Annie

(The story in this post might be upsetting to some people because it involves trying to pressure someone into taking medication and judging them for not taking it.)

I feel like I shouldn't be posting right now because I should be sleeping and I'll be tired on the way to work, but I feel like I use the excuse of sleeping to avoid almost everything, like church, and I barely sleep anyway so here I go.

"They say an unhappy man wants distractions--something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he'd rather lie there shivering than get up and find one."--CS Lewis, A Grief Observed

When we were freshmen Clayton and I had a friend, let's call her Annie. I don't know how much of this is 100% accurate but I don't think Annie reads this blog, so it's probably all right to just tell you how I remember it. Annie identified herself in conversations as someone who had a mental illness and sometimes hurt herself, and one day she casually told me that she probably should be on medication because she was at an age when the way her brain was was being solidified and if she didn't go on medication right now, she would always have problems. She told me this like it was funny and she didn't particularly care to do anything about it.

Clayton and I both have savior complexes and we made it a project to try and get Annie to go to student counseling. Never mind that he would later realize how fucked up he had gotten from the medication student counseling put him on, or that I've been virulently anti-medication of any kind since I was 16, to the extent that I would rather throw up from pain than take an Advil. For whatever reason we decided that we were right and Annie was wrong and we had to get her to go to counseling.

It was almost summer; Annie wanted to be outside when it was sunny so she could skateboard and hang out with her friends. Every day the two of us would descend on her and try to get her to go to counseling and she would say that she didn't want to go until it was dark. Student counseling closed at five in the evening so this was the same as saying she could never go. I remember how ridiculous and reckless Clayton and I thought she was, and how much we annoyed her.

Annie and I grew apart over the next three years but she is someone I admire a lot because she's so smart and interested in so many things. Sometimes it seems like she just has to think of something she'd like, and all the resources appear to make it happen. I found her hard to be friends with because she moved so fast--she would suggest doing something, I'd resist it because it went against my schedule, and by the time I started realizing I would like to do it she would already have left to begin it.

The point is though that a year or two ago I started really understanding how I could see Annie's decision as smart, not stupid. It got me through the last year and a half of college, trying to think that way--blinding myself to the big picture, trying to unfocus my eyes and look at seconds and colors. I couldn't do things right and I couldn't feel good a lot of the time so I stopped trying. I didn't fail. When I saw something in front of me that might make me feel good, I took it.

So for a long time I've been on that kind of track and I've realized how hard it is for someone outside to see why you don't listen to "reason." Why you'd rather ride in a car than worry about your problems taking care of yourself. Why you'd rather have fun smoking than figure out if you will let yourself live long enough to die of lung cancer. Why instead of constantly apologizing to yourself and everyone for not being more organized, you're making Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in a huge pot and watching YouTube videos with your roommate.

The thing I feel most clearly now is that it was none of my business what Annie did with her time. I'm not as clear on the rest of it--how being like Annie applies to me and how I should feel about it.

I found myself talking about Annie today. I was trying to argue why it's okay for me to be involved with men even though I am gay. I'm probably going to get upset writing about this because the conversation turned to an end that felt more permanent than usual. I know I was convincing him at the beginning. At some point it wasn't working anymore for me to say "we should live in the moment" and "I don't expect to ever have a family or a relationship with a woman, so we might as well try and feel as good as we can."

And I remembered, a few years ago I would have thought being with a guy was like throwing something in God's face, being too lazy and desperate for comfort to feel anything but the shadows of what I could feel. I would have thought it was the real thing or nothing, and even now it's hurting me to type that it's not the real thing, because I want it to be as good as the real thing when it's with a guy, but it's not and that's not my fault. And the boy wasn't hurt, he's the strangest, nicest boy--he was relieved.

The truth is it's very hard for me to work especially not being a driver, and it's really hard for me to live on my own, and the only people I talk to outside of work are men who try and bother me. Giving up smoking is a serious sacrifice not because of nicotine as much as the fact that I lose a reason people will talk to me. I'm really sad right now. Sorry if this is too much information, but I've been going back and forth on the Annie thing for such a long time, and I wanted to write about it. Not Annie herself because obviously she shouldn't have been on meds when she didn't want to be, but thinking about endgames vs. staying in the sunlight whenever I can.

The thing is I don't know if I ever felt so much this way since I was on meds myself in tenth grade. Every day I'd take stimulants and spend a few hours thinking everything was really special and important, not realizing how much I didn't notice or how fucked up everything had gotten. As the day went on I got sadder and sadder and the only thing that mattered to me was--guess what--the person I was dating, who I wasn't actually attracted to.

Towards the end of the drugs, in some sobbing state, I told my mom I wasn't happy. My mom saw me all amped and buzzed up on the way to school every morning after I downed my Wellbutrin and Adderall. She said, "But I see you happy every day."

I said, "but I'm not a happy person."

I built myself back up through the two depressing but somehow joyful last years of high school. I was a very sad but happy person by the time I turned eighteen. I'm not sure how lazy and distracted I must have gotten, to get so far off track--because yeah I have to look at the small things, but this has gotten small enough to seep into all of them.

I'm not a happy person.

And this is me telling God and myself that I'm going to get better.

stuff I wish I'd known

being in 9th grade and being cast in this play as a character who didn't exist--the teacher who was directing planned to divide up lines between my character and another character. During vocal warmups every cast member had to say one of their lines and we would all repeat it, but this made me feel awful because I didn't know which lines were mine, because we hadn't gotten to blocking that scene yet. I didn't want to steal someone else's lines. I dreaded warmups so much, because of this one moment, that I tended to skip rehearsals and go to the art room and hang out with Joan. Eventually I got caught, no real harm done; I explained to the teacher several years later, once I could talk to her.

being in 9th grade and always being told my mom to wash my face in the morning and brush my teeth with the electric toothbrush. I didn't wash my face usually--it just happened--I couldn't really explain why I dreaded the sensation of putting water on my face. I just avoided it and felt guilty because I knew it was my fault I didn't have better skin. The electric toothbrush was so loud and full of movement that it filled my head with compulsive horrible thoughts; I usually used it but sometimes I had to turn it off or use a manual toothbrush.

same with toilets (always).

being in 7th grade and having to go to tae kwon do lessons. It started with this ordeal of "conditioning"--running in place, holding weights, while loud music played. It wasn't the exercise, I liked other parts of tae kwon do, but the combination of the movement and the loud music caused all the compulsive horrible thoughts. On the mornings of lesson days, at school, I'd write these little rhyming poems that I could repeat over and over in my head during conditioning to try to keep from having the thoughts. Or I'd memorize certain Yeats poems, which had a good rhythm.

why didn't I tell my teacher to just turn the music off? I guess for other people the music probably helps. It just didn't occur to me that the music was anything other than part of life. Maybe I thought that the compulsive thoughts were part of what conditioning was supposed to be like. It didn't occur to me to say it out loud.

I remember beautiful things like all the time I spent figuring out how to trace words in my head. Like, should I connect the letters? Tracing every word that I thought or heard, like in sixth or seventh grade I think this was. It took time but I had time.

But I also remember that I didn't just tell Mrs. M. that I was upset because I felt like I was stealing other people's lines. Or that I tended to just avoid loud things without thinking and couldn't explain why. And I knew my diagnosis for a lot of these incidents. It's just I didn't know how to talk, or that no one was there to tell me what it meant.

safety is not the worst

Since I haven't been posting that much I figured a desire to say anything is probably a good one even though this isn't related to disability (on the surface). It's sort of hard to remember being this enraged gay person to whom everything was really cut and dry, and I think some of my beliefs were wrongheaded but I also find them important. I was talking to a friend about high school the other day and I just found myself kind of buried in my old trains of thought.

Brief background (embarrassing to even talk about): I came out as questioning to my parents when I was 10, came out as bisexual when I was 13, came out as gay when I was 16 and that's when the realizations were occurring to me. But this doesn't actually line up with what I was identified as at school. When I started high school I found myself in an environment that was much less aggressive than middle school, but I was still really affected by my experiences being bullied. I was scared very easily and withdrawn from everyone but the friends I made at the very beginning of school; I could speak when I was with them. I really didn't like this about myself and because my school was so small I felt that it would be important for me to be openly queer because I thought it would make queerness more visible and acceptable to people if they knew someone who was queer. So I had a rainbow sticker on my notebook and when I was in ninth grade (when I was 14) a girl asked me if I was gay and I said yes. I didn't identify as gay at the time but I thought it was a simpler way to answer than saying I was bisexual (remember, trouble talking).

Over the course of ninth grade I spent a lot of time with Joan, a girl who wasn't very popular, and we were semi-dating for a little while, but I think that it wouldn't have made a difference even if we hadn't been dating. My school was really small and my admission that I was gay had kind of traveled around, and I found out that kids had discussed the rainbow button on my backpack, and discussed whether I was dating Joan. Joan would get really angry at me for hugging my female friends in public, following her around in an obsessive way, or saying in public that I thought girls were attractive, because she said I was making things worse for her. We stopped "dating" pretty soon for various reasons, but everyone still thought we were dating.

In tenth grade I cut my hair short and started dressing in a boyish way, and had another kind of clingy relationship with a girl (I guess we were technically open about it, but I don't know if people thought of her as being queer; she was very quiet but not unpopular in the same way as Joan). We also went to prom together. I became withdrawn from my friends because I was on Adderall which kind of fucked up my support network for eleventh grade combined with the fact that two of my best friends moved away and my best friend and girlfriend graduated. Our relationship was pretty dumb, and she broke up with me very reasonably at the beginning of the summer, but she did it by telling me she thought she was actually straight, which sent me into a huge spiral of feeling like I was the only person in the world who was queer. For a long time I thought of that summer and the months that followed as being a really defining period in my life, because I was really depressed but channeled it well and officially quit various things (any medication prescribed to me, self-injury, letting myself withdraw or obsess over one person) that had been controlling my life.

