Since the spring it feels like I’ve been caught in this material eddy, unable to make any big steps, barely able to maintain the day-to-day. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the things outside my reach, as modest as they may seem. But as much trouble as I have coping with big and small things and ghosts from the past, there are times where perspective clicks and—
I’m a girl (sort of)
with maybe 40 years of life left
living in a small apartment
by herself
across from a large park
close to downtown
of a major city
in the northeast
in the autumn (currently).
It’s just, this is so close to a life that I’ve wished for since I was little, that I knew would never be available to me, that for years only ever seemed to get further and further from reality. In the ’90s I wrote stories with characters in almost exactly this scenario—yes, who were female, and had gender issues.
The main missing piece is an ability to support myself, and in such a way that I have mental reserves to do creative things again. (In the stories, money was always vague but I figured maybe she did computer stuff?) Other than that, it’s all just… continuing. Working on the transition, working on the therapy. maybe even piecing together my own social circle, once the plague dies down. Making this city the home I’ve never had, building a world I want to live in.
But on a basic level, like. I’ve more or less done it—including the parts that seemed, when i was younger, physically impossible. This was the escape I dreamed about, where after high school I would finally sort myself out and become alive… and where I was a girl somehow in these fantasies, which was absurd of course, but whatever.
Hell, with how drawn-out and reluctant my first puberty was, people regularly assumed I was maybe 20 until I was close to 40. It’s catching up a little now, but—it feels like even on a cellular level I was just hibernating; waiting until the moment I could truly live.
I talk a lot about this dividing line, and how I am not the same person as the previous caretaker for this body, but seriously, all my memories prior to maybe a year ago feel so unreal. It’s getting harder and harder to remember specifics, like grasping at a dream.
I may have mentioned that my taste for food has been shifting since my transition. This is pretty normal, of course. Change your body chemistry, your body is gonna start bothering your brain for different complementary materials. In practice it still feels so odd.
It’s hard to navigate. I’m autistic, right, and I’m very particular about what kinds of sensory input I can deal with. It’s taken decades for me to explore and branch out and work through what’s acceptable to me. Since my tastes calcified somewhere in adolescence, they haven’t really changed; they’ve just expanded. I’ve managed to tack things on, break through barriers, develop things further. But it’s all hooked into the same architecture, same basic assumptions that have never shifted. Now I can’t safely fall back on any of that.
I used to be all about sugar and carbohydrates. Whether it’s my metabolism or my neurology, I dunno, but I couldn’t function without a constant input of quick, easy energy. (Even then, functioning was a philosophical matter.)
Now the things I naturally assume I’ll want, I kind of shrug at. They’ll sit there, and I can’t really imagine eating them. In their place, I don’t always know how to read the new signals. It took so long to figure out the old ones. But definitely acids and oils and fats. It’s all about savory things now, which… really weren’t a major concern before. I’m super into stinky cheese and fermented things. I find myself drawn to just, raw vegetables in a way I wasn’t overly. Stereotypical as it may be, I seem to crave as I never have. I was always into, like, gummy and hard candy, right? All sugar, no fat. This is almost the flip of that.
All of this is comprehensible, right. I know what my body is doing and why. It’s just, there’s a lot of identity in this.
As I say, Azure is not the same person as that shell she stomped around inside, or that stomped around on autopilot as she largely slept. If you could even call them a person.
I hadn’t factored how much of my prior sense of self, such as it was, had been scrubbed by that last decade. by this total breakdown of my humanity. Which… in hindsight was weirdly helpful for finding the person buried beneath all that and clearing the room for her to finally grow properly.
But she still inherits all these memories and notions and understandings, and many of them no longer apply, or are fading in ways that are hard to predict. And it’s… really confusing. I’m starting from zero on so many things. This life is just so completely new.
I don’t know what’s even in my head anymore or why I think the things I do or what I like or want. Everything seems to be up in the air, occasionally landing arrow-side down to pierce my skull with some new whim that was not originally a part of my makeup.
To that end, for my own purposes at least—I’m not judging people, as usual; just describing my brain—I’ve never understood piercings. They wig me out, feel like… obvious sorta institutionalized rebellion, and I don’t get wanting to permanently harm one’s self like that.
But… like.
The thought has come to me more than once recently.
