Elucidating Questions

I don’t feel safe

My brother with his anger, for no reason, as if the world abandoned him when he’s had meals every day and a roof over his head and all the luxuries he wants

And my dad who doesn’t hear a word I say

It’s like speaking into a microphone that absorbs sound

It’s like someone punching the wall nearby

Fuck this

Screw that

Kill yourself

I had a place where I felt at peace

And it’s gone now

All I have left is shutting my mouth so my Christian father doesn’t kick me out

And hearing abuse spoken by my brother that I swear the Universe means for me

I’m here

Unemployed so I can’t escape

I’ve begged every time I could wish

But I guess it wouldn’t change anything

I’d still be sleeping with a powderkeg in the next room

Haven’t been sleeping

Can’t stay asleep

And I’m so over tired and my dad has been yelling at his computer and my brother has been yelling at his computer

And I just want to buy something

I just want to bandaid this stress and this fear and this uncertainty with buying things

Can’t

That whole, not having a job I keep begging the Universe for

And it’s so gross?

Because I’m being made to be grateful for this

Thank god I could move back into this house how lucky I am

I feel so alone

I have a friend

But she’s on the other side of the country and I’m on the back porch crying

What’s she supposed to do?

I feel so stuck

And like I’m moving backward

I finally knew who I was at home

Back to masking to appease my family

It all feels so pointless

Everything I did for the past fifteen years

I’m right back here

Right back where I started with no power, no control

Afraid of an angry man

Afraid of losing my home if I misspeak

I wanted to go home

I want to go home

Just don’t ask me where it is

I don’t know anymore

One of the things that really bothers me that they teach in school

Is that if someone does something to you, you’re not allowed to “retaliate”

Retaliate

It has such a nasty connotation doesn’t it?

Retaliate

Not self defense

Not correcting the behaviour

Retaliate

For instance a boy snaps a girl’s bra and she slaps him

She goes to the principal’s office for “retaliation”

The boy gets a finger waggled at them

I brought a stuffy to school in one of my first years in public school

I really didn’t get it

That public schools were a literal mad house of children exploiting exhausted adults

I didn’t expect the boys would take my stuffy and run with it

And when I chased them to get it back I ended up in the principal’s office for being “aggressive” and told it was my fault for bringing the stuffy in the first place

When I’d been doing home school since grade 2, never went to kindergarten, and had no idea that wasn’t allowed

Retaliate

Against comes next

Against

Right? That’s an aggressive stance

An attack

Not self defense

It’s bad and you shouldn’t do it

They were so wrong

They didn’t teach these children how to retaliate

How to utilise your tools to right wrongs that were done against you

And you know what? If someone is sexually or physically assaulting you physically fighting back is always acceptable

But they didn’t teach that

They taught us to accept the bad things done to us and if we were lucky an adult would come in and help

Without ever warning us that that possible adult would disappear

That when you’re out on your own, at your job, in your life

There’s no teacher and the police will be here in half an hour

They didn’t teach us how to stand up to bullies they told us to ignore them

They didn’t prepare us for a world where we would be able to fight for ourselves

Instead they prepared millions of people who would meekly accept most harassment and bullying because that’s what they’d been told to do

Companies and billionaires can do anything because no one knows how to stand up for the things than matter

They told us protesting was legal

Did they ever teach us how to protest?

Did they ever teach us how to stand up for ourselves?

No, because they wanted cattle, not foxes

They wanted swaths of yes men and push overs

They weren’t preparing children for university.

We had to be retaught how to write an essay in English 101

Most 101 classes were reteaching what primary and secondary school fucked up

And, of course, I now know what they knew but never said outloud

Most of those kids won’t finish secondary school,

They weren’t readying us for higher learning

They were readying us to be good, compliant, minimum wage workers

Your cities are run by kids who were told they were getting more out of life than they did

They were told they would be something and now Donna with the bitch cut tells them their place in society because she feels shitty about her life

It’s that whole sick “turn the other cheek” mentality

All Jesus proved with that is that doing so will result in you being tortured and then put on a cross

Dumbest philosophy in all of fucking history

No, no

If someone pushes you?

