This is a continuation of my thoughts from last week, so, again, if you’d rather spend this pride month focusing on joy, please bookmark this blog post and come back to it later.
When I hear someone say that they don’t think they belong as an ace or aro person – both in the context of whether they belong in the broader queer community, or specifically in aro and ace communities – it’s often accompanied by the idea that they are not “representative” enough of all ace or aro people. There’s an anxiety around seeming like the perfect asexual or aromantic person, around needing to perfectly fit the label in every way and every minute of your life, or else you won’t “count.”
Often this anxiety comes from a place of concern for others. I’ve heard demisexual people worry that someone might look at them and think, “Well, you eventually became sexually attracted to someone, therefore this must be true of ALL ace people!” I’ve heard aromantic people worry that if they decide to date or get married, someone might look at them and think, “Since you decided to enter a romantic relationship, that must mean that ALL aro people should just suck it up and do it too!”
What bothers me most about this whole thing is the real impact it has on individual queer people’s journeys of self-discovery. I knew about the aromatic spectrum for years before I realized it applied to me. I knew, objectively, that aro people experienced “little or no romantic attraction,” and that microlabels like grey-aromantic existed. Heck, I already knew that I was demisexual – that I didn’t need to be the same as all ace people in order to be ace!
But I flat-out could not think of myself as aro for the longest time, because I knew that my experience was not the same as all aro people. I was judging myself as harshly as I was afraid alloromantic people would judge me, and misunderstanding myself just as much as I was afraid alloromantic people would misunderstand me.
It wasn’t until I started listening to the podcast A OK, and heard the stories of many different aro people, that I realized I did not need to be representative of all aro people in order to consider myself aro. I knew then that if someone tried to say to me, “Since x is true of you, then x must be true of all aro people,” I could just send them a link to the podcast. It’s a cliché, I know, but it really did feel like a great weight had been taken off my shoulders. I realized that it wasn’t my job to represent the entire community, and I had no obligation to comply with other people’s expectations that I be representative.
Whoever you are, and however you experience attraction, you are NOT responsible for other people deciding that you are representative of anyone or anything. That is on them. Someone looking at you and thinking, “If x is true for you, then x is true for all aro/ace/queer people” is not your fault. It will never be your fault.
And anyone who tries to tell you that it is your fault – anyone who claims that your identity is “too confusing” and will “make the queer community look bad” – is dead wrong. It will never be your job to make sense to the people who don’t want you to exist.
Something I’d like to focus on this pride month, personally, are the ways that the pride community and sub-communities can hurt the very people they ostensibly exist to support.
Now, June is a joyful month, so if this isn’t the kind of thing you want to think about right now, by all means bookmark this blog post and come back to it later. I’m not here to “ruin” anyone’s fun. I’m here to say that queer joy is just as important as queer self-accountability.
The more ace and aro people I meet, in person and online – and I keep meeting more of them, revealing just how big our community truly is – the more stories I hear about aces and aros feeling like they don’t belong. It’s common for them to phrase it as, they’ve been told they’re not “enough.” Not queer enough to be queer. Not LGBT enough to be LGBT. Not oppressed enough, not visible enough, not representative enough to belong. And sometimes it’s not about belonging in the broader queer community. It’s about being told by other aces and aros that they’re not ace enough or aro enough to belong.
An unfortunate truth of the world is that in every group of people, there are those who are only happy if they are excluding someone else. These people look at the world we have, where the powerful and those in the “in-group” take every opportunity to hurt the disempowered “out-group,” and decide that the only way to attain power is to become someone who hurts and excludes those with even less power.
This is sometimes a conscious decision, but not always. Sometimes we really do believe that excluding others is the only way to protect ourselves from insidious infiltrators.
But speaking as someone at a cross-section of identities that often gets me labeled an insidious infiltrator by people who have never even met me, this is a fallacious belief.
The person with a different queer identity to yours is not your enemy. The person with a microlabel or neopronoun you’ve never heard of before is not your enemy. The person who experiences the world differently from cisgender straight white Christian men, and who also experiences the world differently from you, is not your enemy. You will gain nothing from treating them like dirt.
I look at the world we have, where the powerful and those in the “in-group” take every opportunity to hurt the disempowered “out-group,” and I say, we do not need to remain this way. I say, I will gain nothing from perpetuating the cruelty that has been directed towards me. I say, I reject the cycle of violence and exclusion.
I say, it is high time we held ourselves accountable.
