Independence Day…the stupid, shitty possible core of asshole-dom
I have several of these posts backed up!
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A darker post, both personally and politically. But better than keeping my mouth shut, I suppose. A long one.
First a few words about Independence Day, the holiday, and then a longer thought about, hm, I suppose it’s a longer thought about the ongoing process of getting over emotional trauma.
Yesterday was the fourth of July, the U.S. holiday known as Independence Day, when we’re supposed to celebrate by getting together for potlucks and barbecues, and by setting off fireworks.
I’ve always had a weird feeling about the day. Like something was off. I like fireworks, quite a bit, although I dislike the sorts of crowds around them that I don’t go to the official fireworks displays. But I do go outside and try to get somewhere that I can enjoy them. I like the flash and the boom. Also, I don’t have pets right now, so I don’t have their care weighing on me. Your mileage may vary.
Why fireworks?
They scare a lot of people. They’re dangerous to people and property. They throw a ton of smoke in the air. I like em but holy shit are they not really intended for amateurs.
Why fireworks?
In light of the things I’ve learned since I was a kid, I’m gonna hazard a guess and say it’s so people feel afraid and threatened.
The danger, the fear, the mess in the streets, the wildfires, the police constantly driving around and not actually stopping anything, the not knowing whether it’s gunshots or not, the noise, the upset animals–those are features, not bugs.
Ray and I went walking around last night. Tampa, Florida, is MUCH less pro-fireworks than neighboring Saint Petersburg, where we lived last year. Fireworks in Tampa were over by like midnight, and mostly over far sooner. St. Pete was days of horror-movie-level smoke and mist under the dying, flickering purple-blue streetlights. Eerie. The two fourth of July holidays that I spent in St. Pete were nights filled with smoke and sirens. Tampa? Ray and I walked around for almost an hour and didn’t hear any. I kept waiting for them. I’m sure there had to be SOME emergency calls. But no sirens.
Still, last night I thought: Even though street fireworks are illegal and dangerous, there are tons of people who have invested HEAVILY in shooting these things off.
If there were a second open Civil War, at least this much energy would go into house-to-house fighting.
I grew up with the understanding that fireworks on the fourth of July were there to commemorate the past and to warn us of the dangers of ever letting foreign attackers reach us. Now I think the holiday, for all that I love fireworks, is supposed to serve as a warning: behave, or face chaos from your neighbors, who are all obviously out to get you.
Better the devil you know, right?
Right?
We walked down the streets for almost an hour. We turned back once because some people in the street were giving off a bad vibe. The rest of the time, nobody bothered us, nobody shot anything in our direction, they stopped when we got near. We apologized profusely for interrupting one group where we couldn’t get out of range (no sidewalks). They were kids. One yelled, “Have a good night!”
But even in St. Pete we didn’t get attacked or threatened, and we went out walking to see the fireworks then, too. People were just REALLY enthusiastic.
If you had trouble with the noise and chaos last night, you have my sympathies. There ARE assholes out there, and idiots, and inexperienced kids. You should be annoyed and cautious and even angry about how careless people are. You can also enjoy the pretty lights. No need to see the world in black and white.
I ask that you remember that getting whipped up from fear into hate is a political tool that has destroyed the goodness in people time and again.
Love probably won’t save the world, but not losing your cool might.
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This is the bit on trauma. Imma wander.
So Book 4 of the Work In Progress just passed the 300 page mark and is edging up onto 100K. It’s gonna be a long book, 4/5 of the way through the series except for the bonus material. Plot threads are coming together; the bad guys are finally starting to come to grips with the idea that they miiiiiight have fucked up. They’re not willing to do what it takes to fix anything and probably never will be, but ugly consequences are coming home to roost, and they’re scrambling. Our heroes are starting to get a grip on who the bad guys are and why they do what they do, what the underlying problems are. Everyone’s in danger, nobody can track all the moving parts (least of all my conscious brain, it seems), and probably the book will end exactly at it should.
But it’s been a yeeeeaaaaaaarrrrrrr since I started this. The whole series was supposed to be like 250K and be done by last Christmas. I’m just past 500K now and a long way to go yet.
This is the longest I’ve been working on a work of fiction, ever, and it kind of creeps me out. Here’s the conversation I’m used to:
Me: So the book I’m working on…
Other person: Oh, I remember! The one about xxx!
Me: Uh, nope! I finished that one and turned it in to my ghostwriting client. I’m on the next book now!
Me: [Not out loud] …and I finished two other books since then as well, but I’m not going to say THAT because it’ll look like bragging and oh god what if it is, what if I’m that desperate to look successful when I feel like a failure?!?
