A measured response to popular culture.
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I won’t pull it down, but I’ve moved my writing (all that I could find from the past 15 years, including most of my old TinyLetter newsletters, incredibly) over to superopinionated.com — that’s where I’ll be hosting and posting. You can subscribe to my newsletter here if you’d like to get occasional email essays/poems from me, or there’s always the social web.
Because it is one of the two cities in the United States, some part of me constantly wishes I was in New York. (The other proper city is Los Angeles; I don’t mean to say that other places do not exist, simply that they don’t qualify as cities when you account for the existence of Beijing, Lagos, Paris, Tokyo, etc. Instead, they’re the same middling Americana town reproduced at scale. The vast majority of US communities are provincial, proud, and humiliatingly ignorant of the scale of the world.)
I came to New York for theater and opera, overlapping dates of the new Cabaret reimagining and the very recent revival of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, and then tossing in the revived Carmen almost as an afterthought because everyone should see the most well-known opera at least once.
So let’s start with Cabaret:
I showed up and spent a lot of time milling around, wondering which parts of the August Wilson Theater hadn’t been changed for the show. So much of everywhere looks the same now, so much is a bulk purchase, a shittier imitation, and already broken.
And more and more, regardless of how they dress it up, everyone is a cop. I was handed two things when I entered the theater and they scanned my ticket: a shot of well vodka and a sticker. The vodka was supposedly to get me “in the spirit” of the show (I passed) and the sticker was a non-optional cover for my phone’s camera in an attempt to deter people from recording the production.
Cabaret is a musical about a naïve closeted(ish) bisexual man who comes to Berlin right on the brink of the cultural collapse before the Second World War. He meets and becomes caught up in the life of a nightclub singer, and also becomes unwittingly employed by a member of the Nazi Party. As history plays out with the Nazis getting more confident and loudly anti-Semitic, things become worse for characters in the musical and the young man flees. But the nightclub singer insists on staying, believing in her dream that things will get better somehow. The show ends with the club, and the singer, deteriorating.
And the reason I’m even passingly familiar with various historically significant productions of Cabaret on (and off!) Broadway over the last 50 years is because of the very cammers this production went to such pains to keep out. I find the attempt to try and place any musical, but especially this one, at odds with cammers/slime tutorial makers and still try to position the musical production as making a meaningful statement about systemic forces of oppression, to be either lacking self-awareness, or deeply perverse: I didn’t pay all that money for a good seat in the speakeasy just to be turned into a narc at the door.
The Vault Bar felt like the living room of someone who had been very into “Millennial Pink” ten years ago but who was now into “Eyeballs and Gold” and was trying to make that transition work. Every color was the version that an Anne of Green Gables type would apply the adjective “dusty” to. Dusty rose, dusty yellow, dusty brown. The paneled ceiling had been painted with Germanic floral patterns and gold leaf. Blue was spare and I was hungry for it: The Vault Bar sign itself, small beads on the oboe player’s costume harness, The Emcee and Sally Bowles occasionally. But they hadn’t shown up yet, and overall the pre-show had the vibe of being trapped at a house party with a score of Amanda Palmer admirers.
I was not in a good mood. A revival is often a tough sell for me, especially in this time when we seem unable to imagine a future absent an overwhelming amount of nostalgia for past media and ideas (many of which do not deserve near-constant remembering). I had seen the wrong amount of hype ahead of time – enough to get a glimpse and form an opinion, not nearly enough to get any informed sense of how it could all hang together. The Pineapple Room, a little emerald of a place to eat and get ready access to toilets, was delightful if, y’know, the kind of thing that had excited me aesthetically in 2017. But it in no way reminded me of a Coachella inspo board, and that’s the only room I can say that about in the venue.
