Colette: Hello and welcome to Called to Queer, what we hold space for the queer Mormon women, gender queer, and intersex experiences. I’m Colette and my pronouns are she/her. I’m here alone today. Kate is not feeling well so, uh, we’re sending them good wishes and good health. But today we’re interviewing Arawn Billings and we’re so excited for this conversation.
But before we jump into that, we wanna start off by seeing what brought us Queer Joy this week. I’ll start off with mine. This week I was pretty sick, and it was really, really rough. Um, You might still be able to hear my voice a little bit. And both me and my girlfriend’s son were sick and my girlfriend was trying so, so hard to not get sick cuz she was wearing a mask around me constantly and we didn’t kiss for like a week and it was so sad, and so was so happy when she deemed me healthy enough to [00:01:00] take off her mask and be like, we can kiss now. And that was my queer joy for the week.
Arawn: . Yay.
Colette: It was really happy. Like the whole time. I’m like, one day we’ll be able to kiss again.
Arawn: I’m glad that day has come.
Colette: Thank you. How about you? What was your queer joy?
Arawn: So it’s a bit of a story, but I think it’s really funny in terms of just how small the circle slash small world, the queer community slash Mormon tangent community can be. So I have a friend who we both used to go to the singles ward here in Provo together. And which I’m here again for various reasons. And after I left we lost touch, but more recently I noticed that she had started following my art Instagram account. And so I messaged her and just talked to her to see how she was going. And she said that she found [00:02:00] my account because her girlfriend had sent me one of my forbidden fruit posts and she was like, oh yeah, I actually know Arawn, I actually have their art at my place already.
And.
Colette: Oh, that’s so cool.
Arawn: Yeah, so we were actually able to get together and just catch up on our lives and it’s just been amazing to see her light up and embrace like who she is. And just seeing her again and seeing all that was brought me a lot of queer joy.
Colette: Oh no, I love that so much. It’s always so interesting to reconnect with people when you both thought you were like cis and straight and all the things. I’ve done that with a few people. I’m like, oh man. How different could our relationship have been if we had known ourselves better back then?
Arawn: yes. Yeah.
Colette: Oh, that’s so cool too. Just the connection of oh, I already know them and here’s their [00:03:00] art. They’re so cool. Oh, I love that. Yay. Social media,
Arawn: Yeah. There are a lot of reasons to hate it, but there are some really beautiful things too,
Colette: There are some benefits. And speaking of social media, that’s how I got to know you initially and then seeing you in person at the Affirmation conference and being like, Hey, like I’d love to get to know you more, talk about your art. How do you feel about the podcast? And I know you were a little hesitant, so I’m so grateful that you’re like, yeah, we can do this. I think it’ll be really a good conversation.
Arawn: Yeah. I really appreciate you making the effort to make me comfortable and welcome.
Colette: Yeah. So from here, how about you share your Queer Mormon story and have the audience and me get to know you a little bit more?
Arawn: All right. So my queer uh, Mormon story is pretty tangled up in my health journey and the process of trying to overcame toxic shame. As I tell my story, I’m just gonna weave in a couple threads and [00:04:00] you’ll just, towards the end, see how that converges together.
I spent my childhood growing up in a fairly conservative town and was pretty much barely familiar with the terms lesbian and gay outside of them being used as insults.
I don’t think I even heard the concept of transgender until I was in college, and even then it was presented in a pretty othering way, so that it didn’t even occur to me that might also be who I was. It was just like this weird thing.
And as well I was deeply steeped in the concepts of like gender essentialism as well as toxic masculinity. And so the fact that I had a lot of what are considered like feminine traits and also wasn’t ever skinny enough to pass as a cis guy, just were evidenced to me that I had to be a girl, right? and in fact the fact that I was convinced that, or like I had this feeling that I wasn’t a girl I thought was the [00:05:00] results of internalized misogyny and worked really hard on trying to make myself fit into that because I was like, I don’t want to be like the product of misogyny.
And so this was kind of as deep as my introspection went around gender or sexual orientation for pretty much my, all of my teens and twenties. I spent high school, college and grad school both deeply depressed and fighting chronic illness. And so I didn’t really have a whole lot of energy for anything outside of that. I was just trying to get by.
And then I kind of had the perfect storm of a work injury, a flare up of my chronic illness, the Covid Pandemic all come together and basically have a forced period of un unemployment for me that I also wasn’t like frantically trying to go to school or anything else.
And , basically was forced to [00:06:00] rest, which can be pretty hard.
Colette: For sure. Thank you capitalism and the patriarchy for that. And I’ve noticed, I don’t know if this is the case for you. I’ve noticed for a lot of people I’ve worked with using busyness as a way to not deal with their lives. It’s like if I could just stay busy, then I don’t have to think about things. And suddenly, I feel like for a lot of people with COVID, it was something like, oh, like I have time to examine my life and my queerness and oh, wow. right?
Arawn: Exactly. Yeah I don’t know if I ever did it on purpose, like being busy to try and run away from things. It was probably definitely on a subconscious level. But also there is this message within the Mormon church of if you feel bad to throw yourself into service,
Colette: Oh, for sure.
Arawn: We’re even just taught that so I definitely was guilty of that, of yeah,[00:07:00] even beating myself up and saying Hey, I still feel bad. I need to be even more busy. Not in those exact words, but
Colette: Oh, for sure. I feel that on a very deep level,
Arawn: So yeah. But, so basically that period of rest I started because of my flare up of my health problems, I started doing some research into trying to understand them a little bit more and see if I could get a handle of them. And I learned that stress could be one of the missing components that I wasn’t really addressing.
So I started doing a lot of reading about stress and trauma and all of that. And I read quite a few books, but some of ’em that people are probably going to be familiar with, or at least a couple of ’em are The Deepest Well, Waking the Tiger, The Body Holds the Score, Codependent No More, Healing the Shame that Binds You, and honestly a lot more,
Colette: man. Deep dive.
Arawn: Yeah it was definitely a deep dive [00:08:00] and using what I learned from those books I started to do some somatic work to try and bridge the gaps in my healing that were still there after doing a lot of years of cognitive behavioral therapy.
And this work that I did plus kind of the groundwork of what I had gone through in previous therapy sessions and just some, a lot of other things, I started to see the messages that I got from my body as its attempt to communicate with me and ask for my help instead of this enemy that I had to fight.