I want to follow up last week’s Thursday Thoughts. I mentioned that if we step outside of a projection mindset and believe that other people experience the world in different ways, a whole new world of possibilities opens to us. Recently I’ve seen some examples of one new possibility, depicted in some of my favorite TV shows. (Vague spoilers ahead for recent episodes of Doctor Who andThis Is Us)
Something that allo people in a projection mindset have a difficult time understanding, while talking to an aro or ace person, is that not everyone wants a romantic or sexual relationship. Allo people tend to point at ace or aro people hanging out with their best friends and say, “Well, why not date them, if they’re so important to you?” For the allo person, if someone is that important to you, then you mustend up together romantically and sexually.
But if we step out of that projection mindset, it opens a new possibility: that not every “you’re important to me” will end in that kind of relationship. Not every important relationship is romantic.
A recent episode of Doctor Who included a love confession that can be paraphrased as, “I don’t date, but if I did, it would be with you. You’re incredible and I care about you 100%, but I can’t give you the kind of relationship you want.” And it’s brilliant. At no point does the show demonize character A for turning character B down. At no point does the show imply that character A doesn’t actually care about character B. They care about each other, and that care is good, valid, and important, even though it doesn’t involve kissing or romantic commitment or a fade-to-black. Not every “I care about you” leads to marriage, and that’s not a bad thing. It can be a very good and healthy thing, in the long run, even if it hurts in the short term.
This Is Us, over its six-season quest to explore all the many forms the American family can take, has portrayed this possibility as well. Yes, a lot of the “you’re important to me” in this show results in romantic endgame, but in season six, the show takes a turn into showing the ways that people can have an important role in each other’s lives but be much better off notmarried,notholding hands, nothaving sex. Parent of my children. Emergency contact. Best friend. Employee or business partner. The person I love but I cannot support right now, given my life circumstances. My parent, my sibling, my child. And, again, it’s all good, valid, and important.
Why shouldn’t this be our priority – having a web of people who fill important roles in our lives, and filling an important role in many other people’s lives – over having just one person who is the most important person? Why shouldn’t there be many ways to be important, to care, to love, instead of having the ultimate expression of “you’re important to me” be going to bed together?
If you come away from this blog post thinking that I’ve said people shouldn’thave a romantic or sexual relationship, you didn’t understand me. You’re getting stuck in that defensiveness I talked about last week, assuming that how sad you feel at the thought of not having this relationship is how sad everyone feels.
Hear me when I say that we can all benefit from acknowledging that that kind of relationship is just one thing. It’s not the be all end all for everyone. It’s just one experience. It may be an important experience for you. It isn’t for everyone. And we can all benefit from acknowledging this.
Speaking as someone who has come out as ace and aro multiple times – coming out is a continual process, after all, and not the one-and-done culmination that the movies portray it as – you get some common reactions from allo (non-ace or non-aro) people. One of these reactions is a kind of defensiveness.
When I say I’m fine without a sexual or romantic relationship, or if I dare to hint that I wish that the world around me wouldn’t put these relationships on such a pedestal, allo people get anxious. They put up their guard, and they try to prove me wrong. “Don’t worry; you’ll find someone,” they say, assuming their anxiety means I am also feeling upset. “You’ll want it someday,” they say, mistaking their desires for mine. “I just don’t want you to be alone,” they say, believing that a romantic and sexual relationship is the only way to not be alone in the world.
I’m fascinated by the concept of being able to walk through the world assuming that everyone around you experiences it the same way that you do – assuming that if something is normal for you, it must be normal for everyone, or that if something bothers you, then it must bother everyone. When an allo person tells an ace or aro person, “Don’t worry,” what they’re actually saying is, “I’m worried,” and a lot of the time, they don’t even realize that they are projecting their experience onto the person who is trying right then to tell them, “I don’t feel the same thing that you feel.”
What must it be like, to hear, “I don’t experience the world the same way as you,” and to be so bothered by this idea as to immediately insist, “Yes, you do!”
Empathy is a human superpower – the ability to understand that other people have feelings. But empathy, I’m starting to think, is a spectrum. At one end of this spectrum is the ability to connect with someone’s feelings even though they differ from your own – true empathy. At the other end of the spectrum is the assumption that everyone else’s feelings are the same as yours – projection.
It’s easy to have a projection mindset when the world around you is constantly telling you that your experience is the “normal” one. When every character who at the start of the story doesn’t want a relationship finds a romantic partner by the end; when even ads for chocolate are filmed like they’re about sex. There’s also no amount of marginalization that makes you immune to projection – it still stings me to think about my gay Jewish friend of color who said, when I told him I was demisexual, “I don’t think that’s really a thing.”
But if we step outside of that mindset? If we commit ourselves to believing that other people experience the world in different ways, and to believing that we can and should try to understand these different experiences? A whole new world of possibilities opens to us.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about people who are surprised to learn that [insert group here] is oppressed.