I think it’s since the boobs, honestly. They seem to have catalyzed a whole genre of thought that I don’t know how to manage, and only understand from the surface and at at distance. There’s an overwhelm of unreason.
This is a lot of words about something stupid. But I’m going through a thing, okay.
The thing about measuring for a bra is, it forced me to recognize what was going on in this empirical way. I think what still stuns me is how they feel like they leapt at me out of nowhere. I was vaguely aware of their development, then all at once I had to address it. While I was otherwise preoccupied, these two separate mounds of flesh slowly began to aggregate. And, you know. When it’s not supported, stuff’s gonna spread out. Shape isn’t gonna be as obvious.
So they progress to the point that one finally turns their attention to these deposits and goes, huh, guess they’re growing a bit; should look into this. And by then… those modest rolling bumps, they consist of so much material. And if you just gather it up, give it a little support? The slightest pressure and suddenly, wait, these are actual breasts. When did that happen? What? Like, just lightly cup your hands underneath and hang on, there’s a shape here. Cleavage appears.
What I’m saying is that physics play into my obliviousness, then my sudden realization. This tissue is malleable, right. It deforms like a Japanese pudding with any pressure, including and especially gravity. (Which is in part why one wears a bra, yes.) And the reason I’m dwelling on this again is that I checked and despite the destruction of our postal service my first bra still seems set for delivery in three days. And, that’s gonna change things. It’s gonna be this leap where suddenly these untamed lumps are collected and contained, and… there’s a lot there.
In just a few days, I’m… my whole profile is going to change. The way I carry weight is going to shift. There’s going to be visible cleavage. This is becoming real, you know.
And it’s just.
Again it’s not even about the breasts, right. Not in and of themselves. The significance here is more symbolic. It’s kind of a landmark in reclaiming myself, healing my damage. Becoming myself, at last. It’s this objective metric, helping me to see the change in me in much the way the measuring tape was an objective metric allowing me to clearly see them.
I am so bad with measurements without an outside guide. I am so bad with intuition and emotion and vague mushy notions about things. Like how despite the blinking neon lights it took someone dragging me aside and pointing to them for me to see my queerness. I just shrug and accept and don’t really know how to quantify the qualia that make up my world. I appreciate every bit of proof I am who I am. The breasts to my sense of self, the measuring tape to the breasts—it’s all measurement of a measurement of a measurement; this existential train dragging me to the acceptance of my own fucking reality.
More and more, the reality keeps crashing in—showing me that I’m right. That I am me, despite everything. Despite all the denial and harm.
At the end of it, it’s just boobs. Like half the people on the planet. Big deal, right. But I’m going through puberty here. If I’m a little juvenile, I think it’s warranted. There’s a lot wrapped up in this. More than I realized until it was impossible to ignore.
I’m sitting here, feeling overcome at just the thought of claiming that piece of ownership over myself. Putting on that bra, shaping my chest, understanding that this is the new normal, we’re really doing this, and a hearty fuck you to everyone who tried to stop me for 30 years. Who accused me of being myself, like it was the most reprehensible thing.
It’s a point of reference.
I’m making progress. Measurable, objective, real, meaningful, visible progress.
I’m so swimmy, all the time. Flailing in the void. But it’s working. I was always right, even when I didn’t know what I was right about.
I’m going to be okay, maybe. I’ve got this. I’m fixing things. It’s not too late.
Things are finally going right.
It just so happens that this landmark is goofy and comical and… sort of neat, in a visceral way. Which in itself complicates an already complicated set of emotions wrapped up in this. I feel so strange for feeling the way I do about something so base and silly.
This all crept up on me. I had no clue what value or significance it might have. I just wrote it off, until there it was. It wasn’t on my agenda at all. But apparently it’s what I needed anyway.
I’m sitting here, crying—but from happiness. Which is itself unfamiliar. Yes, crying from happiness is unfamiliar. But also, just… happiness? That has to be what this is.
I’m starting to realize I may have never felt actual happiness. That has to be that I’m feeling, and this is so novel.
You know when you, say, bang your shin and you freeze and cradle the affected area, and do nothing until the drowning, blinding pain subsides and you feel like you can move again? There has to be a word for the emotional equivalent of banging your shin, and that response. Seems all I do all day is blunder around, banging my mind’s shin on all the misplaced furniture, sucking in my breath, curling up, and clutching until it washes away. I swear I even see stars the exact same way.