Colette: Ooh,
Arawn: Yeah.
Colette: that’s a big mind shift.
Arawn: it really is. Cuz like, not only, like in Mormonism, we have this concept of the carnal man slash the flesh is an enemy to God. And so there is this like narrative of having to constantly fight your quote unquote dark carnal desires. And then within a wider community, [00:09:00] we are also taught that we are basically constantly warring with our body.
Like in diet culture, in like fitness slash grind culture, it’s about no pain, no gain. and even within kind of chronic illness, often there is this like concept of your body betraying yours, like you through what’s going on. And to like all of these messages. Like it took me a really long time to have that like mental shift.
Colette: Oh, for sure. And I think that’s an, maybe this is just me, but I feel like that’s an ongoing thing. Like even that once you’ve had the awakening, it’s still oh, this is coming up again. gotta deal with it.
Arawn: Yeah. It doesn’t come up very often anymore. Which,
Colette: Good for you.
Arawn: I think one of the things that was helpful for me are, is internal family systems.
Colette: Oh, love that. Yes.
Arawn: Yes. And [00:10:00] so the idea that whatever is coming up, it’s your body trying to communicate in whatever way it can. And so even though it can be really frustrating when these things come up, because of that, the internal family systems that I did a lot of work with during this period, I can, instead of saying oh, this is like something I have to fight and whatever, I can say, okay, like this is just my body communicating in the only way it has, and so I try and just instead pause and listen.
Colette: Love that. Yeah. So you’re doing this work, you’re doing the deep dive into all the books into internal family systems, doing therapy, trying to listen to yourself, trying to heal, and what happens?
Arawn: this connection that I had, like being able to compassionately connect with my body also helped me connect a lot better with my intuition, because that intuition off is it held in that body as well. [00:11:00] And like finally listening to that and giving credence to it, which is also very hard in a culture that often tells us that we shouldn’t be listening to ourselves and instead should be listening to the voices of authority around us.
I’m gonna just keep referring to books, but
Colette: Great. No, I’m here for this. I’m such a reader.
Arawn: okay, excellent. But I love the Women Who Run With Wolves, how she talks about connecting with our intuition. And that’s actually a book I read when I was starting to heal that connection with my internal voice. And when I finally started looking at it as its own authority that had its own worth I also started examining the cognitive dissonance that I had with a lot of Mormon teach teachings and culture.
Because I finally, like when those things were coming up, I finally was able [00:12:00] to actually trust myself enough to okay, say okay, then let’s examine it. And so then I started doing a lot of work around shame
Colette: Oh dear. When you start working with shame, all sorts of fun stuff comes up.
Arawn: It is very true. and so then that allowed me to reexamine my relationship with how I understood queerness, especially from a religious standpoint. Because I didn’t really realize this until afterwards, but I had spent a very long time avoiding examining that because I was really scared of what would come up and what God might say about being queer.
Because like subconsciously I knew that I was queer, but I had been hiding that self, like from my more like conscious side of myself, basically to keep myself safe from this shame and this fear of being like, innately at [00:13:00] my core, wrong and sinful that is often taught about being queer in like Mormon and most Christian spaces.
And it was only like once I had started working through religious shame and seeing basically how much of a straw man it is essentially that I was even felt safe enough to start examining that and bringing my questions to God or this deity that I had a connection with.
And yeah, so like even with all of that backward, it was still scary to decide, okay, I’m going to bring this question and See what actually comes up, and initially I didn’t, , I didn’t even talk to God about it. I actually instead studied it and pondered into my mind, like in Mormonism.
So I
Colette: You did exactly what you were taught to do. Doing what Joseph Smith [00:14:00] did, right? You’re so Mormon. Good job
Arawn: Thank you. Thank you. So I listen to a lot of podcasts by Mormon queer people and articles. I think that, especially where I was at the time, Questions from the Closet was very useful because they approach it in a very Mormon way. And so it’s this kind of a safe place to start. And I found connections with other queer Mormon people, though I didn’t know they were other Mormon, queer Mormon people at the time. I was just like, they were just queer Mormon people.
Colette: They’re just cool people. And then you realize later, oh, and they all happen to be queer. Interesting.
Arawn: There really is that even if you, I didn’t consciously recognize it or was able to verbalize it at the time, but you see queer people and you’re like, they’re so cool. And, and like you don’t really make the connection until later.
Colette: Nope. I feel that. I feel that. They’re so cool. How can I be more like [00:15:00] them? You are them. It’s okay.
Arawn: Exactly. But yeah, so through all of these things, I finally felt safe enough to bring it up with God. And so I prayed about it like a good Mormon does and
Colette: Following that script to the letter
Arawn: Pretty much, yep. And I basically got the message that this queer part of people, like either our gender identity or sexual orientation is an innate part of ourselves and an eternal part of ourselves, and that it is divine and that it’s not going to negatively affect like our glory. In our life afterwards.
And for me it was a really beautiful moment because [00:16:00] I had still been scared, like what answer I might get. And like I just knelt on the floor and was crying for a bit, just let that sink in.
Colette: Yeah.
Arawn: And it also gave me a lot more courage to even start, like exploring more that eventually helped me, put names to like the queer aspects of my identity.
So essentially for me and I feel pretty fortunate for this, but I was able to overcome a lot of the religious shame before I came out to myself, and in fact, didn’t really even come out to myself until I made a safe space for that. And I think a lot of people have to deal with the opposite.
And so even though kind of embracing my queerness is still definitely a journey and is difficult to be living in a very queer phobic society, like a lot of the crippling [00:17:00] shame that people have around queerness, I didn’t have to deal with, at least on a conscious level. And yeah, that kind of leads me to where I am now, which is trying to figure it out.
Colette: It’s an ongoing process. I think sometimes we’re like, oh, you’re queer. You have it all figured out. And it’s like, no, it’s ongoing. Like I’m still learning about my queerness and how that shows up and what that means for me.
So how are you still figuring that out? What does that mean or look like?
Arawn: Like right now, especially living in Provo, something that I’m still trying to figure out is how to feel safe enough to be out.
Colette: Oh yeah.
