Hello. I’ll start by introducing myself. My name is Monya Duhan Relles. Monya rhymes with ‘lasagna’, Duhan rhymes with ‘you can’, and Relles rhymes with ‘jealous’. I like my name. Now. I had to grow into it, like I had to grow into my eyebrows. When I was young I didn’t like either and got a lot of shit for both, and now that I’m older I like both and I think both make me more beautiful. I’ve become my name and in a way, my name has become me. I’ve never met anyone else named Monya and I’ve never met anyone quite like me. There are people similar to me, in the way there are people named Tanya, and Sonya, and Manja, but I’d like to think I’ve maintained my individuality through it all.
I’m also both self confident and vain. I’m pig-headed stubborn and determined. I’m unabashedly sexual, I’m an intersectional feminist. I am (in the words of Neil Gaiman) “gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitris oxide”. To clarify: I like having romantic, sexual, and platonic relationships with people without taking gender into account. I am a farmer, I am culturally Jewish, I sometimes practice Wicca, and I went to a quaker youth group that was very important to me in childhood. I am a farmer; I love to work with my hands and be outside. I am a runner. I love to dance, specifically contra dance. I love to way skirts that twirl when I spin. I can beat most people at arm wrestling but I still lose to most of the farmers in my life. I am a woman, I am young, I mostly shit in an outhouse. I mostly love life and all the people around me. I mostly think life is beautiful. I am interested in language: reading writing talking, and story telling.
So this is me. This is a great many parts of me. I know I am contradictory. For one thing, I change a lot. If you had asked me 10 years ago whether I thought I would be farming full time in 10 years I would have said ‘no way’ and then hit you. If you had asked me six months ago I would have said ‘probably not’ and then hit on you. I also know I am contradictory because I really don’t know who I am yet. I don’t know what kind of music I like or what my favorite color is. I don’t know what job I’ll have in a month. I don’t know if I’m a good person or a bad person and I don’t know what I’d take out of my house if it was on fire although I’d like the answers to those questions are good and the fire, respectively.
So here we are. We made it to the end of my first blog post. Well—I made it. I don’t really know if you’re still with me, magic of the internet and all. Mostly, I hope this blog can be a tool for self discovery and maybe provide some narrative entertainment for any accidental readers along the way. At worst, it is a shout into the void and at best it is a shout into the void and I hope you enjoy it. I’ll talk to you on Sunday.
Monya