The Misfit's Manifesto by Lidia Yuknavitch

Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster/ TED

I first met my brilliant and beautiful friend Melissa Febos on the page when I read her memoir Whip Smart, in which she describes the four years she worked as a dominatrix in a Midtown dungeon. She described that part of her life as a “hell of her own making,” an idea I could relate to, as well as her experiences as a high school dropout and her drug and alcohol use. Let me tell you, her story is one of the most bold and clear expressions of the human condition I have ever clapped eyes on. Later in life when I met her in person, I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that our body stories made a helix of sorts. In some ways I think of her as a sister, certainly of the body and soul, even as our lives are not the same. I feel like our life story evolutions carry pieces of each other. Here is her story about being a misfit artist.

I do think that the experience of being a misfit in the respect that you name—being an outsider up against social norms—was a problem in my own experience that found a solution in art-making. By “problem,” I mean in the sense that Chekhov meant when he said “the task of the writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.” Which is to say, being a misfit and incapable of conforming to social norms was painful, it was incontrovertible, and it forced me to find my truest calling, which has been so profound and that I would not trade for any better kind of fit. I was a strange and secretive child who buried things in the backyard, was aware of my queerness very young, and read books with the same voracity that I later shot heroin. My mother was a bisexual, feminist, Buddhist psychotherapist who raised me vegetarian and corrected the sexism of my children’s books with a Sharpie, and my father was a Puerto Rican sea captain. I say all this to make the point that there was no getting around it: I was different; we were different.

Those differences led me to a lot of dark places, and by “dark” I mean not illuminated by cultural reference and acknowledgment, or curtained by stigma. For instance, my discomfort with the power dynamics I experienced, particularly as a woman, coupled with my interest in chasing down my own sexual curiosity and hunger, led me to answering an ad in the Village Voice when I was twenty-one. There was no mirror in the world of television and school and magazines for the kind of female I was, the kind of feminine. For models of tenderness and catharsis that included violence. So I showed up at this secret place in Midtown Manhattan, and there I created a persona, a character of myself whom I called by a different name—Justine—through whom I could embody and enact these parts of me that seemed misfit in the brighter world outside those rooms.

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