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kaberettFirst, a poem I keep coming back and back to through the years:
Between
As we fall into step I ask a penny for your thoughts.
'Oh, nothing,' you say, 'well, nothing so easily bought.'
Sliding into the rhythm of your silence, I almost forget
how lonely I'd been until that autumn morning we met.
At bedtime up along my childhood's stairway, tongues
of fire cast shadows. Too earnest, too highstrung.
My desire is endless: others ended when I'd only started.
Then, there was you: so whole-hog, so wholehearted.
Think of the thousands of nights and the shadows fought.
And the mornings of light. I try to read your thought.
In the strange openness of your face, I'm powerless.
Always this love. Always this infinity between us.
-- Michael O'Siadhail
Second, the thing I'm playing wall with most this week (and for the past few months, to be honest) appears to be the concept of desire. I'm tangled up in finding it hard to treat wanting as anything other than binary: something one does or doesn't, in effect, completely divorced from emotion (so "I want to, but it's impractical" is something I interpret - and to some degree experience as - "I don't want to"). Which - isn't healthy, but is also a very typical set of experiences/behaviours/beliefs/systems for people I shall euphemistically class as of my background.
And this, of course, ties into monstrosity: My desire is endless. If I claim myself as monster, as armoured and awkward and alien, then I claim power: I claim agency and strength and I proclaim myself fierce and fearsome. But everything has a cost, and in this case it turns out to be that if I am powerful then I am concerned about sweeping people away in the flood of my wanting, I am concerned that my wanting things at all becomes inherently coercive, and I am not willing to do that to people I like or respect. Which leads to the pun in title: being found (or observed) wanting counts as a weakness and an insufficiency, a failure to adequately protect people from myself. (Because that is the other cost of monstrosity: in consciously and deliberately constructing myself as Other in the ways that I do I explicitly accept also the ways that I am capable of causing harm, as discussed previously in terms of my confidence finessing social interactions provided I don't care about the other parties beyond getting what I want out of them.) This also links up with the idea that I can only want something or not want it, that I can't prioritise, that I can't have gradations of desire but only too much of it (because monstrosity also ties in to being Too Much, in that in part I weaponise my sense of being Too Much by turning it into teeth and talons.)
And some of it is also, of course, that given the you-want-it-or-you-don't I deal quite badly with wanting things that I don't get to have, because it's all tied up in rejection-based trauma: I'm very bad at believing that I am wanted But It's Not Practical (on both the small and large scales), very bad at experiencing others' gradation-of-want as anything other than being once again not good enough and not wanted. So at the moment I just... am making myself not want things that aren't practical, determining that if I want something that isn't wanted "enough" by the other parties involved this is Wrong and I need to Stop Wanting It, or never to want it at all; in practice what this is currently looking like is me assuming that I don't get to want anything at all, which makes suggesting or initiating plans very difficult - I'm pretty much completely reliant on other people expressing a desire to do something, but then I get tangled up in feeling as though even saying that much is coercive.
It's clearly being brought to the surface by the current round with depression (about which I am feeling less immediately despairing this week, between no longer being in a high-progesterone stage of my cycle and working myself to pleasant physical exhaustion and having just spent three-four days in close proximity with one of my best friends), but this is an ongoing issue I ought to work on, sigh.
Between
As we fall into step I ask a penny for your thoughts.
'Oh, nothing,' you say, 'well, nothing so easily bought.'
Sliding into the rhythm of your silence, I almost forget
how lonely I'd been until that autumn morning we met.
At bedtime up along my childhood's stairway, tongues
of fire cast shadows. Too earnest, too highstrung.
My desire is endless: others ended when I'd only started.
Then, there was you: so whole-hog, so wholehearted.
Think of the thousands of nights and the shadows fought.
And the mornings of light. I try to read your thought.
In the strange openness of your face, I'm powerless.
Always this love. Always this infinity between us.
-- Michael O'Siadhail
Second, the thing I'm playing wall with most this week (and for the past few months, to be honest) appears to be the concept of desire. I'm tangled up in finding it hard to treat wanting as anything other than binary: something one does or doesn't, in effect, completely divorced from emotion (so "I want to, but it's impractical" is something I interpret - and to some degree experience as - "I don't want to"). Which - isn't healthy, but is also a very typical set of experiences/behaviours/beliefs/systems for people I shall euphemistically class as of my background.
And this, of course, ties into monstrosity: My desire is endless. If I claim myself as monster, as armoured and awkward and alien, then I claim power: I claim agency and strength and I proclaim myself fierce and fearsome. But everything has a cost, and in this case it turns out to be that if I am powerful then I am concerned about sweeping people away in the flood of my wanting, I am concerned that my wanting things at all becomes inherently coercive, and I am not willing to do that to people I like or respect. Which leads to the pun in title: being found (or observed) wanting counts as a weakness and an insufficiency, a failure to adequately protect people from myself. (Because that is the other cost of monstrosity: in consciously and deliberately constructing myself as Other in the ways that I do I explicitly accept also the ways that I am capable of causing harm, as discussed previously in terms of my confidence finessing social interactions provided I don't care about the other parties beyond getting what I want out of them.) This also links up with the idea that I can only want something or not want it, that I can't prioritise, that I can't have gradations of desire but only too much of it (because monstrosity also ties in to being Too Much, in that in part I weaponise my sense of being Too Much by turning it into teeth and talons.)
And some of it is also, of course, that given the you-want-it-or-you-don't I deal quite badly with wanting things that I don't get to have, because it's all tied up in rejection-based trauma: I'm very bad at believing that I am wanted But It's Not Practical (on both the small and large scales), very bad at experiencing others' gradation-of-want as anything other than being once again not good enough and not wanted. So at the moment I just... am making myself not want things that aren't practical, determining that if I want something that isn't wanted "enough" by the other parties involved this is Wrong and I need to Stop Wanting It, or never to want it at all; in practice what this is currently looking like is me assuming that I don't get to want anything at all, which makes suggesting or initiating plans very difficult - I'm pretty much completely reliant on other people expressing a desire to do something, but then I get tangled up in feeling as though even saying that much is coercive.
It's clearly being brought to the surface by the current round with depression (about which I am feeling less immediately despairing this week, between no longer being in a high-progesterone stage of my cycle and working myself to pleasant physical exhaustion and having just spent three-four days in close proximity with one of my best friends), but this is an ongoing issue I ought to work on, sigh.