geilta's blog

2/29/24 12:35 AM o'neill

i fully believe the powers that be would be all too happy to let libraries close down, covid reinfect on infinite loop until people's mental faculties are shot, children shut inside with auto-generated YouTube programming that is devoid of all meaning, while immersing people in conflict-heavy infinite-scroll-loop engagement machines that convince you the impact you have on them is more important than quiet reflection, breathing, or living, until you are too distracted to notice how dissatisfied you are with life anymore, as years pass before your eyes, the meantime in which you didn't realize just how much had changed or could have gotten better if you'd looked around at your shitty job and looked for some possible way at all to ask for help, if help existed, but you don't, because you stopped feeling and liking yourself and making art and fucking around a long time ago, and the older i get the more i understand that above everything else except pure survival, making shitty art and fucking around and holding stupid ass community events is the most important thing on the planet, because these motherfucking ghouls will try to manipulate and milk your every negative thought, trauma, or tears, turning you into the most afraid, frenetic, unable-to-cope version of yourself, either numbing you into ignorance of the horrors or exposing you to them so deeply that you shut down from the overstimulation and stop functioning. i remember my worldview started breaking in fifth grade when i got punished for daydreaming too much and my parents got spoken to, and the teacher said "she [sic] lives in a fantasy world," in the most disgusted tones i'd ever heard, and i understood then that he thought so little of my intelligence that he didn't even think to kick me out of the room before starting to speak about me, and that my imagination and weirdness were so disgusting to him that it made me beneath all his sense of my humanity. it's the most important thing, more than having the right opinions right now or whatever minor social drama you are currently trapped in the center of.

The thing about life is there is always going to be someone sending you the message that there is something foundational about you specifically that makes you inherently not worthy in some way, and they're doing this so they can have easier social control over you, you are not a person in this equation. You're not a person to them the way their family and close friends are people, and in this sense, you are a number or community resource for them to have: it's not bad in itself to want to build a community or have people's resources, but if their narrative of the world always conveniently excluds your voice, it's worth questioning their point of view and whether it's even a valid worldview for yours, even someone like me, even me speaking right now. If I'm vehemently saying I am right and my worldview is justified and morally good but you deeply feel as though I'm missing something crucial, it's correct and upstanding to allow yourself simply to disagree, as long as I am not being excluded from public life.

A lot of people are very fundamentally driven by which individuals are going to let them act how they want to act, and make them feel like they're not bad people for wanting those things. Sometimes I think the organizing of people makes more sense this way than any other I've found. But I've had to, over and over again, question whether someone was making me feel inferior or trying to impose a standard on me that differed from my own point of view, because so often I've simply taken that without question, and at their worst, people who already think they're above it all or below it all can be convinced to act in deeply damaging ways. Do you want to feel physically protected from danger in an existential way, a sense of fundamental rightness, and the belief in the utter correctness of your way of doing things? Far-right conservative fascism will make you feel justified in these things in the most neuron-bliss-blasting way possible. The nostalgia of having things simple, apple pie at thanksgiving, gun hung up on the wall, no knowledge of who we're keeping out when we're saying grace indoors, and the blinding gold childhood imprint this leaves on the aching aging isolated adult brain, is not matchable and not measurable. Somtimes I get angry, because it feels at times as though there are leftists I have considered friends who nevertheless believe that there is no amount of trauma that could justify someone doing something a little morally wrong, and it disturbs me. I don't trust any worldview that believes I could not be among the bad guys, the damaging people who think they're correct, and as a transsexual nonbinary person I have had to question my own fundamental moral wrongness in a way far more literal than most. I don't know. I just don't trust this--what's in the air. I don't trust this way of believing things and speaking to people. I don't trust any of this. At least Evangelicals give you ways of feeling like you've purged your sins.

(Postscript: I am remembering how early I got made to distrust my fundamental opinions and ways of seeing things. Even as an adult now, let alone back then, I can't be trusted as a person who correctly knows things, who can correctly opine, and I was so deeply deeply young when I got scoffed at for saying things slightly wrong or doing things slightly wrong, even though it seemed weird to me, because my ideas and intent came through. Sure, I said it slightly silly, but you can't be such a snob that you can't see right through to the heart of what I meant, can you? The secret is so many people like being degraded, because being degraded means you can have someone tell you how to be good, and it's at least partly why so many wealthy men love degredation, they who don't get nearly enough of it, and at least some of whom I imagine are privately crushed on the deepest soul's level with what it actually means to do this whole life thing correctly, and finally under a sex worker's flogger you can feel some kind of sense of sin and subsequent redemption, a repreieve from the emotional closet of your privilege. When choosing between the choice of a false safety or known danger, a lot would choose the known danger, because choosing the loud cruel person and believing what they tell you about yourself is far easier than having to figure out for yourself what you think and what is right. In the last few years I've recovered from abuse and found out that the most overwhelming part was having to reconsider what was actually true and what I believed was right about literally everything--don't underestimate the kind of psychological balm in this world of infinite choice that total if false safety and total surety of what to believe, or morality, provides. Anyway, one of the wildest lies of feminism as I came to understand it was the transphobic and homophobic lie that women don't play central if oppressed roles in shaping what correct womanhood looks like and thus shaping what patriarchy looks like. It made me wonder about the bad mothers I've known and it made me wonder about the decision to have a daughter. When you're a mother and your daughter starts for the first time misbehaving, what do you see? What do you do? What feels righteous about it as you correct her?)