#I LOVE BEING ONTOLOGICALLY CAPABLE OF HARM

[the-descolada]

It’s very hard to reconcile memories of someone being a positive presence in your life when the downturn was so sudden. One second I had a friend whose love for me I thought was genuine and trusting and then that fell apart so quickly and completely I had no idea it was even happening before it was too late bc of irrational fears inside their head I couldn’t have foreseen or even known about and all of that fell on me and their anxiety became a justification to treat me so fucking badly and I just couldn’t handle that bc I’m only human

[qweerhet]

the tired and repetitive discourse over age gaps in romantic/sexual relationships always feels like gamifying spotting abuse whenever i encounter it. "the Abuser is a creature that does This Action and has These Attributes" like we're talking about identifying birds or some shit. the reality is that abuse is a qualitative distinction of harm, mainly consisting of recurring and systematic abuse of power--social, legal, financial--over another person, and it can happen in any situation where a party has enforceable power. it isn't an inherent trait of a person, it's a trait of a relationship, it doesn't occur due to ontological facts about someone's personhood and someone can simultaneously have both abusive and healthy relationships.

"the Abuser is a Man who is 45 Years Old and sleeps with anyone under 30" does this make you feel safe? do you feel secure in your ability to recognize a predator by their feather coloration? do you feel superior to those who don't have your birdwatching book? does it comfort you to go down a checklist of individual traits and assign the ontological label to anyone who racks up enough points?

the reality is that assessing abuse requires assessing the material reality of any given relationship, and there's like... patterns in dynamics that more easily give rise to abuse (i.e. if you have legal authority over someone, it's so difficult for that not to become abusive in the context of an intimate interpersonal relationship), but quite frankly assigning ontological qualities of Abuser to individual people's traits commonly found in those dynamics like they're pokemon types is. counterproductive, i'll say that kindly. it blinds you to the reality of abuse and it blinds you to the reality of people you love and enjoy the company of and have genuinely healthy relationships with being capable of abuse. it blinds you to how your best friend, who's emotionally intelligent and self-aware and kind, who has none of the Abuser Qualities, can be abusive towards someone who's the same age, gender, set of marginalized identities as them, simply because they're letting that person crash on their couch and not being cognizant of how control over housing puts them in a position of power over that person. how they can be kind and trying very hard in that situation, how they can not have a malicious bone in their body, but still are committing abuse because they're not acting with the awareness that they have material power they simply Do Have.

[moistvonlipwig]

i think it has become received wisdom in steven universe fandom that steven didn't actually forgive the diamonds (perhaps in response to people who hate the ending of the show because they believe he did). i think this is fine as a headcanon but make no mistake it is not a canon fact, and i would argue there is actually more evidence for the opposite.

steven is someone who longs for more family than just his dad & the gems; we know this from "gem harvest" and "mr. universe". he literally added "diamond" to his name suggesting that he considers the diamonds an essential part of this family. he also, contrary to some fans' claims, does not always respond negatively to the diamonds. he is tired out by them at the beginning of the movie but at the end when they show up he reacts to them as if they're his wacky relatives who dropped by for a visit (which. they are). steven is stressed around yellow & blue in "homeworld bound" in the same way he is stressed around the other gems & his dad. he is stressed because of his own problems & is projecting that anxiety onto them just like he did to the gems. but he clearly does not hate the gems! he does have a stronger negative reaction to white for obvious reasons and i think it would be fair to claim that, while prior to suf he thought he had forgiven her, he had never really dealt with his anger towards her, and so he will have to unpack that in the future if he wants to truly forgive her.

but the thing is i think he will want that even after suf! there is a reason the diamonds were part of the group hug at the end of suf and it's not just because steven helped them; steven helped lots of people, they didn't all show up to hug him. they were there because they're his family, he considers and wants them to be his family, they love him, and he in some capacity loves them in return. he can find them a little exhausting to spend time around (in the movie) and see them as an uncomfortable reminder of his own flaws (in suf) without hating them, not forgiving them, or not wanting them in his life. and i truly believe that for steven to eventually reach a place of peace and forgiveness with himself he will have to reckon with his own status as a diamond who is capable of great harm and there are exactly 3 people in the universe who know what that's like. when steven had that intrusive thought of shattering white, what he was actually doing was hurting himself; that's not incidental! his conception of being a diamond as ontologically bad is harmful to his well-being. i don't see any future where steven is happy with himself and has come to terms with his past actions and his diamond tendencies and forgiven himself for them where he hasn't also done the same for white diamond. i just don't

[ser-yolomere-of-swagalore]

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race myself, bitch.