Went out for groceries today. Finally crossed off a bunch of things I’d been waiting to get because I actually wanted them rather than strictly needed them. Got to the register; found I’d forgotten my wallet. On the chagrin march home, got mildly hit on again. So. Generally, fuck.
You see, I’d moved my wallet from where I normally keep it, because of those building inspectors yesterday, and—I. Just. I haven’t done this kind of thing in a long while, because I have my systems to work around my limitations, right. Things are where they need to be. Mess with the systems, and everything goes nuts. First thing in the door, I put my wallet back where it’s supposed to be.
Then I put on a comfortable robe and just ate a fucking block of cheese.
Not pictured: the cheese.
My mother is the kind of person who ruins it for everyone. Like, she’ll carry around this L.L.Bean Boat & Tote the size of an actual boat, and anything complementary she runs across, she’ll dump the whole thing in there until the people just stop making concessions for anyone. Both my parents have severe boundary issues, to a level of pathology where no matter how you explain it, no matter how often, they just keep doing their shit, all the while mocking and badmouthing you for suggesting maybe they could think about someone else’s needs and feelings.
I think a reason I have such touch and personal space issues, when I pick at it—yeah, autistic sensitivity, sure, that. ADHD issues. But also, just. Stop touching me. Back off. I said no. How can I make you understand, stop.
I stopped communicating with her for like a decade because anything I sent her she forwarded to every person in her address book, for commentary that she would then forward back to me. My ex-spouse forced me to resume contact. I cut it off again pointedly within a year. Both people I relied on the first half of my life, so fucking needy, and they just took what they wanted. It wasn’t just me. They were this way to each other, and to anyone else unfortunate enough to interact with them. At least when they were screaming at each other I knew where they were and could be somewhere else.
What I’m saying is, I have never known full, meaningful, practical consent from people with power over my life. Emotional, physical, systemic. The only thing that matters is what they want, and if you aren’t aligned then they’re gonna find a way to take it or make you the villain. The loudest and most indignant person controls the narrative.
So I just, like. You could say I have trust issues. To the point of my brain exploding when someone touches my arm or tries to hug me. I get so confused when I interact with people and, like, they listen to me. Remember basic things about me. Don’t launch off on a tirade at every blunder. Don’t keep score. Ask permission. Ask me how I’m feeling. I’m like. What are you doing? What planet are you from? It makes me so wary. Where are we going with this? What do you want?
I don’t want to be that way. I want to be able to trust people. I want to be able to build a life that I want to live, and populate it with cool people who are earnest and care about each other and have interesting perspective and meaningful principles and ideals. Other people can do this. I shouldn’t have to be exempt.
…
Though yeah, random street dudes can absolutely just fucking stop.
God, even on a relatively good day it’s all up and down with me, sometimes from minute to minute. When the tears start coming, I just curl up and start muttering over and over, “You’re not my best friend, you’re not my best friend.” I don’t even hear it until it’s been happening.
I don’t need that garbage. I’ve got myself now. I’m finally building the relationship that matters the most. But the pain, it never really goes away. I just sometimes manage to forget. For a while.
Anyway, I’m actually feeling emotions these days, so that’s something. They are what they are. They’re neutral. It makes sense that I would feel them. Better than I not. They don’t apply to my current reality. There is no danger attached to them. They’re just normal grief.
One has to grieve, and grief isn’t linear. Change doesn’t work like that, when you’re human. I broke my wrist when I was fourteen. Dumb bike accident. There’s no visible scar, but it still aches sometimes. Even when it doesn’t, it feels odd. Some alien sensation I still can’t name.
I don’t want an unkind person to make me bitter, make me lose trust and hope. They’re just them. They act this way to everyone. I had no reason to think I was exempt. It has nothing to do with me, or with anyone else. I was never responsible for a cruel person’s behavior.
You’re never responsible for another person’s behavior, no matter the relationship, no matter what they say to you.
I want to think most people are earnest. Dumb, self-centered, and oblivious to anything outside their experience, maybe. Misguided. But well-intentioned at least. There are predators, and I guess I am getting better at spotting them, but it can’t be that many.