On to the thing we were ostensibly there to see, the show:
There is a story that needs to be running in an actor’s head the entire time they’re on stage, and every gesture they make, every facial expression they have, every place their eyes fall – all of these things need to align with and be informed by that story. For some of the cast, a certain moment would come in a song and I would see the character drop away and I was simply watching a talented singer and dancer showing off how well they can perform the last refrain of a song. It’s extremely noticeable when the actor to their left and right is still in character. Some of the Kit Kat Club cast is extraordinary, and not just because of their singing or dancing – at this level, everyone is so good that it’s a waste of time trying to measure to that kind of standard. But maintaining enough focus to stay in character even as you cross and clear a stage requires a certain skill, there is no faking it, and not everyone on that stage has developed it. But for the ones who had it, it was sublime to watch.
(The ability to hold a character’s inner life no matter what and appear natural when doing strange things is one of the key parts of what makes an action-oriented performance good, and why I maintain that Keanu Reeves is one of the finest actors of his generation. He will probably never receive the appropriate level of credit for his on-camera stunt work or his ability to make extremely high-concept circumstances feel grounded and relatable and have that all naturally read on camera. Meanwhile, I have seen actors who can make me weep in other roles become utterly unconvincing when they hold a prop gun and hit a green screen mark. I’m certain I’ve written a variation of this before. I will probably bring it up again whenever I can.)
Much attention was on Eddie Redmayne and how he would interpret The Emcee. My main impression of Redmayne as an actor before this comes from his performance in Jupiter Ascending, a film I describe to people as, “great but not good.” The thing is, where film really rewards stillness and thus can allow for a near-total absence of personality, preparation, what have you, and translate it into something that feels very natural on screen, theater rewards hard fucking work. (Inversely, it’s very easy to try too hard in movie acting and spoil a performance; this is why some people hate everything Anne Hathaway does.) Redmayne worked his fucking ass off to build a technically skilled, nuanced performance where every choice and even motion his character makes are connected. Redmayne built the magic circle brightly. His was an emcee that suited the vibes of the building we were in precisely: at times alluring, at times clownish, but never truly cool, always slightly uncanny, and by the end of the night it was clear that this was the kind of person in charge who would turn you in–if he hadn’t already–if it meant his neck was safe.
I suppose it’s expected to say something about Gayle Rankin as Sally Bowles. Here’s the thing: as mentioned above, almost every historically significant performance of Cabaret is available on the internet. There are so many wonderful interpretations of that role, where the actor sank in and found so much to play with, not only the songs but also the acting scenes. There isn’t one “right” way to play any character, and appreciating the different directions talented, skilled people have chosen to take a character is part of the fun. Go enjoy those. There are so many good things in this world. I try to put my attention there whenever I can.
At a higher level, I will say that this production felt like it was struggling to be, at every opportunity, “relevant” (derogatory). At one point the Emcee even came out in what was either a blue variant of That Alaia Coat or a knockoff (I hope it was a knockoff, I know what costumes go through). Given that the United States is a fascist country actively funding genocide in Palestine, I’m not sure it’s a challenge to make Cabaret’s material something audiences can connect with. If anything, it might be tough to make sure people don’t get confused and cheer for the Nazis; and I did notice the material has been softened so there’s less outright Nazism and more vague allusions and gestures. (Very little Sieg Heil-ing in this one! Too camp?)
I’m not sure if it’s wise or not, and I mean that – I’m not sure. On the one hand, people do not seem to be able to connect their behavior with the behavior of anyone they’ve been taught is “bad”, so once something’s identified as “Nazi” on stage, you’ve lost the ability to let the audience hold something more complex close to their heart. On the other hand, if we do not give language to it, it literally cannot be addressed.
