#its me coping because THE ZINE JUST STARTED WHAT THE FUCK

[sword-dad-fukuzawa]

here’s to a year of trigun :] just a cute little (1k. oops.) essay reflecting back on how it’s changed my life.

(twitter crosspost LOL)

You know that strange, dissatisfying limbo between hyperfixations? That was me in January. A 2-year long obsession with Genshin Impact was dragging itself to its grave and I was struggling with life. I got diagnosed with a rare chronic pain disorder at around the same time I caught mono and strep simultaneously (that week SUCKED), classes were kicking my ass, and I was experiencing the existential loneliness of adulthood for the first time. 

University student things! 

And to make it all extra unbearable, my writing was empty. Soulless. I’d write something for a zine and go damn—this shit is awful. Not because it was technically flawed or anything, but there was just…nothing there. I would stare at my stats page on Ao3 waiting for comments and then bitterly complain at my friends when no one wanted to read my work. Hell, I don’t think I wanted to read my work. I’m sure you know the feeling. 

And because my writing is how I cope with Everything, being unable to write made the Everything so, so much worse.

Then—and I forget exactly how I heard about it—I learned that Trigun Stampede had just released its fourth episode. I knew of Trigun from a buddy of mine who had been excitement-posting about the reboot months before, but all I knew about the reboot was that Yoshitsugu Matsuoka was voicing the main character. I had a free afternoon—why not give it a try? 

I still have my liveblogging from January. Here was my initial reaction:

I was having a great fuckin’ time. 

February rolls around and I am immediately, irreversibly, hit with Plantcest brainrot so bad that I discard any pretense of being icked out by brocest ship and I write a 9k long KV thesis called “we’ve got to get back to that stinking garden,” named after a Natalie Diaz poem called “my brother named gethsemane,” which is, truly and genuinely, The Poem on Brothers (Complicated) of all time. That fic is where the visions and prophesies came back, where I started feeling like my writing was impactful again. Like it meant something. It was my first ever foray into in-narrative smut and the first of many, many attempts to capture a future where Vash and Knives love each other even after the end of everything. 

This is really where I found my footing on Twitter and as a short story writer, I think. Where I started really caring about making every word of a narrative pay rent, about conveying and evoking specific, tangible feelings, and exploring genres of media I’d never really been interested in before. Before February, I wrote mostly genfic and T-rated romance. Every so often, I’d dabble in some graphic violence. 

And hey! Now I write hardcore kink and graphic erotica. The gore I used to dabble in is now something I dive into feetfirst and with a rabid desire to make it as sexy as possible. I fetishize the crease of an elbow and the bristly sections of an undercut and I write about brothers having nasty, angry, dubiously consensual sex. I could not possibly tell you how I got here, but shit, man, I don’t regret a damn thing. 

It’s through Trigun that I met some of the most talented, sweetest, most encouraging folk. Plantcest creators, Vashwood creators, people who saw me writing ZazieVash and went hello motherfucker please feed me some more, Romeryl enthusiasts, Kniveswood and Plantwood enjoyers…shit, guys. You’re all so fucking cool.

I got invited to a zine for the first time, I started taking commissions (and holy shit, what the fuck, I still can’t wrap my head around that at all. The fuck you mean, you’ll pay me Real Actual Money for personalized fic? Insane to me. I’m so goddamn grateful.) for the first time, and hell, I published a poetry collection for the first time. Which people downloaded? And tipped me for? What the fuck? I’m still reeling from that. Thank you, by the way. Genuinely. 

What else this year…well. I commissioned art for the first time, I participated in more big bangs and exchanges than ever, I read voraciously and wrote with just as much fervor. I watched ‘98 and I cried and I read half of TriMax and cried some more. I wrote more erotica than I ever have, and I wrote more fic that I’m genuinely, painfully proud of this year than any other year. 

A lot of my writing is about grief and rage, and a lot of it is about trying to be funny in the face of that. A lot of is about learning to live, because that’s what I’m doing right now, despite everything. A lot of it is about trying to be kind. 

But in summary, because this is getting ridiculously long, here’s what I got out of Trigun:

Vash the Stampede refuses to die. I’m trying to emulate that. 

Meryl Stryfe cares about doing the right thing, even if it means she’ll get in the middle of a fight between aliens armed with two bullets in a tiny pistol. 

Wolfwood is carefully, disastrously kind. I want to be like that.

And Knives is nuttier than a Victorian lady in a room painted in arsenic green, but still. I love him anyway. 

And Milly :] no thoughts about Milly. I love Milly because she is also incredibly kind :] 

Trigun has changed my entire goddamn life this year. I think it’s made me a better person. It’s certainly made me a better writer, and it’s connected me to so many lovely and beautiful people. Thank you all for sticking around, and here’s to another year of love, peace, and unhinged porn. I love you all :]

[barefootdancinghospital]

“The world might be ending.

* * *

There’s a commonly replicated piece of anarchist folk art that means a lot to me. I don’t know who drew it. It’s a drawing of a tree with a circle-A superimposed. The text of it reads “even if the world was to end tomorrow I would still plant a tree today.”

