096.002 - March 10, 2012 Resolution
Rather than promising to finish a resolution later (and then never doing so because the Plates begin to attack me full-on), I took the time during two hour-long MAX Blue Line trips alone and isolated and vulnerable today to write this resolution. I will mention no other names, but obviously, this resolution is extremely provocative as it addresses a very traumatic series of events for me. I do not give complete information as to the what that happened here; I only give an explanation as to how the events that happened on March 10, 2012 shape what I am going to do in this new subera.
I do not succeed in all the endeavors I set out to do. Like a prototypical large-scope Sagittarius, I have scores of unfinished projects that I'll never get done. Those are failures, and that's okay. Infeasible work needs to be weeded out of my life in some manner, and things work out best when I'm working on a small number of projects at my level of skill. This way of mitigating tasks I have long accepted. I'm full of creative energy, but I only have so much training and so many resources to allocate to my tasks. Even though I have only had a few successes, the major problem is that some of my failures turn out to be tragically spectacular.
March 10 was one of those spectacular failures.
I did not learn of the results until two days later, when I had learned that I am fundamentally unable to identify humanity in anyone, even though I just had thought that I was able to identify humanity in anyone. I learned that I had been dehumanized, even though I felt intrinsically like I had salvaged the last scraps of my humanity. I learned that the punishment for my weakness, though, would be continued isolation and hatred. I learned that exile was not the only fruit of my failure to be a good representative of the transgender-polyamorous-"pansexual" (TPP) Plate. My punishment was to be the continued denial of rights, the continued denial of friendships, the continued denial of communal resources, the continued denial of shared experience.
The only comfort I have is that I have found the people who really love me, not the people I'm supposed to love. I want to be totally okay with this.
I am ill, but not in the way society perceives me to be ill. I acknowledge that society has a different view in who I am. They say that I am judged, that I am violent, that I am not to resist lest I be called passive-aggressive, that my quiet pain should be punished, and that it is my fault that I have social anxiety, my fault that I have dissociation, my fault that I have gender dysphoria. And these aren't the right-wings that say I have these things; it's the doctors and the activists and the left who say I do.
But I hate all judging; of course I do, I have social anxiety disorder. I've taken a nonviolence vow because of Occupy. I resist however I have to because I have to survive, physically and literally, not some abstract concept of mental games that people would have you believe with my health. I'm quiet because I am naturally introverted; just because I'm not waving my arms around doesn't mean that I'm not hurt or that I'm not empathic. And it is not my fault that my genetics and my gender and my environment all load me with conditions that would make your psychiatrist or physician faint and give up, like the last two did on me. No, no, no, no, no. I am who I am.
Moreover, oppressed people say that I am the oppressor, even though I experience increased levels of oppression due to intersectionality. Oppressed people forget that privilege is not universal; it is iterative (recursive). When those with no rights tell you that you have no rights, you really have no rights. I am the one that the rejected reject.
I will recloset my transgender status (but not my feminine status) as I do with my so-called lesbianism. This does not necessarily make me technically not-transgender, just as I'm not technically not-lesbian. It puts me in the awkward gray area. I do not have the right to be a Trans Woman[tm], though, even though being trans has nothing to do with having rights. I am not a human, though I have the DNA of one. I am forced to be perfect lest one of my intersectionality axes tumble over my head again. Nothing is allowed for me. It's the transgender divorce all over again, another attack from some disenfranchised angry Twitter woman who has nothing better to do than to spread hate amongst her own people and to ruin our chances for reacquiring our rights. Nothing is allowed for me. I'm too much hated for this.
Yet, none of this is really representative of the illness I suffer. I am sick because of my social anxiety disorder alone, and a relentless parade of various activists (NOT RIGHT WINGERS OR OPPOSITIONAL SEXISTS) intentionally stoke my insecurity, demand my perfection, haze me out of groups, and do other cruel bullying acts TO KEEP WHITES IN POWER. There, I said it. It is indeed a jump in logic, to be certain, but if you don't know how I got from one to the other, you haven't been paying attention to the subtext and to the patterns and to the inclinations of other people. If you don't want to pay attention, please get out of my life.
