nov 12, 2024

on isolation, part two (version 3)

is this just cabin fever?

has it really taken me 5 years to put words to it?

everything hurts and I can't feel anything anymore [1; Evie from V for Vendetta]

writing is helping. even if no one ever reads this, thank you to ~solderpunk and gemlog.blue and everyone involved for somehow making a lil sandbox that makes sense in my brain where I can get some of these thoughts out of my head. I locked all my thoughts away for half a decade to keep myself safe and it's been an enormous effort to break out of that (this?) cocoon. the design principles of Gemini in general, yes, but gemtext specifically, make a lot of sense to me and are also just enough of a trellis to climb on without being overwhelming like html has become.

what i need you to understand 
is that you're reading a 
therapy session. 
the writing is the therapy. 
the act of writing, 
specifically in gemtext, 
is allowing my brain to reconnect 
to parts of itself (myself) 
that i lost decades ago. 
this is the part of the internet 
that i played on as a child. 
the part that just let me write 
and got out of my way otherwise.... 

[2]

my body's physical reaction to the stress of even just... writing without any sort of hiding, any sort of parenthetical, any sort of character archetype to hide behind, is a lot more emotional than I expected. I have to figure out how to both sit with the emotions and also just... keep writing. the physicality of typing on a keyboard is such a viscerally different experience from typing on a smartphone. [3]

how much of "me" was just other people's perceptions of me? if I'm not perceived, I don't exist. and I didn't want to exist for a long time, not to other people. it was a defense mechanism. if they don't know I exist, they can't find me and hurt me. but I'm increasinly becoming okay with playing a character, specifically a queer one, not for my sake but for other people. sure, I talk to myself plenty, but I don't necessarily need to talk to other people the way I talk to myself. the in-group speech mannerisms make sense if you're part of the group, and the group exists to validate the people within it. it's an intentional reinforcement of the shared group identity.

don't worry, there are still 
versions of me 
that I will never let you find. 

what I'm really trying to say is that I feel the need to do the artsy traumadumping before I get back to yapping about anime on the internet, and that I guess I'm going to put all of that in the same place this time.

• [1]: Evie from V for Vendetta. I first watched this movie in English class in high school in the late 2000s. I wasn't taught how to write footnotes growing up, so the super long ones I would encounter never made sense to me. at that point, why not just have it be part of the main text? now that I'm writing this in a format that requires them, they make complete sense. funny that I'm bald like her now too. I wonder how her experience of her gender would have changed in her world post-head shaving. was her world so quick to tell her she looks like a convict or a cancer patient? she clearly stuck with the look (in the movie anyway, and it helps to have a face as feminine as Natalie Portman's) even though her hair would have grown out quite a bit the next time she meets V, from what I remember of my understanding of the movie. I should rewatch it....
• [2]: I do have to say, while I am tech-savvy enough to have managed to find my way here, I can also admit that I have never had a reason to use the backtick ` key in my life. (I have had an extremely chaotic life that I will write about in due time.) if you too need help with gemtext, on my physical qwerty keyboard, it's the tilde ~ key at the top left without holding down shift. on my phone (using Gboard), it's on the second page of numbers & symbols and also at the top left. anyway, what clicks in my brain about this is that the creative writing and the coding get to be the same thing. I don't have to pick. I was a fictionpress writer in at least two previous lives.
• [3]: I loathe smartphones, truly, but I don't think I'm quite at a point to be able to quit them entirely. I can certainly cut down my usage substantially, but that involves more projects that I don't know if I have time or energy for. eventually my editing workflow here will get to where I'm not bouncing between my phone and my desktop because reasons, but that day is not today.

home (is a state of mind)