I did not proofread this again and it probably shows anyways here's wonderwall (words about the second week of October)

Once I figure out how to make these like posts instead of this big ol page of good-luck-finding-anything, it is OVER!!

I had started this last Friday but it snowballed into something I needed to recover from and I've got a training and homework this week so this'll count for last week and this week!

Content warning: talk of sexual abuse, homophobia, and religion

Let's go:

"I only write when I can't not do it."~ Toni Morrison

1. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

I don't think it's going to get any easier to write about the more I put it off. A few weeks ago, I finished the audiobook for Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. I only checked it out because it was read by Mama Morrison and I haven't read the book since I was in fifth grade.

I knew there was a part that resonated very deeply with me as a kid and it was a part that was very shameful. While listening to the audiobook, I didn't know when it was coming and I remember, as a kid, returning the book to the library very quickly after finishing and hoping that no one noticed I'd read it.

I spent the past few weeks mostly listening to it before bed. Hearing a writer read their words is a special gift because you can tell they mean it. Or, of course they're the god of their universe and who else can better explain their "In the beginning..." than them?

"When I began writing The Bluest Eye, I was interested in something else. Not resistance to the contempt of others nor ways to deflect it, but the far more tragic and disabling consequences of accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident. I knew that some victims' poweful self-loathing turned out to be dangerous, violent, reproducing the enemy who has humiliated them over and over. Others surrender their identity, melt into a structure that delivers the strong persona they lack, most others however grow beyond it. But there are some who collapse--silently, anonymously--with no voice to express or acknowledge it. They are invisible.

I don't want to say that I collapsed after what was done to me. But I keep reaching for my younger self, some semblance of the child, and the memories I've kept in an outline of the child are starting to fray at the edges. I look for first grade and turn up static. I look at my work clothes and my eyes freeze gnash. I don't think I was silent about it beacuse it's never quiet in my head. But I tell a story I'm sure I've said a hundred times and the faces, the reactions, the "why didn't you tell us this"'s are starting to weigh my confusion down.

I don't want to say I collapsed. I fissured perhaps. I big bang-ed in reverse. I ate myself out of existence and still explode in fearshock whenever someone calls my name.

I don't want to say I collapsed. That implies I moved from whatever happened. It implies that I know what's broken in me and that it can be found, destroyed--fixed. I can't say I collapsed because I'm telling lies less now or I talk sometimes instead. I can't say I collapsed because what good does that do?

2. Sincerely, Your Autistic Child edited Emily Paige Ballou and Sharon daVanport

There were three parts of an essay in this anthology that just destroyed me. In Karen Lean's "A Particular Way of Being" it is written:

"If you deny your child's desires and pain around her sensory world, she may learn that her body and boundaries are not worth respecting."

"As a child, I learned that my body and boundaries were wrong. I learned my discomfort couldn't possibly be real because my discomfort was uncommon. [...] Relent to pain often enough and it doesn't become less painful; it becomes a lesson that pain doesn't matter. I started to distrust my own body."

"Sexual safety means nothing if we ignore our most basic needs for sensory safety." [...] "I did have sex education, and I learned what was appropriate and inappropriate, but I didn't understand what felt unsafe until I was so unsafe I froze."

The last paragraph takes me back to one of the most traumatizing moments of my life and the one that I try not to say anything about because it is objectively, the easiest one to invalidate.

I've had to ignore the irritation at the cars whooshing past on the street five stories below while I'm trying to focus on my coworker giving me instructions. I've had to push past the urge to scream when my clothes fit wrong and I have to sit in the middle of a classroom with eyes on me and pay attention to an hour and a half lecture. I've had to care more about finishing my plate instead of what was on it because I can't leave the table until it's clean. All of this, why wouldn't I numb myself to whatever sexual abuse someone decides I'm on the receving end of?

This goes with number one, because I could never explain why I didn't say anything as a kid except from the fact that I was a kid and I was terrified and I knew it to be my fault. But growing up undiagnosed as autistic, I just figured people ignored their body like I did and that was just that. Reading this part of the essay is hard for me because I shouldn't have ever been ignoring my own needs and/or encouraged to believe I didn't have any and it makes me wonder if I'd known that, if I would've ever spoken up sooner or at least, lessened the probability of me being sexually abused when I got older. It's a nice thought but I know it's not true. I ignore my sensory needs because that helps me mask. I mask because I am not safe in this world. I don't think there was ever really a chance for it to go any other way. Do you?

3. Butterfly Soup 2 by Brianna Lei

Note: Please play Butterfly Soup first if you can!

When I was getting ready to leave high school, I wrote a letter to my best friend telling her that I didn't think we could be friends anymore. I had spent the past four years masking (or at least trying very hard to) and I was in and out of the closet, and I felt like whoever she loved wasn't me but a version of me I couldn't sustain any longer.

I wish I had gone about it differently and given her more credit and had better considered her feelings. But I didn't know that she was in this relationship with me for the long haul. I was used to being left and this time I wanted to leave before she got the chance to leave me. This one would hurt too much.

In Butterfly Soup 2, there's a part where one of the characters reminds another that not telling people you're gay doesn't make you any less gay. I wish I had heard this when I was growing up.

Growing up with only white people as the compass for how to navigate my sexuality and gender was (and is) extremely detrimental to me because it reinforced this belief that not coming out was lying and lying pretty much undid the legitamicy of who you are in every arena of your life.

