#they talk about nuance and then forget that alcohol is a major drug

[mmmetrulyhopefully]

Europeans not realising that alcohol being a big part of their culture is a bad thing are so tiring.

[ceciliatan]

Writing the Other: Conflict and Inclusion Panel Discussion Recap from #ICFA40

Writing the Other: Conflict and Inclusion ICFA 40 Panel with JR Richard, Keffy Kehrli, Usman Malik, K. Tempest Bradford, Nisi Shawl

This panel did not have a description in the online schedule, but I marked it of obvious interest to me! What follows in this post is my attempt to capture what was said. I believe I caught about 60% of the remarks, so this is not all of it, and sometimes I may have mis-typed, mis-heard, or misunderstood what was said, so please do not take these as direct quotes. They may be paraphrased. Please check with the individuals here before you quote them based on this pseudo-transcript.

The panel began with the panelists introducing themselves:

Nisi Shawl: I am a writer and editor, and increasingly this year a teacher! And I coauthored a book called Writing the Other with Cynthia Ward. I teach classes on Writing the Other with this woman to my right…

K. Tempest Bradford: I am a sf/f author and I’ve been co-teaching for Writing the Other workshops, and I admin the classes we don’t teach ourselves. We’ve been doing this for 4-5 years and it’s my fault Nisi is teaching more classes!

Usman Malik: I am a writer of sf/f, subspecializing in horror.

Keffy Kehrli: I am a sf/f writer and I only have shorts stories out. And I edit Glittership, an LGBTQ magazine We dont restrict to LGBTQ authors, so I get a lot of people “writing the other.” I’m also getting PhD in genetics so if I space out I’m probably thining about genes.

JR Richard: I’m a sf/f writer and playwright and I teach creative writing, playwriting, design, and slam poetry to school age children.

Nisi: The first thing I wanted to ask the panel for are some examples of inclusion and conflict in writing the other.

JR: I think that for me, it’s about educating ourselves: as someone with privilege and someone not with privilege—I am female and queer and I go by she/they, but I’m white. And in a previous panel someone said writers go “oh, I have awoken! so now I have learned and it’s done!” And that’s not how it works…? You are always evolving and learning. I have learned what is my lane and what is not my lane. I have learned when people are faking it. I am also Jewish and just read a musical that was written by people who aren’t Jewish and they got what a mitzvah is wrong. Being wrong can be hard for those with privilege. Conflict is hard for people with privilege to accept. When they say “I don’t even see color, I don’t care if people are pink and blue…” they are skirting a conflict that makes them uncomfortable.

Nisi: But do you have some examples?

Keffy: Specific works to cite… I’m trying to think. I tend to forget things that really piss me off. So I have trouble citing examples. There are two things I see a lot when it comes to conflict and inclusion. If you’ve read a lot of sf/f—especially older stuff even beyond just Tolkien—a lot of the models you get for conflict in fantasy works tend be to problematic. They tend to include the other as the enemy. So if you base inclusion on how you read it as a kid, it may be problematic to start with. Tolkien is a great example of how not to do it. The second thing is if you have come up with a villain and you realize you have a very white, straight story, and now you decide oh, I’m going to make this character black, you will possibly run into a very serious stereotype without having realized it. If you put in a queer character without considering how the intersection of that identity with stereotypes you will run right into a problem with them. I see it in submissions where someone decided to make a character queer without seeing how it impacts the story.

Usman: My thought process over the last few years has been A) when I write a story I don’t write the other, I write ME. But you need people who have lived that role. If they write that story, they write about their own experience. That is your cement block for me. We need representation in every sector you can think of, every art. B) Great writers or anyone worth their salt are trying to be authentic. Authenticity is the heart of all good art. It doesn’t matter if you need to know intersectionalism — it’s great if you do, but you don’t need to know any of that if you are working with authenticity and honesty. I have a story set in inner Lahore, Pakistan. I have lived in Lahore, Pakistan, but not in inner Lahore where my parents had lived. So I went back home and visited people there and then I wrote that story. Those are my people and I still felt I had to go and study them. In the Internet, in what I call the Troll World, the ones who are complaining are inauthentic to what they are doing. They are bad writers. That’s how I think about it.

