the Infinite

on Decolonizing/on Generational Trauma/on Praxis

when I know better, I have to do better

Posted on 8 July 2023

cw: mention of genocide and other types of injustice

I have been having such a very hard time trying to understand why I feel so stuck these past however many weeks or maybe months or maybe years? What is time?

The problem is that I know too much. Or maybe, I understand too much about what I know. And the necessity falls on me, if I am going to continue to be the person I claim to be, to do something about what I know, whether or not it’s hard and no matter how long it takes.

and there are so many things to know all the time, some of which are horrifying

I know that Meta (formerly Facebook) is literally responsible for enabling a genocide. I know that their new social media app Threads gathers FAR more information than is safe or necessary unless you’re a company that is literally responsible for genocide.

I know (I think it’s fairly obvious to everyone) that Twitter is well and truly fucked up in an irreparable way.

I know that Substack is responsible for giving big platforms to hateful people.

some of which are truths about praxis, and some of which are truths about us as people

I know that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Any transaction under capitalism utilizes a system that does violence to everyone, and that is a tricky thing indeed when one is living in a country in the throes of post-capitalism. Or, if you like, we are in the throes of the ‘finding out’ moments that come after the ‘fuck around’ bit.

I know that living here in this country has traumatized us all, some much much more than others. I know that I carry the trauma in my DNA, and so do my kids. I know all too well how easy it is to lose hope.

I know that COVID has disrupted, harmed, and made a bloody mess of our lived experiences. It has made everything worse for so many of us.

I know that people are capable of forming and participating in community anywhere people and relationships can be found. (as an animist, I feel it’s important to say that community and relationships include non-human people as well: the ecosystem we live in, the animals and waterways and land we are surrounded by and inhabit)

I know from experience that being cut off from community can be devastating and all-consuming. I know that finding and forming new communities from well-established bonds or brand new ones is hard goddamn work. I can’t expect anyone to pivot directly to a new social media space in the midst of all that. Change is hard. Figuring out where to go next and where your friends are now is exhausting and such a lot of labor.

I know that these kinds of experiences have led over a million people to join and actively participate in the federated social internet; but I also know that a lot of people we’ve been in community with aren’t going to follow us everywhere we go. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of anxiety. It’s painful and confusing and scary to feel in your gut the scattering of your friend group.

some of which are specifically my own issues with my messiah complex and my moral high ground

I am both terrified of not being seen, and scared of being seen.

don’t bother me, bother me please
I’m begging on my hands and my knees
because I love the attention but I hate the affection
ANTIPOP, by gürl & Onlyfriend

I want to devote my life to service, and I am not enough to fill every need or comfort all those who weep (and those who don’t). I can’t be everywhere at once. I tried, and all I got was a hefty dose of burnout on top of existing chronic illnesses I had just discovered.

I have the ego and the expectations of a person that has the attention of thousands of people, with the actual follower lists and email subscribers of a person that has the attention of tens of people.

I know that I say and write and create the kind of content that makes people uncomfortable. Sometimes there’s appreciation and engagement, but I do realize that talking a lot about death and praxis and queerness gives me a pretty narrow group of people who want to hear what it is I think I’m supposed to say.

so I’ve made decisions I didn’t want to make, and there are still plenty of decisions I’m kicking the dirt about

I left Twitter and am no longer publishing at Substack and I am not signing up for Bluesky or Threads or any other social platform that is currently on offer. It’s not my job to exist in all the places so that if anyone ever needs me, they can find me anywhere.

When I worry that there will be a bat signal that I don’t see, I try to remind myself that I am not alone in my purpose to help and serve others; there are a lot of other people also doing this, and I can only do what I can do. One of the most difficult lessons to internalize in my tradition is to count harm to myself into the equations when I am doing the math of harm.

