#might be just an one-off and probably is but being idiotically optimistic can be uplifting sometimes eheheh

[tea-stained]

How fucked am I if I'm actually happy to feel horrible? It feels so refreshing after having every emotion numbed down. I love this feeling of "today felt nice, something unthinkably bad will happen soon", and this overwhelming feeling of helplessness. I love being able to name them!!!

I'm used to this feeling of impending doom to the point where I just sort of accept it, but today it felt different. So powerful. Made my heart go faster. Made me feel so helpless. Made me feel alive!

And I did not even need meds to feel it!

Am I healing? Am I finally healing?

It's such a relief, to feel this way again.

I'm glad. I'm happy. I feel something I can name. I feel so many things I can name. Today was so... Productive! Even though I have not created anything, other than pleasant memories!

I thought it would be a disaster. I thought I've lost myself even further today. But no.

I'm coming back.

Wait for me, my younger self.

I will pull you back up.

We will stand here, soon, arm by arm, side by side.

We will be one again.

Today, I have found you.

But one day, together, we will reach the me.

[st-just]

Semi-coherent Queen’s Gambit thoughts

Overall I really did enjoy the show, even if it might be a bit shallow, once you dig into it. Or, well,, having thought about it I could write a damning denunciation on request, anyway (but that’s true of basically everything I watch, so). Aesthetically gorgeous, of course. But honestly, what’s most interesting to me is how, like, deceptively upbeat and optimistic and generally joyful show it is?

Okay, so firstly – I really do mean it when I say it’s aesthetically beautiful. This show has singlehandidly convinced me that every change in fashion since the ‘60s has been a strict downgrade. The soundtrack’s absolutely sublime as well, both the licensed tracks and just the score – I’m almost certainly going to just be listening to the soundtrack as walking around music for quite a while. I’m no expert on cinematography, but there were a few scenes that were absolutely just showing off, and I sure as hell enjoyed the show (the American championship montage, obviously, and the pull-out in the Moscow hotel. And, well, pretty much every important chess game/tournament). Anna Taylor-Joy absolutely makes the show, and literally anyone whose watched more than two minutes of it probably agrees. Has one of those faces that is just amazing at getting across emotions and ideas without actually saying anything (and without looking like an idiot trying to do so). Really, the comparison that springs to mind is Mathew Rhys and Kerri Russel in The Americans, which is just about the highest praise I, personally, can give. So, yeah, give her and the people in costuming and set design Emmys, at a minimum.

And – getting critiques out of the way, in descending order of how much I care. Jolene is absolutely the most stereotypically Black Best Friend sort of character imaginable, and the conversation where she basically looks at the camera and says she doesn’t just exist to be Beth’s guardian angel doesn’t actually help that much. Beth finally summoning up the self belief and willpower to flush away her lifelong pill habit in the middle of a tournament and playing the next day without any sort of problems was a bit twee. Between the show’s utterly despair inducing vision of the life the women Beth went to school with have and Julie’s whole vitriolic anti-model spiel the show can come off a bit #notlikeothergirls (incidentally, whoever got the French a national stereotype of being sexy, well-dressed and sophisticated deserves a bigger statue in Paris). And, yeah, it’s not unjustifiable or even, like, unusually bad, but Beth hitting rock bottom does end up looking a lot like a playboy spread.

But, okay – when I say the series is remarkably upbeat what I mostly (magical addiction-curing character development aside) mean is that the world (or at last, the world of chess) is shown as fundamentally uplifting, kind, and pure. The conflict of the show is either the result of forced interactions with the rest of society, or Beth struggling with her own damage. Her birth mother and father, the orphanage, her utter piece-of-shit of an adoptive father, the other girls at school – these are all, broadly, terrible. But chess itself is an entirely positive part of her life, and while some of the people she meets through it are rude or condescending at first, they basically all very quickly grow to respect her and become extremely invested in her well-being and success (her relationship with her adoptive mother also becomes more positive and loving basically entirely in proportion to how supportive she is of Beth’s chess career). All of her rivals turn out to be gracious losers and perfect gentleman, and also usually fall in love with her (which, well, fair), and the closest things the series has to a defined, hateable villain (beyond Beth’s self-destructive tendencies) is her adoptive father,  not anyone in the chess world that consumes the vast majority of the plot.

