#existential fart chart

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

right so i made this post almost a year ago; i have a powerchair now

i've only had it for 2 weeks, so my opinion on this is subject to change, but, as of writing this in mid-september 2023 i perceive it to be one of the best things that's ever happened to me

like on par with adhd meds and testosterone hrt

in that those are the only other two things i can think of that have ever given me this kind of "i could take on the world" feeling. like that post i've expressed my gripes with in the past actually resonates with me now (which i may say more about if i can find words)

so uh. past me was wrong about this being an unrealizable fantasy

have noticed that even though i can walk, indeed enjoy going for short walks (when weather and spoons permit), i actively fantasize about having a wheelchair for getting to and from class and other lots-of-walking/standing-type situations

but like. i have one and i can’t use it. it’s one of those cheap heavy chairs like you’d get at a hospital and a. it’s been beat up/on the verge of broken ever since i got it, so every time i try using it i pray it doesn't break; and b. the last time i tried a practice round in it i self-propelled all of one block and ended up near tears from pain

so for this fantasy to work i would have to get a Good, Expensive one, either motorized or so light that maneuvering it didn't hurt much. which, logically speaking just seems so not worth it since i’d only want it for a few hours three days a week

plus, i remember the awkwardness and inconvenience!! i hated not fitting through doorways/narrow corridors, having to shout for attention because no one ever saw me, how much of a nuisance bus drivers treated me as, the pity and fear in people’s faces/voices whenever they noticed me

and also i don’t! actually know for sure that it would be more comfortable than walking! i feel like it’d be better in the heat since, you know, it would mean i could exist in hot weather without combining this pots trigger with its fellows Standing and Exercise, and also like just Obviously i’d have more energy right?? since getting from place to place wouldn't take so much strength and concentration? but when i used the one i have i also remember being. constantly cold, and thus plagued by raynaud's. and getting ex treme ly sore from having to sit still all the time. like the same “constant silent scream”-level pain i get walking home from the bus

and of course i don’t know if it’d be feasible anyway—if i could afford to get anything that’d satisfy my needs, or, hell, if i could even manage to convince a medical authority to set me up with an appointment to get those needs assessed

and god, even if i did? i shudder imagining being fitted and interviewed about it. i’d be so ashamed, feel like such a fraud that i’d be too shy to engage helpfully with their questions

but like. in the fantasy it's nothing like last time. it fits me--it's not huge and bulky, doesn't require me to plant my legs at a weird angle. things don't get caught on the tricky handle all the time, making the top corner of the backrest collapse behind me. i can use the cupholder without constant fear some careless passerby will knock it down. the cushion under me doesn't slide around and squeak. it's comfortable enough that at a restaurant i'd rather stay in it and move the other chairs away--i'm not so desperate to sit any other way than this one that metal cafeteria chairs look comfortable. i can ride a train without sliding five feet every time it stops. it looks nice, like an extension of me, or a place i've chosen to live

so yeah ok i guess it’s just a fantasy.

still really want it though

[thefilmsimps]

Everything Everywhere All at Once (dir. The Daniels)

-Jere Pilapil- 10/10

Thank you, Spider-Man for normalizing the idea of a “multiverse” to the point where a trailer can just name drop the word and it all makes sense. And thank you The Daniels for creating this wonderful, amazing movie. And thank you Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan for being amazing, versatile actors. This was a ride. I literally came out of this movie thinking, “Do I have a new favorite movie?” And I’ll have to rewatch it to be sure, but it’s up there and I have no regrets.

I think the first thing’s first in saying this movie is stuffed with ideas. Wacky, insane ideas. I can’t remember who I read who said this - I suspect one of Roger Ebert’s reviews - but when a story is about a bunch of random occurrences, it can lose meaning. Everything Everywhere All At Once manages to ground its randomness into real human emotions: existential crises, relationships between oneself and one’s children, between spouses, between strangers. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising: this is the same creative team behind Swiss Army Man, an exceedingly earnest work about a man who meets a corpse full of farts. But where I thought that movie occasionally reached too hard for profundity, Everything Everywhere All At Once balances this out with real, actual human relationships.