I demand that during this subera, I will get my healing. I demand that you get out of my way. I will use every tool in my disposal to get such healing in my life, and I don't care how important your righteousness agenda is. I am a human, and I will have this respected before I engage in further dialogue. And saying that "Taryn, you're a human" is not it; stopping your hate of me will be the critical component.
The safe space provided by the activist narrative is a joke. It's not a safe space: it's the total destruction of language itself. Safe space is not the avoidance of triggers; it's a place where those triggers can undergo reprogramming (usually reappropriation) so as to turn elements of shame into elements of pride. It is a place where triggers do go off, but they go off safely because the space is safe, not that the triggers destroy the safe space. I want Safe Space to touch the limits of pain so as to create frameworks to nullify that pain--if this space will not be guaranteed, I will not give it: looking good, communal issues, righteous agenda, etc. be damned.
Calling out privilege only works if an act can be addressed; privilege itself needs to be identified and shared before interaction to address discrepancies. Defensiveness by the one with privilege is a silencing act, for it is the one without privilege who determines whether it is privilege. Always. Reconciliation occurs when the power gap can translate into amends.
Additionally, people are going to trust others however they will, slow or fast, gradually or suddenly. I will not bow down to someone else's trust model. I do not take things at face value. Transparency is impossible between individuals until people acknowledge their weaknesses; it should not be demanded by those in power as a way to bully people into thinking that they are safe.
Lastly, we need to make sure that when we talk about family values, that we do not talk about families as assets. That is, it is not the appearance of family that holds weight, but the safe space that occurs within a family that makes a family such. Truth, honesty, faith, and effort make a family, not the expectations of what a family should be.
Righteousness, or at least what is ethical or true, are all illusions. American society makes this great nod towards knowable truth, towards a sense of right and wrong that falls under non-contextual isolation, and that there's a meta-story outside the confines of each individual human interaction.
I do not tout relative morality, but to assert universal notions of wrong and right when societal tendencies are arbitrary is ridiculous. I'm more interested in individual, relational, contextual, and communal (but not as much cultural) morality in terms of how I interact with other people. I want scope to remain existential in nature; universal scope is so dangerous when applied to moral code, because there is no supreme framework for adjudicating the worth of a human being.
Objectivism, which provides a framework for that, by the way, is not a better way of looking at things. Randomly arbitrary religious frameworks are no better. Proven frameworks are no better. The only thing that matters with framework are whether all those involved grant their consent--not just for sexual purposes, but for all human interaction. It's the social contract.
New to these resolutions and subera will be the overlay of modes. In addition to plates, which is what subera 095 introduced, I will attempt to have a greater objective in my personal growth. In the case of this subera, I wish for it to be restorative. By applying a theme, I will prevent the likely coopt of many of my Plates to the devolution of my character to one of hatred, rage, and sadness. I can also use these modes to remind people of the Taryntorial notion that I try not to be stagnant.
This subera ends when I reorganize my Plates into a new map and devise a strategem to transform some of the pain into more positive frameworks. Critical benchmarks include Twitter, Struggle & Joy, and World of Shards. I must continue the Nerd Divorce and really engage a sort of Queer Activism Divorce, which is quite sad. (I am not leaving Sex Positivity, however, which has been nothing but marvelous for me.)
I also need to be able to deal with other people better. I need time away from all uncontrolled group activities (Exalted and Sarah's, Dusty's, Lisa's, Cassie's, and Natasha's birthdays get an exemption) until April 29. From then to June 18, I want to have protection around me. So no dance parties, no concerts, and no public activities. I am not only recloseting my transgender and lesbian status--I am recloseting my entire soul.
Finally, critical Tarmynological terms from this experience are the Plate framework, along with Thursday, the Birthday, Saturday, and the Fallout. All of this, along with TPP, have created massive amounts of injury. I'm through with injury. Let's get this damage identified, and we'll start the cleanup. Once that's done, we can progress towards actually living the life that I mandate is healthy for myself, regardless of anyone else.