I grew up into anarchy around this piece of art. It was silkscreened as patches and posters and visible on the backs of hoodies and the walls of collective houses. It was graffitied through stencils and it was photocopied in the back of zines. It’s a paraphrasing of a quote misattributed to Martin Luther (the original protestant Martin Luther, not Martin Luther King, Jr., although plenty of people misattribute the quote to him as well). The original quote is something like “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” The earliest reference to it anyone can seem to find is from the German Confessing Church, a Christian movement within Nazi Germany that sought to challenge Nazi power. The quote was used to inspire hope, to inspire people to action.

That’s something I can get behind.

* * *

There’s this book that means a lot to me, On the Beach, by Nevil Shute. I’ve never read it. I can’t bring myself to. I think about it quite often, regardless.

The novel describes a nuclear war destined to kill all life on earth, and it describes the last days of people living in Australia waiting for the inevitable death of all things. It describes how they live their lives, how they find meaning during the apocalypse. It’s a book about how to live without hope. It’s a book of resignation.

It’s too much for me, I think, at least right now.

* * *

The world might be ending.

A lot of people will argue with me about that. They will correctly point out that for large numbers of people all over the world, especially in the parts of the world long ravaged by Western imperialism, the world has been ending for a long time. They will correctly point out that the world itself isn’t going anywhere, that change is constant, and even if what is left behind by climate catastrophe and war is a scorched desert, it’s probable that life will continue. Human life, non-human animal life, and plant life will all, in some form or another, survive all of this.

People will argue, correctly once more, that most every generation has believed that the world was ending. The machine gun slaughter of World War I, the genocide of World War II, the Doomsday Clock of the Cold War, the AIDS epidemic, those all must have felt like the apocalypse. For entire peoples, they were. Yet here some of us are today, alive.

None of those arguments detract from the fact that it sure feels like the world is ending.

Mountains are blown up for coal to pump poison into the air, pipelines clearcut the last vestiges of the wild to help us pump more poison into the air. Oceans are swallowing islands, hundred-year storms happen every year, and it feels like every day we break new climate records.  A sense of urgency about coming disaster is fueling a rise of “I got mine, fuck you” nationalism, and climate scientists are being ignored to an unconscionable degree.

The world is ending.

It’s always ending, but it’s ending a lot right now. For me and the people I’m close to, it’s ending more dramatically than it was when I was born thirty-seven years ago.

That’s fucking paralyzing.

The news is full of extinction and fascism and death and death and death.

And we’re expected to get up in the morning and go to work.

* * *

For awhile, I coped by means of a cycle of denial and panic. The potential apocalypse was, basically, too-much-problem. I couldn’t wrap my head around it or its ramifications, so I acted like it wasn’t happening. Until, of course, some horrible event or reminder of the apocalypse broke over a certain threshold and sent me spiraling into despair. Then numbness took over once more and the cycle began again.

That didn’t do me much good.

About a year ago, I decided to embrace  four different, often contradictory, priorities for my life. I run my decisions past all of them and try to keep them in balance.

Act like we’re about to die. Act like we might not die right away. Act like we might have a chance to stop this. Act like everything will be okay.

Act like we’re about to die

Every breath we take is the last breath we take. You Only Live Once. Smoke em if you got em. Do As Thou Wilt. Memento Mori. Our culture is full of euphemisms and clever sayings that focus around one simple idea: we’re mortal, so we might as well try to make the most of the time we have.

Embracing hedonism has a lot to recommend it these days. It’s completely possible that the majority of us won’t be alive ten or twenty years from now. It’s completely possible, although a lot less likely, that a lot of us won’t be alive in a year.

I used to think, when I was younger, that I was a terrible hedonist. As a survivor of sexual and psychological assault and abuse, I’ve never had much luck with drug use or casual sex. But fucking and getting wasted, while perfectly worthwhile pastimes, aren’t the only ways to live in the moment. Hedonism is about the pursuit of pleasure and joy. The trick is to find out what gives you pleasure and joy.

For myself, this has meant giving myself permission to pursue music, to sing even though I’m not trained, to play piano and harp. To travel, to wander. To seek beautiful moments and accept that they might be fleeting. I’ll rudely paraphrase the host of the rather wholesome podcast Ologies, Alie Ward, and say “we might die so cut your bangs and tell your crush you like them.”

My hedonism is a cautious one. I’m not looking to take up smoking or other addictions. I’m not trying to live like there’s a guarantee of no tomorrow, just a solid chance of no tomorrow. Frankly, this would be true regardless of the current crisis, but it feels especially important to me just now.

Act like we might not die right away

Preppers have a bad reputation for a good reason. The people stockpiling ammunition and food in doomsday bunkers by-and-large don’t have anyone else’s best interests at heart. Still, being prepared for a slow apocalypse, or dramatic interruptions in the status quo, makes more and more sense to more and more of us.

Preparing for the apocalypse is going to look different to every person and every community. For some people it will mean stockpiling necessities. For other people, securing the means to grow food.

