THERESEDOTNET

the feeling, as far as i can tell, can be traced back to the time i spent with my friend when i was 16. reunited after too much time away, we fell into our old habits--watching tv, walking around his neighbourhood, swimming in the pool at his parents' house.

there was a game that we would play as we swam, one without any particular rules or endpoint. the game was simple--slap the shit out of the other as much as you can. we would try to corner each other, feigning blows and searching for openings. in the course of playing this game, we would inevitably find ourselves locked in a tight embrace, each tightly grasping the others wrist with one white-knuckled hand. this blistering texas day was no different, save for the fact that we had a spectator, a friend from school whose presence i can barely register in my memory. all i remember was that as she watched from the edge of the pool, she covered her mouth, stifling a laugh that wasn't really a laugh. through her eyes, i saw for the first time the ridiculousness and the intimacy of the image we created--the push and pull of our hands reaching for the other's cheek, our faces inches apart. i looked at his lips, and i felt something move within me.

when i slept on his couch that night, i lay there in an altogether novel agony, warm in the loins and wishing i'd kissed him. i tried to hold my breath, hoping that i could stifle my body's response to this stimuli that i couldn't consciously process.

in the morning, i wrote a poem about drowning myself.

***

for some reason, straight people feel especially comfortable telling me about their thoughts on queerness, how kids shouldn't be exposed to "sexuality" or think about whether they're gay or straight. when i tell them i first began to question my sexuality at 16, they feel validated in their belief--yes, they seem to say, that is an appropriate age to realize your own abnormality, the right time become other. i try not to shake them by the shoulders and scream that they have fallen victim to the same reactionary conservatism that they oppose with paltry lip service. quietly, unsure of myself, i tell them instead that if i had been "exposed" when i was younger, i might be more comfortable in my body now. if only i had the words i needed when i was 16, or even 15, i wouldn't still be searching for them at 24. if only, if only.

***

i had a friend in high school who i came to love very dearly. the first conversation we ever had took place in the bus loop, minutes before the solar eclipse. we talked about call me by your name and sufjan stevens, gushing with excitement about a film we had yet to see.

it would be years before i kissed her, months after we graduated, at a party in an affluent neighbourhood that neither of us would ever want to live in. i wore an old navy pride month shirt that my mother begrudgingly bought for me, in the hopes that she would be there to see it, that it would function as some legible sign of my burgeoning queerness. we spent the evening orbiting each other, finally cuddling on a bed together while the boys played smash bros. when the party was over, we slept on an inflatable mattress, trying our best to be quiet.

though we hooked up a few times after that, it never once occurred to me to start a relationship with her or even reach some kind of permanent understanding. i felt something for her that i could only call love, but the name i gave to this feeling was still insufficient to communicate its scope. the feeling i felt then was foreign to me, upsetting and incomprehensible--it was too fluid, too intense, a far cry from my usual hopeless romanticism. the guilt i felt over this feeling was much more familiar, and i sank myself into the hollow comfort it gave me.

***

i am an engine of want, a maladapted machine that forgets the purpose of its hunger. i don't know what i want anymore, except that what i want is always out of my grasp. sometimes i think that i've forgotten how to be a human being.

***

i watched from the couch i slept on as my friends, who have been together for longer than i can really conceptualize, ate breakfast together, petting the cats as they investigated the food on the table. the scene was so picturesque that i was not even moved to tears; instead, i felt a pit in my stomach grow as i realized that it gained this very quality through my absence--i was out of frame, relegated to the role of spectator. they were perfect and beautiful, monogamous and pure.

i longed to be close to both of them in the way that they are close to each other, to be apart of the beauty that i must remain apart from. this is not what i wrote in the song about them. i wrote instead that i wanted to be the spit that they passed between their lips. i didn't want to be their third, or to be a homewrecker. all i wanted was to be closer to them than was humanly possible.

i wanted very badly to show them the song, because on a very basic level i thought they would enjoy it. the old shame persisted, and i feared above all else they they would understand with perfect clarity the meaning of my words. i sent it to a different friend instead, one who is not familiar enough with my life to fully understand. he gives me a glowing review.

***

the feeling is not wholly romantic nor holy platonic; nor is it absent of either of those qualities. it is without form, but never without object. i have dreams in which friends touch me in ways that had never occurred to me; when i wake, i think that there must be something evil within me.

