This Is Not - 5/6/25

What? It has been 6 months. 
I already told napoleon everything yesterday.
What else? 
Danny died.
What else?
My new analyst disappointed me. 
It’s not a secret. Dull, deadly disappointment. Amnesia protects—protection causes amnesia. 

I am not currently—no longer, for now—scared of being discovered—to be missing. Now, saddened by and lonely with the knowledge that I’m not here, I bloat with the quickness of my having noticed, having caught my missingness before my playmates. 

New Story (11/16)

OK, so I’m going to continue writing the posts in the doc, but then I’m going to post them in my new blog that I’ve created here. I’m excited about it! 

Some of my previous posts have been unfinished. I hope that’s OK. I want people to know that I’m putting effort into this, and that I care about how it’s presented. But my mind is so fragmented. And I don’t want that to be a reason not to share what I’m thinking. 

I was being boarded up. In the basement. Tim was doing it. Shanti was with me. I was sitting on the top of the stairs, right behind the door. On a wooden chair. I was sharing the chair with Shanti. When Tim started hammering the boards across the door from the outside, I knew that was when I should try to escape through the window downstairs. Tim would be busy for a while, so he wouldn’t notice my crashing through the window on the other side of the basement.

I told Shanti I needed to try to get out. She nodded understandingly, looking at her nails, sitting on the chair I was leaving behind. She was witnessing. She didn’t agree with what he was doing; she volunteered to document it. So she trapped herself in the basement with me. Except I was going to sneak out, and she would wait for me to come back and open the door.

The windows weren’t hard to break out of. I shoved one down, which created a cascade of panes, some of which shattered as I scrambled out of the window. I hesitated for one moment after I reached solid ground—thought about putting the windows that hadn’t shattered back where they were meant to be—I didn’t want them to be added to the list of objects I was directly or indirectly responsible for having broken—but decided I hadn’t enough time. 

Tim was attempting to sequester me because he was convinced I would be possessed that night. I was also pretty sure I would be possessed, and I was scared. But I was certain it wouldn’t help the situation for me to be locked up. Tim and I shared a goal: we wanted as little harm as possible to happen as a result of the impending possession. But we disagreed about tactics.  My thought was that I should be as comfortable as possible. To feel safe, surrounded by people who loved me—so that when I became a monster, I would at least be a well-cared-for monster. I knew I deserved better than to be locked up in a dingy basement.

This did not preclude me from taking accountability for the mess I had made of the house Tim shared with my mom while they were out of town and I was supposed to be housesitting. I had thrown a party. I didn’t mean for it to get big, of course. I didn’t realize that there would be such a network of people related to the people I’d invited—I hadn’t been home for so long. I didn’t realize all these people I used to party with in high school were still around, still partying, looking for parties to crash. They came and put the tapes in upside down, starting a fire in the yard despite the burn ban, and left food, so the yard became infested with racoons and their scat. It had been my responsibility to take care of the house. I had failed to throw these people out before they made a mess of the place. I was truly sorry.

Where would I go to wait the night out, to wait the possession out? Nearby, my friend Fran’s house was a possibility. I had to walk through the cemetery. The corn was moving. It wasn’t corn, it was people dressed as corn. They were performing a ritual. God stuff. I cut a different way, afraid that they would misread the possession if it happened on their grounds, and ended up in Fran’s living room, where he and his roommates were watching a movie. Benji came too. The three of us made out for a bit. But that was later, after I’d told them all about my impending possession, how fucked up it had been for Tim to board me up in the basement, and for my mom to let him. I explained that I wasn’t sure whether she agreed with it, but it must have provided her some relief, a sense that she was being protected from my monster side by her husband, who, despite locking me up instead of asking me what I’d like to do about the situation, had “all of our best interests in mind.”

I was angry. When the night was over and I returned to my mom and Tim’s with Benji, not having slept, I could see they were angry, too—mostly about the party, but also because I had escaped. I let them know how Tim’s lockup affected me. I apologized for the party. Tim apologized for the lockup. My mom admitted they had been so scared. The four of us hugged, putting our heads together. No full repairs, but the beginnings of a new story.

