Can't sleep. Forcing myself to type to see if I can exorcise whatever it is that's keeping me awake. Yesterday I went to a goth night and didn't get home until after 5am. I should be exhausted. I was when I actually got into bed.
I guess I should reflect on the previous night? It was an event called Monster Queen which is partly a goth night and partly a sort of queer, fetishy rave deal. I follow a lot of its regulars on Instagram. They're all so cool and inspiring, sort of bon vivants in how loud they live their styles. I'm not 100% sure I completely gel with the vibe sometimes; last night a gross-out pigman drag (?) act yanked a pig tail buttplug from their shitty ass and licked it clean before downing a green milkshake looking drink, puking it back up into a glass and drinking that....and it's wasn't quite the New Romantic vibe I tend more towards. Or that I was in the mood for, at least.
What I like about the gothic, not just goth subculture but goth as a genre of literature and art, is that it's basically about the beauty of The Fall. It's the constant reminder of a decayed golden age, a tarnished romance, a dissatisfaction intrinsic to humanity. It's this feeling that you will never be complete again, but that's actually great because you'll keep searching and driving forward. It's the acknowledgement and celebration of that deep sadness that a lot of people feel deep down.
(I can hear my downstairs neighbors about to have a fight, it's 4:48am, the sun is about to break the horizon)
I'm currently reading The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. I watched the film first, which the author hated, but tbh it's making the book much more palatable due to how it hops back and forth in Teresa, Tomas and Sabina's lives and comments on them like a matter of history, because the film just linearly portrays (most of) their lives, pieced together from the book. Without spoiling it, there's a bit at the end of the film, when they're on the farm, where they live simple lives and seem at peace, like they've found some genuine happiness. On one hand, it seems like they've compromised in a way, Tomas in particular, to a life that doesn't seem true to their separate ways of living "lightly" and "heavily", and Sabina's reaction to this is a mix of disappointment, grief, but also maybe an affront to her own way of living, because she's someone who isn't satisfied in that gothic, vampiric kind of way.
When I got to that ending, it really brought me to tears. It reminded me of what I worry was a golden age of my own, finally enjoying life for the first time in my early and mid 20s with my ex, traveling a lot around Europe (including Prague, aptly), making her dinner, having our friends over to our overpriced Dublin flat, making things together, just living. We didn't have sex (after a while) and while I did have an issue with this and would never live like that again, I was at peace for the most part. These little things which mattered less to her were the world to me. She never really understood that.
Yet I'm glad that's all over. The last 2 and a half years have felt like a Jungian individuation (though I know I'm tempting fate by saying that) in that my life suddenly shifted track and I've done things like quit my dissatisfying job to go work for myself, something utterly unthinkable before then. There's a new drive there, that "God shaped hole" a la Lucifer that yearns for satisfaction, conquest, recognition.
I just ended another relationship with someone. She was really gorgeous, very caring, and someone beautiful in enough ways that I told her I loved her the third or so time we slept together, which nearly scared her off. But I don't think she intuitively understood this feeling, and there was a fatal issue where, when she got upset or emotional, my own feelings ceased to matter. And I think the lack of recognition is what really killed it. There was a time, poignant in hindsight, where I was talking about worrying that my past relationships eventually only see me as a thing of their comfort, and during it she stopped listening and just wanted me to hold her. She realised what she'd done then and apologised, but I'm also a pleaser to a fault so I said it was alright. This same dynamic played out much longer and uglier in the last 2 months of the relationship and she repeatedly crossed boundaries when I asked her clearly not to.
And I think that this comes back to the difference between "goth" and "emo" for me, where the former is a sadness that you find beauty in but don't impose on the world to satisfy for you, and where the latter is a sadness where you want the world to pity you. I think one is more actualised than the other, and in her case I think she identified with her sadness too much rather than seeing sadness as a thing that happens to her. For tarot heads, think of the suit of Wands/Batons; the drive that makes you do things whether you are happy, sad, angry, etc, rather than the emotionality of Cups.
Back to the club; I feel a bit like a tourist, maybe a voyeur. This could just be my existing social awkwardness which I'm so good at playing off that it seems like I think I'm too good to talk to people who I actually want to know. Sometimes I think I'm too normie for the alt crowd, but then too alt for the normie crowd. I don't use the term "queer" to identify myself, but my younger friends who call themselves queer are often, imo, totally in the dark about queer history or aspects of what I guess is the culture now. Like, sometimes I'm shocked at the lack of knowledge or experience, yet I can tell they see me as the token straight in the crowd sometimes. The amount of times I've surprised them with some, idk, admission or recommendation gives them away. Yet once I'm actually at an event, in with the crowd, I still feel like an outsider.
Maybe it's the raw feeling of "The Fall"? Maybe I should just lean into it more and be off-putting and upsetting? There must be a way to do it that won't piss people I want to know off and completely ostracize me from everyone on the planet.
Fuck, here comes loneliness again.