***

as much as i love writing, i have a startlingly hard time articulating myself in my day-to-day life. when i get quiet, my friends ask me what i'm thinking about. on the rare occasion that i consciously know the answer, i can't quite bring myself to tell them. i want to tell them that i love them, that i always think of them when they're not around. i want to put my head on your shoulder. i don't want to sit on the other side of the couch. i want so badly to reach out, to run my hands through your hair. but the pit in my stomach demands that i keep my hands to myself. why can't you read my mind, and take from me what i want from you? isn't it obvious how i feel? am i that hard to read?

***

the feeling is easiest to digest when i'm just beginning to taste it, when it still feels like just another crush. i write a new song, and it feels like the best thing i've made in years. for a brief moment, the feeling is pure and true, and i feel no shame in my wanting. where do i go wrong?

***

even though i've been ostensibly conscious of my queerness for the better part of a decade, i still feel as though i am just beginning to process it, that i am just now becoming myself. this constant self-analysis brings with it a host of peripheral realizations, widening into a web that threatens to catch every aspect of my being. only now does it occur to me that the way i experience desire is in itself queer, that in many respects it is normal to the point of being cliché.

***

when i was 16 or 17, i read a book called grasshopper jungle, a pulpy YA novel about a bisexual boy who inadvertently causes the end of the world. though its incessantly quippy, irreverent prose reads like a kidz bop version of chuck palahniuk, it's no exaggeration to say that this book changed my life as a still-closeted bisexual teen who had no idea what to do about it.

though an apocalypse rages on around him, the protagonist austin's main emotional concern is his simultaneous attraction to his girlfriend shann and his best friend robby, a fact which haunts him as much as it excites him. in the midst of his questioning, he toys with both of them, finally accepting his bisexuality only after all the emotional damage is done. the world has ended, and the status of his relationships with robby and shann is left up in the air. i don't remember much of the book's finer details save for the last line of the book's final chapter: "i no longer asked myself what i was going to do." it hit like a truck then, and i still think of it now, even though i'm well past the age when i should've taken it to heart. it is, i imagine, a lesson i will have to learn over and over again, through every phase of my life: stop asking yourself what you're going to do. do something instead.

there are certain beliefs or personal ethics we hold that, no matter how fervently they are believed in or proclaimed, remain abstract moral judgments until they are tested in the material reality of our lives. when tested in this way, such beliefs reveal themselves to be either shallow pontifications or materially contingent truths--one learns either the depth of their own hypocrisy or the strength of their own convictions.

in a world that demands such moral judgments of us, at a rapidly increasing rate, such a proving ground can and will be found in every facet of day-to-day life. i myself have often been upset to find that i care much less about a certain pressing issue than i feel i ought to; alternately, sometimes i am confronted with the full breadth of a societal evil i considered nominal at best, and i am in turn forced to reevaluate how deeply i hold certain truths.

last night, i found myself subjected to the latter experience. for context, i work at a trendy, open-air theater that has recently opened a location where i live. i had heard, on distressingly short notice, that we would not hold our regular screening, and instead would host an impossibly large number of influencers. this information was enough to make me worried, as we had already dealt with a handful of such tiktokers in the two weeks that we've been open--blonde-haired girls with unnatural tans would ask us to slow down as we applied their wristbands, just so that they could film the mundane, utterly uninteresting act. my coworkers and i shared our distress at the fact that we were finding ourselves in tiktoks posted by strangers, and in the hours before we opened, we anxiously waited to see how bad it would be this time.

it was so much worse.

"influencing," as a profession, is very easy to hate, even at a digitized remove. the struggle of filtering mindless, hollow content from one's timeline is incessantly draining, a fact which has only proven itself more true in the Age of Slop. escaping the dead stare of an iPhone camera IRL is another beast entirely.

i struggle to describe for you the horror i felt at looking out from the box office to a sea of screens and mobile filming paraphernalia--i can only imagine that such an image is of the same kind that haunts jack white in his nightmares. charitably, i want to attribute some level of intentionality to the way they framed their images; looking at the way they slowly panned their cameras across the space, though, i found myself unable to. scrolling through the tiktoks that some of them have already posted, it became apparent that their camerawork was driven by little more than a desire to replicate a space in its bluntest facticity. in the same way that a landlord photographs an apartment to convey nothing more than its dimensions, these influencers flatly filmed their surroundings without processing them.