With that previous movie, though, it shares a real knack for drawing out amazing performances from great actors. Michelle Yeoh, of course, gets to show off every facet she’s picked up and played throughout her long, amazing career. Ke Huy Quan shows some more subtle but no less amazing shades in his palette. Jamie Lee Curtis is unrecognizable (I had forgotten she’s been all over the promo for this one) in a fun, pivotal role. But the real breakout here is Stephanie Hsu, as Yeoh and Quan’s daughter. Her presence holds its own against its bigger and more experienced stars. All the chemistry is off the charts. Yeoh plays Evelyn, owner of a struggling dry cleaner and wife to Quan’s Waymond. Evelyn is overwhelmed, between an IRS audit of her business, welcoming her father (extremely happy to see James Hong!) for a visit, and trying to manage mixed emotions about her daughter’s queerness and her father’s reaction to it, should he find out. Her marriage with Waymond is strained. It’s a lot, even before a suddenly more assertive Waymond tells her that she might be the Evelyn who can save all possible universes and can download skills from other Evelyns to aid her in fighting a war across universes. Whatever’s going on in that Dr. Strange trailer suddenly seems very small.

I can’t spoil some of the wackier gags here, but there are obvious homages all over, from Pixar to In the Mood for Love (this may have dethroned the latter as my favorite movie, as In the Mood for Love didn’t have martial arts and this one has In the Mood for Love and martial arts). It’s an often hilarious and astoundingly creative work on its own. I can’t wait to see it again, to bask in the wildness and pick out gags that I didn’t notice the first time. Some minor setup seems to be throwaways in the background but wind up being fully realized gags later. It’s at the very least an intricate production.

She’s firmly in the part of her career where she plays a stern but loving mother figure, defined by her relationship to the main character (see Crazy Rich Asians and Shang-Chi), and it’s a disservice to her skills as an actress: here she is playing a mother, again, but with so much more nuance and feeling. And not that she was bad in Crazy Rich Asians, but here she gets the spotlight, and it’s glorious. Maybe over time the shine will come off this new movie for me, I don’t know. But I definitely think the Daniels should be given carte blanche for at least the next few projects. There’s something special in that collaboration; I used the word “audacity” a bunch when writing and thinking about Swiss Army Man. It’s back here in spades in a way that you just don’t see in modern movies. I can’t wait to see what’s next, and I just know there’s no way to ever guess.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

oh 2013 scri

never meet 2017 scri

is it bad that my first reaction upon realizing i’m sick was “oh rad i can make whiny text posts about it”

[tradewaiterreviews]

Drinking at the Movies

By Julia Wertz (The Fart Party, The Infinite Wait). Published by Koyama Press.

Drinking at the Movies is an autobiographical account of Julia Wertz’s move to New York, where she tries to make it in the big city. Right out of the gate she acknowledges that this is a pretty cliché premise, but it’s her life so what’re you gonna do? Drinking is essentially the story of Wertz failing upward in life during her twenties, mainly depicted in one-page gag strips. It’s relatable and funny, but it’s Wertz’s candidness and cynicism that make it altogether more than the sum of its parts.

Anyone lucky enough to live past 19 and step into the existential vacuum of their twenties will probably find something relatable in Drinking at the Movies. Moving away from home into a shitty apartment. Working a shitty job to pay rent for said shitty apartment. Drinking at noon because you can. Feeling lost in a new city. Wertz charts all of these experiences and more, filtered through her own cynical worldview.

In many ways Drinking at the Movies can be a frustrating read. The frustration stems from Wertz’s brutally honest depiction of her many, many bad decisions. The title refers to a recurring habit Wertz has of going to the movies by herself and getting good and drunk. The book starts with Wertz waking up in a laundromat at 3am on her 25th birthday with no recollection of she got there.

But the book isn’t about Wertz’s alcoholism. It’s just something that exists in the background as something she’s constantly struggling with/making jokes about. A running concern through the book is Julia’s brother who goes missing and overdoses while Julia is in New York. She spends a good portion of the book feeling anxious about her inability to prevent her brother’s overdose, while feeding into her own alcohol addiction. The worst part is that she is canny enough to recognize the irony here, which makes it all the more frustrating to watch her struggle.