One thing I’ve learned from my friends who study community resilience and disaster relief, however, is that the most important resource to shore up on isn’t a tangible one. It’s not bullets, it’s not rice, it’s not even land or water. It’s connections with other people. The most effective means of survival in crisis is to create community disaster plans. To practice mutual aid. To build networks of resilience.

Every apocalypse movie has it all backwards when the plucky gang of survivors holes up in a cabin and fends off the ravaging chaotic hordes. The movies have it backwards because the ravaging hordes are, in the roughest possible sense, the ones doing survival right. They’re doing it collectively. Obviously, I’m not advocating we wear the skulls of our enemies and cower at the feet of warlords (though wearing the skulls of would-be warlords has its appeal). I’m advocating staying open to opportunity and building collective power.

There are infinite reasons not to count on holing up in a cabin with your six friends as an apocalypse plan, but I’ll give you two of them. First, because living a worthwhile and long life as a human animal requires connections with a diverse collection of people with diverse collections of skills, ideas, and backgrounds. It’s all fun and games in your cabin until your appendix bursts and none of you are surgeons—or you’re the only surgeon. Likewise, small groups of people who tend to agree with one another are subject to the dangers of groupthink and the echo chamber effect, which will limit your ability to intelligently meet challenges that face you.

Second, because by removing yourself from society, you’re removing your ability to shape the changes that society will go through during crisis. If you go hide in the woods with your stockpile and your buddies, and fascists take over, guess what? It’s kind of your fucking fault. Because you weren’t at the meeting when everyone decided whether to be egalitarians or fascists. And guess what? Now that rampaging horde is at your doorstep, and they want your ammo and your antibiotics, and they’re going to get it one way or the other. Fascism is always best stamped out when it starts. It’s never safe to ignore it. Not now, not during any Mad Max future.

Tangible resources do matter, of course. Any likely scenario that prepping is good for won’t be so dramatic as an utter restructuring or collapse of society. It might mean food shortages, power outages, water contamination. It never hurts to keep nonperishable food, backup sources of power, and water filtration systems around for yourself and your neighbors.

Still, this is a terrible basket to put all your eggs into. You probably shouldn’t live out your days, whether they’re your last ones or not, over-preparing for something that may or may not come to pass.

Act like we might have a chance to stop this

We can and we should stop the worst excesses of climate catastrophe. We can and should stop fascism by whatever means necessary. Throwing up our hands and walking away from the problem is no solution.

It’s hard to remember that we have agency. Unless we were raised ultra-rich, we’ve had the concept of political and economic agency stripped from us at every turn. We’ve been told there are two ways to effect change: vote for politicians or vote with our dollars. Politicians in western democracies are likely incapable of changing things as dramatically as they need to be changed, and they certainly won’t bother trying unless we motivate them to do so in fairly dramatic ways. As for economic agency, there is a small handful of men with more wealth—and therefore power—than the rest of us combined.

We’ve been told we cannot take matters into our own hands, politically or economically. We’re not allowed to have a revolution. We’re not allowed to redistribute the wealth of the elite.

You’ll be shocked to know that I don’t put a lot of stock in what we are and aren’t allowed to do.

Still, even if we give ourselves permission to undertake it, revolution feels like an insurmountable challenge. We’ve got, optimistically, ten years to completely overhaul the economic system of the planet. It can be done. It has to be done. Yet it feels like it won’t be done.

We’re all running the cost/benefit analysis of acting directly. We all have different “fuck it” points—the point beyond which we can no longer prioritize our immediate wellbeing but instead must act regardless of the outcome. In the meantime, we’re waiting until it seems like we can act and actually have a chance of winning.

All over the world, even in some Western countries, people are no longer waiting. They’re  acting. We need to be helping them, supporting them with words and actions, while we get ready to act here as well.

The revolution needs mediators and facilitators, medics and brawlers. It needs hackers and propagandists and it needs financiers and smugglers and thieves. It needs scouts and coordinators and it needs musicians and it needs people invested in the system to turn traitor. It needs lawyers and scientists and bookkeepers and copyeditors and cooks and it needs almost everyone, almost every skill.

One thing it doesn’t need, though, is managers. The people who claim to know how to run a revolution don’t know how to run a revolution or they would have done it by now. The authoritarian urge, to decide what the revolution should and shouldn’t look like, how people should and shouldn’t express their rage and reclaim their agency, will fail us every time. Authoritarian communism is the death of any revolution. Authoritarian liberalism is the death of any revolution. Even the more dogmatic anarchists will get in the way if given a chance. The revolution cannot be branded. Despite Hollywood representations of rebellions, they don’t work as well under a single banner. They are diverse, or they are not revolutions.

The revolution cannot be controlled by a vanguard of activists; if it is, it will fail. The revolution must be controlled by its participants, because only then will we learn how to claim agency over our own lives and futures.

We have a chance to stop this.

I forget that sometimes, but I shouldn’t.

Still, I can’t count on hope alone, or the days when hope fails me would lay me low.