Arawn: Because in certain ways, since I don’t really pass as cisgender, anytime I exist in public, I’m out. And especially after the shooting in Colorado, it can feel really [00:18:00] unsafe. And where I was before this, was a very live and let live society where like as long as you’re just keeping to their yourself, they just left you alone. whereas living in Provo, which is a lot more up in your business and
Colette: Well, I guess that culture of monitoring each other, that comes from the honor code and just bishop’s interviews and just like it is kind of monitoring each other. It’s not the live and love live necessarily.
Arawn: so it, it’s, it’s been a lot harder just to feel safe about existing as myself. And so this past week I had to go to the bank and the library and a certain other things and say, Hey, this is my dead name and this is the proof I’ve changed it and basically out myself as queer.
which, isn’t great, but also in every instance, even though they they didn’t do a horrible job about it, but I did [00:19:00] feel like a little bit like a circus show, but they didn’t also, they didn’t make me feel like I was evil or bad. so that kind of gives me hope. But overall, the general experience was positive. You could definitely tell I might have been like the first out queer person that they realized that they had interacted with, but
Colette: And that is a different dynamic. Like for me, I am cis, but I’m queer. And for you, I, what terms would you use to describe, do you just say queer? Are there, have you done any more dives into different labels on how you would identify yourself within the queer community?
Arawn: Oh yeah. I mean, I can get really specific. I
Colette: I’m here for it if you wanna share, or you can do the broader labels. I think it’s always an interesting discussion.
Arawn: Okay. As far as my gender goes, I think that the most specific that you can probably get with it is I’m a trans-masculine, non-binary [00:20:00] person who is also gender fluid and generally has fluidity that can be binary male and can be completely agender and can be something not on those spectrums, but it’s not a linear spectrum either. I wanna make that clear, like non-binary. And this is not just in between the binaries of male and female.
Colette: I love that you point that out. I think for people when they are being introduced to the queer community, they do still think in linear terms. Even like if people first heard about the gender bread person, and then it’s like, okay, the gender unicorn’s a little better. But then I found this model of the gender universe. It’s like there’s no line here. It’s just all these possibilities and what do you gravitate towards? And I really like that.
Arawn: That’s cool.
Colette: So thank you for that deep dive. That is, I think, really interesting that I think some people may not even understand or know that agender is an option. They maybe heard of non-binary [00:21:00] and they think, okay, it’s neither male nor female, but sometimes in their head, they might still have this linear picture of, okay, it’s in between. It’s like, Nope, that’s not what non-binary means. That’s not what agender means.
Arawn: Yeah. And part of my journey of figuring out my gender was understanding those terms because I thought nonbinary meant agender which is like absence of gender, in a very loose definition. And I was like, no, I definitely have especially like that trans-masculine aspect of it. I was like, and there are some periods where I do still flux into like demi girl, but it is very rare. And the more I’m out, the less frequently it happens. So I don’t know how much of that is just like um, a product of how I was raised.
Colette: Sure. And I think it’s tricky. in working [00:22:00] with trans individuals. Some people the goal is to pass and for others it’s no, it’s this. This is just me. And so I always think that’s an interesting discussion, especially when you bring in the non-binary or agender piece. It’s like, well, what does it mean to then pass if you’re not subscribing to the gender roles or the gender binary?
Arawn: Definitely. And I think that people who only have a surface understanding of that tend to think that to pass as a non-binary person is to be androgynous and to not have, like people realize which gender at birth you are, quote unquote.
Which, as we discussed already, non-binary isn’t agender. It’s not like the absence of the presentation of either binary genders.
Colette: Thank you so much. I wish Kate was here to give their perspective as well, but I love, because this isn’t my experience, I identify as cisgender. I was assigned female at birth. I [00:23:00] identify as a woman and so I’m, I have privilege in that area and so I appreciate you sharing that this is vulnerable to be able to go to the bank or library and have to fully out yourself.
Cuz I am still passing. People can assume I’m straight. And so there’s safety in that, whereas you may not, when you have to say, okay, here’s my dead name, here’s proof I’ve changed it. Obviously, you know I’m queer. That’s hard. That’s a really hard and vulnerable place to be.
Arawn: Yeah it is. And I know that we’re gonna talk about like how stress affects your health later on as well, but like being in that situation where you’re not sure if you’re safe, really contributes to that overall stress levels that you have and can affect your physical health as well.
Colette: Yeah. Can we talk more about that? That was one thing that really interested me and your story and you saying, Your queer story was very [00:24:00] tied up in the chronic illness and stress. And if listeners remember in Lisa Diamond’s episode, she talked some about how stress can lead to chronic inflammation and chronic illness.
And seeing that in queer individuals because trying to fit into a box that you don’t fit into may lead to that chronic stress, right? When you’re constantly on high alert on if I’m safe, of course that leads to stress. So I’d love to hear some of your experience or thoughts about chronic illness and stress and how that’s played out in your life.
Arawn: Yeah. All right. So this is another time where I’m gonna refer to a book
Colette: I’m here for
Arawn: it,
Colette: I’m gonna link it all in the transcripts if people wanna then go find them themselves and do some healing work.
Arawn: Excellent. And so the book I’m going to refer to kind of lay the groundwork of what I’m gonna talk about is The Deepest Well. And so [00:25:00] those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s from Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. And she was working at a pediatric clinic and noticed that there was this link between which she later termed were adverse childhood events or ACEs, and this increased risk of disease, not a specific disease, just disease in general.
And later on she did a lot of studies and work around this. And one of the studies established that having seven of these ACEs and thus being exposed to high levels of toxic stress in childhood tripled the odds of having ischemic heart disease. So this is it’s very much proven and studied and really I was surprised that I basically had to stumble into this work, like nobody really talks about it.
But and I c couldn’t remember cause like I read this book several years ago, but I couldn’t remember if it’s in this book or [00:26:00] somewhere else that I read that basically when you have toxic levels of stress when you’re in childhood, that in adulthood, even when you are presented with quote unquote, like normal amounts of like stressors, that you actually have a higher stress response to it.
Colette: Oh yeah, that makes total sense for sure. Because your body’s already on high alert and so it doesn’t take as much to be able to send that alert. Like I was listening to an interesting TED talk and this guy gave an example of he grew up in the Australian bush and was really used to like getting little things on his legs that was, grassed or whatever.
But then one time he just hit something off thinking it was grass and then he was in the river almost dead because it was a snake that had bitten him. And so the next time that he felt that on his leg, he’s like, oh my gosh, I’m in so much pain, this snake. And then someone looked and was like, [00:27:00] that was like a piece of grass , right?
