This Was Going to be a Tweet,

But I am a member of The Overachievers in National Novel Writing Month which doesn't exactly lend itself to brievity of expression and Twitter character limits are still too low for me to put this together properly. The briefest way that I can express it is this: 

I am pig sick of being told that there is a hierarchy when it comes to supporting causes or charities. 

Many people will tell you that it's a fallacy to believe that such a hierarchy exists, but then others will, when you express support for one charity or cause, question why you don't support something else which is tentatively connected or, in their mind, more important. One big example of this is during Hibo Wadere's campagin against FGM. 

To my knowledge, she has never said something along the lines of FGM is awful, but MGM is fine. (To clarify, not the movie studio, but Male Genital Mutilation). As far as I am aware, the best characterisation of her viewpoint is to say, yes, MGM is also bad, but that's not my fight. 

Her story is a very personal one. In one of the chapters in Cut which I was reading last night, she specifically states she was talking about her vagina. She talks about her culture, of course, but a lot of the conversation regarding the trials of women following FGM are her own story. It's her talking about recurrent infections, about the illnesses she saw her female family members experience and her perceptions of these and how long it took her to go for a wee after her mutilation. She is the perfect activist in the FGM space because she has experienced the trauma she is fighting against, and she has the lived experience of being in a culture that tells a girl that this is her lot in life, and she still said no. 

I'm not doubting that MGM, i.e. male circumcision for non-medical reasons, can have terrible side effects. I'm not even doubting that, particularly depending on the age a boy is when he undergoes this procedure, it can lead to the same level of trauma as Hibo experienced in her own story, but it very much isn't her fight, and it shouldn't be. She's no better placed than I am to tell someone what should or shouldn't happen to their penis, or how it felt when her penis was cut. If men and boys feel that it is a trauma and are angry in the way that Hibo was, they too can choose to break the stigma and talk about it, and they can choose to share their experiences. That's where Hibo's activism started. That is where the best kinds of activism start, because it's not about these traditional roles of "white saviours" walking in and "Westernising" the cultures of other countries. 

If there is something you are passionate about, learn about it, speak about it, raise awareness, raise money - you do you - but there's no legitimate reason to try and take a crap on someone else about causes that they're not acitively seen to be supporting. We only get a certain amount of time, and there is only a certain amount that we can do. You conserve your energy or your spoons for the things you feel the need to address. 

Personally, I think Hibo Wadere is an absolute rock star in the best sense of the phrase. 

This Doesn't Feel Right,

This year has been a bit of a weird one, to say the least, and coming up to NaNoWriMo is no different. It was a number of weeks/months ago now that Hq announced we weren't sanctioning in-person events and that was fine because it was logical and equal and it seemed like things might be a bit better, but not normal, here in the UK. Obviously, that's now not the case. 

When I made the decision to move back to Manchester, it wasn't a decision I took lightly. It was an upheaval of my entire life, and though there were good reasons for it, it has been a trauma, not least because of the logistics of getting everything here, but living half out of a storage locker is challenging to say the least, and all the while I have been wanting to make sure I'm not putting my life on hold. 

With NaNoWriMo upon us, part of me is wishing I could have build a small shed with a portable heater at the bottom of the garden where I could retreat to, and where midnight writing sessions wouldn't disrupt my parents sleeping upstairs, because I like to talk to myself when I write and I like big, loud, clanky keyboards that are not really the best when your "office" space is meters away from other people's bedrooms. My second thought was to look for a cheapish Airbnb to rent for a couple of days/weekends so that I had something like a bolthole to go and stay in whilst I was taking part in the most antisocial of the writing sessions, though I think that the whole talk of national lockdown might have killed that dream, as well. 

The whole thing feels weird and the idea of being stuck in the house twenty-four-seven (because I have no desire to run in this weather) is not appealing in the slightest. My desk is also buried gone, not that there would be floor space for it, since I thought it was buried in the furniture pile at the back of my storage unit. I can't even clamber in there for a bit of peace and writing time. 

This probably reads as a really moany thing; it certainly feels it! I don't want to be whiny about it because I fully understand why the lockdown stuff is happening, but I just find it so hard, and there are certain people I would really rather not be away from whilst all of this is going on. 

I will try and brighten up a little as the month goes on.