(Untitled)

[indubitablydyl]

I.

I wonder what it says about me, that I have only been able to find peace is being someone else for the vast majority of my life.  What is it about me that I find so utterly intolerable?  Why do I want to tear my body to shreds, to make myself scream, to make myself suffer so very much, refraining because of mere trivialities like medical bills?

Comments

[maddict]

This is the first time you've ever even made the effort to talk back, to offer some response and criticism, and turn these lectures into mutual discussion. There's a qualitatively difference between a beating and a fight. One involves violence.

I think you're victimizing yourself, the way you showed me I victimize myself. Teachers, administrators, fathers, friends, and lovers are only masters if you allow yourself to be mastered. If any of this is any indication, if at any point this has been honest and I can derive an accurate understanding of you from what you've said rather than presuming with nothing to go on, then you think of yourself as a sensitive, passive, imaginative, and nervous person who would rather avoid introducing pain into human interaction than engage in something so risky. Then, you look for reasons why you have such a hard time bringing yourself to engage in something other than superficial games and banter, so long as the source of your problems is located squarely beyond your sphere of control--either in the indellible footprint of the past or a whole peer community of suckers who just don't get it, with their gender hypnosis and selfish endeavors of conformity. Taking stock of what you have control over, admitting that control is potentially useful, empowering, and necessary, would require learning to love, little by little, the thing that you were very effectively taught to despise by your efficient and dedicated father-system.

If we're going to have a discussion about ourselves, if we're going to communicate who we are to one another, then there has to be an initial wad of assumptions. Those assumptions won't be altered until we get into the conversation and learn to adapt to that interpersonal discusive environment. For instance, you're assuming that I'm committing all the same epistemic fallacies as your father, who apparently was a very stupid and unkind person. (Do you notice any anger in you when I abuse your father?) It wouldn't occur to you that maybe your life's problem isn't so unique that my style of discussing it renders me useless, that maybe the capacity for patriarchal cruelty you accurately diagnose in me is just as present in you, that maybe there's no such thing as a timeless personality and who you are and how you act will always be relative to the situation, thus making you as culpable for future cruelty as those responsible for cruelty of the past, on which you fixate to provide yourself with the necessary infrastructure for framing yourself as an innocently sneering nonentity who doesn't mean any real harm.