On my first day of eleventh grade, Joan and I skipped the morning assembly as we often did to go for a walk. She told me about the training trip for the soccer team that she'd just been on, and told me that most of the people on the team spent a lot of time talking about my supposed relationship with her. It was too bad because I was a lot more clear-headed than I had ever been before, but it was kind of too late to stop this stuff from happening. I also didn't know exactly how bad it was.

~BACKGROUND IS ACTUALLY OVER~

So, there was this girl, let's call her Martha, who was starting at my school as a sophomore. I was assigned to be her mentor who would introduce her to school, and I hung out with her and her friends once that summer. She knew Joan a little because she played soccer, but I didn't really see Martha much once school started. She made a lot of friends immediately, and didn't really make an effort to hang out with me or talk to me. But bizarrely, whenever my mom picked me up from school, Martha would be standing by the car carrying on a friendly conversation with her, and she would also occasionally, out of the blue, be very friendly and familiar with me. She found my livejournal and would comment on it. She also was close with Ms. H., a teacher who was really supportive of me re: queer and disability things, and would visit Ms. H. and talk to her several afternoons a week (which Joan also did).

Martha and my mom kept talking and eventually it was decided that my parents were going to drive me to Martha's house one Friday night after school. Kind of weird since Martha and I didn't really spend time together, but whatever. Because my school was so small (and probably because of the high percentage of kids with learning and emotional disabilities) it was pretty normal for kids to wander into random classes before they started, or even while they were going on, to say hi to teachers and students. So the day I was supposed to go to Martha's house, she wandered into my Latin class and said, "I'm excited for you to come to my house, we have a lot to talk about--something we have in common." She sort of laughed at me affectionately, as she usually did.

So, I'm sure you can guess from the buildup that what Martha told me when I got to her house was that she was gay, that she had been out at her old school, but that during soccer training it became immediately obvious to her from the way people treated Joan that there was no way she could be out at school. She freaked out and confided in Joan, at soccer training. She also came out to a friend in the dorms (she lived at school) who was the person who told her, "everyone always knew Amanda was different and then when they found out she was gay they had something." And one of her other friends immediately realized Martha was gay because she saw that Martha would be friendly to me but only when certain people weren't watching.

I guess I hadn't been--well, I had kind of known, but I hadn't really been sure if I was really The Gay Person At My School or not. But it became obvious from the way Martha talked about talking to me, that it was what defined me and that it was a reason for people not to talk to me. After that night at her house, we became good Internet friends but would barely talk at school, which she'd always pretend I was imagining. I was trying not to obsess over people, and I was starting to get really depressed and obsessive about our friendship, so I kind of detached myself from her. I really, really hated her in a way, even though I also liked talking to her and spending time with her.

I just remember that being gay felt really cold to me then. Like, I associated it with this almost physical sense of coldness, of wanting to drown, of drowning, of picking up things from the sidewalk and having to put them in my pocket because I'd have them, because I needed to have them. I kind of just thought that's what being gay was.

Anyway, I remember realizing, that night and the next day, that my mom of course had known about Martha being gay and had been talking to Martha's mom on the phone a lot about Martha being gay and other issues; that Joan, my only good friend remaining at school, had known Martha was gay; that Ms. H. knew; and that even though Joan and my mom presumably should have some kind of loyalty to me, and they'd known that I was really really isolated and lonely, they hadn't told me that there was another gay person at school, because it wouldn't be fair to Martha to tell.

And it all came down to this thing Martha said to me at her house on the Friday night: "Amanda, if you only knew how many people there are who really want to talk to you and be friends with you, but are just scared to--"

"Really? Like, who?"

"Well, it wouldn't be right to tell you. It's not fair to them."

Gosh, I'm sorry, and I don't know if this is coming out clear, but I remember that at that age I read Lockpick Pornography and I just took it completely straight. And I just remember this feeling that I was being used as a bulletproof vest for Martha and whoever these other people were.

Martha had this secret greatestjournal (I know, we're old, greatestjournal doesn't exist anymore) where she would pour out everything she was feeling about being closeted at school and how hard it was for her. I read it and I cared but I also would see her walking around school with her friends, when I didn't have any friends, and I'd feel like crying that she got to be close to people, and I'd just want her to shut up about her stupid problem of being safe.

Sometimes I just feel like I have nothing in common with people who were closeted in high school, or passed for some reason or another. It's not exactly the same as being radical--that seems like saying queerness is universal when that's the opposite of what I mean. For me, especially when I was in high school or very closely out of high school (a year or two) it just felt like, this is MINE. You can't have it, you can't fuzz it up, you can't make it different, you can't say it belongs to everyone, because I was by myself. I was like a warning.

So if you're going to take me as a warning (I felt) of what not to be like, you don't get to just turn around years later, or when you're alone, and say that you really are like me after all, that we're the same inside. You are NOT like me. We are not the same. Outsides fucking matter.

...Can someone tell me what I'm feeling or what I mean, by spending the last few hours typing this up?

about med stuff

(I feel really bad because I kind of assumed that someone who was on medications didn't want to be on them. What I ended up saying as a result was really disrespectful. I keep wanting to write them a long email explaining my personal med-context, to explain why I had that reaction, but if I do that it will seem like I'm trying to justify what I said, which I don't want to do because I know it wasn't okay. But after I decided not to write the email, I still wanted to write about my context.)

I was just put on a lot of stuff really fast when I was 15-16 and I was sort of...well, if I understand right I don't know if I got any kind of official diagnosis (I love that you need a diagnosis for accommodations but not for medication) but I guess the psychiatrist told my mom I had depression and hallucinations. (You can ask me if I've ever had either depression or hallucinations. The answer is no.) I was put on antipsychotics and waited to "get better." Instead I felt very physically uncomfortable, so I was put on Parkinson's medication too.

If I understand correctly I was taken to the psychiatrist originally because I was "cycling" which was my family's way of saying that when I was upset or stuck on an idea I would talk very repetitively about it in a way that my family found to be hard to take. It was thought by my family that this might mean I had a mood disorder. (Without comment, can I just say that I was already diagnosed with ASD this whole time.)

A few months later I had been cutting myself for I think pretty standard reasons of not knowing how else to connect/communicate to people, but I wasn't comfortable telling the psychiatrist this because I barely knew him. So he told my mom I was cutting myself for "stimulation" because I couldn't focus, and I was put on Adderall.

It's hard for me to even talk about the Adderall Times because putting a person with ASD on speed is just a horrible, stupid thing to do. The thing is that I knew I shouldn't be on it. But I was just too young to tell the truth. I had such a good time skipping class and hiding in the school library making lists and transcribing songs, so I would lie and say it was helping me with school. Besides, whenever I went off it all I could think about was different ways I could possibly die, so I always found a way to get back on. (Briefly during Christmas break when I was sixteen, I was taken off Adderall and put on Prozac, but I was just so dulled out. For some reason it didn't occur to anyone that maybe I was depressed/obsessed with death because I was on antipsychotics for no reason.)

Eventually the Adderall didn't even make me feel so good anymore and I was taken to a different psychiatrist who put me on Wellbutrin and I felt good again for a little while. This psychiatrist kind of thought I should go off some of this stuff though. And my family ended up deciding I should go off it all, because I had lost so much weight. But I had already done a lot of damage to my grades and my social life because of my complete tweaking out on Adderall all year.

After that, I've always refused to take any medication at all. It's difficult to even convince me to take cold medication. I'd rather spend the day lying down than take painkillers when I have cramps.

Last spring when I was having a lot of anxiety and dissociation problems, my mom really wanted me to go on anti-anxiety meds because apparently Temple Grandin is on them (I know, who could say no to Temple Grandin?). I very much didn't want to go on medication, but I was worried about myself, so I asked if I could see the second psychiatrist I had seen in high school, the one who helped me go off everything. I just remembered that I had really liked him and that he said I seemed like I had ASD (which I appreciated since people were always telling me I obviously didn't).

My mom and I had a lot of conflict driving to and from the appointment because I was saying that I didn't want to be on medication. It's not really worth describing but she basically implied that it was a waste for me to want to go talk to this guy just because I liked him as a psychologist, when I didn't want to be on anything. When I talked to him, he himself was fine with me not wanting to be on meds, but I had to fight tooth and nail with my mom to get her to stop trying to convince me to take meds, and as usual ended up feeling that I was a bad daughter because of my refusal to take them.

Recently, a person with ASD was telling me this funny story about when they were in high school and were on a lot of medications, but didn't want to be on any. The person managed to trick their doctor into taking them off some of their medications, to the chagrin of their parents. The tone in which this story was given and received was very "fuck yeah autism!" and for the next few days I kept thinking of this story, how funny and cute it was. What an awesome kid.

Then something changed and I realized it's not a funny story at all. It's a fucking horrible story. Why should any child have to do that?

I mean, the fact that I thought it was funny is something I like about myself. It is kind of funny and cool when we can resist other people's attempts to assert control over our brains. But also...what the FUCK? A developmental disability is not an automatic reason to be on medication but it seems to work out that way in some people's minds.

And this is why I was a jerk to someone the other day because when they mentioned their medication I was like "you don't have to take that you know! Lots of people have had bad experiences on it," but I didn't realize that this person has had kind of an opposite experience with people saying, "You don't need to be on medication," when the person actually wants to be on it. And I am really really sorry for what I said because I want Autistic people to be able to get what they ask for, and not get what they don't ask for, and that's all.

some complaints about being same-sex-attracted and not adapting well

(totally switched into my old anti-"queer culture" whining mode while writing this, and I apologize tenfold, I really am better now in this area at least. But I'm just posting this without reading it over because if I don't I will never post anything like it at all.)