The only option shown through this representation was dependent on how others viewed you, not on how you viewed and best treated yourself. Even if they were only out to their signifcant other, there was always the expectation that they'd come out to their parents for them or that they'd be outed. But these characters never talked about how when they come out and they go out into the world, people will see a white person before they see anything else. They never talked about how that fact is going to save them in a way black and brown people cannot be saved in this world.

If I had grown up with a message from black and brown people that staying closeted doesn't de-legitimze your sexuality, that it's okay and actually preferable to worry about your safety first instead of spending most of my years worrying about how I'm going to survive the "inevitable" coming out, I do think I'd be a lot better off. But that's easy to say when I'm over here, regretting a good chunk of how I've come out before. Who's to say if that'd have been true back then when I was still locking my door and turning Pariah on the lowest volume setting, my ears cued for the slightest hint of a footstep coming near my door? I talk a big game about staying closeted but the closet never did anything to me--people who made me scared to come out of it did.

4. Sometimes You're The Problem

You can lowkey tell I'm just trying to hit a number ten because I'm tired and I can't believe this is so overdue (by literally no one else's standards but my own) but this does apply. For a couple of months, I've been having a hard time with a mixture of everything above and stuff from childhood and you know, the state of the world. And I've been stuck because I've felt very powerless.

Today, I did the opposite of what I've been doing and it turns out that there can be a different reaction when you try. This sounds vague as fuck but I'm trying not to archive my insides on the internet anymore.

5. Black Girls Are Always At The Center of Horror

This is an essay I wrote for the Horror Is So Gay series a few years ago for Autostraddle. You can read it in it's entirety here.

There's this belief, especially within the black community, that privacy must be synonymous with shame. (I'm trying to build into something here but the concrete won't take.)

One of the things that i love about horror is it gave me an in that let me examine v traumatic/dangerous things without having to re-traumatize myself the way i had to when i was expected to write these like personal essays that i HATE(d) but i was young and didn't know how to stand up for myself.

This is one of my favorites because I'm interested in seeing the timeline of my Before and After on this site. From the beginning to my first time I quit, you can tell (or at least I can) my work isn't true. I'm telling the truth but I want so much distance from it and from myself and I'm doing the opposite by getting abnormally close to it and watching it squirm and then telling people "see what a good job I did? see what a good story I am?" and it's unsettles, watching porcelain masks crack at the smile crevices and trying to tell myself it's worth looking at.

But then the Return Era (when I came back because there was a new EIC and I thought things had changed), I'm doing the work I wanted to do at the start: talk about media (I never wanted to examine my life in public). And I loved going so deep into horror because I got to obsess over shit real close and it doesn't flinch when i say it hurts--often it looks back at me and offers something in its throat about it.

Horror is the last thing I expected to love because I was (and still am) a notorious scaredy cat. But horror is what got me through surviving the sexual abuse at my first job. At surviving the flashbacks and panic attacks and I can't get out of my skin fast enough from that job and other places. I grew up (not just in my house) with a lot of religious guilt and fear of mental illness. Horror frees me in a way that those things definitely tr(ied)(y) to suffocate me.

The things that terrify me in the real world are often much worse than whatever the screen is giving me. At least the things on screen don't touch me, my traumas have never given me the same respect.

But I hate that I haven't been able to see myself or the people I love most survive even in fiction.

Thankfully, there's:

6.Girl, That's Scary

I can't even remember how this podcast came into my life but I'm so glad it has. Jazz and Kat have seen me through many panic attacks, many close never waking ups, and slowing the racing of whatever's in my head. They talk like the people I love and the people who love me, they go off on tangents and laugh at their own jokes, and don't shy away from how horror is embedded in our lives, in how we think and talk and act and move--instead they emphasize how integral horror is to how we understand and communicate with one another and they also validate my belief that if certain horror situations occur, it's simply not my business and I'm gonna nope the entire fuck up out of there and never look back.

But even more than that, I started watching horror and started being able to say I love the genre when I began watching with my friends, the first group of BlackSapphic (like some not all are sapphic but we will talk about pretty women so) friends I've ever had, and there's something to be said about how when you're so used to watching something that gave you a face you could stand to keep, when you were given that face but could only wear it in private--there's something miraculous and freeing and overwhelming in its intensity when you find people who can look at that face without lighting torches, how their looking makes you fall more in love with the mirrors.

Yeah, listening to the podcast feels like that, a coming home but to a home I want, not one I fear.

7. The Black Girl Survives This One

I just want to plug this because I was having a panic attack (shocker, I know) a few days ago and I started reading this and we love to see my words in action. I now had a better reason for my heart racing! I'm only about three stories in, but if you're like me and you love to see black girls survive, you should check this out.

8. Audra McDonald

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itNGTD6llrw

Not to give y'all whiplash but Audra McDonald is starring in G*psy and I need you to understand that Joy Woods and Jordan Tyson are playing her daughters and I will be unable to really meet anyone anywhere else except at the corner of EXCITED and I FUCKING NEED THIS regarding this matter, thank you.

I saw a gif of Laura Benanti looking off into the audience and saying in awe, "I'm a pretty girl, Mama." and I have been an irreparable wreck ever since. I don't know how to explain how much this musical means to me and I'm not even gonna try at this moment, I just want it on record that anyone who tries to bring this topic up with me will regret it.

9.I had fully intended to give a ten numbered list but it's three twenty two in the morning and it's hot and I'm sleepy.

10.Destroy the systems that threaten to destroy you and take care of each other. Until next time, I'm getting a snack, good night.