You get up and push back.

I have to be here to prove to others that they can be here

Prove that your mind can be the darkest place and you can still persevere

I keep seeing other people with my mental illnesses fall

Retraumatised over the loss

I always wonder why I was left here

What right I have to be here over them

Why there wasn’t a miracle for them

Why I was able to take an entire bottle of naproxen and half a bottle of ibuprofen and live

Why my overdose was just me passing out and a weird dream

Why did cosmic timing not favour them?

Why am I here?

Well it was all about telling my story until I died but then I didn’t

And I will shoulder their pain as they fall and keep proving that it’s terrifying and awful but we can do this

That I’m a split in half being who barely comprehends this world

Trapped in a body that hates me with a brain that tries to kill me

But I can fucking do this

This will not be a story that ends with a whimper in the darkness

Even if no one sees it

Even if probably there are AI out there reading it and stealing my style (who knows maybe that’s why they’re all deranged)

But, damn it

I want to persist

I want to be a thorn in the side of every institution that tries to walk all over humanity

Even if it never gets recognition

Existing and being a voice of descent is still being a knob in their pudding

Be a knob in their pudding

Be a body of descent

You never know I bet you someone over history has had a knob in their pudding

And didn’t like it

Existing is sometimes painful

And I’m not talking about the background of pain that just is my existence

My emotions are painful

They erupt from inside me

I feel them so completely and it hurts

Even joy

It becomes too much for me

Writing has been a good tool

Typing furiously for a bit

Spitting all the poison I wouldn’t actually say somewhere where I can say, yikes

But it felt good to get it out

I wonder how much I owe to that little intrusive thought

Write through every panic attack

I still remember it so clearly

Nothing else about the moment but the words

Just gotta hang in there however you can

We are each of us a child of the gods, burning bright with the passion of a star who once shone

It’s kind of like that book I never wrote

About how the world was divided by emotional beings and less emotional beings

Except in mine the emotional ones were the ones who had become corrupt and were oppressing the less emotional people

And the world had to be saved by a gay mixed “race” couple that lived in the sewers

But it’s similar

The way people with strong emotions are demonized

But, obviously, I recognise that it can go both ways

This world needs balance like Christians need Jesus

But we persist

We must persist

I don’t want to be a statistic

I will not be a statistic

Happenstance fuck you for a moment

I’m trying to have a serious conversation here

Life is hard

We make it harder on eachother

One second you feel safe somewhere and the next you don’t anymore

When I feel emotions

Sometimes it feels like I’m exploding from the inside

But things like being safe

They slip away so easily

Just like that you’re just someone on the outside of it

Reduced to nothing and no one again

I’m rarely a first priority

But the ease with which I slip out of spaces has always broken my own heart

The difference between belong and don’t belong

It’s so easily traversed

I don’t want to be the person they want me to be

And I am nothing again

I wonder what it feels like to be right?

What it feels like to fit in?

Maybe they do understand

Maybe that laugh was understanding and not derision

Different from everyone else

Just kind of came into existence

I wonder why we’re here

Does anyone else listen for you?

Seek your touch?

Sometimes I feel like my existence is an insistance on others

I do not feel I fit in here even with my rage and my disappointment

How could a god’s child ever find themselves here?

Not good enough

Not hard enough

Where to fit?

