Elliot Bathory

Part I: A Bigger Paper Bag

From Father John Misty’s album Pure Comedy. The album has had a deep impact on my life and I have an emotional connection with each individual song. Some view the artist as a contrived, self-absorbed, false prophet. I think he knows exactly who is and what he is trying to do. Pure Comedy touches me in a way that no other album since The Who’s Quadrophenia has. I identified with the protagonist, Jimmy, for many years. His depression, his recklessness, his desperate desire to ‘get out [his] head’. Father John Misty has created a sonic place in which I can rest with my deep despair about the state of the world. Dark, clever, occasionally very witty, and of course, real. What follows is an exploration into the many ways in which I, including my inner Jimmy, relate to 'A Bigger Paper Bag’.

“Dance like a butterfly and drink like a fish

If you’re bent on taking demons down with only your fist

And I’ve never known anyone who could lose himself in a bigger paper bag”

I am an Aries. I have a fighting spirit. Demons have plagued me for almost my whole life. The first, that of isolation and inability to communicate. The blockage in my head between thought and expression. The second, the very real and intolerably cruel voice of my mother, which informed the third: the person I became after I left the suffocating suburban reality that Jimmy and I both tried so hard to escape.

He said “My mother got drunk on stout, my dad couldn’t stand on two feet.” And yet when they found out he was using uppers, they kicked him out of the house. Desperate to escape himself, he turned to drugs and wild partying. At the age of fifteen I was so desperate to take speed I used to take 8 pseudoephedrine pills at a time and lay in bed for hours shaking with my forehead pressed to the wall. I was nowhere near cool enough to know anyone who could get drugs.

My mother also drank too much. But then, that was not the trigger for the abuse. It only amplified it. So, to “taking demons down with only your fists.” I’ve used almost every other drug over the years, some quite a lot. But my main crutch has always been alcohol, because as I discovered when I was sixteen, it made me feel normal. It taught me to communicate verbally rather than through writing. I am still not convinced that I can socialise without it.

Naturally, it does not end there. Demons have no courtesy. I’ve been drunk for a very large portion of the last four years. It makes things better, until it makes things worse. It in and of itself becomes a demon. You go from longnecks in the park, to two cheap bottles of red, to finding yourself inside a paper bag, the enormity of which you cannot know. There is endless supply in there.

And as for dancing, well, after a (a lot more than), a few gin and tonics, blue under the light, I used to be quite enchanting on stage.

“The weaker the signal, the sweeter the noise

Hunching over an instrument that you now employ

Like the Starvation Army needs a marching piano in the band”

You can tune those demons out, to an extent. The riot of blood rushing through your head after you huff amyl, their complete, albeit temporary erasure when I used to get lost inside 77 on pills, drunkenness and dancing and revelry and other sounds. Britpop, for example. I no longer know if I identify as a hedonist. What I truly was was an escapist. Not an escape artist, however. My attempts to scale the barbed wire fence of my mind and never look back were always cut short.

You come down. Then you wait until you know you can go back up again. Then you do. My partner gets cranky when I try to go out these days and can’t get into it. I am no longer starving for the things I have in life now, like love, understanding, and happiness. Those situations usually now just remind me of how I tried and failed to find happiness in shallow overcompensations. I always wanted to be fun and cool. I’m not.

“Are you feeling used?

I do”

Yes but let’s not get into that. I used myself and I am ashamed.

“Oh, I was pissing on the flame

Like a child with cash or a king on cocaine

I’ve got the world by the balls

Am I supposed to behave?”

For a few years the diagnoisis that suited me best was bipolar II. Soaring highs, or more commonly, crushing lows. There were times when I was on acid or mushrooms in huge crowds and genuinely felt that the entire situation had been constructed specifically for my friends’ and my enjoyment. Eventually, of course, I fell from that specific hallucinogenic throne in a spectacularly violent fashion and developed actue psychosis.

“What a fraud

What a con”

My specific breed of psychosis was as narcissistic as it was unbearable. I was convinced that everyone in the world knew who I was, and everyone hated me. Because how dare I pretend so long to be happy, to be fun, to be a legitimate person worthy of enjoying life. Jimmy also felt as though he was not truly cool enough to be a mod, and was eventually rejected and ridiculed, confirming his self belief. The film adaptation ends with a long shot of him riding his vespa along the sea cliffs.

I believed there was a global conspiracy against me and its end goal was my suicide. I heard passers by spitting insults at me for months on end. I wonder where I got the idea that anyone would do that?

“You’re the only

One I love”

I didn’t used to believe it was enough to love one person romantically. Or rather, I didn’t feel validated enough by the love of one person. I was suffering a massive defecit of love. I don’t hate myself so much anymore. So now self love has been added, it’s notso much a matter of begging others to throw endless amounts of love into the chasm of my starving soul, but rather being able to participate in the life long work of love.

“It’s easy to assume that you’ve built some rapport

With a someone who only likes you for what you like yourself for

Okay, you be my mirror but remember that there are only a few angles I tend to prefer

I’m only here to serve”

Those first two lines fucking floored me when I first really listened to what they are saying. I learned from quite an early age that all I was good for was my looks. And then sex. So I combined the two to forge an identity that I hoped people would like. An A grade slut, both in my personal life, and professionally. Sexy, easy, available, yours if you want me (please take me I cannot stand myself). Took me a long fucking time to grow out of that. I have never fought as hard against anything and I have come a long way.

“Oh, I was pissing on the flame

Like a child with cash or a king on cocaine

I’ve got the world by the balls

Am I supposed to behave?

