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chelledoggo · 4 years ago

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Coming Clean

The past few days for me have been...eventful, to say the least.

But it's a new day, I've cooled down from the panic, and am ready to make my final, no-BS statement on this whole controversy. I feel like it needs to be done, and a few tweets on the subject isn't enough.

CW: Transphobia, Ableism, Suicide, Anxiety, Panic attacks, Depression, Rape and Murder mentions

On Sunday, July 12, 2020, I made a meme and posted it to Twitter. Essentially, the meme was comparing issues of mainstream trans and nonbinary people (being killed, being raped, being made fun of, being denied health care under Trump, etc...) to the online xenogender community, a community which I had not previously properly educated myself on.

Xenogenders, as I understand now, are gender identities that are used by some people, typically neurodivergent people, because they feel that these terms describe their gender identity better than the predetermined labels that are more commonly used. (cis, trans, nonbinary, agender, genderqueer, etc.) These identities are often based on unconventional factors, such as aesthetics, creatures, mythical beings, natural phenomena, and so on, and often use pronouns specially coined to compliment them.

In the meme, I depicted a very unflattering stereotype of xenogender youth, and used some tasteless terminology to describe how they present their developed gender identity to the world.

I won't bullshit you anymore. Here is the meme. (CW for Transphobia and Ableism; Rape and Murder mentions)

I posted it to Twitter, closed out, and took a nap. I didn't expect much to come out of it except for a few likes and retweets. I was obviously very wrong.

When I woke up and pulled up Twitter again, I was greeted to my notifications being flooded with replies upset by what I'd posted. Many of them were calling me out for ableism and transphobia. Some of them were just flinging insults and mocking me for my age/appearance/etc. Some of them were just fancams.

I'd finally seen the true impact of my actions.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a fear of angering others or becoming hateful and ignorant. I would never want to intentionally hurt innocent people, especially those of marginalized groups such as the trans and nonbinary communities. And as someone who is neurodivergent herself, I certainly wouldn't want to be willfully ableist. I've faced ableism in one form or another for my entire life.

People could also tell you that for pretty much my entire life, I've suffered with mental illnesses. I've been professionally diagnosed with depression, anxiety disorder, PTSD, and bipolar disorder. As such, I'm prone to panic attacks, outbursts, and suicidal ideation when under extreme distress.

As soon as I saw all the anger and hurt I'd caused, I started spiraling into a severe panic attack. I didn't realize how much this meant to a lot of people. A lot of young, neurodivergent people.

I felt like the scum of the earth. I fucked up, just like I've fucked up and made people hate me so many times before in the past. This is my life. Acting without thinking, and then unintentionally hurting people.

I immediately deleted the tweet and made an admittedly hasty apology.

When I'm in this state, however, I don't think clearly. My immediate reaction was that I was just too much of a fuck-up to go on living. I made a tweet saying I wanted to kill myself without any thought as to how that might be interpreted as guilt-tripping after I fucked up instead of taking responsibility.

Again, I was called out on it. So I deleted my suicidal tweets, too.

I then started posting tweet after tweet after tweet claiming that I was sorry and wanted to “be better.” But this barrage of tweets, as sincere as I thought they were at the time, came off as shallow damage control.

Once again, I was called out on this.

The next day, I tried once again to make a no-bullshit apology. I stated in plain english that I was indeed transphobic, ableist, and 100% in the wrong to make that meme, and that, while I still didn't fully understand xenogender identities, I would be respectful of them from now on.

There were plenty of people who were glad I apologized and learned from my mistakes, and I honestly felt a lot better for it.

I was hoping this would just be a fresh start, and things could slowly go back to normal for me and my friends.

However, there were also people angry at me for “bending the knee,” as they put it. I hid their replies to my apology because some of them (not all of them) were friends of mine, and I didn't want them getting attacked.

Some of my friends took this as “throwing them under the bus,” and were angry at me for it. A few of them decided they didn't want to be my friends anymore.

My friends, whether I agree with them on everything or not, mean a lot to me. They are really the only emotional support I have. I suffer from abandonment issues and my mental illness symptoms spike whenever I lose people I consider close friends.

So I lashed out at them for not respecting my decisions. I felt like they didn't really care about my mental health or my emotional wellbeing. I was hurt. Hurt just like I hurt everyone with the meme that started this whole nightmare.

I then, once again, started posting suicidal tweets. I talked about wanting to “chug a bottle of pills” and “go out like etika.” I actually attempted to strangle myself with a bathrobe belt. But, of course, I'm an all-talk-no-action coward when it comes to suicide.