such an approach to filming has, of course, the collateral effect (intentional or otherwise) of flattening everything within the space into the same plane of unreality. in some misguided effort to remain a happy, servile, employee, i tried my best to pretend that this was a normal screening, just another totally regular shift at the theater. this almost immediately proved impossible, though. in the midst of preparing popcorn and beverages, i would turn around to find not eyes but the gleaming black buttons of iphone cameras beaming into the box office. sometimes, futilely, i tried to step out of the frame, but there wasn't anywhere to go.

it is one thing to bemoan the casual democratization of the surveillance state; it is another thing entirely to feel its gaze. i'm not typically prone to crying, but it was a protracted effort not to that night. i found very quickly that, however evolved the human mind may be, it is not capable of responding to such stimuli with anything other than panic.

in the tiktoks these influencers have already posted, i can find myself flattened into the background, relegated to the same plane of reality as the various movie theater paraphernalia that i work with. i don't mean to say here that every photograph or video that happens to have a stranger in the background is a mortal sin; sometimes it Just Happens, absent of any cruelty. what i mean to say is the particular way these people filmed me reduced my being, in the most literal way, from an ontological subject to an ontic object. if any shred of my personhood remains in these images, it is only in my role as a cog in the customer service machine, a fact which is dehumanizing enough in its own right.¹

this phenomenological reduction, however, goes both ways. the mediation of our own gaze through the filer of photographic technology is a potentially murky subject in general, but some of this can be sidestepped by differentiating between the ends one pursuses when they put their eye through the viewfinder. influencer photography is, universally, aimed only at the production of content; i am not generous enough to ascribe any artistic value to it. as i have already intimated, the utter absence of intentionality, the failure to imbue their image with any personality, leaves the image devoid of any humanity. for a medium that is almost wholly conerned with the abstract idea of "experiences," one does not get the sense that these influencers are experiencing much of anything. watching them mill about, looking at their surroundings almost exclusively through their phones, was like sitting in front of a tv, watching miis wander around on the wii homescreen. it felt like drowning in a crowd of homunculi.

at this point, i'm being cruel. these influencers are human beings, fellow members of the human race. even so, i can't shake the feeling that we have all willingly sacrificed some small part of our humanity to allow this to become the world we inhabit. we have let our imagination, our compassion, our empathy,atrophy in service of a system that regurgitates an empty facsimile of our own experience of the world. it's no wonder, then, that we have grown increasingly comfortable feeding people's art, their experiences, their very lives into utterly unhuman LLMs that spit back false platitudes that prey upon our own selfishness with artificially generated therapy-speak.

i'm aware of how i sound. it is very like me to take a Really Bad Shift At Work and fashion it into some grand indicator of The State of Things (half of these posts are the result of getting home from work and feeling awful.) i have tried, in vain, to explain to my coworkers why this awful shift we collectively experienced is indicative of a great evil, one that is wholly emblematic of our society. they understand that i was anxious in the presence of so many cameras, that i hated the way these people wouldn't even respond when i asked them if they wanted popcorn or water. they do not understand that by being repeatedly and nonconsensually recorded to be used as fodder to fill some other stranger's FYP, we have all been violated in novel and frighteningly modern ways. they do not understand that the trajectory from influencer content to AI slop is a straight line. they do not understand that we are in a hell of our own making, and that it is filled with homunculi.

1. it is not lost on me that these influencers performed the precise task that they were asked to; they were there to advertise the business where i work, to drive up sales so that the executives and shareholders who own this business can make more money. it isn't any more comforting to know that my imagic reduction to a mere cog in this machine rather than a human being, is part and parcel of this whole mess.

there is little in this world that i hate more than moving. it requires much more discipline than i can muster, and it is a universally taxing affair, no matter how much one plans ahead. a year ago, after i finally finished my undergrad program, i planned to leave my backwater college town behind and move to the city. lacking any kind of savings or a friend to undertake the move with me, i elected instead to renew my lease, drawing out my stay for another year. i wasn't particularly happy with this development--i hated my job with a passion, and i had vanishingly few friends left in town. soon after, though, a friend who was also languishing on her degree moved in with her angelic hellion of a cat, and i managed to find another job that was more fulfilling than the last.

somehow, i felt happy for the first time in a long while. i spent hours on end talking to my roommate about the development of the english language and the production histories of various cartoon network shows, and at work i finally found myself among people that i could get along with and even befriend. though i spent every day bemoaning the fact that i was stuck in stillwater, the life i led was far from miserable.