I am wrestling with this a bit: I haven’t stopped listening to true crime podcasts altogether, but I am deeply bothered by the incongruence between abolitionist praxis and the carceral system embedded into the format of most of those podcasts. I can’t excuse myself for nodding along when someone says, “I hope he rots in there,” but I am only recently noticing when that’s happening and what is my immediate response to noticing.

to sum up: I am a paradox

This might be the heart of all this thinking and worrying and doing and not-doing. I contain assumptions that are antithetical to one another, and I don’t even know about all of them. I tend to notice them because I’ve managed to learn something that disagrees with a belief I didn’t realize I held.

And I don’t think there will be a time of perfect clarity of thought and perfect justice in every action. I think I will need to figure out in the decades ahead of me, how to forgive myself for not being perfect.

I’m going to be spreading the word about my writing in a different way — I am going to be sending out full-text posts by email after I publish them, and on the weekends you’ll get a digest of whatever the RSS can pick up from that week. I am also going to try and be more descriptive about what I actually wrote about, when I post links online. I get very in my head after the energy output of writing and publishing something I feel strongly about, and I want to allow myself the time to share my ideas in the ways that seem to make the best kind of sense.

xox, Nix

featured image is a photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

on Praxis/Poems/the Cycle of the Seasons/the Work

litha

Posted on 21 June 2023

the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere where I live; winter solstice in the southern hemisphere

my gift to you: a poem to mark the day

we have arrived.
here is another milestone, keep going. you’re getting there.
our longest day.
our yearly luxury of light.
a beam of gold to see what has grown, what is ready, what we sowed, what we now reap.

if you desire a different harvest,
if these grains, these vegetables, these fruits, these proofs of how you’ve worked are reminders of choices you wish you hadn’t made,
plant different seeds.

if you like,
summer is proof that spring arrived when it arrived.
there are babies. there is more food on the earth.

(whether or not it is equitably distributed, that is not a debate; the blessings of harvest do not reach the mouths of the most hungry)

if I were to ask you
what you plan to do with these extra moments in the light
that would be a useless question.
we were not born to use up every minute as if it was the last.
we are here to notice. to see. to observe the riot of the good,
the shadowed and crowded fields of the bad,
to notice ourselves.
what choices do we know that we must make
now that we have refused to look away?

unfortunately,
or perhaps fortunately,
the gifts of the earth are intertwined with how well we love one another.
we can see even when our eyes are closed.
we can know even when we pretend to be oblivious.

so marvel, then,
that the sun still shines upon us,
or maybe it only shines for the glory of the earth,
and we are gifted the grace of that light.

the longest day of the year.
the shortest night.
the least darkness of any day.
let it radicalize you,
because you are also a choice away from what gives life, or what takes life away.

— Phoenix Kelley, Litha 2023

featured image is a photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

on Happiness/on Mental Health/on Neurodivergence

I’ve written myself into a corner

Posted on 10 June 2023

I have spent so much time carefully crafting what kind of things I write here, that I’ve just about taken away my ability to write a regular-ass blog post that isn’t an essay. It’s not that I can’t write one, it’s that my neurospicy brain got into a comfortable and important-feeling process rut and a now a ‘day in the life of Nix’ is not on the list of approved content.

But this is my brain and my website and I am going to write a regular-ass blog post.

guess what I’m working on in therapy

My whole life, I haven’t been able to describe anything in particular as making me happy. I think that phrase just doesn’t work with my personal symbol set for understanding myself and the world. Right now, especially since summer is so hard — I have seasonal affective disorder with bonus climate change terror, plus one trauma anniversary, among other things — it’s been more important to me to look for what I enjoy and do those things intentionally.

If I didn’t have the therapy support for it, I don’t know how I would navigate how shitty it feels to be knocked out of commission every time the air gets bad. Right now, prior to the wildfires beginning in Canada, the air quality has been literally dangerous to breathe. So even inside the house, I’m affected by the air quality, which means I’m sick a lot right now. I have a lot of migraines and a lot of MCAS flares, which include fun symptoms like depression and mild (haha) anaphylaxis. The meds shelf in my bedroom probably looks overwhelming to the casual observer, but it keeps me as functional as it’s possible to be.