In many cases this is simply due to the obliviousness granted by privilege and systemic racism – if you’re a white person living in an all-white community, then it makes sense that you’ve never seen someone mistreating a black person. (It makes less sense now that the internet is a thing, but that requires thinking to Google the thing in the first place, and that’s beside the point of this blog post.)
Other times, though, that surprise is explicitly founded in the propaganda that is a part of that oppression.
For example, a fundamental piece of antisemitic rhetoric is that Jews are secretly powerful to the point of controlling the world – and, therefore, not oppressed. This leads to goyim who have bought into that antisemitic propaganda being very surprised to learn that Jews are targeted. (I remember a conversation I had once, with one of the most progressive activists I know, who said to me, “It’s not like Jews are attacked on the street for being visibly Jewish.” I wish we weren’t.)
I also see this with aphobia – both acephobia and arophobia. A fundamental piece of aphobic rhetoric is that asexuality and aromanticism don’t actually exist; it’s just straight people “pretending” to be queer, and therefore, not oppressed. This leads to allosexual people who have bought into that aphobic propaganda being very surprised to learn that aces and aros are, in fact, targeted. (For harassment, for assault, for overmedication.)
How should I conclude this thought? Probably with what I’ve said before – that representation is important, that we need to widely see just how many ways there are to be human, to understand both the joys and the struggles experienced by different people. For how much knowledge is available at our fingertips, a lot still goes unsaid, or at least fails to reach the ears of those who could benefit most from hearing it.
I have two thoughts that coexist, though they may seem contradictory at first glance.
The first thought: I will never tell a black person, disabled person, person of color, or transgender person that they are wrong when they say, “Both political parties are bad.”
Frankly, they’re right. The terrible things that white, cisgender, able-bodied people are afraid of right now have been the reality for marginalized people in the United States for centuries. Lack of access to healthcare, including abortions. Lack of access to employment, income, and housing. Lack of support in the criminal justice system; being criminalized for existing. Lack of freedom to vote, to gather, to live where they want, to say what they want. This has been the case when Democrats are in charge and when Republicans are in charge. Period.
Therefore, when marginalized people - and my list above is not an all-inclusive list - say that they cannot support either political party, I do not fault them. I do not tell them they are wrong, and I respect their decisions regarding their activism and political action, or lack thereof.
The second thought: I wholeheartedly believe that when you do not belong to those targeted groups, when you have the freedom and ability to vote, to speak and be heard, to raise money, to go where you want and live where you want, to escape the criminal justice system with your life intact - and you base your lack of political action in a “both parties are bad, so I refuse to vote for either of them” philosophy… you are not doing the right thing. You are causing harm. You are wasting your privilege instead of putting it to good use. Whether you realize it or not, you are sitting comfortably on your moral high ground, flaunting the fact that you will be able to survive bigoted policies pushed through by emboldened elected officials at every level. There would not be such terrible federal court cases if our local judges knew we would punish them for even showing interest in starting such despicable work.
The work of activism is both the work of acknowledging that the system is inherently harmful and protesting its very existence, and also the work of doing everything you can within the system to stall the people who desire and enable that harm. There is value in both the revolution and the incremental labor. In fact, I believe both are necessary, if we are to save this nation.
“So, I’m grey-aromantic and demisexual. That means that I only rarely feel romantic attraction to people, and I only feel sexual attraction to someone after I form an emotional connection with them, and even then, it’s pretty rare.”
“But that’s just how everyone is. It’s totally normal to not get crushes on people that often, and I like to get to know people before I want to have sex with them, too.”
“Okay, you’ve brought up a couple different things here. First, there’s a difference between feeling sexual attraction and wanting to have sex with someone. You can feel attraction to a person and decide not to have sex with them until you get to know them. But I don’t feel that sexual attraction at all when I meet someone. Second, sure, it’s normal for me to not get crushes on people that often, and maybe it’s normal for you, too, but it’s not normal for everyone. Just look at all the movies that are about love at first sight.”
“That’s just fiction. That doesn’t really happen to real people.”
“Fiction can be sensational, but it’s inspired by reality. If it had nothing to do with reality, then people wouldn’t be interested, and it wouldn’t sell, and they’d stop making it. But, okay, let’s focus on reality. Real people talk about their crushes all the time. It’s basically all anyone wanted to talk about at my high school – who liked who, who was dating who, how much they loved this celebrity or that celebrity. Was it like that with the people you went to school with, too?”
“Yeah! It could get really annoying. But they were just exaggerating. Teenagers make such a big deal out of everything.”
