I Am Grey

In Terry Pratchett's universe, a witch is someone who stands on the outside, who walks the edges between, without ever being part of either side. I feel like that sometimes. Most of the time. I am always on the outside, looking in, standing between the light and the shadow...the candle and the star. I watch and observe, but rarely participate.

I stand on the brink in each and every moment. The brink between future and past, action and inaction, despair and elation. I watch and wait, and rarely act. I am the leeway, the knife's edge, the one-in-between. There is no place where I fit. There never has been.

I am a Taoist in a society dominated by Christian ideals. I am a female in the fields of math and science, still dominated by males. I am an only child, and an only grandchild. I am a freethinker in a society dominated by obedience to the norm, and now becoming more fascist than ever before. I will not be coerced. I will not back down. This is who I am.

In taiji, we practice moving between extremes, between weighted and unweighted, between yin and yang. We avoid staying at the place-between, at the place where weight and power are evenly distributed. Taiji class is one of the few places where I have ever felt like I belonged, like I wasn't an outsider looking in. There, the form stands in the place-between, between thought and no-thought, between stillness and motion, and unites the disparate sides even as it separates them. There I am at home, at peace, at one. Everywhere else, I am the observer, the cataloguer, the one standing on the outside, between the shadow and the light.