We All Fall Down

Estrogen High

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I am not my abuse. I am what my abuse was trying to prevent. I am the person everyone was afraid I would be. And that person is starting to wake up.

There is much that I only technically consented to. Because it seemed best. Avoided some perceived bigger problem. A problem which often was manufactured, for the purpose of gaining consent. A concentrated decade of this. After a diluted lifetime.

I just accepted the fact I couldn’t do anything. The last time life seemed to carry some possibility was some 24 years ago. Today I feel I can just, make it mine. This is my life, my world, my body, my self. Even the aches and pains, they’re mine.

I can feel my mask slipping. There’s a sort of a hand-off. The person I’ve been forced to pretend to be, who has shouldered all this garbage, has begun to rest, and allow me to take over and just exist.

That other person is another life, with its own anxieties and concerns. They carried me, found me, helped me figure out who I am and what I need to do. They’re tired, harried. They need to go back where I’ve been hiding all this time. I’m grateful. They did their best. They protected me as well as they could. They’re done now.

Now it’s my time. The real me.

The Bafflement of Care

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I got some stuff done at the doctor, and it was all constructive; better than a worst-case scenario. Then a nurse who wishes to remain nameless offered me a lift. I guess they’re technically not supposed to do this, but her partner was waiting around to pick her up at the end of her shift, so she went down and asked him to use that time to drive me home—all the while gendering me semi-correctly.

She did keep asking to make sure I wasn’t a serial killer, which I tried to assure her I wasn’t. I was a little unclear on how to respond to that, especially after the first time. I also approached the endeavor with a certain amount of caution until I saw everyone involved. And, when I saw the scenario it was clearly fine.

I’m so unused to people just… doing nice things that the moment I was dropped off I started to feel so guilty. What am I not doing? I thanked them both profusely. Should I have… done something else? Made some gesture of my own? I don’t know how these things work. Was I rude? Did I act like a jerk? I just. I’m trying to figure, sometimes people are just nice, and leave it at that.

On top of this, all the gendering (which I’ve been getting regularly of late, often in the strangest scenarios). I mean, I know it’s part of her job to be sensitive to that sort of thing, but, like. Again, it’s a lot.

Just. Oh my God, I don’t know what to do with someone just going out of their way to do something like this for me, for no reason, and against policy. I’m kind of overwhelmed.

Normally the worst part of check-up appointments is the hour-long trudge home after the blood draw. Today I got to just decompress, and drink the complementary ginger ale; spike my sugar back up a little. Normally I am completely wiped out by the time I get home, but this time I had enough energy to actually get groceries (where I continued to get ma’amed, somehow, despite looking like a melted slug).

Agh, interacting with people is so strange. I don’t know what I am doing at all. Just, accept it.

Conservation of Trauma

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I appreciate that in Steven Universe violence is always a tragedy. Sometimes it’s necessary, even justified, but that doesn’t make it good. And there will always be consequences. Those who glorify it do so out of damage or ignorance, and it will eat them. The discussion is about cycles of abuse—in families, relationships, the broader social structure—but the show uses its ostensible format as an action-adventure series to subvert all the things we’re told are glorious and righteous, to assert that, no, actually, violence is just violence.

Take the “Stronger Than You” battle between Garnet and Jasper. On the surface it’s triumphant, an early high note for the show. And indeed Garnet was left without many other options. It was an act of self-defense. Jasper was never going to be reasoned with. Something like it had to happen, to prevent other violence. But that doesn’t make it innately virtuous. It still passed along trauma in unpredictable ways. It was necessary, and that’s the tragedy—because violence doesn’t cancel violence; it only mutates its form, maybe puts it out of sight and mind for a while. And boy, that keeps happening in this show—from thousands of years before its start, all the way to the end.

To an extent the Gem War was necessary. It redistributed trauma away from some of the most vulnerable, even as it ravaged all that survived. And the show only ever plays that with ambivalence, except through the eyes of characters who were clearly warped from the violence beyond the ability to cope. It’s a tragedy that it was necessary, and the consequences are endless.

Then all those themes that have been building up since 2013, they culminate in Future. Where would all the violence land, but in the lap of our central character? Including the fallout of Jasper’s history of war and insecurity, heightened to the point of mania by her battle with Garnet. All those millennia of hard-won victory and juggled, mutated trauma come home again, to be absorbed by a single target.

In other shows, the Perfect Steven reveal would be a cathartic triumph, a symbol of growth and success. Here it’s tragedy. It’s clearly wrong even before what happens. This is what violence has done to our boy; this is how it’s warped him. It’s the show’s message from the start, but now it’s personified so you can’t ignore it, much as the trans issues were brought to the forefront at the end of season five.

Abuse and neglect, they don’t just go away. They don’t evaporate when you stop looking at them. It’s like conservation of energy; all they do is transfer and change forms. They linger and fester until they manifest in some new unexpected form. The only way to stop the cycle is to acknowledge it, take a step, back, and show unconditional love.