Oh, I was dancing 'round the flame

Like a high-wire act with a "who, me?” face

I was living on nothing but water and cake"

Perilously close to oblivion at all times and dangerously self destructive but gosh, wasn’t I good at it? Wasn’t I cute? Didn’t you used to wank to me? I have no idea what kept me together, let alone alive. Natural talent, I suppose. That Aries fight. Against the bored, lonely, suffering person I used to be. Against death, to the death. And death hasn’t won me over yet, seductive bastard that he is.

“What a fraud

What a con

You’re the only

One I love

One I love

One I love”

This isn’t about you, baby. It’s about me, Jimmy, and Father John Misty. But then, we are kindred souls. So I suppose it is. A bit.

 Part II: Confrontation (A journal entry, written upon entering rehab)

17.4.18

I haven’t been remembering my dreams. They’ve been fading so fast. I got 10 hours of sleep after deciding not to attend the NA meeting and having to walk past it anyway to get to the smoking area. I didn’t want to encroach on an experience I don’t share but what’s the difference? Why would I care for legality? It’s strange being here in a ‘good’ patch. No withdrawals, only craving nicotine. Am I here not to get ‘better’, but ‘even better’? I’m not sure how I feel. A little alien. Just letting myself think and waiting for anything significant. Being here is symbolically significant. I’m here to learn coping skills and relapse prevention, that’s it. It doesn’t have to provide anything deeper or provoke feelings of profundity. It’s basic shit. I’m an alcoholic and I don’t want to go back to problem drinking.

Where is the fear and pain I felt yesterday? What was the purpose of it? Knock out a rehab stay while I don’t have work/uni commitments and hope I fucking learn for when I do. The best I can do is be present. I am scared that I still don’t know exactly what I’m studying towards. I’m probably not as smart as I presume. What is my lot in life going to be? A job I like and a husband I adore? God, spare me. I’m having a crisis of personality. Intensity and extremity are not useful defining characteristics. Yet being a good, switched on, and fairly interesting person doesn’t feel like enough. How can I relate person to person when I see my own character as lacking? If we are all fundamentally valid and complex as individuals this negative self-assessment automatically carries across to others. I am ashamed not by how boring I feel I am, but why this baseless critical judgement feels so important. My amorphous, superficially high standard insults everyone.

Why is suffering interesting? Why is ‘different’ interesting? Why can’t I conceive of the mid-ranges of reality as interesting, am I that lacking in curiosity and imagination? I’m used to being overstimulated. Or pissed. I am not attuned to subtlety. It is harder work to find wonder in the mundane. Such a vain conquest, so incredibly shallow to attempt to make my life interesting using self hatred as a form of performance art. No one is interested in the creative flair with which you can wield that. Being alive and burning despite things is not impressive if you’re purposefully making life hard for yourself. I don’t really know where I sit with that, though. My mental torment created the life I had. It’s not that I didn’t want to get better. I just took too much pride in how much I could relish in how fucked up I was.

The hereness and newness of myself is queer because it is complete but also completely lacking in drama. I don’t know what foot to start on if not shock value. I’m a recovering alcoholic, a reformed self loathing attention seeker. What am I inviting people to see if not a hot mess? A tepid, anxious 27 year old boy. My social stance is defensive. Find my projected self interesting but do not attempt to actually know me. I am too fragile, too sad, too boring. I don’t want these human frailties to be levelled with so I cast them up high, make an overexaggerated display of them. I’m not doing that anymore. Take me as I am, whatever that is, but also don’t because I don’t know what that is and I won’t make any efforts to help you find out either. So it seems like I want to be left alone but I have been alone on my plinth celebrating my vain, personal self loathing for so long I am starved for human connection. I was lying the whole time. I am one of you. It is still embarrassing to admit.

 Part III: Resolution (A short story about ego death, written in rehab)

30.4.18

So you arrive on your own doorstep one day, right? You would never come to yourself at a time like this, the you that suffers knows he’s not exactly wanted, but he is desperate. There is nowhere else to go, every safe haven is closed or gone. You’re tired, cold, and soaking wet. It’s pouring because of course it is. A few hours pass and your ego, comfortable inside, decides to take a chance and let you in. You’ve been screaming and pleading for hours. “Let me in, LET ME IN!” You collapse fully clothed in a hot shower while your various self conceptions tut and fuss, bitching about the decision. “Family,” some of them say uncertainly, “That’s what we’re for, right? People say that kind of stuff when they love irredeemable fuckstains, yeah?” They don’t actually know this, and the other parts of your ego are by turns confused and furious. “What the fuck, guys? He’ll be fine, he’s always fine, get him out of here!” “You fucking IDIOTS! WEAK! This is NOT what’s supposed to happen, this is not what we do!”

They’re all running around swearing, aggressively and resentfully caring. Like the first time you ever got drunk by yourself to make yourself feel better before your year 10 half-yearlies. How you remember sitting naked in the shower with your head lolling, parents freaking out. Meanwhile, you are there again. Bewildered. Overwhelmed, barely responsive. But you’re wide awake. Layers and layers of clothes, costumes, identities weighing your body down as the warm water soaks through. Something clicks and you realise it makes no sense to be fully dressed in the shower. As a token act to bring normalcy to the situation, you start to take the layers off. The process of removing them all takes a while, but once it is done you feel as though it happened in the blink of an eye.

“Huh.” You say, looking down at your own body. “Is this what I look like?” It’s a significant action in the symbolic world, taking off your clothes. It never felt like it was before. You didn’t understand the meaning of exposing yourself, of vulnerability. You just did it cos you had a malformed concept of fear. Scary things are good for you, they make you stronger. A seemingly contradictory belief that laying your flaws out on the table prevents people from abusing you for them. Nothing can hurt you when you are made of hurt. It is different completely, however, to reveal yourself to yourself. You’re there naked in the bathroom, looking at yourself as though you’ve never seen yourself before.