Tempest: There are a lot of conversations about authenticity but also Own Voices writing, people writing within their own identity category. They are from the identity and they are writing that identity. But there becomes a conflict in which their authenticity is challenged by people whose idea of that identity comes from inauthentic things! (laughter) Kate Elliot gave a really great lecture on this about a review of Ken Liu’s book Grace of Kings. This one reviewer was like “when I set out to read this, I thought I would find an authentic experience of Asian culture, like what I saw in a movie I saw one time.” (audience groans) They have this view of what is “authentic” which is often a stereotypical or really offensive view, and if you do anything else, the audience is very against it. This also causes a problem with people who are trying to write the other and have actually learned the lesson and are doing it well. Say they write outside of their racial cultural whatever, and it’s very nuanced and layered and great, and they send it to an agent or editor. They get told “but you’re white, so you can’t write about Native Americans or black characters” or whatever. Or the editor will say this is not realistic because the black people are not in a gang. The Native Americans are not alcoholics. You didn’t write those stereotypes, but because it’s not what they expect they think it’s wrong. So the conflict comes when what do you do when your editor tells you something like that? We tell them: don’t let them make you put racist nonsense into your book. You may need to call an expert in the subject who has some clout. This happens a lot.

Nisi: I think, Usman, you do write the other when you write someone from a different economic class. You also wrote about orphans. Those are not you. But I take your point about your representation of the other. Recent someone was telling me how “diverse” the cast was from Crazy Rich Asians and I was like: it’s not diverse at all!

Tempest: They’re all Asian! Using the word “diverse” to mean “not white” is every problematic.

Nisi: Who is writing what and who’s including whom—in their anthologies and their publishing stables—those are questions we’re asking.

Keffy: I can say for Glittership I try to be as inclusive as I can, but it’s always a caveat because you can’t be perfectly inclusive. Because there are a limited number of stories, but there are an unlimited number of intersections. Usman gave a perfect example. It’s OwnVoices because it’s Pakistani but it’s not OwnVoices because it’s not inner Lahore. I have one benefit over anthology editors in that Glittership is ongoing, whereas an anthology is out. If you fucked up and put no women in it you’re stuck with it. Inclusion is a process. I’m always trying to reach out to people I don’t have represented. Sometimes though they send me something that I just don’t like. I try to write the nicest rejection letter I can so that they’ll send me more. One of my problems is that some of the groups I don’t have enough fiction from is that I don’t have enough authors sending them to me. Part of it is that there’s a perspective that LGBTQ fiction is very white and that you can have all the types of queers as long as they’re white. I have to be very specific I want more writers of color.

Nisi: But can you clarify? The authors you reach out to are …?

Keffy: I don’t publish any fiction that isn’t queer. There are many authors who I would love to have, but they haven’t written anything fitting for my magazine. I will literally just email people and say “yo, send me stories.” It’s so easy for poeple to get into the idea that if they don’t see a story from people like them, then they think they shouldn’t send theirs either. Sometimes as an author you don’t want to try. No one wants to get the rejection that is like “well, but none of them are drug dealers.” That’s rejection and getting stabbed in the heart. It’s on ongoing process. I go through Fiyah Lit Mag and email all their contributors “Hey got ay queer stuff?”

Tempest: I really feel like in sf/f we have a giant problem where there are not enough editors who are not white cis men. This is especially a problem in anthologies. Most of the major year’s bests are compiled by white cisgender men. The exceptions are like Ellen Datlow, which is great, she’s there because of her seniority, but sometimes there’s not a lot of new people being brought into that. Every time I hear about a new years best it’s edited by John Q Whitefellow. When it comes to talking about stuff like World Fantasy and them not inviting and black people or women to be guests of honor for example. They just invite NK Jemisin and if she says no, they just go back to John Q Whiteguy. They say there aren’t enough others around. (They’re wrong.)