Wertz depicts herself with wide, cartoony eyes whereas the other characters almost uniformly have beadier, less expressive eyes. This makes cartoon Julia far more emotive than anyone else, which is great for selling a lot of the gags. But it also sets her apart from everyone else; an unintentional bit of symbolism representing the way she isolates herself, be it through staying at home to work on comics or heading off to the cinema to drink alone.

Drinking at the Movies is by no means a downer however. It’s consistently funny and like most autobiographical comics it charts the various ups and downs of life. But for all of Julia Wertz’s wit, it’s the panels conveying her sadness that stick with me the most.

Stray Thoughts:

Six panel pages are used throuoghout the book, with the focus placed strongly on people. Wertz also has a talent for cityscapes and environments as well and her apartment layouts and shopfronts create a fantastic sense of location. She has a book coming out in October 2017 called Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City which looks to be a great showcase for this aspect of her work.

Recommended Reads:

The Fart Party - Wertz’s original webcomic which brought her to the world’s attention. The name is a complete non-sequitur. Sadly there is no actual fart party.

The Infinite Wait - Wertz’s follow up to Drinking at the Movies covers three different stories and includes her battle with systemic lupus and getting sober. There are still jokes though, for real.

The Fart Party’s over - An article penned by Wertz discussing her alcoholism and featuring some unpublished and personal diary comics.

[duaneodavila]

SEC Apparently Investigating How Anyone Thought The Snap IPO Was A Good Idea

Who could ever predict that the SNAP IPO would end up looking like a not-so-slow moving car crash?

Well, other than us…

Since debuting at about $27 a share in early 2017, SNAP shares have dropped off in such a dramatic way that a chart of its total performance looks like the visual representation of a long, wet fart sound effect

Aside from having no fully-realized revenue plan, disappointing growth and living under the existential threat of Facebook, Snap is also hemorrhaging executives and becoming uncool very quickly.

Suffice to say a little too late that SNAP’s entrance into the public markets now looks like a true contender for the IPO Hall of Shame. The whole thing has been a shitshow embarrassment that would have been spectacularly unique in its failure had Blue Apron not taken a real shot at stealing its thunder. With the stock price down by just over 75% in less than two years, and with no hope in sight, it felt like things could not get worse for Snap…but that feeling was wrong:

The U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission have subpoenaed Snap Inc. for information about its March 2017 initial public offering, the social media app maker told Reuters on Tuesday.

That’s right, the SEC is basically investigating why the SNAP IPO was ever a thing that happened.

The previously unreported federal inquiries follow an ongoing shareholder lawsuit in which investors allege that Snap misled the public about how competition from Facebook Inc’s Instagram service had affected the company’s growth. Snap said it believes that the federal regulators “are investigating issues related to the previously disclosed allegations asserted in the class action about our IPO disclosures.” “While we do not have complete visibility into these investigations, our understanding is that the DOJ is likely focused on IPO disclosures relating to competition from Instagram,” the company said.

We don’t have complete visibility into this either, nor any cogent understanding of securities law, but we are pretty sure that we’re watching the actual SEC spending actual time and effort looking into how Snap convinced anyone to buy its stock while Facebook existed. So batshit is the notion that anyone would bet on SNAP right now that the government wants to make sure Snap investors are just dumb and not the victims of a mind trick that made them believe there was no such thing as Facebook.

For real.

We’re not even making this up, and that’s embarrassing.

Exclusive: Snap reveals U.S. subpoenas on IPO disclosures [Reuters]

SEC Apparently Investigating How Anyone Thought The Snap IPO Was A Good Idea republished via Above the Law

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

too lazy to find it rn but there’s this Old Classic post on spoonie tumblr the gist of which is like. everyone wants to know whether you’re too disabled to work, but if you can manage to work only by sacrificing your personal life to recovering from that stress no one gives a shit [ETA: it's this post!]