Your ego, anxieties, notions of your self that you’ve constructed are all pacing around frantically, fighting with each other about who’s right and what’s the best course of action. None of them ever had a contingency plan for acknowledging the hurt. Confronting the core of who you are. Their very existences are reliant upon dividing the self into these fragments. The elephant in the room of your life is in the fucking bathroom doing god knows what. He’s been in there for hours.

Back to you there. With all the layers removed, you turn on the light. It’s a lot like tripping. What you see in the mirror you know to be yourself, but the image feels so foreign. Stranger still is how separate the amalgamated pile of faces you used to wear looks there in the corner, apart from you. Not, as you believed so deeply, parts of you. They grow irrelevant as you trace your finger over your reflection. “Fuck. Is this who I am?” After a little while you start to think your time in there might be worrying all of the other selves, and they really didn’t want to let you in, so it would only be right to go and let them know you’re okay. You’re not going to cause any trouble. You’re grateful. None of the clothes on the floor are suitable to wear, so “Fuck it,” You think, and walk out. The exhibitionist, the slut, and the hippie were all naked anyway.

The place is empty, dead quiet. For some reason it feels like it has been for a while. You’re confused, are they playing a trick? After wandering around for a while you decide to make a cup of tea and have a cigarette. Make yourself at home, as it were. It’s nice to be out of the storm, relaxing and enjoying your own company. You don’t need the assistance of your ego selves to do that anyway. You are allowing yourself residency in your own mind, this overexposed, brutally hurt self. The hurt doesn’t feel very present though, strangely. You thought yourself to be the suffering person. That’s why they didn’t want you here. The situation leaves you bizarrely unphased. Things that should be scary tend not to be, right? You’re just rolling with it, acting like the place is all yours while the selves are elsewhere.

You can’t quite believe it, both that they actually relented when you were banging the door down, and that you got into a situation so fucked you needed to seek the help of the conscious collective. You usually just communicate via proxies. “I’m here, how weird.” You think. Perfume Genius is playing and the sound quality is fantastic. Walking back into the bathroom to pee, you notice the pile of clothes has vanished. The trippy feeling you had before settles on you again and you look to the mirror. Your eyes widen as you see all your selves, the shades of ego and anxiety, floating behind you, faint as ghosts. You see the Party Girl, the Masochistic Martyr, the Stubborn Whore. Their faces are passive and kind. Something you’d attribute to the relief of death.

You lived through them, they lived as you so you could survive. They panicked when you got here, begging to be let in. Because your arrival signified their exit. With your presence, in your self and reality, false constructs fall away. You are the spirit that persisted, the soul that endured. Their service was for one end, and that was getting you here. Everything they protected you through, all of the lessons they helped you learn are intact, part of you as a whole. You’re left staring at the naked truth of who you are. None of the people you’ve been fought in vain. The end game was always unity.

25.2.18

I crash landed here two weeks ago. An entirely new reality. A seizmic shift in mood, attitude, perception. Two weeks is not a long time at all to adjust to an entirely foreign way of life. The thing is though, it has not been an effort. I haven’t had to convince myself in to or out of anything, I have simply accepted what has come my way. A safe, stable place to stay with family who want the best for me. When Bonmi offered this to me, along with a suggestion of what to study as part of the terms, I had no hesitation. I began thinking about where to put my furniture. A room of my own, again. A home, again. A chance to start, again. This won’t be a false one. I know, see, and feel that. So do others. It is different this time. I was tempted to drink at Dad’s when the presence of death lingered unacknowledged. The temptation left along with the acknowledgement. I know what you are. You are not welcome in me. The dead skin of a defunct personality has fallen away. Now is time for the new, and luckily, I have always existed somewhere deep inside every version of myself I have ever been. So, a new sense of self, but not a new self. A burgeoning understanding of who I really am. What remains when you no longer relate to the person you hated so much. That strange, sad, desperate creature. A you so burdened by layers of suffering you could no longer see yourself. Only what you so dutifully slathered on. There is a lightness now. I am not fighting anything. I am not my demons, it turns out. That voice I was so convinced was my own has disappeared. I know, because I am not even mad at myself for taking so long to get here. Time is irrelevant. This must be the place, because it’s a miracle to be alive, one more time. One chance is all you need if you actually take it. One afternoon, one week, one slap across the face. One thing at a time. I was worried I was playing a trick on myself, reigniting things with B. No. We get on like a house on fire. He has always seen me, somehow. He is already addicted to this pure version of myself, it must be intoxicating to see the person you knew was inside taking full advantage of their being. I am not afraid to say I love him. We illuminate things in each other. Being lame and boring is unbelievably fun and hot as fuck. He sucked me off yesterday. New.

28.2.18

“For example, today I: went to court fro attempted arson, got spanked, punched, cattle prodded, and fucked out of my mind by a lovely sadist, and ordered Indian food at 1am. It’s a bit Hyperparadise, sin’t it. It’s Do You Realise? It’s Heroes. It’s Queen. It’s You Only Get What You Give. The old ways of getting free are irrelevant. I don’t need proxies. Filters. Masks. I am working in cooperation with the universe. Everything I have learned has come together. I am by no means complete. But the foundation is. I have this vessel and this mind to take me through the rest of my life. Fucking glorious. These sheets smell like purple-hooded depravity with a sexy Viking. It’s a good smell. It’s free. I’m still the same adventurous slut I’ve always been, what a surprise! “I’m glad you finally get to meet you. Cos you’re a delight. Thank you so much for finding you. And thank you so much for making it here. I know I’m better for you doing so, and I know I’m not the only one.” Free isn’t elsewhere. It’s right here. If it starts to feel like it’s elsewhere, then you figure out what is wrong with here. There is no other place. It’s as clear as the light of another sober day. Flooding over me, meeting the light inside. It’s not even that I “could get used to this,” as though there’s an alternative. Altered reality is just that. It’s the same here. It contains the same information.

