flamingsword | Entries tagged with deep

Instead of being here in DW, I have been slowly closing down my Facebook account, downloading the pictures, messaging people with my contact info, deleting posts, unfriending my friends, putting the chairs on the tables and sweeping up the big internet cafe behind me as I go. I will have to maintain a tiny presence there to participate in a mandatory school thing, but I’m pulling as much of my selfhood off the least trustworthy parts of the internet as possible.

It pisses me off, you know?

Not just the enshittification, not just the selling our data to bad actors, not just, as Cat Valente says, the “stop talking to each other and start buying things” urging of the capitalists, but that thing that capitalism creates that gives rise to fascism - distrust. The less safe you can make people feel, the more they turn on each other. The more high-conflict you can make an argument, the less the people in it will trust each other, the more you can radicalize the people on both sides, the more easily manipulable you make the people who are arguing, and the less trustful you can make the arguers, the onlookers, everyone who has to hear about how vicious things are getting in social spaces. It eats away at social bonds by causing people to feel they have to mask who they are or risk having similar conflicts. People feel like they have to Gray Rock their whole lives, close up like a clam.

And then the less vulnerability and honesty people bring to the public square, the less people feel connected to each other, which reinforces the distrust. It’s a cycle of wackness, and I hate it.

So I’m going to be over here in my little corner of the internet, trying to protect others’ privacy while being honest and vulnerable with my own life. If bad stuff happens to me because of it, well. I guess bad stuff is going to happen. I will be tanking for the party, in my own limited way. I’m not going to take ridiculous risks, there’s not going to be a repeat of the White Rose’s scattering of pamphlets in a gymnasium (RIP Sophie Scholl). But I’m going to be here talking to people like they’re not incomprehensible murder monkeys, the way my traumatized hindbrain has been trained to think of people.

I love y’all. Be safe, and maybe meditate on trust once in a while?

In Buddhist psychology, a “near enemy” is a mental state that looks like a positive emotion but is something associated, nearby, which undermines it. Unlike something’s opposite, which is easy to spot, the “near enemy” of a positive emotion is much harder to tell apart and damages the good thing which it is associated with.

If we speak from a place of healthy enough-ness, then poverty looks like the inability to access that state of having enough. That it’s the lack of the things that you need being accessible. If poverty is defined as not getting your needs met, then you would think that wealth would be the opposite, and would get your needs met. But material wealth in this culture has nothing to do with your emotional needs for connection being met, and seems to correlate negatively with healthy relationships, ime. So it seems to me that wealth might be the near enemy of having healthy enough-ness, of worthiness and belonging and connection. That it can be just a different form of not having enough.

Thinky thoughts for today.

I used to grieve all year long, for multiple years at a time, and my griefs would get out of hand and tangled up. That was ... inefficient, let's say. So I started listening to people's grief stories and collecting things from self-help books and therapists and other people's therapy stories, until I had cobbled together something workable for me. Here you go.

First, before the grief occurs, if I can reasonably expect it to occur, I try to align my expectations with reality. I want friendships to last forever, but I don’t expect them to. I accept that I am powerless in the face of people dying, and I acknowledge the weight of it. It keeps me grounded and from guilt spiraling or blaming myself for literal actual entropy occurring. I am not responsible for the passage of time.

Then, after the tragedy happens, I sit quietly with my thoughts and see what wants to come up. Memories, feelings, old wounds that this reminds me of, all those things that come knocking on the door of my thoughts, begging for attention. I feel the first part of the feelings to take in the flavor of them, then stop before I get too invested. I don’t let my feelings run away with me just yet.

Next, I find it helpful to write those thoughts down, since it keeps everything straight for later, so I just brain dump everything onto a document. It is helpful to almost everyone to name your feelings, because it give you a sense of power over them, and I can definitely attest to that.

Then, there’s kind of a hidden step - I look at the assumptions I am making behind the thoughts I’m having. Am I assigning blame to myself or someone else unfairly? Is my model of reality accurate or am I making my feelings about something into my estimation of reality? Am I being gentle with everyone including myself, and not holding myself/them responsible for not being future-seeing, all-knowing, or all-powerful? If I am being irrational in some way, then I try to fix that, and if I can’t tell whether or not I’m being a crazy person, then I talk it out with someone I trust.