“Ha! They do. I know I did. So maybe they were exaggerating about how strong their crushes were. But when someone tells me what they’re experiencing, I think it’s important to believe them. And if they’re describing something that doesn’t line up with my own experience, then it’s even more important to believe them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, so, did you know that I don’t have a sense of smell?”
“Really?”
“Really. Born without. Never had it. You could fart right now, and if I didn’t hear it, then I wouldn’t know.”
“That sounds super convenient, actually.”
“It can be. The thing is, I have no idea what it’s like to smell. That’s not a part of my experience at all. So, like, you’re telling me that it’s possible for you to just walk into a room and know what’s for dinner? Without seeing it? You just know? From the air? Like magic?”
“It does sound like magic, when you put it like that.”
“I know, right? Sounds pretty sus! But if I’d gone my whole life saying that smell wasn’t real, if I told everyone that they were lying or delusional because they said they could smell… what would that make me?”
“A jerk.”
“Exactly! I’d be a real jerk. Stuck in my own head, unable to imagine that other people might experience the world differently. So, instead, when someone tells me that they feel something that I don’t feel, or that they feel it more often than I feel it, or more strongly, I believe them. And I hope that they extend me the same courtesy – that they believe me, too, when I tell them that my experience is different from what they experience.”
“But what you described before, how you experience attraction, that didn’t sound different than what I experience.”
“Well, being able to talk about this stuff means that it’s possible to find people who experience the world the same way that you do, or at least in a similar way. That’s why I like these labels so much. They help me find other aro-ace people to talk to.”
“Are you saying I’m aro-ace?”
“I’m not going to try to say what you are. I’m not inside your head. You get to describe your experience the way you want to. But if you find that these labels are useful to you like they’re useful to me, I’d be happy to talk with you about it, as much or as little as you want.”
Recently someone shared with me a New York Times article titled “Disney, Built on Fairy Tales and Fantasy, Confronts the Real World.” I’m not linking the article here, because I don’t like it very much. It centered on the back-and-forth way the Disney company responded to the Florida “Don’t Say Gay” bill, casting it as an example of Disney struggling and failing to make everyone happy and strongly implying that the company shouldn’t be focusing as much as it is on inclusion.
Whether or not you think a billion-dollar company like Disney should be supporting marginalized people is beside the point of this blog post. What disappointed me about this article is how it framed the issue. According to this article, in the past, Disney told stories that “everybody” could enjoy, and now that they’re taking steps towards diversity and inclusion, they are now telling stories that not everybody can enjoy.
The truth is that those past stories were not for everybody. And those stories did, and still do, hurt the people that they exclude and that they portray poorly.
Recently, Disney has figured out that when they tell stories that really are about more kinds of people, then more kinds of people can and will enjoy the stories they tell. And, again, setting aside whether this is something Disney “should” do in an ethical sense, expanding their audience can only lead to increased ticket sales, so, hooray for smart business decisions. The company is taking steps towards truly telling stories for everybody. And when they fall short of that goal – which they will many times before achieving it – the audience is holding them accountable.
A couple weeks ago, Jaiden Animations on YouTube released a video titled “Being Not Straight,” in which she came out as asexual and aromantic. Instantly, my social media feeds were flooded with people saying that thanks to this video, they had realized that they too were ace, aro, or both.
Now, examples of aro/ace people in media – both real people and fictional characters – are still few and far between. Our representation appears infrequently enough that I’ve noticed how this flood of realization always, without fail, follows. When Todd on Bojack Horseman realized he was ace, so did many Bojack Horseman viewers. Same with Florence on Sex Education. When we see someone on screen learn what asexuality or aromanticism is, and the response is an overwhelming, “I just realized – me, too!”
I love this response, but it also makes me a bit wistful. Because it means we’re not there yet. Most people still don’t know that aromanticism and asexuality exist. They only get the opportunity to learn when it shows up, rarely, on TV or the internet. If we didn’t have these examples of aro/ace media representation, they might never learn.
I think the fearmongers will look at this trend of “character talks about their identity, and then people come out as that identity” and say something like, “This means that if we talk about queer stuff, then it will make my kids decide to be queer!” It’s the supposed logic behind all that legislation that bans discussions of gender and sexuality from classrooms – if we don’t talk about it, then it won’t exist.
But that’s not true. Knowing that queer people exist doesn’t “make” you do anything. It reveals that there are options. Media representation of queer people doesn’t make straight people “decide” to be queer. It gives queer people the opportunity to realize that they are queer, and it gives straight people the opportunity to learn that queer people exist. That’s all. And that “all” can make a world of difference.
