round-up: 5/25
what i'm reading & listening to, and some quotations
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
15 Queer Vampire Movies and TV Shows That Suck (Complimentary)
‘My sadness is not a burden’: author Yiyun Li on the suicide of both her sons
The French Lesbian Curator and Spy Who Saved Art From the Nazis
Quotations:
Closeted trans people are often so well-practiced in neglecting their own needs that they don’t even realize they have dysphoria. They might just think of their body as an object that is completely detached from their mind, and not consider themselves a real person who is capable of having their own preferences or the ability to be harmed. They may exude a casual apathy toward their own well-being, using substances with abandon or putting themselves in positions of physical risk that they wouldn’t tolerate if they saw themselves as fully alive.
If you have no social power, no understanding of where your suffering comes from, and no connections to people that respect you, then falling into despair is emotionally sensible. It reflects your lack of options, and how unsafe and aimless any attempt at rebellion would be.
The anger that we feel as marginalized people is protective, because it gives us the energy to fight back against oppression, and the motivation to combat our enemies. Anger is what some psychologists call an approach-motivated emotion: it drives people forward and facilitates conflict.
You have found your capacity to want things again. And wanting things can be painful, because it reveals all that we lack.
You’re literally eating the flesh and drinking the blood of God during the Eucharist. It doesn’t get much more erotic than that. If you’re a vampire, that’s the ultimate erotic experience.
Validity is not a political identity. No one has won rights by merely insisting on their humanity. Not by such appeals to emotion alone. Of course trans kids are kids. Obviously trans rights are human rights. Such truisms are a defensive strategy rather than a tool for building a worthwhile coalition. Instead of insisting on personhood, trans people should simply live as if such an inane truth is already gospel. Trans visibility, for instance, has not led to greater trans acceptance. Since the Trans Tipping Point, a Pew Research Study has found more people are saying sex is determined at birth. Not less. The face of the other does not inspire everyone to compassion or ethical obligation. Trans people should not wait for a new generation or buy in to vague promises from treacherous Democrats and wishy-washy liberals. We should collect a wider net of interlocutors and allies who are also in search of bodily autonomy. The best trans theorists, such as Kay Gabriel, Paisley Currah, and Jules Gil-Peterson have long critiqued liberal ideas of personal freedom that jettison radical politics in favor of mere tolerance. Often, buzz words like visibility and validity are highly individualistic rather than stridently communal.
When it comes to health, we think of better as done with: I had this cold, and now I’m better, and think of it as a final stage rather than a relative one. So as far as suicide goes, for me, better means being alive and not having a life that is primarily focused on figuring out if I’m okay, just allowing myself to be.
I feel like I’ve spent so long being like, Well, I’m not really better until that section is gone—until I’m done with going through points in my life where I want to die, so it was important to acknowledge that those periods don’t have to mean I’m not okay. Otherwise, I’ll be waiting forever.
I’m not the only person who lives with this. I’m not the only person who has these thoughts. So I’m going to create one cohesive presentation of something that I have felt, something that I’ve seen other people feel and write about, and put it all together in a way that hopefully resonates.
I still believe that so much of suicide comes from people’s inability to meet these arbitrary requirements of society.
I think record keeping is great, obviously—I’m a writer. You want to observe and learn. But you read Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, and you’re like, Oh my God! It is exhausting. There’s only so much you can say about being depressed. And it’s not a matter of like, Oh, get over it because I know it’s not that easy. But there’s a threshold where examination is no longer useful, when it just becomes like a quicksand. One of them talks about this. I think that you do get stuck deeper and deeper, and it’s hard to pull yourself out when it’s all you’re thinking about, whether you’re writing about wanting to die or figuring out like, Okay, I’m feeling good today. What made me feel good today? How can I do that again? It’s just so much thought, and that interiority makes it really hard to live your life outside of it.
It’s easier to believe there’s something wrong with that person. That person was sick. They weren’t in their right mind. I think it’s very scary to look earnestly at the possibility that, no, they had valid reasons for wanting to die. And those reasons—their circumstances—didn’t need to be the case. Those are big, big questions that involve everyone. And it’s scary to think about how the world can and should be different and what that would mean.
Another of the reasons that I shy away from the polyamory label is damningly basic: I find the term a little bit cringe-inducing and evocative of a kind free-wheeling, grimy, hackey-sack playing social politics that I’ve never associated myself with. I’m too hard-nosed and anal retentive to spend even one night at the gender-egalitarian punk house where nobody does the dishes. Even the cool, gender-fucky comedians that I love think polyamorous people have slovenly haircuts and hold court over the D&D table with a sinister air. I am still too sensitive to social judgement to shake all that off. I have never enjoyed camping or long emotional processing sessions. I don’t want to advertise that I will.
