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Boy is taking a shower and I am sitting here reflecting on the strangeness that is my life after 25 years.
It's weird to wake up, almost 26, and know – not realise, but know – how you got here, in a weird, shambling way of left-turns-down-alleys and oh-it'll-be-okays. It's not always okay.
The trick, I've found, is that the baseline of okay is hard to pin down. Without going into a starving-children-in-Africa model, a hierarchy of needs – my needs – is split into several tiers.
Tier one: survive. There's the living-organism survival level: sufficient food, clean water, hygiene, air, housing.
That's a bullshit level of sustenance because surviving should come with a lower floor standard-of-living. That's the tricky part that took me years to figure out. At fifteen I thought: if I can but earn enough money, I can survive to buy the food, water, hygiene, and housing I need to go on. Air is even free.
That, too, is bullshit. At least for me. To jump on another terrible analogy: there are ties that bind. There will always be ties that bind, for me, because I didn't grow up in a box but rather a small palace of opportunity. I have never gone hungry, I have never suffered financial insecurity in any concrete sense, I have never been subjected to a kind of systematic or structural discrimination* that I could not buy, bully, or break past.
That's still bullshit. Being given more, or different, pieces of armour doesn't make you invincible. I thought I could pick up and move across the world, go to school there, make friends, form a life, and that my past would line up like obedient soldiers and that things would just work.
They don't. Even with all the support in the world, because I've got fantastic financial support from my family and also emotional support now that I'm not in a relationship I've got to hide all the time, it doesn't just work. Cleverness and adaptability don't change the fact that the world is fucked up and cruel, arbitrary in places and utterly random in others. Arbitrary and random are also not the same words – another thing that it's taken me a quarter century to find out.
A random life happening is walking out your door one day and getting hit by a truck, or meeting somebody and thinking it'll be a one-time encounter and having them change your life, or getting given decaf when you didn't ask for it. Randomness has no internal logic: whether a random event is good or bad or neutral is a reflection of the person it happens to.
Arbitrary things are far more cruel. Arbitrarily, an immigration official in this country could ruin my life. I doubt it would be random. People react arbitrarily. Not randomly.
So, tier one survival is harder than you think it is. Because if surviving means 'having basic needs taken care of in such a way you can go on and dedicate your processing power to other shit, like improving yourself', I would go back and kick myself at 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21 in the head for thinking that being taken care of meant I wouldn't take damage.
Moving and relocating has been a car crash. Whether or not I had good intentions or good feelings before taking this chance doesn't matter anymore. What matters are the broken bones of leaving family and friends behind, of always wondering will something go wrong with some bugfuck piece of paper, of wondering-but-not-wondering why I don't fit in a place. Part of it is where I've ended up. Part of it is that no matter where I end up, it won't be where I came from. And that that matters.
If tier one survival is waking up in the morning and thinking just about where the money to spend and save is going to come from, I'm not there yet. I'm not going to be there for a long while, even as I'm coasting along monetarily and so on.
I wonder what it is about the word "bi" that kind of fucks everything up. Bisexual, bicultural, bipolar – it just comes around to being complicated, and there are days where I swear to god I feel like a television LGBT character with a knife in my hand wanting to scream, STRAIGHT PEOPLE DON'T GET IT, except in my case you search-and-replace "straight" with a whole variety of adjectival nouns.
I don't know where this post is going, but it's not... a bad one. It's a weird thing to come around and think: if all the shit in the world goes wrong right now, I will actually be somewhat relieved. I've spent such a long time building up moving, and education, and people in my head that even though I own this house I can't really get any time off in it, because I share it with another person. And god is it strange to come around and think: I can love and I can work and, at this point, I can say fuck it to all of those things, because the things that made me are elsewhere.
I guess this is a letter to my younger self:
* People matter
* But they're not everything
* You need more than one person
* You need your own reasons to do things
* You need a room of your own, in the real sense of the word
* If you don't have your own reasons, it's always wiser to be alone when you seek them out
* But never isolate yourself because you think seeking out your own things equals being on your own
So! I'm finally learning how to survive. Really, really survive. Fuck all the academic accolades, the praise from the workplace, the ways that I'm lucky. Learning how to breathe and be okay has taken this long, and even if I had most-of-it-all: armour isn't invincibility. Self-reliance isn't being alone. Relationships aren't zero-sum games. Work is just work. Keep your head up. And protect it.