After this, something just kind of fizzled out inside of me. I came to the conclusion that as much as I wanted to just make everyone happy, I couldn't. I couldn't make everyone believe that I was sorry, and I couldn't make everyone stop seeing me as just someone who wanted to “bend the knee” to avoid backlash.

So I was done. I gave up. I didn't care anymore. I was numb.

I made one last series of tweets stating just that, announced I was taking a break from twitter to heal, privated my account, and left. (I also made a tweet asking for people to report the person who screenshotted my meme and got people on me, but then I got called out for targeting a minor, and deleted this tweet as well.)

That brings us to right now.

I decided that I needed to really sit down, gather up all my thoughts, and recount the entire series of events. I just want everything that happened, including my words and actions, to be understood.

I'm not a bad person. I'm not an ableist or a transphobe. But I am a human. A human who makes mistakes. And when I make mistakes, I want to learn and do right by the people I've hurt.

I'm also a person with an extremely fragile mental and emotional state. A person who doesn't think clearly under pressure. A person who's had to put up with a lifetime of feeling like a failure who should honestly just cease to exist.

The bottom line here is this: I've gone through the suffering that I needed to go through. I realized the consequences of my ignorance. I've tried and am still trying my best to do right by everyone. I need to get this thing off my chest, confess to my sins, and finally let this whole thing go. So I can heal. So that everyone I hurt and everyone who got caught up in this can heal.

I would be lying if I said I completely understood xenogenders at this point. I probably never will. But I don't need to understand. I just need to be respectful. Because at the end of the day, no one's hurting anyone by identifying with a xenogender identity. They're just people trying to find themselves, just like I am. Who the hell am I to put them down? I'm neurodivergent. I've been young. I should know better.

I sincerely apologize to the xenogender community, to the LGBT+ community, to my friends, and to everyone that got caught up in this.

I love you all.

TL;DR: Made a shitty meme. Didn't do my research on xenogenders. Was ableist/transphobic. Had a severe mental health breakdown. Alienated everyone. Am genuinely sorry.

NOTE: At the time of posting this, my Twitter is still on private, and I’m afraid to unprivate it just yet. I would appreciate it if my friends could share this so it can get out there.

#shut up chelle

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fourteenacross · 7 years ago

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okay, i have comments to give on "everyone must breathe," but in the meantime: the section from "communicable" (which i've read 500 times, btw,

Don’t worry about comments, I GET IT I am super behind on a) answering comments and b) reading and commenting on other people’s fic. Such is the holidays, etc.

COMMENTARY! YES! Here are some unfiltered thoughts on this section of fic! Please feel free to ask for elaboration if there’s anything in particular you were curious about that I didn’t hit on!

It takes John four buzzes to realize someone is calling him and a fifth to actually fumble for the phone, see it’s Alex, and pick up in a panic.

“Alexander?” he says breathlessly, his heart hammering, a million worst case scenarios screaming in his mind. It’s the middle of the night–full dark, with the heavy, still silence that means the rest of the world is dead asleep. There’s no earthly reason Alex should be calling him.

So this was one of the first scenes that I wrote in this fic. I knew really early on, when everything before the fall of their second year was going to be quick flashback scenes and nothing more, that there was a point when everyone got sick a lot and Alex had to stay with the Washingtons to avoid contaminating John. I really liked that kernel of an idea, this image I had in my head of Alex being miserable in bed and John being useless because he was too busy visiting Alex whenever he could to get anything done. That sort of morphed into the idea of Washington or Mrs. W coming in to check on Alex and finding John asleep next to his bed, which led my brain down the road of, “Okay, but why/how does he get there?” and this immediately popped into my head after.

“John?” Alex sounds slow and tired, not quite himself. “I woke up and you weren’t here and I had–I had a dream.”

He doesn’t actually sound awake, his words mumbled and slurred and quiet.

“Baby, what’s wrong?” John asks. He’s already sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes. “Are you okay?”

So, we’ve already established in this verse that Alex has recurring nightmares that he sort of blows off. They’re enough to wake him up and rattle him, but he never remembers what they’re about (he never really tries to remember what they’re about) and he’s generally very dismissive of them. John (and, hopefully, the reader) has sussed out that they’re most likely to do with Alex’s abandonment issues and fear of being alone. However, because he’s so quick to brush off his dreams, I needed to make it reasonable that he would actually call John. Having him in an unfamiliar place without John when he’s ill and upset seemed like enough of an impetus to actually imagine him calling John in the middle of the night out of that disoriented mix of fear and confusion and desperation. I think Alex probably reached for John when he woke up, was confused to find himself alone and somewhere he didn’t recognize, and too sick to call out in more than a whisper. Thus, picking up the phone.

