![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[ contains self-examination and maunderings about closets, performances, territory, isfet, and being real. ]
First thread:
There is a perspective from which I can say I grew up in a fairy tale. This is ... not an original metaphor, I got it from a book. The exact nature of the fairy tale is not entirely relevant and not public; let's just take it as a structural metaphor.
One of the consequences of growing up in that sort of structure is that reality winds up being weird and squishy. I don't have confidence in a couple of areas that a lot of people seem to take for granted, because I grew up in circumstances where I couldn't trust that my perceptions of reality were valid; my senses, memory, and internal self-perceptions are all unreliable witnesses.
I set up my life with a lot of external-to-me structuring on these things so that I have verifiable touchstones, ways of confirming my own memory and making sure it checks against the real world. (And we get here into the theology of witnessing: my tendency to make explicit commitments and promises is in part a means of making them real enough to survive even the undertow of my self-doubt. As is, I suspect, my tendency to repeat connection-building statements fairly frequently; it's explicitly Naming them into my environment. And receiving such things partially overcomes my inability to trust extrapolations from current behaviour patterns; I have a specific thing that I can evaluate on a simpler level.)
Second thread:
Now the theological bit. I'm not going to go into a deep theological exegesis on the concept of isfet; I've done it before and that's a whole entry of its own anyway. Naming, being, creation, existence are opposed by it.
I've always been of the opinion that the way isfet manifests in different people's lives will be different depending on their natures, that whatever things particularly gnaw away at their senses of self will be individual and finely tuned.
The big one of mine is being closeted. Feeling that I have to conceal parts of who I am hits all of my negation-of-self buttons. I don't feel the need to go and stand on people's toes and shout in their faces about it -- next up, the Green Monkey Politics entry, followup to Liberty and License -- but if I have to actively conceal it, the process of doing so suffocates me. It processes to me as an un-Naming, an unmaking of parts of myself, which is tremendously destructive to my sanity.
Third thread:
I get weird and compulsive about what's mine and what's not, consent boundaries and the like. I do a lot of work on having my life as mine, and do an intermittently decent job of it, I think. But knowing what's mine and what isn't is one of those systematisations and touchstones, I think, at least in part. If I'm not confident something is mine I get into major doubt-loops about it; if I am confident something is mine, it doesn't get threatened by stuff that doesn't actually threaten it.
My territory, my space; I get touchy about things that intrude into areas that I consider under my dominion, places I feel that I should have some sort of control.
Braiding:
One of the things that I have to deal with in the echoes of a fairy tale childhood is the sense of being on stage, being dragged into a performance, off my own real territory and into a sort of play-acting setup. I know all the lines, but the scope of action is limited and breaking role has consequences. This wears away at me, unmakes my reality, tries to cut me down into a role.
When I'm dealing with this, I have to work the balance between the performance and who I am, and balance the drama that comes of breaking 'character' against the personal damage I take from being truncated down that far. There are places I react strongly from that place of being-on-stage, and this is, as a general rule, not good for me; at the same time, I really get twitchy about the unpredictability of things outside them. At least I mostly know the rules if I stick to the script, and the untrustworthiness of memory and being is less relevant.
I've worked at building my life away from the playacting, as much as can be done when all the scripts and direction are in my head.
But being closeted hits all those buttons -- that sense of nonconsensual performance, putting on a false persona in order to satisfy the impulses of someone else's drama. I can't live like that; it's a half-life at best, Pinocchio without strings but still, somehow, lacking breath and blood and bone.
First thread:
There is a perspective from which I can say I grew up in a fairy tale. This is ... not an original metaphor, I got it from a book. The exact nature of the fairy tale is not entirely relevant and not public; let's just take it as a structural metaphor.
One of the consequences of growing up in that sort of structure is that reality winds up being weird and squishy. I don't have confidence in a couple of areas that a lot of people seem to take for granted, because I grew up in circumstances where I couldn't trust that my perceptions of reality were valid; my senses, memory, and internal self-perceptions are all unreliable witnesses.
I set up my life with a lot of external-to-me structuring on these things so that I have verifiable touchstones, ways of confirming my own memory and making sure it checks against the real world. (And we get here into the theology of witnessing: my tendency to make explicit commitments and promises is in part a means of making them real enough to survive even the undertow of my self-doubt. As is, I suspect, my tendency to repeat connection-building statements fairly frequently; it's explicitly Naming them into my environment. And receiving such things partially overcomes my inability to trust extrapolations from current behaviour patterns; I have a specific thing that I can evaluate on a simpler level.)