While ghostwriting (and not taking the “art” of it too terribly seriously) I was writing at least 50K a month. Not a prob, Bob. On *other* people’s work, that is. My own work would creep along here and there.
This past year, I’ve written about 500K, but I’ve also gotten bogged down more often than I can count and haven’t gotten anything big and new published. It feels like I’m failing, because for me I am.
It’s okay. I’m digging into the reasons why this is happening and learning how to dismantle them. The big reason is that while I was writing for clients I didn’t give more of a damn than it took to get the book written; writing for myself feels like everything has to be SUPER IMPORTANT, and that throws me off. I have a hard time trusting that my subconscious will do a good job unless I’m micromanaging it. My subconscious is six and has a meltdown if it gets micromanaged. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I’m working on it. Much progress has been made of late. No serious worries at the moment.
But while I was bogged down, the same energy that I would throw into writing got turned into other things.
While I’ve been bogged down, I learned:
–How to be a reasonably good photographer.
–How to get to the next level of yoga.
–Starting dancing for myself again, and getting to the point where I can have fun and process stuff through movement.
–Learned how to write essays/nonfiction where I don’t fuck up and/or fight my own voice (which I had previously been bogged down on).
–Processed a TON of bullshit from my past and (mostly) recovered my own sense of self, including getting “my” face back, instead of having my mom’s.
–Started rebuilding networks that fell apart as the ex got worse, making new friends.
–Started digging into AI and using it on a practical level.
–Started working on rebuilding a bunch of marketing stuff for myself, using what I learned recently working for other people.
–Rebuilt most of my health without going on a diet. I’d been starting to destroy my physical body the last few years of marriage.
–Started working with my ADHD (and possibly dyslexia and who knows what other minor stuff) rather than against it.
–Slowly learning how to care about people or fucking ANYTHING without living in fear that some asshole is gonna use it against me.
And still wrote a fair amount of fiction.
The part that’s the hardest, though, is dealing with the past bullshit. I’ve done SO much work on it. I ended up using so much energy on it that it took over the WIP, which made the work richer and more useful personally, and also harder to accomplish (because it’s more “important”).
Every time I think I’ve got a handle on it, I discover there’s a whole other layer of bullshit to pull back, to deal with, to sort through and see what I can use and what needs to be rerouted or comforted or dismantled.–The funny part about it is talking to other people. “Oh, are you still doing the same personal stuff? The xxx?”
Internally: Yes and no; I’m still dealing with xxx, but I’ve been around the loop twice since then and have SUCH a deeper understanding of what it all means, and now I’m far less of a danger to myself and other people, even though it feels like I have to start over every damn morning. How bout you?
Externally: Yep. It’s bullshit.
The last few days have been hard. I’m still not entirely clear on what was going on. Stuff felt off and I tried to figure out why, but all I really did was take care of the easy stuff, the usual physical, emotional, and mental health stuff that I do, in the hopes that it would be enough. It wasn’t. I finally went out for a walk to my Most Favored Tree. While there, I sobbed my fucking eyes out. I felt like my heart was getting ripped out of my chest but I didn’t “feel” anything. I didn’t feel sad or happy, just the pain. That sucked. I usually fight that sort of thing off or try to avoid it; I used to get punished for having emotions that other people couldn’t cope with.
But being alone in the dark, no assholes controlling my life, that meant I wasn’t gonna get punished.
That night, I think I was grieving the end of punishment. Of all the damn things. But on some level, at least when someone’s punishing you, you know what they want.–My brain tried to fasten onto other things but I wasn’t having it. No, the people I care about don’t hate me. I’m not a failure. I’m not a terrible writer. I’m not going to die alone in Florida. Stupid shit.
I kept reassuring myself that whatever I was feeling, that was the right thing to feel just then. If I couldn’t feel my feelings, that was okay. I’ve been through a lot; my feelings don’t have to work the way they’re supposed to. That sort of thought is a trauma thought for me anyway: why don’t I feel the way I’m supposed to? Am I broken? What’s wrong with me? Am I a psychopath? Or at least a fundamentally bad person? What?
It hurt and I sat with it. (Along with Most Favored Tree.) I would have been mad to have been comforted at that point, I think. Comfort would have felt like the equivalent of “shut up already or I’ll give you something to be sad about.”
Yesterday was sort of the same, only with actual emotions I could feel. I broke down crying several times and baked on the advice of a friend. It helped but it was still an overwhelming day, no real idea of WHY for any of it.