I guess this is probably bad, but I'm not making an It Gets Better video because I'm not better.

I was working on a long post about this, since August, but it never really solidified.

When I was in high school, someone who wasn't my friend said this to my (secret, closeted) friend, who then told me: "Everyone could see there was something different about Amanda, and then when they found out she was gay, they had an answer."

When I was in high school, the word dyke or lesbian was a way to easily quantify all the things about me that didn't seem right. When I was in high school I felt very alone.

When I was in ninth and tenth grade, I actually brought all this on myself by not denying that I was gay or bisexual, and presenting in a masculine way. I felt that this was an important thing to do because other kids needed to see that queer people were just regular people. The problem with this idea is, in hindsight, obvious: I am not a regular person. Being openly queer in a heteronormative environment is a noble thing to do, but maybe not if you have anxiety about pretty much everything and have trouble talking to people.

A lot of my coming-out process happened when I was on a lot of medication and overwhelmed by the relationships I was in. By the time I was in eleventh grade, I was more able to clearly see what was going on, and I knew that I'd made a mistake by not being closeted. My school was very small, some people were genuinely afraid to be friends with me in case someone said they were having sex with me, and I wasn't a person who could charm my way out of this stigma. But my school wasn't violently homophobic and I feel like a more normal person could have made a difference. It would have to be a person who fit in every way, except one.

I think this is something that's always been hard for me to conceptualize--I've been in situations that other people would have been able to handle, but I haven't been. I feel like there's an attitude of, "It's not that bad for queer people to be under a little more pressure, if it's an amount of pressure that a normal person can handle, if they have nothing else on their plate."

At my college being same-sex-attracted is a non-issue; I remember the first time I told someone at college I was gay, and how hard that was for me. When I was in high school, I had huge problems saying the word and wouldn't be able to finish sentences if they contained it. In the first semester or two of college, I felt afraid of hugging my female friends or even sitting close to them while watching TV. I don't feel that way anymore. I don't feel separate from my friends because I am not straight. And that is a really big thing that means a lot to me, but it's all I'd be able to say in an "it gets better" video, and on paper, it doesn't sound that great.

I'm incel (don't know this word very well, and if it's associated with a subculture of assholes I take back my identification). I've never had a serious relationship with anyone.

[Edit from 2018: Even though someone tried to explain to me in the comments, I did not understand the depths of the "incel" community at the time I wrote this post and would NEVER use that word to describe myself now. I don't know if "ace spectrum" would be a better word to use, but it was and is the case that I'm rarely attracted to people, and my needs in a relationship are somewhat unusual; so it's not very common for me to be attracted to someone who's both attracted to me and compatible with me. I think a lot of my early-20s complaints about lesbians not being up to my standards were really a way to avoid admitting that relationships and dating don't usually work for me because of how I am.]

I have always wanted to get married and have a big family (big by liberal not conservative standards, so 3-5 kids). But I have never really thought this will happen. For a while I used to think that I might end up marrying one of my male friends and raising kids together, but I'm no longer okay with that prospect; it would just make me too depressed.

Even though my school is ssa-positive, most of the people at my school are straight just like most of the people in the world. I have enough friends that I never feel lonely, but I don't belong to a group of friends (partly because I don't like groups), and I know very few ssa people because I don't have stereotypical queer interests.

A few years ago I posted on a lesbian advice forum saying I was depressed and stressed because I wanted to believe I would someday get married and have kids, but that I had never been in a relationship and didn't think I ever would be. People responded telling me that if I was on a date with a girl, I shouldn't tell her I wanted to have kids, because she would think I was creepy. One person went to my livejournal, saw where I went to school, and told me that my school wasn't any place to complain about and that I should "stop whining." She provided a list of various social groups and activities that would help me to meet "dykes," including eating in a co-op (which would mean being organized enough to eat at the same time every day, taking up a lot of executive function cooking and cleaning, and constantly interacting with a large group of people I didn't know).

I try not to think about any of this.

I used to have a political problem with the way other ssa people behaved. Whenever I thought about it I got so upset that I didn't know what to do. The way I saw it, there were two kinds of ssa people:

1. "gay" people (such as people involved in the HRC) who were very normal and wanted to have normal jobs and normal families. They didn't think much about trans people, non-homosexual sexual minorities, or anyone who wasn't normal.

2. "queer" people (such as a lot of people at my school) who were very into not being normal, playing rugby, performance art, co-ops, and so on. Many of them identified as trans but didn't seem to understand that some trans people actually take hormones and get surgery and are poor, and are not students at a liberal arts college who change their pronouns every week.

(Part of the focus of #2 arose because my only good lesbian friend, and one of my only non-straight-and-cis friends, was a person who was transitioning in college and had before transitioning fit squarely into the category of "very serious person who likes obscure music, old movies, and complaining." This was not such a bad personality for a straight guy, but it just added to the awkwardness she already felt whenever she tried to go to any kind of trans-related group or event at school, since most of the people were female-assigned and also just acted super "queer"--i.e. running around being spontaneous and talking about how we just need to break down all the labels and categories and let people be themselves, man! [Seriously, once I asked a very annoying queer-identified guy, who had previously been a pretty cool gay-identified guy who hated queers, but I think they stole his brain or something, "Well, what do you actually think we should be doing if everything 'gay' people are doing is so racist and classist and normative?" to which he replied that "trans issues are important, like we shouldn't have male and female bathrooms," at which point I couldn't take it anymore and said "Well what about fucking HEALTH CARE COVERAGE FOR TRANSITION" and he said he didn't really know what he thought we should be doing but we'd discuss it later and I should read Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.]

Anyway, it was just pretty annoying for my friend and me, and we used to kind of feed into each other, and one time a queer feminist girl called out my friend in a filmmaking class for making a film about a female character when [the queer feminist thought] my friend wasn't a woman. [The person wasn't intentionally being transphobic--my friend was still using her birth name at the time and maybe still looked ambiguous--but I still think it's not okay to say something as harsh as what she said to my friend, on the basis of the assumption that someone isn't a woman.])

I just got really upset because I still felt alone/depressed about my future as an ssa person, and I also could see that trans people were in genuine financial/physical danger, but I felt like no one cared about just Making Things Better For Everyone. They wanted to either make things better for a small group of normal people, or go totally abstract and just "queer everything" and "break down all the categories and walls," which meant fuck all in the short term for real people.

I felt weird because I wanted to get married but I wasn't normal and I felt like "gay" people wanted to help normal people get married and "queer" people were anti-marriage so neither one included me.

For quite a while when I was nineteen and twenty I insisted on being referred to only as "homosexual" and "same-sex-attracted" because I didn't want to be associated with any cultural groups. A straight friend-of-a-friend referred to me as queer, and was a bit surprised when I spat out, "I'm not queer, I'm gay." In the past year I have started calling myself queer just because I like the word and I don't really give a fuck about how alienated I feel from most people who identify with it.

The only reason I stopped being so upset about being ssa was just because in the last year I started getting into Autistic/disabled stuff and I actually feel like I share the values and am included and not ignored because I'm too weird or not radical enough. So now I feel like I can actually work on stuff that's important, by working on disability stuff, and not feel like I'm alone in what I care about.

But when I go back to thinking about being ssa, I never feel better.

About Kenny

I want to tell you about Kenny. He went to my high school, which I might somewhat flamboyantly refer to as undercover special ed--but it would be more accurate to say that it was a nominal prep school that was not at all difficult to get into, with very small classes, where no one would stop you from lying down on the floor. If you had a kid who, like me or my fake friend Joan, or like Dana or Connor, was obviously not going to cut it in an ordinary school, and if you had a certain amount of money, my school offered an option besides a school specifically for kids with disabilities/mental illnesses/a history of trouble. But there were kids who didn't have any of those things, and just hadn't been able to get into a better prep school. I feel a strange loyalty to the place, although I was incredibly lonely for my last two years due to being a sexual minority who couldn't compensate. It was probably the only school where a person like me could have had close relationships with teachers, learned to succeed academically, and been involved in theater and music; so I'm grateful for that.

During my tenth-grade year they built a new arts building and from then until I graduated that's where I spent most of my time. The whole building was carpeted and there were different hallways where I liked to sit on the floor, against the wall, and write in a notebook or read. I liked the halls in the basement, near the practice rooms, or near the room where my Latin classes were. I also liked the ground floor--I liked to wedge myself in next to the radiator, or maybe on top of the radiator, I forget, but so I could see out the window. There was an anemic field between the arts building and the main high school building, which had been built when my school had less money, and was uglier.

The Dean of Students moved to the arts building and she would let some of us hang out in her office; in twelfth grade I started spending a lot of time sleeping and doing work on her couch. That is also the year that a certain group of ninth- and tenth-grade boys, who kept their guitars in her office, would sit out by the radiator where I had spent most of my time the year before. They would play songs by Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and the Who. Kenny was one of the better guitarists and he had a haunting, pale voice, that sounded like a girl's when I was asleep.

I only spoke to Kenny a few times but he is one of the reasons I became interested in meeting other people with ASD--although he didn't say he had it, he only didn't deny. I was asking him a lot of questions one day while he played "I Can See for Miles" in the Dean's office by himself:

"Hey, do you have anything wrong with you?"

"No."

"I mean, I was wondering if you had Asperger's"

"Oh yeah, well, that."

Kenny had words he liked to use, and his face was always scrunched up in a way that looked like he was in pain. One reason I enjoyed talking to him was that I would start out just seeing the way his face looked on the surface, and thinking that he must be scared, or concentrating, or something; but then I could almost see through the surface of his face, and see that he had all kinds of feelings like everyone else. And then also, of course, the more Kenny played, the more his hands scrambled along the fretboard, the more his face loosened up.