I want to live with love, so stop forcing hate down my throat. It's not welcome here. This awful space that I described here--done until I can handle it. Thank you.
I do not succeed in all the endeavors I set out to do. Like a prototypical large-scope Sagittarius, I have scores of unfinished projects that I'll never get done. Those are failures, and that's okay. Infeasible work needs to be weeded out of my life in some manner, and things work out best when I'm working on a small number of projects at my level of skill. This way of mitigating tasks I have long accepted. I'm full of creative energy, but I only have so much training and so many resources to allocate to my tasks. Even though I have only had a few successes, the major problem is that some of my failures turn out to be tragically spectacular.
March 10 was one of those spectacular failures.
I did not learn of the results until two days later, when I had learned that I am fundamentally unable to identify humanity in anyone, even though I just had thought that I was able to identify humanity in anyone. I learned that I had been dehumanized, even though I felt intrinsically like I had salvaged the last scraps of my humanity. I learned that the punishment for my weakness, though, would be continued isolation and hatred. I learned that exile was not the only fruit of my failure to be a good representative of the transgender-polyamorous-"pansexual" (TPP) Plate. My punishment was to be the continued denial of rights, the continued denial of friendships, the continued denial of communal resources, the continued denial of shared experience.
The only comfort I have is that I have found the people who really love me, not the people I'm supposed to love. I want to be totally okay with this.
I am ill, but not in the way society perceives me to be ill. I acknowledge that society has a different view in who I am. They say that I am judged, that I am violent, that I am not to resist lest I be called passive-aggressive, that my quiet pain should be punished, and that it is my fault that I have social anxiety, my fault that I have dissociation, my fault that I have gender dysphoria. And these aren't the right-wings that say I have these things; it's the doctors and the activists and the left who say I do.
But I hate all judging; of course I do, I have social anxiety disorder. I've taken a nonviolence vow because of Occupy. I resist however I have to because I have to survive, physically and literally, not some abstract concept of mental games that people would have you believe with my health. I'm quiet because I am naturally introverted; just because I'm not waving my arms around doesn't mean that I'm not hurt or that I'm not empathic. And it is not my fault that my genetics and my gender and my environment all load me with conditions that would make your psychiatrist or physician faint and give up, like the last two did on me. No, no, no, no, no. I am who I am.
Moreover, oppressed people say that I am the oppressor, even though I experience increased levels of oppression due to intersectionality. Oppressed people forget that privilege is not universal; it is iterative (recursive). When those with no rights tell you that you have no rights, you really have no rights. I am the one that the rejected reject.
I will recloset my transgender status (but not my feminine status) as I do with my so-called lesbianism. This does not necessarily make me technically not-transgender, just as I'm not technically not-lesbian. It puts me in the awkward gray area. I do not have the right to be a Trans Woman[tm], though, even though being trans has nothing to do with having rights. I am not a human, though I have the DNA of one. I am forced to be perfect lest one of my intersectionality axes tumble over my head again. Nothing is allowed for me. It's the transgender divorce all over again, another attack from some disenfranchised angry Twitter woman who has nothing better to do than to spread hate amongst her own people and to ruin our chances for reacquiring our rights. Nothing is allowed for me. I'm too much hated for this.
Yet, none of this is really representative of the illness I suffer. I am sick because of my social anxiety disorder alone, and a relentless parade of various activists (NOT RIGHT WINGERS OR OPPOSITIONAL SEXISTS) intentionally stoke my insecurity, demand my perfection, haze me out of groups, and do other cruel bullying acts TO KEEP WHITES IN POWER. There, I said it. It is indeed a jump in logic, to be certain, but if you don't know how I got from one to the other, you haven't been paying attention to the subtext and to the patterns and to the inclinations of other people. If you don't want to pay attention, please get out of my life.