I have the kind of trauma that causes me to believe that in order to enjoy something, I need to have earned it, but the criteria for ‘earning it’ are vague and not up to me.

Being sick sometimes feels like a loophole for me, so I don’t feel as upset with myself for spending an afternoon with Netflix or a video game; but it’s also hard to actually enjoy those things when I physically feel so bad.

It’s the time between, those days when I feel pretty good and I have enough bandwidth for whatever the day might bring, when I have the hardest time letting myself just enjoy something for the sake of itself.

So I’m working on it.

to prove it, here are a few things I’m letting myself enjoy lately

I finished watching Another Life on Netflix. I almost never finish a series, because I don’t generally let myself just watch something simply because I like it, but I goddamn did it. It’s a really good scifi show with a trans character with neopronouns (ze/zim/zir) and they do NOT die at the end. Or at any point.

I started a big knitting project that I’ve been putting off for several years, because I love the act of knitting and the fascination of feeling a piece of fabric that I am actively creating, one stitch at a time. I am good at knitting and this helps me feel physical and emotional enjoyment when I pick up the project, hold it in my lap, and start knitting the next row.

A couple of years ago I backed a game on Kickstarter, Mask of the Rose, by a developer that I love, and the game was finally ready for backers about a week ago; today I actually started a new game and let myself be immersed in the music and the story.

I remembered that I can use the Hoopla app to borrow ebooks and audiobooks from my library, and I went a little nuts and checked out too many things at once. I finished We Do This Til We Free Us, although that was less about enjoyment and more about education on abolition and what that could look like. And then I remembered some books that I loved when I was a teenager devouring books by the dozens each week — and some of them are available as audiobooks, so I have been listening to The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay (it’s the first book in The Fionavar Tapestry series) and it is marvelous. I love it. I forgot how much I loved those books and now I get to relive it but from a new perspective.

I’ve even got a little backlog of things to do next!

Ash of Gods: The Way was recently released, and I got it almost immediately because I enjoyed the first game, Ash of Gods, so very much. I haven’t started playing it yet, but I am looking forward to being just as emotionally moved by this new piece of the story as I was by the first game.

There is a neat stack of knitted sections of a rainbow-colored blanket that is waiting for me to steam the pieces out, match them up, and stitch them together so that I can knit the border and have a finished blanket. It’ll be the first large blanket I’ve ever made and it’s for me, not for anyone else, which is all by itself kind of amazing.

My hair has gotten out of control again; apart from the undercut maintenance that needs doing, I’ve got the bleach kit and the hair dye I’m going to use for updating my color. It’s so faded right now and so grown out that it’s mostly dark brown with a pale pink section on the top. It doesn’t look bad, but there is a way I like my hair to look and this isn’t it.

also, these random things

We ran out of butter a few days ago but it’s not grocery day yet so in the meantime I have to eat my breakfast raisin bread DRY, which of course I can do, but then I recalled that one can make butter by shaking the absolute fuck out of a container of cream, so I did that and I am very proud of myself and it’s very tasty.
You know how sometimes you’ll save a container, and then you’ll save another container that’s the same kind of container as the first one, and then months later you find yourself with several stacks of containers that constantly fall over because they’re in the way and there’s not actually anything you can do with them? Yeah, I got rid of them. FINALLY.
I also remembered the life hack that my mom taught me literally decades ago, which is if you need an ironing board but you don’t have access to one, you can use a folded towel on a level surface as long as you’re careful. I like to steam out my knitting so it’s not all curled up, and I took a small box and a towel and made myself a little steam-the-knitting station so I can have the satisfaction of working on a project that is now more aesthetically pleasing to myself.
I’ve listened to Saddy Daddy-O on repeat so many times that I have all the lyrics memorized. What a hilarious amazing song. I heard it on TikTok, y’all (it’s the Lexapro song and it SLAPS, please do not revoke my memes card). And now it’s on Spotify.

I took too long to think about writing this post and now it’s almost four in the morning and I need to go the fuck to bed.

I love y’all. Thank you for being here.

— Nix

featured image is a photo by qinghill on Unsplash