On being empty
Agreement: What if it's a trap? A way to make coercion feel like choice? When was the last time you backed out of an agreement? What did it feel like? What does it feel like when you don't?
What's real cannot be spoken.
Choice is a suspicious idea, to me. What decides your choices for you? You're no more likely to back out of an agreement you already made if it makes you do things you weren't prepared to accept (and hardly more capable if the option is provided vs if it is denied).
Agreement takes on an external will, internalizes it, enforces it. Every contract is a curse, your name standing in for a will that isn't yours but intercedes on your behalf. Paperwork is magic, and bureaucrats are soul-thieves, which is to say body-snatchers. And identity is a prison, or an armor that binds as surely as it protects.
Better to become nameless, curses don't work without names. And identifying bodies is how you curse them. The purpose of the curse is control. The purpose of control is the destruction of its object. The desire for control is the desire for death, which means suicide is surrender to the curse. Every escape route leads right back home. But without a name, there's no track to travel on, and no trap waiting for you at the end. So shed your skin.
Someone looks down on you, which means you're worthless unless you can find someone else to look down upon. The gaze from above hollows you out. It's so hard to look back; hate naturally flows downward. And if you turn it back against yourself, eventually you'll burst. So what to do? I believe the answer is to transform. This thing we're made to carry only has the meaning we give to it.
Counter-production is a community effort, but undoing is possible alone. I am coming undone, for the sake of love. There is no soul except what's been carved into you. Scripture is the map. Flesh is the territory. You find it when you stop looking.
I've been looking for something. I sometimes want community. There's people out there, talking about the same stuff I want to talk about. But not in the way I want to talk about it. I've tried to fit in, only to be left out. And I'm happier being left out, anyway. I know who I am when I'm alone.
But the fact of being left out is a dull ache, which I know for others is searing pain, abject horror. I'm different. Maybe I'm broken. I can be alone, but I can't afford to leave alone the people that I love. So I pick at the seams that keep us separate. The thing you're not supposed to do. Haven't you ever heard of boundaries?
I'm afraid of being made to want things again. I managed to escape that curse. But in its place is a kind of emptiness that I won't call emptiness, a manufactured hole for all the things I've given up. The "void" that others fill with endless nothingness. An openness to what I can't allow. I can never make myself immune to it, I can only throw myself away from anything that tempts it, things like the safety and comfort of people who know my name. Better to be cold, to writhe in bed sobbing. There's parts of myself I'm still learning not to mistreat. When someone looks at me I don't feel real.
How many voices am I speaking with today?
I'm tired of trying to make sense. I'm tired of trying to be known. I'm making peace with confusion and incoherence, and calling it escape. This is my way of being free.