Kenny was a nice kid but what I have to say isn't really about Kenny; it's about Mrs. C., the chorus teacher, and it's about the other boys who played guitar. Kenny was just himself. The words he used were the words that the boys who played guitar would say with him, in between songs. It's about all the kids who were in chorus, because--well, I have to explain about Kenny's stimming. Kenny played a lot of instruments, although I'm pretty sure he stimmed more instruments than he played. What I mean is that while Kenny flapped and stuff, the major things he did with his hands when they were not on a real-life guitar or piano were to manically play imaginary guitars, pianos, basses, violas, and saxophones. The saxophone was the one that got the most positive response, when Kenny got so explosive in chorus one day that no other instrument was good enough and he raised his hands to his face and pressed with stunning accuracy the invisible keys, and blew. The kids in chorus came close to applauding, while Mrs. C. laughed delightedly.

Before you ask, I know what it is like when people are laughing at the way someone moves. That is not what this was. Kenny's words, his stim-instruments, and his more standard flapping and jumping were considered interesting, impressive, and cool. They were not "meaningless repetitive behaviors"--everyone could see what they were about. Backstage before a performance, Kenny flapped at the people around him and we indicated we were nervous, and excitable, too.

Not everyone gets what Kenny got--I didn't get what Kenny got, and I had the same disability at the same school--but I still like thinking about him and explaining it to myself. I think this is pretty much a beacon of how things can be, proof that a person who's different can be seamlessly integrated into the whole without smashing himself into a normal shape, and without anyone else thinking they're doing him a favor. No one was doing Kenny a favor; Kenny was awesome.

One time Kenny did Mrs. C. a favor. He and a few of the other boys were going to sing a special song in the spring concert--I think it was "My Girl," something with very close harmony. It was a small school, meaning teachers did what they could with the talent they had, and I'm guessing Kenny with his incredible precision was going to be the rock who stayed in place when other boys muddled up and down. Kenny's singing was accompanied always by, at the very least, very stiff, sharp, tall conducting movements, his hands pinched together like beaks. At the very least. On the day of the last rehearsal, Mrs. C. said, "Kenny--for the actual concert, can you tone it down? Can you keep it in?" Kenny agreed. Whenever someone tries to explain to me that people make fun of kids who stim in public, as a way of proving that such and such ableist and abusive policy is okay...I just want to show those people Mrs. C.

Mrs. C. liked Kenny's stimming.

She knew that he had to do it.

She didn't think he did it to be annoying or to make people laugh or to get attention. At the same time, if people did laugh or pay attention, she didn't think that was inappropriate; Kenny's stimming wasn't an embarrassment, it was cool.

Mrs. C. knew that some parents would be distracted by Kenny's stimming and that it wasn't part of what was considered to be appropriate behavior for a concert. So she asked Kenny not to do it--in a way that made it obvious he was doing something difficult as a favor to everyone else, not in a way that implied this was a reasonable thing to expect from him all the time.

Kenny worked hard; he sang well and stayed still for the whole set of songs and then he and his friends dashed to their seats, coming down from the risers; Kenny was grinning at his friends, rolling his eyes to show how exhausted he was, wringing the hell out of his hands.

the day of silence

I'm not doing the Day of Silence--I mean, my school is really queer/trans-positive, it's not really an issue, at least not at such a basic level. I haven't heard anything about it at all. Except one of my friends who goes to a different school, who is against the Day of Silence because we're already quiet all the time so why would we be quiet some more instead of saying something. That makes sense to me.

However, I do think about Andy and become really proud, so I thought I'd tell you about him.

At some points in high school I was the only openly gay person, which was awful. Towards the end of eleventh grade, though, a new ninth-grader started at my school. Her name was Dana and she was very vocal about being gay; she mentioned it much more than I did. The next year, Dana and I would sometimes try to start a GSA. This was something I'd tried to do with various other kids in ninth and tenth grade, and always failed every time. We went to a private school, and I guess the situation was that the board wouldn't have been okay with it. But of course the headmaster and the dean of students, and everyone else my friends and I tried to convince during my high school career, couldn't come right out and say that, so they frequently would try to argue that a GSA would actually be a bad idea. They had two arguments which they would deliver, often within sentences of each other:

1. Our school is so accepting that we don't need a GSA.
2. Besides, if we had a GSA, the people who were in it might get beaten up.

So, okay. When I was in twelfth grade, the dean of students and I were friendly. She got annoyed with Dana and me and thought we were causing trouble, but she was still nice to me on an individual level, and I didn't hold it against her that the GSA never materialized.

Kids had tried to start a Day of Silence when I was in ninth grade. I was involved, I guess. It never happened; we were never able to get permission, we were told it would be disruptive. I don't think Dana and I really even thought about it when I was in twelfth grade. But there was Andy.

The Openly Gay Kids (when I was in twelfth grade):

1. Amanda (a senior)--weird, not very many friends, preferred to be friends with people a lot younger than her, but was learning to be with people and was mostly pretty mellow and nice. Was very shy and nervous about being gay, but as people graduated and she blended into the woodwork, fewer people actually remembered she was gay.

2. Dana (a sophomore)--very loud about various things and disliked for that, but also probably disliked more than she would have been if she wasn't gay. Although they didn't always get along, Dana was the only girl Amanda felt safe talking to and they had some games like calling each other "gayface" and talking about how gay they were, which was nice because Amanda found it physically hard to say the word gay except when she was talking to Dana.

3. Connor (a freshman)--very strange and distractible. He had a speech processing disorder and was prone to saying, in a completely serious voice, things like: "Sometimes I wish my eyelashes were longer because they're not very long...but I guess they'll grow." Amanda was fond of Connor of course. He had some friends even though some people found him annoying. Connor almost opted out of having to think about being gay because he was so out of it. Once he sent a bunch of flowery, ornate, anonymous love notes to a straight guy he liked, because he just didn't understand that you don't do that.

4. Andy (a sophomore)--had been assumed to be gay since he was in sixth grade, because he was small and did ballet. Eventually, in eighth or ninth grade, Andy had begun to mention that he was in fact gay. He occupied the most acceptable place for a gay kid--theater. Actually we were all involved in theater but Andy had the exact stereotypical personality of the harmless gay theater boy; he was mostly friends with girls, he was funny and gentle, he never politicized the fact that he was gay, and if he had crushes on straight guys he kept it to himself. He was a credit to the school--as the only Asian student, he was featured prominently in admissions booklets, and his dancing impressed teachers and students alike. Everyone loved Andy.

So, Dana and I didn't think about doing a Day of Silence, that much. But for some reason Andy did. He may have discussed it with Dana or me, I'm not sure; we knew that we couldn't get permission, couldn't get any kind of support from the school, but who was to stop people from just not talking? We asked our friends--well, mostly Andy asked his friends. And because everyone loved Andy, they agreed. And an impression was made, as far as I could tell. Discussions were started in class where teachers tried to argue that homophobia didn't exist and non-silent students couldn't help voicing their disagreement. People noticed that something was going on.

The dean of students was pissed. She made Dana and me come and talk to her. But it wasn't us! It's just not loud obnoxious gay people who care about homophobia, it turns out. It can be the gay person you love and trust, the one you thought was in your camp. It can be the gay person who you thought knew how silly all that stuff was, the gay person whose gayness is asexual and adorable.

I always loved Andy because he was funny and gentle. But then I also loved him for being sneaky and brave.

He was smiling through his own personal hell

So I remembered all my terribly abandoned plans about Lent, and I still stand by my decision to start writing here again, but my plan to think more seriously about God hasn't really happened as much as I'd like. So I'm going to try to write something that is to some extent--hopefully--about morality.

I think goodness is hard for me to understand. I've said this before and I'll illustrate with a story that is, in retrospect, really funny. Also I'm going to use fake names because it makes me feel special. I'm pretty much the jester of the Lord.

When I was in twelfth grade, I read some articles about the musical Spring Awakening and got really excited about it. I didn't have many friends so I ended up asking my parents if one of them would take me, and my dad agreed to take me. Unfortunately, when I came back from winter break, before I'd seen it, this one girl Emily, who was really strange but popular among the theater kids, had already become obsessed with Spring Awakening and she and her friends would constantly go and do student rush. It was sort of frustrating because I was in this awkward position where I desperately wanted to be friends with Emily and the other kids, but I just wasn't, and now I felt that I wasn't allowed to like Spring Awakening, because they liked it.

In an unrelated turn of events, soon after winter break I realized that I had a huge crush on Emily. I'd be about to brush my teeth and then I would just be standing there completely still, thinking about her, and I couldn't even turn on my toothbrush because the sound would upset me too much in my fragile state. Once I skipped play rehearsal because I got really scared that instead of my lines, I would just accidentally start yelling, "I WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH EMILY." I was incredibly anxious and miserable and twitchy, and just incredibly, incredibly guilty that I felt this way--and if you understand why this is about to be funny, then maybe you have seen Spring Awakening and you know that there's a character who acts exactly like my high school self:



When I (now reluctantly) went to see the musical with my dad, I was so extremely taken in and destroyed by what happened to the Amanda Forest Vivian doppleganger that I went into this weird stunned state for hours, and yelled at one of my teachers for not counting so I could keep up with her during an instrumental performance that happened later that night. I bought a t-shirt and a CD, but as soon as I got home I put them away in a drawer because I felt like I couldn't be into Emily and her friends' thing. It would just seem like I was copying. Which sort of sucked because I think it would have been really helpful for me to be able to listen to it, given the subject matter. Basically as soon as I graduated, I became a superfan for the whole summer.

