100 Pages in 9 days
and I have all of you to thank.
I’m in the middle of a project that, for all its weirdness, means everything to me. The thrust of it is that whoever we are and whatever we passionately profess to believe, we’ve got these primal drives underneath all of it that demand their outlets too, and that can have us living out, by demands of our bodies, a life that goes wildly against the one we think we should be living. That sounds like a euphemistic way to say “come on now people, it’s all about sex,” which isn’t actually my point, though this thing has a lot of sex-stuff in it by necessity. It goes deeper than that: I’m talking about gendered conditioning, hundreds of years of reinforced norms etched so deeply that they get under our skins without us being aware of them. I’ve lived a lot of unplanned and cinematically dramatic lessons over the past year that taught me more than a thing or two about how that works.
Which is why, at this stage, this project is a memoir, but I don’t know if it’ll stay that way. It details, I mean like really details even by my standards, several impactful instances that a lot of people don’t know about, and in the interest of at least one person who’d be very hurt if they did know, it might be best to whip out the “it’s a story” for this one. We’ll see. Everything’s a story blah blah blah.
Why I’m telling all of you about this is because I couldn’t have done it without you. It’s fashionable to play it cool when you get a new subscriber to your Thing, but the fact is, I am continually shocked and delighted to know how many of you are actually reading this shit. I had no idea, when I started this, what precisely would happen as a result. All I knew is I was sick of some things, and screaming for minutes on end in my house was simply not doing it for me anymore.
I don’t feel like I hold back for you. I write with trust, and for seven months now, you’ve caught me. That means that when I write in private, pages that no one at this stage is intended to see, I have unprecedented freedom. I’ve never experienced anything like it. From writing 100 no-holds-barred pages that flowed like blood over the course of 9 days, I’ve learned this:
I am scary.
Which is great! Because prior to now I’ve felt oppressed and supressed, like the reason certain normative people get all nervous and weird around me is because they don’t appreciate un-quiet voices and they have viserally negative reactions to assertiveness combined with tits and also they hate disabled people and won’t fucking admit it. True! But regardless! Regardless of every facet of bigotry my existence cannot help but ignite/excite in certain bigots, I am a terrifying human being.
They’re…they’re right to be a little afraid. They have to be right, if I wrote my own sentences, read my own damn thought back to myself using the stuff above my reptilian brain, and thought “am I fucking SERIOUS? Is…is that what I want?”
No matter the answer, for right now. I’ve accepted that there’s the me writing this that wants healthy fulfilling things and then there’s the me writing that that doesn’t care
about a thing except pleasure at its most head-exploding intensity. Fine. I don’t really have to do anything with these parallel wants. All I have to make sure of is that I keep control of which one controls which set of actions I take. Making a project about it, telling a story about it, feeling like I have something to say vis-à-vis all of it helps. I owe to brilliant writers in particular, on top of all of you and your readership: Francesca Lia Block, who helped me find a form for it when it was just a set of ideas bursting out from me, and my dear friend Addie Tsai, whose words of encouragement when I summarized the whole thing obliterated any residual self-doubt.
100 pages is not the end, not even close, but it’s a milestone, and this is a thank you to every single one of you for helping me get there without even realizing you were doing it. My guess is all of you do a lot of great things for a lot of people in your life without even realizing you’re doing it. So I’ll thank you on their behalf, too.