The next night was Fire Shut Up In My Bones, which I had seen twice already but never live. (The Metropolitan Opera occasionally simulcasts operas to movie theaters across the country and while it is a somewhat clunky event, it is also a much less expensive ticket to the Met than otherwise available, especially if you don’t live in New York City.) I don’t quite know how to write about something I am an uncritical fan of; it happens so rarely. This is an opera (a genre I have no educational background in) based on a memoir (a genre I roll my eyes at) and just sitting here now thinking about it again, I’m near tears. It’s simply that way with art when it is truly fine, and why ultimately when I criticize something, it’s because I am wanting it to attain this place. To construct a framework so that the audience may sense the mirrored door within the self, so that the relation between one and all the rest–the living and those who were once alive–can be felt. Fire Shut Up In My Bones opens that door for me.
Finally came Carmen. Yes, back to The Met, which felt decadent (as, I’m confident, it is designed to feel), and if anyone is interested in becoming my patron so I can write about theater in New York City more regularly, consider me very available.
(If anyone is running a carpet installation business, consider studying whatever was used underneath the carpeting at The Metropolitan Opera House for the top of your range. I think I sank a quarter of an inch every time I took a step. Anyone who wears high heels to The Met must be getting the glute workout of a lifetime.)
I guess normally Carmen is about a wanton woman who drives a man crazy by refusing to marry him and doing all kinds of sexy antics and being uncontrollable and…yeah I can’t even get the whole description out. But apparently, that is the frame! For over a hundred years, this has been Carmen, and people were just…okay with that! I guess opera-goers were very late to develop critical thinking skills (see also: still putting Turandot on stage…I’ve sat through it. Yikes.) but eventually people decided perhaps one could look at things from the titular character’s point of view. So!
The Met’s revival of Carmen is about a modern Chicana factory worker in a border town who is just living her life, hanging out with her friends, her frienemies, etc, sometimes getting in fights, but all in all making it work. And then a border guard gets it into his head that he’s in love with her. She goes with that for a while to get out of a detention facility, but then she can never manage to ditch the guy. He refuses to let go, escalating and stalking her, even after she and her girlfriends cross the border and she starts dating a rodeo star. She refuses him to his face once more and he murders her.
And it was so good and so much fun! This felt like the “thoughtful, relevant” update that I hear producers claim they’ve always given shows, but this one worked. It still had so many “big” moments, but they felt very grounded…yet still delivering the spectacle The Met demands. (I could practically feel the class divide in the audience as the story progressed and it sank in that yes, we would be watching people sing in jeans the entire time. Which ruuuuuled. It’s not like the stage wasn’t still full of incredible set pieces and lots of stuff that I am sure has never been at The Met before (eg: an 18-wheeler full of people dancing), it’s just also not Old And Racist so that may have felt alarmingly nontraditional for some of the audience. Maybe I’m being ungenerous! I’m so into this Carmen’s butterfly knife and cowboy boots, though.)
I also stopped by the Whitney Biennial while I was in town, but I took no notes (like a fool) and it’s been months so I genuinely couldn’t tell you who made what or what felt memorable. I recall spending a luxurious amount of time in assorted chairs watching interviews of queer elders talk about their sex lives, and watching a lengthy neon sign with “Free Palestine” hidden in it in flickering letters.
(Watching people notice that one and point it out to each other, and then react to the statement together, was a different art exhibit: the cold American heart. I would say I’ve seldom felt more lonely but that is a lie. It is if not a daily effort then a weekly one to find the humanity in the inhumane behavior of others. To continue to feel among. This has been the main work of the past five or so years for me. It does not get easier.)
This post originally appeared in my newsletter on May 4, 2022
I appreciate the head's up about Roe v. Wade finally actually being overturned (...which the GOP has explicitly been campaigning on overturning for a very long time, and a large part of their political appointments and maneuvering has been about getting to a position nationally with the Supreme Court to roll back Roe and a number of other things liberals assume don't need to be fought like hell for, so I'm surprised at all the surprise), but we're on year 3 of a widespread event that our country has reacted to with a thorough disregard for the health and well-being of children and the people caring for them. I do not think the United States is capable of behaving any other way than providing care for corporations and the extremely wealthy, and treating everyone else as sub-human and disposable; it's just a matter of degree.