But in February, when I was really in the depths of my Emily obsession, and basically hating myself and crying in the car on the way home from school (here's a really hilarious journal entry I wrote around that time, if you're curious), one of Emily's friends, Karen (I know, I'm so good at making up names), developed a huge crush on Gideon Glick, one of the cast members of Spring Awakening. Every time they went to the stage door, she would try to talk to him as much as possible, etc. etc., or sometimes she was too shy to go and Emily would have to go and get a message for Karen, etc. etc. Now, Gideon Glick looks like this:



I know you can't know for sure, but Gideon Glick is a guy who, if I found out he didn't like making out with girls, I wouldn't be all that surprised.

But Karen was.

Gideon Glick did an interview where he mentioned that he didn't like making out with girls, and Karen was fucking despondent! I mean, she was sort of joking, but also sort of not. She sat on the couch in the green room and all their friends clustered around her expressing their sympathy, while Karen nodded sadly and squished her hands together.

So, let's review: Karen was very dramatically expressing her unrequited love for a gay dude (a gay dude out of the many dudes in the world, who by and large like girls) who she didn't really know in real life, and everyone felt sorry for her. Meanwhile, I was unrequitedly in love with the bizarre but fascinating and very moving Emily, a person I saw every day, who I was forced to talk to on a regular basis while I pretended nothing was wrong, because if anyone found out, it would just mean that I was really gross and creepy and a predator.

I wanted to punch Karen in the face. Because I wanted to punch her in the face so much, I figured that it would be really, really charitable, and exactly the kind of thing God wanted me to do, if I went up to her before English class and said, "Oh, hey, Karen, I'm sorry about that guy you like." So I did.

Karen blinked and said snottily, "Oh, Gideon Glick? Oh...well, it's okay." She shrugged with the air of someone who has too much pain to share with anyone else; she sighed, and settled again into her limp Gideon-Glick-is-gay posture, against the wall across from the door of the class.

I almost went into some sort of fit of rage. What the fuck, Karen! I tried so hard to be charitable to you! I totally pushed down all of the totally horrible and intense and sad feelings that I have every day about Emily, and I tried to care about your stupid crush on some obviously gay actor in a musical, when I don't even know you very well! What the fuck!

Ever since this happened, it is sometimes hard for me to decide how good is too good. The problem with striving for the best is that sometimes the best simply isn't possible, and trying to do something really good might just result in you being really, really angry and, well...less Christlike. Like many people who are disabled, and also probably many college students who aren't perfectly suited to the way college is, I spend a lot of my energy just trying to think about how to get through the day. And I guess it's hard for me to decide how much to take "getting through the day" into account when I am making decisions. I mean, sometimes I think I take that so much into account, that I forget about goodness. But I'm also afraid of trying so hard to be good that I end up just really angry, if that makes sense.

And We Could Go in the Ocean

(This is for a class, and as I mentioned when you write personal essays you're supposed to make yourself sound as unpleasant as possible--so keep in mind I don't actually stare at girls in the shower in real life, I sort of put that in to make myself seem creepier. However, now that I turned it in, I can't believe I said that, and I feel like it kind of ruins the story because it's like, "why should I care about this CREEP?")

When I went to farm camp there was a girl, Abby, who I now think was schizophrenic. I mean, in psychology classes, I can’t help but think of her. When I was younger I didn’t think of these things in much complexity. I thought of her as “retarded,” I think. But I’d never met any kids who were actually retarded. I meant she had a sense of being guileless. And that I liked talking to her because it was like going somewhere else.

Our camp was a camp for kids with problems. Except for some kids who were going to Yale. In retrospect it sounds kind of messed up, like they were slumming, us and them—but it didn’t feel that way. You could maybe briefly pretend you were another kind of kid. How did the Group know if your parents had sent you here because they couldn’t control you, or if you were just interested in planting vegetables and living without light?

Except, Abby was apparent. In Group, the counselors would weirdly spur us to new heights of backbiting. For example one time we were told—all fifty of us—to go around and say something we thought was wrong with the way people acted at camp. We would work ourselves up into a fervor even if we didn’t want to. If we tried to say, “Um, people are cliquey?” we were told to say exactly who we meant. “Paca and Jake always sit together and I feel like it wouldn’t be allowed to sit with them,” we would finally get out, slowly, gnawing at the hems of our jeans with our hands. Then Paca would cry while Jake glared at us, trying to open his eyes wide as possible to look sincere. I mean, no one was supposed to be mad. But Abby became distraught, and when it was her turn she said, “We’re broken, we’re all shattered apart, in pieces. There’s been a schism, we’re everywhere. I’m very worried about the schism, I don’t know how we’ll find ourselves. We have to get back together.”

One time I was sent to get Abby because she didn’t show up in the morning to plant vegetables. Abby was in the creepy bathroom that caused me for the only time in my life to stop wearing makeup. She was taking a shower, her pink towel draped over the bar. I reminded her about crew but she said, “I’m taking a shower. I’m cleaning myself. I’m not done.”

Abby wasn’t concerned about the shower curtain and I could see her inside. I’d never seen a girl in the shower before. Abby’s body was skinny and calm and she looked different without her glasses. Later, digging holes for beets, we looked up and saw her coming slantily along the road, with the dawn breaking briefly, the trees starting to beam with yellow light.

I was the favorite girl of Becky, a tiny thirteen-year-old who had depression and anorexia and smoked cigarettes. There were two kids with Asperger’s Syndrome, Noah and me. I loved Noah because it’s always easier to forgive your faults in someone else and even find them charming. I defended Noah constantly to my friend Chase, who had a wide white face and dark hair, was openly against Group and wore Salad Fingers shirts. “He’s fifteen,” I remember Chase saying about Noah, “fifteen!” and I started crying and Chase apologized for making me cry. I think Chase was talking about how Noah should have the sense that other fifteen-year-olds, like Chase, had. I think Chase, in specific, was talking about Noah’s horrible unintentional love affair with the twelve-year-old Sara, who was tone-deaf with a face like a distracted frog. Sara just said they were in love and Noah didn’t say anything, just frowned or smiled to himself. It was hard to tell.

I miss Noah because he was like me, he blundered into problems and then spent time apologizing, over and over, for everything he might have done. Noah was so small he looked younger than Sara, which made it a little less creepy in my mind. I was seventeen but at farm camp I took advantage of whatever it was that made Noah and me pass for younger; I hung out with Sara for a while, letting people take me for a smart and mature fourteen-year-old instead of a hopelessly droopy and spacey almost-adult.

Noah’s face looked nearly deformed in its tenderness, his eyes like marbles behind round wire glasses, his tiny, pointy nose. Noah was just all-around tiny and pointy, certain counselors took a liking to him and would just hold him during Group, his small shoulders burrowed into Dave’s sweatered side, Dave’s hand on Noah’s arm. Noah was like a leech or a suction cup maybe. He was easy to love.

Maybe I also was and didn’t know it. It’s the apologizing maybe that shocks affection out of people when they least expect it. This girl who wanted to be a missionary was hugging me on the last day of camp, crying inconsolably and staring into my eyes, telling me not to be so hard on myself. My cabin told me I was brave.

So maybe it was stupid for me to imagine I passed. Everyone probably knew I was a Noah, an Abby. Although when I first met Noah, I didn’t know he was a Noah. We fed the pigs together one morning and talked about aliens, stuck our heads into the pen.

Once Jesse, the gay counselor, said in Group that he had something to say to me. Then in the art and music cabin, in the rain, he told me he was afraid to apply for a job at Banana Republic. He said he didn’t think he was good enough for anything, that it was hard to even look at people. Jesse had a clear voice and a deferential manner. Sara had a crush on him; she was loudly homophobic but very naïve. I had a crush on him too, kind of. I always used to get crushes on gay men and not understand it, but I guess it’s just like the way I love Noah, the surprise of seeing your problems in someone else’s mind.

Jesse said I was pretty and shouldn’t always go around saying I was fat. He started to tear up. I told him about my dogs and he recognized they were named after characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We complained that people no longer watched it or knew what it was.

One day before Group started, Jesse complimented me because I was always writing down what was happening on my arms and legs. My parents were upset about me doing this, they sometimes cried and said people would know that I cut myself because I didn’t care about the state of my skin. Jesse explained how he was going to be a singer and he could tell because he sang all the time, everywhere, and I was the same.

I wanted to tell Jesse I was gay but I didn’t. Eventually I told my cabin and they said I was brave. Becky was excited and struck up the same kind of relationship Sara stuck up with Noah, but with less implied consent this time around. For a long time I thought farm camp was important because it was the first time people didn’t know I was gay, I could control it, because I could be a good person if people just didn’t know. I was sure a lot meaner to Becky after she found out.

However, my feelings about farm camp are now more diffuse. Sort of like when my dog Xander is curled into me during a thunderstorm, I wake up and there is this fleecey substance pressed into me, a wide, round heart beating hard against my own—and it’s like, why would you come to me? Don’t you know any better than to trust me like this?

Living in the pregnant pause

(Hi, before you start you should know that this is not very much about what I usually post about--it's mainly about religion. As with many Christian traditions I halfheartedly absorbed just because I'm American, I feel that I didn't fully understand Lent when I decided to give up I'm Somewhere Else. Having thought about it more, I feel that Lent is a way of living and thinking and isn't as simple as just giving up something concrete, and I think this post is an appropriate post for me to make during Lent.)

When I was younger I used to think that all gay people felt empty and cried all the time because we're naturally unhappy people because it's an inferior state. I thought that whenever people did gay pride or anything, they were just trying to convince themselves, like the Emperor's New Clothes, and that when gay people said they were in love and wanted to get married, they were just trying to convince themselves they were in love, but really they were settling for someone they didn't really love.

