i'm going to tell you a little story about how alex pretti saved my life, without ever meeting me, and without even being alive by the time he had done it. you can cut out at any time, if you're not feelin it. i don't need to hear about why you didn't like it, or whatever. if you feel compelled to write and let it out, i would encourage you to go do that. but your efforts will be wasted, here. we both deserve better than that.
when i am born, the doctor says, "it's a boy", and i scream for 40 years. these are not the words my mother wants to hear, and i am not the child she wants to have. she has an idea of her life, a story, and i am not in it.
when i first hold language, i casually correct my father, after he tells me something i want to do or be is "for girls", to explain that it isn't for me. "but i am a girl!" i say, surprised he does not know that. soon, i forget it, myself, along with the rest of my life. not quite three years old, already a passenger in my own existence, a hollow thing made vaguely in the shape of a boy, and then a man, but really, a sort of device, an extension of those who hold power over it. i am made out of two things: self-hatred, and fear. this combination makes me especially prone to manipulation.
for 40 years, everybody gets to use my body but me. for labor, for sex, for whatever they please. i cannot do anything without permission. i cannot do nothing without permission. to do nothing. and then the device that is me breaks down and is discarded. my best friend tries to call me out of the wreckage, but she does not understand how deeply i am buried in my own body, and i do not understand that i am buried at all. i have been taught to hate my actual self so thoroughly, and i have gotten so good at it, that the only trace of me that remains is my skin. my raw material. the marble of my sculpture.
when even my best friend walks away, for i have so pushed her, when i am finally completely abandoned and alone, i begin to seep out of the prison of that broken device like oil from a tanker. if the outside is awful, what's inside is worse. the darkness is endless. we will come to call it nowhere. my skin and i. it is where i spend most of my life.
last saturday, i see. these seven. ringwraiths. coerced long ago into trading their humanity for an abused child's idea of power. these hollow, empty things, made of fear, shaped like men, but filled only with the will of their masters, and self-hatred that can easily be made cold and hard, frozen solid enough to wield as a weapon. surrounding this one man. this single bright flame placing himself between their aggression and their prey.
it burns too hot, and these nazgûl crack and splinter, brittle in the sudden heat of courage. their self-hatred brought to boiling, the sight of him is the purest pain, and all control is lost. they must let it out. out. out, out out out out out out. out!! and the flame is doused. where everyone can see. if we like, we can watch the embers fade and grow cold, over and over. we can make a meme about what we think of it.
i have been letting go of my own self-hatred for over ten years. it is made of the same stuff that makes ice agents, it is made of masculinity forged in terror by some vastly more powerful being during one's earliest formative years, often with tremendous physical and sometimes even sexual abuse. a child's body takes in these lessons, enforced by the threat of violence from something ten times larger. basic conservative masculinization, one half of a binary program. we become stuck. the deepest most fundamental parts of our emotional selves are the first to freeze. they stay there. they are maybe three years old. forever.
remembering who i am lets most of that darkness begin to thaw, by virtue of its apparent shape. masculinity, for the simple (which i am), is for boys. most of it falls off, right away, all at once. and finally i can say, again, but, freely this time, by my own will, without objection, that i am a girl. not rebellious declaration, but sigh of relief. i don't have to keep myself. from growing, anymore.
the rest melts slowly, but steadily; i work with therapists, i read books, i take notes, i take classes, i attend groups, share struggles, best practices. my surface-level self-hatred is finally, at long last, pretty well gone some time in the last couple weeks. but what's inside is pernicious, slippery. this self-hatred is difficult to find, impossible to pin down, hard to say whether it even exists, really.
conservativism is a worldview built mostly out of self-aggrandizing bits of unreality. that's the childhood that i'm healing from, by the way, and to say so is a simple accounting of facts. i am not debating various worldviews. i am sharing my experience of the one i continuously escape. i was lied to. constantly. and ultimately trapped inside this honestly pretty unhinged worldview that kinda comes apart on its own, with one or two pins removed. (the pins are lies.)
there is a non-zero amount of those self-aggrandizing bits of unreality still floating around in me. or at least that's our theory. because we can't stand unreality presented as reality when we know that's not what it is, and it is a feeling of unreality that is keeping us out of our body. until alex pretti destroys it.
the thing he destroys is a kind of lens through which i am made, as a child, to see myself, and ultimately also boys and men in general. i'm so habituated to looking through it that i basically forget that's what i'm doing. i think i am just looking directly at whatever.
