clicky.

Now Playing: Paradise by Coldplay (the sun must set to rise)

Fun fact: My knees click when I sit down. All the time. Without fail. If I have to move from standing up to ass meeting the floor my knees will crack, and quite loudly, too.

I'm not entirely sure why. I have skinny knees, I guess. I'm not a biologist. They don't hurt. They're just noisy.

The reaction I get to this is hilarious. And hilariously sad. People cringe, throw me dirty looks - TELL ME OFF as if I'm just deliberately making funny noises to piss them off. I get yelled at more for my clicky knees than for saying fuck too much. It is really...truly...absurd.

It's just a split second of a funny noise and then life goes on as normal. It doesn't mean I'm ill or I'm going to kill you or you're going to die of rabies. I have had people yell at me, throw me dirty looks, whisper behind my back...and you'd think this reaction would be to the fact that I'm a feminist or I'm a nerd or I've said words like masturbation and orgasm on more than one occasion on my blog but...it's just me and my knees. And there's no way around it, either - if I stand up or sit on a chair, people say that they 'don't like looking up to me' or 'feel uncomfortable'.Maybe I should just amputate my legs and save everyone the unspeakable horror of my knees clicking in their presence.

I hate how people shudder and say 'urgh, I hate it'. No, you don't hate it. You just have a socially-acceptable opportunity to discriminate against someone for something out of their control - this same theory applies to anything - to being a woman, to being intersex or transgender, to being gay or lesbian or bisexual - we are obsessed with pointing out and discriminating against things that we cannot control. In Korea there is no such thing as objecting to someone smacking their lips when they eat or their knees clicking when they sit. It just doesn't exist. It's like objecting to the existence of elbows or something - which, knowing our society, will probably become a thing eventually. We base our negative attitudes towards things, especially things that cannot be changed and are nothing to be ashamed of, on what society tells us is okay. It's okay to pick on this. It's okay to act disgusted or offended and what is in any other culture not even worth a moment's thought.

I hate how we have to censor so much of ourselves - so much of our humanity - for what? So that some people who mean less than nothing to you won't be offended by someone who means less than nothing to them. When I am in pain I get dirty looks, as if I am just overreacting. When I cry people call me a wimp and tell me to grow up. When my knees click or I have a breakout or if I leak when I'm on my period it's somehow my fault, all my fault.

We have become so...intolerant. Intolerant of others, and intolerant of ourselves. Anything that isn't explicitly promoted as GOOD and BEAUTIFUL is immediately assumed to be BAD and UGLY. If we were meant to be something else we'd be born different. If hairlessness was so vitally important to continuing the species then we'd all be bald from the eyebrows down. If there was actually something wrong with all the little things our bodies do to function, then they wouldn't happen. I am the result of what happens when nature doesn't work out properly. My heart doesn't work properly and requires surgery. It is hard enough living with the knowledge that you are a defect, that you are deformed. The things that affect all of us, the little things that keep us alive and make us human...they are not mistakes.

We grow up in this world where people don't do anything but smile and look pretty - they don't laugh, they don't cry, they don't bleed, they don't speak, they don't fart or breathe and HEAVEN FORBID do they let their knees click.

I am a human being. I am not a catwalk model or a pornstar or a glamorous photoshopped actress splashed across a glossy magazine cover. I am not going to go out of my way to be silent, to be perfect, to become an inoffensive nonevent. I bleed. I have fat and pimples and body hair and scars and stretch marks. I get hurt. I cry. I'm human.