As always, I couldn't stop thinking. I tried to organize OneTab, which is really hard. It's made for dumping a bunch of tabs out of the way that you might get back to later, not actually organizing them and saving them indefinitely. Naturally, I burned out pretty quickly. One of the tabs was from Retrospring, someone gushed to Porpentine (Charity Heartscape) about Serious Weakness.
I used to have this spiritual teacher. Let's call her Ariadne. She was really, truly trying to help me, doing her best, I know. She did a lot of damage. Part of that damage is in how I perceive Porpentine in particular. It's complicated and hard to explain, but Ariadne collected more and more evidence that she was a Bad Person that I shouldn't keep digesting the media of. That was hard, because her writings felt like they were sucked directly from my soul somehow, and most everything I do in life is really to search for the abandoned parts of myself. Ariadne's teachings felt like respectability: these things are good, those are bad, shun the bad, become good. Granted, I tend to fixate on the bad. I always have.
The reason I'm writing this, that this came to mind, was first because that Anonymous Grub on Retrospring had hit on a really key theme, and it was one that was totally intentional, and that was basically radical self-acceptance, and even radical acceptance of others.
"i thought, there was no way either of these two fucked up twinks are gonna make it out of this book alive because the world punishes outliers and weakness and these boys were so hurt and both so weak and autistic to hell and back.
but then, it didn't happen. i kept waiting for the shoe to drop and it didn't.
and then it exposed a huge flaw in my logic. that the thesis wasn’t about pain and punishment and tragedy. its not, i was just projecting that shit because that's what i believed about the world. no room for weakness. no room for softness. crush crush crush it down until there is nothing left of the little soul that resides in you. turn it into something hard, useful, strong, or terrifying. so no one does it to you ever again. or you die. or you cling to it, struggling, barely able to catch your breath.
and then i think that's when it hit me, that the world already punished them enough. just for existing. actually, first, i came to write a comment to you halfway through the book, and it was something about how much i loved insul and how pathetic and sorry and terrible he is, which he is, but i felt this need to justify my attachment because he is inexcusably a bad person. but that's the thing. i don't need to justify it. i don't need to perpetuate the violence. i don't need to add a disclaimer like: i do not condone his actions. the things that caused him to become a terrible person was the direct result of a violence against him. to condemn him for it, even if it's deserved, justified... no. the world already punished him. it's not my job to continue its work. 'i don't have to make things line up.'"
Part of Porp's response:
"Yeah…making things line up only works out for the machine, the apparatus, humans never benefit, no matter how 'innocent' they are. People can’t survive unless they receive things they don’t deserve. People incapable of working still need food. Without some kind of grace, something irrational and free, reality becomes ugly and colorless.
There were times I got things I didn’t deserve, at the lowest points of my life, but they got me to a place where I could become some kind of person. I just don’t believe you can create a human being by rewarding them if they're successful, and feeding them shit if they're broken. Otherwise the winners keep winning and the losers keep losing.
In Serious Weakness, it’s not an argument for people fucking themselves over with abusive relationships. It’s about two people who were already losing."
Ariadne's girlfriend is all about mercy. This is actually exactly the kind of thing she would want to teach. Probably not through mlm torture porn, but still. Ariadne talked about "harmlessness". It's a goal, it's a destination, but it's pretty fucking hard to practice. I was harmed a lot. On the surface was this sheen of helpfulness and enlightenment, and there was a ton of harm underneath. Charity's work has the harm on the surface, and help underneath. They are forever two sides of the same coin to me now, for better and for worse. I can't think of Ariadne without thinking of Charity, and vice versa. One person is gone from my life, and the other probably won't really enter it, except on the periphery.