After I’m sure I’m making good choices and that I’m not setting myself up to blame myself for shit I have no power over, I set up with a box of Kleenex and some Gatorade or something to replace the saltwater I’m about to lose, and then let my feelings have me for a little bit. I try not to cry for so long that I give myself a headache, but I don’t kick myself if that happens anyway. Biology is weird and I am not psychic.

After a few days or a week of the worst of the grief, I go back to the person I talked to about it the first time, if they have spoons for me, and I process any new feelings that are coming up for me. I don’t try to hold myself to one “stage of grief”, because that’s a fool’s errand. Sometimes I am angry and sad and bargaining, and accepting, and betrayed by reality all at once. And if I talk that through every week or so with someone or a couple of people, then I get through what feels like a years worth of grieving in a couple of months.

It’s not a perfect system, but it works okay for me when I’m not in full on “turn off my feelings like a robot” mode. If you have tricks and things that work for you, let me know?

So the alpha version of this was a comment thread made somewhere else, that sounded really gender essentialist at the beginning. Which is a problem, and thank you again to the friend who pointed that out. So now I'm going to talk around this subject and see what I can get to fall out.

I want to have things that "belong" to enbies and other varieties of queer people. I want to know that the cultural things we invent, we can use to signal other like-minded folks without those things getting co-opted as the new fashion/trend and assumed to be part of binary culture, which often happens. Maybe not every single thing we invent, but surely a few things would not be too selfish. At the same time, that doesn't mean I want to have rigid gender norms for enbies (and binary ppl, either), and I realize telling people what they can and can't wear or do with their hair is at best problematic and at worst gender essentialist. It just sticks in my craw that 'phobes who want my queer ass to not exist will cheerfully use folx' cultural markers to be trendy and then turn right around and discriminate against us while wearing pieces of queer culture. It's irritating as shit, and I don't know what to do about it, which irritates me even more. Ugh.

Also, I think part of what draws some folks to those fringe/countercultural practices like hair, makeup, and clothing styles outside the norm is that we are reflexively identifying with being outside the norm, that we feel the pull even if we're not ready to claim a queer identity yet. So I get wanting there to be gray area for people to take baby steps into. Wanting a super-short pageboy hair cut was absolutely egg behaviour on my part, and I could not have explained at the time why I wanted it. That might also be weak evidence that someone is gravitating toward others of our kind. So I don't want people who still think they're cishetcetera to be like, banned from ever having an edgy haircut, and so forth.

I dunno. I want to have options that are outside of the Masc Dude/Femme Chic binary, that don't keep getting co-opted by the cishet binary identities. Like, one time I literally dyed my hair the bisexual pride flag colors, (icon related), and people just thought it was "pretty" and didn't put any kind of thought into why it was those colors in that configuration. *sighs forever* USian culture needs to start teaching people media literacy and it's applications to real life. We need to ask questions about where stuff came from and what it means. Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar, etc.. When people pick a style, maybe we should start asking what it's going to mean to the people who invented it, or at least have some idea who those inventors actually were.

Anyway, if you have thoughts about this, or adjacent to this, I'd love to hear them.

Two things about our current frustrations: external circumstances and internal circumstances.

So many of us have been taught to measure our worth by our productivity under capitalism. But we are under late stage capitalism right now, full of shit like “lean staffing”, supply chain problems, depressed wages, the gig economy, and the constant grind of “hustling”. We have looming problems like the threat of homelessness, the threat of starvation, and the threat of literal death by plague. The economic caste system in place where other people judge how much basic human dignity we deserve based on things like race, religion, gender presentation, ability, political leaning, and wealth is also a drag on the human spirit. We were not built for these things, and they are not about us. We need to decouple these things from how we judge our merit and our worth.

