I'm getting to the point where I can't trust myself, again.
If I am melodramatic, or provocative, or harsh, it is because I am finding that following these impulses leads me to better places than trying to question them. It's not great, but it seems like it might be best...
Monday, March 30, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Steve - Hates
I've been reading Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit again. I've also been reading The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. The former is a kind of lesbian-coming-of-age-love-story-with-substance. The latter is a radical feminist theoretical tract, with the premise that women are superior to men.
They both share a kind of rad-fem men-are-inferior perspective (though in Oranges it's covered more as a side-issue). Solanas' basic underlying theory is that men are incomplete women, and on some level realise this. This realisation is the reason for women being seen as inferior, because men project all their failings onto women. The full realisation of a man's existence, his actualisation, according to Solanas, is to realise his inferior and submissive nature, and (to the extent it is possible) to transform himself into a woman.
Could it be that reading these texts is accelerating my decent into self-hate?
I used to think that it was merely my assigned gender, what I was supposed to be, that was what I needed to avoid. I could deal with that. It would be difficult, but I could scrape out every masculine cancer of my identity. Even if not, I could work at it.
But now I'm not so sure. Maybe it is my unchangeable sex that is at the root of all this. Maybe I am stuck with these hateful attributes, for as long as I live. Even HRT won't get rid of all of that.
I know how I should be reacting, how I used to. I should have read The SCUM Manifesto and come away with defiance and a desire to prove that I too could be beautiful, could empathise, could feel passion. I should be reading the more rad fem passages in Oranges and denying that I am incapable of love, willing the chance to prove it.
But these days... I'm almost agreeing. I'm beginning to despise my sex in general and myself in particular. I hate everything about my sex. I hate the little psychological ticks being male gives me, and I hate that my sexuality is so indiscriminate, so ruthless. Now, when I read Oranges, I wish so hard to be a lesbian. I want to be and to be with women, to be able to feel all the things I am... incapable of feeling. I feel so utterly inferior, I feel so utterly worthless.
Where is this headed? To oestrogen? To taking a scalpel to my testosterone? I don't know.
I am a turd, a lowly abject turd.
They both share a kind of rad-fem men-are-inferior perspective (though in Oranges it's covered more as a side-issue). Solanas' basic underlying theory is that men are incomplete women, and on some level realise this. This realisation is the reason for women being seen as inferior, because men project all their failings onto women. The full realisation of a man's existence, his actualisation, according to Solanas, is to realise his inferior and submissive nature, and (to the extent it is possible) to transform himself into a woman.
Could it be that reading these texts is accelerating my decent into self-hate?
I used to think that it was merely my assigned gender, what I was supposed to be, that was what I needed to avoid. I could deal with that. It would be difficult, but I could scrape out every masculine cancer of my identity. Even if not, I could work at it.
But now I'm not so sure. Maybe it is my unchangeable sex that is at the root of all this. Maybe I am stuck with these hateful attributes, for as long as I live. Even HRT won't get rid of all of that.
I know how I should be reacting, how I used to. I should have read The SCUM Manifesto and come away with defiance and a desire to prove that I too could be beautiful, could empathise, could feel passion. I should be reading the more rad fem passages in Oranges and denying that I am incapable of love, willing the chance to prove it.
But these days... I'm almost agreeing. I'm beginning to despise my sex in general and myself in particular. I hate everything about my sex. I hate the little psychological ticks being male gives me, and I hate that my sexuality is so indiscriminate, so ruthless. Now, when I read Oranges, I wish so hard to be a lesbian. I want to be and to be with women, to be able to feel all the things I am... incapable of feeling. I feel so utterly inferior, I feel so utterly worthless.
Where is this headed? To oestrogen? To taking a scalpel to my testosterone? I don't know.
I am a turd, a lowly abject turd.
Steve - Despairs
I don't want to remember you like this.