Act like everything will be okay

All the times the world has come close to ending before, it hasn’t. It’s ended for some people, some cultures. Civilizations have collapsed. Ecosystems have radically shifted. Species have gone extinct—including the species of humans before homo sapiens. Colonization was an apocalypse. Some people survived those apocalypses, but plenty more didn’t.

Still, the world is still here and we’re still here.

Capitalism is a sturdy beast, quite adept at adaptation. Marx was wrong about a lot of things, and one of those things was the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions. With or without capitalism, the society we live in might stagger on. We might curb the worst excesses of climate catastrophe through economic change or wild feats of geoengineering.

I won’t bet on it, but I won’t bet entirely against it either.

As much as I need to live like I might die tomorrow, I need to live like I might see a hundred years on this odd green and blue planet. Unless things change, I’m not burning every bridge. I’m trying to maintain a career. If I was certain to die under a fascist regime by 2021, there wouldn’t be much point in writing novels: they take too long to write, publish, and reach their audience. I get some joy from the writing itself, sure, but I get more joy from putting my art in front of people, of letting it influence the cultural landscape. With novel writing in particular, that takes time. That takes there being a future. I want there to be a future. Almost desperately. Not enough to bank on it completely.

I’m keeping some small portion of my time and resources invested in the potential for there to be a future is important for my mental health, because it keeps me invested in maintaining that health.

* * *

The world might end tomorrow, and it might not. If we can help it, at all, we shouldn’t let it end. We still ought to act like it might.

We ought to figure out what trees we would plant either way.

If you appreciate my writing and want to help me do more of it, please consider supporting me via Patreon.

“

[allthethingswecoulddo]

Being a Bi Survivor- 11 Reflections

This Bi Visibility Day I want to share my story of being a survivor. Before we begin, some content warnings. 

Read with care.  ❤️

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In this post, I talk about coercive relationships and sexual violence including mentions of rape in an intimate relationship. I explore my experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other mental health issues including thoughts of suicide. 

I’ve used asterisks for some difficult words e.g. I write s****l violence and r**e  

You can find links to services in this post. If you don’t feel like reading on, that’s cool!

When I read the statistics on bi experiences of s****l violence, a whole cacophony of feelings surface. I see myself and my friends reflected; surviving, processing and trying to pave a way through the rest of our lives after abuse. I hear echoes of the invalidation and ridicule that permeates public consciousness about bi identities. I’m reminded of the voices within the queer community that erase and degrade bi people, with off-hand comments or sustained attacks. And it’s not easy to find the words for those feelings or the words to explain that biphobia leads to deep and lasting harm.

Bisexual women are five times more likely than heterosexual women to be abused by a partner. In one study, 10.8 per cent of bi women reported having been abused, compared to 8.2 per cent of lesbians and 6 per cent of straight women. *

Bisexuals who experience multiple oppressions, such as trans, BAME or disabled people, face even higher rates of sexual violence. Evidence from America shows that while trans people face higher rates of sexual violence, bi trans women are the most at risk.*

I hope that by sharing my experience, other survivors will feel less alone and discover tools to navigate their way through the uncharted terrain of trauma. The role of biphobia in the abuse I experienced might not seem obvious, but it is front and center - biphobia made me vulnerable to abuse, biphobia played a part in sustaining my self-doubt and biphobia strengthened my fear that no one would believe me.

It’s important to emphasize that abuse can happen to anyone. Whether or not you are bi or LGBT+, I hope that this is useful for you.

I was trapped, and only when I left did the fear flood in.

Whilst I was in an abusive relationship, I couldn’t see it. My mental health spiraled, and my friends expressed concern about the dynamics of the relationship. I was much better at finding flaws in myself and other reasons I felt tangled up than I was at recognizing the ways my boundaries were being crossed, and my trust abused. In other words, I blamed myself from the start.

Only after I had left the relationship did I start to recognize what had been happening; that coercion and manipulation were at the heart of the way my abuser had been communicating with me and treating me. The dislocation between my inner world of turmoil and the realities of the relationship suddenly make sense, and that’s when I started to feel the fear.

I felt it hit me like a tonne of bricks.

It might seem like a strange concept, to ‘realise’ that you’ve been fearful of someone or to ‘realise’ that you’ve been harmed. How could I not know that I’d been s******y assaulted?

The saying ‘the penny dropped’, ‘it hit me like a tonne of bricks’ and ‘my world turned upside down’ had never felt so literal as when I started to recognise that I’d escaped an abusive relationship.

My body kept secrets until I was ready to survive them.

Even at this time, when symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) kicked in and I was at my lowest, I remember being so grateful and in awe of my body. It was as if it had held onto all the feelings I couldn’t have processed and managed within the relationship.

My body waited until I was safe to release all the feelings that you’d expect in a situation of threat. I could feel the chemicals in my bloodstream, keeping me awake, alert, poised for defense. 

Hypervigilance plagued my days and nights - it was exhausting, and at the time I didn’t understand what was happening. I felt like I was losing control, and didn’t know what to believe.

Fight. Flight. Freeze. 

I’d heard of the fight or flight response, but I didn’t know you could freeze. It makes sense. When it happened I left my body, I left the room, I went into another world because the one I was in was unbearable. That’s how my body and mind protected me.

