There’s a lot to listen to and learn from in this interview with adrienne maree brown:
We’ve been trained to be afraid of our own yes, and what feels good in our lives. Get curious about that. Who benefits from you being terrified to be happy? As long as you’re afraid to be happy, you’ll not pursue the very things that would require the system to change, require the system to accommodate everyone’s joy, instead of just the joy of a few rich people at the top. That kind of systems change is of deep interest to me.
We have relationships and accountability to the kinds of stories we tell. Art is either upholding the status quo, or disrupting the status quo. Class, race, gender, sexism, nationalism, militarism… the toxic energies of our time want to come through us. They want to come out. They need to be rewritten, and we have to be conscious about how that happens, so that we’re not writing the same narrative.
There’s always going to be a part of me that’s laughing at my own earnestness, so considering my own insignificance always makes me laugh and helps me relax. Everyone’s like, ‘Am I doing enough? Can I do more? Does my life matter? Do people like me?’ I think I do my best work when I’m not concerned about how it’s going to be received, and when I’m really in touch with what I feel is the most true part myself.
Humans have done so much to make ourselves still and rigid and routine, and some people get comfort from that. I guess, as a Virgo, I’m supposed to be comforted by that! But I enjoy routines, as long as I know I can change them whenever I want. The harder truth that you have to get in contact with as a human being is that you don’t know for sure. Everything we’re doing is our best-case scenario, best hypothesis. Since I can’t guarantee that in the future it will be impactful, what I try to do is live each day as if I’m in that future. Like, I want to live in a world where nobody was lying to each other, and we said exactly what we were feeling and thinking with as much kindness as possible. Then I did that, and got much different results than I’ve ever gotten from like, lying, or just being polite.
As I’ve opened up this avenue for posting, I find I’m inclined toward more of a circa-2002 LiveJournal-style public diary, including raw revelations of my internal emotions. I’ve always traced that desire to having been trained to journal publicly by the adolescent-digital culture of the early 2000s. Not a photographic attempt at presentability, but a textual attempt at sentimentality or “truth” — often just as manipulative as an instagram smile.
But then Derrida comes out of a crowd of animals to connect autobiography itself to Christian confession — and I remember my training, the early-life admonition to pray to god, to whisper internally a list of my crimes and desires and to beg forgiveness. Somehow after all of this time (with my memory punched through repeatedly by the moths of depression), I hadn’t connected the thread back that far. At the same time as I want badly to just type freely about how bad I feel and why, and then to post it publicly for my friends and unknown future enemies, I then turn around and face down the inclination for likely-good reasons. But in the depth of my wiring, in the primordial soup of my consciousness, there’s the toxic waste of christianity leeching out in every direction.
Catholic confession is in part a power mechanism; tell the priests about your sins, and they can leverage the community and hold power. Private confession in the Baptist style makes you your own jailer; or, in many prominent christians, it apparently makes you immune to restraint or regret. If you can do whatever you like, and then be forgiven by the ghost voice of your own internal god, then nothing is off the table.
God doesn’t live in my head anymore; but the litany of wrongs runs constantly, uselessly, and the desire to seek sympathy from external sources is a bottleneck on my entire life. Otto Rank said somewhere that eventually we become the keepers of our parents’ voices, or of god’s; eventually we have to become our own parent, our own god, or else the voice of recrimination and judgment takes on a life of its own and strangles out the more productive voices.
There is still a frowning god mumbling somewhere within me; and more-readily, the ignorant condescension and irritation of my parents. I seem to want to submit my thoughts for consideration before a jury of my peers, both to hear myself more clearly, and to possibly have someone say, “You’re right!”
One of the last lengthy text things I posted publicly (almost 2 years before starting this site) felt good to get out of my brain. Multiple friends said they really appreciated it. A stranger said it made them love me. But then my mother saw it, and texted to say she thought I sounded insane. The truth was my mother never learned to hear me clearly, for whatever combination of reasons. But I was still a few steps away from entirely rejecting her voice as an influence in my life, and that chastisement was so effective that I shut down again, when I could have been blooming. As I had done so many times before.
I put my own aims for my life on hold for most of a decade simply because my parents’ expectations were so narrow, and loudly-doubtful, that I assumed I must be wrong and needed to adjust myself to accommodate them. Before that, I wasted another decade trying to divine the will of god and live according to conservative control structures. It’s hard for me to look back on any of my life with anything but resentment and grief. I think I have been a happy child, a bright student, an insightful friend, and a prolific creator. But at the same time, I feel like I’ve hardly ever gotten to meet my real self, the one who has continually tried to rise up out from under these root-smothering sheets. I know lots of other people feel varying forms of this, because we were raised in a garbage culture of authoritarian control.