Internal circumstances: most of us have weird mental/medical shit going on, either to ourselves or to our loved ones. We are all worried about that, even if just on a suppressed, unconscious level. We are in the middle of a global freaking pandemic that does not appear to be going away. We are worried about that, too. (Even the people who like to go maskless to prove how “not afraid” they are, are aware that they are risking death right now, and it weighs on the mind, making them shorter tempered and shittier to people. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.) There’s probably a lot of other stuff going on in our lives and minds that we might be trying not to consciously acknowledge, or else be swept away in a flood of overwhelming feelings and potentially panic attacks. Our minds are full of pit traps right now, and it is not conducive to living an efficient or high-performance life under capitalism, which makes us judge ourselves by the standards of our employability and our ability to not care about these stressors. We are literally being judged by our callousness as though it is a good thing right now, and I just want to point out how fucked that is from every direction.

I don’t blame any of you for trying to handle those big feelings in an over-functioning way, I do the same thing. But sometimes you can choose to voluntarily take a break from sanity to cry and hyperventilate and be held for a couple hours until your brain has gotten rid of some of the overwhelming feelings, before your body decides when to throw you a bigger panic attack on its own schedule, which is inconvenient, to say the least. When you pick the timing, you can go back to being a sane adult later, after the headache and crying hangover. It works,mostly? I have been taking occasional days to be not-okay and my mental health is way better for it. I recommend trying it at least once. If you do it, please make sure to have eaten recently, to drink water and get electrolytes before the crying. Make sure your family/partners know what’s going on and have the bandwidth to take care of you at that time, and plan ahead to make the transitions as smooth as possible. Then offer to do the same for them, because we’re all in this broken world together and the issues we have with that are larger than ourselves.

We have power to handle these things together, and to change the world, if slowly. There is hope of things not always being like this. Good luck.

The world is big and confusing, and you know what? That's probably for the best. If the world were small enough for one human mind to experience and understand everything, well, it wouldn't be the vast, diverse playground that it is, would it? I don't believe in making things ideologically simpler for people to understand if I am sacrificing their ability to actually understand that thing. Especially if that "thing" is me. I don't believe that boiling my nature down to just a couple of elements is going to be useful to their ability to predict my behaviour or plan ahead for me. So if I just let people jump into the deep end of constructing gender: so? (~~And if people want to attack me or my community for their inability to understand us? Well I have a baseball bat and a bone to pick with them.~~)

Which brings us to reality testing.

It is healthy to know when your beliefs about the world are steering you wrong so that you can change them, ( yes? )

Depression, noun: a state of mental health characterised by guilt, sensitivity, sadness, irritability, and despair.
Anxiety, noun: the feeling that something terrible is going to happen.
Shame, noun: the feeling of being bad or wrong inside
Self-hate, verb: the act of treating oneself poorly, the act of encouraging hate for oneself.

Terrible things happen to almost everyone, statistically. But if you believe the Just World Fallacy, it will convince you that you deserve the terrible things that happen to you if you have even a smidge of self-hatred. Thus:

Step 1: dismantle your belief that people get what they deserve. It rains on the just and the unjust alike. People do not "victimize themselves". The rich do not deserve their wealth any more than the poor deserve poverty. The healthy and the unhealthy are decided by circumstances and genetics. Life is unfair unless we make it fair.

Step 2: treat yourself well. If you do not, you will continue feeling like you deserve terrible things/abuse. You have to treat yourself well in order to be able to think well of yourself. Start by treating yourself neutrally, as one would treat a polite stranger, if you must. But gradually begin to talk to yourself as though you are not the loathsome creature your shame, anxiety, and depression tell you you must be. Refuse to do the capitalists work for them in grinding yourself down.

Step 3: stop comparing people. Not just yourself, but all people- no two persons or sets of circumstances are exactly alike, and it is largely useless to compare their personalities, accomplishments, or progress. It is a tool of shame, and a stumbling block propping open the door to self hate and hatred of others.

Step 4: forgive yourself. To work on the roots of your shame feelings, it is needful that you forgive yourself for all the times you were not perfect. Guilt, the feeling of having done something bad, motivates you to grow and do better. Shame, the feeling of being something bad, is paralyzing and not useful. So forgive yourself and work on the beliefs supporting the structure of your shame until it is a dried husk of itself.

Step 5: be free.

Lots of introverted people believe in the existence of "idle chit chat" or "pointless small talk" because they don't realize that it serves a purpose. If you are sensitive to body language, vocal tone, and a person's choices in prosody and grammar, then how they are saying things can relay a lot of information that they are not directly saying.

