songsfortheotherkind.com

I got together with my mother for Christmas and we talked about things. I got to a point where I was asking her to consider the birth sex letter on my birth certificate as no more significant than eye color, just a cosmetic thing. I think she may be grasping it more that I reject not something about me, but what others have put on me based on this insignificant thing. I think I got something from this because she was asking questions that seemed genuine which had me exploring new things in what exactly I was trying to achieve, what was important about me taking my being and identity into my own hands.

I've also worked on the other angle of reclaiming things for what they are, rather than almost everything being gendered. My mother was talking about my intellect, and how she considered gendered. I asked her if she meant that people of the other main gender were stupid, or couldn't be smart as well. I've been especially working on reclaiming my body from appropriation by others, de-gendering it and perceiving it as a unique thing. It really wears me down how pervasive I have allowed my body to be appropriated by the heteromony. I'm so thankful to draw strength from people here in utterly rejecting all attempts to categorize, classify, label, homogenize, or otherwise see me as anything other than a unique thing.

Today Princess Celestia had a romp in front of the camera (click for larger):

the weight of external perceptions and all the rest of it

release from all the noise, indeed

_________________
"For every lie I unlearn, I learn something new"- Ani DiFranco

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go. ~ TS Elliot

Radio show about gender and acceptance. There's an awful parody that has no place in this, so skip to 06:55 for refreshing 3-minute interview with a child about gender, then an interview with this line:

"The most dramatic coming out was essentially the one I made with myself."

Stop once you hear the phone ringing sound at 20:40; the rest is another terrible parody that has no place in this.

My favorite lines were "the difference was not going from male to female... the difference was going from someone who had a secret, to someone who didn't."

I tend to smile a lot in the presence of others, and it drives people crazy because it's a "knowing", painful, nervous smile, a signal of holding something back, and they're always trying to figure out what I'm withholding. The thing is, I don't even know what it is most of the time. It's not a specific piece of information that I can share in words. Something intellectual inevitably bubbles to the surface to placate them, and up until recently I thought the whole thing was only a pattern of my communication. It actually runs deeper than that. Male, female, androgyne or queer, whatever it turns out to be, is part of it, but secondary to this authenticity of self beyond the category. Something I am trying to find the keys to so I can function as myself when I choose to, not just when the strict conditions are fulfilled for complete and utter trust. Perhaps it's simply courage, and being ready for it.

The older woman I was taking care of died yesterday in the hospital. Caring for her is how I had a place to live for the last 6 months. She was in the hospital for about two weeks, and had been doing better. I had visited her a few days ago, and then got a call yesterday from her daughter.

I'm still shocked since it wasn't expected. I hadn't lived with anyone for a long time in my previous place, and was surprised that I did miss her when she was in the hospital for the past two weeks. She didn't talk a whole lot, having had a stroke years before that left her having to re-learn walking etc. She also watched TV all day, which was torture to be around when I as in that half of the house. But I still found I missed her company.

I gave her lots of time to get sentences out, rarely rushing. Through that I could see her being, the nuances that were part of her coherent personality. I notice that what I leave situations with is an intuition of people and things, and mine of her right now is strong. Now I just keep doing a double-take, realizing that she's really gone. It was kind of the feeling I had when this place appeared out of nowhere 6 months ago and was a way to avoid having to move to a different town.

I walk through the house and see everything as it was when she didn't return from something and when I called she said she had been taken to the hospital. I look at little things laying around and they all are like echoes of her presence, with me almost expecting her to call out, or ring the bell to call me from my room, with me jokingly walking in with my arms straight out in front of me like a zombie saying I don't know why but I had an urge to come into the living room.

She had a chihuahua dog that I've come to be really connected with. He is very sensitive and shy, and from the start I knew that if he was ever comfortable around me, it would mean something. It's like that now, and I really care for him. I've gotten good at playing with him, and triggering him to run around and get crazy, which I think he enjoys. I haven't had pets since I was little.

I know that part of this is my worry about where I'm going to live/get money from next. I've been surprised how much of it isn't. I hadn't realized the company she kept despite her condition and the TV. Her and her daughter greatly appreciated me being here and how I treated them.

I'm slightly interested in what's in store next. I'm hoping that I can stay here for a few months more until the house is put up for sale or whatever, helping with going through all the stuff here and fixing the house up.

