round-up: 4/19
reading recs, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Recommendations
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
Dozens of Palestinians killed in Gaza as Hamas official vows to 'break' Israel
More aid is supposed to be entering the Gaza Strip. Why isn’t it helping?
UN says waterborne illnesses spread in Gaza due to heat, unsafe water
Housekeeping:
Spring has sprung! I’m okay with being alive again. The sun is a blessing.
My mom finally mailed me the copy of Moody the Zine in which my art appears. Gorgeous publication. I’m glad to be included.
Things I bought this week:
Magnesium pills, because my friend said they give her dreams1
Things I would like to buy:
& a very serious question, via Twitter:
What’s the hottest (loose definition; up to interpretation) book you’ve ever read?
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
You are not made by yourself, but by the thing that you want.
-Fanny Howe, “Catholic”
Her hand—I want more detail, I can’t have it—
-K. Patrick
Wind applies pressure to the building. Something is blown over on the path, skittering across the gravel. Springs sudden violence.
-K. Patrick
She looks at my throat, just where it leaves the collarbone, ridge into tendon.
-K. Patrick
There is nothing to do. I take my second bath of the day. Since giving up smoking this is my only remaining pleasure.
-K. Patrick
Her bare forearm, only a centimetre from mine.
-K. Patrick
He brings his fingers to his nose, collects more blood and drags it across the glass on purpose, pleased with the evidence, with the drama.
-K. Patrick
Selfishly I want her to look at me. She does not.
-K. Patrick
Something passes between us. Breath across light. Or maybe more. More than breath, more than light. A glance like a cigarette burn.
-K. Patrick
She doesn’t pry. I had been hoping for an opportunity to confess, to tell her who I am. She will not allow it.
-K. Patrick
The moon is suddenly obvious. Not unlike the moon, desire punches through the present. It’s a good line.
-K. Patrick
My mystery is all I think I have.
-K. Patrick
My anxiety has its own heartbeat.
-K. Patrick
I float. If I could choose a different chest I would choose this water. If I could choose a different body I would choose this water.
-K. Patrick
Birdsong. Insects, the river’s full throat.
-K. Patrick
She sits next to me, cramping the left side of her body into mine. It is the most we have ever touched.
-K. Patrick
Before, I enjoyed a consistent, calculated nothingness. I had been liberated by that nothingness. Each day perfect, each day without a pulse. My immovable routines. For once I had been sleeping. Nine, ten, eleven hours. Now, in the middle of the night, her shoulder blades.
-K. Patrick
She is all fresh air and laundry powder. […] She fills the doorframe beautifully.
-K. Patrick
The light is rendered weak.
-K. Patrick
I have always been in pursuit of something. A kind of survival. To think one step ahead.
-K. Patrick
Sunday. I see her. My body knocked loose.
-K. Patrick
Shame will continue its reinventions. No matter what I do.
-K. Patrick
Her hand is outstretched. I put my own hand inside.
-K. Patrick
Her hands. Another planet. […] Estuaries of neon veins, knuckles rising like moons.
-K. Patrick
I am flooded with my own smell. A panicked animal.
-K. Patrick
Most other people study their reflections carefully. Instead I’ve spent a lifetime focusing on the interior, a place that happens without me, organs passing their intimate thoughts, the chase of blood, valves clenching and releasing. Stunning inevitabilities.
-K. Patrick
I suck in my pride like a stomach.
-K. Patrick
Orange peel. Wood, woodsmoke, maybe sandalwood. Brine. The whole sea dried to salt behind her ear.
-K. Patrick
She squeezes my hand. The same ferocity as the hug, the same imperative meeting of bones.
-K. Patrick
We have not yet kissed. I think about kissing her. I think about swallowing her tongue.
-K. Patrick
Her voice happens between my legs.
-K. Patrick
I don’t ask when. A decision made between heartbeats. I will become whatever she wants.
-K. Patrick
We’ve known each other for a long time. I’ve seen him in relationships. He’s seen me in relationships. We’ve seen each other outside of relationships. We knew what we’re capable of, and the trouble that we could bring to each other’s lives. We can make or break each other’s hearts. And so, we started dating with a lot of caution.
The troll in me, she had a time. Unfortunately, you can’t take anything back from the internet, so I will always have the reminders, but the best troll in me is the silent troll.
The only thing that I knew I wanted, or that I could imagine, was motherhood. I didn’t know how it would come, but it is the best part of my journey so far. Everything else was a surprise.
I’m actually afraid of shit. The well-being of your kids, you worry about that constantly. Nobody warns you that having kids means you’re going to worry every second of your life. Right? And betrayal, because disappointment is one of the emotions I don’t handle well. I feel like I’m just allergic to that shit.
The research is very consistent on this: body image impacts sexual functioning. Body self-criticism is associated with all the ways we might struggle with sexuality, from pleasure to arousal to desire to orgasm. Of course it does, right? In order to notice pleasure in your body, you have to turn your attention to your body. And if paying attention to your body activates all kinds of brakes-hitting self-criticism, that’s going to slow down or even stop your sexual response. But if, when we turn our attention to our bodies, we feel only self-acceptance and even pride, that can activate the sexual accelerator in our brains.
