how do you do fellow cis

my therapist said i should go back to journaling to work through some heavy feelings I've been carrying from all the years of internalized self-blame and self-colonization. this is my journal! I want to heal.

I don't want to write long screeds anymore. focusing on the details:

Work is the last place besides my family of origin that can set me off and trigger all my conditioned fears and anxieties. All my trauma was designed to focus me toward "legitimate" and "respectable" forms of production. mmhmm.

Every voice in me is screaming for me to find a path toward self-kindness here. Every voice in me has at some point been pushed into the proverbial plug suit and forced to pilot the Eva in some way but they're not asking for a pound of flesh or apologies from me. They're not begging me to heal or fix them... whatever that might mean for metaphorical swells of spirit and mind. They're all screaming for me to please just be kind to myself. To stop blaming myself including for not being able to heal faster. This isn't a demand. It's a loving wish.

That thought has sent me crying in showers and in the middle of conversations multiple times this week. All my wisdom, hopes, strengths and talents, all these frameworks I've adopted to try to get the strength to overcome... they don't want me to get stronger anymore. They want me to know I'm loved.

They want to give me something that I can only give myself, but it's a gift that takes time and patience. Unlearning is a discipline. Kindness is praxis. I've been called so many kind words by people who have known me but none of those words stay in me. I've been taught in so many ways in formative periods of my life, before I had my own words as a baby, that love is at best conditional when it's directed at me. As an adult it's still hard to believe otherwise. But I'm seeing now that I don't exist just to provide comfort to others and hope that's enough. I see that I wasn't supposed to be parentified and abused. That I was neglected emotionally despite being given material resources to ascend (that I didn't even want). That I was a victim of covert incest and so many other kinds of trauma specifically meant to control me.

I wanted love. I wanted the love I gave to be understood and received as given and not turned into crude narcissistic supply. I wanted to be seen. Work still triggers in me from all the years of alienation, self-dispossession and dissociation, exploitation, lies and attempts to make sense of it all, the wage and time theft... And it has nothing to do with the work itself or even my employers/colleagues. This is all stuff I carry with me because I was told to get strong instead of get healed.

This should be a little bit funny to me if only because I've healed SO MUCH in all these other domains. I can hear in me the call to express my own deepest feminine self in every move and breath. I feel the ancientness and incredible life wisdom flowing through every living creature including my own silly mammal self. I've come to so many philosophical and intellectual resolutions over what used to feel like conflicting ways of seeing the world. I love me in ways I thought impossible and can look in the mirror with a feeling of care and dignity I thought I could only offer others.

And yet I'm still flattened to an anxious mess by these embedded shocks and fears that demand of me to become something else. The demand to be instrumentalized or rather to instrumentalize myself to survive. I haven't had panic attacks in like 8 years and I thought it was over, but I never healed these wounds.

what does healing look like for me? I previously tied my healing to this narrative that I cobbled together from what everyone around me was telling me: Both my family and the whole earth need me and my special god given whatevers to fix them before I am allowed to heal and dignify myself. Guess when the healing was finally going to happen if I held to that. Guess how impossible of a goal that narrative laid out for me. The people and goals I chased to overcome my pain were distractions. People sensed my big heart and hurt me/prevented me from caring for myself properly to get what they wanted out of me.

That's the actual narrative I'm working with now. I have to live kindness toward myself. I can't do what I used to do and dissociate into a self-hurting machine of progress and insight. I can't live as a party trick for broken people in power. I'm not a show pony or a tool (of the government or anyone else, snake). I'm just a person who was forced to stare into the hurricane as a child and told to become a pillar. I learned a lot of things I never wanted to learn and those things remind me of the pain.

This last weekend my partner and I were almost carjacked at a filipino fundraiser event in downtown LA. My partner already made it into the passenger's seat before I could get to the door when someone ran out of a sedan straight to me demanding my keys. All the things I've trained for immediately clicked into place. I scanned all the area for accomplices, his current state of mind, if he had weapons and looked trained or out of control. He looked desperate. Whether or not I could take him, I could tell he didn't want to get hurt in the process because he wouldn't commit to charging and tackling/hitting me yet. I had to position myself to keep him away from my partner, locking the car before either of us got to the door, and squared him down when he kept charging until he'd stop trying to scare me into backing down. I eventually held ground and deescalated with words without having to actually fight or give up my car or endanger my partner.... but like... that situation only amplified my feeling of being this weapon/tool. This person who should never have had to learn all the things I believed I had to. We alerted event organizers of that attempt to protect other tiny filipinas from having to run into that. In a way it was lucky I was the one he came for... but in so many ways I just want to scream. While I still need the strength to overcome and be resilient.... I just want everyone to have a nice time.

What do I do with this?!

quite a bit late to admit it considering the person I used to disagree with hasn't really been on talking terms with me in years but she was right. Rose was the best written main companion. I love Clara and so many things her stories represent, but she was written like 12 different interesting people where the main version felt the least initially developed, which is what happened when you look at how moffat first imagined her but that's not the point I guess

me when all the psychological trauma, neurodivergences, and intergenerational trauma make me invincible

i almost did that thing i used to do on here and write a way long screed. i just wanted to say that i've realized that most of why i used to do that was the same reason i fought so hard to do anything, i thought i needed to do all these things to justify my existence. but i learned a lot. i learned about societal alienation and endless class/race/sex wars. i learned about my own ancestral histories and how those led to the pain and confusion i felt that i thought made me broken and wrong in ways no one could understand. i learned that i'm not either of those things and even found beautiful truths about myself that i may have never known if i weren't forced to slow down in every possible aspect of my life that I thought mattered. i hit a kind of rock bottom but in a loving space and with loving comrades/friends in my life who were ready for me to come out just as much as I was.

so why am i typing? i think i have something to add after all this time of staring down what didn't work. i'm here to say that I'm tired of telling myself the most well-meaning bullshit to justify my own existence. no more rugged individualism as a way to keep the house warm by burning myself down. no more leveling up to stay ahead of the fire that's eating every class bottom up as though climbing was part of putting out the fire. no more convincing myself that being well-behaved, classed, or civil is particularly ethical or kind. no more pretending i don't see power dynamics or how oppressive power systems prevent people from choosing, consenting, and forming the necessary boundaries and relationships we need to fucking breathe. i wanted to document this feeling in the place i used to pull myself together like wet mud into a clay pot. there is peace and liberation in simply being mud. sometimes motivation is just there waiting for you after you've gotten rid of the lies and all the cope that relied on those lies to keep you going.