this doesn’t 100% apply to me? i only go to scrollege part-time; because of that i do get to have a social life on weekends, since i have friday and monday (and wednesday) off from classes too. most saturday evenings i play d&d, and most sunday evenings i video-chat w/ sirka

but i’m still Feeling It (that post, i mean) today. in particular i’m frustrated by the pressure i feel because of my ability to attend in-person classes, walk to and from the bus (and take short walks around my neighborhood on some of the days when i don’t have class), see my friends every weekend, &c. to label my symptoms as Mild and not-seriously-life-impairing

like? i keep telling myself, “well, it’s a lot milder/better managed than in fall 2016.” and—that’s kinda true? the pots is waaaay more under control now because of medication and lifestyle changes, probably also luck, &c. and, i mean. i used a wheelchair for outings like Going to Target back then; i can walk around target now as long as i sit down every time i see an empty bottom shelf. but this isn’t… better?? in some ways i’ve gotten worse at shopping, even laying aside pandemic-related anxiety, because the visual confusion is so overstimulating. and, y’know. i also can’t use that wheelchair anymore, because it hurts even more than walking does.

and also just. when i remember fall semester 2016, i think of forcing myself to walk quickly down the street at 7am for fear of missing the bus. how by the time i got to my seat i’d have no thoughts in my head, only unhappy exclamation points. that’s… exactly how i feel now when i get to the bus i have to rush for after class? i’m just haunted by a different kind of pain now, and also, have less emotional dysfunction over it since i don’t have to get up so damn early

like. i wonder if i’m not actually less impaired, just less unhappy? every tool i’ve ever tried to use to log the nature of my pain, debility &c. and how much these impact my ability to function seems to want me to communicate these things in terms of like. alarming new losses. “how many of your normal activities did you have to give up [yesterday] because of”—one, ok? only one: i skipped brushing my teeth and washing my face last night, because when you’re sufficiently tired even daily habits become foreign and confusing. but that’s because i’ve already learnt how much activity i can sustain, and shaped my life around that!

fucking?

i don’t know how to tell people—or the robots behind apps i’ve tried to use—that when you walk with a cane and wear six different braces and still have eleven joint subluxations in one day, that’s significantly bad?? even if you still made it to and even enjoyed all your classes? where is “i’m in extra pain but functioned as normal because my routine has redundancies.” and, in a more long-term sense, where is “this does not threaten my current lifestyle but has shaped it in its image.”

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

find lately that when people around me react visibly or audibly to pain i sometimes have to swallow down disgust or fury? to choke back a nonsensical (and ego-dystonic) temptation to shout NOBODY CARES!!!, because of the thing where

...well, you know. the thing where when other people accidentally bite their tongues they gasp in horror and their hand flies to their mouth; meanwhile, even when i bite wrong and my jaw dislocates i don't react that way. it's not even that i force down that reaction? a few years back i suspect i might have, though i don't recall for sure. but these days it just doesn't scare, surprise, or bother me enough to summon a defensive reaction

sssso i mean, this disgust response to others' pain makes sense? as an envy thing. like people who get mad about student debt cancellation because they already had to pay theirs off. but it scares me, because i also suspect that sometimes contempt is pity you won’t let in.* i think that i’m too big a coward to look other people’s suffering in the face, so instead i get annoyed that they “overreact” to it. and maybe that doesn't matter in situations like a parent bites their tongue? but over time i've felt a similar contempt beginning to color my perceptions of other complaints they make. like how they slept badly last night, or they had to cut short their walk because their ankle's acting wonky. any complaint where the phenomenon they describe is familiar to me but their level of distress about it seems alien or """excessive.""" i find i can't look at them when they talk about things like this

and? i know where i learnt this habit? it's how i react to my own inconvenient emotions, especially my fear. not just the contempt part: the incomprehension, too. "wait, why are we so upset about this? this is fear--i can tell this is fear! what are we so scared of? it's not like we'll die."

and, well, i know i've said this before, but. pain itself doesn't make you react outwardly; fearing it makes you do that.** the other day i accidentally hit my elbow on a tray--and my mother yelped, because the unexpected sound startled her. but? i didn't expect it any more than she did, so? why didn't i yelp. other people's nervous systems don't tell them "ouch plus big noise, but don't worry; you'll be fine in a minute"--they just say "THREAT." which makes me suspect you can't rationalize your way into a changed reaction like this? i.e., that i don't react to sudden pain with fear because i've learnt "pain is normal." not told myself that, or adopted it as a conviction; i mean, like, physically learnt it. managed to teach even lizard brain that pain, while unpleasant in itself, doesn't lead to further bad things. and that if i relax it'll pass more quickly.

and and and. i like that i can hit my elbow on a tray and not even blink! not least because pain without fear hurts less. so how do i keep it without (scare quotes, biiiiiig scoff) Losing My Humanity like this

*or compassion, or empathy, or. insert less-negatively-loaded word for sorry-feeling here.

