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002 - when keeping it real goes wrong

key terms~

futile devices: words. (s/o to sufjan stevens for this one.)

miss or miss: the opposite of "hit or miss"; when everything is staticky and not-quite-right. wrongness (the "miss" of it) comes into view through the sheer number of failures, rather than being illuminated by the presence of success. see also: "words." see also: "conversational car crash."

or--is genuine communication possible between human beings or are we doomed to run into other people's pain points and defense mechanisms (to say nothing of our own!) over and over until we croak?!?

hello again~

i was originally coming on here to complain! it was going to be the usual pill of "why do i feel so misunderst00d? why doesn't anyone listen to m333?? why do i feel so anxious, yet disconnected in most of my relationships??"

lest, my spelling give the wrong impression, i am genuinely concerned with the answers to these questions. this post, however, wants to be about something else: how words fail us.

yesterday, i had a negative interaction with a person i used to have a crush on. to be fair to them, being demoted from "object of adoration" to "mere mortal" is tough: everyone, no matter how sweet, looks worse without devotion's fuzzy wuzzy roseglow. more proof that other people's perceptions of us have as much to with them as with us.

anyway. things were just... weird. the sweetness that attracted me to them in the first place had seemingly evaporated, now replaced with a bottomless well of negativity and cynicism. my friend and i tried to move the conversation away from the spiralling, with limited success.

problem one: how do you affirm someone's emotional experience without feeding the fire?

after explaining the energy i'd experienced to another friend, i received (what i perceived as) a disinterested response. it seemed that what i had done to former crush (FC lol) was being done to me. wanting people to validate personal emotions and experiences, even though intellectually, i know they can't, only to be shut down. terrible.

problem two: how many of my conversations are about a) commiseration or b) over-analyzing someone else's behavior?

i'm realizing how often graduate school is a breeding ground for unproductive conversations. much of the bonding we participate in comes about through shared grievances, rather than shared joys. we don't have enough time to nurture our hobbies or do any meaningful soul-searching, which means that when we get together, we're often talking about how tired/miserable we are.

(conversely, many times when i've said i was happy and grounded, i discovered shortly thereafter that i was neither happy nor grounded.)

in the theatre community esp, there's so much codependency and enmeshment masquerading as healthy concern and communication. as i've become more and more aware of my attachment patterns, i find myself curious about how these dynamics play out on a social level. and, this can't be said enough: gossip is toxic! which is unfortunate because theatre culture thrives on gossip. who's been fired, which theaters are closing, who's hiring, and so on.

maybe it's cheesy, but word are spells! and for people who (allegedly) understand the power of language and performance, it's wild to see us creating a toxic energy cloud with... our words! wtf.

at this point, my goal for the year is to stop performing my personality and to just... say less.

to validate my own feelings and ideas, instead of expecting other people to do it for me.

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wait, these are so gorgeous 🥲

Essendon, October 2021

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so much to think about here. the rise of the self as brand, and therefore capital. at this point, if you can’t market yourself clearly and distinctly, do you even exist? to riff on benjamin’s “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, we are now the works of art--or rather the self is.

not sure what i’m trying to get at here. maybe it’s the strangeness of seeing classical sculpture, MLK and britney spears in the same frame. what an uncanny cast of characters. 

maybe, it’s that the best we can hope for is to become symbols. at least, within the capitalist superstructure. yikes!

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001

hi. long time no see.

when i started my first tumblr account, the world was a different place. the sherlock fandom was still going strong, arabelle sicardi was the unofficial queen regent of beautyblr. sjw was a legitimate insult. color-coded graphics explained the many valences of gender and sexuality. 

when it came to theory, tumblr was my playground. it was also a lifeline to a world that was bigger than my deeply introverted suburban existence. i found people who obsessed over fanfiction, reblogged the same arctic monkeys songs i loved. i discovered barf troop, lorde, and the power of a good gifset. of course, there were moments of ugliness. fandoms at war. hateful messages. the usual suspects. but more importantly, on tumblr, i saw vulnerability, i saw people unafraid to like the weird shit they liked. tumblr was a place where no one apologized for being. 

all good things must come to an end, however. as it turned out, i couldn’t stay hidden in my room forever. the real world beckoned. i abandoned my account in favor of real life human connection. i pursued all the things you’re supposed to pursue in your early 20s: gainful employment and other people. unfortunately, in doing so, i lost a vital part of myself. by the time i entered grad school at 24, deeply anxious and traumatized from decades of people pleasing, i was completely alienated from my own taste--and sense of identity. a professor asked my class to make a list of our favorite foods and favorite places. not only was i unsure of my answers, i found myself with a startling dearth of memories in general. 

looking back, i can see the pattern. so unused to having a life full of other people (shout out to the lonely black gworls in the back !!!), and subsequently, other people’s energy, i simply took on the interests of the people i was around. 

now if this shapeshifting was obvious, like idk, me suddenly getting in WELDING or smthing, i would have noticed earlier. but it was sneaky. subtle. i watched certain movies or listened to certain albums because they were kinda what i was interested in, or because they seemed like the kind of thing IdealMe(tm) would be into. slowly, compromise by compromise, i drifted away from my center. i stopped reading fiction--stopped reading at all--one of the few activities that always returns me to my own mind. i was attracted to people who seemed fully immersed in their personal interests and tried to ride the coattails of their enthusiasm (cue codependent no more). 

it wasn’t until (yet another) quasi-romantic connection burst into flames that i (all too slowly) began asking myself the hard questions. what was i hoping to escape? why did i expect other people to rescue me from my despair? where the fuck was i and how did i end up there????!??!?!?! help!!!

and, so on.

a year of covid passed, and several relationships grew more troubled. i began to see my own toxic behaviors mirrored back to me, this time magnified to the tenth power. i saw how attachments form. i saw how unfettered need might cause us to siphon other people’s life force, even those we respect and admire. especially them. i saw that i was not responsible for anyone else’s opinion of me. i saw that, in fact, the only thing i could be responsible for in this life was myself. and, that terrified me. i worried that i wasn’t up to the task. i worried that i would fail myself as i had so many times before. after a number of traumatic experiences and the longterm effects of relentless misogynoir, i didn’t feel capable of living my own life. this was partly because i had been wandering for so long, but also because i realized that i would have to become a different person. 

i would have to become myself. which meant letting go of so much baggage re: what i thought i wanted or knew i was supposed to want. i discovered i was in school for a degree i didn’t care about. i discovered that my inner fire was almost burnt out. i needed to bring it back.

after deliberating how i might go about doing this, i decided that i would return to the place that started it all. the olde cursed site. the place where so much of my humor comes from. the place that has shaped me into a weirder kinder human being in the hope that maybe, just maybe, there’s enough magic left to do it again. 

“something good can work” by two door cinema club, a song i first became obsessed with at 16/17 just popped up on shuffle. i hope that title still holds true. 

we’ll see.