But then dissociation became a way for my mind and body to cope in the aftermath too. For me, it felt like a powerful anesthetic, numbing out every feeling indiscriminately, even the good stuff.

Random things would trigger panic or dissociation - most annoyingly, for a long time, I couldn’t listen to the song Golden Years by David Bowie. If I smelt damp clothes or saw a red rain jacket, a whole string of associations fired through me and I was hurtling towards a panic attack.

She told me to respect my coping mechanisms. I hated them. 

My therapist (who I could barely afford - that’s a whole topic of its own) explained that this was a coping mechanism and that I should respect it and work with it. But I was impatient and frustrated. I wanted to get over this, quick.

Looking back, I was struggling to accept what had happened. It was like a story I was telling myself, about someone else’s misfortune.

Time was my enemy.

This period of time, in my memory, feels warped and strange. I remember feeling minutes passing, and time was like sinking sand - it was so hard to keep moving forward and I couldn’t see a future.

I started to have thoughts of suicide. I hadn’t experienced that before and felt really scared and confused. Above all, I felt completely alone, like no one would understand - even if I had the words.

Just above the city, our dinghy, my lifeboat- Survivors’ Network.

Something that surprised me and I’ve never forgotten is how a reserve of resilience and determination, an energy that I never knew I had, surged forward just when I thought I wanted to give up. 

I found Survivors’ Network and started to go to group meet-ups. At first, I’d sit in the circle and drink the tea, eat the biscuits and smile like I was at a community meeting about, I don’t know...a litter problem in the city!?

I fooled myself into believing I didn’t belong there, that it was inconsequential and I was just coming along for the ride. I was keeping my own experience at arm's length so I didn’t have to face the fallout. But as I listened to other survivors’ stories and got to know them, I became comfortable enough to start sharing and chipping away at my shame. 

The group became like a transient family, and a lifeline when I needed it most. 

She told me she believed me.

Only a few friends knew what was going on. I started using other services like Samaritans, RISE and Rape Crisis for extra support. One night I called a hotline for survivors and confessed (to myself as much as the volunteer at the end of the line) that I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened, because I was scared they wouldn’t believe me. They just paused and said, I believe you. I felt relief radiate my chest and hot tears melting the frozen numbness I’d been trying to break out of.

Every good night’s sleep is a Fuck You.

After that, barrages of feelings were set free. One of the most difficult being anger. I didn’t know how to channel it or what to do with it.

I played Golden Years really loudly in my room, pushed myself to go places I desperately wanted to avoid because they were associated with my trauma or ran the risk of seeing my abuser by attending things I would usually go to.

I later learned that intentionally triggering yourself after abuse isn’t unusual. It was partly a way of feeling alive through the numbness, and partly my rage starting to bubble to the surface. I wasn’t going to be kept silent and hidden.

But over time I learned to redefine defiance. I remember the first time I said my abusers' name in therapy without disappearing into dissociation, I called them a wanker and my therapist - who was quite posh and quite serious- said, ‘I see your strength come back when you say that.’

My successes in recovery were small, slow and quiet - I learned to celebrate every single one. And to start sharing my journey with the people I love and trust.

It took a long time to feel like a ‘survivor.’ 

A friend who supported me at the time told me once to ‘make the abuser small, in your mind.’ For me, PTSD flashbacks were not the only way that I felt I was ‘reliving’ the trauma. Fear had permeated every aspect of my life, making me feel as if I was still living through it. The idea of shrinking down my abuser in my mind started to help me see that there was no looming, invisible threat, ready to strike at any moment. It was over, and I was safe.

It became something I had survived. Bit by bit I befriended my body again, and started to heal - recalibrating into the present and mapping my ‘new normal.’

My ‘new normal’.

I wish I had known that although trauma would devastate my life, it would give me an opportunity to rebuild it with self-compassion at the center. When people told me, ‘you won’t always feel like this’, or ‘you’ll adjust’- I thought they meant that I would get used to living in darkness.

Survival for me has meant a lot of private, proud moments. Managing to sleep through the night, laughing with friends, finding coping mechanisms that make me feel safe and above all, learning to open up to meaningful connection with others in a way I don’t think I did even before all of this.

Recovery is a process and one that isn’t always linear. There’s no right way to do it. If like me, you take two steps forward and one step back - just know you are never alone.

Thank you so much for reading.

Here’s that post featuring some survivor services again.

Want to know about any future posts, zines or projects about I do about being a survivor? Pop me an email at mollymaher93@gmail.com

* Both stats are taken from here: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/bisexual-lgbt-pride-sexual-assault-violence-invisible-minority-survivors-a8435226.html

*Here’s a definition of bi from Stonewall: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/glossary-terms#b

[brydigdraws]

It feels like I just posted my 2018 summary of art, but here we are again (and three months late at that)! I haven’t even uploaded some of these Rambling under cut ⬇️

All in all, 2019, both in terms of art and general life, was a bit of a roller coaster for me, with very high peaks and very deep plummets:

January: Gekhath! My boy! I still really like this simple, overworked sketch; I feel like I captured his “soul”, which I feel I usually don’t manage to do with the subjects in my art.