Which is easy to say, of course. But all we can do is forge ahead, day by day, step by step, and try to show care where we can. And maybe one day it will be enough to make a change.

Ding

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Food, when I was growing up, amounted to, “I don’t know; don’t bother me. Make yourself a bagel if you’re hungry.” My school lunch was perhaps a Fruit Roll-Up and a Kudos bar, in a brown paper bag. If there was nothing readily available, I just didn’t eat.

I think I never really got in the habit of food. Even four decades in, I remain vague on the idea of Eating Things. Even when food is available, it’s this abstraction. Yes, ideally I would consume it on occasion. Mostly, I forget—and mostly, I don’t.

When I was a little older, the same friend who helped me to escape from my most recent abuse scenario and set me up where I’m living now—his parents sent me a sort of care package; just, all this food, to eat. Since they knew there was never anything at home.

I stored that in my room for a few months, until I worked through it. Saved me having to enter the same air as my parents.

The two of them, they had their own specific things they ate, which were always, uh. One of them was just liver and onions, all the time! The other, I hope you like boiled rhubarb. If not, tough. And if so… well, it was theirs, right. So they did them, and then went their way. And I had to figure things out on my own.

When I was a little older my paternal grandmother, who was a horrible person in every respect (I won’t approach the racism), regaled me with a story of when I was perhaps two, and she saw me trying to make a bologna sandwich with green luncheon meat. Which… tracks, yes.

Come to it, when I was really young they did that thing of, if you’re bad you don’t get to eat, right. And I was “bad” all the time because I was a weeper. It seemed like everything made me cry. So I just got used to self-punishing and keeping out of the way.

I’m 6’5″ now. I wonder how tall I’d be if I weren’t malnourished most of my life. I wonder if this has anything to do with how late puberty hit me.

Every so often my father would scream at me that I was anorexic. And, then, well, that was the end of it. He just needed to scream that at me, so that I knew it. It wasn’t technically true; I was just scrawny, as I remain. But let’s just say that I was. Do a little math. Why does one imagine I might be that way?

Both my parents were… shall we say, deficient, as people. It’s not my job to sort through or apologize for what damage may have brought them to the point that I entered the story; they were who they were, and they were the kind of people Roald Dahl served to illustrate. Of the two I think my father took a little pity on me, inasmuch as when he happened to be stuck with me and we were out of the house he would always take me for fast food. Often my choice. So there was that. When he had to be there and see that I existed in front of him, occasionally I received the bare minimum of care.

Too much contact, though, made him uncomfortable. If he could get rid of me he would. I’ve already talked about the mall thing, where he’d dump me all afternoon, evening, and night until closing, because he didn’t want me to burn down the house, as he put it every time, but if I chanced to burn down the mall then that was out of his hands. If he remembered he’d give me five dollars for pizza. But with my training, I could easily not-eat—especially if there was a new game in the arcade. Something that introduced new ideas, like Rolling Thunder or OutRun or Double Dragon or Rastan. Or one of a few favorites that happened to cycle back in somehow, like Vs. The Goonies.

As I unpack the tangle of disasters that has brought me to my current situation, I gain more and more perspective on the complicated intersection of ways in which I was set up to fail in life.

My whole response to any scenario, I was taught: go away; don’t remind anyone that you exist; keep quiet, don’t show any emotion; don’t give them reason to punish you. I was taught to be a non-entity, to want nothing, not to attend to my own needs if I even knew them. I’m a bad student, but eventually I learned.

If I make myself invisible enough, I an rewarded with neglect instead of active abuse. So, I can stay quiet. I can make myself sit still. I can just not ask for anything. Ignore my bodily functions. Remove myself from the equation, remove myself from myself. 

Maybe I should eat something.

Between all this and my lack of romantic or sexual attraction, such that every relationship I’ve been in has been a matter of other people inveigling themselves into my life, telling me they’re my best friend until I rely on them, then handing me this ultimatum where for the friendship to continue it must do so on their terms, to which I have replied, “no, don’t go; I’ll do what you say; I’ll be good,” I can recognize a few central mechanics to the manner in which my life has, historically, sucked.

Of course now, as I approach my 42nd birthday, I have begun to learn my own systems—as opposed to the whims of narcissism that have shaped my my every fear and expectation for the first two score of my knowledge. So we’re not great, but we are at a turning point. Had I the capacity to cope with everyday life, and could I support myself financially, I would be well on the path to hunky-dory, and could begin to address some bigger structural issues. For now… I have a quesadilla in the oven.

Got to eat, Azure.

The Longest Yarn

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Every so often I feel like a girl. And my whole body gets warm. The world starts to feel real. Everything begins to make a little sense; I feel connected to some kind of a story. It just comes to me, a realization. A toggle. And there it is, and somehow I’m human. Complete.

