Split Vision

November 29, 2018 by

My character, “Amanda”. Photo by Audrey Hotchkiss

I have a problem with love. I don’t love myself as wholly as I love others. This makes me a good person perhaps, but also a monster.

The soft circles I’m made up of fight to be more angular, and lose unless the pressure of hurt, pain, something to be struggled against which is larger than me is applied, something to be reckoned with. My brain sees its fears in every reflection. These ocular chambers cannot be trusted, will not be denied myopic resolve, nor be trained to react differently to the light.

###

When I am working on a farm my body shines and glows, taking on sinewy shape and golden bronze tone. My back muscles seize. I am damaged and incorrectly proportioned for this labor. Old injuries surface and stop me in my tracks, but my fingers, delving into rich brown life are in love. My brain is terse that I’m not jotting the musings of each moment down (hands filled with hoe and weeds), but my heart speaks the language of plants and sighs sweetly.

When I spend days and weeks writing, out of body, sitting stagnant in a chair that must reek of me by day’s end, my heart is satisfied that it has spoken. My brain gives itself high fives and winds down with comforting, less exhaustive endeavors. My body, left behind stiff and unused but for fingertips, aches and grows less responsive, ornery, sullen, and complaining.

When I work in an office I fight with people. Bare teeth. Rue the day I was born on this planet of unremarkable moments, and wish the insidious poison I taste in my mouth from biting my lip wasn’t blood, but strychnine. I learn a different truth: I have no tolerance.

So are the well worn rounds of my desire, pride, depression, and shame broken down by occupation. Am I a body person, a heart person, or a head person? It’s about gender and it’s not about gender. It’s about my search for truth when there’s no truth to be found.

###

He raised me to the hospital’s bright florescent nova and did not proclaim my life a journey for me to discover. Instead my vulva, fresh from the womb of my Mother was labelled “specimen No. 1” and I was degraded for the first time in my blinking moment of an existence. Degraded not because I was assigned “girl”, and to be “Woman” one day, degraded because I was proclaimed fractured, un-whole, because I was set upon a path of lists and checkboxes (illustrated with many points of power and mystery, but still), proclaimed belonging to a path that was not my own.

No path of lists and checkboxes is holy.

Discovery of my body henceforth was defined by predetermined conditions printed in millions of books, on billboards, and writ loudly on boxes at the breakfast table. Instructions dripped from the lips of all who spoke my name. Expectations and projected pitfalls were branded into the minds of every human I met on this bit of spinning rock we call home. I was promised to another in that moment. I was told to rut deeper in the furrow of advertised femininity, chained to a sex and a story brought on by the glance of a man who had cut my Mother against her will minutes before. He had flashed his knife blade, slicing it through her pelvic floor to bring me out at a pace which pleased his pressing schedule and desire to sew a straighter line. His comfortable manly rut. All the rage in 1978. Have we changed?

###

I remember little hearts springing from my eyes the first time I saw a spiked mohawk and rivets, piercings, and tattoos screaming, “I AM ME! FUCK YOUR LISTS AND EXPECTATIONS!” Still, it took me years and shored up courage to shave my own hair from its scalp. I learned the starkness of nowhere to hide from my newly unframed face. No shield by way of lengthy bangs and curtains of hair. Each expression, every fleeting thought and emotion laid naked in the open, recognizable and bare. I was undateable except for the boy with blue hair and tan skin who also loved mischief and disposing of lists.

Acting school isn’t a place to challenge beauty standards, only emotional norms. Our range should be invisible but for the tremble of a lip, a single tear, staunchly empowered vocals, and the lyrics of our limbs. Pretty at first glance always. No “risk” of individual expression will be tolerated in this industry of uncreative creatives. To be popular with casting agents, director’s couches, and audiences painted with an expectation of status quo was our aim.

The week I graduated I pierced my eyebrow, threading spikes and arrows through that fresh hole in my face. I reclaimed the bit of flesh above my right eye in an act of defiance, satiating a starved desire to be myself first, and the “neutral” instrument of a bourgeois patriarchal entertainment industry no longer.

###

I am neither nor. I am both and all.
I am whole.
I am whole.
I am whole.

I whisper to myself in throes of depression and anxiety. I try to convince myself of worth, but when will I be paid a living wage for the labor of gathering “likes” while helping others see beauty where no one else cares to nurture or hold? I admire others far more than I enjoy myself, but I am stubborn and selfish and I journey on.

I like the way I feel until I don’t. I love the way I create until I tear my work apart. The cycle of brilliance and demolition is a rut I am lost deep within time and time again… Raised to the artificial light I was ticked off “female”. Lesser than. Nurturer. Worth/less without a mask of make-up and willingness to wear heels five days a week. I resent this lie which is absolutely not a lie. I plod too modestly along.