still, i was conscious of the fact that all of my efforts to eke out a meaningful existence were only delaying the inevitable--i was going to have to leave stillwater at one point or another, closing the chapter of my life that i had remained in out of a pure resistance to change. i had loose plans to move to tulsa to start grad school in earnest, and even managed to snag a job transfer to another store there. this still felt like a half-measure, though--i wasn't particularly passionate about my grad program, and the thought of remaining in oklahoma wasn't all that enticing.

a couple of months ago, i made a friend through tinder. though i hate texting with a passion (see post "Email loneliness" below), i found myself texting them everyday; when we hung out in person, we talked well into the morning. they had mentioned that they were moving to Kansas City soon, which was a little bittersweet--i was sorry to be losing such a fast friend so soon. the second time we hung out, though, they asked me over dinner if i wanted to move to kansas city with them. i was, of course, taken aback, especially since i had known them all of two weeks. as i considered their invitation over the course of the next few days, though, i couldn't find a good reason not to take them up on their offer. my own moving plans were half-baked and non-committal, and i did want to get out of oklahoma sooner rather than later. it would be a trustfall, to be sure, but the lesbians do this kidn of thing all the time,a dnthey seem to be doing just fine.

a few days later, i got over myself and agreed to move with them. it's been more than a little overwhelming, and there are moments when i wonder whether i made the right call in moving here--i miss the familiarity of the town i hated, and part of me still feels nostalgic for even the most miserable times i spent there. the art of growth, though, is also the art of learning to let things die, and i'm thankful that i had the strength to let myself leave. the city is beautiful, and my roommate continues to prove themself a steadfast friend. i don't know what the future looks like now, but i finally feel free to imagine one.

like many, i have begrudgingly re-entered the star wars fold after many years of peace and quiet, free from the shackles of discourse. this return, of course, is the fault of andor, tony gilroy's excellent prequel to rogue one, gareth edwards' middling prequel to the original star wars. the show's existence is at once confounding and miraculous in a cultural landscape that celebrates endless, mindless regurgitations of IP from years gone by. the writer's room, which includes house of cards creator beau willimon, is far more interested in exploring the minute mechanics of fascism than it is in fulfilling the lightsaber-centric fantasies of lore fanatics.

that's not to say that the series is absent of glup shittos or references culled from the depths of star wars lore. indeed, one of the show's greatest achievements is excavating the gaps between lucas' work for material, and refining it to the point of perfection. the most prominent example of this dynamic is the character of mon mothma, a rebel leader whose first appearance was a 30-second bit part in return of the jedi. working backwards from her marginally larger role in rogue one, we see her beginnings as a dissenting senator from the planet chandrila, trying (and failing) to slow the spread of fascism through legislation. her arc, spread across the course of the show's two seasons, tracks her descent into the muck and mire of further radicalization as she slowly realizes the futility of her efforts. mon's primary enemy here is mccarty-esque whisper networks, her core conflict the question of whether or not the system can be torn down from the inside. bolstered by a measured, exasperated performance from genevieve o'reilly, the character attains a depth in excess of her relatively minor origins as a messenger for dead bothans.

i could go on and on about the particular ways gilroy's series manages to imbue the frame of star wars with politically-minded, ostensibly leftist storytelling that reflects our world with a startling clarity. i could wax poetic about how the series feels like both a return to lucas' vietnam war inspiration and a grand expansion upon it. i could praise gilroy for managing to use the word "genocide" in a show funded by the mouse house. better writers than i have already done so, though, so i will abstain.

to tell the truth, in the week or so since the final episodes aired (which moved me to tears), i have already found my love for the material receding into the horizon again. it's not that i suddenly find the show's treatment of our current political reality distasteful, or that i've merely fallen out of love with the beautiful work of art borne out of my childhood obsession. rather, i think that i have lost faith in it.

the problem, to put it bluntly, is that the show is simply too politically salient, too historically motivated, for its own good. though lucas' original vision for the series is unabashedly political, and borderline polemic, it acheived those ends through a narrative sleight-of-hand, wherein politically specific allegory is subsumed by the mythic form constructed around it. even when, as in his loop-closing prequels, the real-world referents become more painfully obvious, the campbellian myth still takes center stage.