I don’t subscribe to the reality they insist we live in. I can’t accept such a broken, wrong view of the world. The only monsters are the people who think everyone is a monster but them.
…
The thing is, both romance and sex-based attraction are fundamentally about reducing the other—and often one’s self—to a function. It’s this act of objectification, encouraged by the structure of the culture that we live in. It all confuses me, and strikes me as so upsetting. I don’t want someone to treat me like that, and I don’t want to objectify anyone else. I just want to appreciate and be appreciated by virtue of who one is as a person. Like. I don’t want to be a thing to anyone, and I can’t view others as things to me. It doesn’t really register.
There’s a distinction here. I can understand the role of sex as communication in an existing relationship. It’s not for me, but I get it. A physical language, based in consent and affection and mutual appreciation? Why not. (If one can tolerate it personally.) But sexual attraction as such? The viewing of another in terms of personal arousal? Basing one’s interest in another person on that premise? It’s a big yikes here. It heebs my jeebies right out of my bones.
It does well to stress that I don’t intend this as judgment; more as an attempt to clarify a cultural disjunct that causes me personal distress. There’s a boundary issue in all of this that I have real trouble navigating, and it has resulted in… problems, at times.
In the abstract I see sex as this hilarious folly. Like, what are you even doing, you silly dummies. Its appeal lies in its absurd bathos. There’s a sincere place for that kind of whimsy. I am unsure if the place I’d choose is where most people would expect.
For other people, there’s this transactional nature to certain things that I just… can’t resolve. It doesn’t work with my brain, and it scares me a little because I don’t easily see it except in hindsight.
That understanding of a transaction causes so many people feel Owed, and it, like—this is my body. This is my person. I’m not here for you. I can be with you, if you’re cool. We can do neat stuff together. No one owes anyone anything except recognition of their mutual humanity.
I just don’t get power dynamics. Other people can play these roles and navigate these rules and have fun doing it like it’s all a game, and fine. So long as they’re all consenting and respecting each other, so what. Go nuts. But, like. I can’t.
Yet there is this underlying unspoken presumption: of course I can. I must, and I will, and if I say I don’t, I’m lying or there’s something wrong with me that needs to be fixed. Everyone’s playing the same game, people seem to think, and there’s no way to opt out. And, that can be fucking dangerous.
There are levels to this. There’s the… like, the reaction I’m starting to get from randos when I walk to the grocery store, right. The overt angle. More insidiously… I am getting better at spotting and understanding coercion, at a pace. Not so much when it’s in my face. Like. I don’t know how to clearly signal that I am not playing. You’re not getting anything from me. I don’t want anything from you. I’m just a person here. Can’t we be cool?
I’m just saying, living in a system where this is the norm causes me distress, and I can’t get with it. Don’t want to subscribe. It’s not a moral issue; more a philosophical one based on how my brain fucking works and how I navigate the world. And, like. There are consequences to that disconnect.
The dynamics of consent are complicated, and I expect I will be picking through my history for the rest of my life.
I make an awesome girl. I made a complete garbage train wreck of a boy. But now that I know who I am? I’d want to know me.
I think from about the age of eleven I was really just waiting to die, surprised when I woke up each day and wondering how many more I had left. I burned through a lot of days. I feel like I should make better use of what I’ve got left.
This is a thing I have trouble explaining to people. I’ve never been suicidal. I have never had that much agency over myself. I only just took ownership of my body, after 42 years. I’ve just been waiting every day for the end. Sometimes but not always hoping. Always waiting.
I am very good at waiting. I’m used to it. It’s all I have known. Increasingly since the spring I have been feeling impatient. Which is… new.
Now, I actually want something. I want to be a real person. I’m no longer waiting for it all to end. I’m looking for a way to make it start.
For me, art is a big part of any conversation. The discussion and representation and normalization of often complex ideas in art and media allows people to understand themselves and each other, and can provide a frame of reference, at times a sort of shibboleth for a group.
I think a lot of people who live with trauma kind of fail to develop in certain dimensions until they get the support they were lacking. You have to build up those parts of yourself from square one, once you know what’s missing.
There’s so much queer art out there in every form, and so much more becoming available, so much in the mainstream—and that is going to be crucial.