I continue to feel that writing helps bring me closer to myself. For whatever combination of reasons, it’s easier to write if there’s the possibility someone else will read it. This also introduces the danger of judgment; of appearing weak, unstable, or bewildering. Unmarketable. I may be all of those things sometimes. But I have difficulty reaching the rest of myself if I can’t look at and set down the messy surface of my mind.
Derrida also says, “Things would be too simple altogether, […] there would even be the risk that domestication has already come into effect, if I were to give in to my own melancholy.”
I have absolutely given in to my own melancholy, as well as to the melancholies and manipulations of familial and social structures, and been domesticated to the point of docility before my own death. I don’t know how many lives I was born with, but I’m tired of lying down silently to lose them. I need some of the wildness of “truth,” confessed to the screaming unyielding sun, to the meaning-free constellations of our lineless gods, to whichever fellow animals will hear me and tilt their heads in recognition. I need to believe in my own voice, to believe that I need it, to believe that it isn’t simply hateful noise that needs to be suppressed in order to work to pay off the debts I owe to our monstrous systems simply to sustain my viability as a laborer.
So. Let’s put one word in front of another and believe the page leads somewhere. Even if it has to be expressed partly through the mechanics of control I was given as a child and from which I may never fully escape. I’m just what I am, and I’ve got to endure the parts I despise in order to sustain the parts I sometimes have the energy to love.
Watching a clip of “Hakuna Matata” sung by real-looking animals and thinking it’s either a test (of what we are able and willing to put up with?), a psychological operation by well-known malefactors (Disney), or a cry for help from a dying culture devouring itself. Anyway it made my brain feel bad to look at it, but hopefully everybody has a good time helping Disney make a bunch more money
I made this collage a few years ago, combining images and text from one of the later League books by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, when I was doing a survey of Moore’s work for my own interest.
It came back to mind today as I thought how frustrated I am with myself and how difficult it’s become to speak sometimes, like shouting over the howl of my internal wind. Trying to see in every direction at once, torn apart by predictive text misfiring and failing to present suitable options. The simple answer is that I am worried, unhappy, and deeply uncertain about a handful of things, and that’s made talking through a lot of things very different. I’m trying my best to clear the debris and build a buttress against the wind.
But maybe, instead, I need to build an instrument for the wind to pass through, that can shape its screaming into song.
I had a really hard time today not feeling disgusted with everything human-related. I passed through several train stations, airports, and in-betweens, and everywhere I looked was messy, greedy, thoughtless humanity. Including in myself.
It took me all day to come back around to trying — trying! — to turn disgust into empathy. Everybody’s just making it up as we go. A lot of people inherit problems and do the best they can with them. Others inherit power, and often do their worst. Other people exist in between, navigating complex structures with incomplete training.
(None of this is disgust re: service industry people; everybody working at the airport is just trying to do their job and I appreciate everyone who has to be somewhere for work and put up with everybody else.)
Anyway. I’m having a bad brain time. But I’m trying my best to practice what I’ve learned about nudging uselessly-grim thoughts toward something helpful. Yeah, it’s correct to notice that humanity has made a fucked up mess of this whole beautiful planet; but there are a lot of ways to proceed from that observation.
People need support, resources, and infrastructure. There are a lot of people suffering and struggling under capitalism, and it takes a toll that expresses itself in lots of ways. We’re in this thing together.
Moreover, my imbalanced personal disgust doesn’t need to be projected onto others. Nobody deserves that.
And whether it’s worth it or not, I did get to observe the ocean-foam gathering of clouds from above, and the merciless gold of a satisfied sun. Thanks to all this human mess. I just want us to arrange things more peacefully and respectfully.
Thanks to a brief look at a small list of my friends on twitter, I saw this tweet, linking to a poem by one of my favorite poets (and my internet friend), Wasim Salman.
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“I am the luxury of power.”
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“Something like a person built with poems.”
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Read “Bloodborne: Metroplex” here. Then read the rest of his poems, please. If you’re here, you’ll love ‘em!
Lately text-based communication has been really overwhelming and difficult for me. Keeping up with texts, emails, etc has made me feel really panicky and stressed. It’s essential to my work and relationships so I’m doing everything I can to relax about it; and I’m reducing my intake of things like Twitter (I have it blocked at a network level for most of the day every day now, which has really been helping me focus and redirect my brain) and trying to just respond in any way rather than wait for the “right”-feeling response. That’s a deeply-rooted anxiety for me, for various reasons.
In any case, I’m sorry to my friends who haven’t heard as much from me lately, or who have had to wait an obnoxiously-long time for replies both casual and important. I have not been in a good headspace, but I’m trying to improve it and not let you down.
And if you really need me in a time-sensitive way, please just call me. That’s easier somehow.
