#like the entire internet. has romanticized loneliness

[idolkinning]

aes/moodboard for rin hoshizora & maki nishikino who are best friends, rq’d by anon! i had an idea for what i wanted 2 do w/ this the first night, but then i forgot... so it’s like this. hope u like it, tho! & i rlly am so sorry for it taking awhile

also maki & rin icons were made by yours truly bc i was lazyyy

✨ mod ai

[dreaming716]

Social Media

Being born in 1995 makes technology a weird subject for me. I remember the days having to use a wired phone attached to the wall or sitting on the counter to call my friends. I remember when we were kids and riding bikes around the neighborhood meant really stupid memories and meeting new neighborhood kids around. I remember using a flashlight to read the books I’d sneak home from school just to let my imagination run wild.

Sure, I grew up loving video games. I loved watching TV shows and movies. But I ALWAYS made time for comics, for books, for manga. Because I could use my own imagination instead of seeing life through other people’s eyes. I used to write so many stories, poems, drew pictures and painted. I had my own spark of creativity and didn’t have to use anyone else’s content to inspire my brain to come up with some convoluted product of my dwindling imagination and their work. I had my own style, or would try someone else’s after seeing them wear it in person.

Yeah, the internet it great for quick results on a search. Finding that lost connection you had so many years ago. Being nosy and finding out what people do with their lives when they aren’t with you.

I hate the anxiety social media has caused. I hate how now that I have my life on somewhat of a routine, that I get this melancholic feeling of loss that no one reaches out to me on this stupid little computer in my hands. I hate how much deeper of a rabbit hole I fell down in my depression and anxiety because social media romanticizes trauma and actual mental disorders. I hate that social media became my value of life, of looks, of attention and happiness.

I’m 25 now, and its weird because I’m stuck in between all these different age groups with all these different outlooks on life, yet I relate more to older people in their 60’s and 70’s because I prefer “old-fashioned” values. I want a firm handshake, I want eye contact, I want respect and honor, loyalty.

I don’t want to have a conversation with someone staring at their phone or computer or tablet who’s simultaneously having ANOTHER conversation with someone else or a group of people. I feel like I don’t exist. It amplifies my loneliness because I’m not interesting enough to draw your attention from them.

You know what I do on my phone? I let my brain rot on a few videos after a long day of work. Why? Because 90% of my job is holding conversations with people and paperwork. So yeah, I let my brain rot watching meaningless videos because I get tired of thinking.

Other times I just play games. I play sudoku, or I play word search games. I’ll read, because some people think its stupid to buy books I can just “read online”. I miss the fucking smell of books. Like actual, paper. Ink. Leather if you’re fancy. I miss taking care of my books. Having a huge collection lined up that I can choose from at any time. Using a flashlight in the dark. Curling up with a blanket and listening to the rain as Edgar Allen Poe takes me down a dark path or an encyclopedia shows me the wonders of the millions of species of animals that roam the Earth.

I miss walking around at night and contemplating life with someone. Actually listening, to you, to them. No “blue light” or whatever from a fucking pocket computer. Going to the mall and getting something new IN AN ACTUAL STORE. Trying on clothing without having to worry about shipping costs. Spending hours staring up at the night sky on a calm night while listening to the sounds nature has but we drown out with technology “because we can just pull it up on youtube”.

I miss family gatherings. Not asking everyone about this post or that post. Talking about life, having thousands of tales that I want to share but there’s not enough hours in the day to tell your family so you hold onto some for the next gathering. Not worrying about my job seeing some stupid post and firing me over it. No censorship. Just, life. If you had beef with someone? You either duke it out and show respect after or you sit down and have a conversation with them face to face.

I miss just randomly showing up somewhere and having some exciting thing to share or the excitement people have to see you because they don’t have your entire life on a fucking app 24/7.

Yeah I’m young. But life is too fucking short to ask for attention all fucking day on a website that collects my information to sell me shit or brainwash me meanwhile sucking every last drop of dopamine like cocaine or fucking meth to keep me reeled the fuck in so I waste my entire life on the internet. The sole fucking reason I still have facebook or instagram anymore is to look at old photos with friends and family that I took the last time I was with them. Like My best friend. The ONLY genuine friend I had growing up. The only way I can remember his face is because of those photos. Hear his voice is through the ONE fucking video I have of him and I together before he died. Remember the times with my family BEFORE shit went sideways and my entire family split up in 19 directions.