The more I read of you, the more I can't stand the way you think, the views you hold, the pretentions you have towards relativism and nonpositivism. I want to tear you apart, I want to go through all these systems you place on the world and systematically destroy them. I want you to see the world how I see, or how I try to, viewing everything as having intrinsic truth and good, but with enough passion and attachment to make a fucking difference to your own life at least. You've only ever made decisions in the past, I want to go back there and keep you unsteady, keep you unknowing and keep you from getting smug about it. Make you feel the value of freedom, how out of reach it is, and why it is so important that you keep failing to reach it. I want to make you feel how vulnerable you are. You're making yourself into my enemy, and there might come a day when you realise it. I want to make you realise that you don't know any of this.
I want to change you, but I can't and I shouldn't try. Seems like none of these words is sharp enough to make you bleed like teeth and nails can, nor heavy enough to block out your consciousness.
This feels like the end.
The more I read of you, the more I can't stand the way you think, the views you hold, the pretentions you have towards relativism and nonpositivism. I want to tear you apart, I want to go through all these systems you place on the world and systematically destroy them. I want you to see the world how I see, or how I try to, viewing everything as having intrinsic truth and good, but with enough passion and attachment to make a fucking difference to your own life at least. You've only ever made decisions in the past, I want to go back there and keep you unsteady, keep you unknowing and keep you from getting smug about it. Make you feel the value of freedom, how out of reach it is, and why it is so important that you keep failing to reach it. I want to make you feel how vulnerable you are. You're making yourself into my enemy, and there might come a day when you realise it. I want to make you realise that you don't know any of this.
I want to change you, but I can't and I shouldn't try. Seems like none of these words is sharp enough to make you bleed like teeth and nails can, nor heavy enough to block out your consciousness.
This feels like the end.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Steve - Cries
If you've spent a fair amount of time talking to me, I've probably told you about my relationship with tears. That is, I don't really have one. I tell people I haven't cried since I was 13 years old. It's one of those truths that is true, but isn't technically true. Here is why:
I tell people this, about my lack of crying, and I nearly always get a kind of low-level envy. Like they'd rather not cry. People are ashamed of it, embarrassed by it, and most people seem to try to stop it. I wish I could cry, I try to and fail. I forgot how. Throughout my childhood and adolescence I learned to separate my emotions from my outer appearance. I was given systematic lessons in controlling my temper in primary school, through being taunted verbally until I lost it, and then getting punished when I did, I learned that channelling anger straight through to my limbs never helped. I was given the standard masculinity socialisation which teaches you to suppress your emotions anyway. I was given a hard time about being bisexual around the ages 12-14, which reinforced the lessons of controlling emotions I'd been taught previously. All this with the lessons in pacifism from my mother.
It's all brought me to this stage, where I am essentially unable to express what I feel through my behaviour or appearance. I've felt awful all of this year, and no one has noticed without me explicitly telling them (and they register considerable surprise when I do). Physical expression was torn out of me, and with it went my spontaneity and my ability to live in the present moment. My lack of skill at visual art and driving both stem, I think, from my inability to concentrate on the present. Conversations with close friends are generally mostly silence. I say very little, and listen a lot. On one level this is good, because people like to be listened to, but on another it means I'm mostly existing in my own thoughts.
And people envy me for this. It upsets me when they do. They don't know what a gift and opportunity they have.
I don't really know how to 'fix' it. Existing like this means that I can mostly edit myself pretty easily. But what if that control is the thing I am trying to remove? I'm not sure I want to either, not sure what I'd do in absence of it. I know there are ways of existing beyond it, through it, for times, but it's remembering to do it that's the problem. It has to become a habit. Taking risks and existing on some kind of edge. living with mortality and with almost a desire for failure.
I don't know. I've lost coherence. I think something in me is changing. I cried more for less reason today than I have in a long time, and to have such emotional potential within me is something I don't have very often at all. I will take risks, this Easter break, if only for their own sake.
- I vividly remember the last time I really cried. It was during a long period of what I can only describe as bullying at the hands of my family. My siblings, both younger, went through a period of ganging up on me. I generally just stood and took it, because various events in my childhood had lead to me dealing with abuse in this way. One time, though, my brother started hitting me with a belt. This, I thought, was a reasonable point to start using reasonable force to get him to stop. So I did, and it stopped, and no one got hurt. However, they told the parents, and mother got very angry. Physical violence was never okay, but mental violence was essentially allowed. Thus, the apathy she had showed towards my asking for a bit of help with this pretty destructive conflict between me and my siblings disappeared when I inevitably brought force into it. I was very upset, and I cried quite a lot. Needless to say, my parents displayed the same apathy towards my upset as before. I think I was fourteen at this point.
