existotherwise

[existotherwise]

Wednesday, July 17, 2024 6:54pm

I promise I'm not being dramatic. I don't think anyone really cares for me, or maybe I haven't allowed them to really love me other than in person or over the phone, and any admiration I had stirred years ago, when I was more active, has dried up due to an infrequent presence online.

I'm at one of the worst places in my life thus far, and almost everyone I've developed attachment to over the years has frankly disposed of me, as in factual evidence and not a flare of drama.

I could sit staring at the walls and letting my time blindness unfold into the infinite void of the present, but I try to only feel the ocean waves pummeling my corporeal spirit when consented.

Since top surgery, I've felt more myself than ever before. I took time away in the woods over the winter to allow myself to fully embrace my new range of embodiment. I felt more myself when I was living alone for 4 months in a cabin on a hill in the forest than I do when I must interact with people within hierarchical resource economies for support.

There seems to be some very hidden very subconcious difference in the way that people with resources see me vs. the way that I see myself and how I value my offerings to them. It's as if I believe I am worthy, and they do not. As each domino falls however, I become more desperate... reinforcing a disillusioned banishment from cisgender society.

The base of this alternate reality is a predisposition to being "fully self sufficient" (as one of my friends, an elderly southern aristocratic cis gay man has told me bluntly). Allyship only goes so far to say: "If you can't provide for yourself the same way that I can, than I'm passing the buck to the next person down your already limited list of contacts that believe your reality is more than likely plausible."

Haven't they ever heard of the bystander effect? If Kitty Genovese got a chance to become elderly, she'd puke in disgust, but alas... she lies in dust in Lakeview Cemetary.

So, I'm arriving at a point of legacy-building....

One of my dearest trans friends died in 2018 in the ocean, drown to death, didn't know how to swim and got caught in a rip current. They were one of the brightest lights I still to this day have ever experienced. I went to the memorial. I went to the funeral. The loss of vitality of trans people happens more frequently to suicide or violence, but nevertheless Mother Nature scooped them up and the loss was felt heavily on me and the other trans people in our crew.

I'm haunted by not knowing how to advise a grieving mother on how to gender her baby correctly when the casket is open and the heart wound fresh. They were not gender in the way they wanted to be remembered, but what haunts me more is there is only a small trace of their legacy accessible to the public.

Their art hasn't been archived like Francesca Woodman's or Jimmy DeSana's. Their family did not start an estate, nor did I make them privy to my friend's last words to me ("I have so much more new shit I'm excited to share with you.").

.

.

This is the crux of my soul-death -- If I do not leave this realm with everything already archived and in order for someone to find... If I do not entrust my archive, my storage unit, my computer, account, hard drive passwords with someone who understands me and knows how hard I worked at this shit, knows how I felt intimately about my practice... then nothing was worth it. I'm just a spring cleaning away from the record of my creative mind decaying next to fast fashion in a landfill.

And in this same sentiment, I've recently felt like my present existence [this bodybag that doesn't have a job, can't pay rent, and is barely eating] is ultimately devalued by anyone I have ever felt like I'd write down as my Executor in my "After I'm Gone Organizer" (I neurotically impulse-bought a few months ago when all of this started) or trust with signing over my Google account to or given a spare key to my storage unit.

The only things that keep me going are Archive Fever, my kitten, the motto my dad signs ["I'm Still Standing Ya Ya Ya" (Elton John)] and surrounds with stickers on his letters to me, the discourse on suicide from Heathers (1988), and "Don't Try Suicide" by Queen.

[Pray for us]

[existotherwise]

Saturday, July 13, 2024 10:36pm

I've never publicly published many thoughts. I've read poetry to live audiences and even had a few of them published. I've started my memoir twice now, and the weight of all the thoughts is crushing me.

I think I decided somewhere along that I didn't want to participate in society anymore. That's not so much reality I suppose. I really do wish to share so many thoughts with people, and I only really feel like I can when I write them out beforehand, when they see a nature end. When I share them in long form though, it's too overwhelming directly or in the wrong circumstances.

So here I am... trying it?...

I had a Tumblr years ago. One that I mostly reposted on, and I remember when there became a clearer cultural understanding of those that contributed original posts and those that reposted. I was then more so trying on, as Legacy Russell puts it in Glitch Feminism, "a digital skin" of sorts. I was curating my aesthetic like a mood board, like a starter pack, like my peers, the sad tumblr girls. I was figuring out my identity at the age of the Big Tech Boom. I was one of the last generations of digital immigrants, and one that was set back further by my elder's distrust of technological innovations.

I wanted to share my inner workings, but it all felt too icky to portray. At that time I was in high school. I had just escaped foster care, was living with one of my abusers to get away from another abuser, and I believed that I would one day get to a place where ground would settle, the elixir of a freed youth would lubricate the splinter in my core, and I would burn forth in brazen livelihood to have finally spoken my truth. This did not so much happen.

I did have my moments with the music, moments of truth and friendship and loveliness, but the most genuine joy I've felt has been alone when I was able to sit and remember at least one good thing that's happened in this torturous whiplash world and write it in my own words, not to be interrupted by unprovoked questions or interjections of commonality.

The favor of any crowd is fickle. I am but fortunes fool to think that meticulously archiving my life on a hard drive would assure me a long-lasting legacy in a culture of posterized idols. I've taken myself too seriously. I must feed the AI brain my perspective in order to be spared a life of destitution and irrelevance.

I MUST one day be able to exist otherwise, to procure a room of my own, to forge deeper than the realm I've been cast to, to depend on my mind, and not the labor of body or the ensnarement of my ego.

I hate it here so much I wilt in languish in a weary time-sped promenade of pain and deliriousness like I did as a child, crying in secret in the closet at the evils of prejudice.

The individual is excised as prophecy when it is but dust.

Has predicated existence ever been anything but a game of numbers?

#existotherwise