this lens paints over reality. it is used against me constantly in my youth until i have mastered the art of using it against me, myself. it tells me, when i look at myself, that i only see approved male things. and so it is not long before i see nothing at all, and to this day, i struggle to hold an understanding of what i look like when i am not looking directly at a picture of myself, or seeing my reflection. it's gotten a lot better, but my perception of myself is essentially nothing for most of my life. grooming tasks involving a mirror feel distant, like i'm grooming a dog, and not myself. my body isn't mine, i am not in it. i am as far as i can be, which is usually nowhere.
because it also teaches me to constantly ask myself, how much of a monster am i? it teaches me to expect that every boy is asking himself the same thing. relentlessly. the question isn't whether we are all monsters. it is only how much. the manlier, the monsteri..er. i don't understand how completely fuckin weird my childhood is. because to me, of course, it is just normal. and then, beyond that, it seems that far too many men find that the answer to how much of a monster am i? how much of a monster can i really be? is actually something pretty fucking awful. and they don't know what else to be, because nothing else is allowed.
conservative masculinization constantly whispers, give up a little of your humanity, and you can have a little power, instead. real men are powerful. and power derives from us. obey us and we'll give you more power to obey us. how monstrous can you become? we valorize it, we make it seem so grand. to fight, to be at war, to have an enemy, to defeat them with overwhelming power. just like call of duty.
the nazgûl were once kings of men.
no one had ever really shown me just how untrue it was, each man a monster, without shedding the identity, first. if not man, then not *necessarily* monster. i had never seen a man be so impossibly brave or decent, courageous, measured. not so profoundly that it couldn't be ignored, couldn't be denied. i had never seen myself reflected in a man until i saw him, doing what i do when i see someone about to get hurt. not considering the risk in that moment, because it is a moment of pure being. the time for consideration has passed. and he has taken it.
he knows who he is. he knows, before putting himself in that situation, the risk. renée good, murdered, barely weeks earlier. he knows. the way they'll try to smear him, in the event. he knows. joining with the rest of his community just the week before, to tell the federal government's best child kidnappers to leave. checking on his neighbors in the crowd when the masked marauders have been driven off, a chorus of, "are you okay?" "i'm okay. are you okay?" "are you okay?"
god how they must have hated him.
trigger-happy man-children, who crack in agony when faced with the reality of the man they thought they were, stopping them from being the men they have become. a man who never even touches his weapon, while they wave theirs around with all the discipline of the children they are, desperate to prove their toughness, to prove the lie to themselves. if gun, then tough.
and then, for the first time in their lives, someone shows them what real toughness looks like. and if it isn't them... accepting that is too much. all the awful things they've done in service to an almost entirely fictional worldview. it means, on top of everything else, that they have wasted their lives, every minute, every second, just to be the toothbrush prison shiv someone else uses to get america bleeding, before they are discarded, not just abandoned but disowned.
if real toughness isn't them, they are wasting their lives right now. because they're wrong, about everything, and most especially, what they think they are, what they need to believe they are.
but they're not fearless.
and alex pretti? presence, awareness. a career built on care. lives changed for the better in his wake. every choice rooted in care for the most vulnerable in each moment. protector. healer. selfless defender. tireless sentinel.
he knows what they'll do.
even so, he asks: are you okay?
when i see that stark contrast, the light and warmth of such pure humanity, such selfless compassion, against the darkness of such cold and distant control, my body immediately feels nothing else but what i am, and what i am not, and in me, the two separate. the lens is shattered and swept away, and with it my last bit of anxiety about whether i might not secretly really be a monster after all, like when the ring went on about ten minutes longer than it should have. my last reason to hate myself, and alex pretti destroys it just by being who he is, where he is. just because i saw who he was, and then learned who he is.
did he save me from dying? mmm, it's more, he helped me finally start living. that's saving a life, to me. i did a lot of work to get there, my best friend helped, i was primed to release that lens, if only i could find it, and consciously identify it as the problem. but i never got to that step. i never needed to.
i'm sure i'm not the only one who was viscerally affected by his heroism, which is not a word i ever use, for how cheap it has been all my life. i do not think that i have, in seriousness, ever called anyone a hero, or described anyone as heroic, until this. alex pretti energy. real pre-serum steve rogers shit.
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