“Nothing is instantaneous. Everything takes some time, and it's important to be patient with yourself.”
David discusses what it takes to find and build confidence within yourself.
Chapter 3 |5 min read | October 5, 2021
Nothing is instantaneous. Everything takes some time, and it's important to be patient with yourself. It's the old parable of you know, put the oxygen mask on yourself first before you do it on anyone else. You can write a lot, you can do a lot you can investigate a lot without necessarily sharing it with other people. As a form of sort of like you to them kind of expression. It's always worthwhile, I think, experimenting within yourself, asking those questions within yourself sort of creating a self-discourse in order to explore stuff. The other thing is that, particularly in larger centers, there are queer spaces, either queer theatre spaces, queer production spaces, queer art spaces, queer literary spaces, where you can explore these materials, these subject matters. In relative safety, you still have to be careful, you still have to use gut instinct in order to figure out who you're going to share what with when, and how, but, but at least you can know that you're going to be starting out doing so with people who share some of your experience and some of your perspective.
So it's possible that if you're living in a small town, you can actually zoom in with a group of people who either live in other towns or even in the big city, whatever that might be. So that's something that's always worth exploring. The other thing really is to, I mean, as with anything else, building your confidence, as a queer creator means building your confidence as a creator first. And you don't necessarily need to unless you feel that this is core, and some people do, you don't necessarily need to invest early work with queerness, as much as you need to learn the craft, you need to, you need to get feedback, you need to learn to interact with other people learn to edit your own work, learn to look critically at other people read the past, read the future, create a context for yourself. And, and most often, while you're doing that, something that we would call a voice starts to come forward, and you will recognize it, as it emerges, you recognize it through things like being you even as you're writing.
You can see oh, something is really, really working here. There's a flow, there's a direction, there's a force, there's a strength that I have not seen previously in my work, and that and that is basically your inner creative voice, asserting itself. You'll be able to make room for that it will become invested with your queerness, your transness because that stuff is deeply connected to who you are as a person. But really, you know, focus on the writing focus on the creating, if you're a painter focus on the painting and trust an experiment and trust that the voice will emerge.
“There was always the fear that you were going to be the victim of violence, there was always the fear that you would be shunned.”
David D
I have often made the mistake of taking pride in my output, which is something that creative people I think, suffer mightily from this belief that whoever you are, and whatever you're doing takes sort of second place to whatever you're creating have created and have gotten recognition for.
I am tremendously proud of the work that I've done. I am particularly proud of these last two books. They're a summary statement of my career and not that I want to drop dead now, but if I were to drop dead now, I would feel like I have gone out the best way anyone could possibly go out.
I am proudest of myself. And the fact that I have lived that I have gotten to the age that I've gotten to, I did not expect particularly as a young queer person prior to HIV AIDS, I did not expect that I would see my 25th birthday.
When I was growing up in Winnipeg, there were certainly queer people who managed to reach an advanced age, but it was not common. You were always in fear of the possibility that you were going to die young for a variety of reasons. There was always the fear that you were going to be the victim of violence, there was always the fear that you would be shunned like, these were things that were just really common, and it's, and in some parts of North America, and in some parts of the world, that those are still common feelings.
So I didn't think I would live to be 25, when I was 26, I didn't think I would live to be 30. In the world of HIV AIDS, I did not know why I was alive when other friends of mine were not. I had like there was no way to know. And of course, part of that transforms itself into a kind of survivor guilt, of course, but there was just this feeling of, you know, how have, what am I doing? How has this gotten me to where I am, and what's going to happen to me, it really does feel with every passing day, like it is a miracle to be here. And, and that it's important to, to really own that, to really own the fact that as queer people survival is an achievement, survival, and the ability to be able to connect with other people to overcome innate loneliness that I think is eroding our communities to be able to share our stories, these things, I think, are massive achievements for us. I don't need a trophy you know, I don't need a best seller. It is enough to have gotten here.
See More from David
Chapter 1: Finding Your Voice
For us, these are like, major milestones. And they shouldn't be. But it makes a huge difference.
Chapter 2: Queer Storytelling
I think if you're going to come into my world, then you can do a rudimentary amount of research. You can Google something you couldn't do in 1984. You can find out what are poppers. What is Grindr? What is polyamory, you know, you can find that shit out.