From personal experience, I figured out my queerness (and identified many related problems in my life) by engaging with a children’s cartoon of all things. Musical artists bring a face and voice and familiarity, and when they get vocal about their queerness they can start some important conversations. Janelle Monáe is a great one right now.
Tumblr, with its heavy focus on visual art and transformative fandom, of course serves as a bubbling pot of queer theory and drama. It’s used as a semi-safe place to experiment with ideas and passions and identities. There’s been this explosion of queer terminology and conceptualization over the last decade, and if you look at the citations an absurd portion of that originates on Tumblr. There are some ugly corners, like everything. But it’s significant—as is the overlap of fandom and queerness.
What with AO3’s 2019 Hugo award, lately fanfic has emerged as a major cultural force on a level not previously appreciated. Its status as a low-stakes garbage medium can often be a way for people to work out their feelings and experiences that can be hard to grasp or otherwise express—and as a format, oh lawd is it queer, almost by default. Going back to the 1960s, even. The basic terminology goes back to desperate queers finding romance between James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock.
From my own experience, I wrote my first fanfic out of desperation at the lowest point of my life—just to latch onto some kind of a creative effort with no expectations, no pressure to perform—and within a few months realized I was aroace and trans. It took someone else reading it and pulling me aside for a conversation to realize what I was saying, and even then I had to stew on what they said. But, I must stress firmly, none of this is uncommon.
Trash art like this is amazing, as it is so unguarded and earnest. And much of queerness is about embracing flaws and things other people write off, and saying, you know what, this is important too. To add to that, online in particular, such a community forms around it. Not just on Tumblr, though yeah, that remains a big launching pad even after the 2018 purge and exodus. There are so many outlets for this kind of a thing now, for people’s subconscious minds screaming to be heard.
Art is a way to communicate so much, coded so tightly, that you can transmit reams of information forming a sort of emotional handshake that no one will get unless they do, and for them the message is, you’re not alone. You are not wrong. We are out here.
Art is like Radio Free Europe for the dispossessed and the marginalized, who are told every day they are uniquely aberrant. It’s a way of reaching across the void and affirming a basic humanity to people who are denied it on the regular. And if that art can also speak to a broader audience, and loop them in on the message that there are other ways to be valid? It just knits us all that much closer.
These communities—sites like Tumblr and AO3—highlight how, unshackled from concerns for IP ownership, art serves as a conversation. Stories and icons and themes return to the culture where they live, where people spin them, riff on them, build on them as tools to understand their own lives and to model for others.
All our understanding of life and the world and ourselves, it’s a story we’ve been handed by the people around us, with a frame selected to encourage a particular reading and behavior.
Queerness is realizing, other stories are available. And we can write them together.
In hindsight it says a lot I think that the thing to first draw me in to Steven Universe was “Cry for Help.” There were lots of feelings I had no clue how to process. The scenario, it spoke to me—in a way I had trouble identifying.
Steven Universe s02e10: “Cry for Help” (2015)
It’s not direct, 1:1. But, like. I needed to see that.
It’s so hard to validate sometimes when a thing feels wrong and everyone you turn to is saying to you, what, you signed up for this; what are you complaining about; actually you owe this to the person making you feel this way, for putting up with you all this time.
The whole nature of my arrangement, it was like a big switcheroo, and I was trapped.
My body no longer belonged to me. I was no longer a person. I was just… an acquisition. For someone else’s use, at someone else’s whim. I was a prop for their benefit, and I had no more say.
Again, “Cry for Help,” it’s not exactly the same scenario. (Pearl is the one doing the coercion, for a start.) But, like. The point of the story is, our problems, the dangers we face, they aren’t really about bogeymen most of the time. People are people, and everyone is capable of great or terrible things, sometimes in the same breath. For practical reasons if nothing else, nearly all meaningful violence comes from people close to you. It’s hard to abuse a person without a foundation of trust.
Steven Universe Future s01e04: “Volleyball” (2019)
On some level, I knew things were wrong. I knew I was in a bad situation, and I didn’t know how to get away. But I just couldn’t address it. Not directly. Any problems I faced, I told myself they were my own fault; I just wasn’t strong enough. I needed to bear with it, try harder to prove my use to someone who didn’t even see me as human. I didn’t have the words or the resources to admit what I was facing, how wrong it was. And there was always some new emergency that was somehow mine to clear up.