When you’re in love and in an established relationship, you spend your time together living your ordinary lives. This is not a problem, it’s inevitable; and for people who want a long-term sexual connection with a person with whom they also share a household and even children, it’s the whole point! You want your connection to be filled with your shared, ordinary life. Your sexual connection can be a delightful enhancement of that, a source of pleasure and connection that contributes to the quality of your lives together.
If someone has time to focus on sex and creating a context where everyone involved feels super-horny all the time, the way they might at the start of a relationship, more power to them. There’s nothing wrong with wanting and creating “spark.” But look, I’m busy. Aren’t you busy? I’m also in love. Sharing sexual pleasure is part of how I express that love, and so I’m going to make sure I reserve enough time, energy, and attention to be able to share sexy time with my certain special someone. I don’t need to crave sex out-of-the-blue, I just need to know my partner is great and our sexual connection is full of joy and pleasure, and if I protect time, energy, and attention to devote to sex, I’ll be so glad I did.
One thing that defines my life is that I’m really disciplined. I’m very beholden to my disciplines.
But a big part of this book, quite frankly, is about living beyond a time period where I thought I would be alive. I’m always taking stock of how I feel about being alive in the world. That is an everyday, all-day examination.
My running life is a life unto itself. My writing life is a life unto itself. My life of dog parenting is a life unto itself. They’re not siloed, they’re all interconnected. But the disciplines that bring me to them are like little lives unto themselves. And so I feel like I’m not just surviving beyond one version of my past self, I’m surviving in multiple ways. I’ve outlived myself not just once, but several times. And by surviving, I’ve gifted myself many new lives at once to pursue.
Despite my rigorous approach to Ramadan, I am not a very spiritual person. I’m not a very committed religious person. But I am someone who is committed most vigorously to a belief in the afterlife.
I feel that’s a requirement for me because I’ve lost so many people, and it would be troubling for me to imagine a world wherein I never get to see them or never have access to them ever again. It would be troubling to me to imagine that they left this world and went nowhere.
If I’m honest with myself about what I feel, it is most easy for me to say when we die, nothing happens. We die and we’re gone, and that is the end. But I’m beholden to the spiritual understanding of an afterlife, because it would perhaps guarantee that I would see the people I love again.
I do find myself less interested in an afterlife that one has to earn their way into. That feels like an intense cruelty, to say that there are people you love behind a fence and you perhaps cannot get into the fence, depending on these arbitrary natures of what goodness is or what goodness is not. I believe in the potential to see the people I love again, because I need to.
No one in the neighborhood that I grew up in thought of it as this unbearable war zone. It was our neighborhood and we built a loving place.
I think maybe that’s the real sin: people who don’t live where you live and who don’t understand where you live attempting to name places as evil or dangerous, when you know better and when you know there are multitudes beneath that.
I think sometimes even in love, even in our desire to love someone in a very big way, we are perhaps rushing to love the imagined person. Sometimes in my rush to love someone, I can see myself rushing past the actual person and trying to love the imagined person because the imagined person is a little bit easier for me to love. It is a person who I’ve made. It’s detrimental to you, the lover of the person, and it’s detrimental to the person who is wondering why they cannot be loved well.
Expressing interest, expressing genuine curiosity in other people is what sustains me. And it also just gives me a blueprint for how to love people well. I want to keep people around. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life. And so, it feels possible to build at least a world that is my world that people don’t want to exit so quickly.
I think grief is also an occasion for gratitude. Grief is a feeling that is simply knocking at the door of memory repeatedly. Grief knocks and then if you are fortunate, if your memories are intact and alive enough, the door opens and then you get to revel in what is revealed through that door’s opening.
Grief arrives to me in many pieces. And yes, sometimes it is me grieving the fact that some days I can’t remember the sound of my mother’s voice. That is an occasion for grief that is large, right? But I can remember my mother’s laugh, and I feel like that is going to echo in my brain for ever.
For a lot of people grief is only weight. The weight of grief is immeasurable and impossible. But I wonder, too, if there’s an opportunity to consider the way grief operates within us as something that is occasion for us to say, “How wonderful that I have loved and through my loving there is this visceral feeling that exists.”
When a socially isolated queer person in the suburbs feels that nobody sees them as they are, they might cover themselves in rainbow swag from the local big-box store to an ‘annoying’ degree. When a closeted lesbian teen hasn’t had the chance to form genuine relationships with LGBTQ people, all her reference points might come from shows like Our Flag Means Death and Heartstopper which yeah, might seem fangirlish and irritating to a more seasoned adult. When a profoundly repressed trans divorcee still believes the misinformation about hormones they’ve been fed by the press, they might repeat some downright offensive myths about pelvic floor damage or body hair being disgusting. This too, is incredibly exhausting to help someone process again and again.
Isolated, lonesome queer people who lack fully crystallized identities can be very Annoying. Their self-conscious gestures give us vicarious embarrassment, and their worst opinions remind us of our most ignorant past selves. But they are not a threat to us. They are us, in a more nascent form. And we do our community no favors in trying to exclude them outright.