I’m not used to feeling like anything. Just this fuzzy ball of consciousness, resenting my humanity. This goes back forever. As far back as memories make sense. I’ve been an abstraction, unable to recognize or tolerate the entity holding my place in this game I cannot understand.

Now there’s this anchor. I’m still a space cadet, and I’ve got a whole host of distractions. But, I have a tether to this body and the world it inhabits, and now I know the truth, and sometimes when I don’t think about it, I find myself back on the ground. And I finally get it.

This is that sense of self it seems that everyone else has by default. They’re worn and damaged and a big old mess that I need to keep toiling away to repair, but they exist, and I like the model and the controls make a kind of sense to me. Sometimes I wake up, and they’re me.

And it’s just… kind of astonishing. There I am. There I’ve always been. What did I wake up from? It’s like that morning haze where you clear away the dream logic and sort out where you are and what day it is and what you need to do this afternoon. Except so much more vivid.

It comes when it comes; brains do what they do. When it does, it may follow my evening meds. It’s not hard to connect those dots. What strikes me, though, is how not just right but transparent it feels: this wave of Self and Reality and Truth. The pills are only a catalyst.

This gender business, I don’t mean to play by anyone else’s rules. I’ve been messed up for far too long, and this is my own scenario to sort. I’m going with whatever seems true and correct. And where I get that wrong, I will adjust. I’m a girl, in the lower-case. I’m just me.

A Comb and a Brush and a Head Full of Mush

  • Reading time:4 mins read

The final class of the summer session, my voice group began to get into nonverbal language, which we’ll explore in more depth this fall. What struck me was, eight out of ten of the signifiers they went over that day were things people have spent a lifetime drilling out of me. One thing after the other, they were all, “Here’s what you might want to try doing,” and it was precisely what I have always been told not to do: “Cut that out. It’s inappropriate. It’s gross. Do this other thing that makes you uncomfortable instead.”

But I’m no good at lies, and I can’t really perform. So I just bottle up, and do nothing. I suppress what I’m told is wrong, and I can’t make myself do what I’m told is right, and I glitch out and get weird.

In Dial M for Murder, you know how the husband dictates everything the wife should say to the police, explaining, “It’s much simpler if that’s how you say it happened; that’s what they expect you to say; it will raise fewer questions”—all of which makes her seem more suspicious? In hindsight, every relationship I’ve been in, they just lied to everyone about me—about who I was, what I did, where they met me, what my background was—and kept updating and feeding me these scripts that I was meant to play along to, to support their lies. If I failed to convincingly play the part or foresee lies they hadn’t provided but expected me to figure out, they grew furious with me for undermining them and raising questions they didn’t want to answer. I was going to ruin everything, by… existing.

I am so used to people being ashamed of me, and terrified that those things will reflect back on them. Of them being so ready to punish me for disgusting them, while telling me they’re helping me, and that I should be grateful. It’s such a thankless job, abusing me day and night. The least I could do was recognize their effort.

There’s all this overlap between ABA and conversion therapy, right. So many of the behaviors that they try to crush in autistic young men to make them seem presentable are traits that are described as overly effeminate. And for others’ comfort and my own safety, I sure have had to learn to mask my neurology. And now, we become aware of this. Now we come to actual, overt gender issues—and for me at least, it’s the exact same breakthrough. This is just like learning what stimming is, and why it is, and why it’s good and neutral and necessary. It’s the same process of seeing all these things I have been trained out of doing, and realizing that, no, this is who I always was. I was supposed to be that way.

It’s the revelation that everyone in my life, they were wrong. It’s that, holy shit, they all knew—and my obvious queerness bothered them so much that they tried to make it go away. And I ate it, because I didn’t know any better. I knew I was wrong, because I was always wrong, and they told me what I needed to do instead.

So much of my transition, it seems, is less a matter of learning some new performance than to learn to stop papering over my own natural behaviors to make other people comfortable. To figure out where things went wrong and how to be myself again.

There’s a reason I am such an awkward, nervous bundle of confusion. And it’s not my fault. It’s the abuse. Everything I get into, everything I unpick, it’s not about making this new thing. It’s archeology, digging down and piecing myself back together. Undoing damage. Rebuilding myself from first principles, with mostly all the same pieces but without someone else striding in every few steps to tell me what shit it all is and what I need to do differently, according to a completely unrelated set of plans that requires pieces I don’t even have.

It’s just. The epiphany of being told step by step the way I might want to try behaving to support my identity are exactly my natural behaviors that I have been abused out of performing because they were wrong and disgusting. I was always right. I was always me.

Fuck y’all.

I’d rather be free from here

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The thing about this song, for me, is its dissociative quality. It’s basically about tuning out when you’re in a bad situation over which you have no control—abuse, neglect—and going to your happy (or less-unhappy) place. And Michalka sounds so numb here.

