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cheryl clarke, sexual preference, 1989

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cheryl clarke, living as a lesbian rambling, 1989

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robert f. reid-pharr, from living as a lesbian, from Sister & Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together, 1994

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robert f. reid-pharr, from living as a lesbian, from Sister & Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together, 1994

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clive’s columbines took off like a shot in the middle of the night

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the turks!

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sinking into the ff7 hole

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FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH • Early 2024

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took FOUR bus rides across town today walked SEVERAL miles got a deep tissue massage from a mom whose two year old had the same kind of cancer I did who is now four and doing fine

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how this was more or less how I maneuvered my way out from under my family’s influence. dissociating to escape the worst of the toxic radiation and reassociating with tools and insights my family did not want me to have, that they found repulsive and frightening, which propelled me out of their sphere of control.

dissociation as guardian force.

see also: power fantasies of dissociation. heroines who find Other Things To Focus On during their tribulations to the extent that they can almost entirely dissociate from the truth of their circumstances. heroines who make “the best of it” by hyperfixating on what they can control and successfully dissociating through a difficult period, how many hundreds of years of gendered conditioning through literature goes into that, from dyed moroz to beauty and the beast to every frontier great grandmother family story about how Times Were Hard but she kept a Stiff Upper Lip and By Gum She Got Through It.

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[“The clinical term for going numb to certain parts of experience as a tactic of psychic self-preservation is dissociation. Not all forms of detachment from experience are dissociative, but they serve the same function: to avoid the discomfort of an experience we feel powerless to interrupt. The detachment that I have experienced from intimate physical acts that I have consented to but which I did not enjoy is not the same as that experienced by someone in a violent highway collision, or a rape victim, or even the deadening experienced by the worker who is submitted to decades of grueling and repetitive labor. But these are analogous. The writers of all these stories must perform a careful and often painful recovery of the memories of those exiled sensations. Just as the trauma survivor must do to the tell the story on which her recovery depends. For the trauma survivor, this storytelling must also happen corporeally. Trauma is described in many ways as an interrupted experience not only in the mind, but also, and perhaps even more profoundly, in the body and its systems. Healing depends upon what therapists who practice somatic experiencing call biological completion. Resmaa Menakem, in his groundbreaking book on healing racialized trauma, My Grandmother’s Hands, refers to it as “completing the action.” The survivor tells the story of their trauma in the body, often without speaking at all, slowly reconstructing the neural progression of the traumatic experience so that it can reach a conclusion. Shamanic practitioners sometimes call this process one of soul retrieval, and the term feels more accurate to me than any clinical language, which by definition excludes the spiritual nature of healing. The essential nature of self that we recover and transform by healing, by revising and completing the story of the past, is often more completely described by spiritual terms.”]

melissa febos, from body work: the radical power of personal narrative, 2022

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the sickening sinking isolating depersonalizing panicky feeling that lesbians who fear and despise false lesbians experience when they realize that the creature before them does not bear a gold star and does not have pure lesbian thoughts and will corrode the lesbianism of others through sheer proximity

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Every time I see a duck I think to myself that I want to pick up that duck. There is a sort of quality of the duck that makes it feel like the act of picking up the duck would somehow be analogous to those strange videos where people use knives to cleanly cut through multilayered cakes. There would be a sort of accumulative act even without taking permanent possession of the duck. It would rather be more like pulling the lever on some ancient machine which makes a counter increase by one. The duck is the lever. I hope my meaning is clear to you all?

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please do not engage i am better as a concept

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Dorothy Allison, from Happy Endings: Lesbian Writers Talk About Their Lives And Work, by Kate Brandt, The Naiad Press, 1993: 

[“Allison worked on numerous feminist magazines, starting with Amazing Grace (which lasted one issue) in 1974. "There was a period in this country, particularly in the mid-1970s, where the lesbian ideal was the lesbian writer,” she remembers. “We had all those magazines, and we wrote all that poetry and published each other’s poetry religiously, some really fine chapbooks, but enormous numbers of what looked to me [to be] really thin stuff.”

However, Allison adds, “A lot of what I’ve published as a lesbian editor was often not terribly well written, but it was vital, because it was showing each other to ourselves. I did that, by letting my girlfriends read sections of my journals, or writing poetry that I gave to one person. [But] I wanted to write short stories. I wanted to be what I had not found. And it was harder. It took more time.” Allison explains, “I find the work of being a writer really difficult. Sending stories off— submitting them to other people’s judgement— I find really difficult. And I’ve worked on lesbian magazines [since 1974]. But even doing that, I didn’t send my work off much because it never seemed to me to be either strong enough or nasty enough or worth the trouble.

"Writing to be read is distinct for me from writing for yourself,” Allison notes. “And my kind of people do not go to psychologists or therapists. When I got in trouble in college, I went to the counseling office and realizes immediately that all I was managing to do was put my scholarship at risk. So journals became for me the only place where I would tell the truth.

"And that is not the same as writing poetry or writing fiction. You can tell the truth to yourself, for yourself, [but] you don’t imagine showing that to other people, because when you begin to put stories through that filter in your mind, [and hear] how other people will hear them, you start to tell small lies. And it takes a lot self-examination to even see where the lies are, because you don’t know when you’re doing it when you’re lying. It took me a long time to figure out that sometimes I was just softening [my stories] so as not to upset people, and sometimes I was making [them] funny just to ease it by. To tell people the absolute, honest truth, mostly they don’t want to hear it.”]