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empty-movement · 8 years

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Recently read (and thoroughly enjoyed!) your article "20 Years of Utena Fandom." Question for you! At the end of the article, you mention you're married and have matching Utena tattoos. Frankly, this sounds like the most awesome thing ever!! Is there a story behind this? (Also: Please keep up the great work with Empty Movement website and tumblr!)

That’s very perceptive of you, Anon! There is actually a story, one I’ve told once or twice before. It’s… well, awesome could describe it, but not in the way you think. To those of you who were around for parts of it, I love you, and thank you for being there for us.

All right, everybody, hang in there because this is long. Content warnings include suicide, abuse, and rape.

When I first met Gio in 2002, it was because of SKU. I had watched the movie, I was in the middle of watching the show, and I had devoured her website, Empty Movement, trying to figure out what was going on. Then, because she was so smart and funny and interesting, I started to read her blog. She was in financial trouble at the time; she’d had a large inheritance from her father, who was dead, but her mother was terrible with money and it had been almost completely spent. They were struggling to pay the bills, and she was depressed and upset and feeling like there was nothing she could do.

And then, well, she decided to give Empty Movement away. On top of everything else, it was turning into an eight hour a day job, and she was going to have to get a full time job soon instead of going to post-secondary. The money situation was that bad. She was burnt out and unhappy, so she had decided to give the site to a friend of hers.

So on November 22, 2002, I emailed her. Basically, I congratulated her on recognizing when something was too much, and said I supported her decision to give it up. I could see from various other communities that she was getting some shit for making that decision, and I wanted to let her know that not everyone thought that way. This turned into a full-fledged conversation very quickly due to our mutual love of LOTR, and the two of us emailed back and forth for some time. Gio gave Empty Movement to her friend, Filia, and we became friends in the meantime.

That was pretty big for both of us. I mean, losing the site was big, yes, but becoming friends was monumental. We were both very, very fucked up and depressed at the time. Gio’s life plan was to find a job, support her mother as best she could until her mother died, and then kill herself. She didn’t see a future for herself. All of her hopes for going to University and becoming a doctor or an astronomer had been crushed by their financial situation, which had been directly caused by the people she loved most. The final blow was two people she considered uncles, people she’d grown up with, stealing the last ten thousand or so of their money and running.

My situation was a bit different. I was in a relationship that didn’t register to me as abusive because it was a different kind of abuse from the things I’d experienced at the home I’d run away from. My mother was mentally unstable to the point of yearly hospitalization, and she’d done a great job making me think I was worthless and useless, things I still struggle with today. I’d run away more than once throughout high school, and the last time I moved in with my boyfriend after some friends told me that I couldn’t crash on their couch anymore. I was reluctant to do it, but I had nowhere else to go. I was right to be reluctant. Over the years I was with him, he isolated me from everyone, wouldn’t teach me to drive, wouldn’t let me get a job or go to school, and was pressuring me to have children, which I did not want. My depression was so bad that some days I couldn’t get out of bed. I thought about killing myself all day every day, slightly up from when I’d lived with my mother. He treated me like I was a broken doll, one he could still play with if he put the pressure on her the right way. With everything. Sex too. I can’t begin to tell you how much of me those four years destroyed.

So me and Gio even making the leap from email to chat programs was a huge thing for us. This was early 2003, I think. I would have been 21, and Gio would have been 19. We were both extremely isolated. We both had trust issues to the point where even speaking to someone we wanted to be friends with was terrifying. We got past that. We learned to trust each other, first in very limited ways, but as we proved to each other that we weren’t going to let each other down, that trust grew.

After a while, it became evident that Filia wasn’t doing anything with Empty Movement, in spite of her promises. Gio didn’t want the site, which she still thought of as hers, to lapse into a static state, the way many sites already had. We had some long discussions about it, and in the end, she decided that as long as I was there to take the parts of the workload that she didn’t like and pay for what I could of the site, she would take it back. It was pretty unceremonious. I’m not sure if we even consulted Filia beyond telling her we were going to do it. But EM was ours again, and now that we had something to work on together and were both holding up our ends of the bargain, we trusted each other even more.

Eventually, the only thing I did was spend time on the computer, either writing, taking care of the site, or talking to Gio. My boyfriend didn’t like this, especially as I’d started to refuse sex consistently (which he sometimes ignored), and when it became evident that the doll was too broken to play with anymore, he threw me out. I had to go back and live with my mother, and no matter how much I know she loves me, living with him was better.

So the challenge then was to get through some kind of education and start making some money, Gio because her family was living on the edge of poverty and her mother had to get her nursing license renewed after years of being out of work, and me because I had to, had to, get away from my mother. We made plans. We tried to follow through on them. I got a job working nights at a 24 hour coffee place. Gio got a nighttime hotel job. We spent every spare minute working on the site and chatting online.

We met in 2004, I think. It gets blurry after so long because a lot of the middle part was all the same. I came down from Alberta to Florida to visit her. I stayed one night. We were both nervous as hell, but after we had talked for a few minutes or so we recognized each other as the person we’d spent so much time with already, and we were fine after that. It wasn’t a long visit due to the circumstances– I was road tripping with some of my family– but it was good. We had fun. You know, I can’t remember for sure, but I think we watched some of SKU.

As I said, the middle part was a whole lot of the same thing. Working shit jobs, trying to scrape up money for one thing or another, eventually going to school while working our full time jobs– Gio finished, I didn’t, because I had to move out of my mother’s place and start paying the exorbitant rents around here. We visited each other once a year. First she came up to spend Christmas with me, because she loved snow and usually never got to see it. Later, we started meeting up in New York. It is possible to do New York for two weeks on $2500 total, including flights and hotel.