It’s a simple song. It’s short; there’s not much to it. The lyrics are direct, almost facile in their understatement. It’s hard to find something profound between the lines. All the pieces—there’s nothing here, practically. But combine that surrender with the exhaustion in the performance and the literal dissociation with Stevonnie splitting to harmonize with themself, and it comes off, of course this would be simple. When you’re in this kind of situation, there’s no room to try to be pretty or clever. You don’t expect to be heard at all. Just voicing the simplest of an idea is a struggle, as you mourn for a better life you don’t ever expect to see.

You tell yourself, I’m not supposed to feel anything. That’s not for me to do. Never betray anything of myself. Be good. Maybe they’ll leave me alone. But, I can’t help just… tuning out. Escaping to this part of me where they can’t follow. I can’t always force myself to be present in the face of all of this.

Sorry, but I’m not here right now.

Reserved Spaces

  • Reading time:2 mins read

There’s this thought jig that a certain kind of person will perform: “Oh, I know this thing is wrong, so it’s okay if I do it.” Like, the fact they’re consciously choosing to do a thing that’s wrong gets them out of culpability somehow. It doesn’t count if it’s deliberate!

“I’m not one of those people who does bad things just randomly by accident, because they don’t know any better. I’m a person who just selectively does bad things so that they benefit me. I’m making a free decision, you see, and what’s wrong with that.”

Rules exist to hold their space in case they want to do the thing—like a handicapped parking sign, but for people who are Just Better.

“Oh no, no, this is fine. This isn’t a thing I do all the time. I know I shouldn’t do it. I’m just making a conscious decision right now, because I want to. I know enough not to do this if I don’t want do; I’m not some animal, ha ha. The rules aren’t meant for someone like me.”

It also recalls the way that I get when I bring home a flat-pack cabinet—”Right,” I think; “I’m fine; I don’t need the instructions.”—except, in regard to safeguards that protect more vulnerable people and preserve what little equanimity exists in our fucking society. They don’t need the training wheels anymore, so they’re free to peel out at will.

(I used to know someone who performed this jig on a daily basis. I knew them for a decade.)

(Yes, they were a libertarian. And rich. Why do you ask?)

A New Contract

  • Reading time:3 mins read

See, my understanding of intimate relationships—not necessarily romantic or sexual, though those fall under the umbrella—has always been, this is a person I really like, whom I want to understand more than anyone. I want to watch how they do things, follow the way that they think. To see the way that they function gives me joy. To know them and to learn to see through their perspective makes me a greater person.

It has taken me many years to see that this is… not the perspective other people take. For other people, relationships—including and perhaps especially intimate ones—are transactional. There’s this built-in power dynamic, based on service and cost and reward and punishment. For other people, it seems that maintaining a relationship is like running an AirBnB.

A thing that’s stuck with me; my ex-spouse would assert that unless two people were having sex constantly they were no different from roommates. I used to wonder what they imagined a roommate was. Now I realize I got that backwards. It’s that in this model, every relationship is a cynical transaction. There’s no personal element. It’s an agreement based on goods and services, and all that distinguishes one relationship from the next is the wallpaper. So a roommate relationship is based on an exchange of personal privacy for lowered rent. Okay, fine. Then you do a round of Mad Libs, and say, oh, this other relationship is defined by an exchange of sex—and this one by an exchange of food, or cleaning services. It’s all the same! This is how we use people, you dummy. We’re all out to get what’s ours.

And now that I’ve identified the logic, it’s not just them. I see this in popular media, in the way other people talk about their relationships. If anything, the more intimate and vulnerable the relationship, the more meaningful that I would expect it to be, the more transactional they seem to be about it. And it’s just bewildering to me. What are you all doing? Is this really the way you want someone else to treat you? What kind of a life is this?

I just want to know a bunch of sincere weirdos who have no interest in power games—to make my own society where people can be vulnerable and honest and feel like they belong; where people will appreciate them as they are, all the more for their strangeness and the closer it brings us all to the truth. And, maybe I can make that kind of a world. It’s all just mutual agreement, right? I don’t know how I’d begin to go about it, but you have to start with an idea.

An Icon of Revolution

  • Reading time:7 mins read

“Together Alone” is a strange episode, necessarily rushed by the time constraints of this final block of the original show and how much story the team needs to cover, yet laden with the bulk of the outsized thematic elements this last appendage brings forward into the show’s text as never before.

This is an odd episode in an odd story arc in one of television’s oddest shows. The pace and the structure, we can agree the show’s handled better—and the storyboards sure are rougher than anything else toward the end of the show (but then, every storyboarder has their strength…), and in that, there are some real angles of critical breakdown one could pursue. In some ways it’s easy to argue that “Together Alone” wastes its opportunity, but the ways in which that’s true are more subtle than I see people address. Likewise the parts where it hits the target are magnificent and crucial to the message of the whole 160-episode original series, yet largely unheralded. I’d have done much differently, yet where the episode works I’d have never thought of doing things the way they play out here. It impresses and frustrates me, and keeps making me want to think about it further

These eleven minutes are work of suspense. The savvy viewer knows exactly what’s going to happen from the title card, and so enters with a sense of doom and dismay. With this understanding, the unfolding enterprise is a matter of one damned thing after another, watching the pieces clunk inevitably into place, hoping against reason that someone, something somehow intervenes.

