myceliumgirl

[myceliumgirl]

"david duchovny plays a trans woman in twin peaks" david duchovny plays a trans woman in xfiles

[myceliumgirl]

wishing every trans woman a very deep breath, let the tension out of your shoulders. I'm so happy you're here on this planet with me. no matter how hard it is to find places where we're treated like we belong, this planet is ours too. it's our home, and we're allowed to live in it too. love you

[myceliumgirl]

[“In Muriel Rukeyser's novel Savage Coast, set during the Spanish Civil War and written in 1936 immediately after her time in Spain, the protagonist dreams of the sea:

A green streaked sea, with black tremendous currents. And headlong, plunging through the stream, a force rushing, which carried her along; until she ceded her will to it in a huge gesture. In that moment, she revived, she drew will from the enormous source, and thought, even in the dream: O Parable.

Audre Lorde dreams of a sexual encounter in a utopian counter Moscow:

I was making love to a woman behind a stack of clothing in Gumm's Department Store in Moscow. She was ill, and we went upstairs, where I said to a matron, ‘We have to get her to the hospital .'... And I realized I was in Russia, and medicine and doctor bills and all the rest of that were free ... For a while, in my dreams, Russia became a mythic representation of that socialism which does not yet exist anywhere I have been.

Agnes Smedley, in her autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929), dreams of infinity, which, like the sea described by Rukeyser's character, opens out from the material constraints of the present to vibrate with possibility:

I stood on the outer verge of the world. The earth lay back and below me. I was suspended in the air by my own weight. About me was the universe- deep blue, shot through with grey. Unchanging, never- ending. Before me, above me, below me, stretched nothing but this colour. This was Infinity, I thought. Then I stood gazing slightly upward, and from the vastness teardrops were falling. They fell just before my face, a row of large, dark, grey drops, and by their side, a row of small rose- hued drops. I listened ... they fell into nothingness below me, without a sound there was nothing to make a sound. I neither heard them come nor go. How slowly and endlessly they fell! The large grey drops were tears of pain, I recalled with unquestioning finality, and the small rose- hued ones that came so slowly were tears of joy. Above me stretched Infinity, soundless, unbounded in immensity. A dim humming came ... the dim, never- ceasing humming of the cosmic universe. The uncomprehending vastness of it filled my being. I turned restlessly and awoke. Infinity hung over my spirit.

Reading this vision of vastness, of a humming universe, of rose-hued colours felt like opening a window out from the gloomy images of defeat I had been contemplating.

I thought of C. L. R. James writing about Moby Dick while incarcerated on Ellis Island. I thought of Rosa Luxemburg looking through her prison bars at sparrows, blackbirds and birch catkins. I thought of Victor Serge in exile in Mexico, writing in his notebook in 1944, less than a decade after he escaped the Stalinist purges and soon after fleeing encroaching fascism in Western Europe. Serge knew that he would die soon and that ‘tyranny' would outlive him. He thought of the past, of his many dead comrades, of the war he had been spared, but he also tenderly described the soft textures and sonic tremors of the world around him:

At night, more distinctly than during the day, the garden full of mango, lemon, orange, and banana trees and flowering oleander produces a symphony of rustling, whispering, whistling, buzzing and vibrations.

He wrote no platitudes about hope but remained committed to a cause whose victory he knew he would not live to see.

While I was in the process of finishing this book, I came across accounts by women involved in the UK Miners' Strike of 1984-5 in Yorkshire. In contrast to my earlier experiences of reading similar material in my attempt to conceptualise an alternative to ‘left melancholy', I was struck less by their descriptions of the negative emotions associated with defeat than by their emphasis on positive and lasting subjective transformations. A woman from Castleford characterised her involvement in the strike as having an almost therapeutic effect, but one that conventional psychiatric treatments had failed to accomplish:

I suffer from agoraphobia, and I'd been virtually housebound for thirteen years before the strike started. I couldn't even go to the shop on my own. My husband and son are both miners, so when the kitchen started up in the Church Hall at Hightown they persuaded me to volunteer. I was a bit nervous about the idea, but I came down and did a bit of washing up and got talking to the other women, and it did me a world of good. Since then I've hardly missed a day and I really enjoy it. It's a marvellous atmosphere, everyone is so friendly. Whenever anyone's got to go to the shops I'd always volunteer- at first people who didn't know me couldn't understand why. I've been to psychologists and psychiatrists and even spent money trying to find a cure, but this strike is the only thing that done it. The only way I can explain it is— it's like being reborn. I know that I've got to keep active after the strike.

I started this book with the conviction that it was important to acknowledge the emotional toll of political defeat. I wrote this book because I felt suspicious of rhetorical appeals to hope that failed to account for the difficult emotional realities of political defeat. I fin- ished this book reminded that experiences of political struggle can also change people positively and in lasting ways.

As winter turned into spring, I received a message saying there was an immigration raid happening near my flat in Glasgow. I went with my flatmate to Kenmure Street where people were milling around an immigration enforcement van surrounded by cops. Someone was underneath the van to stop it driving off, we were told, with the two detainees inside. Over the course of the next few hours the crowds grew. I emailed to cancel my psychoanalysis session and stayed on the street. I saw people I hadn't seen for months due to Covid- 19 lockdowns and met others for the first time. Strangers shared water and snacks. Someone let me into their flat to use their bathroom. It seemed as if the cops were about to kettle the crowd or charge into it at any minute. Rumours and photos of the cops' activity on neighbouring streets circulated. As more and more people arrived, the atmosphere grew thick. We waited. We remained together. We gossiped. We shouted: ‘These are our neighbours, let them go!' After hours on the street, the rumour rippled around that the people in the van would be released. Shortly afterwards, they were. They emerged waving. In that moment, when the crowd erupted and the row of cops shrunk back, it was as if the darkness of all the previous months spent in isolation had suddenly lifted.“]

hannah proctor, from burn out: the emotional experience of political defeat, 2024

[myceliumgirl]

i think sloppy kissing will cure us both

[myceliumgirl]

please be nice to me unless you’re being mean in a hot way

[myceliumgirl]

sometimes it's OK to skip a song you like when u don't feel like it at that moment. u r not hurting its feelings

[myceliumgirl]

First time block printing, behold my little guy

[myceliumgirl]

this is one of my favourite videos ever i turned it into an mp3 and put it on my phone so i could listen to iy whenever i wanted

[myceliumgirl]

[myceliumgirl]

There is a strata of transexual for whom interesting PDFs act as a sexual currency

[myceliumgirl]

can you do this thing for me pleeeaassse i cant do it (sees you doing it slower and less effectively than me) i can do it actually could you maybe move out of the way

[myceliumgirl]

[myceliumgirl]

Yes pls

[myceliumgirl]

you're cute so i'm downloading you

[myceliumgirl]

Apps do not foster empathy. Only library books do that.

[myceliumgirl]

Ozy Worldy