I feel unknown

And like it will always be that way

I don’t particularly want to dislike people

I’m feel no pleasure from not liking someone else’s actions

I always end up feeling like I don’t fit in

Every space has its own kind of cruelty

If I had the option to exist without causing harm to anything ever

I would do it

Everything seems so innocent until it comes into contact with something else

My something else is other humans

I hate judging people

It leaves a sick feeling in my stomach

There’s always gossip though

There’s always ridicule for no good reason

And me not feeling comfortable in a space because there’s always a target

It’s never consequential

I don’t know why my comfort is never important

I don’t know why they say these things about eachother in places the people being spoken about can’t defend themselves

I started “lame” gossiping

I just agree with whatever the person gossiping says and then don’t say it to anyone else and if anyone asks I just didn’t feel like starting a fight

Because people dislike you if you won’t gossip with them and then will turn the gossip on you

I’d prefer to talk about what we like about people

And then go back to those people and tell them about the lovely conversation we were having about them

Bravely tell them all the things we love about them that just came up in conversation

Positive reinforcement is not just for non-human animals

You’d think we’d be smart enough to see our own similarities amongst creatures we are related to

Bah

In this quiet place where I hide my contempt for this world

And my love for the planet

I am so good at judging humanity as one big blob

But individuals are frequently so beautiful

But our insides

This place is as close to what it’s like inside my head as anything

Frequently I write my initial feelings and then go on puzzling and change my mind

Frequently my anger is its own thing and I don’t feel that prickly in person

Is every human a different world inside themselves?

Like I am?

A shadow of myself in front of others for my own safety?

Not all I suppose

Some people feel safe on this planet

I wish we spoke words as beautiful as the Earth is

That we only quaked when it was needed

I wish that we spoke love and not poison into existence

I wish I still loved humanity

It’s not hard to love individuals

But I don’t know what hope we have when it’s been 2000+ years and we still speak so negatively all the time

Animals have evolved traits that keep them alive in an increasingly difficult environment in that time

We still pick hate over love over and over again

I don’t know

I just wish I found somewhere that I fit

Where there isn’t toxic positivity nor toxic negativity

Where we accept that sometimes stuff is shitty and we talk about the shitty stuff

But we also don’t tear people down

I have this fantasy where I run away

Just away

That everything goes right and I’m free

I’m assuming all my disabilities just cease to exist for this to happen

I just walk away

But where always becomes a question

Where is better than here?

A tiny town where I’m the only queer person but at least there’s an actual forest nearby?

Any number of cities where I wouldn’t fit as much as here

Everything is so disgustingly predictable

And I’m sick of seeing things coming from a mile away and screaming at the locals to run and being called insane

But, thanks to the internet, the locals are everywhere

Thousands of times I’ve said what will happen to be called crazy

And this isn’t the psychic crap

Psychic was predicting the wars happening, back in 2018, with no context

I just see patterns

It’s all so

These events around me

Why does it have to be so typical?

Why can’t someone surprise me and actually do something?

And when can I stop feeling like the someone is supposed to be me when I have no power?

By the time I had wormed enough power to do enough to help I’d be one of them

Why doesn’t anyone else have this sick sense in them like things should be different?

I shouldn’t say anyone

Why don’t enough anyones feel this way?

Why is there a great wall of disinterest in anyone’s eye who could do anything?

Why is there never a successful champion of those that need?

And I don’t know how to be what you need me to be

I want to run away and be someone new who doesn’t feel these responsibilities I cannot fulfill

I feel like I’m standing before a great beast who expects me to overcome them to succeed

If you wanted it a better way why is violence written in the path that brought humanity to realisation?

Did you create us in your image and then want us to be different from you?

Suffering isn’t written in your insides

Struggle is

Danger

Violence

Your potential is our potential

Or do you wish us to be beyond you?

Should we be your successors?

Love

I’m not sure you made it

But you are made of it

Like it just had to exist because of you

I wish we could each be you

As knowing and understanding

I wish we had the compassion of a gentle breeze blowing by to touch your face so you’re not alone

Knowing that in each body is a soul that feels

Even if they’re not all the same

Understanding that each person is a reaction to their life experience

That those reactions are visceral and personal

Understood that capacity is individual

That a world with less harm would create more chances for joy

And that hatred is wrong

It’s hard

I struggle with it when words are slicing through me

I am nothing beside you

And yet you almost go less noticed than I do

Massive yet unseeable

See-able but insufficient

If I could run

I wish I could run to a place where I could meet you face to face

I wonder what face the faceless would have?