Latest news with #identity
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
My cultural awakening: Buffy gave me the courage to escape my conservative Pakistani upbringing
I was 10, cross-legged on the floor of my parents' living room in Newcastle, bathed in the blue light of a TV. The volume was set to near-silence – my dad, asleep in another room, had schizophrenia and frontal lobe syndrome, and I didn't want to wake him. Then, like some divine interruption to the endless blur of news and repeats, I stumbled across Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show may have been barely audible, but it hit me like a lightning bolt. Before Buffy, life was like a pressure cooker. I secretly yearned for a more alternative lifestyle, but even wearing jeans would have been a big deal in my family. I had an assisted place at a private school as my parents were quite poor. Mum would say: 'If you don't study, we'll have to put you in the other school, and you'll just get beaten up.' It sounds like fear-mongering, but she was right: the students in the local school were known to beat Pakistani people up every Shrove Tuesday. So I dedicated my life to working hard. After Buffy, the foundations of my world imploded. I made a secret Myspace account, and got into metal bands such as Kittie and Murderdolls. I started wearing lipstick and eyeliner, got tattoos and bought a PVC skirt on eBay. For a while I felt like two people: I was the same old Sofia in the week, but on a Saturday I'd step into my new identity and hang out on Goth Green – a patch of grass near a couple of shops selling alternative music and clothes. As a young Punjabi person with conservative Pakistani roots, my future felt predetermined and grim. But Buffy cracked open my understanding of feminism: suddenly it wasn't just some abstract, academic concept; it was cool and empowering. For Buffy, defeating the series' villain, the Master, seemed impossible, but she always kept going. Her resilience became a lifeline, especially during one particularly dark incident. It was my cousin's wedding, and I wore a black sari – an incredibly liberating act for me at the time. A family member came to our house afterwards: he was angry, and, as well as not approving of my clothes, claimed I'd spoken to him disrespectfully. After a heated argument, he beat me up. I remembered how Buffy always got back up, no matter how broken she was. That image of defiance really stuck with me in that moment; it gave me the strength to get back on my feet. Because my dad was ill, we had a lot of people, mostly men, visit our house and try to tell me what to do with my life. They said I should go to Pakistan and have an arranged marriage. Witnessing Buffy's independence made me realise I didn't have to follow a prescribed path. Instead, I took the leap and did an art foundation at Newcastle College, which was where I found a new community. Naturally, Mum found it hard to accept that her daughter was an art student – so much so she told people I was studying geography. I'm glad to say that she came around eventually. At first, she called Buffy 'rubbish' in Punjabi, and said what I was going through was just a phase. Thanks to some encouragement from my cousins, she started to realise the show wasn't too much of a leap from the south Asian dramas on Zee TV that she loved. She even got so at ease with my aesthetic that she bought me silver flame New Rock boots for my birthday from one of the Goth Green shops. Decades later, I now work as a freelance multidisciplinary artist. I'd never have guessed that a TV show would have been the catalyst that propelled me here. The most unexpected twist of all: Buffy made my mum go to Goth Green. You can tell us how a cultural moment has prompted you to make a major life change by filling in the form below or emailing us on Please include as much detail as possible Please note, the maximum file size is 5.7 MB. Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. If you include other people's names please ask them first.