Fuck social media. Its a fucking drug like pills, like cocaine, like crack, like meth, like fucking heroin. It may not kill you physically, but it takes your soul. Takes your mind. Takes your imagination. For what? For fucking what?! Money? Attention? Social interaction? Go fucking outside. Talk to people. Put the fucking phone up and look someone in the EYES. Use your fucking ears and not your airpods or beats. Look into someone’s soul and not a screen. Give them a fucking hug and go for a walk. Go to the zoo. Go to the park. Go fishing. Go to the beach. Enjoy the fucking moment, because its fucking gone so fast.

Fuck the likes. Fuck the shares. Fuck the comments. Fuck the groups. Fuck the subscriptions. Fuck’em all.

They don’t mean A GODDAMN THING WHEN YOU’RE DEAD.

The pictures do. Thats about fucking it.

[violetsystems]

#personal

I survived without a concussion.  I still can’t figure out whose bass that was.  i still can’t imagine playing in a Sting cover band either.  So there’s a lot of things I’ve been throwing out regardless of their immediate threat to my person.  I feel like I’ve been punched around and then I don’t really feel like I care too much.  Inside my apartment is cozier than before.  I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future and then none at all.  I sent my parents Christmas gifts last night and talked over text.  They’re supportive and they don’t really pry which leaves me to live my own life.  The value of that life I live is the ultimate mind fuck.  I’d argue everybody needs some time to spend with themselves to care about their self worth.  Not many people have that option.  My situation is always unique for as long as anybody has ever read my ramblings.  It feels dizzying at times.  Like I’m spiraling in freefall in outer space trying to figure out which way is up.  Most of the time staying put and maintaining position is the best course of action.  People get antsy and nervous.  I had a lot of that over the last six months.  These days I don’t know that I really have much else to do for the moment.  The vaccine is on the horizon at some point.  I was thinking to myself that the virus was the reason I was let go from my job.  The ultimate protection against that is to get vaccinated.  And I have all the time in the world to get that done before summer at the latest.  Realistically I could hobble this entire thing out until next November draining everything and still be at zero.  But it’s the silence that fucks with me the most.  The act that regardless what I do nobody really cares or pays attention.  Which is probably why it made sense to start a corporation out of nowhere.  If you have enough money, you can do anything in America.  And arguably, there aren’t any roadmaps out there for people like me.  This is especially true when large tribal groups of people in power like to pretend you don’t exist.  And you are supposed to read further into that understanding that this is part of the culture of the successful.  You wonder how they got successful in the first place.  Certainly not on their own.  And certainly not without a lot of money to go along with it.  It is for certain that I don’t really worry about money for the time being.  I worry about the scarring around all of the open wounds nobody attended to.  Which the latest was enough to shake me a little emotionally when a guitar that I did not own came flying out of a closet onto my head.  I would say nobody was there to kiss the pain away.  But the thought of you is always on my mind.  So maybe that’s why I survived a good night’s sleep.