I am overqualified, under-qualified, and angry about the paths which may lead me out of debt and constant struggle, and I have no tolerance for them at all. I do not accept social graces as other than the controlling violence I know them to be.

###

A girl, size zero, ate half her yogurt cup in acting class and cried that she was overweight and we attended her, talked it out, held her pain and soothed her edges. I was terrified to exist in the room that day, so many sizes larger than a zero myself, having a body with substance and strength. I cried in anger and angst about the hell this lifetime is. There would be no return to acting class innocence, knowing others’ perceptions of me must be monstrous indeed. I would never be flat enough, tall enough, straight enough, whatever it was I needed to be enough of to work my way out of debt in this, my beloved industry.

###

I do not wish I was less educated, I wish I was less poor. I do not wish I was built differently, I wish the world celebrated humans with bodies. Everything hurts. I am a toothfull thing, dark and mushy in the light, and I do not know how else to be. I am writer and an artist, truth-teller with no fact-check available for my version of truth. I am sensitive and sad. I am at moments wildly excited and hopeful, as only a creative knowing the uplifting fervor of might-be-attainable dreaming will be. I am flawed (oh so flawed) but my flaws are not measured by diamond commercials and lipstick shades, in skirt sizes and shaving cream standards of shame. My flaws are wrapped up in the fact that I have a problem with love. I don’t love myself as wholly as I love others. This makes me a good person perhaps, but also a monster.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art.
Please visit my Patreon, offer one time Support or email me for other options. Thanks.

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To a Day of Thanks and Mourning

November 22, 2018 by

TDay is a hard one for me. I don’t celebrate it for plethora reasons. Family is one of them. Today commemorates my break-up with the born again Christian missionary contingency of my family when I was 15 in an incredibly humiliating and painful scene — a family which still (to my perspective) refuses to speak with me because I ask questions, do not adhere to religious authority, and live my life as authentically as I know how. My marriage to someone of the same sex years ago was an issue, I’m sure my gender is one, I’ll bet being a kink writer and sexuality educator etc. counts. I know that calling out hurtful behavior and asking for a conversation a number of years ago broke the camel’s back and has resulted in radio silence since. I usually spend this day alone, and feel the freedom and weightlessness of quiet resilience when I do. I’ve had the experience of being deeply triggered in the past — thankfully I think I’m past that intensity of emotions.

I’m not telling you this so you can feel sorry for me. I’m sharing my experience because this day is a complex one. It’s a day of celebration and family gathering, and it’s also a day of genocide, betrayal, and much pain. It’s a day defined by the political spin machine which persists in its lies to this day. It’s a day in a week of advertised over-consumption between food and things (no coincidence that consumption is both nourishing and self-soothing — what stories are we nourishing, what fears and pain are we self-soothing?). I believe that until we can speak with one another about our differences, our pasts, our pains, and try to navigate through acknowledgement and acceptance of each person’s roots, until we learn to have hard conversations and take manageable steps toward peaceful coexistence with those who we do not understand (even sometimes those who have mistreated us), we will never celebrate anything as the family, the Nation, we could be. The American dream is not a picture perfect reality bought with dollars and social graces. My American dream is living in acceptance and celebration of the richness of diversity this land contains. No one of us deserves this land, it is not ours. We belong to the places we set down our feet and dreams, and we owe that land commune-ity. We will create and become the dirt of this place after death, which is a powerful acknowledgement, yet life was meant for the living — the beautiful, vibrant, multicultural, mutiperspective reality of our autonomous brains and bodies coming together to create better life and more life before the finality of each body’s return to earth. Love each other. Rise above pain. Be uncomfortable on someone else’s behalf instead of superior and steadfast in your resolve. Clay is malleable, as are our minds and bodies…

Back to my family for a moment… my cousin, the one my age, had a baby this morning. I heard about it from my siblings instead of directly from my aunt who no longer speaks to me. I still texted her congratulating her on being a grandmother and asked for my cousin’s number. I still wished her a happy thanksgiving. I’m pretty sure those things mean something to her, and though there is a hole in my heart from her silence from all these years, I prefer not to play into it or be victimized. I don’t know if she’ll respond. That’s ok. It’s funny that this day, of all days, I should reach out… appropriate I guess. Our lives are built in circles.

To a thoughtful day however you do or do not observe its gravity. We are all expected to reflect, today, on the meaning of where we come from. Perhaps this will lead each of us to more clearly know who we are and who we can still strive to be. Much love to you and yours.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

Support my writing on Patreon. For one time Donations: Support the Artist or email.
This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art. Thank you.