It's nice to want things but work is necessary, and throwing a bunch of money around or voting is what got us here, so clearly that's not working. (I may never get past the ACLU deciding that partnering with Y-Combinator was the best thing they could do in 2017 with *all that fucking money* people gave them. Yes, Peter Thiel's Y-Combinator. Money ruins people.) Anyway, what could I possibly know about the situation, I am a man after all, I only happen to have a uterus. Sending love and support to all the people getting erased amidst the loud white cis lady histrionics, and a gentle reminder that with all these decades of Roe being legal, we already do an egregiously bad job of providing care. I do not want to preserve our current system; I seek a better one.
(Lest I seem completely ungrounded, a grim offering from where we came from: I have been in a Wikipedia hole for a few days around the month of December, 1910 (why? I don't know at this point, it's enjoyable for its own sake) and I've been learning about the disappearance of socialite Dorothy Arnold (which remains unsolved). One theory of what happened to her? She died subsequent to a botched abortion in a clinic so notorious for it it was nicknamed “The House of Mystery” because so many women from the area disappeared after visiting. This was the standard of care available to a young woman who lived on East 79th and whose family was in The Social Register.)
Anyway anyway anyway. Loved this interview with Parul Sehgal, I love writers who can communicate about their work process effectively, I get so much out of it.
I continue to be unable to read very much about whole categories of thing for very long, my mind and body simply revolt. I can't get more than a paragraph into anything about NFTs, for example, anymore...I think fundamentally there is an assumption that it is inherently valuable to accumulate money, and I simply don't agree with it, and any event or article or process that runs along those lines is nearly impossible for me to engage with. I don't mean “it's necessary to have money to survive under capitalism”, I mean that some people seem to be artists and some people seem to be making art to fuel their capitalist practice, and it's...fucking weird.
I still think often about the houseless man I transported from the emergency shelter to the quarantine shelter when he exhibited Covid symptoms, back in the summer of 2020, who said as he was leaving, “well if this kills me, it was nice talking to you.”
We have so little time with each other as it is, I hope we can spend it decently and with some integrity.
Several months ago, one of my metamours sent me an email asking for skincare advice. They’d recently started testosterone and while it was going well, to quote directly, my god my face. I ended up writing a reply that I want archived somewhere, both as a marker in time, and in case it’s useful to anyone else in the future. So if you are newly on T:
First of all, congrats on the hormones! I hope it's going well! The bespoke gender experience is the only way to live, I don't know why so many people settle for off-the-rack.
My early experience with T was very similar in the omg what is happening with my pores?? arena. It doesn't stay like that forever, and also I think every beard/body hair I have was preceded by an extraordinary sebum event 1-3 months beforehand. So at least for me, reaching a place of zen-like acceptance that it was a liminal state definitely helped loosen up any feelings like I had to fix or change what was happening and let me ride it out. I found shifting to observing and accepting where my face and body were currently helped me feel less like I was in conflict with them. Oh I have the zits that I developed overnight and then by the end of the day, there will be a whole other set of zits that somehow have already appeared again. Okay that's happening. vs what am I doing 'wrong' that's causing these/how can I make these go away. idk I just already had so much to unpack about masculinity that I wasn't expecting, any area that I could write off as it won't be like this in a year, probably, so I'm just not going to worry about it was good mental space to free up.
All of that said! Some things I found that helped were switching out a lot of stuff I was using on my face/body, and then all the tedious advice about cutting back on sugar/caffeine (basically: reducing things that would cause even more oil production) — although I think there's limited/mixed data about how effective that is tbh. I'm more of a “moderation in all things” person because I figure if I'm hyperfixating to the point of being stressed out about, eg, yoga, that's not actually going to reduce my stress.
