#and for goodness' sake he's been thrown into the deep end with the intense scrutiny & that messed up car

[chaoticlandworlder]

Ngl the liam lawson hate is getting real tiring

[stina-lu-blog]

Laurie Penny is everything to me. She is the opinion I wish I had thought of first. She is the scream I have repressed. She is the nights I wish I had spent protesting in the rain in the weeks following last year’s election. She is the friend I needed after my first breakup. She is the repository of hard facts I lack when I try to change my parents’ minds. She is the song I want to write. She is the diary I have filled to the margins and thrown away in embarrassment.

I’m sitting on the floor of my bedroom. It’s on the second floor of a nice apartment, so nice that my mother not only approves, but also has put in the effort to take pictures of with her phone. I can afford the place because I have agreed to section off a small part of the living room to sleep in. Two years ago, a man came in to make the arrangement official with the installation of several tall white bookshelves that fall just twelve inches short of touching the ceiling. 

Unspeakable Things balances on my knee. 

So Laurie speaks the unspeakable, and I am left unable to speak, period. It’s an intimidating book to have in your home, just as she must be an intimidating person to meet in the flesh, and I’m ashamed to be stirred, tonight, by only the last chapter, the chapter with the title “Love and Lies”. For context’s sake, I will talk about a relationship I had, the only relationship I’ve ever had, that broke me in such a way that I felt I had to bury my misery to salvage my small vestiges of self-worth. It’s 2012, my sophomore year of college, and we live in the same dorm. We also happen to be in the same journalism program, so we exchange notes and quotes, gossip about the industry experts that file in, one after the other, warning us of the “death of print” and lauding the emergence of digital media. The semester ends, and I leave for London.

We correspond for a year while we take our respective semesters abroad, and once we’re both back in the same city we finally meet up again, shyly, in the lobby of our campus library. That weekend he comes over with a bottle of wine. I remember sitting there at the “smoky crystal” table my roommates and I had lugged over fourteen blocks back to our then-empty eighth floor apartment. I remember feeling my heart thud loudly in my chest as I try to figure out where to look if not at him. But I love looking at him, love noticing over and over how he smells of beer, love the tiny mole on his neck and his sheepish smile and his boyish confidence. And because I know he’s too perfect, I feel the need to flex my own power somehow, by teasing him and keeping him at arm’s length. Part of me is also inexplicably unsure. Part of me is also scared. Looking back I distinctly remember the moment I realized he had completely taken over my thoughts. I was hurrying into my Business Law lecture late. A small classroom with three short rows of tables, and even then under the intimate scrutiny of my professor and classmates I’m unable to stop replaying our last conversation, belittling myself for things I had said and things I hadn’t, worrying about how I held up against his last flame, feeling my face flush when I remembered the night he kissed me, missing him. 

The rest of the semester passes by like a hyperactive dream. The highs are ecstatic but the lows are defeating. More than once I found myself curled on the bathroom floor, angrily wanting my independence back. I don’t want to obsess over him anymore. I had wanted to go into this pragmatically, but feeling swiftly superseded any attempts to be kind and rational. I have “trust issues”, but I also have the distinct feeling that love isn’t supposed to be this taxing, at least not at first. I am consumed with envy and the need to know. I allow him to understand none of this, opting instead for the more passive tactic of slowly pushing him away. Then one night about ten days to the end of school, I abruptly end things. We go on a short walk in the park behind my apartment, sitting down across the basketball courts. For a while there is only the sound of sneakers squeaking against painted asphalt and the snap of rubber rebounding off the tight perimeter of metal hoops. I can’t even look at him. He knows what’s about to come, so he starts. He was always a good counterpart to me in that regard. 

He doesn’t say much, but what he reveals is enough to make me resolute and angry. That night I fall asleep relieved, but the next morning the misery is enough to squash me deep into my mattress, so deep I can barely flip onto my side under its weight. Unbeknownst to my friends, this became a months-long affliction, and though I eventually grow used to it the regret becomes a permanent worm in my brain, an awful, nagging reminder that life is a labyrinth of forking paths and most of the time it is impossible to retrace your steps and choose again. 

