New Comic!
Note: you can buy a redrawn zine version of this comic at my shopify store.
TRANSLATIONS:
Finnish (credit: Valhe)
Hungarian (Fordította: A Szivárványon Innen)
Apparently now that I'm not in school anymore I'm all about giant long-form comics.
Identity is a really important topic to me, and the trope of 'finding yourself' is almost as problematic and insulting to me as the trope of 'coming out'.
I want to destroy the idea that some identities are less valid than others, the condescension that comes with 'they're just figuring themselves out', and the insulting dismissal of identity exploration and performance in youth as being somehow not 'real', or as 'attention seeking'. Fuck all of that.
And beyond the fact that 'inconsistent' identities are really challenging socially, they ALSO carry these real, actual life and liberty risks; we're expected to use the same name, orientations, values, languages, and identities across all aspects of our lives, we are expected to have normative identities that can be quantified and qualified and trust me, TRUST ME when a person is perceived as having inconsistent or unusual identities they are being flagged in all sorts of systems for extra scrutiny and action. I know this from experience.
So, yeah, this 'one true identity', this 'finding yourself', this 'who is the real you' stuff is bullshit. We are so, so much more interesting than that, and we deserve better.