Nisi: When I edited an anthology, Nalo Hopkinson was asked to do it first. And she said no, you should ask Nisi instead. One thing we can do is keep pushing off the requests to someone else you know. I have edited three anthologies now and helped edit a few others. I make a spreadsheet and I track where are things coming from, what races are they, are they bi or queer or cis, et cetera. I don’t go for a quota but I am very conscious with trackable data about who I am getting.

Tempest: It’s good we have some editors who make an effort to understand things outside their understanding. I think Neil Clarke and John Joseph Adams do a good job with that. JJA does a good job because as the SERIES editor for a year’s best he brings in annual editors who are from more diverse points of view. He’s had Charles Yu and NK Jemisin. And then that influence rolls on.

Keffy: I do see a definite impact of my identity on my submissions. I see many more trans and nonbinary stories and authors than I did at Shimmer magazine. There I saw many women who were driven by the female editors there. As a transman I know that is impacting who feels comfortable submitting to me. But so is the fact I’m white. People want to hope they’re sending to a warm, welcoming place for them.

JR: The situation in my hometown in the theater community is very segregated. Nebraska has about a million people and it’s ridiculously segregated. There was busing when I was in school. I produced a show called Woman in Omaha. The show had women each given 5 minutes to do a thing under a pink tent. I told them I went to Omaha Central High School and I haven’t done anything at The Union, which is in the middle of the black area of town. Me and my husband were the only two white actors they had that season. I asked my friend Beau if she would co-produce with me. Most of the theaters in town will completely whitewash a cast. The white producers keep saying [non-white] people don’t show up to auditions. But it’s because they think they won’t be welcome in that space. Denise Chapman tells a story that a guy came in to audition with his dreads inside a hat like he was trying to hide it. She told him, look be yourself, and he just began to glow once he could be himself. I think A Woman in Omaha was really great and a moment of intersectionality. Anoterh example, we were doing Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin; it is all about being a black woman in musical theater. And in the Q & A after this white woman in the back stood up and said “well, but why aren’t all of you auditioning at the Playhouse?” It’s because the Playhouse’s idea of being inclusive or adding diversity is to do The Color Purple and Raisin in the Sun.

Nisi: Which is like 60 years old. Let’s talk about is conflict inherent in inclusion? Does inclusion automatically mean exclusion?

JR: I hope inclusion doesn’t mean exclusion! I think it means I can walk into a room with people of diferent faiths but all have a respect from what each of us are doing. Discomfort in inclusion, when you have grown up as white as the default in Omaha, Nebraska, it can be uncomfortable to step out of that and realize white is NOT the default and then be scared to mess up and not be inclusive. If you’re not uncomfortable in a situation either you are not pushing yourself enough or you are comfortable in your little box.

Keffy: I think conflict is inherent in inclusion but it’s also just as much in exclusion. Conflict that has been externalized I brought inside and you have to deal with it. I think that’s where a lot of the discomfort comes from. It’s not about whether black actors get in the door, it’s about whether they’re being treated correctly once they’re inside. That’s part of it. It’s a reframing of the conflict that already exists. I don’t think inclusion automatically means exclusion, but sometimes inclusion just moves the exclusion line elsewhere. Like with the expanding acronym of LGBTQ etc where do you cut off the letters? Who is left off when the bus leaves the stop? I try to be aware of that. Being a queer magazine there are people who don’t think they’re being excluded.

Usman: Exclusion versus inclusion — usually exclusion is a variant of colonization. If someone is doing that, the end result is always supremacy of some sort. Whether it happens by set mechanisms or systemic change, conflict is going to happen. The other thing is you know we were talking about editors and submission before. ICFA and the sf/f world is very different from the MFA world and the horror world. A horror antho came out by a well-known, big-time writer and I was reading the TOC. Out of 27 stories, one was by a woman. That editor is a friend of mine. I brought it up, and he came on my page and got mad. I don’t think people are deliberately being evil. But people are too arrogant to admit that things should change. There is a lack of humility on the people who are perpetuating the system. Even in the LGBTQ community there can be that arrogance. Another thing when you are a 16 or 20 year old brown kid sitting out there, they don’t know what we’re talking about. This is a very European and North-American centric discussion. We are already excluding 90 percent of the world.

