i almost did that thing i used to do on here and write a way long screed. i just wanted to say that i’ve realized that most of why i used to do that was the same reason i fought so hard to do anything, i thought i needed to do all these things to justify my existence. but i learned a lot. i learned about societal alienation and endless class/race/sex wars. i learned about my own ancestral histories and how those led to the pain and confusion i felt that i thought made me broken and wrong in ways no one could understand. i learned that i’m not either of those things and even found beautiful truths about myself that i may have never known if i weren’t forced to slow down in every possible aspect of my life that I thought mattered. i hit a kind of rock bottom but in a loving space and with loving comrades/friends in my life who were ready for me to come out just as much as I was.
so why am i typing? i think i have something to add after all this time of staring down what didn’t work. i’m here to say that I’m tired of telling myself the most well-meaning bullshit to justify my own existence. no more rugged individualism as a way to keep the house warm by burning myself down. no more leveling up to stay ahead of the fire that’s eating every class bottom up as though climbing was part of putting out the fire. no more convincing myself that being well-behaved, classed, or civil is particularly ethical or kind. no more pretending i don’t see power dynamics or how oppressive power systems prevent people from choosing, consenting, and forming the necessary boundaries and relationships we need to fucking breathe. i wanted to document this feeling in the place i used to pull myself together like wet mud into a clay pot. there is peace and liberation in simply being mud. sometimes motivation is just there waiting for you after you’ve gotten rid of the lies and all the cope that relied on those lies to keep you going.
gender and sexuality is a fickle thing. sometimes two gay cisgender men will be dating for decades and one of them will turn out to be a transgender woman. a lot of times that won’t work out but sometimes it will. her partner may still choose to identify as gay. She might even identify as gay, and they continue to be happily in love. Queer politics isn’t going to get any better if you don’t accept that situations like that happen every day.
(via dunglizard)
Anonymous asked:
Hey I'm trans what do I do now?
pukicho Answer:
You must journey through the western gates into the great unknown, past the black ridge, through the mires betwixt towering mountains, past the empty fields of gold that stretch on for miles, unto horizons anew.
Pukicho said trans rights.
I… think?
I said trans quest
Oh I have an immediate existential level issue (doing mostly fine!) that subreddit communities were really helping me work through and now Reddit is down and I am suddenly aware of how little I can speak about my situation without prepping people in my life first to hear it and I am just…. 😐
Had to work very hard to not say the obvious answer here. I’m gonna treat myself with a quick Hades break.
this is far from unique but given my dismantling of self-policing and all the anxiety that i “needed” to work and push through everything I believed was important, i’ve been extra resistant to dive back into things that i recognize as products of internalized prejudice and hyperindividualism/toxic positivity. i still work and do mutual aid support because i care about my relationships to our communities and the goals of all the groups i associate with, but i can’t focus for as long. i drift more. i don’t keep track of tasks and goals by associating them with my pain anymore. i come back to the keyboard and feel disgusted and resistant to the whole process because i know that what brought me here, speaking the way i do, using these various toolsets, was a multigenerational colonized mindset that drove me to self-injury, burnout, and (hopefully not permanent) disability. the constant and dynamic physical pain has been a hell of a teacher, a constant constant reminder of what the violence i’ve done to myself in a bid for self-improvement. at my core i know i did it for reasons i still believe in, but the ideology i adopted (or rather was forced to adopt to survive and try to thrive) could never help me reach my real goals. individualism is no solution for collective societal problems but it is a recipe for deeper alienation and trauma. I cannot unsee it. I feel it in every muscle, in my sometimes twisted guts and strained joints and ligaments. i feel it in the moments of reprieve when things are aligned enough not to hurt too much. i feel it in the calm moments i used to steal but not simply let myself have to be present to our animals and plants and just breathe.
i don’t really wanna work today. or any day. capitalist labor has the stench of the very thing that kept me from my own liberation and any lasting joy for so so so long, kept me from accepting my deeper identities, my ancestral histories, so as to gain the kind of power that would supposedly empower me to help others. until i slowed down, it felt like everything i was doing only deepened the wounds i wanted to heal. i’m writing this to get it out of my head for just a second because i need to be able to confront this feeling directly and heal even this, let it breathe, give it a chance to take the space it needs to work through me in ways i never let this or any of my feelings speak to me before. this is my process to become okay with radical self-acceptance and revolutionary action.