andor, however, leaves this mythmaking at the margins, letting it seep its way in only when absolutely necessary. in all of its three-episode arcs, each story reaches as far as possible towards towards "realism," such as it is possible in the confines of sci-fi spectacle. the most moving (and arguably most direct) of these stories is the narkina 5 arc, wherein cassian is forced into prison slave labor as a result of his activity within the rebellion. the prisoners within the narkina 5 complex are almost universally average citizens of the empire, most trapped in the prison-industrial complex for reasons as arbitrary as they are in the US. over the course of three episodes, cassian fights (mostly in his own self-interest) to convince anyone around him to attempt a collective escape. his primary target is kino loy, a prisoner tasked with keeping his cellmates in line as they unknowingly contruct parts for the death star. though kino repeatedly refuses to join in any such plan, he is finally moved to action when it is revealed that, contrary to what they've been told, no one is being released from the prison at the end of their sentence--they are being funneled straight back into the prison, moved around in the complex to avoid suspicion.

the narrative at play in this arc is so clear, so direct, that it ceases to be allegory and becomes instead a narrative culled from the real-world and merely adorned with the aesthetics and trappings of science-fiction. this is part of what makes the series work so well--there is very little undressing required to find the real-world referents, and even less to be moved by them. it makes for exceedingly compelling television, thought-provoking and rousing in equal measure. it is an escapist fantasy wherein the world the audience is escaping from is a near-perfect replica of the world they enter when they gaze into the television screen.

so why, after investing so many hours in such an engrossing and moving story, do i feel so empty? good fiction, good art, often behaves in this manner, and it is a form i crave and seek out. part of this, no doubt, is that in andor's case, it ultimately serves a wider narrative that is far inferior to its own. rewatching rogue one, i feel brief pangs of grief for the characters that i have retroactively invested in, but mostly i'm bored, wishing i could go back to my memory of the film colored with the depth and grace of its prequel. another part of my dissatisfaction almost certainly stems from its provenance as the product of an ontologically evil cultural monopoly, one that is also listed as a target of the BDS boycott.

taken alone, these do not sufficiently account for a wholesale loss of faith. good art often comes to us from places of evil, individual or corporate, and it is not a mortal sin for an artist to use a cheap canvas to paint a masterpiece. ultimately, i have lost faith in this particular kind of image, one which gestures towards its model but does not name it. in recognizing the stranger, isabella hammad asserts that "in the language of both law and literary form...recognition is akind of knowing that should incur the responsibility to act for it to have any value beyond personal epiphanies, or appeasing the critics of the one doing the recognizing." andor makes for a very good mirror, clear and unblemished in its reflection of our world. the problem lies in the frame, in the vanity lights that adorn the image we gaze into. it's so much easier to settle into this reflection than to turn around.

i think i might be autistic. heavy emphasis on the might, because aside from a few go-rounds on the raads-r and and a series of suspicious anecdotes, i have no hard data or official diagnosis. it seems more likely than not, in any case, and it would account for much in my life that i have been unable to make sense of until now.

in high school, i would try to make it a point to say hello to people i knew in the hall as a part of some long-standing effort to be more sociable. i was liked by others well enough, and most were kind enough to oblige me with a reply, though i'm sure it was mildly annoying to call back among the crowded halls. a strange trend emerged, however, subtle but persistent: some would respond in the pitched-up, drawn-out tone reserved only for children or the mentally handicapped (you know the one), turning a simple "hello" into a grand statement of barely-hidden condescension. i would lie awake at night, wondering what exactly was meant by this tone of voice. surely they know that i'm normal, i thought to myself, surely they can see that i'm not like the kids who need to be corralled into the SPED room. we're in the same class of people, you and i, cut from the same neurotypical cloth.

i never did figure out exactly why they responded that way, and i'm far enough removed from the experience that i can lock the memory away with all the other mild social horrors of high school. to tell the truth, i didn't think about it all that much until i took the raads-r on a whim a few months back. i expected a slightly above-average score, some median number that would tell me "you're kind of weird, but mostly normal." the site returned a score of 136, which is, in fact, the mean--for autistic participants.

i've been more than a little haunted by that number in the intervening months, perhaps ascribing too much power to a mildly controversial self-diagnostic. for whatever it's worth, though, none of my friends were all that surprised when i told them. my roommate, who took the test because she saw the same tiktok, scored somewhere in the 80s, and her boyfriend, the most normal man i have ever met, scored a 42. about as incontrovertable as evidence gets, i think.

i'd love nothing more than to receive an official diagnosis from a licensed professional, but the current state of affairs makes such a decision seem inadvisable. human shitstain rfk, jr. is touting plans to both concretely identify the "cause" of autism and create a registry to track autistic americans. my own shithole state recently passed a bill that would allow autistic oklahomans to self-identify through a discreet marker on their IDs. as an already too-visible transfemme, collecting actionable data for the state regarding my neurodivergence seems like a Bad Idea, to put it mildly.