Globe and Mail
21 hours ago
- General
- Globe and Mail
Her turn to play
Maven Maurer stood in front of the bathroom mirror at a friend's home in Jasper, Alta., early one morning this spring, staring intently at her own reflection. She wasn't nervous, not really. She'd stayed up late practising what she was going to say at the event, rewriting and reworking her speech, making sure everything was exactly how she wanted it to be. She'd told her story before, but only in bits and pieces. This would be the first time she'd share it all in public. She had chosen her outfit carefully – a new black blazer with wide-leg pants and a sunny yellow shirt – and she'd applied her makeup with precision, blending her foundation, curling her eyelashes, covering her scars. She thought about Mike. She knew some women in her position would try to forget him. Pretend he'd never existed, even. But Mike was so much a part of her that she didn't want to let him go. She was grateful to him for being so strong and fierce, for keeping her safe, for getting her to this place where she was finally ready to move on without him. 'So many people in the trans community kill off their former self, they erase any sort of history of their former life,' Maven said. She couldn't do that. Her past was too visible to leave behind completely, and she wouldn't want to even if she could. 'I had some of the most amazing experiences. I fathered three magnificent daughters, married an amazing woman, and we built a pretty incredible life,' she said. 'And I didn't want to wish it away or have it be any different.' Instead, Maven's therapist had suggested another way of looking at it that made sense to her: What if her body were a vehicle that Mike had been driving all this time? Now, with gratitude, it was Maven's turn to take the wheel. Sometimes it's described as an egg cracking open. The experience of realization that changes everything. For Maven, it happened when she was 44 years old and living as a man named Mike. It came in the wake of a near-death experience, and after a lifetime of trying unsuccessfully to make herself fit into her own life. It was 2020. Around her, the world itself was changing in ways that were previously unimaginable. Maven's transition felt equally unfathomable. It took her a whole year just to get her mind around it. Mike was an acclaimed professional football player who'd won two Grey Cups. An MMA fighter whose nickname was 'the Wolverine,' because of his ferocity. The very picture of a certain kind of masculinity, body roped thick with muscle, fashioned in the image of Conan the Barbarian, whom her father had once said was everything a man should be. No longer living as Mike could mean losing everything: wife, family, home, friends and all the privileges a man possesses in this world. She would be the first professional football player to come out as trans, and one of only a handful of players to come out as LGBTQ+. As a trans woman, Maven could face marginalization, scrutiny and threat, all for a chance at happiness. And maybe, one day, the contentment that had always eluded her. It was a gamble, but it wasn't a choice. It was a matter of survival. Maven grew up in Saskatoon as Mike Maurer, a scrawny kid who was bullied and always felt different than the other boys. She learned early that the only things that helped were to be strong enough to withstand as much pain as possible, and mean enough to fight back. In high school, she started playing football, where those qualities were admired and celebrated, and after graduation she did a stint with the army, aiming to go overseas on a peacekeeping mission. She came back to football almost by chance after a scrimmage with her unit at Taylor Field, where the Saskatchewan Roughriders played in Regina. She attended the Roughriders training camp in 1996 and joined the team the next year, forging an aggressive playing style that, as one former player described, 'wipes guys out all over the field.' Even before her first game, she got into a fight with another player. She broke her hand but never missed a practice and still suited up for the game. It was the kind of mettle coaches loved, and the story spread. 'It just exemplified, I guess my character,' Maven says. 'You knew that I wasn't going to take any shit.' She says that attitude left her on the outside of locker-room teasing and bonding, but that's how she liked it. 'I kind of excluded myself,' she says. 'That's where I was comfortable. That's where I was my whole life. I was always on the outside looking in.' She played 13 years in the CFL, a fullback and special teams player for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the BC Lions, the Ottawa Renegades and the Edmonton Elks (then the Eskimos). In that time, she won two Grey Cups and gathered both accolades and injuries that come with that many seasons of serious football. As Mike, she fell in love, married and had three daughters. But no amount of success or praise was ever enough. She hated herself for every failure, and felt disconnected from how she appeared in the world. 'It's hard when you're not authentic, and you're always thinking about how you're going to be perceived,' Maven says. 'Does this align with my tough guy image? A lot of it was like, how am I supposed to act?' She thought of suicide, but she didn't want to put her wife and girls through that kind of loss. Instead, she fantasized about dying while saving someone else – the scenario that had drawn her to being a soldier and, later, led her to train to be an EMT and firefighter. Through accidents and acts of recklessness, Maven did come close to dying more than once. At some point, she started to think about why she'd always survived, to wonder what her life was for. 'When I opened that door, it all came flooding out,' Maven says. 'All the memories and all of the hurts.' She remembered playing with the girls when she was a child, laughing with them, sounding like them, and even feeling like them until the boys overheard and turned cruel. 