Tempest: Then people who are rarely excluded claim that inclusion makes them excluded. Like if there is a “slot” for a woman in an anthology they feel that slot might have been taken away from them. I had a conversation with a co-worker that every country has one representative in the U.N. He felt America should have a bigger say. But why? Why should that bother him? I was like: what are you talking about. Of course it should be one each. But he was thinking America is the best, we deserve more etc because that’s what he’s been taught. So in his mind automatically America should get more seats in the UN. But in anthologies they’ll say yeah these are the “best” even if they haven’t made any effort to reach out to other cultural contexts. They’ll say “You can’t ‘exclude’ these (white authors) because that’s exclusion!” There’s a weird sense of fairness to these people. When I did the reading challenge. This one guy was like “oh you’re right I’ve only read one women in five years!” But when I suggested he read only women for a year he was like “But that wouldn’t be fair!” like that was going “too far.” As if one year versus five would swing the balance too far toward women even though he just admitted that only reading one woman in five years was too little.

Nisi: I was doing a reading at a place in New Orleans through a college there. We went to a home in a neighborhood. Outside black kids were playing with their bicycles and baseballs and the organizers told me I want those kids to come to this reading because I don’t want them to think this isn’t for them.

Keffy: Many things have been improved by the Internet. In the days of postal submissions I would not get stories from Nigeria. So there is more outreach than there was. But I run into the problem that there are countries where if an author sent me a story they could be putting their life in danger. The Brazilian elections recently, they elected an extremely anti-queer president. He’s Super-Trump. But right after that, I went through my submissions and I had submissions from Brazil. There are people who are going that far to get their message out. Most of the people of color who send me things are part of a diaspora in some way, and rarely from the indigenous countries. It’s hard to reach out.

Usman: I think the organizations are very smug. SFWA and the others, they feel they are doing a lot of outreach. They don’t get a lot of funding. Arts have lost their funding. But we have Codex and SFWA and ICFA, but how connected are we with the rest of the world? When is World Fantasy going to be “World” Fantasy? It’s taken ten years for the most briliant writer in India to get a reprint into Nightmare magazine. The way we know about Vandana Singh and Maryanne Mohanraj is because we’ve MET them. They’ve been at the cons. What about all the out of the country writers?

Nisi: Yeah. A lot of the people I know are from Clarion West.

Tempest: But that’s where the whole rolling down the hill thing happens. You open the door a little wider each time. But for people outside the US it’s a different trajectory. The staff on the Writing Excuses cruise give a scholarship for writers of color. It’s a networking opportunity. We have all these people now in our network. Con or Bust is another organization that was started because of POC being economically disadvantaged.

Nisi: I tried to talk about this in an essay I wrote called “Unqualified.” One way you are made to feel unwelcome is by a high economic bar. Lowering that bar proves you are welcome. One who is really reaching out is Neil Clarke who is reaching out to people of different nations. About the cascading effect of when you open opportunities to clueful allies, if you open up to people of color, then again we can further that. Alex Jennings, Ghita, all of these are people stamped with the approval of science fiction credibility, and they can now open the road further for other people.

JR: I also want to talk about elitism here in the US that I see a lot of with my students. I run a playwriting workshop in a special ed program. Often they have never had a creative writing class of any kind, ever. I also work in low income public schools. A lot of the time there are refugees or kids in low income families and there is such a gatekeeping. You have to have a cover page. You have to use Times new roman font. Etc. Stories are rejected for these gatekeeping reasons. I have one refugee kid from out of the country and he had written a beautiful story. He had written it on his phone. We had to figure out how to get it off his phone. We had to figure out how to get it out of there and reformat it and all these things (and then it wasn’t even accepted). I went to an MFA program but not everyone can do that.

Nisi: Not everyone can take 6 weeks out of their lives for Clarion even if they get a scholarship.

