And everyone will say "I told you so"...

[kiya]

they all just nod and sigh, but I made a run at something real and they never even tried.

("Spectators", the Crüxshadows.)


I had an argument today.

It's been a long time since I've been rendered this angry. (I got a warning for it, too. My first in a couple of years on the Dope.) I didn't quite go tunnel-vision on it, but I had the shakes. I also seem to have rage that effects me like decongestants: it clears out my sinuses and leaves me sort of dizzy and shaky until I have something substantial to eat.

The gist of why I was angry boils down to dealing with someone who appeared to be arguing that the only reason I love more than one person is that I'm in some way defective and had an abusive childhood, and the only people (well, specifically men; women were pitiable, men were "pigs") who would be involved with me under such circumstances would be abusers and assholes.

That's not actually relevant to what I'm writing about except for context, really.

A while ago, papersky responded to someone who had asked if a bad childhood was necessary to being a writer. She said something to the effect of, "You know, I had an unhappy childhood. And I had a happy childhood. I can tell stories about both. Life is complicated."

I think part of what gets me about the sort of fable-telling is that it ignores the complexities. I've run into a lot of these fables -- ranging from today's "the only way you could possibly be poly is because you were abused, poor thing" through to the disturbingly predatory, "if you weren't so sexually repressed you'd fuck me" into things like "if you don't make sure your children play with appropriately gendered toys they'll grow up queer" or "the only way you could hold that political position is if you're insane" -- and they're all looking for a nice simple button to push, to explain away the unwanted or uncommon result in some way, to make it something that can be turned into a story and thus put away on the shelf with the fiction. The stories are complete unto themselves; they don't need actual people in them except as dolls to act out the roles. The people who object to being made into marionettes are told that that refusal is proof that they're nothing more than puppets who are, at best, ignorant of their status as dolls.

I don't like being a character in someone else's story about how the world is. I have my own stories, and they don't have neat and tidy pushbuttons and tidy plotlines. They're messy like the world is messy, full of organic mush some of which smells pretty damn awful and which, when its good, makes some kickass fertiliser. That's the real stuff, down in the mulch, where reality grinds in under the nails. Fables have a point, they're a construction; living only has the points that the people doing it make of it, and those points don't necessarily correspond to the pretty little just-so stories that other people might want to make of their lives.

Today my story involved working on to-dos. It involved folding laundry. It involved curling up on my couch with arawen just being together, talking about stories we had told or were in the process of telling, talking about happy childhoods and unhappy childhoods and the wistfulness of parting. It involved discussing the Daily Show and chocolate with oneironaut and welcoming teinedreugan home and laughing at his Warcraft. I'm not making up a moral-to-the-tale; I'm not done with these stories.

I wrote a while back about transgression, about dealing with people who find me intrinsically transgressive, deviant, whatever, and dealing with that. The person who was being a jackass on the Dope wrote me an email to apologise, and I don't know how to respond. He wants to apologise 'if' he was presumptuous or offensive. If if if if if. If making up lies to justify his bigotry offends. If it presumes things that are untrue. If it tries to turn me into nothing more than a crippled story that explains things in terms of his preferred explanations for everything about the world. If.

I used to not talk about things because I was afraid of being made into a fable. The just-so story about the one that thing happened to. The archetype. The example of everything wrong with the world, sometimes.

I transgress, I transgress. I do not submit my life to conforming to pretty little stories, convenient and tied up with a shiny ribbon; I no longer submit to the fear of people trying to image me in the simplistic. I will be, even if it distresses the ones who want to fit everything into tidy little shoeboxes. ειμι!

and everyone will say "I told you so"
they'll all just nod and sigh
but I made a run at something real
and they never even tried
and everyone will say "I told you so"
yeah they'll all just nod and sigh
and tell me where I made my big mistake
they may just be surprised

Dua Set. Heh.

Comments

[lady-and-lion.livejournal.com]

Wow. I especially love the bit about unfinished stories.

I wish I had a more insightful comment, but nope, not today. I have writer's block? ;)