Second thread:
Now the theological bit. I'm not going to go into a deep theological exegesis on the concept of isfet; I've done it before and that's a whole entry of its own anyway. Naming, being, creation, existence are opposed by it.
I've always been of the opinion that the way isfet manifests in different people's lives will be different depending on their natures, that whatever things particularly gnaw away at their senses of self will be individual and finely tuned.
The big one of mine is being closeted. Feeling that I have to conceal parts of who I am hits all of my negation-of-self buttons. I don't feel the need to go and stand on people's toes and shout in their faces about it -- next up, the Green Monkey Politics entry, followup to Liberty and License -- but if I have to actively conceal it, the process of doing so suffocates me. It processes to me as an un-Naming, an unmaking of parts of myself, which is tremendously destructive to my sanity.
Third thread:
I get weird and compulsive about what's mine and what's not, consent boundaries and the like. I do a lot of work on having my life as mine, and do an intermittently decent job of it, I think. But knowing what's mine and what isn't is one of those systematisations and touchstones, I think, at least in part. If I'm not confident something is mine I get into major doubt-loops about it; if I am confident something is mine, it doesn't get threatened by stuff that doesn't actually threaten it.
My territory, my space; I get touchy about things that intrude into areas that I consider under my dominion, places I feel that I should have some sort of control.
Braiding:
One of the things that I have to deal with in the echoes of a fairy tale childhood is the sense of being on stage, being dragged into a performance, off my own real territory and into a sort of play-acting setup. I know all the lines, but the scope of action is limited and breaking role has consequences. This wears away at me, unmakes my reality, tries to cut me down into a role.
When I'm dealing with this, I have to work the balance between the performance and who I am, and balance the drama that comes of breaking 'character' against the personal damage I take from being truncated down that far. There are places I react strongly from that place of being-on-stage, and this is, as a general rule, not good for me; at the same time, I really get twitchy about the unpredictability of things outside them. At least I mostly know the rules if I stick to the script, and the untrustworthiness of memory and being is less relevant.
I've worked at building my life away from the playacting, as much as can be done when all the scripts and direction are in my head.
But being closeted hits all those buttons -- that sense of nonconsensual performance, putting on a false persona in order to satisfy the impulses of someone else's drama. I can't live like that; it's a half-life at best, Pinocchio without strings but still, somehow, lacking breath and blood and bone.
Tags:
From:
no subject
No, really. Please to ignore the huge ritual I've coordinated for the last nine years. That's an exercise in applied logistics and guerilla memetics; the fact that I have to dance around in a silly costume is a regrettable but necessary aspect. If we had more people involved, I could sit at the side of the room and hand people props instead of trying to yell over the crowd.
I hate that "oooh, everyone look at MMEEEEEE!" feeling. I hate the aftermath, looking over what I've said & done and realizing it didn't go nearly as well as I'd've liked. (It never does. The performance in my fantasy world, regardless of situation, is impossible as long as the laws of physics continue to apply.)
I rather enjoy closets; jumping out of them & scaring people is such fun. (I've also been known to hold on to a good pun for several years, waiting for the opportunity to slip it into conversation.)
Consider this:
We're all born naked. Everything after that is drag. (Radical Faerie quote.)
Of course, nobody wants to be stuck in drag they don't like, and that seems to be the problem. But it helps (me, anyway) to not separate my "real self" from my "business self" or my "deal-with-gov't self" or my "talk with Christian neighbors self." It's all my real self; some of it is just more directly involved with activities I enjoy.
But just as I can deal with moving boxes around to clear the living room for a party--even though I don't actually *like* moving heavy boxes, and I can't wear my nifty costuming while doing it--I can deal with talking to the manager at work about a raise in order to make enough money to throw the same party--even though I don't like doing it, and I can't wear my nifty costumes.
You may not have to actively conceal as much as you'd thought. I'm constantly amazed at what people will assume if you don't go out of your way to tell them otherwise, enough to worry about the ethics of manipulation in letting them believe.
From:
no subject
--the fundamentalist Christian classmate who's one of my best friends at school and yet is completely unable to peg that I am a giant flaming pagan. ;)
He's likewise been gently corrected on the assumption that the hotness of girls doesn't matter to me-- "well, no, see, it *does,* I just have a boyfriend." He has yet to lynch me, so I must've done it pretty well.
From:
no subject
I know a similar one attributed to Ru Paul. It's why I have a tag and photo gallery each labelled 'all drag'.
You may not have to actively conceal as much as you'd thought.
I don't actively conceal anything. Not since my parents' divorce was finalised.
I just know that when I run into encounters with fairy tale land, the whole reality/fantasy borderland gets extremely stressy.