AFOG

In the ongoing struggle between etiology and dealing with symptoms, I get lost and don't know how to proceed. Am I giving too much weight to a post-Freudian structuralist impulse and dedicating too much time and energy into looking for first causes? Will such an approach yield that much of a difference in dealing with what's going on with me now? Or if I focus on triage, on identifying symptoms as they occur and cause difficulties now, am I simply spackling over deep structural harm in such a way as to strongly suggest similar or related issues rise up again?

To further complicate matters, there is a growing, real sense that new approaches are possible, but right now it just feels like the acknowledgment of potential without any clear path to something else. I'm a sucker for that, though: new beginnings, new potential, the shedding of skins and reemergence, but I don't have a good history with seizing days, moments or opportunities. I get caught up in the theoretical, the potential, and actualize little if anything until the potential fizzles out like the inevitable trailing off of a high, leaving me back where I started with the bitter aftertaste of what might have been in my mouth.

I have an opportunity to do serious, hard work, to have a more solid foundation from which to build, both internally and interactively. Things are starting to shift in ways I don't quite understand. But I don't know how to move forward, or to move at all. Look to the past? Staunch the flow of bleeding now? Push through the pain, and to what? It doesn't help that it's all in areas in which I feel decidedly behind the curve, but also areas in which I think are different enough that no one has notes from which I can copy.

I suspect this is part of what therapy is for, but it feels too slow, too safely bounded. Not that this requires danger, I don't think, but maybe the possibility of danger? And of course, everything is complicated; inside of me is my own mess, but this is a big part of getting outside of myself, and outside of me is complicated in big, different confusing ways.

notes

"The experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done is the focus."*

"While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person."**

"Shame is an acutely self-conscious state in which the self is 'split,' imagining the self in the eyes of the other; by contrast, in guilt the self is unified."***

*Helen B Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis
**Merle A Fossum, Marilyn J Mason, Facing Shame: Families in Recovery
*** Judith Lewis Herman, Shattered Shame States and Their Repair

self care, speaking out, fear of being an asshole

Yesterday in a large gathering someone I'd heard unthinkingly transphobic and problematic things from* in the past again bring up trans related things, this time in relation to a scripted fetish show show centered around a transgirl who still had "you know, her thing". "Oh, funny!" was the loud, immediate response of one of the most grating people present. Time dilated for me, and in that minutes long two second gap I weighed my options.

I was pissed, and also wondering why it was, exactly, that this shit keeps coming up in some crowds. Is casual transbashing some new sign of sexual cosmopolitanism? Because from where I sit, it's just another instance of very mainstream policing and differentiation. How big a stink did I want to make about it? It was offensive generally, and to me also personally. Did I want to shame people? Hell, yes, but at what cost, and to whom? It wasn't my gathering, and I actually like the people who called it, but no one else was going to do or say anything. How exposed did I want to be? How much was safe? And why was it that this shit went unchecked?

I fell back to my native tongue and said something like, "Nice. Fetishizing the other never goes out of style, does it?" but probably both in terms of content and delivery, no one heard or caught it except fairyhead, who shared the moment of contempt with me. A little later, I realized what would have been more effective, at least in the short term, would have been something like, "Um, hello? Transgendered here, and kind of offended. Would you like to explain what's funny about that to me, because I don't get it."

But would that be best, and for whom? I don't really know what self care feels like, so I'm not sure if I can successfully invoke that. On principle, that feels like an excellent, if aggressive approach, but sometimes aggression is called for. What worries me is my longstanding history of taking stands on principle and beating both myself and others in its pursuit. Would this put principle over other concerns, including but not limited to self care? Or would this just end up in me being an asshole? I often feel like I'm the dirty social secret, whose inclusion is on the sufferance of others, and while I know that's a fucked up way to look at interactions, it came from somewhere. In the previous transphobic incident, no one said a thing, including my friends, which only feeds into my fear of making others uncomfortable. But what the fuck? It makes me uncomfortable to have such statements go unchallenged, and the silence of my friends fuels my social fears. Maybe standing up for myself, for challenging things that make others uncomfortable might be viewed as me being an asshole, but does that make it true?

I don't know what to do in situations like that, but they're going to keep happening. I do know that the anger is closer to the surface these days, but it feels less... bitterly explosive? But also more confrontational. I don't know how to proceed on these fronts.



*She liked the idea of sexually segregated showers because she didn't want some unknown guys staring at her naked (but apparently unknown girls are OK? Assumptive bi/lesbian invisibility, anyone?), and thought that transguys clearly belonged on the boy's side because, "Hello, you're a boy now", which just reeks of privilege.