even if i could comfortably get myself a diagnosis, i'm not sure how much, if at all, it would really help beyond calming my nerves. i told my dad, who i am almost certain is also on the spectrum, that he ought to get tested, but he waved it off. (it's worth noting that he has apparently been told many times by those around him that he might be autistic, which is very funny to me.) when i asked him why he was so averse, he told me that it wouldn't, couldn't, even, change much for him at this stage in his life. i was suprised at his dismissal, but i'm beginning to think that there might be a kernel of wisdom in his position. what would concretely change for me, aside from gaining a document to point at when i find myself hopelessly unable to communicate with others?

there is also the outside chance, of course, that i am autistic and asocial, that the qualities that make it difficult for me to be a Normal Human Being are in fact intrinsic to my own moral character. maybe i'm a bad person, a bad friend who just so happens to fall somewhere on the spectrum. a diagnosis might only allow me to deflect genuine self-criticism, keeping me safe in the knowledge that i was just Born This Way.

at the end of the day, there's no way of knowing. i'm equally unsure of my status as a bad person or an autistic one, and i fear that i'll only make the situation worse by dwelling on either possibility. all i know is that i haven't felt very much like a human being lately. maybe i just need to try harder, to say hello to everyone i see in the halls. maybe one day i will wake up and find myself perfectly integrated into the human race, free from any fear of being "other," loving and loved in return.

i realized recently that i hate texting with a deep, boundless passion. i think it is an ontologically evil form of communication, and should only be used as a stopgap for the most mundane needs. it is too immediate, too demanding of our time--it makes no room for anything but the present moment. maybe i'm being dramatic, but i think the sooner we as a society realize this, the better off we will be in the long term.

most of the texts i send to my friends these days revolve around one or two shared interests--a spotify link to a remix of a song we both like, a headline teasing a filmmaker's new work. months will go by between these messages, and the interactions that result from them could hardly be called conversations. we exchange a few messages of excitement, and the the silence resumes until something of interest comes across our screens again.

one of my friends, a good friend who i love very much, has become the friend i only text about sally rooney. as i was reading through her book beautiful world, where are you, i would send him pictures of my favourite passages, and we'd gush a little over the beauty of her prose. (she is, for the record, highly inventive and formally innovative in a way few authors are, even if her thematic development is a little stagnant at times.) one of the few criticisms he levied at her work was that her use of emails as a mode of communication between characters was severely outdated, and didn't reflect the way that young people actually communicated with each other. a fair critique, although it is possible that irish millenials really do email each other that much. in any event, i responded with some equivalent of "fuck that", and asked him for his email address.

over the past few months, we've developed the kind of correspondence that i used to dream about, the kind you only find in 19th century romantic novels. as someone who struggles with both face-to-face conversations and any form of instant text message, the epistolary form has been the saving grace of my connection with the human race--it allows me to revel in language's expressive capabilities, to be affectionate and depressed and ecstatic in long form. (an underrated perk of writing letters to your friends is that you get to say things like "i love you" without any embarrassment.) it allows me to take my time in crafting some meaningful account of my life, and my friend is gracious enough to do the same in his messages to me.

whenever one of his letters reaches my inbox, my day is made, and i feel immense joy at reading about his life, even when he's doing less than stellar. sometimes in my excitement i draft a reply immediately upon reading it, saddling him with the mundane details of my existence. most of the emails i send him are about my persistent loneliness: an abortive crush on a co-worker, insecurities about my mildly autistic way of communicating. i'm sure he must tire of hearing about these things, but he's never anything less than graceful.

though such a correspondence helps to dull the loneliness somewhat, there inevitably comes a time when i have to wait for his reply. i feel loneliest in these waiting periods, and i wonder whether i have any real, abiding connections to the world around me. i swipe through bumble, i open up my messages app to find no one has replied to my texts quite yet. in the minute after i sat down to write this, a bell tone rang from my computer, and a red dot nestled itself above my email tab. it's not a subscription or a tuition bill, thank god. i feel bad writing this self-indulgent nonsense instead of writing him back, but i think i'm going to sit with this one for a minute.

my arthritis is flaring up again. most of the time i manage just fine, but the cold has seeped into my bones and split them open at the nerves. at work, i try not to grimace with every step i take, with little success. my coworker carries me through closing, and when i try to apologize for not being much help, she brushes it off with humiliating grace. i try not to overstate it, because i hate being dramatic, i hate being a burden, i hate being the sometimes-cripple who won't shut up about it. i don't mention it at all if i can help it. i just forgot it could get this bad.