After a while, we started sleeping together on these trips. It was pretty natural even though we’d both thought of ourselves as straight. There was never a whirlwind romance moment; there might have been if we weren’t still so intensely fucked up and distrustful of everything, including our own emotions. We were not healthy people, but we were pulling each other up out of our respective mires. Sometimes that was painful, sometimes it wasn’t, but it demanded so much trust from both of us that sex, even with our body issues and emotional issues, was not a big leap to make.

Then Gio got sick. I might be mixing up the timeline here; as I said, a lot of this part was very samey so it’s hard to remember what happened when. I won’t go into too much detail, but we spent a year and thousands of dollars trying to figure out what it was, and then once we knew that it was an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit, we spent another year on tenterhooks waiting for her to be able to get insurance through her mom’s work, knowing the cyst could burst at any time and if it did her entire future was fucked due to medical bills.

It didn’t burst. She got insurance, and then spent more thousands of dollars getting her operation. This is when we started to talk about becoming a permanent thing. It was clear that we weren’t going to just disappear on each other, we both bawled like babies when we had to split up at the airport, we still spent every free minute of every day chatting online even when we were both in school full time and working full time… but it was knowing that she could get another cyst at any time and have to go through that whole process again that made us start talking about her moving up to Canada.

By this time, our forum had been open for a while, and we had friends in the community. Some people knew bits and pieces of what had gone on, but mostly we kept it to ourselves. Trust issues. Despite that, we made a lot of very good friends in the SKU community, people that have been very close to us and that we value more than anything. We ended up having “cons” after a while– we called them RoseCons– where a bunch of us from the fandom would all fly out to one city and hang out for three or four days and party together. They were great. I’d love to do it again, even if it is a lot of work to set up. Literally these were the highest points of our year, not just because of RoseCon, but because it was more time we could spend together.

Gio started coming up for entire summers when she was off school once her mom had her nursing license back and Gio wasn’t supporting the entire family on her tiny paychecks. I worked at jobs I hated, gave myself nervous breakdowns from hating them so much, and eventually started drinking every night so that I could stand them enough to do them. This lasted for… two years? Three years? I was a functional alcoholic, though. I never drank until I was home for the evening. And I drank less when Gio was around, partly because I was embarrassed, and partly because having her around made things better. I’ve since kicked the habit, before you get worried. I can have a couple of drinks and not go overboard, and I don’t crave alcohol the way I used to. It was hard to kick the habit, but not as hard as smoking, which I’ve never been able to give up entirely.

The tipping point where we knew we were getting married was once when I came down to visit her– we went to Key West for the day, and somehow it was decided that we should get married and she should come up to live with me. We’d been talking about her immigrating to Canada for years by this point, and marriage had been floated as an idea, but we’d never decided one way or the other. That night it became a part of the plan. I don’t even remember what was said– there was no proposal, just an agreement that this was best.

It was still a couple years away, though. Gio had to finish school and she wanted to get some experience before coming up to Alberta so that she could get hired more easily once she was here. That’s not how that ended up working out– after six months of hunting for a job in Florida, we said fuck it, and she just came up to Canada to live. I supported us while she did all the immigration paperwork, and we got married. It was a very small ceremony. Only Syora from the forum and her boyfriend were there. I’d invited my mother, but she couldn’t come because she had errands to run that day. There’s a reason I don’t talk to her anymore.

So we were legally married in 2012. It took a couple months for the immigration paperwork to go through, but it did, and Gio was a permanent resident. Approximately two weeks after she sent out her first application, she was starting her first job as a nurse. I held on to my job as long as I could, but eventually I just crashed and burned, and then I had to spend some time unemployed so that I could recover and stop drinking.

Things have been pretty much the same ever since. I mean, there have been incidents, like the attempted stabbing that a few of you have heard about (the non-oyster-related one) (someone who hated us came at us with a knife, it’s a long story), but they’re not really relevant to the story of how and why we got together. What is, and always has been relevant, is SKU and Empty Movement. We would both probably be dead right now if it wasn’t for the show and the site. Instead, we are happily married and in a pretty good place in life, even if we still struggle with depression and I’m trying to make my way without traditional employment. That’s down to the show, and the friends we made because of it. We still hang out with people from the fandom as much as we can– the fandom has provided us with so much support and purpose over the years that we’ll probably never let it go.

We got our tattoos at RoseCon NYC, just before the whole con went to a physics lecture. I can’t even remember whether we had decided to get married then or not, but we knew it was coming even if we hadn’t said it. Mine is on the back of my neck; Gio’s is on her shoulderblade. Sometimes one of us will poke the other’s tattoo and say, “Mine!” We’re pretty disgusting with that cutesy shit, and we don’t even mean to be.

It’s kind of funny. You’d think that with all we went through, Utena and Anthy would be the ones we identify with most. But… no. It’s always Touga for me, and Saionji and Akio for her. Still, I always thought it was pretty messed up how our lives ended up mirroring Utena and Anthy’s arc. Life imitating art, I guess.

Anon, and anyone else still reading, if you hung in there for that entire thing, thank you. It’s people like you, the ones who are willing to listen to others and engage with them and be open that are the reason we’re still around, both in the fandom and probably just in general. We went through a lot of shit, but the show, the site, and the fandom were always here for us. They’re the reason we met in the first place, and the reason we made it safely all the way to marriage. We still have problems, but they’re not the huge, life-ending problems that they used to be. And that’s because of you. Thank you.

#abuse #Anonymous #rape #suicide #Utena #this is part of why I want to build a personal stories section of the site #putting this in the utena tag because it's real-life Utena and I'm alive because of the show

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