We Used to Clap for Failure, Now We Don't Clap at All
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 just becomes seasonal. The only way to believe it would truly end was for me to take all of my writing offline until the cultural memory of me faded. And so I did.
This didn’t feel like much of a sacrifice at the time; I had married my amazing boyfriend, and while he also had a growing internet fame, his fans were seemingly uniformly enthusiastic and positive. They also clearly loved his work but not him, which was a healthy boundary I did not know how to encourage or enforce with my own fans. I definitely had people who were not harassing me, let’s be clear! But even people who liked my writing were sometimes…kind of creepy? Getting photographed paparazzi-style in public and then having the photos posted to Twitter, or being at a friend’s wedding and meeting someone only to have them lean over and whisper in my ear I follow you on Twitter! and then stick to me for the rest of the event stand out as exemplars of the kind of experiences I repeatedly had and didn’t know how to handle, and also didn’t feel like I was allowed to dislike, since it wasn’t, y’know, hundreds of people threatening to find where I live and rape me to death.
What is my capacity? What do I need it to be and why?
What is a reasonable capacity to expect of myself and others?
I like to think of capacity like a swimming pool: a swimming pool might have the capacity to hold a lot of water, but if it’s empty, it still has nothing in it. I might hypothetically have a deep capacity for care, for love, for compassion, but if I am tapped out, I’m tapped out.
After I pulled down my blog and left social media, I worked in Big Tech for a bit, and life was pretty stable. But stability isn’t the same as happiness, and eventually my husband and I started talking about starting our own company. And on paper this looked like it would work because he’s a very good computer programmer and I’m good at project management and admin-type work. And in that sense it did work for several years, where “work” means we produced things that clients liked and we paid our bills. But I think he was doing it because it aligned with his principles and professional goals, and I was doing it as a way to invest in our personal relationship. I thought it would make him happy, it was work I was good at, and being good at things feels good, which is almost the same as listening to yourself (whoops). When the industry pivoted and his professional interests shifted, he wanted to leave the company at least for a while. It felt like he was rejecting me as both a colleague and a person. I was totally devastated, and I lost all confidence in myself.
We were in a fortunate enough position financially that I didn’t need to find work right away, so I did a lot of volunteering and wondering about what my value was to my community, if it wasn’t to help people make software in more ethical conditions. I hooked up with some of the local volunteers in Portland who prepare for the city’s inevitable major earthquake and started going deep enough that I was soon taking National Incident Management System courses from FEMA for fun. Eventually, because we live in capitalism, I asked myself, “what would a job doing this look like?” and the lowest-lift entry point into emergency work (in case you’re curious) is getting certified as an Emergency Management Technician-Basic. So I did.
And then I got a job as an EMT, driving wheelchair vans, secured cars, and ambulances. My hire date was in late October, 2019.
Yes, that was a shitty time to become an EMT. I lasted 18 months.
Being really honest–and what is the point, if not to be honest–there are a lot of good motivations for becoming a front-line medical worker. Nobody can take the rhetorical position that I deserve to be SWATed, raped, or killed for what I do is not one of them. Nobody will get sick of me and leave me now isn’t a good motivation either. I’m really good at this also, it turns out, isn’t good enough; it makes it really painful though once you realize you need to quit. I was a good EMT. I am the kind of person who, when I point myself in a direction, will excel at it, and I had supporters who were cheering me on to continue and get not only my nursing degree, but go all the way to become a Nurse Practitioner. They’re adding an NP specialty in transgender healthcare, and the allure of being able to offer the trans community something I’ve never had – a trans healthcare provider who is themselves trans – was something my ego absolutely loved. I had a whole career pivot laid out in my head and it seemed like that was going to work; I just needed to pay my dues in the field before going back to school.
Instead, Covid showed up and the WHO warned everyone day after day, but nobody took any measures to stop it until it jumped from China to Italy. At that point, we started low-key stocking up on supplies on the assumption it would make it to the States, that I would eventually get it as a frontline worker and bring it home, and by then there would be shortages. We were right. We still didn’t know how bad it would get.
