Awakening
A few months ago the janitors at RISD went on strike. Last time this happened the admin caved within 5 hours. This time it went on for weeks and weeks. At first I performed ambivalence and tried to embody a kind of demure culture critic rye distance. As the weeks went by and the picket outside the administration office grew I felt a twinge every time I passed. Some students had joined in and were annoyingly making educational flat-illustration instagram posts and building their own noisemakers to deploy on the front. I started to wonder if my annoyance was actually veiled guilt at my complicity through silence and inaction.
Oliver was mad at me for still going to class despite the strike. I was mad at him for not texting me.
Eventually I caved and went to the protest. It was my first time ever going to any kind of demonstration. During 2020 I kept my head down and pontificated about a lack of concrete goals or the decentralized organization of BLM. I think I was afraid of getting arrested more than anything but really it’s probably because I was somehow embarrassed to care about something.
On the third week of the picket the painting department called a crisis meeting with all the faculty and students. We stood around a table and yelled at each other for half an hour before deciding to call off class and join the protest. We broke out into groups, one to make signs, one to cause mischief, I was put on the team to draft our statement of departmental resistance. I scribbled on a legal pad while a bunch of my classmates yelled slogans over each other. I wrote that RISD was an institution founded on and perpetuating neo-colonialist structures of white supremacy, arms dealing, war profiteering, human trafficking, production of a class of global elites, etc. etc. Things I would have cringed at hearing myself say a year ago, but that I’ve always believed. Most of my venom didn't make it in.
I was interfacing with a Sophomore who was dressed like an organizer. They looked non-binary. Talking with each other with detached urgency, discussing ideas for direct action, ways to make a mess in protest without having the custodians have to clean it up if we won, I felt a spark of intimacy. The picket line is a very horny place. I hate that that’s what’s on my mind right now.
I’ve been sitting on wet grass banging a steel barrel with a piece of pipe for around six hours. My soft hands are blistered and dripping blood- I’ve never worked a day in my life. Val is here, scowling. She’s strumming her guitar while puffing on a hand rolled cigarette. She looks right at home.
I can feel my throat starting to close up. Now that I’m a radical I smoke more. Or rather I care less in the way that dykes in movies or Val smokes.
I like being at the picket. I don't like that i like it. I feel a vibe shift. It’s spring. I want to be a part of something bigger. I want to kill the atheist in my head. I want to be trans and queer and wear a sports bra at the labor strike protest. I want to kiss val. I want to meet a hairy gender punk afab. I want to fuck an occupy flanel wearing trans girl who’s 6 ft and beautiful and passionate who berates me for not being class conscious and who has a tiny bit of stubble under her chin that i feel when i hold her neck when we kiss. I want to be that girl.
Last night I had a dream where I was part of a far-left radical student terrorist organization. I kept a knife in my boot. I was a new recruit and my partner was Lana. We were tasked with planting explosives at graduation. I liked it a lot.
I’m thinking a lot about how I was so, so lost before E. I didn't even know how gone I was, it's like I was retarded and I suddenly became baseline. You don’t realise how fucked you are and you cant understand or appreciate the world when you’re under a cloak of dysphoria, unable to inhabit your own subjectivity. It kind of feels like the way I would try to inhabit fictions is suddenly a lot easier, that those fictions were not falsehoods but just different versions of reality, equally as real as being a hateful atheist-brained reactionary anti-SJW repressor.
I wish that Lana hadn’t seen me that way, that she would have met me as I am now rather than then. But then again I wouldn’t be the way I am now without having met her. Maybe that's why I’m so hung up, I want to see her to tell her this, to show her that that wasn’t me, that I’m better now. I hate who I was so much, who I was a week ago, even. I’ve always had such intense hateful feelings to my childhood self, my middleschool self, who i was in highschool. When I was quarantined in RISD’s high rise old bank building dormitory during lockdown I took an edible for the first time and fell into a hellish spiral of internal self-contradiction, I would hear a voice in my head, my voice, telling me that no matter how hard I tried I would still be a shitty little atheist nerd boy smart kid, that even this zoomed out self-analysis was just a further tactic to remove myself from that, and that recognizing that was another layer of disguise and self-classification as that kind of person, and that that meta-analysis was the same thing, and so on and so on and so on. That was time was the closest I’ve felt to suicide. The feeling of being bound to what felt like an inescapable monologue of a hateful cis-boy larping as trans to escape my own self hatred.
I went to an evangelical christian high school where we were told daily that gay people were sick in the head because they all got molested as kids. This was at the height of post-bush new atheist youtube videos and I got really into snarky polemic put downs of religion and a bitter attitude that implicitly rejected any kind of mystery or magic in the world and instead worshiped “science” and strict reverence of the neoliberal pharmacopornographic machine. What was at first a misplaced search for therapies in reactionary shitting on fundamentalist war hawks eventually gave way to just being an asshole. Being an anti-feminist, calling muslims barbarians and thinking that being trans or nonbinary was being sick in the head because they all got molested as kids.
I had so much hate in my heart for so long, I hated everybody. I also hated being a boy and would have done anything to change it.
I spent a lot of time on 4chan and got some kind of permanent brain damage from it. That was my primary introduction to a trans lexicon. I couldn’t stand the pornsick consumer-cult of trans reddit and I wasn’t on twitter, and of course I had no trans friends in real life. In Hannah Baer’s book she talks about the urge to view everyone through a starter-pack lens. On gay 4chan everyone is a moodboard. It’s why I hate nerds so much, everything from how they approach art to how they think about love is a list of criteria; body, personality, subcultural gesture, plot, archetype. It’s like they view the whole world as a BDSM fetish checklist with percentages for dominant, submissive, piss kink, etc.
4chan /fa/ “Ideals” page I made in high school (a practice where people fill out a grid with their ideal hair/face, body, personal style, boyfriend/girlfriend, lifestyle and home)
I’m realizing that so much about myself that I hated, the way I behaved, the way I thought, the ways I acted out was all because I’m trans and didn't have the vocabulary to explain it. It feels liberating, cleansing. It also feels like a cop-out, like I’m letting myself off the hook. But I want to stop torturing myself and just be better. I want to believe in God, I want to be an activist, I want to go back to the DSA, I want to love.