Keffy: There are such problems with so-called standard manuscript format. I don’t really care. I get things in all kinds of fonts. It’s in Word. I just change it. There is no standard anymore. With postal submissions there was a high barrier to entry. But do any two magazines have the same format now? I had to copy my whole story into a notepad file to submit it in plain text into on magazine’s submission form… I decided never to do it again. Some of it is just… ugh. The thing is, I didn’t know anything about any of this until I started going to conventions. I would go to panels of editors, some of whom will remain nameless, but they would go on these tears about the (sarcasm) horrible things writers did like using the wrong font and how can anyone take that writer seriously? I have anxiety disorder so I was so worried I didn’t get absolutely everything right. I was afraid I didn’t speak the right lingo. So I am trying to make my submission handle-able for me and my co-editor. We have a submission form to make it doable for us, but it’s important when you are curating anything which things are really barriers to entry.

Tempest: What information someone has access to so often gets brushes aside. Someone types something into the Internet and they don’t know where they land has the wrong information. There are a lot of scammers out there. The people who get taken advantage of is because they accidentally landed in the wrong place. They weren’t dumb or not savvy. The only reason I know anything is I once opened the right promotional email and ended up here instead of the wrong place. and it must be even easier to land in the wrong place if you’re not from North America.

Keffy: Like JR said, there are a huge amount of places where they don’t have computers but they all have mobile phones. There are kids right now writing full novels in the back of the English class on their phone.

JR: There was a teacher at our school who was holding back giving notebooks to the kids because they had to “earn” them. Me and my boss were so mad at that. They are only reading white men from the 1930s and so if we go into the class and we say we’re going to write poetry they go “yuck! ugh!” because they think of writing as something that is for “him” and not for themselves. And I say no, we’re going to write what YOU want to write.

Nisi: OK, let’s open it to questions since we’ve got 45 minutes left. Oh no wait, only 15 minutes left! Where did the time go!

Tempest: We got talking.

(Then came questions from the audience but my fingers are cramping so I’m going to stop typing.)

from cecilia tan https://ift.tt/2Hp1KkE via IFTTT

[jillmckenzie1]

Pressure Drop

As many of us do, the arrival of the year’s end is a time for me to look back. If I were to sum it up, 2019 was all about surprise. Putting aside the absolute insanity of our politics, the year in film has been wild as hell. We saw both the Star Wars and MCU franchises come to a temporary end. We saw films about cathartic cults, flicks involving doppelgangers, and a number of movies examining class warfare. Perhaps strangest of all, we saw one of the best performances of the year delivered by Adam Sandler.

Maybe it’s not so strange, though! I’ll grant you that a cursory look through Sandler’s filmography is dire, to say the least. The majority of his films are bro-ey comedies where he’s doing little more than dicking around with his friends and getting paid for it. I generally don’t begrudge people enjoying a thing, and I’ve read numerous times that Sandler is a genuinely good dude. The sad fact is that his comedies aren’t for me.

It doesn’t matter if they’re for me, because his movies have made billions at the box office. Quite a lot of people love his comedy, and in order to be a successful comedian, you’ve got to have a keen understanding of human behavior. Sandler might play the fool, but he’s far from an idiot. He pays attention and files those little behavioral tics away for later. Once in a while, he’ll even explore the dark side.

Along with his comedies, he’s played a jaded movie star in Funny People, a man annihilated by 9/11 in Reign Over Me, and a desperately lonely entrepreneur in Punch-Drunk Love. When Sandler has the right material — and I’m not kidding here — he can not only hold his own against anyone, but he can also deliver acting that’s skilled and nuanced. Sandler continues to prove that with his bravura performance in the new film Uncut Gems. It’s by no means a film for everyone, but those attuned to its panicky rhythms won’t forget it.

Some people experience addiction through their struggles with drugs or alcohol. Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) is a little different. There’s a great yawning void inside him that he fills with near-constant chaos. How did he get to that point? We’re never told outright, but brief asides tell us everything we need to know about his likely beginnings and probable end.