There was another thing on Retrospring to write about. Let me give some background first. Ariadne was plural. (She believes she integrated herself, mostly, but that it takes consistent meditation to maintain.) She believed that I was plural, or close enough, and she was trying to help with that. She wasn't the first person to believe that; I think it's a matter of vibes. My therapists have just said, "well, we're doing parts work anyway, so whatever, you're good." I don't meet criteria for DID or even generally OSDD. I might have in the past, but the thing is, it's really hard to find memories that would confirm or deny that. That's kind of the point. I know I've dissociated a lot, and big chunks of my life are missing from memory. I'm mostly over it. Sometimes I remember new things, anyway. You just gotta roll with it.
One of the hundreds of ways I related to Charity Heartscape was when she said that dreams felt more real to her than reality did. When I shared that with Ariadne, she gave me this snide little comment about her lack of surprise. So, for reasons I can't recall, I asked Porp if she was plural. Anonymously, of course. At the time, it felt like a slur. I think I was trained to feel that way... Anyway, she had answered, earnestly, and it's an answer I relate to.
"Hard to say! Inside its kind of a fractal ocean of infinite chimeraforms without a "true center" or hierarchy. Soul-gel-morph absorbing colors, shapes, species. My consciousness was fractured from an early age for sure and never had a chance to 'set' but its pretty useful for writing. I don't know if I experience it the way my plural friends talk about it. I've experienced time loss but it's probably more attributable to ptsd/torture. My gf is plural and I love her"
I feel like the "true center" I have is kind of a lie. It's a facade, an artifice. It's the voice of my writing, it's the shape of my ruminating thoughts. Sometimes I speak to myself in another voice, a nicer one, that actually nurtures me. Well, I don't consider it "I", but I don't not consider it "I". It's another, but it's part of me. I'm not whole, this voice writing this isn't whole. It's why I hate writing and ruminating for so much of my life: I don't get to be the others often enough.
It's really hazy for me, and writing about it, I start to feel like I was wrong, and I am really plural. It feels like I have a milder form of what my own lovers have had, where I "soft-switch", suddenly speaking and thinking with a different personality, but being aware that I'm doing it, and feeling a bit embarrassed. But then again, maybe that's just part of the normal spectrum of human being, and it doesn't need to be analyzed and categorized. I don't need to fight for respect from people who would withhold it over dumb shit like that. I don't think that Ariadne even intended me to -- that was always projection. These are my flaws, my prejudices. I always tried to "fix" myself, one way or another, hence the rumination. My real goals are to be happy, and to feel whole.
"It's pretty useful for writing." That really struck me, because it feels familiar, too. I'm the narrator, but I don't have to be. I've tried writing about myself in third person before, to try and sympathize with myself better. It wasn't quite enough, so I tried semi-fictionalized, writing about someone who was basically me but not quite. That helps a lot. Writing about imaginary versions. Writing about completely separate people, but that I can identify with. Sometimes, on rare occasions, I get to write as that nurturing voice in my head. I wrote self-compassionate letters for a while. Some of them are really hard to read again, like they topple my emotional stability like a really shitty Jenga tower. The voice when I read it is different. Sometimes it sounds younger, sweeter, some young girl I never was that's still trying to parent all of us.
Oh, one more thing. This was from that earlier Retrospring.
"When I read something and the characters are firmly Men or Women it can be alienating, as opposed to their gender being a container for wounds, inversions, animals, possessions, the whole spectrum."
Just one more idea that I've been struggling with for a while, that this person I was supposed to shun has hit upon directly. I decided to DM Ariadne's girlfriend once again to ask about "parallel karma", this concept she brought up so much, and whether some people's lives and paths are unavoidably intertwined. I waste so much time in therapy, getting nowhere, trying the wrong approaches. Why wouldn't you look for people who seem as similar to you as possible and see how they're coping? I realize now that that's what I've been doing. Boy, it has not worked out. Or maybe it does, and every approach is painful. The lover that was more like me than anyone else I had met before has gotten on my nerves enough that I probably got healthier just to kill off that part of myself. Maybe you have to meet people that are like you, and come to hate the ways that you're alike, to fix yourself.
ha, I forgot I mentioned the "radical self-acceptance" thing. whew, I'm bad at that, frfr.