Son

Of a

Bitch,

Everything’s

Real.

All rituals are just symbolic actions. If the intended result occurs, who did that? Is it entering into an agreement with the universe, one as a transmitter? Conducting energy in or out of a soul? I am looking forward to studying psychological science. What do I already know, what has different names, where is the overlap between spiritual and scientific understanding. Swiss Army Therapist. My lived experience is so god damned valuable. I just need to tie it in with more formal knowledge. The abundance of potential + possibilities is not scary at all. It’s breathtaking. Subtly thrilling. Taking control is not the burden I imagined, quite the opposite. Real freedom comes when you stop avoiding the truth, the here, the now. The one ever-changing moment occurring over and over, the illumination of one axis of past and present, known and unknown, a fragment of time at a time. A blink can last years. My eyes are wide open.

1.3.18

A different, action, oriented approach to understanding myself. I didn’t plan to take things this way, but I think it is working. It’s different. Trialling this new version of myself in both familiar and unfamiliar scenarios. I had a fucking anxious meltdown after cooking dinner for B and his parents tonight. Somehow, that was a horrendous misstep and a selfish act. Because I did not have a firm grasp of the script I flipped out that I was playing a character that wasn’t even in it. Or wouldn’t be in a normal rendering of the events. Evidently new situations and not automatically being suspicious of good, innocuous things are still challenges. This in no way surprises me. Adjustment is a process. I’m probably too naturally cautious to go egregiously wrong, but my capacity to turn a drop of self doubt into a flood is still awfully formidable. I swam at the bottom of a 100m waterfall thisafternoon. I saw Say Anything lastnight. I saw fucking friends from high school there which tripped me out really hard. So much old and new colliding, all these experiences rushing toward me, going through them and revising what I think, where I stand. A baffling kind of clarity. The slow, sustained shock of the new. Reality, this reality, has always existed but I have not existed in it as such. It’s different when you see yourself in it. You do learn about it from the outside. It’s deceptively simple to apply that knowledge, what you know about living in a world and self that you’re actively avoiding, to being present in these things. They weren’t your enemies after all but your experiences in fighting them have given you a much deeper understanding of them than that possessed by those who have always been awake to the point of never dreaming of, let alone living in an alternative. Consensus reality can be a kind of heaven when you have the wit and cunning of someone who has generally only experienced it as hell. This isn’t going to be easy but it isn’t going to be an ourobouros of attrition either. Elsewhere isn’t a place. It’s a shitty self destructive mentality. Here, now, here, old, here, new. It doesn’t have to be such a fucking struggle.

4.3.18

It is infinitely easier to go with the stream of life rather than fight against it. For me, I think, the master key to unlocking this knowledge came in the form of accepting and affirming my gender. A rough start, for sure, but now all of the other attitudes and behaviours I had tied to ‘being female’ are gone, it is becoming increasingly clear. The last stronghold has fallen. The water of presence and clarity rushing over me swept away the last vestiges of self hatred. It wasn’t me I hated. It was who I pretended to be. The weight of lying to yourself is so enormous it becomes unrecognisable. And yet with such a simple click, the transformative power of its removal is so, so clear. Truth in the sober light of day. All of these things suddenly making so much sense. I wasted so much time trying to understand myself in the world with a broken set of ill-fitting lies. Exploring every possibility except the one sitting so plainly at the core of my psyche. Pretending to be a woman is killing you. You’re not an idiot or a fuck up. You’re a boy. What is wrong is not living that. I had no idea it could be this easy to simply exist. Or that the determining factor for change could be so blindingly simple. And yet! The dam is broken, the universe is flowing through me and I am starting to conceive how I flow through it. The warmth of self compassion. You made it kid, you found the key. And what a fuckin’ time you had along the way, a different lifetime existing as a square peg destroying itself trying to fit into a round hole. Now it all fits, the final piece revealing the meaning of the whole puzzle. Here’s your picture of Eden, now enjoy living in it. How boring it must be to be cis. No brutal war to feel comfortable in your body and mind, no reward from victory. “I’m not making empty flattery, I’m telling you what I find impressive about you. I don’t know that you’ve been hearing the truth about you, either because nobody has been saying it, or because you couldn’t receive it.” Revelation not as a bang, but a whimper. Oh, shit… yeah. Ay.

13.3.18

It’s like stabbing in the dark without the darkness. Pinning the tail on so many multifaceted donkeys simultaneously. It’s right there. That’s the spot. Where your lack of clit used to be. The part of your brain that is activated by a genuine touch. The lifting of the veil. It’s always been here, always underneath, always underway. In truth, in power. In trust. Behold, a monument to resilience. In it everything is relevant, everything is significant. All of these knowings. It really feels like the war is over. What was lost will not be retrieved. It has no place here in the now. Peace is a kind of reprieve unlike any I have truly known before. Different challenges arise. The reality that it may not always be safe to hold hands in public. That you can only meet others as deeply as you have met yourself - and this goes both ways. Truly seeing and being seen. Not everyone is going to like it. But the right ones will. Tomorrow when I wake up I will meet the man who will remove the remaining weight on my chest. [Note: surgeon to cut the tits off, if that wasn’t obvious] From there I can only assume the lightness will be unbearable in the most phenomenal way. Elliot was the indestructible core that refused. He was, I am, me now, the reason I held on. I am so fucking proud of myself.