Howard operates a store in the midst of Manhattan’s Diamond District. It’s small, claustrophobic, and the dual security entrances give Howard a much-needed buffer between himself and whatever likely pissed-off person he’s dealing with. He’s constantly hustling, and his associate Demany lures in potential clients for wildly overpriced sales. Surrounded by valuable stones, Howard yearns for the deal that will push him over the top.

The acquisition of a black opal from Ethiopia might be the deal he’s waiting for. Sure, Howard feels a connection to it due to the Ethiopian Jews who unearthed it. His larger connection is the upcoming auction of the black opal and its potential value of over one million dollars. Making the deal even sweeter is the arrival of basketball player Kevin Garnett, who sees the opal and is bewitched by it. He asks Howard if he can “hold onto it” for luck at that evening’s game and offers his blinged-out championship ring for collateral. Howard says yes, and this is only the first of many, many poor decisions he’ll make.

You’d think that would be stressful enough for Howard, yet he immediately pawns Kevin’s ring, then takes the money and places a ridiculously big bet on the game. This gets the attention of his brother-in-law and loan shark Arno (Eric Bogosian), to whom he owes a lot of money. He’s accompanied by Phil (Keith Williams Richards) and Nico (Tommy Kominik), two legbreakers who would happily kick Howard’s ass up and down the street. There’s also Howard’s wife Dinah (Idina Menzel), who views him as a loudmouthed joke, and his girlfriend Julia (Julia Fox), who has her own struggles.

In the past, we’ve talked about the twin mistakes filmgoers sometimes make with 1) assuming that the main character of a film should be likable and 2) assuming that a film should be enjoyable. That is nowhere close to correct here, and while Uncut Gems is a hell of a good movie, it’s also a two-hour panic attack of a film that follows around an unrepentant scumbag. Trust me, you won’t be bounding out of the theater with a spring in your step.

Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie have directed a grimy and explosive film that would be right at home in a Times Square theater in the 1970s. Set in a New York City thoroughly scrubbed clean by gentrification, the Safdies specialize in digging between the cracks and showing us the desperate people who view every day as a battle. It’s that desperation that fuels the film, and their pacing is relentless. Layered on top is a pulsing synth-based soundtrack by experimental electronic musician Oneohtrix Point Never. He creates a constant environment of unease, never quite allowing viewers to settle in and relax.

Written by the Safdies and Ronald Bronstein, the screenplay is a marvel on several fronts. First, it excels at dropping us into the pure chaos of Howard’s world and revealing character through action. We stick with Howard’s point of view throughout, yet time is always taken to show people reacting to him with bemusement, annoyance, contempt, and rage. The script also understands that, regardless of what a person is addicted to, addiction is a black hole that cannot be filled. That’s the point of addiction, and the screenplay never moralizes and treats Howard as a cautionary tale. We’re dropped into his shoes and taken for the ride, whether we like it or not.

What makes the ride bearable is a lead actor that’s innately likable. Not everybody in film has that warmth, and while I’m a great admirer of Edward Norton’s skill as an actor, he often comes off as cold. If he had played Howard, the movie would have been a nightmare. Adam Sandler’s charisma helps to draw us in, and we worry about the end result of his poor decisions. Howard is a perpetual motion machine, always moving, talking, plotting. He lives on the edge, and he’s driven by delusional goals. Sandler has the fanatic’s gleam in his eye, and he always knows when to crank it up or throttle it back depending on the situation. It’s a performance of enormous skill and discipline that deserves recognition.

Uncut Gems is very much a Your-Mileage-May-Vary kind of film. The Safdie Brothers have zero interest in making a crowd-pleaser. Their artistic ambitions are highly specific, and the kinds of people that adore Adam Sandler movies like Billy Madison and The Wedding Singer will positively despise his newest film. That’s fine since real art has a distinctive point of view and the courage to stand by it. Uncut Gems.is art and it’s one of the best films of the year.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/pressure-drop/

[aratdragon]