I had ignored the show before that episode. Then I saw the response online. I looked up some reviews and saw what it was about. I dug up a copy and I watched it, repeatedly.
And just, seeing that coercion.
And, knowing, in some raw piece of what was left of me: oh.
There are so many abusive relationship dynamics in this show. It’s really something else—for any TV series, let alone a show aimed at twelve-year-olds. So many moments, it feels like the show is checking in on the viewer, saying, you see this? This isn’t okay. If it looks in any way familiar, go and chew that over for a minute.Maybe talk to someone.
Steven Universe s03e15: “Alone at Sea” (2016)
…
One of the reasons I like Lapis so much is, not only is her story just one big mound of whoomph identification over here; she’s also… not very likable. Lapis is a major fuckup. She’s prickly, and nasty, and inconsiderate. Not on purpose; just because, that’s what trauma often does to a person.
She knows how awful she can be. She knows how much she can hurt others without meaning to. It’s just, she just doesn’t know how to manage her pain and fear and depression well enough not to. The worse she responds, the worse she feels, because she doesn’t want to be like that. Every time she lashes out, all it does is affirm her own self-image that little bit more.
It’s not cute. It’s not cozy and sad and pathetic. Lapis is bitter and broken, and she has zero faith in herself. But, she also is so full of love and care and gratitude, that she wishes she knew how, had the basic fucking energy, to express.
It would be so easy to paint a character like Lapis as, oh, that poor little waif. Pity the mirror girl.
But no, Lapis is an asshole.
And it’s amazing.
And just, so… real.
Steven Universe Future s01e08: “Why So Blue” (2019)
90% of the time, Lapis is Extremely Not Helping. Because in the event she does anything, she doesn’t trust herself not to fuck it up or hurt someone or just lose control. But when she can keep it together? There’s no stopping her.
…
All that trauma, leading to all that bad behavior, all that conflict, all that grief and self-loathing, that’s the bulk of the show, just seeing how this plays out. Seeing people bounce off each other, bite each other’s heads off, weather each other’s abuse in the wake of things way bigger than them, that we never get to see clearly. Because they’re just the world Steven was thrown into. Much like us.
With Steven Universe, the real story happens long before the show begins. The show is about the fallout and the consequences of decisions ages in the past. What do we do now? What does this mean for us? How do we fix this? Can it even be fixed? Why is this on us? How is this fair?
Steven Universe: The Movie (2019)
This is in part why “Change Your Mind” has to happen as it does, why the trans allegory plays out in its slightly occluded way. Rose isn’t there anymore. She can’t end her story. She can’t fix things. She will never know closure. But we can still find a way to address her problems and move on.
We can give her a proper elegy, make sure the reasons behind her decisions are as clear as we can make them, and try our best to accept the present for what it is, and make the best of it that we can. Like Lapis, like Pearl—like Steven, like Amethyst—Rose was a fuckup, and she was in pain. That pain set all of this in motion. We can try to address the causes. Then for our part we can do better, we can be better. We can make a better life than we were handed.
That’s what it’s all about. That’s what everything is always about.
The throughline of Steven Universe is about working through the crap that has been left for you by forces outside your control and finding a way to live your life again.
And yet people remain baffled that Future plays out the way it does. As if it’s not the only possible resolution. As if the whole reason for this reckoning was for any other purpose than to come out the other side and find a way to be human.
So no kidding, the key that lodged in the back of my head and led me to recognize my queerness, some 30 years after it would have been useful to know, is this whole scene here—the dynamics of which we’ve all seen discussed in abstract, right? But to see it dramatized like this, and to recognize these thoughts and feelings so deeply…
Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 17
Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 18
Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 19
Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 20
Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), pages 17-20
This is precisely what I’ve felt whenever someone’s gotten close to me, and these are exactly the thoughts that have always run through my head. Even when the relationship lasts for years, that thought hangs there, coloring every single interaction: how long until they see me for who I really am, and then what will happen?
Like… it took a bit of unpacking for me to understand why I identified so closely with this business, based on what I had come to recognize about myself. The first step was recognizing the aroaceness, as reflected in the early interaction here. That wasn’t too tricky. I had empirical data to work with, and had been wrestling with years of browbeating for my lack of sexuality in relationships, which I just sort of interpreted as queerplatonic situations, without knowing the term.