I got so burnt out watching people dying of something entirely preventable, I lost my belief that our system allows humans to actually care for each other. I took people who still had active Covid cases out of emergency rooms because made-up hospital rules said they had to go home, back into their households which were full of people who were given no masks or protocols for how to isolate a Covid patient. My job was supposedly to transport sick people, but it became to spread a fatal and disabling disease. And the further into 2020 we got, the more often I did this without full or appropriate protective gear for myself, sometimes stealing basic things like gloves from hospitals because we’d run out on the ambulance. (Sometimes the hospital staff would have to steal from us, who had supplies was a day-by-day issue.) It took me a long time to begin to talk to anyone, even my therapist, about that time. I felt like everything I experienced was poison that would harm anyone I shared it with.
When I sit and try to hold the mounting scale of deaths in my head and heart, both directly from Covid and indirectly from other care withheld due to delays and shortages, and how the reason given at every turn is the motive to protect the profits of corporations…it is in those times I believe that either I do not know God at all, or God’s will is that this country erodes and capitalism fails. And either way, I pray that the grief doesn’t consume me and I stay alive to see the beginning of whatever is next.
Who and what do I trust and why?
Can I trust my own perception?
Can I trust others’ capacity and tolerance to meet the needs of the moment?
Can I trust I am not alone?
I’m the oldest you can be and still be a Millenial, bumping elbows with Gen Xers as the cool friends to mimic and look up to, and I had some absolutely non-Millenial career turns starting out. But I had no real goal in going to college and I only went because it was very clearly the expectation that I go. Two different times in high school, I felt a very deep pull inside myself to drop out of high school and pursue something else.
When I was about 16 I came across early concept art of The Argonath from The Lord of the Rings along with a post about how they were starting to work on adapting the book into movies and filming down in New Zealand. I wanted to drop out of high school and go to New Zealand and talk my way onto the crew somehow. I had zero connections, and I’d only read The Hobbit, but I felt extremely confident that I could do it, and that that’s what I was supposed to do. My mother was unconvinced that this was a good idea (to be honest…she had a point).
And then when I was about 18, I learned that Mother Theresa was opening a chapter of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in New York City and I wanted to change my plans for university and go volunteer there instead. Again, my mom was not on board with me dropping out of school, so I didn’t do it. I went to college and I ended up picking my major (Communications and Culture) somewhat at random and because I liked the classes, but also because it had the word “Communications” in it so it sounded like something I could spin as practical in a job interview.
When I stopped at my high school at one point to visit after I’d graduated, the entire English department seemed horrified that I wasn’t taking any creative writing classes…which was a surprise to me, because nobody had ever told me writing was a thing I should study, or that I was a writer.
What does something like a road trip or a retreat look like online?
How do I travel and experience that passage of distance and time in a place of timelessness and permanence like the internet?
Maybe the least-Millennial thing about me is my resistance to monetizing personal or confessional writing. While I have kept a diary for almost my entire life, either physical or online (or both), I balk at the invitation to be vulnerable for an audience, especially a paying one. This, in part, is what soured my relationship with people who read my blog back when I was working in videogames; even if they kept reading my work, broadly speaking they started reading my work because I was That Loud Rape Survivor, and I did not want to professionalize my trauma. As I’ve continued to live, have experiences, heal, etc, I continue to question what I even have to say in public, or in a space that can at any point shift from somewhat intimate to brutally flooded with people.
I also do not want to commodify my queerness for straight people. It is important–critical–for me to believe that I am relatable. It’s possible for someone who does not live in my circumstances to identify with my experience, just as I can do that with someone outside my experience. This process is how we build empathy, and doing it is how we show each other a glimpse of God. I resist the capitalist message that straight people should preoccupy me or my writing. I do not want to be obscure, but I also do not believe that I am. I believe I am very clear, and anything I am threatening by my existence is something that deserves to be, at the least, examined within the person experiencing that feeling. That’s their personal problem, not mine. I do not translate or over-explain myself or my life to cishets. But then where does that leave me, in a landscape of queer content that feels like it was produced almost exclusively for bored wine moms and liberal nightmare straight gays?