17.3.18

Assisted self-immolation as a religious experience. Appearing before a magistrate as a ritual. Fucking as a means to enlightenment. Needles for four purposes [Note: play piercing, blood test, vaccination, testosterone injection]. Presence as a spiritual practice. Accepting positivity as just as meaningful, valid, and interesting as misery. Beginning to understand that you yourself are all these things too. Not letting this overwhelm you. A radically gentle approach to every person you have ever been. Put your defences down, there’s no need to fight. You are here. Stronger than ever, not despite it all, but as proof of the spirit that endures, experiences, transforms, reveals itself. A euphoric, triumphant strength. A mirror that knows. That which resembles the grave but ultimately never was. The unifying event. Your own personal singularity, your own personal Jesus. You’ve got to see the light to see the light. [Note: this is totally about orgasms] It’s here now, too.

25.2.18

I thought that perhaps the shape of my mouth had changed, but it’s more likely that my lips have always curled up slightly at the edges. Betraying that cheeky, confident side. It is late on a warm Sunday afternoon and tears are beginning to break out of the grey sky. B is cleaning, Crack-Up is playing. Two nights ago we binge watched Queer Eye and both cried. Lastnight The Shawshank Redemption with an extended interlude of personal political discussion. Today lunch in Kiama. Blowjobs and blowholes. Different ways of thinking. Cause and effect vs. what if? Realities and potentialities. What do you reckon? Being the master of my own reality is confronting and wonderful, baffling in its simplicity. It is what it is. I have a say in what’s to come. There doesn’t have to be a deeper meaning, but it’s fun to play around under the skin of things. Give them different shapes. Perfume Genius going on about shapes. A triangle or a 9. [Note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIE4T4m9KGc] I just spent a moment regarding a horse. I think I made her self conscious. Do a horse thing like sniff the grass and look at your hooves, much like a person would look at their phone or out a nearby window. Constant assessment of stimuli, shuffling through possible reactions. How quick or slow this can be. The unnecessary filters of anxiety. B goes with what’s most plausible. Seems sensible. Where to settle on the spectrum of hope. Effort! Temperance? Wow. Temperance indeed. Something about all these one or two line phrases that get thrown around suddenly making a stupidly reasonable amount of sense. Seems as though everyone really is onto something. Everything in moderation, for example. Bonmi has always said I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I mean yeah, but it is interesting to try. I think I want to try ballet as well. Ballet and guitar. If I can roll cigarettes there is a very real chance I can try other things. Mmm. The power of the startlingly obvious. Clear after the blood running down my face after I attempted a chin-up. Bright as the light of an orgasm appearing through the darkness. It’s different when you see it for yourself. The huh, the yeah, the here, the now. The hmm, the yes, the true!, the wow. Something about Nirvana. B is going through his wardrobe chucking out clothes and just carelessly, without presence of forethought, handed me a navy Ben Sherman polo shirt. I was in disbelief for a moment, unable to comprehend the casual bestowal of such a life changing gift. He did not seem to appreciate the significance of the gesture, the moment every teenage mod dreams of. I feel a sense of pride and awe, all of the history of my subcultural forebearers running through me. I feel legitimately blessed, a partaker in a thoughtless exchange that is actually a rite of passage.

27.3.18

That is so unbelievably fucked. This is the end of the world as we know it. But in my mind, there is a way to divine optimism from that. What we are currently experiencing globally is a conservative backlash to the progress we have made in the last century. People are afraid of change. An Army man who fell in love with me at a strip club argued, weakly, when our political differences arose that “That’s just the way things are.” A ridiculous amount of people subscribe to this philosophy.

That makes me angry. And it should make you angry too. That is the most piss poor reason to submit to the status quo. The reason things don’t change is because people don’t care enough. People are afraid, because the government tells them to be. The people who voted for Donald Trump have been conditioned through media like Fox News to believe that everyone who is not a straight, white, Christian, cisgender male, is in some way their enemy.

This is not a world I want to live in. This is dishevilisation. The world is falling apart and most people are too concerned with keeping themselves and their families with a roof over their head to do anything about it. And that is not their fault. Capitalism forces people to submit to injustice, because there is no other option. Democracy as it currently exists leads us to believe that we do not have the power to choose anything except the lesser of two evils.

America has chosen the greater of two evils. The government and the media do not want us to wake up and enact real change. Of course there are great leaps being made in terms of social justice (a term which is shamed by some people because some people are selfish fucking idiots with no clue about their own privilege), but we still have an incredibly long way to go. We need to stay strong through this and support each other in creating a better world.

If we are not all destroyed in Trump’s WW3, I believe this is possible. A good analogy is that once, the alpha males of a tribe of monkeys ate rotten meat and died, leaving behind the beta males and the females. Since, there has been no violence in the tribe. Those who voted for Trump voted for their own self destruction. Refusal to change is little more than resigning yourself to becoming part of the past. Bigots will die off. Feminists will rise.

What has saved me time and again is staunch optimism. The ‘staunch’ part of it comes into play when my resolve has worn thin and I don’t see the point in launching another fruitless attack. When I am closest to giving up, I slap myself across the metaphorical face and remind myself that without optimism, I have nothing. Because there has to be something better coming. There always is.

A phrase I like to repeat to myself is “Everything will be ok. Eventually, but not forever.” It’s completely true, and the pessimistic part of me likes the end of it. Eyes gleam and mouths smirk. Bad times are always around the corner. But that’s not the point. The point is, life goes on and you, an infinitesimally small and insignificant speck of cosmic dust, at this infinitesimally small and insignificant point in time, are a part of it. And don’t you want to be, don’t you appreciate that fact?