If you see me listening without making eye contact and not engaging in much conversation? Something is up. Building a baseline for the standard conversational behaviors of your social circle is part of relational information and social policing. Knowing when something is wrong and what you can probably do to fix it is important knowledge, and there is a reason why most introverts are socially awkward: because they aren't paying attention. Without that extra information being conveyed, they are lost in a sea of potential responses with no lifeline.

Almost all of emo's early work is about resonant pain, because emo has this aesthetic of "here is my trauma, listen to me grapple with it and try to cope". And My Chemical Romance did that better than most. In some ways they were the most distilled form of emo. Their band exists because Gerard Way was on the ferry from New Jersey into Manhattan the day the twin towers came down. He had a front row seat to our national tragedy, and he was so shaken he couldn't stop talking about it to his former garage band members at church, one of whom told him to write a song about it and he'd play it.

That legacy of bearing witness to trauma, of singing out the pain you can't keep bottled up: that's emo. My Chemical Romance was just pain on a grand but relatable scale, the pain of seeing something that left scars, of having disappointed your grandmother and yourself because you weren't there when she died, the pain of having to carry on when those you love die.

Like all music seen as "feminine" and therefore threatening to the toxic cocks of rock, My Chem, and emo in general, faced some strong pushback. Every bit as strong as the riotous backlash against disco were the attacks against emo kids and the cyber-free-for-all of terrorism against 'netizens like Boxxy. Artists like MCR had songs about ~emotions~ and that was Not Okay.

One of the basic premises of emo is that working through your trauma onstage is valid art. Having feelings in public is seen as feminine and icky in popular culture, so rebelling against that norm is punk. Doing the work of publicly processing trauma is both punk artistry and the feminist act of using your emotions to create instead of destroy. Doing it where other people are paying to watch it forces that feminism into the cultural conversation, making the world better.

Until some assholes decide that straight masculinity is all that music ever needs to represent.

But we've heard that one before. ;)

Okay, let's make a game of spotting neurotypical versus autistic social skill failures!

Study the person you suspect of being neurodivergent. If they interrupt those whose opinions don't matter to their job or lives when they are speaking, they have bad social skills. If they interrupt their boss, those bad social skills aren't necessarily associated with the power heirarchies in which you only disrespect those below you. If someone has a delusion like racism or sexism, then they will reflexively estimate themselves higher than their bosses if their bosses are below them in the delusionary hierarchy. If they don't even recognize that there is a power dynamic in play, and will interrupt anyone including straight white male bosses, then they are probably autistic.

If you watch where people's eyes go, you can often deduce what they want. If someone stares at the gender of their preference for longer than two seconds at a time, they have bad social skills. If they stare longer than ten seconds, they are either being intentionally intimidating or they have no clue that social predators do that, and are behaving that way by accident. This does not have a clear demarcation between neurotypicality and autism, but it is worth noting that while predators can pretend to have bad social skills, their bad social skills don't extend to people they aren't attracted to who have the social capital to push back against them. Autistics with bad social skills dont tend to be able to hide that they have bad social skills. In order to learn to fake social skills you have to actually understand the social dynamic at play, which means really having the social skill.

If someone has anxiety and chooses to deal with that anxiety by avoiding the conditions that give rise to the problem, that person has poor ways of dealing with their own feelings. If a person gets into those situations because they can't predict them, but then will avoid actions that alleviate the underlying problem, they have bad social skills *and* bad ways of dealing with their own feelings. Neurotypical people do not often get paralyzed by the intensity and number of their own feelings, so the latter indicates autism in a way that the former does not. If they avoid confronting their feelings and the situation to the point of collapse/missed deadlines then they have executive dysfunction and are not neurotypical any way you slice it.

When you point out a small error and the person gets upset with you for pointing it out, that person has bad social skills. If the person doubles down on the error or tries to make the error someone ELSE'S problem to fix, that person is probably neurotypical. Autistic people, in general, tend to think that if other people's actions are giving rise to a problem, then they can't fix it themselves and it's up to us to do so. We get used to being the only one who can be counted on while young, and if we don't find others who can be counted on, we often don't ever outgrow that assumption.