Because his body was then on high alert to watch out for any snake attacks. And I think the same thing happens in other ways.
Arawn: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve definitely heard that story before, but I’ve never heard it related to the stress response. That’s really interesting.
And so the ACEs that I’m talking about none of them involve like the systemic racism, queer phobia, bigotry, but it is recognized that being on that end, like the more minority end of a systemic racism or other bigotry is going to result in high levels of toxic stress even as a youth. And then you add any of those other actual ACEs to that and you’re definitely going to increase the risk of having some sort of disease as a minority group. One of the reasons why it is more [00:28:00] likely for minority groups to have these chronic illnesses.
As far as like recognizing this is myself I didn’t know any of this when I was in grad school, but grad school has one of the most clearly delineated examples in my life where when it was coming up to finals and I was extremely stressed out I had basically zero tolerance for physical exercise because I had basically maxed out my body’s tolerance for stressors in general.
Colette: That makes sense.
Arawn: And it was really frustrating because up until then I would use exercise as my source of managing stress, right? So that was incredibly difficult to adjust to., but basically I had just maxed out the inflammation that my body could handle. And I had to do everything I could to manage it the opposite way.
Colette: And when you say the opposite way, are you talking about just going back to the idea of resting
Arawn: basically, [00:29:00] which I think especially if you’ve had trauma in the past and like your own body isn’t safe from trauma, rest can feel just as traumatic as anything else because you’re basically like making space for all of this unprocessed stuff to come up and so not, so it can be really scary.
Colette: Yeah. But as far as so you were taking this time, you weren’t able to exercise anymore because your body was just so on high alert, had all that stress from systemic things, potentially from traumatic experiences. You take the rest and then what? Like it’s not like it magically goes away. chronic illness is chronic illness.
Arawn: Yeah, for sure. So in my experience, like what kind of happens is so I’ll go into this [00:30:00] burnout, which increases the stress in my body, which that inflammation increases my chronic health problems. And so then I get into this ugly feedback loop of like, when I try and pull myself out of that, then I just increase the stress in my body again, and we just keep going.
Colette: Oh no
Arawn: Yeah.
Colette: I think people are gonna relate to this. I know several people of my friends in the queer community that deal with chronic illness, and part of me is like, would you be dealing with this if you weren’t living in this systemic society, if you hadn’t had these traumatic experiences? And it’s really hard to keep living life when you have your body fighting against you.
Arawn: Yeah. And I mean, that’s like the whole… The body’s not really fighting against you. It’s trying to protect you. And the adaptations might not be [00:31:00] specifically to the environment that you’re in, but I don’t think that the body is really the broken system here. It’s our environment. Because we don’t really have any space for chronic illnesses.
We don’t really have any space for actually recovering from these things. It’s all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and just getting back to work and going back to grind culture. And our health system is incredibly ableist.
Colette: Thank you for saying that so plainly. Yes.
Arawn: like there just really isn’t any space for people who have chronic illnesses and need more than like the system is willing to give them, essentially.
Colette: So as you’re learning this about yourself and trying to take the rest and heal and continue to function because it’s not going away in this system that we live in, how do you continue to move [00:32:00] forward and work with your body to move forward?
Arawn: so I’m incredibly fortunate that I have family support that like when I hit a wall, they said come home, stay with us, rest get yourself back together essentially. And I know that not everybody has that privilege. And I know that on this podcast you’ve talked about the importance of community support before, and I think that is incredibly important, especially since as minority groups, we are prone more to disease and more chronic disease.
And it’s important to have a community that’s going to be able to help you, like helped in Mormon terms, take on those burdens. And like there, there are a lot of frustrating things about Mormon culture, but I do appreciate that aspect of it.
But what is nice is that as far as the queer culture [00:33:00] goes, I think that most queer people are incredibly good at that. Like where I’ve gone and had queer communities they’ve really had my back. As far as like making sure that I have the things that I need the resources, connecting to my resources that help me. So I think that the queer community in general is pretty good about basically having that community support.
Colette: Oh, I think that’s really important, and I’m glad that your family’s been so supportive too. That unfortunately isn’t always a given for queer people as we know and have heard from many stories. So I’m glad that they were able to and that you accepted that help. I think that’s a hard thing for a lot of queer people too, is to, when we’re in a culture of independence, it can seem like you’re broken or weak for accepting help, but that’s, I love the community care idea if we can accept it.
Arawn: [00:34:00] Oh yeah. That it definitely is incredibly hard, especially I think as a trans-masculine person who’s deeply steeped in toxic masculinity. And that’s another thing, hard thing that about chronic illness is like there’s this message that men have to be strong, that especially physically strong and independent and all of those things, and unfortunately, that’s still seeped into my subconscious as well. And so working past that has definitely been its own struggle as well. And so I think that you layer that on top of everything else.
And I also think, and you’ll have to actually ask a butch lesbian, but I think that there is even though they’re performing masculinity in a different way, I think that there still is. And sometimes we even within the queer culture itself, like this pressure that, hey, you’re masculine, so like perform it in this certain way, so there is, [00:35:00] there’s also that struggle. But it didn’t just magically come to me where I was like, Hey, I can easily rely on people for help.
I’ve like I’ve been dealing with health problems since I was like 16. And I basically just had that beaten into me from constantly hitting walls that I finally just had to say like, okay, I hit a wall, like trying to man through this and just isn’t going to work. I’m just going to put myself into, digger myself into a deeper hole. How do I know this? Because I’ve tried it too many times to count, like
Colette: We’re in this cycle and something needs to change.
Arawn: Yeah. So that’s. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was doing a lot of work to try and heal the stressors that were contributing to this burnout. And like I’ve done a lot of work to, on the other aspects of my health that [00:36:00] I can address. But as I said, I’ve been sick since I was 16, so I’ve maxed out what the medical care system can do. And so a lot of it is like addressing the inflammation and other things that come with being in pretty much constant trauma slash stress.
So I’ve been doing a lot of work on that as well as I actually changed careers or in the process of changing careers for that specific reason. There were too many things that were contributing to burnout from that. So I’m again, fortunate that I am capable of doing that. But that’s like once I came to the, my realization, that’s what I did.