James Joyce -- Ulysses (with some much needed editing)

I haven’t written here in a long time. In fact, after this post, I don’t really see myself writing here every again-- and no, before any of you (if there is, in fact, any one who will see this) jump to conclusions, this isn’t some kind of weird suicide note, or plea for help. What this is, is a sort of manifesto, or a summation, of everything that I’ve felt, and am feeling at the moment, and in a way, hopefully, purging myself of these feelings forever. It’s a goodbye, but also a new opportunity. A creation, as well as a destruction. A final litany of things that I have to say, or wanted to say, and a final exorcism of numerous antagonistic little ghosts that have been rattling around in my head for God knows how long. 

I’ve always been struck by the concept of a sort of Joycean paralysis. Maybe because it’s true-- that Irish people are, in a weird way, struck with a sort of deep, abiding, spiritual malaise, a psychological and emotional paralysis, as a sort of weird, post-colonial hangover-- or maybe because it simply hits too close to home. The narrative of a sort of genealogical, archaeological torpor is one that is all too easy to believe, because it is something that I have experienced quiet viscerally throughout my entire life, but also in a way that is difficult to articulate. The sense that you’re fundamentally at odds with the world around you because of some fundamental, spiritual displacement resulting from years (centuries?) of imperialistic and religious abuse isn’t something that goes well over dinner, after all-- especially when dinner is a hurriedly bought Burger King and the sound of mopeds careening up and down the Cardiffsbridge Road muffles the sound of Coronation Street on the television. 

But it’s a feeling that has stuck with me so long. Longer than I can really remember. This sense of being held back. By myself, by the world around me, by the people around me. Dreams of leaving, of emigrating, have been a consistent fantasy of mine. Occasional spurts of creative writing have always been characterized by the theme of a departure, whether through the realm of some childish Tolkien-esque fantasy or through a plane ticket that randomly fell into the protagonist’s (read: my) lap. That feeling of momentary, ontological vertigo, when the plane leaves the ground and you can feel yourself lifted in that miniature pocket of zero-gravity, is a sensation that I’ve craved and chased (either literally, or figuratively) whenever possible, with varying degrees of success. I even had, at one point, a bit of a miniature breakdown (you know those ones, where they creep up on you, where you have this vague sense that at any minute things are just going to collapse all around you, and nothing will ever be the same) and I started doing some pretty illegal things to get money (fill in the blanks there however you wish) in order to essentially run away, get a plane ticket to somewhere, and just start afresh. But that did crash down, either way-- I started having some viscerally severe panic attacks; I felt like I was going to be trapped here, forever, that I was going to die here, that all the dreams and aspirations I had of doing something worth while were just gonna be swallowed up the dull, plot-less relentlessness with which life here seemed to drive itself--arguably into the ground. I attended counselling, got a professional, objective perspective, and was able to get to grips with things. The anxiety stopped. The borderline insane drive to escape was lulled, and while the gnawing sense of there being a sort of hole, at the center of everything, dissipated, it didn’t quite disappear. I was, once again, able to manage, and plod right along. 

Over time, I’ve come to terms with the fact that my sense of malaise is not, in fact, the result of some kind of literarily prescribed sense of paralysis-- or, at least, not entirely. It is the result of years, perhaps arguably even decades, of mistreatment. By a family and a home that is so deeply dysfunctional that it is, legitimately, tragic. By an early upbringing so neglected and isolated that, to look back and take an earnest look, is genuinely pathetic. By a mindset and by people who see who I am and see something to laugh at. I’ve slowly come to terms with the fact that my family have never quite seen me seriously, as someone incompetent, flowery, soft, and not worth paying attention to. Years, again, potentially decades of subtle gaslighting, invalidation, negation, criticism, patronizing, condescension-- all compounded by shitty, so-called friends, who were all too happy to take advantage of my desire to please and turn it around on me-- had resulted in a person who had so much self-doubt, such a negative self-image, such a horrible sense of failure that, to further disappoint, would result in self-harm. Decades of having my life dictated to me, taking up responsibility and accepting the burden of my family’s terrible choices, of having my potential and my opportunities circumscribes by what seems to be the endlessly unfolding soap opera of my extended family’s self-inflicted pain.  And the worst part is that I simply thought all of this was normal. The concept of Joycean paralysis was able to help me understand, in a vague sense, what was really wrong, but only hindered me in truly understanding its origin.

I worry that if I go on like this I’ll only end up sounding like some kind of serially self-pitying asshole, one of those people that advertises their personal trauma and tragedy as a means to win the Sadsack Olympics, or obtain sympathy, or blame their lack of success and fulfillment on their past. But in the end, that isn’t what this is about. That isn’t the reason why I’m writing this post. In fact, the reason why I am writing this is far more joyous, written with a deep smile spreading across my face. I’ve spent my entire life orientating around myself around other people, of pleasing other people, and I’ve gotten very, very good at figuring out what is that people want, and giving it to them. What I’ve learned, an what I’ve finally gotten the balls to do, is do what I want. I’ve learned to say no. I’ve learned to pursue what I want, to accrue self-confidence, self-love, self-esteem. I’ve learned to deny people, to put myself first, and tell people who need to be told what for. I’ve learned that to be “good” is to give in, to do as I’ve told and take it all on the chin, and I’ve learned that to be “bad” is to pursue what I want, and to rebel. And, fundamentally, I’ve learned that when I am good, I am very, very good, but when I am bad I am FUCKING FIERCE. 