If the subject of study reacts to uncertainty/not knowing the answer to something by being extra certain in the absence of evidence, they have bad emotional intelligence. If they react to uncertainty by stalling out or insisting stonily that there is no way to be sure, they are probably neurodivergent. If they do that and then propose ridiculous and complicated ways to get data about the area of uncertainty, they are not wasting your time, they are trying to help everyone be informed about what they consider a dangerous risk. It is a grey area, but does indicate autism as it disregards other people's feelings about the risk.

(With credit to

bestmiaou for getting the conversation started and some of the distinctions.)

(With credit also to

feotakahari for the good point about which hierarchies get recognition and respect.)

How you can help OCCCUPY
(without camping)

Transfer Banks. The best and biggest thing you can do to send the message that you do not approve of unethical banking practices is to get a credit union or local bank. If you have a Chase, Citi, Wells-Fargo or Bank of America account, withdraw your funds and place them somewhere that you trust. Wall Street can't use your money to commit moral failings if they don't have your money. Since September 29th $4.5 billion has been transferred into credit unions. Every lost dollar is a vote of no confidence. Every dollar transferred is put back into your local community.

Return Credit Offers. When you get your mail, open the unwanted credit card offers. There will be a postage-paid envelope inside. You can fold the rest of your junk mail into the envelope and send it. If they're going to waste your time sending them every month, then you get to waste their money on postage while supporting your local post office.

Read. Educate yourself on the real messages of the Occupy movement: Accountability, Economic Justice, and Equal Protection under the law. The corporate-owned media feel too threatened to report the movement without bias, but the internet has both sides of the story. There are livestreams of the protests easily accessible, and live camera footage has no bias.

Write. Write to your mayor, your chief of police, your congressmen and representatives. Tell them that you support bank accountability and congressional reform to eliminate moral hazards. Ask that they support First Amendment rights and ethical treatment of non-violent protesters. Remind them of their roots in the community. Write to the news corporations and ask them to report the news more fairly - not just our story, but everyone's. Ask the media who you receive information from to stop burying stories under fluff, and to explain nuanced issues for better public awareness.

Call. If you do not receive an answer or receive only a form letter, call. If the signal is busy, do something else for a few minutes and call again. There's no protocol to stand on, and no need to yell, just talk to the staff or the person you're trying to reach as though they are your employee. In the case of civil servants, you pay their salary: they are respectfully obligated to listen to what you have to say. In the case of news organizations, your viewership can go elsewhere and if they are smart they know enough to be pleasant.

Discuss. Calmly and without escalation, talk to your friends about your observations and the conclusions about our country that you have drawn from that knowledge. Discuss your concerns, your fears and hopes. Strengthen your friendships by sharing your feelings. If you have friends who think there's nothing wrong with 80 hour work weeks, or think that those who can't find jobs are not worth respect, or think that it is fair for banks to bet against people's ability to pay for their homes, please ask them how those things benefit America.

Assemble. Go to an Occupy camp. See the conditions on the ground for yourself. Talk to protesters, organizers, and police. Look with unbiased eyes at all sides of this conversation our nation is having and draw your own conclusions. Attend a General Assembly and participate in the consensus. If you feel inspired to reject the imbalance of powers in our system and wish to protest, hello and welcome.

Teach. If you like the movement but think there is something that could be done better, show some people how to do it. Teach-ins happen most days at all Occupy camps, and the more knowledge we share, the more we have.

Donate. If you have things that you don't use, please donate. If you have sleeping bags, tents, food, books, socks, scarves, coats and mittens, band-aids, collapsible shelves or portable storage bins, markers and poster-making supplies, a poster that you made but cannot stay around to wave, or if you are lucky enough to have money sitting around, we will gladly accept many things and try to put them to best use. Most Occupy camps have a presence on twitter where donations can be coordinated in an open forum.

FORGIVE. The rich and powerful did not mean for this to happen. The bankers and investors were short-sighted and they work in a high-risk field. They got used to taking risks and then more risks, and some of those risks were not theirs to take. They risked our homes and livelihoods. They were foolish. But foolish is not evil. The government was foolish to think that the state could let them take as many risks as they wanted. They were foolish and we supported them in their foolishness by being less critical than we should have been about ideas that proved unsound. But now we have no time to waste on foolishness or on the bitterness and blame it generates. Please forgive yourself and all of us, and let us move forward from this a more careful, more mutually respectful nation.