**other emotional reactions can do this too, to be clear! when my cat scratches me, i push him away and snarl not because it hurts but because the distraction posed by unwonted pain annoys me. think also of movies where an angry character kicks a rock to let off steam, and then howls because the stubbed toe makes them angrier.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

o 2013 self you unsunned babe, you unborn snow

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

wait, so, if when you start talking and it's difficult and sounds weird and fake, like the product you listen to coming out of your mouth doesn't match somehow with the sensation of speaking, or you can't figure out how the words you're saying emerged from your vague decision to speak--if that's dissociation, then what is that thing where like. you're talking, and it's normal and fine, and then you suddenly remember that it's you talking, your body producing the sounds your mind producing the ideas, and it's weird and too much and you panic for a second (and probably lose your train of thought), but if you lean into it the sensation passes and everything's fine again? is that also dissociation? and if so then why does it feel like greater awareness of yourself than usual

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

thinking about this post. don't want to reblog it, since my thoughts on it are so undecided, but, do want to hash those thoughts out here lmao

the thing is, i was exposed to that narrative? like don’t get me wrong—i had non-zero fear that mobility aids would make me feel like tiny tim. but. four and a half years ago when i bought the wheelchair i now find too insufferably clunky to use, i did that based on the fantasy not just that it would make things easier for me but that that ease would make me happier, more confident, make me like myself more. and… yeah, no, it did not do that. it just made things differently hard, and made me feel like a different awkward combination of invisible with hypervisible nuisance.

even w/ my cane(s), which i use every time i leave the house* and often indoors too—half the time? yeah, sure. i feel like a wizard with a staff, or a dandy at a horse race. but the other half the time, it makes me feel like a booger on a bus seat. like something amorphous and gray that everyone wishes they couldn’t see

not sure where i’m goin with this; i certainly don’t wish to echo the sentiment that mobility aids are Sad and will make you sad. but. i didn’t “discover my inner badass.” it made me respect myself neither more nor less? and idk how much i like having been promised that fantasy of confidence

*except when i opt for the rollator instead, which. is also its own entire pros and cons list. the thing’s not comfortable to walk with; i just like being able to sit. but it beats the wheelchair, which is old and heavy and breaks a lot, and which i can barely self-propel with at all anymore because my shoulders don’t really, uh. stay in their sockets, at that angle? last time i tried using it i made it one block, then came home near tears from frustration. n.b., tho, that if 2016 me saw this sentiment they’d be like, “…so? the only reason you don’t angry-cry after walking that far is you’re more used to that discomfort.” like, sure, my shoulder joints were more functional then, but, hhhhholy cow, pots. never had a pots flare as bad as the one that fall/early winter. and i doubt i’d dismiss the wheelchair so easily if my ability to walk hadn’t improved since then

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

uuugggghh for days on end i’ve felt well enough to be restless and bored but not well enough to sustain any kind of activity or focus

i’ll get invested in something for a few minutes, maybe an hour, and then get so overwhelmed i need to lie still and flat for a while. but when i try to nap my eyelids pop back open within seconds, either with some new idea or from the horrible empty crawling sensation of MUST HAVE STIMULUS! WANT DO SOMETHING NOW

it’s That Thing you get when you start to feel better after days of acute illness, except, on repeat? with no guarantee of improvement to motivate me to stay still. someone come be the cottard to my mme verdurin