This is probably hard to believe given how much I complain about being gay on this blog, but I don't feel that way anymore. There are still a lot of aspects of it that I find to be shitty, but I know they affect other people differently. Also, I just don't feel miserable. I think a lot of this has to do with my environment. When I was in high school I looked at all the shitty aspects of being gay and would just cry all the time, but I think that's because aside from the legit shitty aspects I was in an environment where there were lots of non-innate shitty aspects, like having to feel really nervous about everything I wrote and said, and having to feel cut off from being friends with both genders in different ways. These aspects were sort of under-the-radar and pervasive so I didn't necessarily see them. At Oberlin they are mostly gone, so even though I don't think that being gay is a fun time, I think that being alive while being a gay person can be a very fun time.

So, anyway, the way I used to feel about gay people is now how I feel about religious people. I drew a pretty good comic about it in class.



AFV: batter my heart 3-person God
God: (reaches down with a giant shining hand and wrests AFV's heart open) Hi! I'm here!
AFV: (looks happy)
AFV a few minutes later: (looking sad) Did that really happen. I probably just imagined it. AARGH I'm so alone in the world.

The fucking shit that God has done for me and I don't even care. Or, um, the fucking shit my brain is doing because the idea of there not being a God makes me want to die? Except, either way I just want to die so I can find out, at this point I feel like I'd rather be in hell and know there is a God. (I recognize this is kind of a messed-up thing to put on the Internet. I have no motivation to commit suicide, lots of fun stuff is happening right now and I'm a happy person, gay germs aside. I'm sure I will be agonizing about the afterlife for seventy more years, unless I get hit by a bus.)

I have actually figured out how I ruined my relationship with God. Amusingly, given that I now feel pretty normal about being gay, and horrible about God, in the time period when I felt horrible about being gay, God was just around. Sometimes people are like "it must have sucked to find out you're gay, you're so religious" but I wasn't raised in a religion at all. In fact I became religious when I was ten, after I had already started finding out that I was gay. It was my own thing. For a while I would tell God that I was sorry for being gay, but I soon figured out I wasn't. Even later, when I felt like it was an empty, horrible thing to be, I didn't think that God was mad at me for it or anything like that.

Sometimes I thought my prayers got answered. However, in twelfth grade I prayed for my music teacher, who was bipolar and would yell and swear at the kids in my class, to get better, because I knew something horrible was going to happen. I really loved my teacher, I was one of the only kids he considered worthy of apologies after he blew up. One time he awkwardly bought me flowers after making me cry in class. Anyway, I prayed a lot, and then something incredibly horrible happened. I think he wasn't even allowed back on campus afterward. After that, I didn't believe in the power of prayer, but I thought that God could change me if I wanted to be changed, and sometimes when I prayed I felt it happen--this grace, just something that altered my way of thinking about things.

Then at the end of first year I read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis. I always liked CSL when I was a kid but sometimes I think this was the worst decision I ever made. I always said Christian prayers because that's most of the little I had been exposed to, but I didn't really think Christianity was true. I remember watching the movie Jesus Camp and thinking "that sucks, those kids have a real feeling for God but they're being told all the wrong things about Him."

But then when I read Mere Christianity I thought a lot of it made sense. I started moving toward identifying as Christian. I also got interested in medieval studies and I was really moved by the way medieval Christians related to God. And I just thought that I wasn't Doing Enough. If I was Christian there would be certain things for me to read and certain things for me to do, in order to be a religious person.

The problem is because of my social shit it is pretty impossible for me to go to church regularly. For the past two Sundays I have gone to church and I think--could be wrong, could totally be wrong--that this will be the time it actually works out, because I have a friend who likes going to church and we go together, and no one really talks to us or anything, which is perfect.

Actually, I don't know why I said "the problem is." I have about eight problems. I would like to know what to do in church all the time, and be able to take communion. But it is scary to think about contacting people so I can get baptized and confirmed. Also, the really really really big problem is just that I have horrible doubts. And not just about the existence of God. I just find Christianity to be--well, I mean, it's very beautiful, and it makes sense, but--

Next year I want to live in Talcott, which is this really castle-y awesome dorm that is right next to the building where most of the creative writing and Latin classes are. Once I started thinking about living in Talcott, I remembered that the kosher co-op is in the same building, and wondered if it would be nice to join it. I remembered that last year I thought it would be nice to be in a co-op where they sometimes pray.

But then I couldn't even believe I had ever thought that would be okay, because I would probably like it a lot, and if I liked praying with Jewish people, then that would mean Christianity wasn't real. I realize now that I believe mostly in experience. I mean, I know I've experienced grace. But lots of people who aren't Christian have experienced things like that. I feel like my attempts at identifying with Christianity are just making me not believe in God because I find it completely impossible to reconcile Christianity with the things about God that I firmly and deeply believe.

Since I started identifying as Christian, I've become aware that lots more people than my parents (especially my father) are extremely contemptuous of religion. I mean, almost everyone I know is like that. It just makes me think I'm stupid and if I wasn't so stupid and deluded I'd be an atheist. I was reading some posts by chaoticidealism, who is an ASD person who's written some really good and important stuff about ASD and functioning level things, and is also Christian. She said that she has doubts, but that believing in God makes more sense to her than not believing in God, so it's actually less of a leap to be a theist. Maybe that's how I feel, now. The thing is I used to be so sure.

I keep meeting people and asking them if they're religious. Why would I do that? Who cares? Why do I need other people to make me not wake up in the middle of the night feeling incredibly terrified and alone all the time? (The other night I woke up and there was this voice singing outside and I didn't feel alone at all and I started shaking, but, fuck, that stuff never stays with me for long, of course, because that's just how stupid and horrible my brain is.)

I'm always screwing with my Facebook religious beliefs, trying to be clever and accurate at the same time. In the past year I've had "Episcopalian Quaker Deist," "Christian Universalist," "Affective Piety," "There was a pregnant pause before He said okay" (Belle & Sebastian), "Pray to God but row for shore" (a quote from Carnivale), and "Cretin." I guess these are all reasonably true (especially the Belle & Sebastian one) but "Cretin" probably gets the closest to how I feel.

"Cretin" means Christian. People started using it as a word for intellectually disabled people as a way of saying, God is for everybody. Our society hates intellectually disabled people, so now it is a Ramones song, but I like the original idea. I think that spending time with severely intellectually disabled people is a pretty good way to understand God, and this definitely isn't because I think that they are adorable saints, but I do think there is a deeper love in us that we try to constrict and deny the farther we get into the world. If you don't have language and you're not far enough entrenched in your standard culture to do impression management, I think that you experience and display that love in a more obvious way. I know a woman who tears up Bibles and scratches people in the face when she gets mad--I'm not saying severely disabled people don't have original sin--but she also hugs and kisses people as soon as she meets them. She doesn't remember people's names most of the time. I think that if we didn't remember we're not supposed to hug everyone, we would hug everyone. It's caritas.

I hope this doesn't come off as offensive but I seriously sometimes want a DDDD--Doctorate of Developmentally Disabled Divinity. I feel like maybe as I've tried harder to be standard, I've tried to make my feelings about God be standard too, and it's just not taking. It just makes me feel terrified, it has for months.

There has to be something under all the systems. There has to be something under all the words. I put all these words on top of God and now it's hard for me to see God. I'm always praying and it's like I need to pray to keep God alive. But what if there's a kind of prayer that stacks on top of God and hides God away?

I try to look at life like I have the brain disorder where you can see colors but you can't tell what anything is. Like an everlasting shutdown, but more fun. If you dislocate your mind like that, then of course you can see life is glorious, it's something more than the sum of its parts. But sometimes I'm afraid that that's all I can say about God. Maybe it's stupid that I find myself trying to say more than that.

(If you have any more faith than I do--i.e. about as much faith to fill a contact case, probably--please talk to me about this, I'm kind of falling apart.)

sorry I just had to express my Jeremy Vest crush some more

soon he will need his own tag.



I like Susan too but Jeremy is definitely the win: "Hey ladies and gentlemen, this is Jeremy Vest in a store the name of I don't know, we got our prom outfits and we're ready to rock and roll tonight." I wish I talked that fast.

Also on a serious level, I feel incredibly nervous for them going into a prom like that, it's like disabilities + high school = why would you do that if you don't have to, but it seems like no one's being a dick to them at all, which is pretty great.

(Is it okay to use the intellectual disability tag for Williams? I don't know anyone with Williams but a lot of the reason I have so much interest in it is that it seems to be kind of like ASD in that it's less of a straightforward impairment--hopefully after my previous post, this doesn't come off like I think people with Williams are better than other intellectually disabled people because "they're good at music" or something, but just that I think it's a different kind of experience and I'm interested in meeting people who have it. When people post How's Your News videos on YouTube, there are often some comments from people who are confused about the nature of Vest's disability--"what does he have, ADD?")

I was cleaning my room and I found this

January 25, 2007

This stupid crush on this stupid girl who I don't even know drives me crazy. I really depress myself. I guess it has to be psychological. I keep noticing things she does that I do which makes me like her more but I have gone to school with her for three and a half years and this has never happened, so obviously I am crazy. If we really had so much in common I would have felt like this before.

My theory: she is sort of like me in some ways (well okay just the constant writing mostly) and maybe I wish I was her because she's kind of mean and she seems to cry or freak out about things all the time but she has a lot of friends and she has Mrs. M. who she is so close with. And I guess it upsets me because I don't have many friends and I sure don't have teachers fucking adopting me and and when I'm sad I just have to deal with it. I don't sit around emitting rays of sadness and making everyone within a mile radius feel bad and my stupid fake mom teacher has to come put her hand on my head because my brain can't take care of itself. (Can you tell I wish Mrs. M. was my fake mom? I really do. I think she's awesome but I didn't even like her until 11th grade and she's not my advisor etc. etc. You can't just make a person care about you by wanting them to and I know I have my own advisor who likes me a lot but I don't see her very much. So meanwhile I go to playwriting and try not to be an advisor thief. Everyone loves Mrs. M., she's like a celebrity so I don't have any right.) Anyway, I don't think ______ has any excuse to be sad. I guess she probably has something wrong with her so that's not fair of me.

well look. I have barely any friends but I do have some and some people have none. I am not bullied. My teachers are all nice to me and seem to like me. Some other person probably has a psychological crush on me and thinks I'm a moron for not being happier.