February: Worked on my first (pretty bad, ngl) game as a 2D artist! It was a class project, and we had about ten weeks to make it. Executive dysfunction reared its ugly head, but thanks to peer pressure I still got some character designs and portraits done. This was the first portrait I did.

March: Another character portrait; still doing game development stuff. I’d say that it was, overall, a fun experience.

April: Executive dysfunction stressed me the fuck out about a big, individual school project. Drew this in a couple of hours to calm down, with a technique I hadn’t tried before. Did not actually help me de-stress at all in the long run, as the project still loomed over me.

May: Rock fucking bottom. I think this was the worst I’ve ever felt in my life, and that’s counting years of untreated depression and low-key suicidal thoughts. Executive dysfunction had me fucking paralysed; couldn’t work on the aforementioned project at all, even though that was exactly what I needed to do to feel better. I think it was the pressure I put on myself?? Or something??

June: I had powered through and eventually managed to hand in extremely sub-par, but passable work. It was a wake-up call for sure; you can’t depend on that near-deadline adrenaline rush to make good art! However, this Extremely Queer piece I did for an Overwatch pride zine helped keep my spirits up!

July: Worked at a shitty summer job with shitty coworkers, shitty pay and shitty hours. Didn’t have much time or energy for art, but got into Good Omens. Like, I got really into Good Omens, as though I had jumped out of a plane with no parachute. I hadn’t experienced a special interest this intense in a very long time. It was literally exhausting. I think I read the book (bc I refused to watch the series before I read the book) over the course of, like, three days, just reading during my breaks. It really was what I needed to not become a mindless zombie during those weeks. It inspired me to write a lot, too, which I haven’t really done in years, and that has kept up until now, and I’m very happy for it (most of it way too fragmented to upload anywhere, I’m afraid). This Crowley was inspired by the book, before TV!Crowley got completely burned into my brain.

August: Luckily my summer job didn’t last for the entire duration of August, so I had enough energy to paint a proper value study! (I actually love like Aziraphale more than Crowley, but he’s the one I project really heavily onto so...) It got out of hand and didn’t turn out very much like the reference, but it’s still one of my favourite pieces I’ve done!

September: School again! Executive dysfunction again! Managed it a bit better this time around, though, and, among other things, made my first UI design for a group project! Very interesting experience!

October: Same project, but a painted background this time. It was a pain in the ass, as I rarely paint and don’t understand light sources and shadows very well (that’s why I usually do value studies when I actually do paint), and find rendering hard. Still proud I followed through!

November: Another group project! Executive dysfunction who?? We worked a lot in the same room together; the constant peer pressure and weekly goals doing wonders to actually make sure I was working (seems my two main modes are “master procrastinator” and “complete workaholic”). Did my first proper 3D model textures. Here’s an enemy design I did for the project. Our group’s assigned art director really helped me loosen up and dare to exaggerate and make things asymmetrical. Throughout most of my life I’ve been near obsessed with the idea of “perfection” in my art, which is silly and unattainable, and has only lead to stiffness and boring poses. I feel like working on this design freed me from those shackles, in a way, although the sensation still lingers. Really like these little dudes; it was super cool to see them modelled in 3D and animated!

December: My gift for the GO Holiday Swap! I did bite off a bit more than I could chew with this one, as I already had the aforementioned group project and a zine piece to work on; but slow and steady wins the race and I got it done way before the deadline. I would have liked to do something more with the background, but I simply did not have the time, and I’m very happy that my giftee seemed to appreciate it!

I still struggle with executive dysfunction (in all aspects of my life), but I think it’s getting better and I’m starting to develop coping strategies :’) We’ll see how this year goes! Based on what I’ve learned from previous years, I’ve made myself the promise to try and put my health first, school second, and art projects third. Hopefully this will lead to more free time for me, and thus more spontaneous art (there have been a lot of things I’ve wanted to draw over the last year, but couldn’t because I already had other commitments I had to work on). Self care babey!!!

[agentskyhouse]

An Indian Walks Into A Bar

It sounds racist the moment you hear it, but today I’m the extremely light skinned Indian (Mi’kmaq, Two Spirit), and the bar is telling me that beer is my spirit animal.

Synchronicity is a funny lady. When she thinks you’re ready, she’ll hand you something that will change your life – but it’s up to you how.

This morning, I talked with my partner about white folks using the term Spirit Animal (he brought it up due to something he saw on tumblr – he is white), and like everything else, it’s not black and white. Colonists have their own roots where animals were spiritual to them, but like most things, the predominant amount gave up those cultural memories long ago when trying to assimilate themselves to religion and nation. It seems with it went the ability to respect a fair number of things, from spiritual practices, to cultural differences, to their own elders. At times, it is questionable if this level of cultural deficit disorder not only created massive intolerance for anything unlike them, but also about learning to think outside of their own comfort zones and show compassion and empathy.