“I’m…okay?” Alex murmurs. “I just–”

Silence.

“Did you have a nightmare?” John asks.

“I–maybe? I don’t–I think I did, I don’t…remember now. I just–you weren’t here, and I couldn’t–I thought–”

About…fuck, three years ago now? Four?…I got pneumonia and bad. Not like, hospital bad, but “ran a fever for six days” bad. It’s the sickest I’ve been in memory and whole fucking days passed in a weird fugue state. I could not think straight, I couldn’t hold conversations, I disassociated, I forgot where I was. It was really fucking weird. So, that’s where Alex is here. His brain is scrambled from fever and he knows what he wants (John) but holding onto that thought takes up all of his cognition right now. He doesn’t have enough brain power left over to answer questions or even parse them, really.

The more Alex speaks, the more confused he sounds. John slips out of bed and grabs a pair of jeans from the floor, fumbling into them one-handed.

“Sweetheart, it’s okay. You’re okay,” John says. “You’re at the Washingtons’, remember? You’re sick.”

John and Alex are a lot more traditionally affectionate now than they were in early drafts of this verse. In a deleted scene from a later story, something happens to John and Alex calls him “sweetheart” and everyone else is mute with surprise because they usually just called each other names as a form of affection. That’s sort of eroded now, to a degree–they still call each other names a lot, obvs, but they also sort of embrace some more treacley, affectionate pet names. There are still lines, though–Alex calls John “sweetheart” in a sort of exasperated way at some point in, I think, i saw the whole story unwind, and John makes fun of him. Similarly, he calls John “honey” in exasperation in the story about getting an award and John makes fun of him there, too. But, when the chips are down and John starts feeling protective, that’s where his mind goes automatically–being as genuinely soft and careful and gentle as possible, including embracing that sort of sappy pet name stuff.

“Right…right…okay.” He sounds marginally less frazzled and spacey. “I just–right. I’m sorry. I’m–why did I call you, did I wake you up? Why would I–”

“It’s fine,” John says quickly. “Do you want me to come over there?”

Alex hesitates. “No, that’s stupid,” he finally says. “I’m fine, I just–I just–woke up and…I don’t know, I’m…used to having you, and I just–” He shudders and makes a quiet, frightened noise, and John’s heart breaks.

“I know sweetheart, I know,” John says. “I’m almost dressed, I’m going to drive over, okay?”

John was not like, super cool with leaving Alex on his own at the Washingtons’ to begin with and now Alex needed him and he wasn’t there, and the logical part of his brain is saying, as he tries to pull on his jeans and listen to the phone at the same time, “You dummy, he’ll be fine, he’ll fall asleep in a second,” but it’s drowned out by the panicked part and the part that takes his loyalty to Alex super seriously. Alex is his family and he fucked up pretty badly taking care of his blood family, but he’s not going to fuck up taking care of Alex.

“You don’t–I just…woke up and…I can’t remember….”

“You don’t have to,” John says. “Don’t worry about it, you don’t have to remember. It was just a dream. You’re okay and I’m okay and it was just a dream.”

This is honestly more to himself than to Alex, at this point.

“I’m not a child,” Alex says. He says it more to himself than John, which settles the issue. John grabs a hoodie from the top of the dresser. “I just–I was scared.”

“I know, baby,” John murmurs. “It’s okay. I’m leaving now, I’ll stay on the phone with you in the car, okay?”

“You don’t have to,” Alex mumbles. “You don’t have to come, I just–I don’t know why–I shouldn’t have called.”

“No, no, no,” John says. “You can always call me.” He walks out into the living room and grabs his coat, struggling into it one-handed as he continues to hold the phone to his ear.

“It’s…late,” Alex says. He yawns. John grabs his bag and his keys and leaves the apartment. “I just woke up alone. I hate waking up alone when I’m sick. I woke up alone and I was scared.”

In the original draft of this scene, Alex was much more coherent. I had to go back and make him a little more scattered so that it would be believable that he would forget this entire conversation come morning.

Also, the “I woke up and you weren’t there” is about as clear a window into Alex’s psyche as we’re likely to get, at least when it comes to this part of him that desperately needs other people and refuses to acknowledge it. There’s a reason he keeps repeating it.

“That’s okay,” he says. He locks the door and starts down the stairs, trying to go as quietly as possible. It’s the middle of the night–he doesn’t want to wake up the whole building.

“I should go.”

“Don’t bother, I’m already up, I’m already coming over,” John insists softly. “You don’t have to go anywhere, Alex, you can stay right here on the phone with me.”

