music

From a young age I thought about going to war and what that would be like. My father was quite nationalistic and even asked me once (when I was like 10 or 12 or 13) if I would enlist in a defensive war against the USA, if I was 18. When I said yes he was as proud as I'd ever seen him. I watched band of brothers with him and my brother quite often, also from a young age, I spent a lot of time trying to get inside the minds of the soldiers there, so as to understand if I could perform in that kind of environment, and what it would take to do so.

When I hear, Green Fields of France, John McDermott, it reminds me of the fear I had as a kid watching those movies/shows, wondering if one of those soldiers might be me. Through the tragedy I saw on screen I learned to steel my heart, and this song returns me to what I encased within, the innocence I buried because that's what I thought being a man was. I've been a woman my whole life, but I didn't know then. What I did know was that manhood was something I had to perform. On some level I knew being a man wasn't inherent to me, so I constructed one inside of me.

The first time I heard this song I was riding in my Dad's car, younger than the above, and so hearing the song connects me to that time, and how scary it was when I first started to reckon with the idea of whether I'd go to war in the future.