- I just remembered, that wasn't the last time either. The last time was when I broke up with my girlfriend at 15. Four years ago. I don't count this one though, because... I don't know. I want to say a longer period of time, because that's how it feels. More on this later.
- When I say cry, I mean really cry. Anything that involves sobbing, shaking, all that. I tear up at films, and when I'm under a lot of pressure, and even that is rare (I think I've shed two tears max since the beginning of 2008), but that's always been me either trying really hard to cry or vicariously, at films/books/etc. I'm posting this entry because today I teared up quite a lot at a film. Good Bye Lenin, which isn't a sad film, not really, but I don't know... it's beautiful.
I tell people this, about my lack of crying, and I nearly always get a kind of low-level envy. Like they'd rather not cry. People are ashamed of it, embarrassed by it, and most people seem to try to stop it. I wish I could cry, I try to and fail. I forgot how. Throughout my childhood and adolescence I learned to separate my emotions from my outer appearance. I was given systematic lessons in controlling my temper in primary school, through being taunted verbally until I lost it, and then getting punished when I did, I learned that channelling anger straight through to my limbs never helped. I was given the standard masculinity socialisation which teaches you to suppress your emotions anyway. I was given a hard time about being bisexual around the ages 12-14, which reinforced the lessons of controlling emotions I'd been taught previously. All this with the lessons in pacifism from my mother.
It's all brought me to this stage, where I am essentially unable to express what I feel through my behaviour or appearance. I've felt awful all of this year, and no one has noticed without me explicitly telling them (and they register considerable surprise when I do). Physical expression was torn out of me, and with it went my spontaneity and my ability to live in the present moment. My lack of skill at visual art and driving both stem, I think, from my inability to concentrate on the present. Conversations with close friends are generally mostly silence. I say very little, and listen a lot. On one level this is good, because people like to be listened to, but on another it means I'm mostly existing in my own thoughts.
And people envy me for this. It upsets me when they do. They don't know what a gift and opportunity they have.
I don't really know how to 'fix' it. Existing like this means that I can mostly edit myself pretty easily. But what if that control is the thing I am trying to remove? I'm not sure I want to either, not sure what I'd do in absence of it. I know there are ways of existing beyond it, through it, for times, but it's remembering to do it that's the problem. It has to become a habit. Taking risks and existing on some kind of edge. living with mortality and with almost a desire for failure.
I don't know. I've lost coherence. I think something in me is changing. I cried more for less reason today than I have in a long time, and to have such emotional potential within me is something I don't have very often at all. I will take risks, this Easter break, if only for their own sake.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Steve - Has Some Things To Show You
I'm starting to amass a collection (archive?) of beautiful things. I'll be posting them here every so often. None of them are mine unless otherwise stated. I shan't be attributing them unless it's necessary.
But with her...I can't even articulate my feelings. It's as if sunshine is warming [my] face, on a beautiful July day, and as long as she is there my face will always be warm, I will always be safe and in great health. That is an awful description but it is the best I can think of right now.
What these men saw was the Nevada wreathed in clouds of her own amber smoke, uprooting gun emplacements, scattering pillboxes, and smashing tank and troop concentrations, but what you, as the only newspaperman aboard this American battleship in this invasion, saw was men rather than a machine that did all of this.
This.
But with her...I can't even articulate my feelings. It's as if sunshine is warming [my] face, on a beautiful July day, and as long as she is there my face will always be warm, I will always be safe and in great health. That is an awful description but it is the best I can think of right now.
What these men saw was the Nevada wreathed in clouds of her own amber smoke, uprooting gun emplacements, scattering pillboxes, and smashing tank and troop concentrations, but what you, as the only newspaperman aboard this American battleship in this invasion, saw was men rather than a machine that did all of this.
This.
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