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

do you ever think about “learned helplessness” rhetoric as a sort of counterweight to “picking battles”? i was thinking about this one youtuber who did a video about her own learned helplessness, and how uncomfortable it made me because of the disparity between the examples the video from which she learned about it gave and those she herself gave in her own video. the original video gave examples like, concluding falsely from not winning an award for your performance that no one likes you as a performer and you should give up music/comedy/whatever it was altogether; she gave examples like, wondering if it was worth it to pursue another surgery when the previous, like, 10 had had unsatisfying results. and i had this moment of like—lmao this is so uncharitable, but in that moment i was like “oh. yeah. this is never gonna work out for her." in a way that felt very character is fate, though in this case “character” isn’t a fair word to use since her problem was clearly bodily rather than rooted in habits of mind.

so then i was trying to think of examples where this insight—viz., that “helplessness” isn’t always the wrong thing to learn—applies to my own situation. the example that came to mind: imagine if i still kept trying to go outside in hot weather, in hopes that maybe this time i could tolerate it without getting a pots flare and sensory overload. so then i thought, but what about continuing to try to improve my ability to go outside in the heat? for example, it may be possible to raise the temperature threshold past which i feel sick, e.g. by turning up the air conditioner by one degree a month. is it “learned helplessness” that i don’t do this? i think the answer is yes, but i don’t feel much motivated to change this or to reproach myself for it. because going outside in hot weather is not a battle i can win. imagine it: june, 73; july, 74; august, 75; september, 76; october, 77; november, 69?! Oh Right, that’s when the heat comes on. so then by next may i’d be back at 73. (and n.b. even 77 wouldn’t help much. today the high is 91, and that's pretty average this half of the year.)

i’m trying to think of a situation where i’ve learned helplessness inappropriately?? and the only one that comes to mind is 2017’s disbelief in friendship. after i got back in touch with sirka, my renewed belief in the possibility of connecting w/ other humans led to my having more fulfilling conversations w/ my other friends as well, because i didn’t close myself off as much. but even then, the solution wasn’t just keep trying—it was try something else. picking a different but related battle that i could win. i couldnt have brought the wall down by knocking my head against it

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

though... i’m also just embarrassed by how little practical difference the improvement has made? i think because it was easier to believe myself when i said “i can’t work��� when that meant “i can’t stand still for more than five minutes, can’t walk more than a few blocks, can’t sit up for more than half a day more than twice or thrice a week, can’t perform any unfamiliar task without taking days to recover, and feel absolutely horrible every hour of every day.” than it is now, when i can take half-hour-long (and sometimes longer) walks as long as i go slow and take breaks to sit and the weather’s good, feel horrible only for pockets of most days, and can perform the rest of the above tasks sometimes but just can’t rely on myself to keep up that level of activity. like: now, qua sensation “i can’t work” mostly means “i have no job skills”; i know intellectually that chronic illness keeps me that way, but “too sick to work” no longer feels accurate, in that i now fantasize about getting a job rather than recoiling from the very idea. and i despise myself for this so much that admitting continued ill health at all feels like i Must be exaggerating for sympathy or out of fear of judgment

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

do you ever find you lack the spoons to resist things you dislike—but also that this miraculously gives you the ability to put up with them?? you would think low energy to resist would equal low energy to withstand, and sometimes it does, but

normally when my dad brings out the vacuum cleaner i cover my ears and scamper off, only-mostly-sarcastically wailing “oh noooooo” as i go. yesterday though i hurt myself in a way that i don’t understand yet but that makes many upper-body movements ridiculously fucking painful, and therefore costs a ton of spoons. enough, in fact, to cause the altered state of consciousness that puts enough buffer between me and the world that i dislike things less than usual. so today when dad started vacuuming i was like you know what, i’ll deal. i don’t care enough to escape.

but i know from prior experiences like this that next time it comes out i’ll hate the vacuum as much as ever, and feel exactly the usual desire to escape from it! so is this... a survival thing? is it adaptive? or is it a small-scale/acute version of the thing that happens when you’re depressed where you interpret “bad” as “normal” and don’t recognize red flags? does this altered state still know how to differentiate between dislikes and actual dangers, or is it the mastermind behind cunning schemes like the time i accidentally set three dishtowels on fire?