We’ve known each other since we were 14, so 1/3rd of my life. We watched each other grow up, we know all the nuances of each other’s personalities. I helped you through the end of a 5 year relationship with one of my best friends and we grew so, so close during that. I was in an abusive, toxic relationship, and I cheated on him with you. You credited yourself for “getting me out of the relationship,” which I needed to get out of, but you turned cheating into something that seemed redeemable for you. We continued to have sex, pretty much meaningless, until the 3 month mark hit, when we realized we had feelings. I was still healing from my past relationship and didn’t want to be in a new one. You still pressured me and rushed me - saying things like “I want you to be more available to me” or “I just want to talk to you all the time.” I kept you at an arms length, letting you in more and more until about a week and a half ago, when I called you my boyfriend for the first time. But, as I lay here, so sad, I am reflecting on some of the problems in our relationship, and it’s hard to deny the fact that they’re, I don’t know the right word, ominous, I suppose. 

1. You haven’t been there for me when I needed real emotional support. When my ex and I first broke up, you never asked me how I was. You even went as far to say I was a bad person for what I had done. All you cared about was how your ex felt - seeing she had found out about us sleeping together during the whole ordeal. About a month later, I got really, really drunk one night and ended up in a hotel room, covered in vomit, with bruises and scratches all over my body. I called you and told you that I needed you as my friend, not somebody I was sleeping with. You said “well, as your friend, I’m disappointed in you.” Recently, I had to face the year anniversary of my abortion. I told you it was a hard day for me, and that all I wanted was peace. That night, when I was joking with our friends in our group chat (one who I had previously dated, not seriously), you got upset with me for the way we were joking around. This wasn’t something new to you, you knew the nature of my friendships, but because we were now in a relationship, you wanted those friendships to change. You were yelling at me, completely forgetting the fact that I was already struggling - because your own feelings clouded your respect for mine. Then, most recently, you got a text from an anonymous website saying that a past partner of yours tested positive for an STD. I told you that if you’re worried, you should be tested (you’ve never gotten a test before), and that if you had slept with somebody recently, while we weren’t together, I’d rather not know about it. You accused me of not trusting you. I promised I did, but I knew you had gone on a few dates, but I didn’t know where they led. Then, I told you that I was going to get tested, just to make sure - seeing I have an auto immune disease and any health issue could be major for me. You accused me yet again of not trusting you, saying that my words and my actions didn’t align. You didn’t want me to get tested, as to prove my trust for you, or maybe you were worried that you did give me something and you didn’t want me to know...whatever the reason may have been, you didn’t want me to get tested, risking my own health. 

2. Jealousy. Admittedly, I have a history of infidelity, infidelity with you, specifically. And admittedly, I had tinder on my phone (even though I never used it) for much too long. I see those faults and I recognize them. I’m not an angel. However, your jealousy is getting overpowering. You claim it stems from the night with Rohit, when we were all very drunk. You and Dave had passed out, so just Rohit and I were talking. We weren’t flirting, we weren’t talking about anything sexual. In fact, we were talking about his father’s abuse of him when we were younger. Apparently I touched his leg? I touched his face? These are things you told me I did, despite me not having a memory of this. Then you were upset because I ended up in bed with him, but I will explain that part later. All I was doing was talking to my long time friend about something serious in his life. If I touched him, it was most likely out of comfort, but nonetheless, I am allowed to touch my friends. It continued on to you getting upset with me for joking around with my friends. Then you told me, just today, that you don’t like it when I lean my head on my male friends or cuddle with them. Both things that you could not provide examples of. Granted, I know that cuddling with my friends in a sexual manner isn’t okay, and I wouldn’t do that, but what I think you were referring to is how Kam, Devin and I will sit on the same couch and watch movies together. Or how I will sometimes lean my head on somebody’s shoulder. Am I not supposed to have a physical relationship with my friends? My friends that I have known just as long as I have known you. My friends that you know the nature of my friendships with. Am I not allowed to touch my friends? You will look at my phone when I am on it, you will question who I’m talking to. I remember once I told you my friends and i were having a party at my apartment and you asked me questions - not because you cared, but because you were gathering information about who was going to be there and what was going on. We got into a fight after the whole abortion anniversary, as previously mentioned, where we weren’t talking much for a few days. During that time I went to a bar with my roommate and a few of our friends from the neighborhood showed up. I told you about this recently and you said “I don’t like the fact that you were at a bar with 4 guys while we were fighting.” I’m an alcoholic, a problem I have recently come to terms with. You actively make sure I don’t drink. It would be one thing if you were legitimately concerned about my alcoholism, but it doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels very much like you are trying to keep me from drinking so I won’t hook up with other guys, and you are using my alcoholism as a mask for your anxiety. 