The transness took a little longer to click, but then it was the biggest fucking “oh†in the world. My pan business… well, that took longer still, and isn’t directly informed by this comic, but after everything else it was more of a shrug. Sure, we’ve gone this far. Let’s just collect all the flags. Why not.
I think what really sells it is Steven’s awful, brain-dead avoidance strategy, which… yeah… followed by, “Maybe, instead, we should talk about what we want to do?”
What we want to do?
…
Oh.
…
OH.
…
oh?
Like, I genuinely never understood that I had a choice. I thought I just had to play with what I was dealt, go along with other people’s expectations for me. When people gave me an ultimatum and told me we couldn’t be friends anymore unless we changed the terms of our relationship and did things I didn’t feel comfortable doing, I had the option to say no, you go coerce someone else. I’m fine here. I didn’t have to actively suppress everything I was in order to make other people comfortable all the time. I didn’t have to deal with abuse. I didn’t have to be who other people wanted me to be, and were angry when I wasn’t.
The autistic masking sure as hell plays into the above as well. like, there’s always this anxiety in the event one manages to “pass” that one is just working one’s self into a bigger and bigger problem, so that when they notice the truth, some real shit is going to go down.
“… what we want to do.â€
Like, that kind of shook me. and for several months after I stumbled over the comic, I kept dwelling on it, putting myself in the place of Stevonnie, making analogies to all these scenes from my own past—thinking, what would I want to do? What do I want to do now? Does this apply in a real way? Is it too late? Do I have choices? What are they?
It turns out, yes. I had choices. Choices that I didn’t know enough to make. And then, I did.
Flaw is character. Flaws are what make us actual people, and not just cartoons. Flaws are what allow for beauty and growth and potential. Without flaw there is no hope. Stories often pay lip service to or structurally apply this ideal. It’s fun to root for the underdog, the misfit, so long as you know they’re in the right all along and they’ll show everyone in the end.
The best thing about Steven Universe is how deeply flawed every character is, how much they hurt themselves and each other as a result, and how committed the show is to showing them compassion anyway, without excusing their behavior, until they can learn to do better.
The thing people hate about Steven Universe is how deeply flawed the characters are, how much that drives the story, and the show’s refusal to pass judgment on them as people no matter how much it emphasizes the damage they do.
Because in our culture compassion is endorsement. To address a thing means to legitimize it.
So when Pearl… does what she does to Garnet, and for all the appropriate horror and weight, the show doesn’t write Pearl off entirely and rather spends this whole arc exploring the fallout of her decision, the peanut gallery chimes in about the show’s problematic attitudes toward rape.
So when, in desperation and to mixed success, Steven attempts to talk down the Diamonds—convince them to use their power to help people instead of hurting them—rather than look for a way to kill them outright, we get two-hour-long screeds on how a bisexual nonbinary Jewish woman is a Nazi apologist.
What makes the show magical is that it will not draw hard lines about people; only about the damage and the growth they cause and experience. It shows that anyone is capable of positive or negative change. It shows how attitudes and behavior are systemic, and how they cause a chain reaction that manifests in cycles far outside one’s control or direct understanding.
It’s a show about unconditional love and hope for change in a world that sucks where people repeat the garbage they’ve learned and don’t know how to do better even if they understand and accept the harm they do. Where the first step often is just accepting the pain and moving on.
And fuck if that isn’t the most relevant message in the world.
But we’re a culture that roars for blood and righteous retribution, where the only people who do bad things are people who are innately bad, and where some people are just more human, more deserving, than others.
Maybe if we had a few more positive philosophical models like this show, our cultural narrative would shift a bit. As it is, it’s a moral outlier. As anything that prioritizes kindness over righteous obedience will be. Because that’s what an unkind oligarchy has taught us is trouble.
Steven Universe is the best TV show ever, seriously, and if you haven’t yet you need to watch it until you understand it.
Which may take a while, as it’s fucking strange, and queer, and neurodiverse, and doesn’t signify or indicate or move or talk or think like any other show out there. But it’ll change your mind, change your life, if you allow it.