'I wasn't allowed to cry,' Maven says. 'I had to toughen up. I wasn't allowed to grow my hair out.' Then there was the pep-rally drag show in high school, when, as Mike, she'd dressed in a bobbed wig and a long black dress. She remembered how one of the other football players said, 'Holy crap, Maurer, you're hot,' and how it felt so good to face the rest of the school like that, to hear the cheers and applause. Later, she knew it had felt too good, and told herself, 'I can't do that again.' Decades later, she put a photo of Mike into the Gender Swap app. She instantly thought: 'I love her.' Meditation, therapy and journaling brought her to the truth. She was a trans woman. The first person she told was her wife, Hayley. It was more than a year after her revelation that she ventured outside for the first time as a woman. There were three places she felt safe to go in Regina: a pot store, a board-game shop and Safeway, all within a few minutes from her house. People knew her in the city, and they had ideas and expectations of who Mike Maurer the football star was. After she began hormone treatment, Maven and her family decided she should move to Jasper, to start a new life surrounded by the water and trees and mountains, in a place that spoke directly to her soul. Her first day living full-time as a woman was when she started working as a train conductor in January of 2023. 'When you go through the whole hormone change, you almost go through another puberty,' she says. 'You're a trans baby at first, and everything is new.' Maven made friends, spent time in nature and worked at converting an old school bus into an off-grid home. She lived quietly and privately until last summer, when she was invited to Vancouver to celebrate the BC Lions 2000 Grey Cup team being inducted into the BC Place Wall of Fame. About half her old teammates would be in attendance. They would be honoured during a televised game, and Maven tried to imagine how it would go. How would she be announced? What would the other players think? How would fans and the media respond? She booked a plane ticket the day before the event. She was standing in the middle of the field with men all around her. Her hair was long and straight, and she wore a BC Lions bomber jacket over a silky orange shirt, her fingernails painted to match. She lit up when she heard her name, 'Maven Maurer.' Her Grey Cup ring glinted as she waved to the cheering crowd. 'My teammates welcomed me with open arms, and it turned out even better than I could have imagined,' she says. 'Them embracing me as Maven healed parts of me I didn't even know needed healing. Hearing my name being announced, my real name, while out on the field in front of the fans with my team present, was pure euphoria.' Maven Maurer strode into the Legion hall in Hinton, Alta., on a sunny spring morning, and picked up a name tag from the table at the door. She wrote down her name and pronouns – she/her – and adjusted the lanyard against her yellow shirt. She was one of the featured speakers at the Unity Summit, a gathering celebrating stories of inclusion, equity and resilience in the small Alberta community. Maven was still healing from a breast augmentation, but after all she'd been through – all the accidents, years of football – the recovery barely fazed her. It all felt natural and right, like when she started hormones. She felt strong and healthy and good. Her transition had revealed many things. She'd lost people close to her, but so many others had surprised her. Friends and football heroes had chosen to stand at her side. She tried to ignore the negative comments some people posted on social media, brushing off the hatred she saw and felt directed at her and the trans community. 'Do you know how much you have to love yourself to withstand that?' she said. It still surprised Maven that she could love herself so much. 'I want to be that person that uplifts people and spreads the joy and the love, because I was not that before,' she said. 'I was mean and snarling. I was the Wolverine, and it was all a projection ... because I had been bullied and I had been the outsider and I didn't belong.' Maven and her wife had decided to pursue the next chapter of their lives apart. But they remained best friends, and they'd been texting throughout the morning. Hayley had helped her choose the outfit for the speech, and had bought the gold chain Maven was wearing – a pendant that spelled out 'Maven' in script. Their divorce had recently become final, and even though it was raw and deeply painful, it felt like another form of love to let each other go. Maven's wedding band remained, tattooed on her left hand. Maven took a deep breath before walking onto the stage. 'My name is Maven Maurer, but that wasn't always my name,' she told the audience. Pictures played on a screen beside her. She liked to show people the two parts of her life side by side. Mike, rugged and scowling. Maven, smiling and joyful. 'I discovered myself at 44 and began my transition at 46, proving it's never too late to find your true self,' Maven said. 'Every day we get to decide to be the best version of ourselves. We can choose to remake ourselves – rebuild ourselves using the best parts that we want to keep and letting go of what no longer serves us.' The crowd rose to a standing ovation. Later, people flocked around Maven to share stories about trans people in their lives, or to talk about how much courage it takes to be who you are, whoever that is. 'You're really brave to do this,' said one woman, Deb Bird. 'And you're beautiful.' When Maven was asked how she chose her name, she said it was because it means 'one who understands,' and is a variation of Maeve, a powerful figure in Irish mythology. 'Queen Maeve was a warrior queen, and that's how I picture myself in my mind's eye,' Maven said. 'Warrior queen. Here I am.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
I kept my married name when I divorced. My children did not.