Please repost, print, share and distribute as much as you like, no credit is necessary.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Our national rhetoric is suffering from a poverty of compassion. Our unspoken belief that one must earn the empathy of peers through financial accomplishment is deeply flawed. Mercy that comes at a price is not mercy at all.

We have been seeking to balance our need to care and be cared for within this flawed system by collectively overproducing and overconsuming. But money is a limited resource, and we map that system of scarcity onto respect and affection which are infinite. We have been mislead by our expectations for so long that we have become intellectually dishonest in order to compete with one another in the belief that we cannot all be cared for, but that brings us no closer to balance than our complicit silence in the face of imbalance.

When we, the 99%, deliberately put people we disagree with out of the bounds of our respect, we are making enemies of our opposition, making them defensive, entrenching them further in their view that compassion is not a necessary part of public life. We must meet their cynicism with sincerity and their anger with our honest grief at the injustice that we have all perpetuated by participating in this sham of fairness.

Respect the 1%. Most of them thought they were making good policies and intervening for the best. They honestly thought they could have our best interests at heart in the absence of understanding our lives and the compassion that creates. Any action in advance of compassion is flawed, theirs or ours.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

How much do you write fanfiction in your head? When you're reading a story or watching a movie, does your imagination fill in missing details and add depth to characters? Where does that skill come from?

We don't experience other people the way they are, and we know that. We experience them as characters in the story we're watching unfold. And even though we know that they're more complex than what we can see, we can only construct them in our heads from external signals that we interpret through our understanding of the world. And while our translation might be faithful to the events and reactions we watched, we know there's more to the story than what we're seeing. So we write possible scenarios for our acquaintances until one makes sense. And then we have a richer understanding of that person. Because we write fanfiction about real life.

I have a relationship with books that movies and tv shows can't live up to. My brain is just wired for books, i guess. And in the fanfiction community that's possibly the norm instead of the deviation. Bookworms write because we love the written word. But there are other kinds of fan, and all fanship is valid. So. Which do you prefer: the book or the movie?

Posted via LjBeetle

"Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you.

Just got back from the memorial service for Albert, saw many faces that I remember the beta version of. There were recitations of poems and a song, and a couple of laptops with a picture slideshow. I talked a little at a podium about what Al had meant to me, listened to others talk about him, too. Last entry there were the stories, but this time there is ( how Albert made me feel. )

Carolyn spent the night at my place last night, crashed out on the futon. We had port and told crazy stories and caught up. I got more in touch with the good-feelings side of the loss, but that just made the loss sharper today. I'll take the win for feeling my feelings, though.

This post is about fighting fair, the uses of trust, how to act in good faith, how your shame hurts others' feelings, apologies and forgiveness, asking for what you want, the subtle insult of manipulation, and the balance of power between two people. It's got a lot to say, and it goes on a bit. And since some of you are pulling stupid human tricks in your relationships, I'm not cut-tagging it, and I have disabled comments.

When the relationship is more important than what you get out of it, you agree on rules and then abide by them because that is the foundation of the relationship. Anything less implies that you do not respect your partner's ability to act in good faith or a lack of empathy for their betrayed feelings. Fighting fair implies that while you disagree on something, the disagreement is less important than the relationship that it arises from, and prioritizes your connection over your moments of disconnect.

When you ask for what you need it implies that you trust in your partner's willingness to fulfill your needs as best they can. When you don't trust your partner then you don't ask, and you use indirect tactics to get your needs met through trickery. Eventually that message of distrust is received, and hurts the feelings of the distrusted party. This person is forced to constantly chase after you, trying to read your mind to fulfill your unspoken needs to avoid feeling manipulated, distrusted, and misunderstood. That is not fighting fair, and it does not work very well. Eventually most people will also retaliate, matching your aloofness so that you are forced to pay the same attention to them so that the balance of power is restored. Then you both alternately ignore and pursue one another, and the underlying weakness from the lack of mutual support means that when external stresses are applied then your relationship falters and breaks up when it would have lasted in a more trusting environment.