I survive a lot of things.  At this point, people on the internet think of me as some combination of Solid Snake and Palpatine with a frappuccino.  I wrote here for years just to stay sane.  I still write here to stay sane but mostly to share my thoughts with my friends.  One of the most bitter realizations I’ve had in my adult life was the reality of my friendships.  In your twenties, we all have this romanticism about working with our friends.  When you spend two decades working and building entire communities in a city, things evolve and change.  That’s the nature of true culture.  It doesn’t stay stagnant.  The solutions are not always the surefire answers you want.  Democracy is messy over time.  And yet for all the pretention of the last twenty years, I still walk out the door and people know who I am.  There’s entire subsets of people that signal me on the street corners because of the things I support.  I don’t know that anybody knows exactly what is going on with me other than here.  It’s all so vague because day after day I don’t really talk to anybody very deeply about anything.  It’s mostly surface level conversation.  I walk everywhere.  It’s safe enough for me.  I don’t know about anybody else.  After having my self worth plummet into the toilet being let go from my job, I wondered what I had left.  And I have a lot.  I also still have a lot of bitterness and anger at my situation.  But ultimately, I get over it.  I’ve been through enough shitty life experiences to know I get back up again and reinvent myself into a better version of who I need to be.  This doesn’t mean that loneliness isn’t a motherfucker.  The trick is that everybody is probably more lonely than you.  It takes some guts to face yourself in the mirror.  More guts to answer to the problems that you cause yourself.  Kind of like putting a bass guitar so high up in your closet.  I have shot myself in the foot so many times being awkward.  And you live and you learn.  I do worry excessively about a lot things.  And then again I plan for a silver lining.  I do look back at how isolated and alone I feel.  And then I know this is completely the opposite if I just believe in myself and my self worth.  You have to do that first.  And if you believe in yourself you already know how hard it is to overcome the fear.  The fear never goes away.  That’s another trick.  I spent a lot of time getting rid of the baggage as they say.  Spent a lot of time cleaning out my closet recently too.  You have to dust off a lot of cobwebs.  You start to notice a lot more chips in the walls.  You address things with care and attention.  And you start to transform your environment through action.  I spent some time weaving rags and cleaning spaces for an arts collective years ago.  We had a show at Jane Addams Hull House museum.  A lot of what drew me to the practice was the healing and meditative nature of cleaning.  I’m unfortunately your token cis heterosexual male in this regard.  There’s a lot of privilege straight boys can face if we just look at our bathroom sink on a daily basis.  And some of us do.  Today I am marginally unsuccessful based on a cursory look over my shoulder aside from the shelving I added last week.  

Of all the shit my friends on here know is that I’m a really genuine person.  It hurt so much to feel like I wasn’t part of a community I serviced for years.  And at some times I felt like I didn’t really belong.  White rich people always trying to control the institutional dialog on something.  I spent years going to raves and underground shows enough to know everybody dances.  I’ve spent years on social networks like these listening to what people really had to say.  I’ve scrolled through enough dick floods to know that my dick is enough for me. And I know how I live is my own  business and everybody deserves to live and be free.  It should be obvious we are all different and we live in the perfect country to accept and celebrate that.  Being unique shouldn’t be at odds with who we are as a country.  And yet, we all know the reality of conservative and populist values.  That the money thinks it can rule the world all the same.  It should be easier to fight it these days.  And yet, nobody wants to acknowledge anyone exists or the real history about people and what they’ve done.  It’s worse than cult behavior and it’s fractured the very social fabric that holds people’s dreams together.  I don’t really worry much about it at all these days.  I’ve survived this much with a pretty ridiculous story to tell my friends every week.  My question has always been where do we go from here.  If you are me, you look in the mirror and just know there isn’t much to do but continue to evolve.  And being accountable for your own shit by yourself is something I think everyone could agree is a pretty good goal for a man like myself.  So many times I cried to a wall wondering if I was good enough.  I look back at that and know that I am.  It took work.  We spend so much energy caring about what the world thinks and not enough time finding our own voices.  We parrot out beliefs that make us seem woke but never walk those beliefs around in public out of fear of being tested or provoked.  When you are staring life directly in the eyes, the words come differently.  I wish I could say I had it all figured out.  But at least I can admit I’m only human as I am.  Humanity is something we should be able to feel these days.  And all we really feel is the ugly parts of it.  The ugly parts are celebrated while the real emotion is frothing below.  Genuine communication can’t be commodified.  It can’t be manipulated if it wants to be sacred.  Intimacy is a complex thing in modern times much like modern love.  People think they can shortcut their way through anything.  And these plans fall apart.  These emotions don’t last or stand the test of time.  And people show their true colors in the face of adversity.  I know what it feels like to be abandoned.  And I know what it feels like to be betrayed.  And I know what it’s like to have a community that supports each other no matter who we love.  That’s a real safe space to build from.  I intend to fight to keep it that way for everyone.  However invisible I’m meant to become.  Maybe that’s my superpower after all.  Being the exception.  It takes work to survive.  in that respect nothing has changed with me.  <3 Tim

[feministdragon]

From the perspective of the gazer, the male gaze can feel lonely.

