abuse

On Fucking Up

  • Reading time:3 mins read

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.

  • 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.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I’m still here.

You’re not going to kill me.

Stonewall

  • Reading time:3 mins read

For allistics, every interaction is on some level a power struggle. It’s not about understanding; it’s about asserting. You can see this in politics as well; the more explanation a candidate gives for a position, the less people seem to respect that candidate. If they just assert, â€œthis is how it is,” no matter how irrational or unreasonable it is, then people back away and go, okay, clearly they know what they’re talking about. 

I don’t like to fight, I have no interest in controlling anyone, and I want to know the reasons for things so that I understand how stuff works. But the more that I try to earnestly engage with allistics on my level, giving them all the tools I need to deal with a situation, the more aggressive they become. Because they see it as a fight they can win.

So the more quickly and bluntly you can shut them down, give them no leverage to even question your decisions, the smoother things will tend to go—as unintuitive as that feels.

“No.”

“I’d rather not.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I just can’t.”

I can’t stress this enough: allistics don’t want to know things. They don’t want to understand reasons or methods or meaning. They think they have it all under control, and that you’re undermining them, insulting them, if you give them anything to work with that interferes with the conclusions that they will form on their own. 

You’re controlling the story, they think, with all these facts and details, and not letting them write it themselves. How dare you. Well, they will show you who’s in control of the story. 

The only solution is not to engage. Don’t give them anything. Then they can’t throw it back at you. 

“This isn’t a negotiation. This is me telling you no.”

I think this is why consent is such a big issue for me. I don’t do power struggles. I don’t do negotiation. For me to say something, I’ve already worked out all of the angles I can and proposed the most generous possible solution, reserving as little as I can manage for myself. For someone to question that and say, no, you’re being a dick; I need more than the 95% you’re giving me, it’s just…

No.

I said no.

Fuck you, I said no. I won’t let you kill me.

I am so vulnerable to manipulation and guilt, to give up what autonomy I have over my own mind and body and emotions and needs and desires. I’m so prone to giving more than I can spare, even after I’ve drawn the final line, just to keep the peace.

No more explanations.

Just, no.

Setting boundaries is hard as hell. But if you don’t, it’s an invitation for abuse.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

god, my marriage was fucked-up

i was too lost to see it, but everyone was right

i feel like i’m lucky to be alive now

and for the first time maybe ever, i want to be

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.

Unpolished Mirror

  • Reading time:5 mins read

I’ve always had a poor sense of self. The confusing thing, that I’m only just working out, is that this doesn’t mean disliking myself; it means being hopelessly out-of-touch with a concept of me. With an inner narrative about who I am, and why, and how I feel about that.

This is an engineered situation. I know I’m not alone in this, except in that my experience is my own. But the effect is that this whole zone of selfness, this area that defines me and what I want and need, it’s fogged over with a perception filter. I try to look, and I roll off. To look at myself, try to identify myself as a person, even work out what I might want from moment to moment, it’s like making eye contact with a stranger or staring into the sun. Or checking one’s inbox, when an unpleasant response is likely. More than that. It feels shameful.

I lived in an abusive house. One of those where almost daily my father would congratulate himself at me for not hitting me, and telling himself (one suspects) more than me how grateful I should be, because other people had it much worse. Constant screaming. Near total neglect.

There were no mirrors in the house, except a high and dark one above the bathroom sink and a palm-sized one high up by the front door. I’ve mentioned this, but it seems important. I never got in the habit of seeing myself. I learned to keep my head down, make no demands or noise. If I did nothing, didn’t add to the noise, didn’t draw attention to myself, I could maybe get through the day without any of the surrounding war landing in my lap. Life was a matter of deflection, avoiding confrontation, reading danger signs, and pleasing the unpleasable. In return, at best, I got nothing. I got left alone.

And when I mean alone, I mean alone. No one ever really talked to me. Asked me questions. Showed me how to do anything, take care of myself. I had to figure out how to survive myself, sort of, in a house with two adults. As long as I was blank, I was fine. Because, if I weren’t blank I would be wrong.

In hindsight, anything would have been wrong. But I also… I didn’t have a strong concept, again, but I knew almost nothing that people expected of me applied to me in the slightest. In the ’80s and early ’90s, concepts of gender and sexuality weren’t so developed in the culture that would reach a small town in Maine. Whatever other people were doing, it sure didn’t fit me. Lots of people assumed, or feared, I was gay. I knew that wasn’t quite right either.

This whole scenario, it created a sort of limbo where it was impossible to move forward. The warfare between my parents undermined a desperate attempt to attend college out-of-state, and I just wound up doing what I was expected, trying my best to hack out a tolerable space in it. It wasn’t until I was 25 that I stumbled onto a lifeline, an excuse to get me out of that house. I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn’t care; I had to go. And I shifted into a totally different abusive situation. Someone looking for a void mirror like mine for themself.

So it went. I’m now 40; of those, only three years have been of my own company, outside of relationships where my lack of a sense of self was the main draw for the other, and I was a tool for their vanity. The point of me was not to be a person. I was obedient, so as to survive.

Obedience is the thing. It’s the only way that I’ve known, yet I’m so very bad at it. I’m okay when it means doing nothing, but when it means to do that which comes naturally to others, or to play a role written for me, I don’t have it in me. And this is where the pain comes in. The depression, the anxiety, the shame, it’s actually nothing to do with me. My poor self-concept isn’t a concept of a poor self. That’s not where the hyphen is. It’s all to do with the narrative put on me by others, that I’m expected to reflect without flaw. And I’m not so glossy.