We don’t want there to be any Annoying Queers in our midst, because we all want to get past the uncomfortable phase of identity-formation that took us longer than we wanted and involved us experiencing so much pain. We also fear how the Annoying Queers make us look to the cisgender, heterosexual world.
I don’t think any of us literally believe that the more irritating a person is, the more of a pressing political threat they are. But we behave as if we do. We devote huge amounts of time to complaining about the types of queer people that irritate us, and develop complex taxonomies for describing why they are so annoying and why defeating that annoyingness matters. This person is a tenderqueer, that one is a tucute, and in their style of dress and annoying mannerisms we can tell that they represent all that we hate most about ourselves and how we are seen.
It’s easy for us to wind up directing more attention toward the queer people that annoy us than we do to our shared enemies.
It’s not a good use of our time. It’s not good for our shared futures. And it’s all rooted in internalized shame.
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard queer people state matter-of-factly that a bisexual woman who has not dated any women yet isn’t really queer, and that she shouldn’t be welcomed into queer spaces because her straight privilege and her boorish straight husband will make everyone else feel “unsafe.”
Whether bisexual people in “straight” relationships are affected by structural homophobia is a debate that gets kicked up all the time in queer spaces, but the actual bisexuals in question are rarely allowed to weigh in. If they attempt to speak about their experiences of oppression and exclusion, they get insulted, branded Annoying, and laughed out of the discussion much of the time. How dare they claim to know what it’s like to suffer from social stigma and shame when they… have internalized it so deeply they haven’t been able to have sex?
How dare any of us claim that our fellow queers are not oppressed, when we know nothing about what it’s like to be them?
I think users of micro-identity labels get criticized because they’re complicated. Even other LGBTQ people can find their complexities Annoying, because they challenge existing stereotypes about who is and is not queer, and what sexuality even is. And because their identities are so rarely spoken of, it does take demisexuals and others like them a long time to sort out who they are — and there may be a lot of discomfort and Annoyingness along the way. But that doesn’t make them any less queer. In fact, having a sexuality or a gender identity that transcends all naming is just about the queerest way for a person to be.
If it is not a privilege for a gay person to be closeted, then it is not a privilege for a bisexual person to live unrealized, unfulfilled, and mistaken for straight. If it is psychologically damaging for a trans person to be unable to transition, then it is also damaging to have a nonbinary dysphoria for which no transition options quite fit. And if growing up without any gay elders ravages the self-esteem of queer men and women, then it can easily do the same to omnisexual or stargender people who have never met anyone like them.
The more obscure or complex a queer person’s identity is, the less we know as a community about what their needs are. But that does not make their needs fake. Just because their difference cannot always be easily seen does not mean it isn’t always there, affecting everything about how they move throughout the world.
The greatest violences of queerphobia happen to us quietly, every single day of our lives. Our trauma begins the moment our infant bodies are slid into onesies that read Ladies Man or Daddy’s Girl, and follows us into slumber parties, health classrooms, camping trips, locker rooms, and family weddings. Homophobia is written into our laws, taught in our standardized tests, printed on our government forms, passed around in nearly every watercooler conversation.
You don’t have to be openly queer to be terrorized by it. In fact, remaining closeted for a very long time is one of the greatest signs of queer trauma there is.
Personally, I cannot view any less-experienced queer person as carrying more privilege than me. Even if their lack of self-actualization means they’re less likely to be hate crimed or discriminated against, I still feel a lot better off than them. I recall how it felt to starve and beat myself daily because I couldn’t reconcile my true feelings with the person society demanded that I be. Nothing was worse than being unable to name my suffering or locate other people like me.
The mandate to make a living pursuing one’s deepest aspirations drove scores of young people into the MFA programs and journalism schools that trained writers. They proliferated, from 79 creative writing programs in 1975 to the recent number of 602 undergrad and 247 post grad programs. This was fine until graduates wound up in debt—these degree programs cost so much —and then graduated into a brutal job market and a climate of stagnating wages at publications owned by billionaires and private equity firms. It turned out that labors of love also got caught in the maw of capitalism.
Conditions for writers and other creatives were already shaky, their personal finances in many cases unsustainable, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The way that Wellington, 59, sees it, the pandemic made “the borderline impossible, truly impossible.”
Vulnerability and introspection are our superpowers. And we all have them — so why don’t we use them? We’re not using our superpowers.
You have to wrestle, tussle with the angels. I like writing because you get to hold the hand of the spirit.
I now replace desire
with meaning.
Instead of saying, I want you, I say,
there is meaning between us.
Escape is what I’ve wanted
since I was little.
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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I don’t sleep enough to dream, so I’m trying them as a lil biohack. Will report back.
I don’t talk often (on the internet, anyway) about my “After MFA” journey, and how tremendously troubling I find the whole racket of academia in the 2020s and how unrealistic programs are, ignorant to the point of deceptive about the realities of post-grad employment, but, uh, yes to this.