So I am leaving. In fact, I’ve been planning on leaving for quite some time now. Since March, roughly. I am moving to the U.K, getting away from this place, to spend time with people who I have chosen to spend my time with, that I have build up relationships purely of my own choosing and initiative, and whom I trust. To build a life that I choose to build, for myself, and shirking off as much of the trauma, pain, insecurities and self-doubt as I can. Psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan believed that the core motivating force in all human behavior was anxiety, and not just anxiety, but the creative and ornate ways we go about avoiding or managing it. According to him, a personality was simply a collection of habits and strategies people gathered over time to “avoid or minimize anxiety, ward off disapproval, and maintain self-esteem.” What I’ve learned, personally, is the sheer liberating power of identifying and deconstructing the aspects of my own psychology that are life-limiting, and taking great joy in completely and utterly destroying the ones that are build up anxious defense mechanisms. I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t scary, because when these mechanisms fall I’ll be thrust, head first, into facing the things I am most deeply afraid of—social rejection and abandonment, unworthiness and failure, unlovability and isolation, to name a few. But it is liberating because I’ve come to realize that, yes, our defenses serve a function, but no, we don’t actually need all of them to survive-- and then, suddenly, an entirely new life is possible. I’ve come to realize that I actually CAN tolerate anxiety; I CAN live with not being liked, I CAN be misunderstood, I CAN make mistakes, I CAN feel bad. And let me tell you, it is a relief. God is sometimes understood as a creator, but he can also be understood as a destroy-- And I am choosing to be the God of my own goddamn life, and taking great pleasure in destroying that which I don’t like.

I’ve ended up prescribing some great, symbolic significance to the act of me leaving. It is me righteously striking back at all the things that had made me hate myself in the past, because they couldn’t simply tolerate hating themselves and needed to destroy me in order to feel better. And so, to them, I say: 

Fuck my family, who have done nothing to actually foster and cultivate who I am as a human being

Fuck the people who have turned my own kindness against me and made me doubt myself

Fuck the people who have made me feel as though my command of words is a weakness-- I am a fucking fantastic writer, and I dare any of those people to challenge me, because I’ll write them into the fucking ground. 

Fuck the people who made me doubt my intelligence; I am more than smart enough to figure things out for myself and smart enough, at least now, to see them for the self-hating, jealous troglodytes they are.

Fuck this place that has made me feel that who I am is wrong, and lesser, and subordinate-- I am worthy, and powerful, and capable.

Fuck this country, and its backwards, stagnant, repressive culture

FUCK

YOU

And that’s it. There’s my gigantic, theatrical display of radical self-acceptance. In a way, what I want to do is leave, and never come back. To delete all my social media, and start afresh. But I know that’s not realistic. I know I have to tether myself to “home”, as much as I disagree with the idea this place is truly home. I will say this, however-- there are parts of my experience here, and my life thus far, that have been wonderful. I’ve got a handful of genuinely fantastic friends, and I’ve forged some very important memories with them. To burn those bridges would be unforgivable, and I would never be able to do that to them. 

It’s 2:16am. I was already exhausted but I had to write this and get it all off my chest. But this is it-- me signing off, forever. Let this be a testament to everything I want to be, an will be, from here on out. 

-Ian.

[spilledreality]