So — I use the Bioderma Sensibio cleanser nightly right now, it seems to be working well although it is very gentle. I never used to use any kind of toner before and now I do (and ye gods...it's necessary). I did find that switching to thinking less of “removing” oil and keeping more of a mindset of “circulating/replacing oil” was better at keeping things calm? I've found skin cycling helps (1 night of a retinol, 1 night of an acid/mask/whatever, 2 nights of skin barrier-replacing face cream) so I don't overdo it but I'm still making sure there's not a ton of buildup.
...Also I think some of it depends on what your face is doing all day. I work retail and tend to get a decent amount of activity/outdoor time now, but for a while, I was spending a lot of time indoors in front of a computer monitor, and that definitely made a difference in terms of how often I was sitting with my hands on my face etc etc.
Nothing has helped with clearing active breakouts and stuff more than drinking a ton of water + the invention of the weird little face stickers to wear overnight. Or the clear ones during the day. Where were those when I was in middle and high school and doing first puberty, omg. I like the CosRX ones but tbh, try a bunch and find which ones work well for you. Some companies make heavy-duty ones with tiny spikes they claim inject salicylic acid directly into the zit, it's great/horrifying/effective.
Morning:
- I just splash water on my face in the morning to get off whatever I put on it the night before...this felt VERY WEIRD after an entire adolescence and adulthood of cleansing in the morning, but if your pillowcase is clean, it's not necessary. (Note: change your pillowcase at least once a week, maybe more. You won't always need to, but if your face is producing a lot of sebum/oil, that's a great medium for bacteria, which'll irritate your skin and make things worse. Also depending on how old/full of dead skin cells your pillow is...maybe a good time to replace that too. Probably not the advice you emailed me for!!)
- I’m currently using M3 Naturals Professional Facial and Avene Solaire SPF 50 facial sunscreen. Mainly I just don't buy “oil free” things because they'll probably dry me out and increase production, but I also don't need “moisturizing” products (...definitely not).
Evening:
- The aforementioned Bioderma Sensibio Micellar Cleansing Oil
- Any kind of toner, I don't care, my instructions to my husband are “whatever is a WinCo”...I think this one involves roses? Does it have an old-timey font? It's just to get whatever I didn't get off my face already, off my face already. Nothing with alcohol though because I don't need to strip moisture.
- Oh that reminds me, this video by Lisa Eldridge changed my life years ago...I don't want to insult you, you're an adult, but I am also an adult and I apparently needed to be taught how to thoroughly wash my face? Around minute 6 or 7 is when I would say it applies to someone not wearing makeup, but any time she says “makeup” I pretend she's saying “T-fueled face grease”. I think a common mistake is putting on a cleanser and then not letting it stay on long enough to work, and taking time to massage it into my face fixes that.
- My 4-night skin cycle is this AHA/BHA mask, this 1% retinol treatment, then 2 nights of this moisturizer. I'm still experimenting with night creams,, but the other two are great. That AHA/BHA mask is something I leave on all night because I'm a monster...you probably shouldn't do that right out of the gate.
The other main thing I like to do is use the Boycat app to check if any beauty product I’m about to buy is owned by some company that’s operating a factory in occupied Palestine, or is supporting the genocide in Palestine materially somehow. This can be restrictive and narrow the field of products I buy! But if there’s a way for me to know how to avoid actively supporting a genocide, I’m going to do it, and this is one way.
****
I used to have an email newsletter, “Superopinionated Power Club”…technically I still have it, but I never send anything to it anymore, so I’m officially retiring it. I’m going to move at least some of my old newsletters over here if they feel suitable.
This was originally sent on December 3, 2016.
I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I have spent considerable energy crowbarring apart my sense of time and personhood so that I can understand there to have been a past and a present, and that those are different things. One is happening and the other is not happening anymore. Three years of my life, doing this activity, teaching my brain, rewiring myself. It brings calm, it brings safety, it brings a sense of adulthood and control — I am grown now. I have power and am no longer a scared little girl. It’s not happening anymore.