It's weird to wake up, almost 26, and know – not realise, but know – how you got here, in a weird, shambling way of left-turns-down-alleys and oh-it'll-be-okays. It's not always okay.
The trick, I've found, is that the baseline of okay is hard to pin down. Without going into a starving-children-in-Africa model, a hierarchy of needs – my needs – is split into several tiers.
Tier one: survive. There's the living-organism survival level: sufficient food, clean water, hygiene, air, housing.
That's a bullshit level of sustenance because surviving should come with a lower floor standard-of-living. That's the tricky part that took me years to figure out. At fifteen I thought: if I can but earn enough money, I can survive to buy the food, water, hygiene, and housing I need to go on. Air is even free.
That, too, is bullshit. At least for me. To jump on another terrible analogy: there are ties that bind. There will always be ties that bind, for me, because I didn't grow up in a box but rather a small palace of opportunity. I have never gone hungry, I have never suffered financial insecurity in any concrete sense, I have never been subjected to a kind of systematic or structural discrimination* that I could not buy, bully, or break past.
That's still bullshit. Being given more, or different, pieces of armour doesn't make you invincible. I thought I could pick up and move across the world, go to school there, make friends, form a life, and that my past would line up like obedient soldiers and that things would just work.
They don't. Even with all the support in the world, because I've got fantastic financial support from my family and also emotional support now that I'm not in a relationship I've got to hide all the time, it doesn't just work. Cleverness and adaptability don't change the fact that the world is fucked up and cruel, arbitrary in places and utterly random in others. Arbitrary and random are also not the same words – another thing that it's taken me a quarter century to find out.
A random life happening is walking out your door one day and getting hit by a truck, or meeting somebody and thinking it'll be a one-time encounter and having them change your life, or getting given decaf when you didn't ask for it. Randomness has no internal logic: whether a random event is good or bad or neutral is a reflection of the person it happens to.
Arbitrary things are far more cruel. Arbitrarily, an immigration official in this country could ruin my life. I doubt it would be random. People react arbitrarily. Not randomly.
So, tier one survival is harder than you think it is. Because if surviving means 'having basic needs taken care of in such a way you can go on and dedicate your processing power to other shit, like improving yourself', I would go back and kick myself at 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21 in the head for thinking that being taken care of meant I wouldn't take damage.
Moving and relocating has been a car crash. Whether or not I had good intentions or good feelings before taking this chance doesn't matter anymore. What matters are the broken bones of leaving family and friends behind, of always wondering will something go wrong with some bugfuck piece of paper, of wondering-but-not-wondering why I don't fit in a place. Part of it is where I've ended up. Part of it is that no matter where I end up, it won't be where I came from. And that that matters.
If tier one survival is waking up in the morning and thinking just about where the money to spend and save is going to come from, I'm not there yet. I'm not going to be there for a long while, even as I'm coasting along monetarily and so on.
I wonder what it is about the word "bi" that kind of fucks everything up. Bisexual, bicultural, bipolar – it just comes around to being complicated, and there are days where I swear to god I feel like a television LGBT character with a knife in my hand wanting to scream, STRAIGHT PEOPLE DON'T GET IT, except in my case you search-and-replace "straight" with a whole variety of adjectival nouns.
I don't know where this post is going, but it's not... a bad one. It's a weird thing to come around and think: if all the shit in the world goes wrong right now, I will actually be somewhat relieved. I've spent such a long time building up moving, and education, and people in my head that even though I own this house I can't really get any time off in it, because I share it with another person. And god is it strange to come around and think: I can love and I can work and, at this point, I can say fuck it to all of those things, because the things that made me are elsewhere.
I guess this is a letter to my younger self:
* People matter
* But they're not everything
* You need more than one person
* You need your own reasons to do things
* You need a room of your own, in the real sense of the word
* If you don't have your own reasons, it's always wiser to be alone when you seek them out
* But never isolate yourself because you think seeking out your own things equals being on your own
So! I'm finally learning how to survive. Really, really survive. Fuck all the academic accolades, the praise from the workplace, the ways that I'm lucky. Learning how to breathe and be okay has taken this long, and even if I had most-of-it-all: armour isn't invincibility. Self-reliance isn't being alone. Relationships aren't zero-sum games. Work is just work. Keep your head up. And protect it.