Crystal Rasmussen: A queer journey from shame to self-love | TED

51,485 views ・ 2021-07-15

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These days, I find it easy to look in the mirror.
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This used to be the case, too,
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because I learned to be a drag queen alone,
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Back then, in the early noughties,
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there was no cultural mirror for someone like me.
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There was no chance of switching on Netflix
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and finding someone who looks like you,
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and Lily Savage never quite made it to the Woolworths bargain bin
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if she ever made it to the dizzying heights of VHS at all.
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So there was me and a mirror,
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and that's the only place I saw myself for a long time.
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It will be over a decade until this part of me became more than a mere reflection.
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And in that time,
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what happened would change my relationship with that mirror.
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In that decade, I came out as gay
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at a Catholic state comp in the working class North West,
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and I survived.
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But as with anything that unsmooths the edges of normal society,
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that coming out brought with it a daily dose of judgment
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and therein shame from almost everyone around me,
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shame that was heard and felt and internalized
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and often replicated by me.
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Commonly, when we think about shame,
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we imagine it at the extreme end of the spectrum,
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anything from years of intense dieting
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to keep up with extreme Western beauty standards,
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all the way to things like honor violence.
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But for me,
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my shame existed at the long end of the tail of the shame monster,
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as self-hatred.
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Now, this didn't really affect anyone else.
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On the surface, I was fat, feminine, gay, spotty, ginger.
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I didn't really have much going for me, by society's standards.
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But what I did have was a killer, if not overcompensatory,
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bitchy gay personality,
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and I was not afraid to use it.
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If you were going to throw a rock at me and call me a faggot,
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then I'll barb you back by telling you that one day when I'm famous,
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you'll be licking my boots clean and begging me for employment.
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(Tsk)
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We all reproduce shameful and shaming behaviors,
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because we're all trying to escape our own shame.
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And as the shame monster swallowed me whole,
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I couldn't find myself in the mirror.
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Eventually, I left my hometown and went to a rather posh university
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that my whole town had celebrated my acceptance at with glee.
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And when I arrived there,
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I started to tell lies about my upbringing.
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Not big ones.
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There's only so many vowels you can drop
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until someone realizes you're not landed gentry.
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But I started to say things like, "I'd read that book" when I hadn't,
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I started to tell people I'd grown up in Manchester,
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when really, it was two hours north of there.
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I spent time alone in the mirror,
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like I had with my drag persona all those years ago,
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trying to change the way I speak just a little.
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To the world, I was easy.
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I worked hard to fit myself into a neat storyline,
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the friendly gay Mancunian,
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when really I knew that the swathing complexities of my identity
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couldn't fit inside a storyline.
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And if I was found out, I was terrified that I'd be cast out.
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And so the self-hate ensued once again.
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Now, what does self-hate look like? What does it feel like?
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It sounds pretty intense, but it's actually way more boring
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and way less dramatic than vile gouts of hatred towards who you are.
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For me, self-hatred was about not believing things
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that were objectively true.
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It was about looking in the mirror and seeing something monstrous.
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It was about looking in the mirror
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and seeing something not deserving of love or respect from myself and others.
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It was about looking in the mirror and wanting to change parts of myself:
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my weight, my gender, my sexuality, my class --
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so extremely that you commit acts of self-harm and self-denial.
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I lied, I judged, I bitched. I changed the way I spoke.
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And I had so much extreme sex
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that I would find myself, years later, recalling all
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the times my consent had been breached
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because it's what I thought I deserved.
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Sidebar, to say that extreme sex, when practiced safely and consensually,
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can be some of the best sex.
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But as my grandma would have said, I was in a pickle.
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I looked in the mirror and I saw something monstrous.
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But I managed to persuade those around me that I was fabulous.
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The first time I performed in drag, I was 19,
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and to put it lightly,
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I was not fabulous.
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But so was everyone.
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And the standard back then, in 2011, was much lower than it is now.
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And, you know, the people of my repressed generation
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were just pretty happy to see something different.
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But ...
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As bad as I might have been,
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this experience was such a liberatory process,
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something that Oprah might have called an aha moment,
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because for the first time,
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this thing I'd only ever really seen in a mirror was real.