When I got divorced, I didn't change my last name to my maiden name. I felt like our common last name connected me to our children. Some of my children decided to change their names to my maiden name. One of the first questions my divorce attorney asked when she began compiling the paperwork for court was, "Do you want to revert to your maiden name?" I said no for only one reason: I wanted to have the same last name as my children. We had been married for 24 years and had five children. We'd chosen names for them that had deep personal meaning and merged my Jewish heritage with their father's Cambodian culture. Our common last name united me with my children in a way our DNA could not. Sharing a last name tells the world you're connected. As the mother of bi-racial children, it wasn't always obvious that I was their mom, yet my identity has always rested in that role as their primary parent. Maybe it's my own judgmental nature that led to the decision not to change my name. I am prone to concoct all kinds of fantastical stories about why a woman may have a different last name from her child. I'm usually wrong. We raised our children in a small town where gossip was rife. As a divorced woman, I'd felt held to a certain level of scrutiny. I didn't want to go to court anymore. It felt safer to hold on to my married name. Not everyone had to know my marriage had fallen apart. My children made a different choice. On a visit home from college, my oldest son told me he'd decided to use Solomon as his last name. Although he did not change it legally — an unwieldy process that is only getting more complicated — he Americanized his Cambodian nickname, dropped his last name, and added my maiden name. When his dad left home, he was 16, but it wasn't until he moved across the country to attend college in California that he took on the new identity. As an aspiring filmmaker, he believed his new name might open more doors for him. My daughter also changed her name when she started college. She created a new first name from an acronym of her initials and swapped Yem for Solomon. I didn't know it until I visited her on campus and was greeted by her roommate with a "nice to meet you, Mrs. Solomon." These two siblings made their name changes independently and without consulting each other. It ended up being more of a coincidence than anything else, but not all my children swapped names. The two boys in the middle are still Yems. One has Solomon as a middle name and probably did not see the need to make any changes. He did pass it down to his son as a middle name, perhaps starting a family tradition. My daughter-in-law kept her maiden name when she married him. She feels very attached to it both personally and professionally, but she has no interest in adding hers to her children's names as a hyphenate or otherwise. My youngest son is the only other one who's married. Before their ceremony, his wife wanted them both to use Solomon as a last name. They considered it but came up against the roadblocks of a legal name change. There are forms to fill out and hefty fees to pay. In California, an announcement must appear as a legal notice in the local newspaper for a month, incurring another sizable fee. Then two to three months down the road, you appear before a judge who makes a final ruling and issues a court order with a new legal name. After that, your Social Security number, driver's license, passport, and other documents must all be updated. It was exhausting for them to contemplate while planning a wedding. They ultimately decided they would hyphenate their last names, each adding the other's as a symbol of their love and commitment. I never stopped to consider why my children made name changes. I felt deeply honored by what I perceived as an act of love and support for me. It didn't occur to me that there might be a deeper meaning behind their decisions. Back then, I was so consumed with my own grief at the dissolution of my marriage, I didn't realize my children might be feeling the same sense of abandonment I was experiencing. As I reflect on their decisions now, I realize they each made profound pronouncements about the impact of the divorce on their lives, along with their fidelity to me. Read the original article on Business Insider
Entrepreneur
a day ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
The Surprising Way That People Fuel Their Own Impostor Syndrome
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You're reading Entrepreneur United Kingdom, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. What is impostor syndrome? Anytime you're doing something you've never done before, or your situation changes dramatically, it's the job of your identity to ask the question "is this safe?" and "should I have it?" If you don't have limiting beliefs about your worthiness, then you may still get a slightly heightened feeling of apprehension at times. But generally speaking, you should be ok as long as you stay grounded, focus on small steps, and acknowledge the wins as you go. For this first type of impostor syndrome, you may also hear your inner critic giving you intrusive thoughts about if you're good enough, or if you're able to sustain it. The key difference is that you can fairly quickly catch and answer these thoughts with some self-awareness and courage, so they won't last very long, and in fact, the faster you get into action-taking