One thing though: SHE'S SUCH A GOOD WRITER. Fuck. Even though she has a million friends and doesn't like me even in that capacity etc. etc. it's really hard not to want to know her better when she unleashes one of her things. They're just so fucking sad and they make it seem like she's not a person but a big aching consciousness that understands people in some inside way. That understands the undersides of people. In fact it makes me feel bad that I am such a bad writer and can only write about nervous people after ten years. So maybe she deserves all this.

I have to pray a lot I guess. Even though this has only been around for a few weeks I can't imagine being without it. Which is REALLY WEIRD. I really might be going crazy.

February 2

I stopped being sick + she was out for a few days + Mrs. M. told me I was a good writer = my crush is in remission. I still like her but it's not so weird anymore. I AM SO RELIEVED.

later?

what I wanted to say was: just look at me. Just look at my hormones, just look at my nerves. Just looked at my love for you rushing out of me, my face like an explosion, my heart snap snap snapping like fingers with a fast song, my hands more like a little animal hidden away in an underground den because I jam them in my pockets all the time to keep from reaching out for you. My memory is not photographic but where you're concerned it's pretty damn close. I could take a test on you. I could say what you eat, what clothes you wear a lot, like I imagine you're so excited when your mom takes them out of the wash and you have to wear them right now, right today. I could talk about your hands, the sentences structures you favor, your nervous habits. And then oh snap extra credit, your posture, the way your face looks when you sing, the shiny sharpness of your voice onstage. I'd get a hundred on the you test, more than a hundred, the Paw of Perfection[1]. But it wouldn't matter. I don't have a penis so I'm disqualified[2]. It's like I didn't bring the right equipment to the race up the steep rocky cliffs. I can love you as much as I want but I'm wrong, it's just wrong, and I need to stop.

1. The Paw of Perfection is what my high school Latin teacher would give you if you did really well on a translation, because she was obsessed with her dog.
2. BWAAHAAHAHA

In conclusion, I can't decide if I'm glad I'm not this unintentionally hilarious anymore, or if I sort of miss it. I don't really have romantic feelings for anyone at this point. I think this partly comes from having a really specific type, and partly as I've gotten better at functioning I feel things less strongly. Although, maybe this is just me realizing that because my type is so specific, and because most people are straight, it's more practical not to have these feelings, and just shutting them down. When I really think about it, it's hard to imagine that I'll ever have a relationship.

Manners

I just finished my Latin exam. Having done the math, I think it's pretty likely that I just scraped by. Literally, like I got one point above failing. Does this matter? Not at all.

It's time for another edition of Kartheiser is Magic, but in this case, it's a segue into an actual disability-related topic! Hooray!

[In response to the statement that he seems younger in real life than he does on the show] "I actually have been through a lot more in my life than Pete has. I think Pete is less of a man than me. The difference in the visual is that Pete had a finishing-school upbringing. I'm an actor, so part of my job is looking like a bum. So I think manners and age are being confused here."

YES VINCENT KARTHEISER! THANKS FOR BEING SO FUCKING COOL ALL THE TIME! Manners are not age. And the fact that people think they are smacks me in the face about a million times a day.

I sometimes have very Pollyanna-ish reactions to things. This is both because of ordinary ASD sensitivity to details, and because of the nature of my scripting. As I think I've previously said, it used to be very hard for me to do things like buy candy bars, ask for directions, or, well, anything. I felt overwhelmed by the task because I knew that as well as the stated task there were lots of other secret implied tasks about my tone of voice and the way my face should be looking. (If you think this isn't true, you're just stupid. Go to a sandwich shop and use nonstandard tone and body language and have trouble processing and making decisions while you are ordering your sandwich. The people at the sandwich stop will be super happy to point out, verbally or with body language, everything that's wrong with what you're doing. Or, if you have a very serious, tense expression on your face because you're trying to make decisions fast to not inconvenience them, they'll ask if you're okay.)

Anyway, everything was such a big challenge that it was hard to do anything, so I figured out the solution of acting really excited and optimistic and young and innocent. This is a very simple persona that lends itself to easy scripting. When you are buying a candy bar you just think to yourself how excited you are about the candy bar and focus on expressing that. When you are asking for directions you try to be cute and make a joke out of how young you are. Suddenly, in the space of like a year, the amount of things I was able to do increased a huge amount.

Previously, I had found it very hard to talk in class or ask teachers for help because I didn't know how to talk or look. Now, I approached teachers with a persona of being young and adorably baffled--a persona that was partly sincere, but could also be used to humorous effect if the teacher was the joking kind. I had an easier time talking in class because if I had trouble understanding something, or if I was expressing a lot of ideas and my script broke or wasn't properly set up, I could giggle and make a joke out of it. Once I started scripting, my grades, and my comfort with my teachers and classmates, improved enormously.

I am a bit more academically impaired at Oberlin than I was in high school. Even though Oberlin is a very small and laid-back school, it is not comparable to my high school which had 50 kids in a grade and had a high population of students with learning disabilities. Besides, there's just the fact that for most of the time I was in high school, I was legally a child, and even after my eighteenth birthday I might as well have been. It seemed more natural for my teachers to have a motherly or fatherly relationship to me. In college, I am expected to some extent to behave like an adult, and if I come to a professor's office hours acting ditzy and young, they might think I am annoying, unmotivated, or manipulative. So at Oberlin, I have to be doing pretty badly to go see a professor, unless they have a very casual, accepting attitude (like most of the classics professors). The only professor I am actually close to in an admissions brochure sort of way, like I've been to her house, used to forget to come to class sometimes--so she's someone I can feel completely safe with. All in all, I still do a lot better than was expected of me.

Sometimes people say that I am immature or use words like "crazy," "insane," "annoying," and "obnoxious" to describe the way I am. Also, when they notice that I am apologizing a lot or putting a lot of concentration into figuring out how to do something right, they tell me not to be so nervous, to have more confidence, or not to be so insecure. All these words imply that I am an unfinished person. Either I am unpleasant or annoying, and I should improve myself so I won't bother people, or I am incomplete on a deeper level--inappropriately anxious and self-hating. If I stop being a person who can be described with all these words, then I will be an adult.

While I have been in the UK, I have not made very much use of the Pollyanna persona. I feel that I don't know the culture well enough to know if it will be appropriate or if it will be annoying. When I am buying things, I mostly make use of something I taught myself to do at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, where people are always staring at my hair:



If there is any downtime while I'm waiting for my sandwich to be made or my groceries to be rung up, I simply mentally remove myself from the situation and try to stim out on some band posters or ceiling lights. That way no one thinks about me at all. The only problem is when the other person tries to be friendly. Niyatee was trying to explain to me that when the lady at the burrito store guesses what kind of burrito I'm going to order, she isn't trying to a)mess up my script and b)make me feel guilty about my repetitive eating habits. I still feel scared about going to the burrito store, though.

I don't ask my professors for help because it might be annoying and as a result I got very behind in two of my classes and will be very close to failing them if I don't fail completely.

I haven't struck anyone as crazy, obnoxious, immature, adorable, otherworldly, or any of the other things I am called, because I barely talk to people at all and when I do I am nervous and blank. I say what I'm required to say and then feel it wasn't good enough.

It is hard for me to go anywhere or do anything because I don't feel I have a system for how.

When I go home, when I pick up a lot of jangly exclamations and interrupt myself in the middle of my sentences, when I raise my hand and preface my question with, "I know this is really stupid, and maybe I shouldn't even be in this class if I don't know this, but," when I stick out my hand towards people to say hello to them, when I skid around and call everyone "kids" and act incredibly delighted about yogurt-covered pretzels at the student cafe, when I eat snow and lie down on the floor because I have kyphosis and accidentally start stimmily running across campus because I feel hopeful and happy coming out of my ExCo on a cold starry night, I will be a person who is accomplished and capable in a lot of ways. I will be more of an adult when I am a quirkfest than I am now that I am paralyzed by a desire to be unseen. To be inoffensive. I feel calcified here, but with worse manners I can really make something of myself.

Good times

I think I previously mentioned how in ninth grade I liked this girl who was always getting really mad at me. For some reason I decided to reread her livejournal from 2004 and it's probably the funniest thing I've ever seen. Maybe it's only funny to me because I know how ridiculous we both were at that age (I'll probably show it to my dad when I get home, he'll think it's funny too).

(There are several posts where she typed up fliers about the school dress code and made fun of their spelling mistakes.)

More aggrevation [27 Apr 2004|12:21pm]
Amanda just went and pissed me off again. I told her about the theory my mom came up with about her shocking for shock's sake, and how bisexual people are usually either gay or straight, and usually want to cover up what they are to fit in more, or want to seem more eccentric. Amanda then said today stuff that is really insulting to my mom, such as saying she is small minded and stuff. FOR GODS SAKE, MY MOM WORKS FOR TWO GAY BOSSES! I hate when people say my mom is small minded, when look at all these homophobic freaks out there. Openmindedness is one of my moms strengths, and i think that those who criticize her for that, should be labeled as intolerant. And I thought Amanda understood.