The show’s take on gender roles and period-appropriate patriarchy. There is, to borrow and probably butcher (I believe) Kate Manne’s there is quite a lot of sexism in the show, but almost no misogyny. Which is to say, Beth has to deal with plenty of condescension, double-standards, suffocating expectations, and generally being being looked at askance, and the show is absolutely crystal clear that actually living up to those expectations is a miserable, soul-crushing, dream-killing husk of a life. But when she ignores them and demands to be accepted as a serious chess-player, once she shows that she’s as good as she acts like she is, everyone just, well, lets her. There’s no enforcement mechanism to the patriarchy, or if there is Beth is too exceptional to ever even see it. And no one ever becomes hateful or violently insecure when shown up by her – quite the opposite, really.

Semi-related, but for a show set during the Cold War it’s got an oddly positive view of the Soviet Union. Benny’s rant about how people actually care about chess and give it prestige, and how chess players there actually work together and cooperate instead of being obsessed with individual achievement (which the rest of the show goes on to make very clear is a virtue and something worth copying). There was a bit in the last episode along the same lines that actually made me smile – when the State Department/CIA goon asks Beth to tell the reporters how being in Moscow has made her proud to be an American, when she clearly (imo) is rather fond of the sudden adoring crowds and the reverence her sport is treated with.

Beyond jokes about the there being another universe 10 degrees off from this one where the whole thing is a VN where you beat each potential love interest in chess to unlock them, the comparison that comes to mind is honestly Among Others by Jo Walton. Not for, like, tone or subject matter or anything, but just for the general arc of ‘Weird Girl in mid 20th century deals with horrifying childhood trauma and alienation from the social life expected of her by diving headfirst into nerdy/esoteric subculture”.

But yeah, anyway, gorgeous, enjoyable show. Would watch again. Give Taylor-Joy an Emmy. Thank you again to @triviallytrue and @rox-and-prose for the recommendation. 

[angstidote]

Hello. I am back, somewhat anyway (part time?). I needed to take some time to detox from tumblr because, as I discovered when I pulled back for a moment, I was spending a solid 6+ hours a day on it. And that’s not an exaggeration…it was even interfering with my day job. Even after logging out, my fingers kept clicking the hot-bar button, until I had to remove it completely. Then, the time it freed up… so. much.. free… time... .. . … .

Not healthy. Not balanced.

So I spent the time I gained reflecting on some things that haven’t felt so great for me, starting with some pre-verbal patterns related to fear and self-esteem, and then getting derailed by the disappearance of one of my cats. The latter brought up a lot of fear around not knowing what happened to him, guilt around feeling like I should have been able to protect him somehow, and anger with humanity in general (even though, rationally, I don’t know if a human is even responsible). More than anything the last month and a half has been a painful reminder of how little control I really have, since I guess I tend to forget it. I can predict and therefore steer so many things in a predictable way...

Anyway…it’s not something I’m proud of by any means. No one likes to face that they’re being manipulative and arrogant, but better to put it out where I can see it.

I’ve also been reflecting a lot on negative messages I’ve been accidentally sending myself. For a year or two now I’ve had it in my head that I’m supposed to be different than I am, that the way my brain and body work should have changed more than it has, and…I’ve been really running myself ragged and causing myself a lot of unnecessary emotional pain, basically by telling myself that I need to do more than I’m probably capable of.

I was talking to my teacher about how painful it is physically for me to be with people because other people’s psychic energy is just so overwhelming and invasive. There is no mood that can be hidden from me. I feel intention so no matter what someone’s mouth and body say, I have an instinctual and physical understanding of what was intended. And this is really helpful for understanding and working with people, but it’s also taxing as fuck and downright awful sometimes.

I once went to a Buddhist temple for an overnight vigil in Kyoto where I ended up talking to a Reiki practitioner who offered to help correct something…a headache maybe? I warned her I was sensitive to that kind of thing but she assured me it would be fine so I said hell yeah then, ‘cause I mean free Reiki, but no exaggerating, like 10 seconds into it I fucking fainted and had to spend the entire night recovering alone in the monks’ quarters.