Colette: I think that’s an important point to highlight. I remember when I first heard about the book Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski and them talking about the idea that, it’s not just about eliminating stressors. Sometimes we’re like, okay, why do we need to focus on, [00:37:00] we think when we’re stressed, okay, the stresses, the stressful event is now gone. I should be okay.
And just the idea of, okay, yeah, you can do things that way to eliminate stressors, but the stress is still in the body, and what do you need to do to maybe change things? So it’s not the stressors, but what do you need to do? And it sounds like you’ve had to do both approaches of, okay. Yeah. Changing careers, doing community care, but then also doing things like the somatic work, like therapy, like different things that way to heal and work and try to work through some of this stuff that’s just stored in there.
Arawn: For sure. Yeah. Do you want me to talk about somatic work?
Colette: yeah, I know you mentioned it and I know we had talked about beforehand. I, as a therapist, am fascinated with it because, I graduated over a decade ago with my MSW and it was so focused on like cognitive behavioral therapy cuz it’s easy to teach people in grad school, like this is how you do CBT and it can be super helpful, [00:38:00] but the longer I’m in the field I’m like, but I need other things to help people. And the somatic work is so fascinating to me. So I’d love to hear about your experience with that.
Arawn: For sure. So I would say that my first introduction to it, though, I don’t think it’s called somatic work in the book, but it might be is the book Waking the Tiger which that plus the book the Body Keeps the Score, I would say are like the two seminal books that I’m familiar with about how trauma is stored in the body.
And I’ve read both, but like for anyone who’s listening, I would say that the body keeps the score can be fairly traumatic readthrough because he talks about his patients experiences a lot, which since it’s about trauma, they
Colette: Can be very triggering.
Arawn: yeah. So if you’re looking for something that’s more like kind of patient friendly as in you as the patient I found Waking the Tiger [00:39:00] much more useful in that
Colette: I haven’t read that one. Thanks for that recommendation.
Arawn: Okay. Yeah. The Waking the Tiger actually has a series of exercises that you go through. And so they start out very beginner. Where it’s like, look at this picture and think about how it makes you feel and how it makes you feel in your body. And it you start with very neutral pictures before getting more into let’s think about this traumatic event and how it comes up in your body.
So I think it was that one was very geared towards people who are seeking help for that somatic processing and. So I did those exercises. I like, honestly, I did a lot of different things, so I
Colette: you’ve done so much work,
Arawn: yes, I have
Colette: work to figure out [00:40:00] yourself work to heal work, and I am just so grateful you’re willing to share all this cuz man, it is work. And that’s one thing I’ve had to learn as a therapist. It’s not a one size fits all. And so I’m always curious like what works for you? Because some people might be like, oh, that sounds cool, or Nope, that didn’t work for me. What else worked? And so anyways, thanks for sharing. Continue.
Arawn: of course, and thank you. And I don’t know how much. if these all fit into the somatic umbrella. But like I did EMDR, I did self hypnosis, I did poetry work, I did yoga, I did grounding methods, I did mindfulness and meditation techniques.
And then I also, I call it kinetic work cause I’m not really sure what exactly to call it. But as I was doing all of these other things, like these emotions and these other things would come up in my body. And for me it wasn’t enough to just feel them or experience them. I often had to physically move through them to allow them to [00:41:00] be processed and passed through, which is something that I think both of the books talk about that I talked about earlier.
But essentially a lot of the time I would just have to get up and shadowbox as I was processing things or get into defensive maneuvers. I did a little bit of TaeKwonDo when I was younger and so
Colette: That’s awesome.
Arawn: it, yeah, so not only was I familiar with these things, but it was just something that I felt like I needed to do.
And sometimes I would start talking too and just whatever like came up, I would just say which, like at the time I was in a space that I could actually do that. But for me I felt like it was a really important aspect of starting to work through anything that was stored in my body.
And so have I completely healed from that? No. But I think that it helped me start to process a lot of things to the point where I feel a lot safer in my body and [00:42:00] experiencing things. I will put the caveat, and I think you can probably expand on it, but unless you already know how to regulate your emotions, like doing something like this without any sort of support system could be pretty dangerous.
Colette: A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. I work with a lot of clients and before we do any of this trauma work, cuz what you’re talking about is trauma work. Um, And that is a little bit deeper. And so it’s making sure, okay, let’s, what coping skills do you have? Let’s build those. Because as you’re doing this work, it can bring up the trauma that you’ve been suppressing, and it can become more present cuz how you’ve dealt is compartmentalizing or suppressing or whatever.
And so I’m glad that it sounds like you had the basis of all these skills and you had supports in place to then do another level of working through this.[00:43:00]
Arawn: For sure. I had done like seven years of cognitive behavioral therapy at this point.
Colette: Yeah. You had a pretty good basis
But I, I love you terming it the kinetic thing. Cause that’s one thing I’ve learned again from the book Burnout. They give a pretty powerful example about in nature when you see like a prey animal being chased by a predator, sometimes it’ll fall down and play dead. And if the predator then leaves before the animal gets up and runs away, you see it shake. And they talk about how that is getting, like sure, the stressor of the predator is gone, but stress again is stored in the body. And so the way the animal gets rid of that is shaking, then it can get off and go away.
And so you pulling in this body work in somatic and kinetic stuff is very healing. It’s hard and so much, and does it solve things? Is are you completely healed? No. But it’s [00:44:00] adding the tools to your coping box and you are in a better place.
And I love you sharing all that. So thank you.
Arawn: For sure
Colette: Um, I’d also love to talk about your art. That’s how I originally connected to you, was finding you on Instagram and I think Kate sharing some of your posts. And we haven’t really touched on that and how that’s played into your life experience and there’s some beautiful art you’ve done in regards to queerness, in regards to religious deconstruction. I’d love to hear about your experience with that and how that fits in.
Arawn: Sure. Like with my bigger pieces, I tend to pick a subject that I’m thinking about and that I’m trying in, in some ways am trying to process. So if you look at my more complex pieces, it’s usually about a subject that I’m pretty passionate about. And like every time I come back to that piece, I’m processing it, I’m thinking about [00:45:00] it.
And so I think that there’s only one really that’s actually about the queer experience which is, I’m really bad at remembering how I. Pictures. But it’s a trans woman with her hands up reaching towards the sky, and there’s a rainbow. No, a white light coming from heaven essentially, and in her hands it turns into a rainbow. And it’s about the process of just like seeing our own divinity and recognizing that the queer experience, the diversity of the queerness is within, like what we see as divine. Even if you, it takes a prism to recognize that all of those rainbow colors are in the light.