I’m mostly nonmonogamous because I can’t seem to stop having sex with random strangers the moment that I am dissatisfied. Wanting to have sex seems like a suitable enough reason to have sex with other people, for me.
A lot of polyamorous people speak about eradicating jealousy, extending love limitlessly, and using one’s close romantic entanglements as a way to build networks of support— as if we were all embarking on some shared social project for the betterment of the world, and not dating people because we want to and it feels good. They create TikTok videos about building attachment security when you are alone, and warn one another against imposing rules or making demands that would be unfair to your partner or their partners. The most breathless advocates for polyamory imply that it’s a better way to love, but say explicitly that it’s a lot of work, hours and hours of solo and partnered therapy to ensure that you are unfailingly self-aware, capable of regulating your troubling emotions on your own, and never so needy as to do anything that might limit your loved ones’ freedoms.
And honestly, fuck that. It’s not reality, even among the heavily-therapized polyamorists who pretend to never harbor their metamours ill will. No matter how much they dress it up in nonviolent communication, sometimes there’s just a bitch who gets on their nerves, and they may pretend that they are asking for needed quality time with their primary partner at the exact right moment to disrupt a date with that hated person. They are human, and their own life should actually come first.
Hesitant as most of us are to admit it, we enter into nonmongamous relationships because we have desires, and we’ve decided nonmonogamy (or polyamory) is the most strategic way to get those desires met right now. A lot of people have become poly because someone they thought was hot was poly. Numerous close friends of mine have admitted to me that they use polyamorous dating as their primary way to make friends. Some people enter into polyfidelitious triads because three paychecks make it easier to cover the bills. It’s not always a decision made for higher-order philosophical reasons, and even when it is, the messy animal in us that hungers and hoards its food and wants to attack emerges from time to time.
Where I differ from most of the polyamorous people that I meet is that I don’t think that’s a bad thing, the messiness and toxicity that sometimes comes to the fore. I frankly find it very sexy. I want to be wanted unfairly. And I certainly have my unfair, unascended, greedy little wants, and I think I’d like to be with someone who wants me clawing for them, too. And I think there is a risk of polyamory losing its acknowledgement of human passion, and a population of queer, kinky, nonconforming people who are already prone to erasing their needs not showing their full selves in their relationships, out of fear of being too outwardly demanding or jealous.
Where a problem emerges is when we can’t articulate what it is that we really want.
Affect is information, and the rabid beast of your jealousy is telling you that there is more that you need, and perhaps a lot that you aren’t asking for that you should.
I think it is very important for all nonmonogamous people to realize that you actually can be unfair in your relationships. If somebody truly cares about you and wishes to make a space for you in their life, that does actually require that they clear the way. The polyamorous cliche is that love is unlimited, but I still don’t understand how that can be true, unless we see love as a completely abstract, almost imaginary spirit-force that has no connection to how individuals live their actual lives. The way we show our love is with actions and choices. Our time, attention, emergency contacts, and housing space are not infinite. We all make sacrifices and compromises for the ones we love, and the demands their lives place on us right now.
Relationships change us, we are affected by other people, and it is okay to expect that a serious partner make changes in their life in order to keep you in it! You are worth the drama, baby! It's okay to have a large impact on the lives of the people you are with. It's okay to make demands.
You’re partners. You are gonna affect one another's lives. I don’t think that gets talked about enough.
People like to say that you can’t control the love of your partner, but our close relationships develop and grow based upon our choices, and you very much can ask that your partner not make choices that leave you feeling sidelined.
We don’t just tumble into deep, loving relationships randomly, we decide to spend long stretches of time with a person, expose our psychological wounds to them, show up when they’re hurting, buy them gifts, answer their texts before other people’s, take them to places special to us, listen to the music from their teenaged years, and send them videos of us jerking off into their panties. And we can decide not to do any one of those things if another partner asks us to. Or we can refuse. Either way, it’s better to have the conflict.
I am a firm believer that jealousy is not a thing to be risen above or overcome. It is a fiery, sexy side of you that compels you to grow closer to the people you want. Jealousy means you want more, and there’s nothing hotter than a person who is incandescent with white-hot want. Listen to that shit. You NEED something. You feel UPSET about something. You want to advocate for yourself over others. Yes, your own desires matter more to you than other people’s. That is fine and natural. You are you. You aren’t them. Leave other people to do the advocating for themselves.
I’ve always felt slightly depressed unless I’m making something.
I wasn’t confident about my writing. I remember saying to a friend from a writing class, “I almost feels if a baby has written this, it just feels so immature.” But maybe that’s how writing always feels to the person who has written it.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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