i was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis when i was 22. at the time, i was frightened and angry--my nascent fear of death and decay grew at an alarming rate as i tried to wrap my mind around a corporeal degeneration i thought lay years ahead of me. i scorned the god i half-believed in, adamant that i was too young to deal with this. job's cries became my own, giving voice to an internal drama working its way across my body. no whirlwind came for me, and i learned to put such thoughts out of my mind.

i don't begrudge my younger self for reacting so dramatically, but i wish i had learned the rules of pain a little sooner. what the book of job does not account for in its bodily theodicy is the fact that pain is, in most permutations, fairly mundane. it resides within the body, not outside of it, and its materiality is complicated as a result. it is largely invisible, and communicating it to others is a tightrope act of linguistic intensity. sympathy might be offered, deadlines might be extended, but the scope of aid that can be offered is ultimately limited. at a certain point, you get all the help you're going to, and it's time to go back to work.

as i write this, i feel my forearms creaking, beginning to buckle under minimal amounts of strain. later today, when i hoist the ice bucket over the bev station or sweep the crumbs off of the floor, i'll probably wish i had spent this time resting, steeling myself against the ache i knew was coming. this hasn't helped much, anyway--pain is just pain, and no amount of writing or philosophizing will diminish it or transform it into something beautiful. still, i would rather write about pain than writhe in it, letting the ache consume my every waking moment. at least i wrote something. at least i tried.

do you ever feel insane? like, totally-off-your-rocker, need-to-be-put-in-a-facility, incapable-of-basic-human-interaction insane? does this insanity reside inside you like a sickness you can't get over, infecting your every thought, every movement, until it's all you can do not to tear your skin off to find its source?

i don't ask this merely as a rhetorical way of making my neuroses your problem, though i do tend toward such dramatic gestures more often than not. my problems are my own, and i can't write my way out of the labyrinth they lay in my mind. i'm just trying to get a pulse, and i'm wondering if yours ever feels quite this erratic.

so i feel insane, and maybe you do, too. what gives? what is the point of infection for an illness such as this? what salve could ease the itch it causes?

i think the affliction is both more pervasive and invisible than it might initially seem. the issue at hand is not one of maintaining constant self-care, or finding the right outlets for emotional excess. that's all well and good--important, even--but the issue is at once exponentially greater and infinitesimally smaller: it's the question of how to move through the world, one that does not feel built for people such as you and i.

feeling different or unaccounted for is not a particularly novel experience, though our diary entries from when we were 12 might suggest otherwise. to be human is to be utterly unique, and to be unique is, in some sense, to be alone, solitary and painfully discrete. humanity, in its great collective wisdom, has developed a foolproof workaround for this issue, however--with the gift of language, we gained the ability to create categories, neat little boxes into which we can collect distinct qualities and distinguish them from each other with particular linguistic utterances. points of commonality and difference are efficiently established, and we can feel comfortable in the boxes that have been provided for us. they provide convenient rules of existence, points of reference by which we can easily navigate interaction with others depending on our degrees of proximity to them. simply put, these boxes allow for streamlined, socially sanctioned ways of moving through the world.

again, this isn't an especially novel idea--i'm sure any trained sociologist could tell you as much in a more succinct manner--but it points towards the nebulous, intangible anxiety that i feel now. what i'm really interested in is what exactly happens when these boxes begin to break down, and the disorientation that occurs as a consequence.

in her landmark book queer phenomenology, sara ahmed writes that "bodies as well as objects take shape through being orientated toward each other, as an orientation that may be experienced as the co-habitation or sharing of space."¹ phenomenological orientations, she argues, dictate our direction in life, broadly speaking, as our "bodies tend toward some objects more than others," acquiring new directions in the process.² the queer body, then, is necessarily disoriented, as it radically diverges from normative orientations and charts new pathways through its experience of the world.

when ahmed writes about disorientation in this way, one can't help but feel excited, as it intimates an infinite horizon of possibility for queer experience. that isn't to say that her vision of queer phenomenology is all sunshine and roses--she is frank about the difficulties of such a process, and the often less-than-ideal realities of being queer in a world such as ours. still, there's a radical optimism in her work that's almost infectious.