It certainly would be wonderful to be the center of attention, thinks the gazer, who today more than ever does his gazing completely alone, without any social interaction with other people of either sex. All over the internet, men identify with this lonely gaze, giving rise to everything from “pick-up” “artistry” to terms like “forever alone” and “friendzone.” Some of these become men’s rights activists, and believe that the people their gaze is attracted to–beautiful women–have everything they could possibly want. They develop a hatred for the object of their gaze, feeling that the gazed-upon is privileged with a life that, at least, never needs to be lonely.

Other men develop an affinity with the gazed-upon. Many of the trans women I have known who would bristle at any notion that they are autogynephiles, start out as men who consider themselves to be sensitive and have primarily female friends.

Over time, their empathy with women friends is compounded by alienation from socialization with other males, who often reject this male because of his perceived non-conformity to male norms (expressed as being a “pussy” or “wimp” or “bitch”–all feminizing terms). They then reject the notion of their own personal masculinity and the gender binary. They can’t, however, let go of the notion that there’s a “gender spectrum” in which some traits are masculine or feminine–that we’re all people and that the notion of gender consists of social roles designed to segregate the sexes.

These beliefs combine and form into the expression of a desire to be a woman, which is essentially retconned into their history from childhood onward. Parts of the person’s childhood in which they breached gender roles are often brought up. What’s not often brought up is the fact that all children breach gender roles–that in fact, children will commit breaches of rules of all sorts, and that this is generally the way that humans learn the rules of their society. It’s not just a few kids who transgress gender roles, not even most. It’s all of them, every single one, and transgression of gender boundaries is necessary because gender roles are bullshit that must be learned, which means rules breaches and corrections are just part of the fun.

Instead of being eroticized and objectified, in this scenario, the trans person is idealizing women in the same way that a white professor of American Indian languages and literature did when she once told my entire class that there were no profane or curse words in any American Indian language because “they don’t think that way.” Women, the gazed-upon, become idealized from their gaze. Left with a piteously deficient model of masculinity and an idealized one of femininity-on-a-pedestal, and with their heterosexual desires still intact, these men become MtFs who identify strongly as lesbians and eroticize lesbian sexuality because they believe it frees them from the power dynamics of heterosexuality while giving them access to spaces free from those “other” kinds of men–spaces where women feel safer and more free about letting themselves talk. The MtF trans* people I have known who fit this dynamic have an almost fetishistic need to talk to women about personal things and to be let into a woman’s inner emotional space, even women they barely know. They take a lot of pride in (and will happily tell you about, ad nauseam) their ability to get into a woman’s psyche and help her solve her problems. They give lots of advice to women.

When someone who idealizes women in this way transitions to living as a woman, they often talk a lot about losing privilege. What they are actually doing is, very often, nothing of the sort. The trans activists who started out as Silicon Valley nerdy “forever alone” types (who comprised a huge number of callers over the years!) were economically and racially privileged men, but when it came to the patriarchy, they were being shit upon by traditional masculinity. Instead, they’re seeking to move up, not down. They want to move into women’s spaces, where their male socialization will make it easier for them to get ahead, be assertive, and be at the top of their social hierarchy with other women talking to them and ensuring that they don’t feel lonely. Instead of hating the gazed-upon, this kind of person decides that the only freedom from the gazer’s existential loneliness is to become the gazed-upon. Once in the territory of the gazed-upon, the person who has been socialized as a gazer can switch at will in their relationships with women, both sexual and otherwise, a privilege not afforded to female born persons.

For these MtF people, the idea that they might have retained some of the trappings of what they were taught as children, that they were treated differently as male children than they would have been as female children, is odious because it represents a challenge to the idea that they have no part in patriarchy. They seem to believe that patriarchy is something you can simply walk away from, and say that you had no part in it, as long as you say the right words about your identity. They don’t necessarily fetishize giant breasts and other similar patriarchal beauty dictates, but they do romanticize and fetishize lesbian relationships and sexuality, and they idealize femininity in general in a way that made me uncomfortable when I heard it during phone sex calls and more uncomfortable now that I am no longer involved in that industry.

https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/but-theres-no-such-thing-as-autogynephilia-phone-sex-the-male-gaze-and-how-blanchard-and-trans-activists-both-get-it-wrong/