So anyway, I was asking my teacher for advice on how not to get overwhelmed, only to have her start in on psychic barriers. And I got kindof irritated because I know how to do that—as well as can be done in my case—what I wanted to know was how to take them down but not be overwhelmed. She kept telling me that I’m an exceptionally sensitive person and that, as a result, I need more time in silence than most, but I was like, angry about this even though it’s the truth. Angry at myself.

It pisses me off that I can’t stay perfectly calm and tranquil when I’m with others because it makes me feel like I must be doing something wrong, which is what I was actually trying to ask her. “What am I doing wrong?” Because I’ve been studying myself in this situation for like 2 years now!! I’m not telling myself anything negative about my capabilities, I’m not assuming anything not situation-specific about the people I’m with, I’m not scared of anything that I can figure out, and I’m not believing in any particular thing about anyone. But, if I don’t keep some kind of barrier up (which kinda necessarily feels like holding a defensive stance and therefore is not completely relaxed), I feel like I’m just hemorrhaging energy.

What it comes down to, as I told her, is that I feel like I shouldn’t have limits like this. Her reply to this was to laugh at me and say, “Yeah…no. We all have limits when in physical form.”

And I mean…I guess I never thought about that seriously.

I mean, I know that I if I do certain things I’ll die, and that my brain just ain’t wired to do math, but over the last few years, if there’s only one thing I’ve learned it’s the vital importance of not simply accepting things as they’re perceived. Whatever the mind says should be considered but, like, always with a grain of salt so…I guess I’ve just reached a point where I don’t trust that limits are real, even for my own body…except that in this case, in response, my body is telling me that I’m an idiot.

I know that, as a person with asthma, there are limits to what I can do physically without an inhaler, so why I think this should be different, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because there’s an emotional component to the energy exchange? But over the last two years I’ve become increasingly focused on this particular limit because no matter what I try I can’t seem to overcome it. No depth of self-inquiry, no length or purity of meditation, and no trial-by-fire will fix this issue AND IT’S BEEN MAKING ME PSYCHOTIC.

Imma be real, it’s been seriously poisoning the very peace of mind I’m fighting so hard to maintain in the first place.

When I first moved to Japan last year to try and BURN THIS WEAKNESS OUT OF MYSELF Natalie said to me, “You’re like a healer-class character who doesn’t know how to ration her mana.” And although she was talking about a different situation, I have found myself remembering this time after time after time, and I think that this is yet another situation that metaphor applies to.

If I sit back and look at this objectively, having the ability to instantly know what another person is feeling is an insanely useful skill, but yeah, it’s never gonna benefit me in huge groups of people because there’s no chance I’m not gonna get burned out or overwhelmed.

I’m sure that it’s as Lissa said, that my purpose is not to expand out in every direction infinitely, but to figure out how to best use my resources, whatever they are, to their highest potential. It’s in this way that I’ll become able to elevate the world around me, not by becoming all things to all people…which is impossible, yet is what I’ve been thinking I have to do.

This would also account for why I’ve been feeling so unsure of myself and what direction to move in. I feel like my subconscious has been staring down the barrel of having to do the impossible, and has become paralyzed as a result.

Of course, the current political climate isn’t exactly uplifting either... Everyone around me is depressed and stressed out and, basically, that means that I’m depressed and stressed out so long as I’m in the same room they are (or if I make the mistake of reading the news). But while I certainly don’t plan to bury my head in the sand, truthfully there’s not a lot I can do about much of it right now. When there’s something I can do I know my friends will draw attention to it, and otherwise…I legitimately think it might be better for me if I shift my focus somewhat, away from the things that are filling me with angst and back to the things that have allowed me to feel loving and optimistic.

I mean, the things you allow yourself to ruminate on are the things that have the most power over you, and the only person who can ruin my peace of mind over an extended period of time is me, so I need to shift my attention away from the past and the things I can’t help, and focus on the things I can.

I’ve been painting a little lately, thanks to Laura. She’s been encouraging and reminding me that art is meant to be finished then left behind, rather than infinitely planned then belatedly picked apart until it’s dead, which is what I do with everything I produce presently. I also signed up for a write-a-book-in-6-weeks kind of writing course to help give me a little more direction and some artificial deadlines.

I know I have the ability to lift people up rather than drag them down, myself included, and I’m going to try and take a dose, and stay a dose, of my tumblr namesake.