by JigsawAnalogy » Mon Jun 20, 2011 8:47 pm
I think that, for me, I accept being a bottom in the way that I accept any self-knowledge.
There are aspects of my identity that are much easier to see from the outside--for instance, being biracial. I had to come to terms with that on my own, and I had to do work to figure out what it meant for me, but it was really easy to know that there was something there to come to terms with.
There are also aspects of my identity that shape my life on a daily basis. It might have been somewhat easier to accept being a lesbian than being a bottom, because I'm constantly surrounded and supported by people who either are queer in some way, or who understand that it's part of the normal range of human experience. But I still had to spend time understanding who I was, and I had to come to a place where I could accept that I wasn't going to fit into the life that I'd been taught to imagine from the time I was a little kid.
Then there are things like having a physical disability--mine isn't obvious from the outside, and so I sometimes really have a hard time accepting that I have to make accommodations for it, and cutting myself slack for the ways that it changes my life--and the ways that it impacts other people's lives, like W's.
And there are things like my religious identity, which is pretty mixed, and which does have an effect on me, although I'm no longer sure that I could really say what my identity is... but I've learned to accept that it's the path I follow that leads me to the place that is right for me, in spite of it not being any of the paths prescribed by the religion in which I was raised, or in most other formal ways of dealing with spirituality.
Being a bottom falls somewhere in the middle of those things. It's who I am, it's what I need, and it's the thing that leads me to the place I need to go. I feel ambivalent when my needs as a bottom mean that things get harder for W, but I can also look at things intellectually and see that it's not all about me taking things from her.
I suspect that very little of how I came to accept being a bottom would help someone in a position different than mine, though.