I tried to explain what I was feeling to Ray and failed but she somehow understood, probably more than I did. At any rate she was good company. We murderized zombie pixels together, then, later, she told me about all kinds of good nerd stuff while we were out for the walk. (There was a long digression about self-insert fan fiction and “Y/Ngineers,” and we both riffed on that, ending up with self-insert writers as the yin of geekdom, and cosplayers being the yang.) She was in one-track-mind mode, though, so I had to watch to make sure she got the right cues and didn’t panic a couple of times. She had NO idea where we were, despite being less than half a mile away from the apartment at all times, didn’t know how to cope with the kids in the streets, had no sense of the vibe being safe or unsafe, and just about walked off the sidewalks several times. I held her hand most of the way so I could give her hand signals–stop, turn, wait, I’m listening, stay closer, you go first/last, that kind of thing–and spent most of my time just listening.
Eventually she petered out and I started talking because we weren’t anywhere close to getting back yet, and what was really bothering me started to come out.
(Sorry, this may sound nuts; it may particularly sound nuts in the context of “THIS is what you were upset about?!?” And it’s all tentative.)
Over the last week, I’ve run across three different things about “short-term versus long-term mating strategies.” I still have more to get through on one of them, and I don’t think any of this is actually official. More actual research will be required. But it resonates enough that I’m gonna run with the idea to see whether it sticks.
–A certain proportion of humanity focuses on long-term mating strategies, where both parents stick around and invest in raising the kids.
–A certain proportion of humanity focuses on short-term mating strategies, a.k.a. fuck and run. People with asshole-type personality disorders MAY show a higher number of behaviors consistent with short-term mating strategies than the average person.
I know it’s not that cut and dried. I know it. I know anyone can become an asshole. I know that some people are misinterpreted as being assholes when they’re not. I know that some of the most interesting people walk the line between being an asshole and not. I personally define an asshole as someone who can’t grasp that other people and even their past/future selves have valid, feeling existences. I know that some people will never be anything but assholes. I know that it kind of just crops up throughout humanity. There is no getting rid of assholes. They are interwoven among and inside us.
But.
I ended up talking to a friend last night, someone who’s struggled with assholes in her life, too, and I told her about it, and she had the same reaction Ray did: “That would explain a lot.”
Looks over substance. The super-competence at whatever tasks they use to make them look like a good “catch.” The lack of competence at everything they don’t like doing, so that “oops” it can be Someone Else’s Problem. The depersonalizing. The leeching while claiming to be the only thing holding this family/office/country together. The dead tone that says, “What now, you malfunctioning piece of cheap equipment?” after they get done with a bad day at work. The constant push-pull between affection and bullying. The bigotry of us versus them–the racism, the homophobia, the fucking fear of anyone who isn’t a proper breeder.
All of it: fuck and run. Or at least love-bomb and depersonalize.
If true. I’ll have to think about it, give it time. But I feel it. I think I’m grieving it.
Ray said something that resonated yesterday, that I’ve been building up to this idea lately because I’ve had to deal with a number of people who were assholes to me recently after having a nice long break from it. And this morning when I woke up, I figured out what set me off this time–it wasn’t even about me. Someone was being an asshole to someone else and I couldn’t do anything about it and it just put me over the edge.
I just feel like curling in a ball and screaming about it. This? This might be what it was all about? This was why? This was the root of all that bullshit? The fuck? For some people this is a feature and not a bug?
But I also know how tight that same bullshit is woven into me. Both sides of my family have major assholes and I can dip into major asshole mode when I need to protect someone. It’s not like my hands are perfectly clean.
The idea hurts because it’s not just an idea, it’s in my face and it affects me and the people I care about, it’s *me.* The fear of becoming like this drives a lot of the behavior I’m trying to change. If I’m gonna change, I have to grok this somehow.
I’m trying to learn to live against fear, I think. To be brave so I can do more things, sure, but to fail to succumb to the worst parts of myself. I don’t want to accept these parts, but it’s not like they just go away. The more I fear them, the more they distort me. I am them and they are me.
I have no answers today. I still feel terrible. I’m ashamed that I am STILL having to spend so much energy on this, when I could be writing actual fiction.
But at least I’m not so afraid of myself that I can’t let myself feel how bad I feel, and I’m not trying to tell myself stuff that isn’t true, in a desperate attempt to find a meaningful explanation. Nobody I care about hates me. I’m not too much. I don’t have to tone it down. I just get to care about this stuff. It is not too much trouble. I’m grateful for the opportunity to stop hating myself and to move with more care and love through the world. I’m grateful for the feeling that I actually have something worth offering to the world, even though the world is fucked up and what I do may never do any good. I spent so long living in fear and self-loathing and numbness that this is a gift.
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Stupidly upset about assholes.
Midjourney image for AI & Nasturtiums.