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Revolution Wasn’t Born from Nothing, it’s Birthed Through Our Bodies

October 1, 2018 by

Last night I hit a wall. I’m tired of being so angry. Deeply grounded anger has been in me for so long, and for so many reasons. Fair warning: this post is a passionate one…

I look back through my life, and since I was a child I can remember yelling at sexist, abusive, men-will-be-men fuckers who were in charge of my body, my education, my well being, my financial opportunities, my access to institutions that produce art, my safety, and on and on…

However, the letting go of anger turns into an internalized malaise and depression and because of that

I
Just
Hurt.

I can’t fix it. There’s no fixing to be done. Just deescalation, if that’s possible, over eons of time. Now is not a time of deescalation though. Everywhere I turn there’s another reminder, another slander, another insensitivity, another trigger steamrolled over, another same old song and dance as soon as the waves calm… is this thing ever going to get better?

My anger and this depression is in my body, and there’s nothing to do but keep on feeling it. Keep on processing. Keep soldiering on.

It isn’t fair. It’s never been fair. I don’t even know if “fair” is the point at the end of the day, but this shit is pathological and persistent, not just “unequal but we’ll catch you on the flip-side”, it’s insidious, demented, and strong. I’m tired of keeping my chin up. I’m tired of soldiering on. I’m tired of calmly explaining the state of the world, the state of my body, what it feels like to be abused and denied basic help, what it’s like to be ignored or attacked every single day in some grand scale or microscopic way… I’m sick of regulating my breath and slowing my pulse down so I can speak clearly while I break all this shit down, over and over again. It’s as if I’m teaching a goddamn child every time I’m put on the spot by someone else’s bigotry, misogyny, classism, racism, ignorance, finger pointing, or other fucking railroading bullshit spun in my direction to put their discomfort squarely onto me. I’m tired of holding up my friends who are hurt, because that’s what we do in community to keep ourselves alive or some semblance of sane. It’s been a really long road, holding lots of people up and I’m tired. I’m stuck in this forever-lasting game of “keep the balloon in the air”, and all of us forced into playing are constantly almost hitting the floor while we try to juggle our lives at the same time, fed fairytale hopes through the media machine about how bootstraps can guide you into middle class. We’re fucking understaffed and people keep having to call out because they can’t get out of bed — most of that brought about by actual abuse whether it be rape, harassment, the one millionth rejection in a week just because of who someone is, loved ones being killed, or or or or or or or… and I know compared to many I have it really good.

I’m tired of the bitterness I hear from all sides — righteous bitterness even. Sometimes being reminded of the things I’m furious about when I’m not feeling mad makes me want to curl up and die. I’m exhausted from feeling alone and separated from friends because we’d rather actually be 1s and 0s to each other than risk playing in the woods or looking into one another’s faces when feelings, writ large, spread visibly. I do it too, I hide in my workaholism because I don’t feel safe outside, and I don’t know where else to go to but into my mind. When my cat, Tamlin, dies I’ll probably turn to ash instantaneously — what’s the point of living if you can’t be calmed by the love of a familiar who doesn’t care about your race, sex, gender, orientation, physical abilities, prettiness, social position, or wealth as long as you feed and care for them lovingly?

This country has a serious problem with loving, and it starts with the self. I’m pretty sure the advertisement industry has a stake in self-loathing no matter what the effects or consequences. I’m pretty sure the church and politicians are only too happy to keep that game going. People who love themselves and aren’t afraid of their neighbors are exponentially harder to manipulate than “believers”, and you profit off of them by way of money and power much, much less easily.

I’m sick of the insane lies that come out of the mouths of people who should know better, and I’m sick of the conflations and ignorant tales told by people who wish this stupid fucking world was more simple than it actually is. Please read some articles from non (or less) partisan sources. I’m rabid about the people in power who manipulate just as sure as they breathe, eat, and blink. Never have I understood the Red Queen’s rallying cries more, “OFF WITH HER HEAD! OFF WITH HIS HEAD! OFF WITH THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM’S HEADS!!!!”

We do not live in a Democracy, we live in an Aristocratic Oligarchy. The idea that “We, the People” are pulling any strings with levers in a ballot box has been disproved time and time again. When will that change? What do we do to make this civilization listen? How many black people, brown people, red people, women, queers, and other minorities have to be strangled slowly in the town’s center before we stop accepting the example we’re being fed and turn against these abusers once and for all?

Do we not understand that we are in this together?!

