Ep 12: Sex & "Coming out" as Mentally Ill, Being Okay With Your Gender When No One Else Is with Shiggy Shezaire

Shiggy Shezaire is a 28-year-old, queer, pansexual, black Caribbean person using she/they/he pronouns, depending on the circumstance and person.

CW: This episode talks about suicide ideation and the death of a family member.

This is Shiggy’s writing of her bio: I grew up always having a weird relationship with my gender. Sexual orientation was always a lot easier for me to pinpoint and identify. As I got older, it was very easy for me to say that I was bi, then pan, then queer in my orientation because it remained a constant that I was attracted to anyone that caught my attention. But it was more difficult to explain the detachment/ ambivalence I felt towards my own gender. As it currently stands, I have no real opinion on my own gender. Right now, most people will assume I'm a cis-female; sure, if you say so. A few years ago, I would have been perceived as a transmale; also true, also not quite right. Internally I feel that my gender is just existing to be performed in any iteration that I feel is appropriate.

It was hard to explain as a kid (especially in a binarist understanding) that, while I didn't outright reject being a girl, being a girl was not all right for me. Yet I felt that being a boy was not mine to claim either. I remember as a kid trying to use my sexuality to explain my gender, saying specifically, "there's a girl in me that's straight cuz she likes boys, but there's also a boy in me that likes boys and sometimes girls". There's a lot to unpack there, but the short story is at that time I was trying really hard to push away from being perceived as a *girl* and it was easier to describe myself as some odd 3/4 bi-boy, 1/4 straight girl because in my mind a *gay girl* was too much *girl*. The funny thing is that I was always comfortable with myself. When I didn't have to explain or describe myself, I was happiest. Even in queer settings where I feel the most understood and at home, there's still a pressure to categorize and identify that never sat right with me.

Identifying as trans, then as genderfluid, still gave me a definition that was too solid, too codifying. That's why I settle on queer in all its vagueness. Now, in 2012, I was baker-acted (involuntarily hospitalized) because I had a meltdown in front of the wrong people. My mom believed, rightly, that I was overwhelmed by school. And she believed, wrongly, that I was overwhelmed by having a trans girlfriend who "convinced" me that I was trans too. The truth of the matter is that I was just overwhelmed. Looking back on my entire life, I can see that I live as a pressure cooker: slowly boiling but compressing everything until I can't. When I do finally explode, it may be due to a single or few contributing triggers, but in reality, I'm just a really anxious person who's really good at bottling up all my day to day anxieties until I'm not. I'm still in the process of learning how to manage and process the parts of my brain that don't cooperate. But being hospitalized opened my eyes to the immense pressure that I put myself under, my general nervousness, and the comfortable traps of depressive thoughts. I've been diagnosed with OCD, panic disorders, GAD, major depression, etc. And in all honesty, for me, it's been harder to "come out" as mentally ill than as queer.

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If you would like to get in touch with Shiggy, you can contact Shiggy on:
Instagram: @gettingshiggywithit

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Website: https://www.meagannarvaez.com/

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