Christ, I’m looking at pictures of the person I was two years ago and I don’t even recognize them. Their features look all strange to me; they look a decade older, and so haunted. Even a year ago, I’m like, who the fuck is this and why do they look about to shatter?
This is making me uncomfortable, and I’m not inspired to continue with this spelunking because holy shit, but, uh. I get what my therapist was saying, even at a glance. I have a long way to go, lots of things still suck, and I can’t hold more than one idea in my head per day, but damn if there hasn’t been progress.
I’ve often mused about how age has been catching up to me, how for half my life I’ve looked sort of vaguely 20-ish maybe, and up to a couple years ago people kept assuming I was still in college. Now this body is 42, and I think it looks about that. That’s fine. It is what it is. But holy hell, in fall 2018 that person looked like they were one foot in the grave. It’s just so alarming.
It’s not just an abstraction. I think my former situation, it was literally killing me. Now? I’m actually alive. For the first time. It’s just a start, but—better late than never.
The thing about bodily sensations—pleasure, pain, excitement—is typically I have trouble telling them apart, as with this autistic brain everything is so extreme for me. It all just parses as various degrees of “too much,” that I have to grit my teeth and weather through until it ebbs to a manageable level. Social overwhelm, sex, injuries, overly strong scents, high temperatures, they’re all the same to me. I’m hit with this wave of shock, and my whole body shuts down. I tremble, start to black out. I can’t process what’s happening. It’s like a DDoS for my nervous system.
I say this because I feel like I’m suddenly become a little sensitized to caffeine. It’s never affected me much in the past, beyond kind of calming me down and clearing my head. In college I used to drink a couple cans of Surge to help me sleep. Maybe it’s my changing chemistry. But the last few days, I’ve had one mug of coffee and I feel like crying and taking a nap. I didn’t make the connection until now. My body feels like someone’s been yelling at me for an hour.
So, I guess that’s one more thing to pay attention to now.
Post published:Saturday, September 12th, 2020
Reading time:1 mins read
So much of my life takes a different focus when I understand it’s not my responsibility to convince bigots that I’m human. It doesn’t matter who they are, how they may be related, what leverage they may carry over me. They were always wrong. And I survived, and I’m here now.
It was they who failed me, not the other way around.
When I think of my childhood it’s basically just flat melancholy. So to engage with the pastel melancholy nostalgia of Steven Universe, it just—whoof. That wasn’t my life exactly, but in several emotional dynamics it feels so familiar—a past I recognize, yet with an optimism; a version where things can get better. The loneliness, the neglect, the emotionally unstable adults who act like needy little siblings to the children; the knowledge that you’re always doing everything wrong; the vague unprocessed dysphoria; very little sense of what’s normal or how to connect with others—it’s all part of the radiation.
So many episodes of the show, at least tonally, emotionally, they paint this picture of scenarios that could have been that way. They weren’t, and probably wouldn’t have been, but I understand them, almost remember them, in a way that I just don’t get from other stories.
I’ve talked about this before: I don’t emotionally engage with stories. I approach media with this satellite view, where I study how the pieces fit together to communicate meaning and I think about the way it’s done, how clearly it says its thing and whether that’s interesting. I think a big part of that is, I don’t feel like most things that people have to say are really meant for me. I engage with them like an alien, appreciating them on the basis of all the other abstract patterns I’ve seen in the last 40 years.
This show, for once something actually speaks my language. It communicates the way I communicate, prioritizes the things I find important, thinks and feels about things in a way I find intuitive, notices the details I notice, ignores the things I don’t care about, is queer and neurodiverse in ways that I never fully appreciated I was until decades after the harm was done. So many of the emotional consequences it shows to the scenarios it depicts, not only do I not see those, shown in that way, in other stories; they’re some of the truest, realist shit to my experience, often beyond what I’ve been able to process or communicate on my own.
To be able to reframe a neurodiverse, queer childhood and see it for what it is, and know that for all the universality of some experience it didn’t have to be as bad as it was… that’s a lot. The amount of healing it provides, just to see an alternate possible past, where for all the unavoidable problems one faces, unconditional love and acceptance are possible and reasonable to expect from others.
I get why people might not understand this series. It’s fucking weird. And it’s the only story I’ve met that more or less reflects my own perspective on the world. So, like. Other people, you get every other story that’s ever been told by anyone. I get this one.