Life is pointless and we all die, there’s no point in arguing that. What matters is making the most of it. A clever boy once wrote me, “It’s so difficult to look to the future and see something better. But that’s our necessity and our goal and if you lose that then you let all that other shit win, and I refuse to do that just yet.” That refusal is crucial. Staunch optimism is a fierce rejection of the demons that we face, and a commitment to betterment.

It can be incredibly hard to maintain an optimistic outlook. Even when the bulk of it is gone and things seem their bleakest, I draw from the tiny indestructible part of my soul that keeps the core of it safe. Staunchness is toughness, a refusal to relent. You face those things trying to crush you with the primal force of a mother bear protecting her cubs. You have to treat yourself like a baby animal sometimes. You wouldn’t let demons destroy a baby animal.

Taking care of yourself is, at its most base level, a commitment to the future. That’s the only reason we do anything good for ourselves, because it will lead to better things in the future. I think, whether it’s expressed or not, that all of have those “What the flying fuck am I doing with my life?” moments. Depression and all its friends can suck the raison d’être out of you. It’s our mission to keep fighting, and keep envisioning the path out of the lowlands.

I realised, after a few years of chasing that particular dragon, that I conflated coolness and authenticity. Because it never came naturally to me, I always felt like a fraud whenever I found myself in favourable social circumstances. Somehow my carefully constructed facade was working and these cool people deemed me one of their own, or at least recognised my effort. When this first started happening I was convinced it was some kind of fluke and I would never truly be one of the cool kids.

Somehow, contradicting everything I believed about myself deep down, I kept suddenly realising I was part of an appealing situation. And no one seemed to notice how out of place I felt. Among a sea of authentic vessels, I was a rickety little canoe of self doubt. It seemed as though no one else had to try. They just woke up every day, innately cool, chose their clothes with confidence, and left the house to pursue whatever cool things it is that cool people spend their time doing. They were genuinely cool.

Later on I started to figure that I couldn’t be the only one who was faking it. I never thought I had ‘made it’, exactly, but I was socially fulfilled and among good company. It occurred to me that perhaps no one came out of the womb a born trendsetter, and there had to be some amount of effort put in along the road. At this point I started to feel a greater sense of kinship, a kind of belonging that had previously escaped me. We all fake it every day, what a revelation.

Then, of course, there are those who couldn’t care less about being cool. Not needing to impress anyone is an admirable quality. I have no idea what that’s like but I can imagine it being less stressful. Everyone finds validation in different things. Trying to be cool is a fickle one because it’s all about what you think other people think of you and that is a bit too much thinking for something that objectively doesn’t even exist.

I still see authenticity as a very desirable trait. There definitely are people who do themselves so well that they don’t need to really try. I think that’s what I thought was cool the whole time, the ability to express oneself exactly how one wishes, without reservation. A part of it is definitely confidence. For me that came with time and experience. Most days I tone myself down, but I feel more comfortable doing me than I ever have. You climb Cool Mountain and find that everyone at the top is more or less just like you.

I liked the pain. I didn’t understand why. I had, and still have, fantasies of throwing myself on the pavement and being trampled by passers-by. What is fundamentally wrong with my self-preservation instinct? Is that why people get aggressive and hit each other? To deal with that same fucked up impulse to put oneself through pain? I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s universal but it seems as though a lot of people experience that. When sex came into the picture, things started to make sense.

Sex is a power exchange. I suppose in some instances it’s even, neutral, but in most it involves one partner assuming a dominant role over the other. This may or may not involve some element of violence. For me, it did. I distinctly remember the first time I ever felt the connection between sex and power. My first love tied a rope between his bed frame and my wrist, turned the light off, and left the room for fifteen minutes. I suppose that’s not exactly violence, but it certainly led to it.

Is violence a power exchange? Or is it about something else? Perhaps it’s to prove a point, perhaps it’s to release pent up emotions that can’t, or won’t, be dealt with in a healthier manner. Is it just a part of human existence? I feel like it might be. BDSM wasn’t as big a part of my life as I’d have liked it to be, so when I heard about the Roller Derby Society at uni, I leapt at it. A fast-paced contact sport for women? Sign me up. I never got further than the basic skills training, but the idea of slamming into someone at high speed excited me.

Boxing seems like a sensible way to deal with aggression, but it never appealed to me for whatever reason. Is aggression the same thing as violence? I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap, but I’m no expert. I used to sit on my second love’s lap at parties and slap him across the face for no reason. Our friends were shocked but did not comment. Perhaps that was me making a display of power? I did want to hurt him, but for shock value. I wanted him to hurt me, for pleasure. Violence isn't necessarily sexual, but it can be.

It seems as though most people have violent tendencies, to small and grand degrees. The thing is, some internalise and some externalise. Some, like me, do both. I even outsource these desires when I ask for floggings. People pay other people to do that to them. People pay to do that to other people. What makes certain kinds of violence socially acceptable? Lots of popular sport is violent. That’s seen as a family friendly form of entertainment. Street fights? Oh, they’re bound to happen. Consensual violence in bedrooms and BDSM parlours? Whoa, whoa. That’s just messed up.

We’re all still animals inside. We all still have desires we don’t entirely understand. Men are raised to understand that violence is simply a part of their lives, whereas women are raised to see it as something to be kept at arm’s length. What was that about power? It’s no wonder women’s aggression is so looked down upon when patriarchal values teach us to be submissive, receptive, and never assertive. It’s a tricky game figuring out how violence fits into your existence as a young woman. It’s repulsive, it’s for ‘them’, it’s… suddenly very appealing?