“I don’t have anything to say,” Alex says. He still sounds dreamy and soft, not entirely awake for the conversation. John starts walking faster and finally hits the ground floor.

“I don’t have anything to say,” the true sign of Alex being sick XD

“It’s okay,” he says as gently as he can manage. “You don’t have to say anything. You can just sit there, and I’ll know you’re okay and you’ll know you’re okay.”

“Mm.”

John is not super great at taking care of other people, especially when he’s so panicked. He’s also beating himself up for not being there.

It’s cold as dicks, so John doesn’t dawdle in the parking lot. His engine is loud in the frozen silence of the night, and he hears Alex startle over the other end of the phone.

There are a lot of references to how cold it is during this story. Winter 2015 was THE. WORST. in the northeast and in Jersey, too. I have like…legitimate trauma from that winter. We had a record snowfall in Boston and like 90% of it fell over less than 30 days. It snowed every weekend. There was nowhere to put it because none of it melted because it was also record low temperatures. By the end of it I was literally crying every day because I couldn’t stand it anymore. New Jersey didn’t get quite as much snow as we did, but it was just as bitterly cold.

“I’m starting the car,” he tells him. He puts the phone on speaker and rests it on the seat next to him. “That’s all. I’m on my way to you now.”

“Okay,” Alex mumbles. “Okay. You don’t have to.”

“I know,” John says, “but I’m going to. The car’s already moving.”

Silence on the other end. In fact, it stays silent as John pulls out of the parking lot, as he turns down their street, as he turns onto the main road.

“Alex?” he asks again.

No answer, save for a soft snuffling sound. Alex, he assumes, is asleep again.

He reaches across to his phone one-handed and ends the call. He’ll be there soon enough, and he trusts that nothing will happen to Alex in the five minutes it will take him to finish his drive across town.

I like the idea of John not even taking the time to put his phone in the dash clip or hook it up to the AUX cable–he just hits the speaker button and drives.

The other big motivating factor for him, outside of his own panic and need to take care of Alex out of familial responsibility, is how small and scared Alex sounds through all of this. I’m a really lazy writer, so this is a construction I use in the text a lot (though I haven’t used it yet in this section, I think), but John and Alex are both big obnoxious personalities and thus, when one of them is acting quieter and more timid than usual, they always make note of how out of character that is. They don’t like to show weakness, so when they’re too tired to hide their weakness, it’s a flashing red light to the other that something is really wrong. Here, John knows what’s wrong–Alex is sick–but it’s still eerie and unsettling enough that it spurs him to move more quickly.

The Washingtons’ house is dark when John pulls up outside, and for the first time he realizes how crazy this whole thing is. He’s breaking into his mentor’s house because his boyfriend had a bad dream. This is…not normal. It’s possible John is majorly overreacting. Alexander is an adult, he can take care of himself, he doesn’t need John rushing to his aid in the middle of the night.

But John remembers how lonely and needy and touch-starved he was when he was sick, and that was in his own bed. Alex is alone in an unfamiliar place. And Mrs. Washington gave him a key. So this isn’t…totally weird.

Probably.

Another construction I use a lot because I’m a lazy writer–John and Alex are low-key self-aware that their relationship is really more intense and obsessive than is healthy, and convince themselves that because they’re self-aware, it makes it okay.

He sits in the car for another minute after coming to that conclusion, weighing his options, trying to decide just how crazy and clingy this makes him. In the end, he can still hear the soft way Alex said his name over the phone, and that answers the question for him. He would do anything for Alex on a normal day–he doesn’t stand a chance at resisting when Alex is sick and scared.

Just hitting you right in the solar plexus with the image of Alex’s quiet, scared voice over the phone. You’re welcome.

He closes his car door as quietly as he can manage and walks swiftly up the front walk. He tries to act casual–he’s very aware of the fact that he’s a latino kid in a nice neighborhood in torn jeans and a black hoodie, and while people in Jersey are more likely to call the cops than shoot on sight, the only thing that could make this more embarrassing would be having to explain it to the Washingtons and a police officer at two in the morning.

I try to walk a line between a realistic amount of thought and reference to how race impacts these kids and keeping it from distracting from the story at hand. I’m very aware that I’m a white lady with wildly different experiences, but I don’t want to erase that aspect of the characters.

He unlocks the door and opens it as softly as he can, slipping inside and locking it behind him. He hears a rustling in the hallway and winces, preparing an explanation in his mind, but it’s just Nelson, who trots over to him and head-butts his leg looking for pets.

“Hey, buddy,” John murmurs to him. “I thought I told you to look after my guy while I was gone.” Of course, even if Alex had been awake when John left, he’d probably have kicked Nelson and Blue out of his room–John will never in a million years understand Alex’s universal disinterest in animals.