New Story (9/25)

I did the thing again where I tried to take the names out of past posts, forgetting that I’d most recently decided to keep the names in. For this reason, I’m considering adding a bit more of a formality to my posts; if I don’t, I’m too tempted to revise the previous ones. Stubborn revision is not what I’m trying to do here—what I want is the daily attempts,  not the polished stone, which is what I lean into making if I don’t set things up otherwise. This isn’t my worry stone, this is my river. The balance between formality and blockage is delicate. I chose this casual mode of blog, easy, on the google doc, almost as if it is just me here—because I knew that if I started something less casual, it would be hard for me to scratch the surface of it, especially if I took a while to write between posts, dust building up. I thought writing more posts here would give me the confidence to make the blog more formal, adding aspects of publication that are, if not irreversible, at least ritualistic—and I think I was right, I have more confidence now—but I’m still here. Perhaps soon I'll move this blog somewhere else.

I just read the chapter “Between Naming and the Unknown”  in Sophie Strand’s book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, so I was already thinking about names and naming. This chapter thrills me—its subject matter is of particular interest, and I love the question “How can honoring our ‘both-ness’ change courtship into a terrain that is more egalitarian, playful, and reciprocal than the patriarchal modes of romance that seem to invite sexual violence and domination?” I too care about creating systems, including courtship systems, that allow for openness of expression, gender or otherwise. That’s why at points, this chapter upsets me: Strand blames the act of naming for shutting down or creating blockages to spaces that allow for openness of expression, and in doing so, she risks discouraging expression by timid (or stubborn) souls that might require the act of naming in order to make any mark at all. 

She implicitly compares the act of changing one’s name and pronouns to Adam’s naming in Genesis, implying that in naming themselves, (trans) people are attempting to “‘own’ [themselves] with the magic of a self-generated nominal.” Strand uses the we pronoun here—in her version, instead of themselves, she uses ourselves—but it feels false without a personal anecdote, and the use of this example brings up questions about the soundness of the argument overall. 

Naming oneself may be “escap[ing] the imposed names and strictures of our parents, our institutions, our cultural oppressions” indeed without being an attempt to “own” oneself. 

Strand begins her essay with a gloss of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, describing the protagonist’s ambiguous gender: “By the end of the performance, we observe a being who practically scintillates with complex sexuality, but who, importantly, cannot and will not be named.” Going without a name is idealized here, perhaps even fetishized. But is being without a name actually desirable? The violence of being named doesn’t exist in a vacuum but has more to do with what happens after the naming. What would it take for Viola to continue being witnessed as a full, mutable, perhaps nonbinary messenger, after her name has been revealed? 

To me, suspending the act of naming isn’t as powerful as doing the work of continuing to see complexities after the naming has occurred. Names are useful, can be fun, can hold hidden meanings or be totally without them. In this world that I have come to know through names, I wouldn’t dare deny myself one, nor would I continue to answer to a name that displeases me. 

 “Am I a man? Am I a woman? Both? Let us wait before we answer. Answers tend to end stories. What if, like Viola, we lived the question?”

The problem here is that Strand slips from names to answers in a way that would trick us into believing that they are synonyms. But answers and names are not the same. Names don’t tend to end stories. Don’t names usually begin stories? In fact, how would we begin a story without a name? The other problem is that I disagree even with the idea that answers tend to end stories. Answers are not inherently violent—if anything, it is the withdrawal from dialogue that sometimes occurs after an answer is given, the abandonment of the conversation, that is violent, neglectful. But that abandonment does not occur within the answer. It occurs after the answer. And usually, if you pay attention, the withdrawal or abandonment is not actually the end of the story.

New Story (6/16)

Three things have come together in my mind today: in short, they are Butoh, my romantic attachment styles (and perhaps those of others, we shall see), and the chapter in Brian Latour’s book Pandora’s Hope called “Circulating Reference;” but the connections won’t make much sense unless I describe them further. I will start by describing what is closest to me and most emotional, because it might cut through to you.

I have to come to see a pattern in my emotional life: I will start by describing some instances in which it occurs. One such instance occurred 7 years ago, today; I remember because it relates to the event of my sweetheart’s birthday, and today is again her birthday (happy birthday, Madeline!), 7 years later. Today is Saturday, so the day in question, as it was 7 years ago exactly, must have been a Saturday as well. 

Madeline and I had been dating for a little over a year; we lived together in the same room of a punk house on the eastside of Olympia. We both worked as caregivers for adults with developmental disabilities, and I was in school, though school had probably just let out for the summer.

