round-up: 3/16
recommendations, quotations, etc.!
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
I made two tiny zines this week. Please behold.
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
Researchers examined data collected from 2000 British adults over age 50 over a 10 year period. After analyzing data on their health and lifestyle, a clear pattern emerged. When people go out to enjoy a movie, show, or museum on a regular basis, their chance of becoming depressed plummets. Just one outing every few months was enough to cut their risk of depression by 32 percent. Those who went out once a month or more cut their risk of depression by nearly half. Given how down people are these days, that’s saying something. While it is unclear what exactly it is about cultural engagement that protects against depression, it is likely a combination of factors including social interaction, mental creativity, cognitive stimulation, and the gentle physical activity of just getting there.
Dr. Gregg Henriques of James Madison University has argued that depression is a state of behavioral shutdown. When a person is feeling low, their knee jerk response is often avoidance and withdrawal. This unlocks a downward spiral of critical thoughts and an inner battle leaving the person even more stressed, isolated, and depleted. The only way to counteract Shutdown Syndrome, Henriques argues, is to harness what he calls the “paradox of effort.” Put simply, override the impulse to avoid and withdraw and instead deliberately participate in activities that move you toward your values, that boost positive emotions, and that enhance connection.
Override the temptation to retreat. Ignore the allure of another night at home in front of the television. Make plans with a friend to do something and stick to them. We are often told that what we feel shapes what we do. But it goes both ways. What we do also shapes how we feel. Choose activities that engage you and connect you to others.
I come from a DIY background where I’ve been playing music since I was 16 years old, booking shows, promoting myself, touring the country in vans, sleeping on floors, carrying my amp down rickety stairs. So as soon as I was able to begin financially supporting myself by playing music and not having to work at a restaurant on the side, I was like, I’ve won the lottery — I need to just run as fast as I can and do everything and be grateful. I have to keep going at this clip.
It’s so fun and amazing to travel the world and play shows, but it requires a lot of being absent from your life. It’s an incredibly privileged position, but there were parts of it that were really quite hard. And I think that was sad for me because I had achieved this dream of mine, and parts of it were difficult. I want to be cautious about the way that I talk about it, because it was not lost on me how lucky I was. I think that was part of what made it really challenging.
Not all Korean people are like this, but I’ve had some Korean people say to me, “I don’t understand why Korean Americans are so obsessed with our culture.” I feel like it’s so judgmental and unfair because any time a Korean person is trying to stake out a position or find themselves, at least in the U.S., I’m always rooting for them. I think a lot of Korean American people or Asian American people are rooting for them. And it’s heartbreaking to me that they can’t do that for us over there sometimes.
I feel like people always talk about impostor syndrome being this really awful challenge that we have to rid ourselves of. Karen Chee actually has a joke about this — about how most people are not really good at things naturally. You want to be a rock star? Chances are you are a fucking impostor! What do you have to do to prove that you deserve to be there? You put in the work. I feel more comfortable now that I have more time to put in the work than when I had to figure it out on the road at that time.
Trans people are no longer eligible for NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] grants and things like that. I want to be able to write against that, but I also want to be able to have mental space and not just constantly be in the maelstrom of bullshit. So I’ve been in Colombia the last couple years. And while being in Colombia, I have started reading more Latin American writers. When you think about fascism and right-wing governments, oftentimes people think about European history, but it’s been flaring up on and off all throughout the Americas. There’s a history of Latin American writers who know how to respond to this, how to continue making art in it, how to group together and go other places for a while. [Gabriel] García Márquez finished One Hundred Years of Solitude in Mexico City. Roberto Bolaño was writing in Mexico. Writing a novel is a three-year project, so in anticipation of what seems to be happening in the States, I’m more and more trying to establish a place to look from outside of it as well as from within it.
I think it’s possible to be just a fiction writer.
Oftentimes, what fiction does is approach the problems of the moment from the side.
We’re in this era where if I give you an intellectual case for something, you’ve already heard it before. The internet is full of people telling you how to intellectualize a problem. What I think people actually respond to these days is emotional situations, where emotions are the side door into changing how people think. They’ll feel something, and then having felt it, they’ll intellectualize the reason why they feel something. As a fiction writer, when I write about two kids jerking off at boarding school or giving each other blowjobs on the soccer field, what’s actually going on is—you have a character who is like a classic bro and you have a character who is feminine. You can feel what is between them—both the affection, the desire, the love, and all the shame that’s preventing that from happening. Then you can say, “Why are these people ashamed?” The answer becomes things like, “Well, maybe it’s homophobia. Maybe the bro who’s narrating it is afraid of his attraction to his roommate.” Or maybe because that roommate is feminine, there’s a misogyny that the character feels towards anybody who is feminine. He’s so interested in impressing other people with what a tough man he is that he actually can’t accept the love that’s available for him. From there you can say, “Well, this is the cost of misogyny. This is the cost of homophobia.” But if I started by saying, “Hey, homophobia is bad, you shouldn’t do it,” nobody is going to listen to me.
The work of a fiction writer now is to soften people up to ways of thinking that come from how they feel first, rather than trying to convince people. You can give the greatest reasons in the world for why people should respect me as a trans woman. They’re not going to. But if I can make people feel something, they come around to thinking it’s on their own terms because they felt it first.
I’m running into a context that’s actively hostile, a government that has put my life at the center of its policy. Although it’s a horrible time, it’s actually a huge opportunity. There’s a lot of people who have said that we don’t have to care about trans lives. Like, the fucking New York Times op-ed recently said, “These trans issues are marginal.” Well, I’d be happy to be left alone. But if you put our lives at the center of your political policy, your package of political repression, then it also offers us a huge opportunity to be like, “Okay, let us tell you what we really are.” They can try and shut us up, but if we’re making the better art and we’ve got the more compelling stories and you’ve put us at the center, then it’s a huge opportunity for us.
I think a lot of the language that we use in modern times—especially language around gender—gets immediately subsumed and taken over and calcified by discourse.
The party line is that you declare yourself a gender, and then everybody will respect it. But the way it actually works is that you declare yourself a gender, and then you have to negotiate that with the entire world all the time.
In fact, most of the things that make me trans are things that everybody else, including cis people, experience. Like, how do I get other people to desire me as I want to be? How do I present myself to other people so that they see a coherent piece of self? How do I negotiate with the body that I have to get what I want?
What distinguishes that experience from the guy who is trying to have a “rugged guy” identity but who has a body people don’t immediately identify as rugged? Is that experience a trans experience? Most people would say no, but I would say that actually that frustration is very much like my frustration as a trans person. Again, the boarding school story that you talked about is not narrated by a trans person.
When you’ve met enough trans people you realize, “You can end up at this destination coming from all four cardinal directions, and the experience is not necessarily the same.” When I say that I’m trans, what I’m essentially saying is that I’m standing in solidarity. I feel an affinity with other trans people. It doesn’t mean that everything we’ve experienced is the same. It doesn’t mean that we have decided to make the same choices. I don’t think there’s one thing that you can diagnose and be like, “Well, you feel this way, do the equation, now you’re trans.” Trans is just a name for a bunch of people who decide to have each other’s back. Once I’ve decided that the most important thing for me about being trans is having the backs of other people who decide to stand with me, then there’s not any real reason why I can’t expand that to all sorts of people, including people who don’t necessarily decide that the word trans applies to them.
I'm, like, angrier than ever, and I have a capacity for conflict that is the highest it's ever been.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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