For long spans you’re just… waiting, as events play out, and so much of the takeaway is in how the episode passes that time with its Abrams-style awkward small talk, peeling away and compiling tiny observations of how things work here, how people think within this system where everyone is always just standing around, waiting for the inevitable.

We wait, and we steep in this empire of lies and denial and repression, where everyone furtively pretends they don’t know what “ffffun” is—they would never do anything improper—all the while haunted by a vision of Pink’s Pearl, bleached by conversion therapy for improper relations with her mistress. We see the overt transphobia against Garnet. The racism of a colonial society. This is where the full decadence of the empire—and how untenable and barely maintained it is as a system, all comes into play. The more denial that’s going on, the more that happens in the shadows that they pretend doesn’t exist. There are no homosexuals in Russia.

All this fear and propriety and this cycle of abuse, it doesn’t actually stamp out what it tries and claims to, because people remain people. What it manages is to maintain a certain paper-thin image, that everyone knows it’s a lie, but no one dares contradict. Like that central moment—subtle enough that I often see people glaze over it—where Yelp nervously glances at Bloop before she asserts that people don’t do… that sort of thing here, only a few minutes before Lemon Jade pulls her surprise focus.

We know Yellow Pearl is obstructive and difficult and nervous and vain, and lies constantly to keep order. Why do we imagine this key moment is different from anything else that has come out of her mouth ever? Especially with that delivery and body language? The way the two of them immediately look at each other—Yelp in a panic, Bloop like “You know.” Are they onto us? Nope, not gonna talk about that here. Doesn’t happen. Haha, what do you mean. That beat serves to establish the fragility of the society, how false all this imposed structure is—allowing the accidental moment of revolution at the ball to hit all the harder. Like, this is it. Everything is different now, there’s no maintaining the lies anymore.

Then the way Lemon Jade leaps to support, it’s played as a joke—but it’s really anything but. It’s the whole point. It’s our main indicator of this whole thing that we never quite see, this knowledge that our heroes aren’t alone, that this system doesn’t work, that revolutions can happen.

We don’t really see the consequence on-screen. People comment on how curious it is the Diamond mech smashes up all these buildings and bridges and stomps through the streets in CYM, and the only background Gem who seems aware is that one astonished Topaz outside Yellow’s chamber. Like, where is everyone? This is world-shattering stuff going on outside.

By the end of season five, the show was quite literally running on borrowed time (The final six episodes seem to be appropriated from the order of what would soon become Steven Universe Future.), so it does what it can, hits the vital moments and whittles down everything else. With just 88 minutes to sell a season’s worth of story, they consolidate and breeze by any larger issues and implications outside of the core cast.

Against all odds, the show more or less nails the landing, albeit at a breakneck speed. It’s really miraculous they got it to work at all, let alone as well as it does. Ideally, though, it needed a few more episodes to breathe, set up further context and meaning and character work; cement its themes, ground them in tangible emotions and character development, and manage the tension leading into the final moments.

“Legs from Here to Homeworld” is nuts, and could have developed better as two or more chunks, establishing the fragile nature of the CGs’ truce with the Diamonds and exploring Steven’s deep sense of responsibility and determination in the face of now more-latent bigotry. We needed at least one more episode before the ball to add to the build-up and to further establish the people living in this society and what they’re dealing with, and how they pretend that they don’t really feel about it.

A huge missing beat is a further bottle episode in Stevonnie’s holding cell. This is the perfect moment to pause and compile our lead characters as they roll toward the end. What the story calls for is deep personal discussion juxtaposed against rising society breakdown. Eleven roiling minutes of Stevonnie talking to themself in the dark as word spreads of the events at the ball and they start to hear at first vague signs then riots and confusion break out around them. They sit helpless, locked up for who knows how long on this alien world, unsure how to balance introspection with personal survival with worry for everything outside of their grasp. Talking through self-blame, settling on confidence in who they are and their right to exist. As the world breaks through even into their tiny cell, the despair and anxiety of failure turn to a growing realization they may have kicked off something big and the uncertainty over whether or not that’s a good thing.

This is the discussion we’re missing, because there just isn’t time for that kind of build-up. The one place where all of that really breaks through to the screen is in “Together Alone.” And of course Stevonnie’s presence here as the inciting element of this revolution—just by virtue of their unashamed existence—is kind of the centerpiece that the show has been building toward since episode seven. They anchor all the trans elements, the repression. They are the ideal, largely innocent version of the experience Rose wishes she could have had. The thesis statement of what could be. They’re not exactly what Steven asked for way back in season 1a, but they are a femme-presenting giant enby. Of course they would bring down tyranny by example in the moment that everyone else gets to see what they’re missing in life, and that it’s actually possible.