I’m sick of the pettiness and fearmongering used to control people where they eat. I am livid that people who have done wrong continually refuse to acknowledge deeper truths through the practice of self-examination. No growth, just doubling down seems to be the rallying call of our hierarchy. And the cycle keeps going, abuse after abuse after abuse… none of this is right.

I believe we are better than this — not even that deep down inside. Most of us are capable of getting back up relatively gracefully when we fall. Most of us are capable of learning, of apologizing, of becoming a better more whole person not despite of but BECAUSE OF strife. FUCK ALL THE DINOSAURS WHO CAN’T GET IT TOGETHER BECAUSE THEIR WEAK-ASS, CATERED-TO LIVES HAVEN’T TOUGHENED THEM UP ENOUGH TO PLAY FAIR, CHANGE THE COURSE, OR APOLOGIZE.

THE REST OF US HAVE DEGREES IN DISCOMFORT.

THE REST OF US HAVE LEARNED SURVIVAL IN THE FACE OF UNETHICAL AND HARMFUL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND POWER TO THE DETRIMENT OF OUR EVERYDAY LIVES INCLUDING HOUSING, FOOD, AND ADEQUATE RESOURCES FOR AN ERODED SENSE OF SAFETY OR MENTAL HEALTH. THE REST OF US HAVE TAKEN BEATINGS IN THE MOST INCENDIARY WAYS SINCE BIRTH AND WE STILL GET SHIT DONE IN THE MORNING.

If I don’t deserve a living wage for the work that I do, a lying rapist piece of shit certainly doesn’t DESERVE a job sitting in judgment of our country’s A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G. The F.B.I. had better do their due diligence, and if our president isn’t impeached and sent to prison soon there’s no way I believe in justice, the American Dream, or Democracy. Not in this country.

I’m speaking of unfairness at a level I cannot condone or even rightly comprehend fully, and though it’s been going on forever, it somehow feels worse these days.

To be really clear, I DID report the gym teacher who touched me, and NOTHING came of it, even after my parent’s got involved and it was admitted that I was not the first to report him. He responded to his slap on the wrist (by the male administration) with more harassment and trying to corner me the next chance he got, which was at our next gym class. This is only one rather tame resurfacing of the facts I get to keep replaying in my brain, from my plethora lived stories, these weeks while the nation debates whether or not someone with multiple rape charges against him gets to sit in highest court and decide whether Roe v. Wade will be overturned and what limitations of rights I have over my own body should I happen to get knocked up… Oh yeah, and there’s a “sexy handmaid’s tale” costume being sold through Yandy, in case you want a jump on that before the uniform becomes mandatory.

Do you know what it feels like to freeze and lose control of your body because someone is touching you in a way that they shouldn’t? Do you know what it’s like to black out when you’re being yelled at, and no matter how many times you repeat the word “stop” to have no recourse but to wait, curling into an ever and ever tighter ball on the floor until it’s over? Do you know what that does to your head when it’s over, and you “didn’t stand up to your abuser”? Do you know how long it takes to piece that shattering back together? Time and time again?

You smile, you fucking loser.

I AM FURIOUS ABOUT BEING IGNORED AFTER SPEAKING UP.
I AM FURIOUS THAT “REPORTING” DOES NOTHING TO CHANGE THE GODDAMN SYSTEM — THE SYSTEM WAS CREATED TO KEEP IMBALANCE OF POWER A SUSTAINABLE REALITY AT THE MERCY OF SECOND CLASS CITIZENS, AND WE KNOW WHO WE ARE. WE’RE NOT TAKING IT AS QUIETLY THESE DAYS.

Don’t fuck with survivors. This isn’t a men against women thing, it’s a get your fucking shit in order thing. It’s a break the abuse cycle thing. It’s a grow and learn to empathize and be a better community member thing.

Is there any doubt why I am who I have grown to be? Why I create the things I create? Why I love and support the people I do? Why I educate? Why I art? Why I have zero ability to work in a corporate environment, and I cannot face enacting my art through the “normal” channels available to me if I’d just simply audition?

I have something to fucking say.

I’m drowning in an unfair system that stacks cards this way and that, treated as though being poor is my choice and something I should be shameful for. I’ve had my voice and my body taken away from me over and over again, and have been told there’s something wrong with my body and my voice in the first place. IF ONE MORE FUCKING PERSON OR INSTITUTION CENSORS ME IN THE NEXT YEAR I’M SERIOUSLY GOING TO FLIP. MY. SHIT.

And I swear:

Like blood running down my thighs every month since the age of 13, the revolution is coming. It’s the most natural thing in the world. You either learn to take care of your business, or every month it gets worse…

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

Support my writing on Patreon. For one time Donations: Support the Artist or email.
This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art. Thank you.

Filed Under: Brain on Download Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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