almost--for this particular queer body, it's difficult to even be pragmatic, much less optimistic. there's no doubt that the pains of phenomenological disorientation have allowed for great joys to blossom in my life. my assent to my latent bisexuality at the age of 19 disoriented me, to be sure, but it allowed me to re-orient myself as a trans-gender, trans-sexual body, acquiring new directions that i wouldn't have been able to take otherwise--the expansion of my sexual orientation(s) dislodged me from the comfortable position of heteronormativity, allowing me to inhabit my body, my self, more truthfully.

the problem is that the disorientation never fully subsided. as a particularly clocky transsexual, this experience of disorientation is a near-constant fixture of my experience in the world. though my femininity is an inherent, immutable fact of my being, its external reality is almost entirely dependent on the disposition of whoever is looking. this manifests in a myriad of mundane ways: misgendering, overcorrection, exclusion, errant inclusion, insensitive questions, overconfident assertions--the list goes on. i am Schrodinger's Tranny, at once both man and woman, trans and cis, gay and straight, human and inhuman and sub-human and super-human.

this super(im)position of multiple states upon my singular body continuously disorients me in space-time, preventing me from finding any solid footing as i try to make my way through the world. i am constantly dislodged from myself, unmoored from my own experience of the world. to be sure, this would be at least partially ameliorated by passing just a little bit more, but i think even the most successfully passing transsexuals might tell you something similar. the ultimate effect of this quantum-phenomenological projection is one of near-total dematerialization, an obliteration of the body as it is fractured into a multiplicity of irreconcilable perceptions. "i'm not queer," william lee says in a dream, "i'm disembodied."³

it's no wonder, then, that i so often feel insane--i am constantly at odds with the world around me, unable to find a point from which i can move forward. every move is lateral at best, as i do what i can to dodge the psychic blasts beaming in from every direction. i'd like very much not to feel this way anymore. don't you?

ahmed asserts that "queer does not reside in a body or an object, and is dependent on the mutuality of support," and she is right to say so.⁴ i'm thankful to have a handful of queer friends who i can depend on, friends in whose company i am nothing more and nothing less than myself. they are the reason i keep going at all--if i didn't have them in my corner, i'm sure this insanity would have eaten me alive. for now, it'll have to be enough for us to stave off the rot together, one day at a time.

^{1. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 54.↩}

^{2. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 58.↩}

^{3. Queer, directed by Luca Guadagnino. (A24, 2024).↩}

^{4. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 170.↩}

tomorrow, i'll be 24 years old. the thought has caused me some great anxiety, and i've been at a loss to explain why. it's not, i don't think, the fear of getting older, though that's certainly mixed in there somewhere. i'm conscious of the fact that, though i'm getting older, i am still young, with much time ahead of me. it's the time behind me that i fret the most about.

i've found in recent years that i am a very slow person. i don't mean "slow" in the perjorative sense; rather, i am slow in the way that i move through the world. i am slow to respond, slow to understand; above all, i am slow to change. when i was 19, i watched sally potter's adaptation of orlando in a film class, and felt my eggshell cracking. though i came out as bisexual months before, and non-binary a year later, it would be three more years before i was miserable enough to admit that my body was insufficient for the task of externalizing my inner self.

this dynamic has permeated most every aspect of my life, with varying degrees of consequence. it took me five years to finish college, four to get over my first real relationship. i've been reading the brothers karamazov for over a month, and i've barely cracked 250 pages. i've accepted this as a more or less immutable quality about myself, but it doesn't change the fact that the person i am now is who i wish i could've been at 21.

years ago, at a party without an occasion, i was talking with a friend. i was asking him about the things that he was working on (he is a very talented fiction writer, a gift which i envy greatly), and he indulged me in summaries and pitches of his short stories and hopeful novels. telling me about one of his favourite writers, one who he hoped to emulate, he said, "i'm young enough to dream about what i'll be when i grow up." drunk and filled with love for humankind, i was so struck by what he said that i stopped listening as intently as i should have; later, as i lay on his couch, head spinning, i frantically typed it into my notes app, hoping to stave off forgetfulness.

over the years, i've opened up that note many a time, trying to mold it into a suitable lyric. a month ago, i finally managed to write it into a song, a cheesy, hannah diamond-esque pop tune that borrows much more from my idols than it innovates. i gave myself until my birthday to finish the final mix. i'm still not satisfied with how it sounds, and i've moved the deadline to valentine's day. if i ever finish it, i'll let you know.

i've been so preoccupied with the final product that i managed to forget what exactly moved me about my friend's beautiful, offhand words. i am trying to believe them now, repeating them like a mantra: i'm young enough to dream about what i'll become, i'm young enough to dream, i'm still young enough...