mode, the less of an effect they will have. For many people, simply getting started cures their impostor syndrome thoughts, and they are free to do what they need to do. When impostor syndrome won't go away. The second kind of impostor syndrome is fuelled by identity. This is the one that causes the worst cases of impostor syndrome, and why much of the advice doesn't seem to work for you. When it comes to identity-fuelled impostor syndrome, you still decide to do something new and important to you, and it still triggers the same "is this safe?", "is this for me?" internal checks. The only difference now is that this time, the answer that your deeper beliefs and stories send back is: "Absolutely not, are you crazy?! - Who do you think you are for wanting something like this? This is far too nice... Why would you think you could have anything this good?" And it's almost always supported by the iron-clad evidence of: "We've never had it before." But that's true of literally everything you have ever achieved. Anything you currently have in your life right now, there was once a time you didn't have that, so never let that hold you back. That said, if you are fortunate enough to at least make some progress, what people find is the more you learn, the more you realise how much you don't yet know - which only makes the feeling of not having enough to work with so much worse. So when you try to use positive thinking and force to make yourself do the things, you're really just pushing against yourself. This means the harder you force things, and the more pressure you add, the more your identity's resistance will push back. This is what many people describe as feeling stuck. What actually works. OK, so now we know it's not about forcing yourself to do the things, and the old ways aren't working for you anymore because it's your identity that is stopping you from moving forward with confidence. On a deeper level, a part of you doesn't feel good enough, and is using old beliefs and comparisons to support that feeling. When we consider that, we can work on reversing the feeling. 1. Ground yourself in safety and trust Since impostor syndrome is mostly fuelled by insecurities and comparisons to others, the fastest way to get your power back is to reverse your focus back to yourself, and disregard all other people, at least temporarily. This is also where we double down on love and worth. Where you feel into your body and send yourself the purest forms of love, that maybe you never had before, but you can allow yourself to receive it now. To anchor into your body, physically reassure yourself through words and touch, and connect to the sensations that your body is giving you. It's here where you create safety and security within yourself. You may need some support from a professional coach or therapist to help you with this if you have never or rarely felt safe in your body before. Once that's done, you can build up trust by doing small things and acknowledging yourself as you go to remove doubts and build confidence. 2. Directly challenge old beliefs As mentioned earlier, impostor syndrome is made of old beliefs that don't serve you. It's these beliefs that your identity is measuring you against, so once you're in a safe and secure state of being, it's these beliefs that we're going to change. To do that, first follow the "If/Then formula" to discover the specific story that your subconscious is running to keep you stuck in self doubt. What you're looking for is a story that reflects a deeper fear or limiting belief. It may not be rational, in fact, it rarely is rational, but it's whatever comes through and you feel in your body that part of you might believe it. For example, "If I do this [big scary thing], then it will hurt me by [outcome I absolutely don't want], and I don't want that to happen" or "If I allow myself to fully trust [myself or someone else], then it could hurt me by [some betrayal, rejection, failure, etc], and I don't want that to happen" This story will show you the deeper belief and fear, and once you can see the belief, you can start to challenge it and work to replace it with more positive and empowering beliefs. 3. Decide who you are and what you're capable of. Finally, we take the last step. After we have cultivated safety in the body, and you are now the primary provider of safety and love in your life. We have isolated specific beliefs and stories and brought them into higher awareness. Now is the time we make some powerful decisions that can carry us through and into our best life. The word "decision" literally means "to cut away", so that's what I want you to do. I would like you to decide now that you are going to fully believe in yourself, that you don't need to know if it will be successful before you start, because you will decide now to take the leap of faith in yourself and do the thing. I'm not promising that it won't be scary, but that's why you decide again and again, as many times as you need to, that you are good enough, and you can find a way to make your visions come true. Because it's in that certainty, that your greatness will finally be allowed to shine.
NHK
a day ago
- General
- NHK
Japanese town braces for panda departure
For decades, Shirahama in western Japan has been known for its panda breeding program. China is now recalling the animals, leaving the town without a major part of its identity and economy.