A few weeks ago, I did what a lot of Indians do – I found a way to laugh to cope while watching Standing Rock get closer and closer to what many of us knew would be an outcome. Not an outcome of failure, but the constant cycle of growth in resistance where you’re handed something painful, and you take that and grow. I’ve been reminding so many people, and especially myself, that the last time indigenous folks really dug their heels in, people died. One of the many, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash (who was raped and murdered horribly), is one of the many reasons I do what I do. Why I stepped out of the shadow of a slow, miserable death that was passing as a white male (ftm), and embraced what I had known I was since childhood: A Mi’kmaq/MicMac Two Spirit (in my case, a nonbinary queer trans person).

I had decided to start doodling a comic, “Indian Curse (Or A Blessing?)” which is intended to be a comic about decolonizing through pointing out inherit racism in American Culture in amusing, but educational ways. Largely this was for my own benefit, but also because I have an art show coming up soon and thought it’d make a few fun and educational zines.

This morning, as I worked on a resistance art piece for a café off of Newark Ave, I detailed the line work on my connection to the mntu: my guides Apli’kmuj (rabbit), Mishipeshu, Wobe/Wape’w (Swan), and Wowkwis (Fox). My “spirit animals”, who have all been with me for some time and represent the four seasons of the circle. I listened to interviews in the background of Chase Iron Eyes and Regina Brave. I thought of rallies coming up, people I’ve been helping emotionally through these times, and how I can look back now to when I used to try to be part of the colonial machine. How empty and lost and angry I constantly felt.

So, when I walked down Newark Ave, a spot covered in local businesses I support and surrounded by clients and partners of my own (because I too am a local, small business owner who pushes my own clients to support local, as well as host and attend gatherings at many of the bars in the area), I had to stop short talking to a friend on the phone because of a sign waiting for me outside a new bar.

“You have to be fucking.. No way.

Hold on I need to see something.”

I’ve run my share of local storefronts, both in the NYC area as well as in Richmond VA, so between this and being in the behavioral science field for a living (conflict resolution being one of my things), I’m sometimes overly aware of body language. So, going in, I tried to keep my body calm, remain civil, but be clear when one of the bartenders approached me.

“Excuse me, who would I talk to about the sign outside? I was wondering if it could be changed – it’s offensive to indigenous peoples, like myself.”

There’s always that moment colonized people get when you bring up bigotry or racism pertaining to themselves (whether intentional racism or not, and I’m sure in this case it was not intentional). They pause, their eyes do a momentary unfocusing before becoming sharp, like they’ve been hit over the head or someone has threatened them. Often, after this, two things happen: aggression or emotional and mental removal from the situation. The bartender, who was far darker skinned than I, chose the second. With an eye roll and a look of annoyance, I was told I would have to talk to the manager, and I asked if I could.

After removal, people’s behavior tends to slow and draw out, as if you’ll go away if they take longer and stall you. I didn’t, and so the next textbook step occurred: The bartender grabbed a coworker and began to explain, while making a point to laugh it off, and the two engaged in staring at me, chuckling and making comments I couldn’t hear. This second bartender, who was extremely light skinned, left to get the manager.

If nothing else, the fact that this is how the bar staff behave at Atlas Public House. As a business owner and someone who has managed staff for over a decade, there is absolutely nothing appropriate about how they handled this situation, and their manager would proceed shortly to make it worse. The question of course comes up if how I look: a queer/Two Spirit trans punk of ambiguous gender, added to how they handled the situation. However not only should how I look not matter, but Jersey City is full of people like me that own and support businesses here, as well as people of many other cultures. It’s why I love JC – the diversity here is beautifully staggering, and doing its best to remain so.

Being an old pro at dealing with aggression from unintentional racism, I stepped outside so that the owner and I wouldn’t be cramped in the doorway. Atlas House had its entire front glass walls open, so my hope was to be able to talk with space, but also while being on semi-neutral ground. I took a picture of the sign, because I know how this often goes.

When the manager stepped out, his body language seemed panicked and hyper alert, so I can only imagine what had been said in the game of telephone before he had come out to speak to me. The look was quickly followed by a look of a removal bordering on possible aggression: his body language was hunching, there was very little blinking going on, but he did a very good job of orienting his weight away from me when I approached.

He also completely refused to look at me.

Not in just his eyes being elsewhere, but his head being completely turned away. It was not loud in the establishment, nor outside, and as much as I would like to chalk it up to his not being able to hear me properly, I can’t. However, once again, this is where as someone managing a business, you say “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you properly, could you please speak up” or something else to alleviate the problem. I should have accepted it as the precursor to aggressive body language (hell, I teach that precursor), and likely due to how I look, but I’m still trying to give the guy benefit of a doubt.

Now I’m sure my body language was tense as well – seeing this just days after Standing Rock was raided was already emotionally difficult, but I’m accustomed to handling that. I’ve been educating people and businesses about unintentional and intentional racism and other forms of bigotry most of my life because I exist, and see it around me repeatedly, every day. And to continue existing, I resist the white supremacist patriarchy, colonization, that many folks in the United States are indoctrinated into, but don’t recognize for what it is (which is not their fault, but they do need to wake up to it). I’d worked for years a couple blocks from the Redsk*n’s training camp. I have called in other coworkers at business meetings and in the work place for making racist and trans/queerphobic statements when it could have lost me my job, I contact companies and institutions that uphold racism, and I walk around looking like myself every day.