And yet I look at @everyquiltblock by Kelsey Gilmore-Innis and I want you all to be the elementary school kid I was when part of the AIDS Memorial Quilt came to my school, was laid out and filled the entire cafeteria while I walked carefully around each square. There’s something especially mournful, wounding, and unfair about the AIDS Quilt that I love about it, still, after all this time. It communicates very well even just looking at one square on a screen. But seeing it fill the room that held my entire school normally, and knowing this was just one tiny part of it, was daunting in the way that death is when your mind is forced to grasp large-scale murder before it slips and becomes a number once more.
4-H is big in Indiana, and my mother won Dressmaking when she was growing up, so I knew a *little* bit about sewing and quilting. Enough to know that it was hard, to respect the work and listen when they said not to mess with or run on any of the squares. Enough to understand that you can’t really sew a person’s entire life into a rectangle of cloth, no matter how hard you try. I hadn’t seen a person die of AIDS yet (that wouldn’t happen for another 10 years or so) but I’d already started losing people.
I’ve always been queer, even when I didn’t understand that that’s what I was — trying to hide it would have been like hiding that I’m tall. And yet to a great extent I *did* try to hide it, or adapt around it, to survive. I’m left now at 35 with a set of aesthetic...habits...that I cannot tell how I feel about since it’s been so many decades of ground-in conditioning. Like a plant that grew horizontally for a long while to reach sunlight. I consider something and reflexively I can hear my mother saying “but that’s so *masculine*” and I feel a deep somatic flinch. I pushed back enough to cut the bows and shoulder pads off every dress she ever put me in, she always described me as “active”, but I truly don’t know how much I love and how much I’ve learned to enthuse about as a defense.
And yet even with all of this, my favorite people, the friends of my mother’s that I liked best, the people who entered my life who seemed to be operating on the same frequency as me, who I was happiest with — well, in the 1980s, straight people just made odd comments about them around me occasionally and I didn’t understand it. But then also, some of the men among them started to get sick. And then they started to die. And then they all died. And those folks left that weren’t dead were incredibly sad, all of the time, perpetually going to someone’s funeral or one hospital or another. This sounds like an exaggeration but that’s how I remember it, happening so fast and then it just wouldn’t stop happening. People suddenly wearing all-black all the time. Then the red ribbons. And this was my fairly conservative family, in the middle of the Midwest.
And then Ryan White got diagnosed and FINALLY straight people (my mom) would say “AIDS”. My hairdresser who I loved had died of AIDS. Our favorite waiter at our favorite restaurant had died of AIDS. Etc. I stopped being incredibly nervous about catching fatal pneumonia and instead felt the overwhelming retroactive hopelessness of being in the middle of a preventable crisis. But nobody was preventing it.
(Eventually the AIDS-torture-porn movie Philadelphia would come out, prompting my homophobic father to completely 180 re: gay people and also amnesia himself about ever having been homophobic. That doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of this, I just invite you all to join me in slow-blinking at his lack of accountability.)
I am glad to remember that time. I am glad it is not happening anymore. I am glad to still feel the “fuck you, FUCK YOU” unfairness of entire lives lost, which I couldn’t fully understand as a fifth-grader staring down at the squares, all the lovingly hand-stitched blocks, each letter of each name cut out and sewn down so carefully. The cathartic healing craft that must, must be part of this project. Such a beautiful thing that should not exist. What an incredible memorial, demanding expansion in step with Reagan’s shameful legacy. Every time I despair about where my mentor is, I need to remind myself to look for their name on the quilt; that’s where they probably are because we lost a generation.
And we are about to lose another one.
I feel like time is collapsing again. I don’t know if it’s only me, but it seems to be happening to the rest of the world too. Things are going wrong and they keep going wrong, and the people who can stop it keep not stopping it. For an abuse survivor, it’s the worst kind of feeling, over and over again.
Although for some, I suppose this is a new feeling for you.
