Cargo Shorts & Crying
“Woah, when’s the last time you shaved your legs?” my grandpa scoffed, glancing down at the inch of skin visible on my ankles.
“I don’t shave.” My voice caught a little in my throat, but I stood my ground, watching him sip his cola with a smug expression on his lips as he swallowed.
“Hm. Have I ever told you my story about that?”
“No,” I replied, trying to signal with my tone I didn’t want to hear it.
“I was in Paris,” he continued, set on telling this story despite my less than enthusiastic expression. “I saw a woman walking towards me, dressed up like a superstar. Yet, even from far away, I could tell something wasn’t quite right. She got closer, and I realized she had hair as thick as a man’s, and tufts of it were poking out of her stockings. Armpit hair was sprouting out of her shirt! She was wearing a designer outfit and trashing it completely by not shaving!” He laughed as only a man ignorant of his additions to the patriarchy could.
“I don’t see anything wrong with that,” I said back. My hands started shaking with anger, and I shoved them into my pockets to hide it from him.
“I just think there’s somethin’ not right with it,” he shrugged and took a swig of soda as if he hadn’t just insulted his granddaughter.
I glanced down at his legs in the pair of cargo shorts he was wearing.
They were covered in hair.
Furious at the hypocrisy an otherwise intelligent man could display towards someone who can’t fight back without gaining the label of “disrespectful,” I began sketching my newest art piece. My graphite tears fell onto the page and rolled across the surface of my sketchbook.
“Putting yourself to work again?” my mom asked, peering around my door frame and glancing at the colored pencils splayed out around my desk. “You know, it’s alright to feel emotions. You don’t have to make a statement out of it every time you feel upset.”
Her words caught me off guard. The hurt I feel when I’m forced to confront the way society views me as lesser than the heterosexual man is beyond something I can express in words or traditional articulation. I cry a lot about the injustice in the world, just with a different medium. My art was never meant to be a statement, but a coping mechanism.
Where art and feminism intersect, to me, is so much more than just a topic to draw or write about. It has become an outlet for hurt caused by the patriarchy, where my identity as a queer, neurodivergent woman lives in colors, shapes, and figures that travel from my heart to my hands and end up in their final form on paper.
In my experience, crying is a multitude of actions and creations, an adjective that can describe the vast majority of creative endeavors sprouting from pain or sorrow. My crying is art.