Rather than tell you about my transition from 2025 to 2026, I’ll tell you how that transition reflects the greater transition of who I am today, and how I became it. My teen and college years were wrought with “no’s,” “anti’s,” and “against’s.” After an upbringing of embracing being an outcast, my adulthood has surprisingly found many “yea’s,” “for’s,” and “belongings.”
Labels are like Magnets, Not Stickers
A friend of mine once told me that – that she treats labels like magnets instead of stickers.
While there are plenty of things about me that were never a phase, mom, there are also plenty of “sticker” identifiers that I’ve scrubbed hard to get the glue off me. But since realizing that they don’t need to be stickers, I’ve been covered in magnets – ones I’ve adopted, and ones I’ve been given.
Brazilian, American, Latina, Caucasian, immigrant, citizen, foreigner, resident – the ones I moved to the US with. Artist, creative, ambitious, innovative, MacGyver – the ones I grew up being told I was. Depressed, anxious, emo, scene, suicidal, quirky – in middle school. Rebellious, wild, delinquent, combative, provocative, slut – teen years. Hippie, weirdo, stoner, witchy, in college.
Who cares? Not I. I don’t care what labels you give me, and I don’t take very seriously the labels I give myself – not anymore.
Becoming a Gnome – Sticker or Magnet?
Something about magnet-ting myself as a gnome just made sense to me. In part it was the fact that elves, hobbits, wizards, dwarves, goblins, orcs – those all seemed to exist somewhere, already. Modern media has already magnetized them on our fridges.
But gnomes? I feel like I can claim them, a little bit. None of my other larping friends seem to be dressing up as gnomes, creating Gnomecore Pinterest boards, and collecting gnome gnacks. It just felt very “me.”
There’s this fantasy in my mind about having once been a little gnome, invisible to the human eye unless glimpsed in between bush leaves or blades of grass, from small gaps in the root of a tree and you can almost hear the door bell ding as it gets shut behind me.
But I, a particularly curious gnome, finding myself exploring a human witch’s home, stumble into an enlargement potion that pulls me from my gnome village in the woods and thrusts me directly into human society, no longer able to fit inside my wee cottage.
What else is but a gnome girl to do, but to try and use all her tinkering knowledge to delineate this experience?
Articulating my Own Belonging
That experience is, of course, an allusion to my actual uprootment from Brazil to the United States. It feels exactly like my native home is a fantastical paradise full of laughing fairies, while my present home seems to demand exciting technological conquest amongst cyberpunk humanoids.
And what a wonderful life it’s been, indeed. I belong to many homes, am labeled with many magnets, and for that, I am grateful. Grateful to each village’s villagers who place those magnets upon me. Grateful to be given magnets that feel like me, and to be content with who I am anyway when given magnets that feel not-like-me. Grateful to have magnets in abundance. Grateful to the meaning of each magnet, each form of connection to a loved one, having so much pull on who I am, and who we are.
The experience of being part of a community, of being loved, of being a villager, of giving to a village – is, in and of itself, magnetic.
absgeller 
Leave a comment