HETEROBORIA – My Neologism

I am not even going to pretend that I am not weird, or a little of an oddball.

As emotionally exhausting, and alienating as that can be a lot of the time, it also gives me wonderful insights into things and allows me to look at situations from a different perspective.

A random strand of this is that I am a very creative person.

A unusual thing happened when I was on social media recently, and I came across someone’s twitter account. I instantly found myself developing a little online crush on someone (which is not the first time this happened) and so I scrolled through their account.

The more I scrolled the more the journalist in me was unleashed, trying to figure out if this person batted for my team - using their pictures and tweets to decide if there was a homosexual undertone to anything they put out.

I instantly became uninterested in this person when my research showed me they were heterosexual.

In my mind, their opinions on an array of subjects was no longer interesting. It lost that dynamic and complex layer of thinking that I had interpreted as being there.

The person just became another cisgender heterosexual male, who I am sure is intelligent, cool and has something that makes them idiosyncratic, but whatever that was I could no longer see it.

Something that made them stand out in my mind, vanished.

It was in that moment this new word pop into my mind – HETEROBORIA.

The word would come from putting the roots of heterosexual (hetero) and bored (bor) together to come up with this word –heteroboria.

Sometime passed and I still thought about this experience. The more I would come across someone on social media who I thought was interesting, would then become less so once I saw that they were heterosexual.

I was being a little tongue-in-cheek and made a picture of this Theo-ism (a theo-ism because my name is Theo and it is something I made up).

Once I did this, I spammed all my friends with my creativity saying “Look at how genius I am at coming up with this NEW word”. 

My friends indulged me, and appreciated how weird I was being, but while chatting with a fellow gay friend, he pointed out that a few days before he had experienced the same type of feeling.

He was having a chat with someone else and in this conversation he had ended up describing the feeling of heteroboria.

Besides feeling validated, I could only just laugh about it.

While this word is probably not going to redefine the use of the English language, and I will probably not receive any awards for it, I can at least appreciate the fact that my unique perspective on this allows me to come up with such eclectic things.

If nothing else comes from this, I can rest contently knowing that I created a word that entertained the loved ones in my life, and made someone smile.

Yours Sincerely,

The Lion Mutters

PS – While I can admit to not have the best grammar, and my spelling isn’t always flawless, it is trippy seeing the number of times the word heterboria was underlined as I typed this. Lol.

Learning about Whiteness and Colourism

Something interesting I have learned in the past year are the subjects of whiteness and colourism; specifically how these words have helped me expand my vocabulary and articulate my feelings around race.

The subject that has captured my mind the most has been whiteness, because it is the ways in which people of colour (like myself) have been told how some of the things white people do, then becomes the standard of greatness.

Like how I made sure I spoke English in this overly enunciated manner so that when white/coloured people regularly told me, "You speak so well", I felt so proud; even when I was saying nothing of importance. This is interesting because no one usually says that of white people.

Like how I ended up wanting to go to one high school because it was seen as the classier school where the white kids went, instead of a closer school that most of the coloured and black kids went.

Like how I would expect my parents (then eventually a single parent mother) to provide me with the things that some of my white friends had, when what I had was already the luxury that they could provide.

Like how growing up on Ricoffy, turned out to be fake coffee because my lower middle class family could never afford filter coffee, and only in high school did I learn that there was this thing called filter coffee.

Like how the media kept pushing this notion of “white beauty” on me to such a degree that it has subconsciously shaped my first instinctive preferences in guys, and beyond that they way my imagination often visualises fictitious characters.

I would stop reading a book when it repeatedly pointed out how “half-Asian” or “dark skinned” a character was, as those character traits would disrupt this image of a white character in my head.

I have had to become aware of all these things and in some cases needed to unlearn these habits, while in other cases I’ve needed to make peace with how I was socialized throughout life.

Racebent Hermione Granger

Colourism is another part of this, as it is something which relates to racism and classism on those within your own racial class. An example being the snide/derogatory comments made about people from a poorer social group when you have exactly the same skin tone.

The only interaction with this I had was when I would judge people of colour for how they would speak English; never mind the fact that English would be their second or third language. As if their manner of speaking English would be a judgement on their intellect.

I haven’t dealt with colourism as much, but learning about this issue, and becoming aware of whiteness (specifically mine) has been a very enlightening part of this year.

The process of learning about these things have been extremely difficult and uncomfortable for myself but by learning more about this, I had found that it has made me more open to learning about the people around me instead of judging them first.

I know that I am still learning, but I am proud of myself for what I have become aware of thus far.