“Together Alone” is a clumsy episode, burdened with more than it can handle. But gosh is it ever crucial. Just take a step away from plot for a moment, and appreciate the sheer cosmic audacity of this revolution, overlaid with the creeping horror and tragedy of the personal story. It couldn’t happen any other way. The truth was going to come out, and it was always going to change everything.

Gray Matter

  • Reading time:2 mins read

It seems to me there is some kind of association between comfort with probability or uncertainty and understanding of compassion or the theory of mind. It’s something about relative, rather than absolute, reasoning. Where I see a lack in one, I often see a lack in the other.

Comfort with one doesn’t necessarily equate to comfort with the other, of course. People will specialize and compartmentalize. But, like… there’s something here, that I’ve not yet picked apart.

Related to this, there’s this thing about autistics supposedly lacking empathy, right. This is based on tests that ask one to draw conclusions about someone else’s mental state based on limited information. Each question has an absolute, correct answer. The way autistics tend to address things like this is, “I don’t want to presume. I’m not that person. There are, like, a thousand possible explanations. Here are maybe a top five, in terms of probability.” And that causes them to fail, and the tester to conclude they have no empathy.

In the neurotypical mind, or at least that of those who pathologize the autistic mind, a failure to project onto another person and so to expect that they’d behave exactly like one’s self, in favor of recognizing that everyone is different and has their own set of reasons for doing things, is considered a sign of defect. Which, uh, in terms of the framing of the exam, is, like. You can see the absurdity here, right—the complete and utter lack of theory-of-mind that goes into the testing of an autistic’s theory-of-mind. To be “empathetic” by this perspective is to fail to understand that people are different.

Anyway. This kind of an expectation that everyone else is some sub-facet of one’s own self, it seems to line up with stuff like trouble with large numbers or what a likely chance is as opposed to a remote possibility. Playing the lottery every week and getting angry each time when you fail to win. Black-and-white thinking. Either it is or it isn’t, and if you say it’s not that simple then you’re fucking around and not to be trusted.

Army Badgers

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Details aside, TERfs are basically gender-swapped incels. Or perhaps more to the point, I’m surprised I haven’t seen much comparison between TERfs and Gators.

They both base so much of their rage in this concept of, “How dare you fakers take away these things that make us feel special and different; get out of our reserved space.” It’s not even a matter of appropriation; it’s of disgust and shame, filled with strawmen:

  • What if someone thinks I’m one of you?
  • What if I am forced to like penises?
  • What if someone takes our panty shots away!

It’s this need to feel individually special, basing it in these external factors and declaring they’re endemic, and freaking out more than anything at the threat of their identities being eroded by letting too many of the impure past the gates. (Ergo, the route to Nazism for all these groups.)

It’s complicated, as whereas Gamers are clearly not a marginalized, vulnerable, or protected group, fully half of our society is still considered slightly less human than the other half. But there’s a difference between looking for equity and human rights, and making a clubhouse—and TERf ideology is entirely like Gator culture. It’s about how we have our own things; we’ve made our culture where we can pretend no one else exists but us, and we’re the powerful ones; now you go away—which is, like, that’s a mockery of what feminism is and stands for. It’s exactly like the Games-Are-Art-but-Keep-your-Politics-Out-of-Games business. What are you doing? Not what you profess you’re doing. You’re not actually trying to make things better. You’re just feuding. But, that’s also where the MRA/incel ideology comes in—this toxic feudalism, where instead of addressing the problems you’re facing, you stake camp, build up an echo chamber, and make everyone outside the walls a bogeyman.

It’s all so fucking middle class. It’s so barfy. It’s just like these MAGAs demanding they get their pedicures and food service. It’s not about the feet or the food; it’s a power thing. They base their identities on a unique superiority over another group based on various signifiers of an in-group or social success or whatever. It’s this mode of thought that interprets respect as obedience, rather than as compassion.

We perceive (correctly, in the case of women; LOL in the case of Gamers) that society does not afford us our due respect, so we will make our own club tailored to our whims where we get to pull all the strings—as opposed to, you know, working to make the real world kinder.

Kindness is for rubes. This world, it’s all about who wins. (Ergo in part why Gamers go fucking ballistic about difficulty levels and things, i guess.) if you win on your own terms, that takes away from our indicators of power and value. Don’t you fucking dare sell your Bitcoin.

All these groups, they’re microcosms of this capitalist nightmare we’re caught up in where we’re pitted against each other for power and resources and our precious bodily fluids; encouraged to factionalize while the gentry sucks the last juice from the husk of society. This is what the ruling class wants from us; it’s what it’s always wanted. Just so long as we keep thinking we could be one of them if we play the game right, and that the only thing stopping us is everyone else in our way—then none of us will think to look up.

And if you happen to not give a shit about winning, and just want to live your life without suffering and as compassionately as you can within the limits of your current understanding, then you’re not playing the game. You’re breaking the rules. You’re negating all their hard work. Time to doxx you, and rid the world of this dangerous anarchist element.

