This past week, for the first time in a while, I tweeted something just to tweet it. After completing my readthrough of One Piece, I was praising the inclusion of Kiku and Yamato as two outspoken and largely respected trans characters. I added that I was frustrated that, despite Oda writing Yamato as consistently identifying as a man and being referred to as a man by everyone in the story, he still referred to Yamato as a woman in narration and included him on a cover that grouped a lot of women and girls from the series. Because why do that? No one made Oda write Yamato that way, so why also go out of his way to misgender him? All I got were transphobes trying to explain to me that either it’s ok to misgender Yamato or that he isn’t trans. This is why I don’t like social media very much. And it’s like, none of them said a word about Kiku, and there’s one difference between Kiku and Yamato. Or rather, two very visible, at least F cup differences. It’s so dumb to see transphobes so scared of being gay for thinking Yamato has nice tits. He does, and it’s…idk, about as respectful as ogling anyone else’s tits, probably. People of all genders can have nice tits. I have a few pairs, myself. The world is a wonderful place.
Anyways, onto another topic. Let’s go with this one. I watch Dropout stuff a lot, and when I watch the Make Some Noise episode with Vic, I get kinda caught off guard when they say, “I don’t have many vices for myself,” in a bit. It’s not something I think about in my own life. Like, the idea that a vice is a good thing to have never really occurred to me. I don’t have the typical ones; I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I don’t smoke, I quit sugary sodas, and I’m even limited in caffeine intake (not that it has any effect on me). So what do I do about stress? I think the main vices I have are avoiding responsibilities and overeating/generally eating unhealthily. I may have a lot of anxiety around socializing and tackling something important like art, but there’s nothing stopping me from, I don’t know, random example, reading all of One Piece instead of doing dishes. When my legs are tired and my back aches at the end of the day, it’s nice to get a whole take-and-bake pizza and eat it, even after promising myself I’d only eat as much as half.
Like with any vice, the downsides of overindulging are hurting me as much as helping. I’m sure I’d feel better if I took more frequent and active care of my own space, and had grown-up habits like brushing my teeth even when I’m not about to go to work. I want to eat healthy, and I like the thought process and end result of cooking, but fast and junk food is always available and requires less time investment. What do I use that time for? Not cleaning my apartment, or typing up notes on a story. Then I just feel guilty for not doing those things, and that guilt fails to motivate me because I’ve surrendered to my anxiety. And in general, I’m not nearly as active as I’d like to be; I can’t exclusively count a job where I walk a lot as my physical activity. To be clear, I’m not a complete mess; I do cook for myself at least once a week, and I clean up as needed. It feels good to do stuff like that. Whenever I think about having my whole night open, and that there are dishes to do, my brain immediately goes back to childhood, when playing games or reading comics instead of doing dishes was my greatest luxury. I can just buy a pizza? Life must be pretty amazing.
And…honestly, my choice of vices are pretty depressing to me. I don’t want to tug on the thread of my family history of addiction, but there has to be something else! I can do anything with my time, so I want to do something that could benefit me and help address my anxieties. I could find YouTube videos about drawing, or learn to dance. I don’t trust online information about health and weight loss as a rule, but maybe I could eventually find something that’s not a fad diet or junk science. At the very least, if I spent the money I spend at Wendy’s and Chipotle (because they’re in the same shopping center as work) on ingredients and cooked smaller batches of food for just two meals, I could get more variety and learn more recipes. There are options in the world.
And I will be trying some of those things soon, I hope. Tomorrow, I want to buy some clothes that’ll let me dress like Akira from Kemono Jihen every now and then, because he has my favorite formal androgynous dress-up aesthetic. I want to look up tips on how to doodle more, so that I can be drawing more often and keeping in artistic shape. Every time I draw something, I attach all this weight to it, and then I’m obligated to use it for something, and to only use drawing time for something I want to have that weight. It would be nice to be able to draw something just to draw. There are things I can start doing right in front of me, even if they aren’t the “most important” problems in my life.