Oh I have an immediate existential level issue (doing mostly fine!) that subreddit communities were really helping me work through and now Reddit is down and I am suddenly aware of how little I can speak about my situation without prepping people in my life first to hear it and I am just.... 😐

Had to work very hard to not say the obvious answer here. I'm gonna treat myself with a quick Hades break.

this is far from unique but given my dismantling of self-policing and all the anxiety that i "needed" to work and push through everything I believed was important, i've been extra resistant to dive back into things that i recognize as products of internalized prejudice and hyperindividualism/toxic positivity. i still work and do mutual aid support because i care about my relationships to our communities and the goals of all the groups i associate with, but i can't focus for as long. i drift more. i don't keep track of tasks and goals by associating them with my pain anymore. i come back to the keyboard and feel disgusted and resistant to the whole process because i know that what brought me here, speaking the way i do, using these various toolsets, was a multigenerational colonized mindset that drove me to self-injury, burnout, and (hopefully not permanent) disability. the constant and dynamic physical pain has been a hell of a teacher, a constant constant reminder of what the violence i've done to myself in a bid for self-improvement. at my core i know i did it for reasons i still believe in, but the ideology i adopted (or rather was forced to adopt to survive and try to thrive) could never help me reach my real goals. individualism is no solution for collective societal problems but it is a recipe for deeper alienation and trauma. I cannot unsee it. I feel it in every muscle, in my sometimes twisted guts and strained joints and ligaments. i feel it in the moments of reprieve when things are aligned enough not to hurt too much. i feel it in the calm moments i used to steal but not simply let myself have to be present to our animals and plants and just breathe.

i don't really wanna work today. or any day. capitalist labor has the stench of the very thing that kept me from my own liberation and any lasting joy for so so so long, kept me from accepting my deeper identities, my ancestral histories, so as to gain the kind of power that would supposedly empower me to help others. until i slowed down, it felt like everything i was doing only deepened the wounds i wanted to heal. i'm writing this to get it out of my head for just a second because i need to be able to confront this feeling directly and heal even this, let it breathe, give it a chance to take the space it needs to work through me in ways i never let this or any of my feelings speak to me before. this is my process to become okay with radical self-acceptance and revolutionary action.

i believed for most of my life that i was broken and that the only way out was to turn myself into the kind of person who this society needed to save it from itself and the kind of child/grandchild who could do that and still honor them and their sacrifices, etc etc etc. I believed I needed to sublimate all my unspoken desires for connection, self-acceptance, and a healthy world into my personal ascendance and the rewards that come from that. i sometimes lapse for a bit and panic thinking that i need to somehow personally make all the right choices like Paul Atreides to take on all the right responsibilities to keep the world from collapsing just so i can let myself exist and be loved. reading this after writing it helps me see how absurd the notion is but that feeling was how i coped for so long. how i got here.

buddhist ecosocialist therapy has helped so much. rooting myself in my endless truths in an entire ecosystem of frameworks and contexts has helped me feel real and immutable. researching my people's culture beyond what my family attempted to show me allowed me to see it without their trauma and various kinds of erasure and biases. all these things have made it easier for me to just be in the moment with my loved ones, pets, and friends. it's helped me to stop holding a metaphorical gun to the back of my head to move and do more and stop being "lazy" and not settle for being unskilled or uncharismatic or whatever whatever whatever that's all noise now. it's all just noise. and that's the noise i see buzzing when i get to my desk, and i feel like now is the time to create a new set of terms, a whole new social contract in which i am a stakeholder at the table, a co-creator, a subject, and yet still only a small small small part of the larger whole where my voice matters.

in some ways i'm grateful for the path and the kind of society that forced a person like me to push so hard that i've been able to both become multi-disciplined and educated beyond the horizons of my family's more humble beginnings and to discover the medicine for all my many wounds, but it's also the society that plucked my people from the healthy vibrant lands and original cultures they once had and made us into the image of our colonizers. what i get from this hindsight all depends on the framing and all those framings yield different but inseparable truths. i'm tired. i'm full of life. i'm angry. i'm finally feeling unburdened by intergenerational karma that is still here but no longer pinning me down. i feel responsible for things that are the size and shape of myself. i can break any role i want however i want. i can respond to the world in ways that are more appropriate and far more powerful than what i've been told i could given the power i thought i had. but i never asked for all the suffering that got me here and i certainly don't want a world that's built on an engine of socioeconomic suffering and violence that keeps people from ever feeling alive and safe. healing the world still means changing it but it's not just on me to do it.

i guess all this is to say i am unpacking the bad and trying to find a way to root back into this world as it is, a world that i never asked for but is absolutely still the world that's here. it is neither good nor bad to do so, merely the only thing to be rooted in. it feels like that's really the only thing left for me to do if i wish to express myself and my spirit in response to this world. to no longer feel apart from the universe or like i needed to chase untangible and impossible things to feel like i'm okay. my path is one of flow and acceptance now, and even this rage is a gift that i can learn to love and let go.