Colette: How’d you first just get into art and then be able to, it sounds like it’s been a great healing thing to process, but is that something you’ve always done your whole life? Like how’d you get into doing this art that you now share with the world?
Arawn: , it’s, it’s pretty cliche. I’ve been drawing since I could [00:46:00] hold a pen, essentially. There have been times in my life where I didn’t think art was practical and so I tried getting away from it. I was like, I’m just gonna focus on like the more practical aspects of my life and it, I couldn’t. Like, there’s this part of me that I need to express in art.
And when I finally just came to grips with that, I put a lot more effort into developing my skills. And it’s just kind of a natural progression.
Colette: but art is still very personal. What made you decide to create this art Instagram, sharing these very personal themes with queerness, with divinity, with religious deconstruction and shame. That’s, talk about vulnerability.
Arawn: well, Okay. As far as my religious pieces go, the whole reason I started those was because I was incredibly angry about certain things. [00:47:00] So my piece, the Heavenly Host, Praising God, which is various angels of different ethnicities above a much farther down basically a nativity scene was the result of me sitting actually, so I was in Texas at the time. I had just encountered a lot of very overt racism to some of my coworkers. So I was incredibly just angry and trying to process how to even deal with like what I could do about that essentially. And then I was sitting in the temple and just seeing like how many of the pictures were just these white guys
Colette: Yep. Yep. And of course, white Jesus too. Don’t forget.
Arawn: white Jesus. Yep. And I was specifically looking at the scene from the Bible that specifically at is about the women in it’s like after the resurrection. And instead of focusing on the woman, [00:48:00] it’s focusing on these guys. So I’ve got all of this stuff and I’m just like so pissed about it in the middle of the temple and feeling pretty guilty because the Mormon culture teaches us of being angry is not healthy emotion.
Colette: Which is the dumbest thing. Emotions are emotions. This is your friendly neighborhood therapist reminding you that emotions are not good or bad. Anger is an emotion just like any other emotion. Now, continue.
Arawn: Excellent. Love the plug. So I just got like this nudge. Okay. So do something about it. And so I just took all of these emotions that were stuck inside me and decided, okay, like the things that I’m angry about are because I’m passionate and I want something that isn’t in existence at the moment.
Like, I’m angry that we are in such a hateful society. And so if it were to look like what I actually want it to look [00:49:00] like, what, why, like that I’m angry that it doesn’t look like, what would it be? And so that’s how both of my very overtly religious pieces came about. The Heavenly Host Praising God. And then my second one, which is Jesus and the Woman Accused, which is very much about the love on Jesus’ face for this woman who is accused of adultery instead of focusing often on. Cuz it, it really feels like most of the time when that’s depicted, it’s about how, I don’t know, like how wretched she is, and I wanted to focus on this isn’t about that, it’s about how much Jesus loved her and saw her as a human and saw her as worth like protecting and listening to.
And so that, that piece actually came about after hearing some of the experiences that my friends had with like victim blaming within the church and just [00:50:00] like the issues. So for me it’s often just I have to do something with this anger. And so that’s where it goes.
Colette: I love that. I think that’s so powerful. I know representation, as you’re talking about in art is also very important to you, and you’ve been doing some more recent series or working on pieces portraying like fat bodies and bigger bodies. Can you talk some about that?
Arawn: Sure. And I’m gonna kind of back this up and just talk about representation in general for a bit. Um, especially queer representation.
So something that really hit home for me was I had, I have a trans friend and I drew a picture of her and she sent back like this really emotional reply about how it helped her kind of feel her own gender in her body essentially. I don’t remember the exact terminology she said, [00:51:00] but and she was like, have you ever felt that? And at the time I was like no. Like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And like I was really happy that she had that experience, but I didn’t know what she was talking about.
And then later on I was at a gender support meeting and this short fat trans guy came in and he was like oozing charisma. He had just come up in off of his motorcycle. He had his own motorcycle helmet, motorcycle jacket. He was just, he was cool, and I will probably never embody that amount of coolness, but seeing him really helped me see like, How I could embody my gender in the body that I had and like see myself in the future. Cuz at that point I was still very like I had just barely started testosterone. There weren’t really any physical changes from that [00:52:00] yet. And so just like seeing any sort of future for myself was because I saw some, I saw a guy that like I could actually relate with basically.
And like we, we’ve talked a little bit about shame, but one of the aspects of shame is that it festers when you’re, and you can’t talk about it when it’s like silence. And I think that there are certain things that you can feel really shamed about just for the fact that nobody talks about it, that you don’t see anything that is around it.
And so something completely innocuous and innocent, you can still feel a lot of shame about it just because you don’t see any representation or someone talking about it. And so for me, it was incredibly healing to address some of the shame I still felt about being queer just [00:53:00] by seeing other queer people exist, and especially queer people that I could actually relate to.
Because within the representation that you see in popular media, it’s usually skinny white people, young white people, and as that’s not the majority of queer people. So it can be incredibly difficult to see yourself within those people. And again, to imagine in any sort of future where you could exist as a queer person, especially as you grow old and fat and all of those other things that come with living life, you know.
And so I guess like for me, that representation is not, is like not only about being able to see yourself and like to address that shame that’s often felt just because you don’t see yourself.
But it also helps us kind of see our humanity in [00:54:00] and recognize that, yeah, I deserve to take up space, I deserve to exist as I am. taking away that shame and also that representation to be shown who other people who aren’t in that minority also humanizes us. Because if the only messages that you’re ever getting about someone is from someone who’s like talking from like a bigoted perspective or just like common misconceptions or stereotypes, then you’re not going to actually see people’s humanity and you’re not actually going to understand where they’re coming from or what they need, or like you’re just gonna see them as a number.
And so like I think it’s important for representation in all media. I’m just an artist, so my representation shows up in art.
Colette: Love that. Thank you so much for talking about that.
Can you talk a little bit more about the Forbidden Fruit Series? I [00:55:00] think that is a really cool concept too.
Arawn: for sure. So the Forbidden Fruit Series actually came I was first just drawing like this hand holding a pomegranate and it was a representation of Eve and the forbidden fruit. As well as there are a lot of parallels to Persephone especially like the Retellings in more modern times where she chooses to eat and go down into the underworld.