Let’s backtrack a bit, to a few days earlier in the week: I can see us now, walking to the Mobil on Boulevard to get coffee with large dashes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cappuccino, conversing with this caffeine and sugar boost on our way back. We often talked, on these walks home, about our relationship, in an attempt to understand what we were building together: we were (and are) both very invested in having a shared field of reference, and at the same time coming to a common understanding of our relationship was (and is perhaps less so now) incredibly difficult. One major lesson I learned from her at this time, during these conversations, is that comparisons between how I treat her and how I expect her to treat me can be useful, and are necessary. At the time I had been on a track of avoiding one-to-one comparisons between myself and other people in an attempt to “stay on my plate”—admittedly a silly tool to use universally, which I may have overused in an attempt to stray from my ways of disordered eating and the chaos it invoked in my life. This comparison practice was an especially important one for Madeline to impart to me because it aimed to correct behavior that had harmed her in her childhood. 

Our relationship is, among other things, polyamorous. It was at the time too, on paper, though neither of us were dating other people. 

Madeline doesn’t like her birthday, so she said she didn’t mind that I had planned a trip to go to visit a family friend with my sister in Bend, Oregon for the weekend. I was nervous to leave, and felt bad that I wasn’t able to be there with her, even though she didn’t seem to care.

New Story (6/6)

seeing being seen can be cool and can be scary

sometimes I want to make it stop 

that’s why I practice 

coming back to neutral

New Story (6/2)

I forgot about how I’d decided to use real names because of Bob Glück and I edited the last couple entries to take out the names. I’m not going to add them in again, but I will use real names from here on out. 

I love it when I remember a dream for a split second, even if I can’t hang on to much. That just happened to me. I can sort of see a place in my dream, under an above-ground train. Groundhog’s Day, the movie, seems relevant to this dream, too, but I’m not sure how yet. Have you seen that movie? My birthday is Groundhog’s Day, and I’ve seen it. I don’t especially love it. I like What About Bob? a lot more. I like Bill Murray, for the most part; the way he smiles often feels like breaking the 4th wall, like it’s cutting through something and actually landing in my lap as an emotion. 

I just tried to find something I’d written about Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off but I couldn’t find it.

I remembered my dream a little more. Natalya and Nancy, Natalya’s mom, were in it. I’ve dreamt about Nancy a lot. I’m not sure why. Natalya was packing up to go out of town. I was hanging out with her while she packed, I think. It was hot, and summer, but shady in the house. Natalya was going to Europe. 

From the basis of my mom’s house, I felt like and I still feel like a lot is possible. My imagination was harmonious with the seasons!!!!!! I want that for myself now. Like when I take a walk in the park. The lush trees right now. The little baby dog picks up all sorts of plastic. There are so many people at the park. I don’t want to live in the city. I don’t want so much plastic.

I’ve fostered a lot of dogs now. Somehow I think it will fix something for me when I do it. More, more, more responsibility.

New Story ( 6/1)

I am writing a novel. There is someone watching me, and they write about me. Not all the time, but enough. Little details of my life come out in sentences. I’d have forgotten them otherwise. Discovering the hardwood floor beneath the carpet in my old house. I can feel missing M. though, I can feel that right now. The cells that are wanting that are in my chest, to decompress. My tear ducts open. Is that what happens when I feel I’m going to cry?

Whether or not I think I’m smart enough to write something worthwhile is besides the point. (Obviously, it’s related to the point enough that I’m writing it down here, though.)

What would the 2009 version of me sitting at my mom’s computer in the laundry room, multitasking doing math homework, talking to C. on the phone, chatting with A. on Facebook, what would that version think of this story? Would that version think this version was smart? 

I wish I could just hang on to one version. I wish things didn’t get so blurry and stuffy, so that whatever desires I have could stay frothy and fresh-squeezed, stop arguing. 

This morning after coffee and Vyvanse, I told B. a story about my family. Speculating about the possibility that my parents or my parents friends’ might have been polyamorous, and I might not have known. Maybe that 2009 version of myself, if looking upon this 2024 version of myself, wouldn’t even notice that I’m polyamorous. 

Maybe, my farts now smell relatively better than my farts did in 2009, so that the 2009 version of myself finds my 2024 farts surprisingly pleasant. Despite the fact that they smell a lot worse than they did in 2022.