I leave you with this, which is better than I have in me, as always:
A Litany For Survival
Audre Lorde
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
I didn’t know you were still writing, Courtney. It’s the last XOXO Conference, an event a friend described (accurately) as a Twitter reunion and I’m in the crowd with my partner of two years. (We are both here supporting our mutual partner, my husband, who is speaking. You can pause to draw yourself a little napkin diagram if you need to. Although I shouldn’t assume; it turns out even my mother-in-law knew the word throuple, god help us.) This is my partner’s first XOXO. They were Very Online in their own ways at times growing up, but they never experienced the near-total enmeshment of professional and personal social spheres that happened to me about a decade ago, and which upon reflection was objectively insane.
Some of the XOXO attendees are strangers and will stay strangers, sure, but some people here are people I knew almost 15 years ago when I worked in the videogame industry in Boston; some of them are people I contacted while I was still in Boston and pre-arranged social meetings with in Portland before I even moved here (an Extremely Me thing to do at one point in time); some of them are people I became friends with here while my husband and I were running our creative coding tech co-op; some of them became friends during the lockdown stage of the pandemic when we were all posting constantly on the same Mastodon (technically Hometown) server my husband runs; some of them I thought would become friends but we’ve landed more on friendly acquaintances; some of them I tried to be friends and it went badly and now we ignore each other. Some of them don’t recognize me because I’ve been on testosterone for seven years and thanks to no more conference travel and my reduced social media activity, people don’t see my face as often. It turns out there’s an internal divider: am I excited to help this person re-recognize me, or does that feel like too much work? So I end up just wishing some of them well in my head as I walk by. It’s the kind of retrospective of all my social choices I was hoping to put off until my death. Lol. Lmao.
How do we get free without leaving each other?
I’ve repeatedly experienced sitting in a large room of people all clapping for themselves because they believe themselves to be separate from, and better than, another group. I’m tired of this experience.
Telling myself I could never become like someone else, that I am safe from behaving how they behave and therefore I’m allowed to condemn them and applaud their condemnation, doesn’t lead me where I want to go, emotionally or spiritually.
I got into the videogame industry because my amazing new boyfriend was in videogames and it was an easy career transition to make. I was wrapping up a Masters in Project Management, and videogames are projects, and his enthusiasm for the industry was contagious. The Masters itself was a safe bet that came from my safe-bet job at a law firm that I got after dropping out of film school because I was freaking myself out at how I was supposed to make a living making movies. I didn’t know the film industry was unionized (and, also, it’s very hard to make a living making movies…but I was too scared to try).
Now that a lot of time has passed (and I’ve done an enormous amount of therapy about it), it is darkly funny to me that my career as a producer in videogames ended up being overshadowed by that thing I didn’t take seriously at all, my writing. In brief: I got invited to give a talk at a conference and decided not to go because the conference grossed me out. I got tired of explaining that decision at industry meetups in loud bars to friends, so I wrote a post on my blog with my reasoning. The wrong corner of the internet found it, and the next thing I knew, I had a lot of very angry nerds crawling all over my life. (Thanks to whoever started and maintained this timeline so I don’t have to try to sum up how weird 2010-2013 was.) I went from having a blog that maybe, maybe, ten people read in a week to being One Of The Cultural Voices In Indie Games literally overnight. Did I choose that? Absolutely not. Did it occur to me to question that? Also absolutely not. I could manufacture an opinion about anything and I was dying to tell it to you. One example: my no-edit first-draft impressions of Bioshock Infinite apparently made their way around the Irrational offices and also apparently hurt some feelings. (This perversely delighted me at the time because I was deeply immature, both as a writer and a person.) I simultaneously wanted to feel like I was being taken seriously professionally, but also refused to take my own work seriously, and then felt frustrated when people took that seriously.
What can I expect myself to tolerate from someone else, and what is it safe to remove myself from?
What experiences would I grow from if I could only expand my tolerance?
The thing is, once there are people running Twitter accounts dedicated to “proving you’re a liar”, online harassment never fully stops, it ju