So for me, that’s where the whole series started was just, it was kind of about me processing especially from a Mormonism take on Eve where she is told not to eat the forbidden or the fruit of knowledge but is essentially given a choice and she chooses to follow her own intuition about what is right and is generally looked down on [00:56:00] in Christian circles for it.
Which there’s a lot of parallels to the queer experience there. And
Colette: sure. For sure. I’m just like, uhhuh, uhhuh
Arawn: and sometimes it’s just, it makes me laugh that like the Mormonism take is that Eve was right and yet it is still so frowned upon to seek your own knowledge about certain things such as being queer. So there’s a certain very painful irony there.
Colette: Yeah. And I just got goosebumps with you saying that so plainly. It’s yep. And I love, I’m looking at your web shop right now, and I love that you have this series that people can buy a print or a postcard and it’s all of the fruit with the different identities and colors representing different members of the queer community.
And then you have just, it says good [00:57:00] fruits. Like that just gives me chills to think about.
Arawn: yeah. I love the layers that go into this because yeah, that’s also referring like the religious take of you know them by their fruits. And really when you look at queer people’s fruits, they’re good.
Colette: Yes. claps, all the things.
Arawn: And then there’s also like the fruity aspect. You know, Like how the term fruity is often referred to queer people. And so there’s a lot of layers and I love how it came together. Like, I don’t know, it, it felt a lot like serendipity because at the time I was just doing that piece and then I was in a place that I couldn’t really be out and I thought to myself like, I really wish I had some sort of way to just embrace my queer identity that wasn’t going to immediately out myself to other people. And [00:58:00] so those things came together. And so that’s what resulted in this various different types of fruit in different pride flags.
And it’s a way to be able to say like, yeah I embrace this knowledge about myself, this forbidden fruit even in places that you might not necessarily be able to be out. And so that’s a certain part that I’m pretty passionate about. And what’s really cool is people who so supported my Kickstarter made it possible for me to donate a lot of stickers to Encircle and so I went back after I donated them and I, I asked about it cuz I, I basically donated him to like the youth at Encircle, and they’re like, people really liked them. Like they, they went really fast and people were really excited about them. And so just knowing that they reached people who like, specifically [00:59:00] needed that sort of thing meant a lot to me.
Colette: I love that, and I may have to go look more at your site and maybe buy some stickers for my next retreat to add in the swag bags. I love them. They’re so great.
Arawn: Aw, thank you. That’s really nice.
Colette: Well, and, And changing topics a little bit. I didn’t even make the connection about Persephone. And when we were talking before about you being on the podcast, you also mentioned how you found your name and I think that’s an interesting connection too. Can you talk a little bit about finding your name, which I is not a familiar one for English speakers, I’m assuming
Arawn: No I’ve definitely got a lot of different amusing and interesting pronunciations of it, that’s for sure.
um, and I have to apologize to any Welsh speakers that I’m probably going to butcher it myself.
So basically when I finally kind of embraced that I was [01:00:00] non-binary and that I was going to change my pronouns, which honestly for me was an act of like working through shame. Because as I said before, shame often festers in silence. And so I got to the point and was in a place where I could safely come out. Just, making sure that’s a point. That I was just like, I am done living with all of this shame around being queer and in I’m going to embrace it. I’m going to come out. But I had a very hard time finding a name that really felt. Like it fit for me.
I spent a very long time looking through names like English names and had this like whole list that I had collected and I was like nothing feels right. And it was really frustrating cause I was like, I don’t even know where else to look. Like I basically looked at everything I can [01:01:00] and I had a non-binary friend online that I finally turned to and I was like, I need help. Like, how the heck can I find a name? Do you have any suggestions? And they’re like, okay, look into your ancestry and start looking into some of the names there.
And yeah, I have a lot of English ancestry but I had already looked there. But I also have Welsh and Scottish and Irish history as well. So I decided to look into that and there was a name generator that I was just like clicking through to see if I could find anything.
And Arawn just like popped up and I saw it and it just immediately clicked. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know the history. I didn’t know how to pronounce it, but I saw it and I was like, it’s that one that one.
And so I started doing some [01:02:00] research into what it was like, cause I’m not gonna just take it without knowing. And Arawn is a Welsh deity of the other world. And the sources that I was looking into, basically say that he has been demonized post-Christian colonization to be the god of hell essentially.
But that’s not the original mythos. And like we talked about before of this kind of reclaiming of the Persephone myth, I think that queer people have this parallel where we have been demonized by Christianity.
And so learning that aspect of Arawn was a it was it meant a lot to me and it really. Helped me connect with this name and this deity, not to mention that [01:03:00] he is also a shape shifter and a magician.
Colette: Really? I didn’t know that part.
Arawn: Yeah. And as a non-binary person, like it just, that was another aspect to the just I really vibed with.
Colette: Oh, for sure. That’s so cool.
Thank you for sharing that. I think, again, I got chills of just the parallels. And yes, of course this is your name. That’s awesome.
Arawn: Thanks.
Colette: So I’m pulling up my questions. think I hit most of them. Were there other things that you wanted to talk about that we didn’t?
Arawn: You did ask me how I let go of religious shame.
Colette: Oh, yes. That’s a good question. And for me, I know that’s ongoing, so I, if you have any insights,
Arawn: I, I can give some insights. As you said, it’s definitely an ongoing process and I am not the authority on this, but
Colette: I love, this is why I love this podcast though, is I love hearing people’s [01:04:00] thoughts and learning from people on what works for them and being like, Ooh, could this work for me? Could this work for other people? I just love, again, that’s also why I’m a therapist. I just love hearing people’s thoughts and life experiences.
So thank you for sharing
Arawn: Definitely. If anything I figured out can help people, I would be ecstatic. . So this is another one where books were part of my process. I guess I’m a
Colette: I’m here for the bibliotherapy. This is great
Arawn: Excellent. So I think especially within our culture now, most people are familiar with Brené Brown’s shame work. And while that was definitely important and maybe laid groundwork that I don’t completely recognize. For me, what helped me really connect a lot of these things was actually John Bradshaw. And his work is a predecessor to hers. He, his work was in the eighties. And his main book is Healing the Shame that [01:05:00] Binds You, at least when it comes to shame. And what Brené Brown refers to as shame, he refers to as toxic shame.