What I read tonight in Laurie Penny’s book, and maybe this is a trite takeaway from an otherwise very empowering and enlightening polemic, changed the narrative I have been sadly entertaining for years about my decision that night near the basketball courts. Laurie writes of a trademarked Love, defining it as a neoliberal ideal that replaces religion as today’s opiate. She quotes Alexandra Kollontai:

I still belong to a generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love still played a very great role in my life. An all-too-great role! We, the women of the past generation, did not yet understand how to be free. The whole thing was an absolutely incredible squandering of our mental energy, a diminution of our labour power.

...As great as was my love for my husband, immediately it transgressed a certain limit in relation to my feminine proneness to make sacrifice, rebellion flared in me anew. I had to go away, I had to break with the man of my choice, otherwise I would have exposed myself to the danger of losing my selfhood.

My selfhood. That is what lay bruised and neglected in my first foray into love. I will be the first to admit that I was also enormously naive and insecure, and those were undeniably contributing factors to the abuse on my selfhood, and to the ultimate and abrupt end of my relationship. Undeniably, those shortcomings bottlenecked the intensity of it. But what also contributed largely was my inability to reconcile the image of me curled up on the bathroom floor, racked with jealousy and anxiety and self-doubt, with my experience of what was supposed to be the grandest feeling in life, the feeling of being wanted. Finally, after all those years of reading and watching Love, trademarked, I had it in my possession, I could hold it and feel it under the skin of my fingertips, draw its outline in the dark, and yet...I didn’t understand why I felt compromised in the process. 

Another excerpt from Laurie’s book:

I have been in Love™. I have fallen hard and fast for people with whom I shared something precious and unspeakable that went far beyond sex. I crossed continents, kicked in jobs and boarded trains in the middle of the night with all my hopes and some spare pairs of pants packed in a trundle-bag to be with those people. I pared down the awkward, ugly parts of my personality because I thought it might please them. I even felt, for brief moments, like the shining girl I knew I was supposed to be. I felt beautiful and special and treasured and I did my very best to make the other person feel that way too. It was fantastic. But after a while, it was also stifling.

Being In Love is great, but it’s not the greatest happiness I have ever known. If I’m honest, I prefer plotting revolution with my friends. Every time I have been in that kind of love, I have ended up running, packing up my things and leaving notes real or imaginary and moving on, because I was sick of being a love object. And in that running, what I found was that outside fairy tales, love happens all the time.

I don’t want to point all the regret and sadness I felt at the end of my first relationship to the consequences of neoliberal brainwashing. But I do find a lot of solace in what is discussed in that last chapter of Unspeakable Things, and I have to believe that it’s because it touches on some truth I haven’t been able to verbalize until today. Why is it that we are primed to believe romantic love is the end-all, that it is “a prize to be won and jealously hoarded”? Why did I want it so badly that I was willing to mute my eccentricities, to allow my mood to be dictated by a partner’s actions or inactions, to transform myself into a mold of the person I thought he wanted? 

Let’s be clear on one thing though: I’m sure it works both ways. I’m sure I’m not the only one who pared down my personality or cross-configured moods. And besides, there’s something satisfyingly carnal about the invisible lacerations, the self-inflicted splicing and sewing. But there is also something to be said about how far we are willing to take that. 

Laurie writes, “People shape their lives to stories, and sometimes it works.” 

Within the framework of the story I had grown up on, that night in the park I had thrown away the best thing to have ever happened to me, the ultimate happiness. 

But within the framework of the story Unspeakable Things has reconstructed for me, that night in the park was my deciding that Love, trademarked, was not making me happy at the moment, at which point I began moving towards something that would. I had not, as the current stigma of being single suggests, given up the lottery. I had simply decided that there were other games I wanted to play. To me, that narrative is powerful but, more importantly, it is freeing.