I’ve discussed my relationship with violence and how it developed as I grew up. Or is it aggression? I still don’t know. Maybe the former is inherently negative, and the latter not necessarily. I think everyone, in some way, craves a little bit of the ol’ ultraviolence. Watching action movies, horror movies, boxing matches. Those are safe and easy outlets. Some of us take matters into our own hands, or open a dialogue with others. It can be messy. It can be hard to define what’s destructive and what’s not.

Do I consider myself a violent person? Having looked further into it, maybe I do. The one truth I have found is that I would never act violently toward someone unless they wanted me to. I think that’s where we need to reassess how violence is handled socially. It is never okay to perpetrate violence against an unwilling party (unless there is inequality or injustice in the picture). That’s how young night clubbers die. That’s how at least one Australian woman dies every week. That’s not what it’s about. On a large scale, we need to teach each other that violence is an urge that needs to be dealt with delicately.

Not all of us are born with the skills to create these shields of self preservation, though. In this world you are either a wolf or a sheep, and if you don’t grow fangs and learn how to growl, you end up on the other side of the equation. This binary of weak and powerful, attacked and attacker, is reflected throughout every part of the great capitalist machine. We are taught scarcity and competition, we learn to hate the “other”. It’s mano a mano.

This is why the intentional practice of vulnerability is a radical act. To be yourself completely, to ignore the social cues urging you to arm yourself and assume the defensive position in favour of peace and honesty, is to open yourself up to attack. Trained fighters and wild wolves know a vulnerable target when they see one because they look, smell, and act different. And there it is, right there, that word: different. A heart on a sleeve is only so much fresh meat from the attacker’s perspective.

And they do attack. People who are intentionally open, deliberately honest, and ultimately vulnerable, are seen as idiots because surely they know what’s coming to them. If you express a different viewpoint to the armed masses, if you show a little too much emotion, you will be ridiculed at best (see: anon hate) and outright assaulted at worst. This behaviour is not in keeping with the tight lipped, upright social order. Everything is fine. Don’t cry. Crying is not productive.

Emotional vulnerability is not always chosen. It is born into some of us, and it bleeds through some of our facades in the form of mental illness. These perceived weaknesses are blessings in disguise. We cannot help one another if we don’t know who is suffering. Such is the great lie that we live under: “How are you?” “Fine thanks.” Many of us are far from fine, but we don’t want to break protocol. Imagine a world in which we were honest about our feelings.

Take a second. Imagine that.

So much would change! And that is what the world so desperately needs right now, change. We no longer need to fight to survive, pitting ourselves against each other in this rat-race. Love is the fundamental current that runs through the universe and it is about time we admitted that. Vulnerability means being open to the possibility of great, soaring love and compassion, as well as the crushing staleness and desperation of present reality. Allow yourself to react.

It’s about being honest. Not only with others, but with ourselves. If you are not okay, you are not under any obligation to pretend to be. Very few of us are truly okay, and in my opinion, if we could all admit that, we would be a hell of a lot closer to creating a world that we all want to live in. The first step in freeing yourself from your self-made armour, the shield that prevents love getting in or out, is speaking up. The earth, which we are all part of, is not okay. It is okay to cry about that.

Radical vulnerability means baring your truths for all to see, as unpalatable as many may find them. It means sticking up for yourself, and sticking up your middle finger to those who don't like it. Knowing who you are and not being afraid to enact it is a revolutionary act. Flowers still bloom in the face of violent heat and deathly cold. Remember that. Don't stay quiet about your pain, don't hide the scars the world has left you with. We all have them. Trust that your whole range of experiences are just as valid as those that are culturally sanctioned.

So try it. Be open about your experiences and your emotions, let your guard down. If anyone should attack, don’t take it personally. They are stuck in a medieval mentality that has taken root so strongly we find it difficult to see any alternative. The reality is that we don’t need to fight any more. We need to support each other, be kind to nature, and tear down the structures that prevent us from doing so. The only thing left to fight is the status quo that keeps us quiet and complicit in our misery.

I met my first boyfriend, a Canadian of the same age and textual inclination, on an online Pictionary website. I never used the international calling card my Dad bought me for Christmas. Why would I taint my and Fleabag's (yes, really) perfect text-based love with the awkwardness of phone calls? I communicated perfectly well with people of all ages across the world, but if a friend even so much as pushed me in the direction of a boy in 'real life,' I would turn scarlet and freeze. Then puberty happened. Then alcohol happened. The latter seemed to be a magical elixir that turned me into a normal, socially capable person, and allowed me to follow the new impulses that arose out of the former. Incredible!

Yeah yeah awkward teenager blah blah, get to the good bit. I fell in love with Suicide Girls around the age of fifteen. Those women were so beautiful, so different from the type I saw all through Girlfriend magazine and, essentially, everywhere else in the media. I had already started externalising my inherent sense of alienation through bold hair cuts and colours, multiple self-administered piercings etc., and discovering these tattooed goddesses, I finally had something to look up to. With past experience as a model signed to an agency, it was natural progression when I became a Godsgirl at the age of 18-and-one-week. My first photoset was taken by a friend in a cramped, graffiti covered toilet cubicle at the last night my very favourite bar was open. I called the set 'A Fitting Farewell.'

It was a farewell to a venue that had shown me dozens of raucous, goon-soaked nights and facilitated countless random hook-ups. Getting photographed naked in the bathroom felt very appropos. In hindsight though, it was a farewell to an entire life of shyness. I didn't have to contend with bats and balls, or even people I happened to also see in person on a fairly regular basis for validation. There were people all around the world commenting on my photos and journal entries. I had 'fans'. I had taken a chance to construct an entirely new identity for myself, without the interference of 'real life' awkwardness. My alter ego, was everything I had ever wanted to be. Confident, creative, sexy, and most importantly, wanted.