I demand that during this subera, I will get my healing. I demand that you get out of my way. I will use every tool in my disposal to get such healing in my life, and I don't care how important your righteousness agenda is. I am a human, and I will have this respected before I engage in further dialogue. And saying that "Taryn, you're a human" is not it; stopping your hate of me will be the critical component.
The safe space provided by the activist narrative is a joke. It's not a safe space: it's the total destruction of language itself. Safe space is not the avoidance of triggers; it's a place where those triggers can undergo reprogramming (usually reappropriation) so as to turn elements of shame into elements of pride. It is a place where triggers do go off, but they go off safely because the space is safe, not that the triggers destroy the safe space. I want Safe Space to touch the limits of pain so as to create frameworks to nullify that pain--if this space will not be guaranteed, I will not give it: looking good, communal issues, righteous agenda, etc. be damned.
Calling out privilege only works if an act can be addressed; privilege itself needs to be identified and shared before interaction to address discrepancies. Defensiveness by the one with privilege is a silencing act, for it is the one without privilege who determines whether it is privilege. Always. Reconciliation occurs when the power gap can translate into amends.
Additionally, people are going to trust others however they will, slow or fast, gradually or suddenly. I will not bow down to someone else's trust model. I do not take things at face value. Transparency is impossible between individuals until people acknowledge their weaknesses; it should not be demanded by those in power as a way to bully people into thinking that they are safe.
Lastly, we need to make sure that when we talk about family values, that we do not talk about families as assets. That is, it is not the appearance of family that holds weight, but the safe space that occurs within a family that makes a family such. Truth, honesty, faith, and effort make a family, not the expectations of what a family should be.
Righteousness, or at least what is ethical or true, are all illusions. American society makes this great nod towards knowable truth, towards a sense of right and wrong that falls under non-contextual isolation, and that there's a meta-story outside the confines of each individual human interaction.
I do not tout relative morality, but to assert universal notions of wrong and right when societal tendencies are arbitrary is ridiculous. I'm more interested in individual, relational, contextual, and communal (but not as much cultural) morality in terms of how I interact with other people. I want scope to remain existential in nature; universal scope is so dangerous when applied to moral code, because there is no supreme framework for adjudicating the worth of a human being.
Objectivism, which provides a framework for that, by the way, is not a better way of looking at things. Randomly arbitrary religious frameworks are no better. Proven frameworks are no better. The only thing that matters with framework are whether all those involved grant their consent--not just for sexual purposes, but for all human interaction. It's the social contract.
New to these resolutions and subera will be the overlay of modes. In addition to plates, which is what subera 095 introduced, I will attempt to have a greater objective in my personal growth. In the case of this subera, I wish for it to be restorative. By applying a theme, I will prevent the likely coopt of many of my Plates to the devolution of my character to one of hatred, rage, and sadness. I can also use these modes to remind people of the Taryntorial notion that I try not to be stagnant.
This subera ends when I reorganize my Plates into a new map and devise a strategem to transform some of the pain into more positive frameworks. Critical benchmarks include Twitter, Struggle & Joy, and World of Shards. I must continue the Nerd Divorce and really engage a sort of Queer Activism Divorce, which is quite sad. (I am not leaving Sex Positivity, however, which has been nothing but marvelous for me.)
I also need to be able to deal with other people better. I need time away from all uncontrolled group activities (Exalted and Sarah's, Dusty's, Lisa's, Cassie's, and Natasha's birthdays get an exemption) until April 29. From then to June 18, I want to have protection around me. So no dance parties, no concerts, and no public activities. I am not only recloseting my transgender and lesbian status--I am recloseting my entire soul.
Finally, critical Tarmynological terms from this experience are the Plate framework, along with Thursday, the Birthday, Saturday, and the Fallout. All of this, along with TPP, have created massive amounts of injury. I'm through with injury. Let's get this damage identified, and we'll start the cleanup. Once that's done, we can progress towards actually living the life that I mandate is healthy for myself, regardless of anyone else.
I want to live with love, so stop forcing hate down my throat. It's not welcome here. This awful space that I described here--done until I can handle it. Thank you.