How do I experience change and create space to let others change?
When I was working and writing online, the way it would go is sometimes I would get mad on Twitter and then an editor for an outlet somewhere would DM me and ask if I wanted to write an article about whatever I was mad about. This is because things that make people angry drive “engagement” and I have long had a knack for being right in a way that pisses people off. In real life this can make me difficult to be in conflict with; on the internet it means I probably could have embedded Google AdWords on my blog back in 2011 and used the revenue to pay for the therapy I needed because of all the harassing comments on said blog. Now apparently one can have a newsletter platform instead, with the allure of paying subscribers but the tradeoff that your platform could turn into a nazi bar at any time.
I’m possibly being ungenerous, but when you’ve got post-traumatic stress, it’s easy to not have enough energy to keep trying, and it’s always been very easy to say, “well then why even try” and give up on myself, or get scared of the possible behavior of other people. Writing, the thing I do no matter what else I’m doing, has felt harder and harder, less and less like something I do to keep breathing so I can do other things and more and more like forcing myself to breathe through a straw. And for what? Just for me? So, what, I can remember the awful things that happen sometimes when I write?
I do not want to be with “everyone” simultaneously, constantly. I believe it is fiction bordering on delusion to talk about the internet that way.
While there is potential for many people to possibly interact with a web page in realtime, it is much more unpredictable and complex than that.
Life isn’t meaningful to me, and online life in particular isn’t meaningful to me, when I flatten it in my imagination as having to assume I am writing for an “everyone” to read.
I cannot hear or feel God in it when people talk that way about online connection.
I do not trust vague talk of restoring hope or joy. I see people celebrating the pain of others too frequently to fall for that. I know the history of how fascism hijacks sentiment, and I need a lot more skepticism from otherwise smart people, especially working in the technology industry. Every time someone makes open-ended appeals to feeling good, I go re-read On Smarm again:
Smarm should be understood as a type of bullshit, then—it expresses one agenda, while actually pursuing a different one. It is a kind of moral and ethical misdirection. Its genuine purposes lie beneath the greased-over surface…Sympathy begets sympathy, to the benefit of things that don't deserve to be sympathized with. The ascendent forms of cultural power depend on the esteem of others, on the traffic driven by Facebook, on the nihilistic embrace of being liked and shared.
Back at XOXO, I’m out at lunch down the street and I overhear a man loudly, confidently saying to his lunch companion, “Well the reason these people are unhappy is because they’re disconnected and they have children. You can’t really participate in culture when you have kids.” Because of how the tables are arranged, I’m able to turn my head and make eye contact with him easily, and I do. The look I give him is a raised-eyebrow bemused one, and then I turn back to my food. He keeps his voice down after that. I wonder if I was wrong to respond like that, and then decide I can tolerate loud, and I can tolerate stupid, but I can’t tolerate loud and stupid.
What does it mean to be in a community with other people? How is that different from simply being connected?
What are the different ways my behavior affects others, and I am affected by the behavior of others?
When I look back over my professional life so far, I feel like it can be diagrammed rather cleanly:
I have been writing and printing my own poetry chapbooks since 2021, and that has felt good. (Nobody tries to kill you over poetry, I’ve found.) In 2022 I started taking acting classes again, and it’s been strange to relearn how to perform on stage and emote as an actor now that I’m not in the closet. I’ve recently started studying sketch comedy as a writing form, because it’s good for me to experience being new (aka bad) at things.
I don’t know what I’m doing or how to make a living at any of this, and it seems like the current writing landscape is “it’s impossible to make a living at this.” I don’t want writing to be something that gets taken away from me, so I’m trying to find ways to write that feel safe again.
I’m working on not regretting my choices and accepting that where I’m at is where I’m supposed to be.