I'm using this as an opportunity to explore all the things that have come up, as a strong catalyst for further growth. I appreciate all the things this has stirred up, what aspects of my values and life I'm having to re-assess right now.

Over the years a drive to have an objective explanation for everything around me. It's partly to predict stability of things and when they might become threatening, but there's something else that I can find no purpose for when I look at it. This took priority over everything else, trying to explain everything including myself. There was this sense that if I could objectively explain things, I'd be secure, things wouldn't surprise me.

I don't see the objective framework as being so significant now. I think that it's interesting in at its highest value is consistency, but this is very limiting. I'm transitioning to my own experience as the primary framework for dealing with the world, and yes, predicting it too. The objective framework isn't the only way to predict things.

In a way experience is like a bunch of objective framework islands, constantly forming and sinking, sometime connecting, then sinking, always leaving behind experience that guides the formation of future islands. It's decentralized so it isn't crippled by the weight of any particular island or its inevitable sinking.

I see the objective framework as a very limited thing, a huge mass that barely moves, is always playing catch-up, and barely covers everything that is. For a being to tie its self to this is very limiting.

Above I just created more objective description of what I'm doing. There's a drive to have concrete explanations, almost as if the lack of explanation would mean the lack of the actual happenings. It's easy to fall into trying to have a semi-complete map of things, so I can tick the box off on some completion list. I'm trying to stop when I notice this, force my self to work merely with the experience and intuition about it. So the island above is now sinking, and I can feel its constraint on my thought dissolving.

All these ideas about things can be so limiting to me. There's some fear that if I don't pay attention to these objective views, I'll miss something important, I'll waste time (time itself being one of these objective things), I'll miss a chance to secure some physical resources for survival. It's interesting because when I'm not giving those attention, they don't matter. I don't care about the future, about opportunities, whatever else this worrysome mindset fixates me on to the detriment of experiencing my self.

Moving the objective out of its center space makes room for all the other aspects of my self, especially intuition. It leaves logic, coherency, certainty as mere tools, rather than critical things that take priority over others. Whereas the objective world saps meaning out of everything, requires one to constantly work to find meaningful things, this one is full of meaning and significance. There isn't the perpetual delayed gratification, tradeoffs between meaningless things and pleasure payoffs.

I can feel the heteronomy right now in researchers' attempts to bring things into the objective, to make them legitimate in the heteronomy's eyes. I have a strong sense of the god worship of it, all these people constantly trying to bring legitimacy to things so they'll be recognized as real and respected.

I was thinking last night about the manifestation of this in gender, where people who don't match the two genders have to come up with labels, identities so that they will be recognized, given legitimacy. They have to come up with scientific explanations for their behavior, preferably something medical. People who vary have to figure out what exactly they are, find some label that reliably fits.

"What are you? WHAT ARE YOU?" is this dire question the heteronomy and its followers must have answered. It's almost like it finds reality devastating and kicks and screams at every little bit that it's forced to acknowledge, requiring enormous proof before it finally accepts it as real. It's a fragile thing that isn't based on evolution; it wants a static world that has nothing unexpected, nothing unknown. It wants to form routines that work until the end of time.

There's another simple reason why heteronomy seeks constant classification: the commerce, trade, in Beings.

Remember, the heteronomy expresses itself across the spectrum of the illusion and the most important one for the individual, apart from their own evolution as a Being, is the recognition of and effective response to being construed as property, which is exactly where the 'law' and 'authorities' have placed living Beings.

It's due to simple commercial principles that there is the unrelenting push towards classification: commerce is based on being able to assign a monetary value of a-

I just wrote a whole post here and lost the bloody thing. I'm too angry to rewrite it right now, will get back to this again soon.

><

_________________
"For every lie I unlearn, I learn something new"- Ani DiFranco

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go. ~ TS Elliot

I've been noticing a freedom to think whatever I want about anything and everything. Anything I imagine could be true, I can give it real consideration. I notice a limit around survival/fear. If for example I imagined that death didn't matter, fear would stop me from just walking into traffic. I'm tracing down my resistances to things and at least having a clearer idea of what they boil down to.

This freedom is not something I've experienced like this before. This extends to absolutely everything now. I'm not giving anything authority over what I'm experiencing right now, not even what I've thought in the past (because for one the past is another idea, another claim about things unseen). Maybe there is no past. Maybe time is something very different than what I've thought of it as.