When you catch yourself doing something hurtful, even if you did not intend such, apologize. To do otherwise implies that it is acceptable to you to risk your partner's feelings. Seek to make amends until the hurt feelings are soothed. Find ways to avoid problems that have recurred. Negotiate boundaries and context differences with caution and respect. Carelessness and lack of consideration imply that you are not planning for your relationship to last. When your lover is sorry and makes the effort to heal the divide between you, let go of your bad feelings and express your forgiveness. To do otherwise implies that you are interested in what you can gain from your lover's guilt and bad feelings. That is establishing trust.

If you love someone, take care of them. Speak their needs to them aloud, as best you understand, so that they can get used to engaging in dialog, giving voice the unspoken parts of themselves. Do not make it unsafe for them to want things by using what you know in order to hold an advantage over them. Do not test how much you can get away with to see how far such privilege goes; life will give you many tests of the bounds and strength of your relationship with no help from you. Do not judge yourself a failure at the first sign that you cannot meet all of someone's current needs. Trust that if you are loved your partner will give you back the care you have given. That is acting in good faith.

We learn hatred by hating ourselves. Eventually, that shame and negativity is externalized and projected onto those around us, even the people we love. Pushing people away comes in many forms, and two of them are reciprocal: hurting someone's feelings and withholding forgiveness when your feelings are hurt. Both keep your partner at an emotional distance that feels safer than the thought of letting go of your self-hatred and the fear that surrounds all shame. It's a coping strategy to buy time, but when time runs out you have to pick which has primacy: your relationship or your desire to not challenge your insecurities. When we prioritize hatred above love it is a tragedy, each time and always.

Love is NOT all you need, no matter what songs or storybooks tell you. Please invest yourself in trusting others, in forgiving yourself and them for the weaknesses that we all have, and build your relationships to last.

I love and trust you all. Please stop hurting each other.

Hey, have I told you guys my "Alan Moore is living in quantum superposition as a fangirl" theory? No?

Recently I was reading this article on how scientists were trying to get a virus to exist in two quantum states simultaneously, and the difficulties doing it to larger organisms in the real world. To which I immediately scoffed, because there is an author/fangirl/chaos magician who does that all the time. He is Alan Moore, the author of Promethea, V for Vendetta, the Watchmen, and Lost Girls - a published femmeslash futurefic crossover/AU of the sexual adventures of Alice from Wonderland, Dorothy Gale, and Wendy Darling.

I hear that, statistically, it's pretty much just women who write slash, and that there's this perception that people who slash the characters from children's stories must be some sort of perverts. And yet many of the people who are supposed to subscribe to that theory would also have to be fans of perennially popular Moore. He seems to occupy a singularly multi-layered existence, much like that virus, because nobody even sees him for what he is. That passage in V for Vendetta where V is extemporaneously filking his life's story to the tune of Cabaret? Songfic, bb. Seriously.

Great. Big. Fangirl.

If you're wondering how is it that he can be in two places at once like that, be one thing and do another - well, he is a chaos magician. Messing with the normal order of the world is a spiritual tenet for more people than just the cracktastic slash fangirls on LiveJournal. ;) Love ya!

In other news, I have cyst pain+cramps again and my personal life is not doing me many favors. I need someone to write me a book, How to Comfort Distressed Humans: A GUIDEBOOK FOR THE CONFUSED VULCAN. Anybody up for the challenge? Or want to have coffee with me next Thursday at the Starbucks near my house?

As a person of pallor, I am concerned about what people are saying about race and class issues as displayed by the movie. And so I have decided to play devil's advocate over on io9's article about the racism inherent in Avatar's handling of the film's themes.

( Spoilers, HO! )

* So I have now seen Episode 1 Season 1 of Leverage. Where can I get more of this?

* I have been thinking through the logistics of insanity, and how chaos theory applies to repeated iterations of the impossible. Perhaps something is not possible when you begin working towards it, but will be by the time you get there (re: our current president is black). In this way some kinds of insanity have real world applications as far as invention, scientific discovery, and social progress. Because the initial conditions of the repeated experiments are constantly changing, each repetition has different chances of success.