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She was tangible.
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And what's more, she was adored by a crowd of people.
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Drag continued this way for a while,
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until the barrier between the mirror and the real world faded away.
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I had admitted my most shameful desires to the world,
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and somewhere in some pockets of some worlds that I never knew existed,
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she was adored.
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So I started to drop my vowels more.
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I started to talk about Lancaster more.
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I started to wear ball gowns in the street,
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and I started to fall back in love with what I saw in the mirror.
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Eventually, everyone around me followed suit --
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my friends, my family, my lovers.
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She became a place of value, and of power, and of uplift.
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She became what she'd been in the mirror all those years ago --
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a savior.
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So I did what anyone who found their power source would do,
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and I leaned in as archcapitalist Sheryl Sandberg would say,
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and I journeyed to the heart of the queer motherland,
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East London.
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There, I had queer sex, I made queer friends,
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I wore queer clothes,
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and I built myself a job where I could dress like this every day,
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worshiping at the feet of the Northern women who raised me,
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and be celebrated for it.
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It's kind of a wild thing to get your head around,
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the idea of being celebrated
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for something you were so painfully derided for before.
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But my journey to shamelessness was not over.
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Funny how years of deep embedded circuitry
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takes a little while to untangle.
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See, I'd made this bubble,
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this shame-free bubble
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where everything about me was celebrated.
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And one night on the way home from a gig in drag,
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I was beat so badly that I was hospitalized,
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by a homophobic passer by.
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The shame flooded out of my internal boxes and filled me up.
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I went to so many dark places in my head.
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I'm loathe to repeat them,
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but I asked myself questions like
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"What if everyone who's ever said anything bad about me was right?
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What if I deserve all of this shame?"
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I had some work to do,
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and I was a bit too shaken to stay around in London,
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so I took a train from Euston back home to Lancaster,
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and I spent some time healing.
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And I worked hard to fall in love
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with the things I thought I'd left behind,
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the things I'd loved about Lancaster, growing up.
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The people there, the way we connect,
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Jan down the SPAR shop, who sells fags,
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the boys who give you a bit of a look but respect you nonetheless.
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And I came back to London with more of an awareness
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of my value,
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of my history.
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I had been dressing differently since the attack.
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I was wearing all black, plain clothes, trying to blend in,
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because when I was at home in Lancaster,
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I realized that safety was more important to me than curing myself of shame,
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and I can't do the latter if I don't have the former.
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But while I was up in Lancaster, I'd also had another realization.
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I realized that everybody suffers with shame.
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Even my attacker.
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This was another aha moment,
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a moment so liberatory that it confused me for a while.
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The fact that I wasn't alone in this, that everyone suffers from shame.
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Normality is God and everyone's a sinner, I realized.
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I got obsessed with that.
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I started looking everywhere
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and seeing shame in people's behaviors,
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from their silence to their violence,
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from their gender-reveal parties to their big white weddings.
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Even my attacker.
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He was so filled with shame because of what masculinity had done to him
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that upon seeing my difference, he lashed out at me with his fists.
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Rather than curing my shame, I had to work hard to reimagine it
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as something that we all carry around with us,
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like little pebbles attached to our back in a rucksack.
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It's something that affects us all,
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that causes harm in us all
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and causes us to perpetuate harm outwards to others too.
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I also realized I was existing in a complicated interplay
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of narcissism, self-hate and shame too,
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where I wanted everyone to accept everything about me.
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And until then, until that moment,
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I would see something monstrous in the mirror.
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But I realized that I don't need everyone to accept everything about me.
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Jan down the SPAR shop who sells fags
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has way bigger problems than my gender,
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my class, my sexuality.
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She's got her own shame to deal with.
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But what we do need -- well, I need --
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is the ability to live safely.
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The ability to walk down the street in drag
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and not have some homophobic passerby do what he did to me.
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And the way we do that is by doing some shame-work.
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It's about looking inside
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and realizing that all the boxes that had been put there by the world
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are a lie.
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All the things that you've had to shave off to make yourself smooth,
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bring them back.
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There's power there, there's value there. There's beauty there.
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Shame-work is social work --
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it's time we all did a bit.
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These days, I find it easy to look in the mirror.
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Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
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