i believed for most of my life that i was broken and that the only way out was to turn myself into the kind of person who this society needed to save it from itself and the kind of child/grandchild who could do that and still honor them and their sacrifices, etc etc etc. I believed I needed to sublimate all my unspoken desires for connection, self-acceptance, and a healthy world into my personal ascendance and the rewards that come from that. i sometimes lapse for a bit and panic thinking that i need to somehow personally make all the right choices like Paul Atreides to take on all the right responsibilities to keep the world from collapsing just so i can let myself exist and be loved. reading this after writing it helps me see how absurd the notion is but that feeling was how i coped for so long. how i got here.
buddhist ecosocialist therapy has helped so much. rooting myself in my endless truths in an entire ecosystem of frameworks and contexts has helped me feel real and immutable. researching my people’s culture beyond what my family attempted to show me allowed me to see it without their trauma and various kinds of erasure and biases. all these things have made it easier for me to just be in the moment with my loved ones, pets, and friends. it’s helped me to stop holding a metaphorical gun to the back of my head to move and do more and stop being “lazy” and not settle for being unskilled or uncharismatic or whatever whatever whatever that’s all noise now. it’s all just noise. and that’s the noise i see buzzing when i get to my desk, and i feel like now is the time to create a new set of terms, a whole new social contract in which i am a stakeholder at the table, a co-creator, a subject, and yet still only a small small small part of the larger whole where my voice matters.
in some ways i’m grateful for the path and the kind of society that forced a person like me to push so hard that i’ve been able to both become multi-disciplined and educated beyond the horizons of my family’s more humble beginnings and to discover the medicine for all my many wounds, but it’s also the society that plucked my people from the healthy vibrant lands and original cultures they once had and made us into the image of our colonizers. what i get from this hindsight all depends on the framing and all those framings yield different but inseparable truths. i’m tired. i’m full of life. i’m angry. i’m finally feeling unburdened by intergenerational karma that is still here but no longer pinning me down. i feel responsible for things that are the size and shape of myself. i can break any role i want however i want. i can respond to the world in ways that are more appropriate and far more powerful than what i’ve been told i could given the power i thought i had. but i never asked for all the suffering that got me here and i certainly don’t want a world that’s built on an engine of socioeconomic suffering and violence that keeps people from ever feeling alive and safe. healing the world still means changing it but it’s not just on me to do it.
i guess all this is to say i am unpacking the bad and trying to find a way to root back into this world as it is, a world that i never asked for but is absolutely still the world that’s here. it is neither good nor bad to do so, merely the only thing to be rooted in. it feels like that’s really the only thing left for me to do if i wish to express myself and my spirit in response to this world. to no longer feel apart from the universe or like i needed to chase untangible and impossible things to feel like i’m okay. my path is one of flow and acceptance now, and even this rage is a gift that i can learn to love and let go.
Something that I first applied to working with children, and have applied in a limited form to working with adults: you don’t need to tell someone when they read your instructions wrong. Sometimes it’s enough to point out what they did right and then whatever they didn’t do? You ask them to do it in more precise words, and you make it sound like it’s a new request. Remarkable how fast things get done this way.
This is also a habit I built up from emergency response training. If I say “I need you to bring me a first aid kit and an accident report” and you bring me just a first aid kit, it’s so much more efficient to say “thanks now can you bring me an accident report” than “I asked you to bring an accident report why didn’t you bring me one”.
Once you’ve internalized “a person bleeding out is one of the worst times to start an argument” you start to wonder what other tasks could get accomplished without arguing
(via 3stqueen)
aphextwinselectedambientworks:
given most footage ive seen of celebrities on this show are immensely uncomfortable at best, seeing tony hawk of all people just go ham with the chaos really adds a lot
tony hawk pro catharsis
(via doc-coyote)
