Our Identity

Our generation is living in uncharted territory; the ground we are breaking has never been explored before. We’re still far from perfect, but we are learning – slowly – how to accept people different from ourselves. I am finding myself explaining to my younger brother many nuances that our parents never had to know: the difference between being bi and pan, celibate and asexual, drag queen and MTF. Even seemingly synonymous words like sex and gender.

What I love about little kids is that they don’t care about things like that. They love themselves. They love their bodies. They celebrate fingers and toes as well as spit and feces and all the other things that us grown-ups just don’t understand. Children know from a young age if they’re attracted to boys or girls, or if they were born in the wrong body or with the wrong name. Pronouns don’t matter to them. They love themselves anyway.

Since I chopped my hair off last year, I’ve gotten lots of questions. “Didn’t you like your long hair?” “Is there something you want to tell us?” “Are you gay?” It’s amazing how much of our identity lies in superficial, temporary things like hair and clothing. But to date my favorite question comes from my baby cousin Tyler, who pointed one finger at me and demanded, “Hey, you – are you a he, or are you a she? Cuz you look like both.”

Moments like that remind me that we need masculine and feminine traits to balance ourselves out, and that we don’t necessarily have to be a he or a she. It’s okay to just be us. It’s okay to like ourselves – and each other – just the way we are.

Worthy of More Than Hell

I don’t believe in a hell. I never have. I think about it, and I understand why other people might believe in it, but I cannot compromise my idea of an all-loving, all-encompassing god with that of a place of eternal torture. There has never been a part of me that wanted to punish, not even people who could arguably deserve to be punished, and I never honestly understood why. Isn’t it a good thing if all the wicked people in the world go to hell? Shouldn’t I be glad? Shouldn’t I want them to suffer for whatever they’ve done?

But… I don’t. I want them to be happy – with themselves, with their life, with their choices, with their reality. I want them to be free of whatever personal hell they’ve created already, and I want a god who can appreciate that, who can lead them to a homewards towards joy and peace instead of torment.

One large idea behind Wicca, one main thing about it that caught my attention, is that there is no hell. Not just that, but there is no evil. Devils don’t sit on our shoulders and whisper sins, and fallen angels don’t wait down below with red horns and burning pitchforks (obviously not, since the existing concept of Satan comes from a twisted version of the pagan deity Pan). People make bad choices, yes, but we are all only doing the best we know how. It doesn’t make us bad. It doesn’t make us sinful. It makes us human – erroneous sometimes, and hopeful, and beautiful in that hope because it, too, is what makes the world beautiful. Even mass murderers are nothing more than human.