And also he did a PBS series, which last time I checked was on YouTube under the same title where he talks about things. So if you wanna just hear him talking about it, you can also look that up.
But I think one of the things that he talked about that really resonated and made sense, especially with my previous experience was how toxic shame, you’re basically trying to divorce away from a certain part of yourself and you’re isolating it and you’re othering it and it can be very lonely and isolating.
And so a very important part of recovering from that shame is being able to readapt all of your parts into yourself, which I think although isn’t the main focus of internal family systems [01:06:00] can be an aspect of that, at least in my in how I was processing things. And as I talked earlier we can feel shame about the most stupid, innocuous things just because we don’t talk about it. And so not only have I felt shame about like my queer identity, but I’ve felt shame about having depression, about just emotions in general. I’ve done so much work. I can’t even remember all of the things that I’ve had shame about, but just at least in the time period in the space that I grew up, you just didn’t talk about things.
And so for me, a lot of my shame work was finding places that it was safe to talk about what was going on inside of me. And it was a very slow process. It first started out with like my therapist. I had an amazing therapist who worked with me. I went to BYU [01:07:00] Idaho. And he was there for like, All of the four years that I was there. And he was like fundamental and basically there was a pivot of like me actually being able to connect with my emotions and start processing things. Honestly, I don’t even know if I would be alive if I hadn’t had that pivot point in my life just based off of how things were going.
So like he actually helped me start naming these things, realizing that it wasn’t shameful to even talk about these things. And then there was group therapy that I started going into, and then like finally there were parts of myself that were I actually felt safe enough showing to other people that I found people who I could discuss these things with.
And so then I had friends that I could talk to about these things. So as I said, this was a very long process. Like starting college was over 10 years [01:08:00] ago, just to date me as a little bit old. and then hearing people talk about, Things that I was going through as well. So like he talks about the mirroring eyes of others. And so there is that process of them like seeing you and hearing these things about you and not like when they view you, it’s not oh, now I see you as this huge shameful person because you’ve shared these things. So you definitely need to share these things with safe people. You can’t just like randomly pick whoever and like the wrong people are going to just shame you and make things things worse. For sure.
But as I talked about that representation and just seeing like, oh, this person is doing this thing that I thought was really shameful and I mean, you have to have processed a certain amount of it or else you’re just gonna like, wow, I’m shaming that person for doing that, but. Once you’ve kind of processed it [01:09:00] enough, like interacting with people and seeing that is another important aspect of working through shame, I think.
And then as far as religious shame specifically goes I know that deconstruction is very much a buzzword, but like the concept itself was actually incredibly important for me.
Because there are so many things, like especially growing up Mormon, that I’ve been inundated since birth with. And until I took it and examined it, I just took it as fact. This was just like how it goes. And so a lot of the shame, especially. Say around being queer. Like when I started examining it and saying, okay, do I actually agree with these things.
I’m like, okay, no. And like finding all of the pieces that like build up to it don’t even make sense, [01:10:00] but like, unless you actually take it apart and examine it, you’re not going to see that it’s just going to be stuck there in that subconscious. And to break that apart even further, so you see what I mean.
So for example, like the whole thing that queer people are lesser than because they’re not in a heterosexual marriage. And it’s because they can’t reproduce. Which one. Why is that even the end all be all? And two, within the Mormon concept of the spiritual world, are we going to reproduce spirit children in the same way that you reproduce physical children here?
Doesn’t make any sense. And then the concept of this unconditionally loving God and you connect it with any other concept like, is this unconditional loving God going to condemn us for something that is just innately part of [01:11:00] who we are? Like that doesn’t logically that doesn’t make sense either.
And like sometimes you have to even examine your understanding of God and your interaction with beauty because a lot of people that I’ve interacted with, how they see God and how their interactions are extremely tainted by their interactions with either their parental figures or other like religious authorities.
So if you are used to a very conditional love even if logically, you can say, God’s unconditionally loving me, unless you examine what you think unconditional love actually looks like, most likely you are going to be projecting that conditional love that you’ve experienced from other people onto every interaction.
And like even for me, like I was so [01:12:00] scared to talk to deity about being queer because of all of my projections from my experience. With Earthly, things.
Colette: Hundred percent.
That really resonates with me, just you talking about that experience. It makes me flashback to when I was starting to deal with some of my, realizing I was queer. I was talking to a friend at a party. and I’ll never forget this conversation.
She was like, do you really believe that if you live a good life and you take care of others and you’re a good person and you marry a woman, treat her well, that you’ll get to heaven And God will be like, Ooh, so close. You were so close, it was just you picked the wrong gender. And I’m like, yeah, wait, why do I believe that? I don’t want to believe that.
But it was so deeply ingrained. I’m like, yeah, of course I’m gonna get to heaven and God will be like, Ooh, like you almost had it. If you, and she was like, no. Like I believe that if I live a good life, [01:13:00] it doesn’t matter who I marry. If I treat them well and live a good life and I’m a good person, like you God will be like, Hey, good job. Like welcome, right? And I’m like, okay, I want to get there. How do I get there? , right?
Arawn: Yeah. And yeah, like there are so many steps that were subconscious for me, so I can’t, and as you said, everyone’s different. So even I, I was able to lay out all of the steps that I finally got to the point where I could deconstruct that. It’s not going to be like the magic road for everyone. And so unfortunately, sometimes you just gotta map out that journey yourself.
Colette: I appreciate the resources you provided and just some of the insights as to what worked for you and I so appreciate you taking the time. I know being on podcast isn’t everyone’s favorite thing and especially for introverts, so I appreciate you taking the time to prepare for this and share a lot of your story. I know it’ll benefit people.
So thank you.
Arawn: You’re very [01:14:00] welcome and thank you. Thank you for having me.
Colette: Thanks for listening. We appreciate you joining us today. If you’re liking these episodes, we’d love it if you’d rate and review called to Queer on the podcast Player of Your Choice so that other people are more likely to find us. We’d also love it if you’d share a podcast with a friend who could benefit from hearing these stories. If you wanna monetarily support our podcast for the ongoing costs of keeping this going, feel free to go to our site and click on the donate button at the top of the page. If you wanna contact us, you can reach us at hello@calledtoqueer.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram @CalledToQueer.
See you next time.