These groups are all the same. All that distinguishes them is the signifiers; the purity badges they wear. Fourteen words, and all. We’re the pure ones. Society is war, they all say, and we’re gonna win, y’all.

And this is how we lose each other. This is how we lose ourselves. This is how we lose the world that we live in. All out of fear someone else has a better bike.

A notable element of the dynamic is the mechanism of picking a demographic who is more vulnerable than the group and labeling them a danger to the group’s identity and way of life; an infiltrating power representative of all the group stands against. Doesn’t matter who; it’s all Mad Libs:

  • For Gators, women and queers and racial minorities are everyone oppressing them by suggesting different angles to the medium than a cishet white male power fantasy.
  • For incels, women unfairly control the bedroom
  • For TERfs, trans women are men trying to, uh, colonize femininity.

Never mind that one for one, each of these outside groups is substantially more vulnerable in society at large. It’s just that when you live in a (gamer) gated community, you’re not a part of society. Society is the danger. And oh no, here it comes. Fetch your rifle.

Note also the way that these groups conflate power and pleasure: identity is self-actualization, is power. Consent and autonomy for others are the antithesis to joy for the self. The thing that your existence threatens to diminish or take away from me, make a mockery of, it’s the thing that gives me carnal joy: pedicures, sex, a certain kind of boring videogame, sex without a potential for penis. This is what freedom means; never checking with someone else first.

Capitalism, baby. The middle class. The power to do what we want, with no questions. You’re not my dad.

Under capitalism, kindness is weakness; it’s submission to someone else’s power. I’m no wimp; I won’t bow to you; how fucking dare you ask me to be kind.

And yeah, for all these groups predation goes right along with the ideology—so of course they project and expect it in others, so as to distract from or justify their own behavior.

It’s what winners do.

The Means of Narration

  • Reading time:1 mins read

We need more stories, because stories are power.

Stories change norms just by existing, and centering a perspective as real and heroic. Authoritarians have always understood this. This is how they keep dragging public opinion over the line of absurdity over and over.

Yet for all that, look how quickly opinions shifted once the protests started, and people got a new story, with new heroes.

Stories outlive civilization. They’re all we’ve got of what came before, and who knows what they leave out.

They’re the most powerful weapons and the most powerful shields, because they’re a statement of value. Every story serves to set terms for what we hold normal and right. They shape reality more than stones, because our reality is us. It’s just people.

The very nature of stories is people over property. Stories themselves are made to be comrades. Intellectual property is a sinister concept, that could only exist under capitalism. It’s a form of servitude of the human spirit.

Control the means of narration. Assert your stories. Make them real in the telling.

The Phantom Carrot

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I think what makes life hard for me in a neurotypical world is that I don’t respond well to coercion or ultimatums. It’s not that I’m proud or defiant. It’s that I don’t get what’s happening. Someone declares something, expecting it to activate my self-interest—kick-start a negotiation or an argument or a plan or some kind of active response—and I say, “Oh.” They say, “This is going to happen!” And I think, “Well, that’s unfortunate, but I’m not going to interfere with your decision. Surely you know your mind better than I do. I guess I’m going to have to live with it.” It doesn’t enter my mind that I’m expected to do something—and if so, what exactly.

I get the sense people see this as willful, or that I don’t care what happens, or like I’m calling their bluffs all over the place—when the issue is that I don’t fully grasp the nature of the threat, and have little sense of self-preservation. You tell me a thing, and I incorporate it into my understanding: this is how things are. My own desires don’t really factor in.

Even on a flat plane, it’s hard to make that leap that I am able to act in my own interest, or what that might entail. It’s such a stretch of the imagination to just… do a thing. That if I realize I’m hungry, I have the agency to just make a sandwich. I feel clever every time I figure this shit out.

This has always been a problem with me. That last decade was another level, of course. Every interaction was a threat of some sort, expecting to coerce something that I didn’t understand. I still spend so much time puzzling over what they were trying to make me do (and failing). But this extends to, you know, just basic engagement with the systems that frame our society. Capitalism. The legal system as it stands. Cultural norms. All of this stuff we lean on, it relies on this tapestry of implied threat, expecting that of course people will sense what’s good for them and act accordingly.

And I, like. I can’t work with this dynamic. It doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know what it’s trying to tell me. And I don’t have any strong impulses that guide my behavior. You tell me I have to die now because of some mistake I made, I nod and I say, “Oh.”

We need a new way of doing things in our society, that doesn’t rely on coercion and punishment.

Bogey Town

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So much of my abuse experience has been guilt over thinking about it, labeling it, bringing it up at all—comparing it to worst-case scenarios and thinking it wasn’t as bad as that, beating myself up for being so weak as to be affected like this, point to anyone other than myself. Then I actually recount what happened, and I see how alarmed people become, and I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. And I read others’ accounts, and I read long articles and manuals about abuse, and they’re like a glossary of my experience. I’m told it’s a textbook case. Then I look for any little crack. Surely I must be exaggerating. There must be an extenuating factor. It has to be my fault somehow. I know I didn’t always act perfectly either. Sometimes things just happen and they’re messy. Then I look at the damage I’m still working through.

