An Exercise in Catharsis Following the Berena Split
Looking back now it’s all so obvious. I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole and couldn’t figure out why I felt so different, so ‘wrong’. Why didn’t I see it earlier? It’s so simple really, it’s because when I looked around I couldn’t see myself. I grew up in a rural, small town environment before the birth of the internet when there was zero representation of myself on TV. I didn’t recognise the true version of myself because it didn’t exist in the world around me. Or rather, it did but it wasn’t visible to me. Even after moving to the ‘big smoke’ I had a very slow awakening and looking back I can easily parallel my gradual dawning of realisation with the very gradual increase in w/w representation in TV/media. However, even though that representation clearly piqued my interest, it hasn’t always been positive - doomed, clandestine affairs; infidelity; deaths; passionate but brief affairs before living a straight life (tropes I believe they are called). I bel