* Love's Baby Soft is pedophile-attractant perfume. I may have to make a frightening Loli outfit to celebrate finding this gem hiding out in my bathroom. There may be pigtails involved. You have been warned.

* Subculture is the proving ground for dominant-paradigm social policy in the same way that State courts are proving grounds for what becomes federal policy. We're beta-testing new behaviors and shaking the bugs out, so that the majority of our culture can keep to the stable, already-tried ways of relating. People can be as conservative as they like, but what is normal for us now will be a social norm in 50 years. Think back: Beatniks, rock n' roll, hippies: their radical new habits and practices have become our own. Deliberate minimalism, ecological awareness, activism as a lifestyle, the refusal of racism implied by listening to 'black' music: these things used to exist only in outcasts, not in people who swam in the mainstream.

*Some nights, especially when I can't sleep, I feel unstoppable. I feel like pain is just a condition like breathing and is equally invisible, like every action I take every day will echo through my entire life, like the shadows of what we have been are cast forward onto the future by the light of our former potential selves, obscuring the narrowing field of what we can become in the moving dimness. Only the choices we passed by are brightly lit, and in the gloom ahead lies our eventual fate.

*Why do I only get metaphorical when I hurt? Stupid stomach pain. Stupid insomnia.

ETA: Unfinished sentences are also what happens when I can't sleep. Fixed now.

The most profound thing that I have seen this week.

Go. Read.

ultimate_bryan asked me how it was that I could now get away with telling people whack things about themselves with minimal upset. He was not there for my attaining 4th level and getting the Earn Forgiveness feat, so it's understandable that he's surprised. I am amazed myself sometimes. SOSHUL SKILLZ: I HAZ THEM! So I'm making up a conversation in which I impart wisdom to him for a change. :D Given an infinite timeline, all probabilities approach 1. It could ~~eventually~~ totally happen!

HEIDI: Hey, you know that thing a week ago with that person, where you had this particular response?
BRYAN: Yeah. What about it?
HEIDI: I was thinking it was like that thing a year ago, how a person did a similar thing and you responded by doing that. Do you remember it that way? Like, do we have a common context here?
BRYAN: Yeah.
HEIDI: Here are some other similarities about both situations, and why I think they both happenend that way. Witness the logic process that you used to interpret the situation. See how I totally get you and where you're coming from?
BRYAN: *is wary* I can see how the situations have things in common. You're going to say something critical now, aren't you?
HEIDI: Sorry, but yeah. Neither of those responses worked out very well for you, and I don't like seeing you get hurt. I get that you see these events from this perspective, and if I'd been through this thing your family did, then I'd think the same way. I identify with your miscommunication or other problem. I'm no better than you and do not pass judgement. But the other people in the situations don't know you like I do and they have an interpretation that goes like this and makes you look like a dick. The situation may not come up much, but maybe you could try something different next time? It's just a thought.
BRYAN: I don't have this problem with people who make sense, and I don't think I should have to change or justifying my actions.
HEIDI: Hey, you know you already have my approval, and while it can get painful to watch sometimes when you're upset over these things, you're also worth it. I'm not, like, invested in changing you, so if you don't want to change then don't. But if you want to talk about it and pick apart the logic, you can. I'm not going anywhere.
BRYAN: Oh. Is that it? I thought there was going to be judgement in there.
HEIDI: Nah. I left that habit behind at cleric lvl 3, mostly because someone pointed out my bullshit to me in a conversation just like this.

( logic structures behind this conversation )

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hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

written on the subway walls and tenement halls

Entries tagged with deep

Mostly caught up

Poverty, definitions, and near enemies.

My grief process, for interested parties.

hair, nonbinary identity, and co-opted culture

Pandemic, late stage capitalism, spoonies, and a helpful tactic.

My gender-fuckery and reality testing

How To Not Hate Yourself

Introvert social fallacy #1

MCR and the Inherent Feminism of Emo

Social Intelligence and Failures Thereof.

[occupy] What you can do to help

the case for intellectual nonviolence

(no subject)

ASJ IV: the Restrospective

Build Your Relationships To Last.

beware of crack

James Cameron's Avatar and racism.