that while such things like my tail may seem easy compromises, the issue goes SO much deeper that one thing. My ENTIRE life, there has always been *some*thing about me that rubbed certain people in groups the wrong way. No one wanted to be friends with me in school cause I “dressed and acted gay.” To blend in, I worn solid colored sweatpants and shirts for much of grade school and I was intensely bullied for that too. When I became too scared of other kids to ever try and make friends again and became a loner, I became a school-wide target because I was now a “narcissist” because I liked to perform outside of school and didn’t have friends. I was pushed out of a zoo internship in a horrible way because I was “too enthusiastic.” I was involuntarily kept from public view in an activist group because I wore feathers in my headband. When I was Sunday school teacher, I was targeted by two people because I was gay and possibly had “nefarious intentions.” In other groups it’s because I was young in a group of older people and stuck out too muchj. For some others it’s because I was brown but wasn’t “ethnic” or “Christianized” enough.

My tail back in the day also caused three instances where I was told twice to remove it or not volunteer, I was asked to not bring it into a restaurant after a family verbal absconded me, a department store tried banning me and I was prevented from going on a trip to DC as president of a youth advocacy group. There are dozens of example big and small for how “unpalatable” my person has been to society’s institutions my whole life. People in groups are largely just f*king bigoted garbage.

The amount of times I felt “something” was happening or was decided about me because I was too outspoken, too anti-establishment, too “off”, too this, too that.. it’s been a f*king exhausting lifelong existence but I’ve continually come back to this very strong position of “F*K EVERY. ONE. OF. THEM.” If society is going to always find *something* uncomfortable, inappropriate or threatening to the status quo about my existence, no matter how much I try to blend in, I might as well be EVERY thing they don’t approve of ALL AT ONCE–and do all the things I set out to do while I’m at it!

Especially when it comes down to it, all of that energy comes from the EXACT SAME place that bigotry comes from. It’s why I literally have a shirt that says “Society says be yourself.. except not like *that.*” It’s a lie we’re told as kids, while kids who are truly different grow up to face a life of alienation or trapped in a skin that isn’t them. As “progressive” as we claim to be, we haven’t changed one bit as a society. We still target people who are different, who LOOK different, who dress different. We still see people who are different as threatening or targets that must have their non-conformity scrubbed away until they look, act and think like everyone else..

It’s a battle I will face every day for the rest of my life but the contrary stands for EVERYthing I’m against. Indigenous children by the thousands were violently stripped of the culture they wore on their bodies because *this* culture deemed anything worn on the body that wasn’t uniformly European to be an affront to god or.. what we call now “unprofessional.” The same way they treat tattoos, skin, hair, etc. The expectations that now exist today are rooted in that racism and I will forever call that sh*t out.

The most painful, infuriating and awful moments of my life will always be when I’m prevented from working with groups or furthering my pursuits at points just because I’m “different” but as I’ve discovered, I will never be able to escape this curse and responsibility of being someone who is truly …different… in ways much of society does not approve of and I’m more than willing to die on this hill in the pursuit of standing for every adult and child who’s lived a life of perpetual alienation like I’ve always have.

– Courage