everymomentexisting
AFFIRMATIONS: (1) I know identification to be a construct, and therefore to be a system that I can be liberated from. (2) Gender does not factor into the way I understand myself in any way other than critical and/or performative, and I do not have to justify that or any of my ideas regarding myself. (3) Identity is a defined space I have the ability to move through and between. (4) Queerness is a way to navigate and question otherwise strictly held truths. (5) I reject narratives that do not bend to my ideology: I do not strive for visibility, I do not attempt to create something particular and based on anything other than the present moment. (6) I once tried to make every moment important in its own way, and I found myself overflowing with trite emotion and needless suffering. I now approach a space with objectivity and treat each moment with equal disregard. (7) I take images for granted and refuse to engage with binaries. I rest firmly in the middle of being and nonbeing—an image lifted off a page, all my narratives at once, every moment existing at the same time.
IDEOLOGY: The moment of waking, the routine developed over months in quarantine— as reality settles in, and I choose to engage with it. Each day is the same: I wake, account for my devices, make my bed, clean my shit off my bedroom floor, then head to the bathroom to freshen up. Quarantine is an underlying technology, one that has rewritten reality in this fashion, each day becoming indistinguishable from the next. I no longer need to identify for an audience that only exists inside my devices. Without a camera, I cease to exist in the performative ways that I understood myself prior to quarantine. Here in my room there is no oppression, there is no need for identification. My walls and floors are curated extensions of myself, and there is nothing here to suggest I have an identity at all. My gender is meaningless, my name is meaningless. I am my objects, my possessions; I am possessed by my objects, the art and ideas around me. Online, I use the pronouns I have always been told to use in case anyone needs to refer to me, yet I pray to never be called upon. This is not to say that I do not participate; I do speak and engage in dialogue, but I do so on my own terms. I speak into empty screens and voids and no longer seek affirmation from external voices.
IDEOLOGY: The hallway is a shared space, and I move through it without hesitation or policing. The landscape is defined by whoever’s body takes up the most amount of space in any given moment. And as every moment exists at once, the hallway belongs to everyone who has ever walked through it. It is cruel that there are only two directions to move, but we are equipped with the ability to move through it whenever and however long we please. A body in this space is anyone’s and everyone’s. There is never only one action in the hallway. It, as well as the bedroom, is a space to negotiate ourselves. It is a space of constant transformation. A sequence of time is divided into separate instantaneous moments and mapped out accordingly. I see disparate versions of myself side by side and wonder how I ever was so big, ever so small. This is ultimately a fabrication, a mimicry. The state of limbo exists at a point in time; all versions of ourselves exist at the same time. I find the divine to exist within myself, yet unaccessible in its entirety. Instead, I present a small rendering, a likeness, of what it’s like to feel everything all the time.