Getting to know myself, it’s scary. I’m so used to checking over my shoulder. Making sure no one sees me glancing in the mirror, or the glass of the shop window. What I see there, it feels forbidden on so many levels. But, it’s all that I have. I need to take a serious tally. When I step away from the shame of looking at all, and the fear that what I find may not match the expectations of those who control my fate, I like the person who I find. It’s a shaky relationship, the one I’m building, and one started far too late. But at least I’ve found them.

I still don’t know what to do about all this, how to support this person who it seems that I am, how to help them be who and what they need to be. But I see them now, and I’m coming to understand. And I’m starting to care. So this can be my little project from now on.

The Overton Binary

  • Reading time:6 mins read

It’s hard to understand these things sometimes, and it can take a while to put the pieces together even after the vocabulary is there, but it’s becoming clear that I’ve never much understood the gender binary at all. It’s always struck me as a gross and distressing performance. This goes for both ends of the scale, though as I present male I’m closer to the grossness of that extreme. Heck, as with reactionary politics that extreme tends to overwhelm the whole scale; let’s not kid ourselves. But any strong, exclusive gender performance weirds me out. Like, why can’t people just be themselves, with all that entails? Why slot into these reductive archetypes, that so far as I can see only serve to maintain a power structure? Like so many barriers between people. Like the notions of race and class, and all of this.

(I don’t mean to criticize people for choosing or falling into a role; what frustrates me is the social framework that practically requires people to pick a side — because life is war, and someone’s gonna have to win it. (P.S., the house always wins! (The house is Patriarchy!)))

I know it’s not easy, and I come from a position of privilege. Relatively speaking. I present male, white. I’m pretty well-educated, tall. All I’ve really got against me (until you get to know me) is some extreme social awkwardness, which I can sometimes fake my way around. Even with all that, though, I’ve been bullied pretty much my whole life for not being male enough. I made an easy target in middle school. People more than occasionally assume I’m gay. My ex-spouse used to freak out whenever I did or said anything she perceived as un-masculine.

Thing is, I don’t understand this charade. At all. I’ve never thought of myself as male, really. Or female. I’m just, I’m me. Gender performance has never been a topic that’s crossed my mind, unless someone made it my problem. Which again maybe is my privilege, in part. Presenting nominally (foppishly) male, I don’t have to worry too much about physical or sexual violence. Emotional abuse is another topic, and I do seem to have a personality that lends itself to predators. But that’s probably more to do with my mild autism than any gender issue.

It’s all this outside thing, you know. I don’t mind presenting as male, if I’m not expected to put on this gender performance. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my identity, and my body issues are more around awkwardness than my relative androgyny. I’m just me, is all.

Awkwardness and boundaries. Goddamn, the boundaries. So hard to know where to maintain, and where I should make an exception. Though I’m starting to understand that may be never. Because it never feels right. So, that’s my choice, right? It’s my body. It’s for me, before anyone.

For above reasons, it’s probably to my advantage to present as male. So it’s fortunate things turned out that way. Might as well ride that train, right? Won that social lottery. But for I think similar reasons to why I recognize myself as ace, being forced into a binary hurts me. I could do without another therapist marveling at how gender roles in my relationships always seem to end up “flipped.” That’s got less to do with gender, guys, than with personalities. A passive person tends to attract aggressive people. (Recognizing my asexuality helps there.) I could do without anyone ever telling me I’m wrong for not being what they expect me to be, playing some role that has nothing to do with me. I could do without anyone in my life who can’t accept me for who I am, before what they think I should be. Same as I try to do with them.

I’m pretty messed up, and I probably always will be. But I’m starting to find that line between what I think is actually a character flaw that I need to work on — of which I have many — and what’s everyone else’s problem. Of which I’m starting to think there may be far more.

It still makes me really sad, though.

I find it way easier to identify with women, but that may be less to do with femininity in itself than the extreme awfulness of masculinity as performed in this culture. Some kind of an Overton window thing, kinda. If that can even be adapted to a gender spectrum. Again both extremes feel weird and icky. It’d be nice if everyone were lent the freedom to just be themselves. Like, toss the whole spectrum in the trash. What good is it? But power structures make this easier for some than others.

It’s like. In English we just have the word “cousin,” right? Same for lots of family terms. We’re not very specific. In some other languages, they bug out if you don’t specify a gender. They Need To Know if you’re talking about your male-cousin or female-cousin. It’s Important. Coming at that from an anglophone angle, it sounds comical. What should it matter? If the gender plays a role, it’ll come up in the conversation, right? If not, who cares. It’s just a shame that attitude doesn’t stretch further. I don’t even much get why gender should be a thing.

Anyway. I don’t know how much this is some deep-seated philosophy and how much you can attribute back to that autism (which plays into not understanding or much caring about social conventions beyond, you know, trying to be kind to people). But I don’t live in this world. However much of an expression of privilege it may be, based on my skin tone and anatomy and the vocabulary I use, I don’t like these power games and I don’t want to play them. I don’t like to play any game where there’s a winner and a loser. I’m… okay with myself if left alone.

And that’s really what it comes down to: wanting to be left alone. Building friendships based on kindness and mutual appreciation and acceptance, not on some socially driven power game. I don’t really get sexuality. I don’t really get gender. I want little to do with either.

I never want to again be in a situation where I’m tied to someone not through friendship but through expectation of some role performance. I won’t be objectified like that, same as I don’t want to objectify anyone else. Just, be people, yo. Be good. Don’t just use each other.

And if anyone has a 6′ long slim purple overcoat, I’ll totally take it.

Autumn dress is the best dress, man.