The resistance to this action is probably my most annoying and deeply-rooted anxiety, which for the moment I’ll call a fear of vulnerability. Basically, if I know that something can be done to fix a problem, or that a problem even exists, then I have to do something about it. Like, partly in that moral obligation kind of way, but also more fundamentally, that’s how I’m built as a person; I can’t not take action if I know. And that’s pretty scary. If I do something important, I could end up getting hurt in a way that will never leave me. It’s like how I don’t want to learn how to make enchilada sauce, because then I won’t have the excuse to go to a Mexican restaurant; if I purposefully hold myself back, then whatever current state I’ve deemed “comfortable” is always still there, even if it’s not actually comfortable.
It really is just a fear of that pain, too. I haven’t experienced bullying, or that much in the way of discrimination. When I have experienced discrimination, it was something stupid that I was more angry or laughing about than afraid or hurt, despite all the anxiety I felt around how I theoretically could be hurt. Like, today, I had a lady tell me to kneel at my bed and surrender myself to God so he can save me, and it’s hard not to assume she approached me, of all the people in the store, because of my gender presentation. That’s really annoying and a waste of my time and insulting, but painful? Not really. A professor once threatened to kick me out of a class if I couldn’t prove that God wasn’t real (ironically, it was a class on how to determine if you’re looking at solid, fact-based, verifiable information, the exact opposite thing as faith). I remained in that class, but if I got kicked out, I’d mostly be angry that I’d have to take the class again, since it was a requirement. I don’t have to answer or back down to people like him. It wasn’t really painful when the preacher at my great-uncle’s funeral went out of his way to lament how atheists don’t have heaven to look forward to, and that we’ll all end up in hell. Dude’s a jerk, and I already know why and how he’s full of crap, so why would his words hurt me? Even something like failure doesn’t really hurt me like that. Like, what constitutes a failure? When things don’t turn out like I want, they still turned out, and I think about next steps and mistakes to correct. It can be demotivating, but not permanently so. It’s the fear that demotivates me more.
There are so many ways I know I can disprove this fear. I just gave some good examples. Whenever I talk to people, I get anxious about saying something “weird,” but I say it anyway. I mean, I have nothing else to say; if I speak to someone, I have to use my available dialogue. If they don’t like it, then I’d beat myself up over losing a contact, but it’s not like that’s any different than where I am now. Whenever I hurt myself in public places, I laugh and smile about it. I grew up in karate class, where casual injuries abound; stubbing your toe is a joke, even when it happens to you. You gonna get worked up about a little bump? You wimp? It’s silly that you did it, and it’s silly we forget how much force we use just to move our feet around as we walk. I mean, I’m often so aware of my body and its relative location to the things around me that it seems like a purposeful gag when I bump into things.
But there’s another good example. When I hurt myself at home, I don’t laugh about it. It’s just painful. I’m willing to give myself slack, maybe even as much as I offer everyone, when I’m around other people, but I don’t give it to myself on my own. I talked about that a bit recently, how I’m a perfectionist. I know all these things, and I know what I can do, and I know I want to do them, and I know that once I do, it’ll become habit and a normal part of my life, and I haven’t done it anyway. If I’m not going to give myself the exact thing I want, I might as well have nothing at all. “No effort. Only results!” For someone who doesn’t care about results, I care way too much about results. It’s actually so easy for me to get into a mindset that as long as I do what I want, it can end up however it will, and I know I’ll just keep trying. But in the moment, I get so intensely focused on how it has to be the very best, the exact thing with no missing parts or mistakes. I imagine it’s like being Full-Force Shishillian (just read One Piece). Why do I want to be “the best?” I honestly don’t have an answer, beyond that it seems like doing something without that aim is meaningless. Why do something without putting in your full effort, as if it doesn’t mean anything to you? But obviously, that’s not what I’m trying to get to in life. I want to put in my full effort, not my life energies. As my karate teacher said, “Go as fast as you can, not as fast as you can’t.”
Weekly Thoughts 7/1/23
Life in the Gutters 