It’s, like. The self-doubt. This is what keeps people down. This is why people don’t speak out. The mind games. Abusers seek out people with low confidence, and they write the story. They make it clear that any contradiction is a betrayal, and in fact an attack on them.

It’s so hard to resolve the imbalance. The mind, it keeps dancing to make things equal. Yes, they did this, but… either it’s not as heavy as it looks or it must offset something on my end. One is so trained toward fairness. A sense of reason. I must have deserved it somehow. Approached as a closed system, you keep adjusting the scale, trying to make it even out. It has to make sense. The person you rely on for everything, that you invest everything in, you adore so deeply, it must have taken something huge on your end for them to treat you like this.

I have breathing problems. It’s not a physical thing; it’s that I keep forgetting to breathe. Even when I remember, stress constricts my airways. For close to a decade I had this mysterious chronic cough and lightheadedness, that went away as soon as I was on my own again.

I used to be a singer, technically. I at least had years of singing lessons. The thing that came hardest to me was breath control. The slightest anxiety, and my body cinched up. My lung capacity shriveled. I didn’t have the tools to work against it, or even communicate my trouble.

My voice lesson the other day, I brought this up. They suggested a few ways to break the tension—applying some outside pressure, some other frame of reference. Pressing on the diaphragm with the heel of one’s hand, for instance. And it’s tough, but it sort of works. So far.

And that’s why they isolate you. That’s why they try to strip you of your friends, your tools, your resources. Why they insist that talking about even neutral internal business is considered a betrayal of trust. Because their control is predicated entirely on a closed system. The moment you start to talk about what’s been happening, the moment people can give you feedback, that you can start to compare notes, the system begins to break down. They no longer control the scale. And that’s the moment they live in terror of. Because, what comes next?

This is the moment that it feels like we are entering as a society. Hundreds of years of abuse, it’s all starting to come out. Everyone the world over, to an extent regardless of ideology, is starting to recognize it for what it is—while the powerful scramble, and scream. In the way that they will.

  • There’s a reason we don’t have healthcare.
  • There’s a reason we don’t have food.
  • There’s a reason we don’t have guaranteed housing.
  • There’s a reason we’re poor.
  • There’s a reason we’re punished so heavily, for minor offenses.
  • There’s a reason we’re triangulated against each other.

None of this is natural. None of it has to be like this. We deserve better. We deserve to have our own lives. To be allowed to care about each other. This is all done to us. And just the littlest resistance, it scares them this much.

Their hold is so tenuous. It’s all a story. It’s the story written in these statues that we’re tearing down. It’s a story that weaves and wraps through every unnatural system we’re taught to rely on for our basic survival. Wall Street. Banks. Corporations. This notion of a 9-to-5 job. Productivity. Real estate. Copyright. It’s all just a story.

We can write a new one. A just one. We have everything we need to take care of each other. What if we just… did it?

To every oppressor, and to those who benefit from abuse, the abused are internalized as the bogeyman. They have to keep up the abuse, because what if one day the victims activate and turn against them? If the victims are ostensibly freed, then what if they come back for revenge?

This is in particular the white narrative in this country, and in every other colonial society. It’s the basis for every horror story we tell. There’s a reason zombies are based on Haitian culture. Haiti, the free Black nation that famously overthrew white rule, that we have punished ever since out of fear the ideas might spread. What if They turned on us? What if They came back, and we were called to pay for our sins?

This is the fear on an individual level. This is the fear on a structural level. It’s the fear the in-some-way privileged are coached to repeat to ourselves in our deepest metaphors. It becomes justification for every abuse. It’s necessary, because it’s too late now.

To which my brain responds with… say, for instance, CHAZ. Weeks of police violence; then out of terror of retribution, they left the station to the masses… who occupied that fraught space, and started a farmer’s market.

I’m not talking forgiveness, because what good is that and what does it even mean, really. I just mean, like. Who gives a shit about them. All their power is illusory. We don’t have to grant it. What if we just ignored them, and checked on each other instead. That whole thing where you see someone in danger—a woman, BIPOC, Muslim, queer—and you step between them. You ignore the attacker and you just check in with your old friend whom you’ve never met before. Demonstrate solidarity in the face of irrelevance. Often that’s all it takes.

What they fear more than anything is a loss of power, of irrelevance. Of our realizing we don’t need them, we don’t have to fear them. That we can take care of each other. That against every story we’re told, kindness and compassion and support are what make a functioning world.

I am still very ill, and fraught, and stretched too thin to clearly see, and I don’t know what I have to give at the moment, either materially or emotionally. It’s all theoretical. But. Maybe it’s time to trust a bit in compassion, and a recognition that we are in this together.