General Challenge

Okay.

So I know my abilities grow through constant challenge. When I take myself out to the edge I always find that I survive it in the strictest sense. I learn what dies and what's shed when I push myself in different ways. I learn what's worth it: to go there again in exchange for something becomes an option, not an unknown to be feared.

My life is one of constant challenge. I don't sit on things long. I get bored, I move around, I try new things. I'm giving up on saying I want it any other way; these choices have always been my own and I have made them consistently throughout most of my adult life.

I get tired. I get discouraged. I plan things and the world throws me what everyone calls curve balls (I don't play whatever game they're referring to). People don't do what I need. Things don't do what I want.

I get through. I enjoy myself most of the time. I get stronger, and my strength comes as often from self-knowledge and a solid grasp of where I should and shouldn't venture as it does an ability to bull through something.

I love people like crazy. I pay attention to things I like. I try to figure out how things work and why. I look for patterns in everything from weather to people's behaviour, obsessively, but refuse to commit to cause and effect on those patterns without scientific backing. I love to help people but hate being taken for granted. I love being asked for help because it's so hard to help another human being in this world.

At night I come home and I'm tired and lonely sometimes. Sometimes I've ground myself down to the point where I walk in the door and wither stare glassily at the wall for god knows how long or I burst into tears. When I spend the night with Angus he almost always falls asleep before I'm done all the things I need to do for the day. When I spend the night with the Writer I almost always wake up three or four hours before him. My life has been disconnected from partnerships and has settled instead into oases of closeness between sometimes very long periods where I spend a lot of time relying on and thus coming to trust myself.

I trust myself.

When I feel something I pay attention to it. When I need something I can advocate for that. When I want something I can often ask for it. I'm starting to be able to treat myself as I would treat an ideal partner: driving hard a lot of the time, but offering softness and haven when it's really the best idea.

I take joy in introspection and in analysis. I like thinking about things, breaking them down and putting back together. I like being silly. I like the longest conversations that meander until the sun rises. I interrogate people about themselves because I'm curious.

My fury I reserve for things that hurt and deceive the people I love, which is sometimes all people. I am protective -- to a fault. I am empathic -- to a fault. I overload on people's bad feelings easily and take them into myself. I easily feel excluded, and convince myself I am unwanted when no such barrier exists. Less often lately, but still fairly often, other people's joys make me feel excluded and I kick reflexively or withdraw like a wounded thing. I hate that.

I believe in everyone's right to joy and pleasure in the world, and the right to bury yourself in that pleasure, to luxuriate in that joy. That is not an earned right. It's a birthright given to us by some interaction between the world and our humanity, and we shouldn't throw it away or scorn it in favour of 'earned joy' of some kind. That's spitting in your mother's face when she hands you a Christmas present, it's pissing on the college money your father saved up to give you-- disrespect of the worst kind. If you like, and I recommend it, you can also do things to earn feelings of self-respect and accomplishment, but that pure joy in being is given to us free at the start. Whatever it takes to make that happen in you, whether it's looking at a sunset or eating a carrot you just pulled out of the ground or jumping off a cliff with wings made of plastic cloth or paying slow and careful attention to the slide of cock into cunt, you should do those things. You owe it to yourself and to your sentience, to your ability to appreciate.

I hate puritanism that says if you don't work for something it means less.

I hate laziness that says settling for something is better than reaching for that thing which best fits your unique personality and human shape.

I hate fear. I hate how many people, myself included, never do things because we're afraid to start.

I love when people trust me enough to tell me their secrets. I love the way people smile when they finally, incredulously, begin the negotiation process with the world which results in their finding/carving a niche that fits them in particular. I love seeing people transcendently happy as much as I hate when people joyously gather into conversational groups to tear other groups down.

I have trouble putting myself on the inside of groups. When people are talking about 'them' I am always 'them' whether or not I have the right religion or the right colour skin or the right mannerisms. I always want to stick up for the immediate underdog. I always want to argue against a position of absolute certainty. I always want to draw certainty out of a lack of conviction.

I think everything that exists is beautiful. The people I love are the most beautiful of all, and until the distancing I've experienced while going to school just recently I couldn't see the faces of people I loved, just my thought/feeling/personality projection of my experience of their psychic shape.

Language is my playground and my solace, but if I had to limit myself to one kind of language I would prefer always to think in questions.

I would write like this forever but I'm tired and hungry. I need to eat, and wake Angus up, and go to bed.

I would love for you to tell me who you are and what you believe and what you like and want and everything like that. What's important to you about you?

Be well.