The Extremes Are Always Clear, The Middle Always Murky

Just finished The Bakkhai, Anne Carson's translation of a late Euripides play (400ish BCE). Sometimes it made my gut churn. Quick TL;DR: Dionysus comes to Thebes, inciting local women to run for the hills and abandon their infants for drunken orgies. Local ruler-adolescent Pentheus is skeptical of Dio’s divinity and worries broken-window style that Thebes' structural integrity is threatened by the cultlike transgressions; hoping to tamp down preemptively, he orders Dionysus and his gang of followers imprisoned. Dionysus, predictably enraged, foments ("ferments") the women to destroy local villages and burn down Pentheus's home. (Christ it’s a universal pattern; maybe the moron Crichton from Farscape was actually on to something with his diplomacy LARPing.) Pentheus is fully Apollonian to the point of authoritarianism, trying to maintain order and force the world to submit to his personal conception of "common sense" and rationality. A total episteme guy, no sense of humor. But his overbearing oppressiveness is an exact mirror of the Dionysian overbearingness: chaos that does not rest until it swallows the world whole, until all structure is dust, the cultural-meme equivalent of a tornado or black hole. What seems at first like Dionysian fun n' games, drunken revelry and casual sex, is revealed to be vengeful, controlling — the Bakkhai, the local horde of women who've run off to the hills to suckle wolves and scissor, are absolutely obsessed with policing the unpure, beseeching Dionysus to punish anyone who's not adequately Bacchic. And no one in this play is capable of moderation. They're either throwing people in jail for having sex or they're tearing off farmers' heads with bloodlust. Everyone except Teirisias and Kamos, resident elders whose wisdom (looking like basic human reasonableness) includes a refusal to draw fanatical hard-lines. At one point Kadmos is all (paraphrasing) "Dionysus might be real, might not be, does it matter? The revelry does no harm, and it would bring honor on our family if it’s believed our family’s related to a god." (Dionysus is Pentheus's cousin; grandfather Kadmos gave birth to two daughters who gave birth to Pentheus and Dionysus.) (Therefore, I assert, Euripides was the First Pragmatist. William James had nothing on Kadmos.) Meanwhile the Bacchic horde is just begging Dionysus to "crush the hubris of wayward men" who aren’t adequately Bacchic. But the thing about the Bakkhai  is that, when men aren't around — my understanding of the Greek symbolic logic: men are structure, women are chaos, only chaos can give birth to new structure — when men aren't around, the Bakkhai women sleep "calm as buttons," completely at rest. And then some local cowherder is unlucky enough to stumble upon their camp, or they smell a man from afar or whatever, and pretty soon the Bakkhai have ransacked two local villages and ripped the farmer's entire herd to pieces with their bare hands. Pentheus, an arrogant macho guy whose solution to literally every problem is grabbing his sword, pisses them off more than anything; they rip a pine tree out of the ground to get to him. Which looks a lot like a structural, symbolic logic at play — absolutism breeds absolutism, maybe, or mutual disarmament beats preemptive suspicion in the longue durée. (Again: Crichton.) Or maybe it's just that chaos, the Bacchic, are merely negations — of structure, of order — and without structure to convert to raw fuel, the Bacchic/Bakkhai would burn out quickly on it own, the way a party dies down when the drugs run out and the high starts wearing off.

The Bacchic is freedom in its most literal sense, which again is just negation, liberty from any rule or any restraint whatsoever — teenage ontology, maybe — including freedom from the (disapproving, social) sober mind, hence, ekstasis. What Euripides seems to be pointing at, or understand, is that this kind of teenage edgelord anarchism only exists because society's there, or school, or parents or whatever, and because these structures are probably dramatically failing too. There's always been the desire to shed responsibility, but good structure at least minimizes or controls this rebellious urge, and Pentheus's authoritarianism is definitely not good structure. You need a (The) Man to rail against or you'll have to actually start thinking about your beliefs positively, instead of as negations of whatever values regime you're under. Fanatical belief is a social condition. There aren't any fanatics on a desert island, only pragmatists; the ideology enters when other people do. (Thus the shepherd and his dismembered herd.) I’m not sure there is an answer to the eternal Apollonian/Dionysian problem, but I think the pragmatism Euripides gets at is involved, looking something like the basic acknowledgement of reality rather than its denial: Pentheus's protestant suppression/literal prohibition only rouses ("arouses," ha) the Bakkhai. Teirisius and Kadmos the elders are the only ones smart enough to know when you see a wild animal, you look it straight in the eye and back away slowly. The really wild parts of the play were the cross-dressing sections, which I’m still not sure what to make of. Pentheus, perhaps psychically influenced by Dionysus, thinks a little bacchanalia — dipping his toe, using irony for internal justification — dresses up as a woman to spy on the Bakkhai women in the hills, perhaps even catch them in cunnilingus. And this fissure, this personal allowance to let a bit of Dionysus, does in fact destroy him — he's literally torn apart by it, what classicists love calling sparagamos, in a literal destructuring of the symbolic order. One of the women who does the tearing is his own mother, arm from socket, drunk off Dionysus. (Only from chaos can new structure emerge, as only from woman can man.) Anyway, this play has had a lot of scholarship and I'm sure I inevitably retread retread swathes of existing interpretations, but at the very least I think this is a reading Carson's translation deserves, despite its slickly trendy surface suggestion that Pentheus the conservative is secretly a crossdresser, the way the old joke about homophobic Republicans being in the closet goes. (I don’t know about you but I always found those suggestions offensive to both conservatives and the gays.) The play ends with Agave, Pentheus's mother, marching down the streets of Thebes with her son's head impaled on a stake, praising "Bakkhos! Partner in the hunt!" A servant remarks, "The trophy in her hands is her own tears." They know not what they do.