There are so many people ready, able, and working to make others comfortable with increasing diversity.
We always need more people pushing harder for change. When you can push harder, do it.
Change has never been a product of time passing. It has always been the product of those who pushed as hard as they could, whether they had a choice, means, or not.
I’m still learning how to support my beliefs with practice and strength, so there’s time for you to learn too, if we start now.
I’m tired, I’m not ready, but I exist. When inhumanity comes for my friends, for me, we exist.
A couple weeks ago I got the opportunity to present Olympic College’s 5th Annual Diversity Conference. This was the first presentation I’ve done outside of school, and there was unsurprisingly a lot of procrastination involved. I wanted to take a moment and share some things about my topic, and what I learned during this experience.
I’m on the official schedule. And I have a ribbon!
“Sex education, sex positivity, consent, and bodily autonomy are ever important in this era of media addressing sexual harassment and accountability so prominently.
In this talk we’ll go over basic terms refining sexuality discourses, highlight the importance of sexuality inclusive social justice work, and give participants practical ways to advocate for healthy discussion of sexuality in their daily lives.”
When I wrote this description I had a lot of goals and expectations for myself, a lot of which got much simpler because of my inexperience in preparing for and executing a presentation. By the time conference time came, my main goal was to talk about the connections I was making between the tools used in social justice work and advocacy related to sex and sexuality, and ways to apply these tools more broadly.
On the day itself, I went over a collection of terms and ideas I enjoy thinking about, or that particularly frustrate me as the case was for several, played a video about Jacqueline Boxx (linked below) as an example of where there’s more work to be done, showed off some of the people I’ve found most interesting in my own learning, and mercifully my lovely participants had a wonderful discussion that interestingly took a parental approach focus. Though, there were quite a few interesting tangents and questions that I’ll be considering for my future projects.
Some Cool People Doing Cool ThingsStarting Point
I also got some really nice, and constructive, feedback. I have some ideas for where I want to go next, and what things I need to keep in mind for next time.
I’m incredibly happy that my topic was interesting, and that I got such positive feedback as motivation to keep pursuing it. I know I’m not the only person working on similar topics, and I’m looking forward to discovering new details and timing that make my thinking valuable contributions. I know I’m going to be writing more on the ideas I explored and my slightly haphazard way of learning them, but I make no promises for swift products.
As for the nitty gritty on the presentation side, I need more practice speaking itself. This is given. I need to be better about making time to prepare, and refine. (Basically, the opposite of procrastination.) I also want to include more points to include consent and actively build on the accessibility of my projects.
All in all, I had a wonderful experience, I learned a lot, and met some really awesome people. It great to build on my previous experiences at Olympic College’s Diversity Conference as an attendee, and I’m excited to keep working on more formal, academic-ish, researched work.
Zoe Brook 