I explained briefly that the sign was inappropriate to indigenous folks, and asked that it could be changed. I think I said about a sentence and a half.

I tried to keep my tone level but still be heard over the minor amount of noise in the environment. I use my hands a lot when talking, and I made sure to be doing a lot of palm open and up gestures. I tried to maintain physical space, not out of any concern for myself (which other activists constantly tell me I should be more worried about, but when you work conflict resolution for a living for more than fifteen years, you get so used to setting yourself up to receive minimal damage that it becomes less a worry and more just how you naturally interact with the world), but to try and keep thing comfortable. We had ended up back in the doorway, as the manager had not come outside and planted himself firmly where he chose, so giving that space was a bit difficult.

People are not good at controlling their faces when stressed. We all know it. I’m lucky, I’ve had to refine the faces I make to minimize getting hurt at my own job for quite some time. I’ve had practice, and I still screw up. However, the sigh, disgusted and annoyed look (and I really wish I was being melodramatic here and not just good at reading body language and writing about them), and muttering of that it would get changed “but we were just having fun” just falls into more bad business management.

It also makes a person look like they got their hand slapped in the cookie jar.

It doesn’t matter how good you look in a nice suit if your hospitality skills in the face of a tough customer aren’t good. And while I wouldn’t consider an Indian or any other BIPOC asking civilly you to remove an insensitive statement (yup, I still hadn’t said racist by this point, and I wouldn’t have by the time I’d left – I was trying to keep tensions minimal) from your marketing as a tough customer, I’m decolonized. Maybe that’s why my clients like me so much. My empathy skills are customer first, if they’re not saying or doing anything harmful (and even then, maintaining empathy in the face of the tough customer prevails).

The “we were just trying to have fun” is one of the best-known tropes in colonized America for racists, sexists, and bigots. It’s also a knee jerk for men of privilege, who have been taught that dehumanizing other cultures or peoples is fun, because it’s what their culture teaches them from birth. As a Mi’kmaq Indian, I’ve heard that line thousands upon thousands of times in media, and to my face. As a person that identifies as (and am read as) femme when I feel like it, I’ve heard the line just as many times for just as many reasons from transphobic bigots and womanizers. That line has preceded and followed attempts at assault on my person in the past. The joys of being an indigenous Two Spirit in this country.

I explained, as calmly as I could, that it is not funny, a joke, to the people it effects. He argued, and I asked

“An indigenous person walks into your establishment and tells you the sign is inappropriate, and you argue?”

Which is when the manager’s body language changed, and I in turn made sure my breathing was steady, because I was being hard stared.

You’re taught in conflict resolution and self-defense that a hard stare is really one of the last warning signs before escalation and reaction. It is the “back off or I will make you back off”, and I’m very thankful that the manager did not follow the look with becoming physically aggressive. That isn’t a jab at him, he avoided the situation when he was already setting the chemistry in his body to fight mode, and that takes an incredibly amount of emotional and mental restraint.

There was a motion forward towards me first, the mouth made a rictus (teeth baring) that often follows a hard stare, and I was told “You know, I was going to change that sign, but you kept talking. So now it stays.” and, thankfully, he began to turn and walk away. Thankfully. Because he had made a clear physical crowding of space, and his body language was everything I should have instead been walking away from.

There were a few more words exchanged. I said there were other people in the area that would be hurt by this when told, and he reiterated his statement. I left, and headed in the direction of my next client, shaken and pulling up my social media.

While I don’t think this manager, or the staff at Atlas Public House are bad people by any means, they are doing poor job showing respect to a community they are looking to serve. They owe that community (not me) an apology, and need to work on their customer service.

To those looking for more info on “spirit animal” appropriation, feel free to use your Googling skills.

To the manager of Atlas Public House:

Just this past fall on October 9th, Newark Avenue saw indigenous rights protestors walking from Christopher Columbus Ave down Newark. Having stepped outside of Raval a moment, I and many others cheered them on.

Only a block or so from you, a café called Lackawanna sits and creates safe space that promotes indigenous resistance and rights, whom used to have a poster at the door that said “This Is Not Neutral Territory”. The art I mentioned earlier commissioned by them, and speaks of many things that attempt to destroy indigenous peoples, including microaggressions through cultural dehumanizing.

Only days ago, grandmothers, children, women, and men were forcibly removed from Standing Rock. They were tackled, grabbed, dragged, jailed for asking colonized peoples to wake up and take responsibility for their actions. On March 4th, people of all kinds march in NYC for indigenous rights and clean water for not only Standing Rock, but other areas, such as Flint. On March 10th, we do the same in DC.

You are surrounded by cultures of all kinds here in Jersey City. Your bar is new. I humbly request that as you get used to your new space, you do not follow the path of colonizers when they too were new in the Americas: To bite the hand that feeds you. It is a habit, once started, is hard to break.