Grr... [24 Apr 2004|10:55am]
Amanda went on a parade, which means i cant talk to her for three days. This sucks. Also, I found out yesterday that she thinks gay people can become straight if they wanted to. This is not the case. Gay peoples preferences are genetic, and not something they can change at the drop of a hat. There is either a disillusioned straight person, or a gay one. You cannot STOP being gay, any more than you can STOP being straight. You can come out, of course, but that is merely a facade. I hate it when people think homosexuals can stop being what they are if they merely choose to.

In other news, amanda and i sorta made up, and i didnt push the above issue too much. I got cold stone ice cream, and me and amanda msted the newer parent trap. Pretty good day, other than the first thing.

[I'm actually surprised that I believed people could change their sexual orientation but I'm not sure I had a super clear idea of what sexual orientation was at that point; I thought I was bisexual, after all. I do think that the "liberal" view of homosexuality tries to categorize it as a much more cut-and-dry thing than it really is and that's probably what my 15-year-old self was incompetently trying to articulate. Maybe?]

funny and upsetting stuff [22 Apr 2004|10:16pm]
Today we got this awesome book in English. The importance of being earnest. Its light-years ahead of Wuthering Heights, the worst book we have gotten this year.

[Really long and hilarious critique of every book read in English class that year. I wish I could post the whole thing but it's massive. Doesn't this sound like a Dear America book or something? What kind of real kid writes a journal about the books they read in English?]

Amanda really angered me today. She is always reading, drawing, or writing, which kind of makes me angry, especially when she considers walking exercise. I don’t understand why she wants to be on track team when she hates to run, is always last, and has no friends on that team. If she has to hate a sport, wouldn’t she prefer a sport where you don’t run as much, and has a really close friend with her to encourage her? I just don’t get why she wouldn’t opt out for soccer. *sulks*

I also found that the only theaters playing Shaolin Soccer [apparently a movie she wanted to see that I didn't want to see.], were in NYC. It just pisses me off. Why can’t anything go right? One perfect day is hardly much to ask for. Amanda will probably be saying halleluiah. dammit.

Yesterday [18 Apr 2004|10:17am]

At a snack-kiosk, Amanda got the most disgusting thing i think I will ever see her eat. it was mutated cheese over nachos. There was so much nasty cheese, that the chips on the top had grown soggy. I used to see stuff like that served at my middle school cafeteria, and have never trusted nachos and cheeze since. Unfortunately, Amanda had no such experience, and had to suffer the floppy revolting cheesy abombination.

Another dorm mother gripe and other current events [15 Apr 2004|07:57pm]

Amanda and I listened to this really sexist song today. The chorus goes, "AND A REAL WOMAN KNOWS A REAL MAN ALWAYS COMES FIRST! AND A REAL MAN CANT DENY A WOMANs WORTH!" What about gay men and women? are they not real? hahahahah! and what about a man coming first? I can understand putting a partner ahead of one's self, but a man always ahead of a woman? HA! and the man cant deny a womans worth? what the hell does that mean? that he cant stand not to have s3x with her? lust hardly makes the man. self control is the key, guys. and dont listen to brainwashing alicia keys songs.

In the dorm, watching documentary on Pamela Anderson [14 Apr 2004|06:46pm]

I feel really bad for David,cause all my friends hate him for a reason that they wont really tell me about. And he has some medical disorder or something, according to one teacher. He's hardly ever in school,and i dont really know any friends of his. I think he has lyme disease. Hes actually a pretty funny guy, and just because he acts a little off-sync, is no reason to shun him, drive him away from the lunch table,insult him to his face or his back. Besides, hes a democrat and an Anti-Bush, which i can relate to.

I wish Amandas curfew was a bit later than her parents insist. They always get really pissed off when i call amanda at nine-thirty. Im really sorry, but thats the earliest i can contact anyone, because thats when i get out of study hall. I feel really depressed.

This is probably annoying and not funny without actually having been there. I'm not sure. It's easy to remember why I had such a crush on her; she had such strong (and unintentionally hilarious) opinions. It's weird that I had an easier time finding girls to crush on at my tiny high school than I do at my college which is more than ten times the size. I think this is probably because I'm just a nasty closed-off person now, and not really because all the girls at Oberlin suck like I always claim they do.

Tattoo ideas

This time yesterday I decided I was going to get a tattoo. I was walking past a tattoo shop with my friend LB, who is visiting, and she exclaimed that we should both get tattoos there in the next few days. I immediately agreed and started agonizing over what to get. Nine hours later when we were falling asleep, I kept getting really upset and telling LB, "I wish I could do this, I wish I was different. I wish someone would fix me, I wish I was a real person." Then I prayed until I fell asleep, and woke up about fifteen minutes later and thought, what the fuck, I can't believe I was going to get a tattoo. I'm not really sure what getting a tattoo was mixed up with in my head; it seems like dream logic. It's hard to believe I was thinking like that in real life.

My opinion about tattoos is that they're wonderful when they're done right but I think it's stupid to get one just to get one. I don't see the point of having a really small plain image or phrase on your hipbone or your shoulder. I was thinking of getting one on my knee, but it would be hard to decide which way it should face; really, the only place I'd definitely be happy with would be my arm or my wrist, which is obviously a big decision because it's hard to hide. And I still live with my parents and they'd be upset (not to mention I'd be doing it with their money, which seems wrong). And I'm too young, in terms of independence and life experience, to really know what I'd be getting myself into if I got a noticeable tattoo. It's better to wait until I'm a little older. Then I guess I'll get something on my arm. And when I'm a little older than that, maybe I'll get a half-sleeve. And so on. (I wonder if it's possible to get the opposite of a half-sleeve, like a long glove. That would be so incredibly impractical and so incredibly awesome.)

Anyway, I feel weird that I got so impulsive and emotional about such an odd thing. Having LB here is really nice and I guess I feel more hopeful about life. Maybe I was trying to express that? It's not like me to make a lot of decisions and pronouncements I don't understand. But I am going to make a list of my ideas because I think they're good ideas.

1.

Harriet the Spy. This is something I've wanted for almost three years and there are lots of good reasons for wanting it. I've been into Harriet the Spy since I was eight and my obsession rises again every few years. Obviously writing is really important to me and I started because of her. When I was about 12, which I guess is when my second or third round of obsession happened, I saw Harriet as sort of an ASD role model who was actually interested in things and didn't care for politeness. (When I was mad at my mom, I would call her a "bridge-player," and I did it enough that it stopped being novel and started being just the same as calling her a bitch.) During my most recent round, when I was 19, I was feeling alienated from other gay people and comforted myself by thinking about how awesome Harriet and her creator, the super gay Louise Fitzhugh, are. Except, despite the fact that this is the most sensible tattoo ever, it's lost a bit of its appeal for me in the past few months. Which is probably proof that I shouldn't get any tattoos.

2. (the one on the far left)

Viola da gamba. Basically I have this giant thwarted love for medieval and Renaissance music. My high school had an early music group, which sounds really posh but was actually pretty messy and unfortunate for reasons I won't go into. But this was good for me because it meant that despite not being able to read music I was an important member of the group just because I was sincerely interested, and when I was a senior I ended up playing viola da gamba, which is a precursor to the cello which is 100% cooler in every way but fell out of favor because it's not very loud. I really loved playing it. Of course, because I can't read, I'll never be able to take part in any decent early music group in the Real World (and the Real World includes my college, which has a big deal conservatory--therefore I can't even get into classes where I could learn to read, because I'm not in the con). Besides, I'm not exactly good at playing even if I could read.

So early music is this thing that's probably gone forever from my life, but will always be a part of me. One of the only really powerful interesting things in my life when I was really sad and lonely; something I threw myself into because I had to. Also, my viola da gamba teacher had a really strong effect on me, both positive and negative, and that's something that will always be part of me too.

3. / / /

Corinthians lion! This is what I want the most and it is the one that would be the most difficult to get because I am very bad at communicating to professionals what I want (I think this is because when I was a kid, I was considered to be a holy terror when I got my hair cut because I was just like GET AWAY FROM ME STOP TOUCHING ME; I haven't found a happy medium between being like that and being a doormat, with the result that I end up with incredibly awful haircuts and have taken to just cutting my own hair or getting LB to do it because I'm not afraid to tell her to stop). Anyway, I need someone I trust to design my Corinthians lion before I get it. I want it to look sort of like a crest, although I don't actually want it to be a crest. IT'S HARD TO EXPLAIN.

I really loved the Narnia books when I was a kid and like the idea of getting a tattoo related to a childhood obsession. Narnia was a big part of my relationship with my dad when I was a kid, so there's that too. Most importantly, I love C.S. Lewis's apologetic books and they've had a big influence on me (that's understating it; I wouldn't identify as Christian at all without having read them). So having a Narnia tattoo is kind of a tribute to CSL in general, and therefore a religious tattoo.

I love Corinthians 13 just as much as everyone else and their mom does. In fact it is right below my palm right now because I wrote lines 8-12 on my computer keyboard. I mostly like it for the Platonic stuff, but "caritas numquam excidit" is the only phrase short enough to make a good tattoo. Besides, it's always true. It is usually translated as "love never fails" and then people use it for their wedding vows and stuff, which is dumb, because sex fails. Limerence fails. But caritas doesn't mean either of those things, it means mercy.

I think this is a tattoo I will definitely end up getting once I can design it/am older, because it is really important content-wise, is something I'll always believe, and would look awesome.

4.

Puddleglum is a Narnia character. He's a Marshwiggle. A lot of what I remember about him is just saying the word "Marshwiggle" a lot with my dad because we liked saying it. Puddleglum is usually whiny and grumpy I think, which makes him the perfect tattoo for me.

But I mostly want him because he says this: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."

The main problem with getting him is that the only picture I could find that I liked (the one above) might end up looking sort of gross on my arm. So this is another thing where I wouldn't just be able to bring in a picture and say "do this."