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

sometimes i wonder if people who talk about how they’ve grown up without just-world hypothesis (”everything happens for a reason” &c.), aren’t too broken up about its absence, have a hard time imagining how the loss of it could have been so earth-shattering to previous generations--sometimes i wonder if they’re just wrong

disclaimer, no i do not seriously believe this, yes i know that Everyone Is Different, i’m just griping about my own experience. with that said,

my mom’s agnostic and my dad’s an atheist. i never consciously believed “everything happens for a reason,” and as a kid i scoffed at people who said stuff like that. god sounded fake, soulmates sounded fake, hell the whole idea of having a “purpose in life” sounded fake. if i’d heard the term “optimistic nihilism” at the time i would likely have said it described my worldview perfectly

and then i got permasick, while still recovering from past trauma--and also trump got elected, but that was just the last coffin-nail--and i discovered i hadn’t had the slightest whiff up to that point of what “life’s not fair” and “not everything happens for a reason” and “the universe is chaotic neutral and doesn’t give two shits about the fate of humanity” mean, and was now being forced to eat it raw. and it was unbelievably bitter and i don’t think i’ll ever get it all down. in 2017 i rarely thought about anything but “nothing means anything”

here’s an easy example to illustrate this change in mentality: in 2014 i read Nausea for the first time, because the idea of depression as a kind of existential emetophobia intrigued me. i loved the (translated) prose, but found the thesis bathetic--so obvious that it felt trite and rushed.* and then between 2016 and 2018 i reread it so many times i had chunks of it practically memorized, because its main character also can’t stop thinking about how nothing means anything, and i desperately needed the intellectual company of other people who found this upsetting

so when people much older and better-informed than i am talk about living self-consciously meaningless lives like it’s no big deal i’m like... are you somehow so much smarter than me that your ability to assimilate concepts i can hardly fit my mouth around extends out of the intellectual realm and into the emotional one? or have you been sprinkling existential green-can parmesan on your food this whole time while i choke down gorgonzola? because now when people say “optimistic nihilism!” like that solves everything i kind of want to throw all the messiest and worst-smelling cheese i can find at their heads

*which is a totally fair criticism, and remains my estimate. as an advertisement for sartre’s worldview i don’t find this book satisfying at all. but it’s precious to me, so please never insult it where i can hear you, lmao

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

i think the main reason i so dislike this assuefaction business, even though i know i need it and in some ways am grateful for it, boils down to 1. the tendency to think of illness without suffering as a sin (as tumblr user exigencelost put it) combined with 2. general angst about my loss of the just-world fallacy.

i’ve talked about that before, this is anything sacred problem. i guess i’m uncomfortable with the idea that “are you ok?” has no straight answer—specifically with the idea that my answer qua sensation can be “yes” when my interlocutor’s answer, were they in my position, would be “no.” this idea of breaking the rules, flying under the radar, of being the subject of a double standard, without being able to proclaim in good faith that it isn’t fair, because “yes” actually is the truth.

a lot of chronically ill people seem to try to get around this by saying it shouldn’t be their responsibility to pretend they’re ok for the sake of healthy people’s comfort.* and it’s not that i don’t often a. do that (pretend, i mean) or b. resent having to do it (or at least, feeling socially pressured to, or like it’s the line of least resistance). but people say this like pretending is all they do, and, like i’ve been saying, i seriously doubt that. even when it starts out that way?** “faking till you make it” works. no, you don’t stop having symptoms, nor do they stop curtailing your life, nor even do you stop disliking them, but. this post? not a lie. the ratio of meh i’m used to its to capslock screaming is about 6:1. “no reaction” becomes your default reaction. you do eventually “make it.”

and i think that’s what fucks me up. part of me wants to unmake it, for the sake of self-respect, because i dislike this idea of living at a distance from myself? of letting people/my health/idk, the universe in general Walk All Over Me. but here’s the thing: “getting in touch with your feelings” means being more open to them. and openness to them takes away the horror i feel like i deserve. openness to experience breaks the feedback loop between pain (or dizziness, or nausea, or whatever) and fear.

*and i endorse that judgment, and try hard to practice it in my own life!

*which in my case it certainly did not. it started with a lot of self-deluding “this is fine,” in light of which Acting Fine was a perfectly natural solution that, For Some Reason /s, didn’t always work. and i think this is typical.