After a while I started thinking about the ways in which I could further utilise this new identity I had created for myself. I was nineteen, enduring my first (mostly friendless) year of university, partying hard on the weekends. The two versions of myself that were most well-recieved by people were the sexy online version, and the drunk party girl version. It made perfect sense to combine these two strengths and apply at the city's 'Premier Gentlemen's Club'. I was sick of living in the suburbs, and this lucrative dreamworld seemed like the ideal ticket out of the boring reality I had spent my entire life in. I overcame my fear of phone calls and arranged an interview. After one rigid, awful trial on stage, I was hired.

People used to ask me, “Weren't you scared when you started?” I was scared. Not of getting naked on stage, that was a breeze, but of initiating conversations with strangers. But that was part and parcel of the job. I had to get used to it. My dancing slowly improved, I learned a few pole tricks, and my conversational skills slowly improved. Alcohol helped a great deal, but I was someone I had never been before. I was confident, not only in my bodily expression, but my abilities to coax men into private rooms. They sensed something different about me. It was not just my unusually expansive vocabulary, but a kind of naivete. Each conversation was a lesson for me.

I won't hesitate to say that I learned most of my social skills in a strip club. I grew into a person I had never been before, someone who was capable of taking the lead and engaging strangers. Where I had been shy and reserved, I became bold and confident. Eventually this side of me bled over into the real world, and my fear in social situations lessened. It took forcing myself off the internet and into the bowels of a sexualised underworld to realise that I was, in fact, a person just like everyone else. Capable of verbal communication with people from a large chunk of the social spectrum. It was hard to believe I was the same person as the painfully awkward freak I had been growing up. I mean, I was still a freak, but adults have way more fun with it.

She is taught that she is secondary to the whole process, she is the object onto which desires are projected, and she is the receptacle. Her desires, if she is allowed to express any, are dependent; a yes (or a no) in response to the offers made to her. So what of the young woman who finds a fire has been lit between her legs, who rubs at it to stamp it out without having any idea that masturbation is not soley a male pursuit? Maybe she's fifteen, stuck at an all girls' school with poor social skills and no grasp of the trends followed by her peers. She wants, she sees through the uniforms hanging off her classmates, she pictures herself with her favourite musician backstage - but what kind of girl does this make her?

Girls receive, not seek, attention (not actively, anyway - the hoops one must jump through to make oneself desirable are never ending). Is she wrong for wanting, is she defective because she desires? No one wants her to begin with. This is where the fear creeps in, along these lines. She is afraid of what she feels and what these feelings say about her. Can you be a slut before you ever touch a boy? Sure you can. It's all dark at this point, these are dark feelings, dark secrets, things to be explored after the light is switched off and you are supposed to be in bed.

Yet she sneaks out to wander the streets at midnight, she lays naked in her backyard during storms and writes poems about that raw, unfamilar ecstacy afterward. Do you get turned on by the sound of thunder? It's that sense of impending doom, it's that heaviness that rolls around in the back of your head. It's dark, it's dangerous, (a girl was attacked last year in the same suburb!) but you want it. A thread is woven between what you want and what you best keep away from. These dark pathways are not safe for a young girl. Don't dip your toes in things that stain; a reputation, once gained, can not be lost again.

Despite all the warnings she wakes up every other morning with dirty feet, cold daylight reminders of the impulses she followed the previous night. Soon enough one thing leads to another and she is tiptoeing out the back gate to meet boyfriends, she is fucking on golf courses, under bridges, and in vacant sibling's bedrooms at house parties. She slips into disabed toilet cubicles where the flavour of the month can slip into her. She doesn't care what kind of girl this makes her. Her wanting and her newfound wantedness intersect. She still has poor social skills, but if she drinks enough she is bound to wake up somewhere next to someone. Validation. Yes, yes yes.

After a while she knows the rules and she is a competent player in the game. She is getting what she has long sought after and she marks her victories on a page at the back of a little black book. Years pass, one conquest following, and occasionally overlapping with, another, and the process starts to become part of the mundane. She wears the word 'slut' like a badge of honour. What keeps it interesting, what keeps her going, is that element of fear. Lust entails a curiosity that is easily satisfied, it bounds up to an experience and swallows it without a second thought. It's a simple pleasure. Fear adds the complexity. Yes, yes, yes becomes yes, (no!), yes.

It's impossible to predict, though, where fear and lust will combine to create that electric trepidation. Fear is, by nature, anticipatory. It resides in knowing and the unknown, the seed of potential that grows and exerts pressure on the mind. Her heart starts pounding, her hands start shaking, she stops by at a pub on the way for a shot of tequila. She knows what she wants but she's terrified of the outcome. It's that overpowering lust that creates that dizzying anxiety. The efficiency of the desire → reality process. 9 times out of 10 she gets what she wants, but it's the rare ones among these that scare her - they make her feel alive.

Is it because that social conditioning still sneaks in and colours her thought patterns? (Black, charred, tainted. Only bad girls play with fire.) Is it because the path she walks has led to destruction so many times before? (Her heart begging her not to carelessly let another one in further than he can physically penetrate?) The dizzying possibilities of a new venture in radical esctacy? Perhaps it goes all the way back to the beginning. She, like most children, developed a fear of the monsters that lurk beneath the bed after lights-out. Is it that this natural anxiety has been inverted? The monster is in your bed and you put it there. You like the way it howls, the way it pulls your hair.