Tricycle Gang In Brooklyn, New York City (1930s)

go away forever with me

nuance in all things but

sort of think it's a red flag for someone to be too sure that in any given interpersonal conflict there's a single Right Answer

like obviously there are plenty of things i personally think there's a single correct stance on (trans rights, 2 plus 2 equaling 4, etc) but i also think like. okay. so in my personal opinion people who disagree with me on these issues are Wrong. however! i can't wave a magic wand to erase that wrongness from their mind—and moreover my own ethical convictions mean i shouldn't even if i could, because i believe that a society which bans wrongthink is a dangerously repressive one. i think it's critical that people have the freedom of their own thoughts, to arrive at their own self-determined conclusions—even if i vehemently disagree with where that means they end up! because the alternative is worse! both because any weapon i condone could ultimately be used against me—the current US administration would very clearly say that my belief in trans rights is wrongthink!—and because if someone espouses a stance i endorse without thinking it through, they won't be firm in their conviction: no chain of reasoning will convince you in any lasting way unless you've personally tested all its links, and seen for yourself that they cohere. you see this all the time with eg bad casual trans allyship that just find-and-replaces 'women' with 'afab' and then doesn't understand why that isn't satisfactory, because the speaker hasn't actually rethought which of the many slippery concepts hegemonically filed under 'woman' they're actually trying to reference ('is targeted by misogyny'? 'has breasts'? 'has a uterus'? 'menstruates'? 'can get pregnant'? none of those are perfectly overlapping circles!), they've just reskinned-but-retained their original cissexist perisexist ableist white supremacist etc concept.

but so like. okay. the wrongness can't be magically erased: it must be combatted. but already with that choice of language i'm heading down the wrong path because if you bring aggression it will be met with defensive aggression. ultimately you only get people to back down if you approach slowly and gently and leave them room to save face. and also like. in a close-relational context it's extremely obvious that you ought to care not only abt who's Objectively Right but abt treating the other person respectfully and tenderly and abt trying to enter into their experience a little and hear them out abt it and sympathize with whatever suffering it contains instead of dismissing it out of hand. in a not-close context that becomes less obvious but i don't actually think it becomes less true—because like. cf that one post abt how you shd only critique people to the same extent you're actually willing to sit down with them and help them, but also the flipside of that where like. i do basically think it's reasonable for people to only incorporate critique from others who are willing to engage in extended sympathetic dialogue with them, because what's the alternative? you just automatically assume that anyone who's tearing you down is right about it? i think it was earlgraytay who pointed out once that like. that's not actually mentally healthy behavior—people should have a healthy self-regard and not immediately jump to 'you're probably right that i suck.' like i'm personally much too willing to assume that i suck and (1) it's entirely bc that was the message i got from my emotionally abusive mother for decades (2) believing that has not, shockingly, actually empowered me to make positive changes! so i really do think we have to work out how to get people to embrace humaneness without, and i really don't think i'm actually speaking hyperbolically here, abusing them into it. the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house, etc.

anyway i don't think this is some brilliantly radical line of thinking on my part but it's also like. well basically no one believes it as far as i can tell, or if they do they aren't actually willing/able to set aside their own pain long enough to practice it. it's always like 'well here are the reasons i'm ontologically permanently a victim and so have no obligation to try to set aside my own woundedness and meet other people halfway.' and i'm not even immune to that myself! like look at me talking about my cptsd-inducing childhood as if that excused me from any obligation to try to rejigger my own psyche now that i'm an adult! but like. idk. bitch we're all wounded. okay. it sucks in this crab bucket. how do we build a ladder.

[disclaimer of course that like. no you don't have to feed the sea lions. yes you get to take breaks from activism. no we almost certainly can't and shouldn't take a gentle parenting approach to all bigotry. see original 'nuance in all things' header.]

Terrace paddies in North Vietnam [Shortlisted in National Geographic Photo Contest 2015] by Quynh Anh Photography on Flickr

Day 8, swallow-tailed kite

the biggest epistemological gap between me & 95% the rest of the world is literally just how much i love to look things up on the internet and how much it baffles me when other people don't like to do this. we live in the information age. like i'll google anything i'll read this bmj paper on the toilet i'll look up words i don't know i'll append pdf free to any possible phrase. i don't know how anybody is voluntarily turning this down. sometimes i get so tired of searchinf for something physically inside a store i pull out my phone and google like silken tofu aldi what fucking aisle while im standing right there. otherwise what is even the point

i do wish my experience of having feelings (this isn't me being Vague, i do very generically mean 'having literally any feelings at all about anything ever') didn't automatically involve a meta-layer of feeling viscerally humiliated by the fact of my having them

like any time i get irritated or upset about anything it almost immediately tips into 'well okay but probably i'm the problem here bc i'm Oversensitive and Irritable bc i've failed to construct a life for myself which makes me happy in a way that would cushion me against being bothered by these irritants, which in the philosophical scheme of things i recognize i should Rise Above' (in this framing i am apparently an oyster and happiness = nacre). and it's not that there's no potential truth to this line of thinking but it also feels a little like i imagine having one's emotions blamed on one's menstrual cycle would feel (disrespectful & humiliating)

with things like sadness-about-everything-and-nothing-in-particular or, idk, private delusional romantic hopefulness abt people (nothing recent in this category but i have been known to experience it from time to time) it's slightly different bc there the meta-feeling is less about my failure to respond appropriately to other people and more about, like, why am i not advanced enough to have evolved beyond these feelings. like 'i understand intellectually how unfounded and ultimately laughable i look right now and yet. despite my ability to observe myself i still continue to experience this (unpleasant, humiliating) experience. why can i not think my way out of it.' and of course this is more or less equivalent to saying 'why can't i think my way out of the human condition' which. hello. and yet!!

anyway i think none of this is helped by the fact that my nearest and dearest are largely deeply phlegmatic, pragmatic people, at least in terms of the affect they present to me, and so by comparison i feel deeply histrionic and stupid and childish at essentially all times: Local Man Secretly Dancing Bear (unlike aubreyad where dancing bear secretly man). the answer is presumably 'don't compare yourself! you are a different variety of Creature! #IDIC!' but unfortunately the comparative impulse is i think. again. pretty deeply human (for feelings on which, see above)…

Dutch farmer in Marken, 1943.

I made this!!

Spangle-cheeked Tanager

javier.chaves.photography

kinda funny that my body hair is just like every other aspect of me in being poised precisely between 'will get funny looks' by hegemonic standards and 'pfft, you think that invisible shit counts?' by counterculture ones