I’m more of an Alex than a John, tbh. I’m a little more accepting of animals than Alex is, but I really don’t care for cats and I’m not like, crazy about other animals. (Except bunnies. I love bunnies.) I tend to love dogs I know and am vaguely aware of dogs I don’t know.

Anyway, GWash’s dogs are named for his horses because even though he had a trillion dogs IRL, it was easier to find the names of his horses than his dogs and I am, as I have mentioned several times, quite a lazy writer.

(Also, Alex totally would have kicked the dogs out of his room.)

But Alex is why he’s here, so he scratches Nelson behind the ears one more time and then walks quietly down the hall to Alex’s room. The door is open a crack and John nudges it the rest of the way open, peering inside.

“John?” Alex whispers. He’s lying in bed, propped up by half a dozen pillows. He’s also half asleep, with the blankets pulled all the way up to his chin. There’s a nightlight plugged into the corner, letting off a faint blue glow. Just enough to allow someone unfamiliar with the room to navigate their way to the bathroom, John figures, but it’s also enough to see how pale Alex looks, still.

“It’s me,” John confirms. “Just me.” Nelson nuzzles his hand. “Me and Nelson,” he amends.

“You didn’t have to come over,” Alex says. He sounds more Alex-like, now. Still tired and a little distant, but he doesn’t seem as scared or lost as he did on the phone. “The whole point of me being here is so you won’t be around me and get sick again. You didn’t have to come over.”

“I wanted to,” John says. “I needed to make sure you were okay.” He puts his bag on the floor and toes off his shoes, then gets gently into bed next to Alex, lying on top of the covers. Alex is immediately pressed to his side, arms around John’s waist and clutching him more tightly than John would have expected given his current state.

Alex talks a good game, but he was pretty desperate for John. I think, while he’s mostly over connecting every sickness to his mother’s death–he gets sick enough that it would be nearly unmanageable to think of it every time he has a sniffle–these particular circumstances of being separated from someone he loves are digging into that same place in his heart. He’s exhausted and he can’t think and he’s miserable and he just wants to be held and loved and while he understands why John is elsewhere and, in fact, wants him to stay there and be well instead of getting sick again, he’s also sad and sick and desperate.

“This sucks,” Alex croaks.

“I know,” John says. Alex’s hair is stringy and sweaty and tangled, but John smoothes it out anyway, brushing it back from his face. “Just try to sleep, babe. You’ll feel better if you can sleep for a little while. And if you have another nightmare, I’ll be right here.”

“I don’t know if it was a nightmare,” Alex mutters. He yawns against John’s chest. “I just woke up.” He yawns again, and when John looks down, his eyes are already closed. “I woke up and you weren’t there.”

“I know,” John repeats softly. “I know, baby. I’ll be here this time, okay? Just sleep.”

John feels super, super guilty about not being there.

And that seems to be all it takes. Alex is back to breathing deeply and evenly just moments later, still wrapped around John in sleep.

That should be John’s cue to ease himself out from under Alex, tuck him in, and head back to their apartment. Leave Alex here to sleep the rest of the night in peace, get some rest of his own away from Alex’s germs, swing by again tomorrow morning before work, maybe….

But, he should wait a few extra minutes, just to be sure he doesn’t wake Alex up. Just long enough to be positive that Alex is truly and deeply asleep. A few more minutes won’t hurt.

And Alex’s desperation is mirrored in John. He also understands why Alex is quarantined and doesn’t want to be sick again and knows this is for the best, but it’s cold and it’s fucking February and he hasn’t slept alone in months and he wants to hold Alex as badly as Alex wants to be held.

Nelson gets up from the floor near the door and walks over to John’s side of the bed, looking up at him curiously.

“Sorry, buddy, I’m not here for you tonight,” he says. Nelson noses at his leg and, when John doesn’t push him away, jumps up onto the bed and settles himself at the bottom, his head resting on John’s feet. “He’s not gonna like that,” John tells him, but he doesn’t make any move to discourage him.

Asleep in a warm, soft bed with Alex in his arms and a dog on his feet is pretty much John’s ideal fantasy.

And it would be mean to shove him out of the way when he’s just gotten settled. So, really, John is doing everyone a favor by just snuggling with Alex for a few more minutes….

Yeah, he knew he wasn’t moving after that XD

It’s midnight now and my brain is mush. If there are any PARTICULAR QUESTIONS you have about this, plz feel free to ask for elaboration!

#commentary meme #the-everqueen #they call themselves the trash of the thing

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