3. Sex. You have a hard time taking “no” for an answer. I will tell you I don’t want to have sex and you will continue to press for it until I eventually give in. You will be persistent and pressure me until I do, or you’ll pout if I don’t. Everything with you revolves around sex. Sometimes it feels like you very much see me as a sex thing that you have feelings for, not that I am a human with my own sexual needs. This is exemplified in your continuous sex with me when I am blacked out drunk. I made excuses for you in my mind, because I know that it’s difficult to tell when I am blacked out. However, three instances stick out to me in my mind. First, that night with Rohit. I had drank so much that I lost count of how many I had, plus I had done a good amount of drugs. You knew I was unbelievably wasted - I know you knew. At this point, I had already asked you to stop having sex with me when I was blacked out drunk, to which you responded “stop getting blacked out” placing the blame on me, and removing it from yourself. Anyways, halfway through the sex, I realized that I didn’t actually want to be having sex (a moment of sobriety, realizing I was blacked out) and left the room. I went upstairs to my room, and you followed me up there. You were probably coming to talk to me, but in my mind you were just coming there for more sex. That’s when I got in bed with Rohit in the room next door. You came in there too, so I left and slept in my cleaning closet. I never was in bed with Rohit to sleep with him, I was in bed with Rohit because I knew you couldn’t have sex with me there. The next instance was after the night at the A&B. I had blacked out at that point, but the night is coming back to me. I was obviously wasted. We had sex. I left the room and then came back in, thinking you were my brother. You then reminded me that you were you and then had me give you head. Afterwards, I sat on the couch and said “Brad, when did you get here?” I was ridiculously drunk, yet you still fucked me. And then, the most recent time was January 3rd. I had two whole bottles to myself and I remember saying to you, before I blacked out. “Don’t have sex with me, I’m blacked out.” Yet, once again, you had sex with me. I know I have fault in this too, I’m aggressive when I’m drunk. I want to have sex when I’m that drunk. But there’s a feeling inside of me that is so sad to think that you, knowing that I was that drunk, would decide that it would be a good idea, despite my repeated requests for you to not have sex with me. Sex is a hard thing for me, I have been raped twice - once as mentioned above, and once in high school, an instance for which I was made fun until I graduated. These aren’t things I talk about, these aren’t things I dwell on, but these are things that shape my feelings about sex. Respect and sex are so important to me, and a lot of the time, I feel like that is lacking. 

4. Intensity. We have known each other for 7 years, so it’s easy to skip ahead in a relationship when the getting to know you phase is long gone. But we are 21 and you tell me how you want to get married and have kids. I love you, so I start planning this stuff with you, even though I have told you time and again that things are moving too fast. You want to talk to me constantly, see me constantly, if I can’t facetime you one night you’ll get passive aggressive with me. And I feel guilty. I feel guilty because you have told me things like “If this relationship doesn’t work, I can never have another relationship.” Or “I can’t go through another break up” Or “If we break up, we can’t be friends after.” I feel like if I don’t make this relationship work, then I’m going to ruin you for the rest of your life. You’ve put so much pressure on me that I’m trapped. I care about you so deeply, you have been such an important part of my life, that the idea of hurting you like that so deeply upsets me. And the thing is, I don’t want to leave you, I don’t want to break up with you. Despite what I have written, I love you so much. I am writing the bad things, not the hundreds of wonderful things about you. But it’s like you’re trying to tell me that I can’t break up with you before the thought even crosses my mind. You’re trying to beat me to the punch and make sure I stay with you forever.