There are the things I'm directly experiencing right now, and there are all the things I fill in the blank areas with. The blank area itself is imaginary, and I imagine it to be huge, and fill it in with a vast array of imaginary things. Nothing is off-limits for filling this in with. I'm allowing myself to fill it in and revise with great freedom. I used to impose heavy objectivity requirements on this, but now I think that it doesn't matter what I fill in, or rather, full creative expression in this area is the best thing (I don't want to say best because it's still some rigidity).

I'm having clarity on what I want to be doing, and how I need to configure my living environment. It's like something's awoken and given a strong guiding principle to choosing things I have. I'm better able to choose what I can abandon without fear of missing anything important.

I'm noticing effects in my moment-to-moment experience. I keep feeling an immense power from the present. My thoughts/worries about the past or future are just put aside. I don't care. It doesn't even exist. Things around me have such significance, like they're just bursting with meaning, that I'm sitting in the middle of a universe teeming with possibility, with threads of things going on all around, all part of some huge thing. Right now I'm looking around my room and I am expecting at any moment for something extraordinary to occur, something unexpected, something novel. This sense is familar too, from my childhood. I've been experiencing it for several days now off and on.

I feel like I made some step from being inside the virus to outside it. Something in my skype call with songs clicked in place and I finished intellectually rejecting the heteronomy. This has been enough to end all threads of thought supporting it. There is of course still plenty of fear-laden triggers I have, all of which I put in place myself I might add, which I'm noticing, accepting, and digesting.

I can have conversations in my head now where I state something I'm thinking, believing for the moment, which seems utterly fringe, and where someone responds back how impractical it is, how I must just be having fun imagining things, and I reply back, no, I'm believing it with as much power as anything else. Now I see my task as simply making a bridge between my world and whatever I'm currently dealing with around me, sort of like wheels on a car with shock absorbers to make the ride smooth even though the road is bumpy.

This mental freedom has given me a sense of physical freedom as well. I'm free to do whatever I want, at all, and deal with whatever consequences there are. Virus-infected people might respond negatively, might try to harm me, might do things that trigger fear in me. But they're not separate from everything else; they're just part of the universe that behaves in a particular way. Somehow I don't see a divide anymore, with them being this special case that's frustrating to deal with (though I still get triggered often). I can trace this to just not caring about them any more than anything else. They are part of everything and aren't getting special status anymore. Since I don't have to bow down to the heteronomy anymore, I'm not resentful having to deal with it, since again, it's part of the natural order, and I'm not being corrupted by it anymore.

I finally watched The War on Kids which I had saved a while back. I would link except it's been removed from YouTube since it's copyrighted; there's a lot of clips from it and discussion for the title though. It shook me inside and helped me reconnect with what happened with me on a more general level. In school it's all about destroying the kids' self-authority. Again that's where I've gone astray recently. It's so pervasive that I forget that almost all interactions with people around me involve usurping my self-authority. It comes under so many guises that I forget it's all the same thing. Once external authority is in place I am less clear, more confused about it but don't realize the source, until I'm left in a muddle like I am. I keep falling for it, the "oh this is something different, you need to act quickly here and if you want to stop to think you're doing something bad to me, so hurry up" sense.

A lot of the time I just have to faithfully say no to the constant pressure to give in to their view, that they're right and I'm just kidding myself. I have to say, "no, I know that I am far more important than these things you're pushing, and I will stick with my own thinking, even though right now I'm not even able to think clearly. You're just a bully."

The beliefs about things mattering slipped off today. Very shallow breath, been sitting staring for dozens of minutes just thinking. I can see what drives me. At base beliefs about things mattering. State of world. People. Accomplishing things. Avoiding unpleasant things. Planning. Imagining future and attempting to steer it. Something drives it about having people hear me, being listened to, acknowledged. I saw the arbitrary busyness that people are in. Hope for something at the end of it. Behaving as if what they do is important. Fear of death. Limited life and wanting to make something of it. Not wanting to disappear. These seem like something each person adopted at some point but forgot. Seems natural state of things, unquestionable, invisible, unknown. Mechanicality. People can't listen, just illusion. Real, solid things that exist, but human world is not part of it. Gone in a flash. Most of my life has been finding things to do, occupy me, distract me, suck up my attention. All involved hope of some light at the end of the tunnel. Can't build anything on these illusions, shifting sands, always falls apart. I hope I stop falling back into the trance.