There’s a joke that goes, “Before Mount Everest was discovered, what was the tallest mountain in the world?” The answer is, “Mount Everest – we just didn’t know it yet.” It’s better when we know.
Being able to acknowledge and think critically about discomfort is a skill that the world doesn’t want you to learn.
No, this is not a conspiracy theory.
Discomfort is your body and mind’s way of telling you, “Hey! Something’s different! Something’s off! Something’s changing!” It’s a useful tool, evolutionarily. The primordial ape that responded to being cold by bundling up in a pile of leaves was more likely to survive than the one that did nothing. As a result, humans are generally quick to feel uncomfortable.
Sometimes, discomfort is a sign that something is truly wrong, and you need to get away from the source of the discomfort right away. Other times, discomfort is a sign that this is an opportunity for growth, for improvement, for making the world a better place.
However, we are not encouraged to think critically about discomfort and figure out which of these two circumstances it is. In fact, we are actively discouraged from doing this.
If you’re in a position of power, you are encouraged to think about any discomfort at all as the most terrible thing ever. This is why white people often behave as though being called racist is worse than actually being racist.
If you’re not in a position of power, then you’re not supposed to think about your discomfort as important at all. This is why people with chronic illness are so often told that they’re faking it or making a big deal out of nothing.
Being willing and able to think about our discomfort – to consider it instead of simply avoiding it – is not an easy thing to do, but it is a revolutionary act. Thinking critically about discomfort opens doors and is a vital skill for changing the world.
(I talked about this first on TikTok – watch it here!)
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how people live on inside of you, even if they aren’t a part of your life anymore. I joke a lot that everything I am, “I come by honestly” – when someone finds out that my dad’s an English professor, for example. Yes, we’re all individuals, but we’re also all combinations of the people who have been important to us. It shows up in our language and our behavior, and a lot of it never entirely goes away.
This can be a good thing. I love that I inherited my love of reading and writing from my dad, and my sense of politics and critical thinking from my mom. But it shows up in smaller ways than this, too. One of my best friends from college would say “I feel you,” meaning, “I relate to you,” or as the kids say these days, “big mood.” This phrase wasn’t a part of my vocabulary until I met her, but I picked it up from her. She and I now live in different parts of the nation and only speak rarely, but I still say “I feel you” or “I feel that” a lot.
But I’ve also been thinking about how my ex-boyfriend would drive one-handed. He liked to hold my hand while he drove, and I thought that this was sweet. I envied him for it, because I had learned to drive with two hands on the wheel and letting go was scary. So, I practiced, and I taught myself to drive one-handed so that I could hold his hand when I was the one driving.
He broke up with me almost two years ago, and I still catch myself driving one-handed.
We’re creatures of habit, for better and worse. It’s a good thing to be conscious of, because it takes real work to get rid of the people who became a part of our bodies.
(I talked about this first on TikTok - watch it here!)
Recently the prompt of the day on Daily Prompt was to write a poem focusing on the theme of mortality. This was not a complicated or unusual prompt; poets write about death all the time. But me being me, I overthought it and got a bit metatextual.
Here’s what I wrote:
Poets often talk of death And so reflect on life - What’s limited is loved, they say, And joy’s known thanks to strife
But when I think of death, I find It’s opposite for me My joy in life takes pause when I Recall mortality
I’m caught in spirals, lost in gloom While thinking of the end… Life has so many twists and turns To think about instead
You know someone’s a writer when they end up writing about writing. This poem could use a revision; I don’t like that final rhyme. But that’s beside the point.
Almost immediately, someone commented on the poem: “Life does have a lot of twists, but our time running out is what makes life… life.”
This may be stating the obvious, but that comment is the exact mindset I was addressing in the poem – the idea that death is what defines life. In the poem, and now in this blog post, I’m pushing back against that idea.
Death is a part of life, yes. It’s an integral part. You wouldn’t have life as we know it without death – cell death, decomposition, entropy. But I don’t agree that death is what defines life. It’s just one part of it. We could just as easily say that birth is what defines life. Or that breathing oxygen is what defines (human) life. Or that having fun, or being sad, or doing loads of laundry is what defines life. Life isn’t life just because it ends.
It’s very common to point to the fact that life ends and call that motivation. Clearly it works as motivation for some people, because we keep saying it. It’s the moral of a million movies. However, it doesn’t work for me. The idea of everything just stopping doesn’t motivate me; it bothers me. When I think about death, I get stuck, like I described in the poem. When I’m thinking about dying, I’m not really living.
One of the ways my anxiety manifests is with a constant feeling that I am running out of time. That I don’t have enough time, that I’m falling behind, that whatever I’m doing is a waste of time. This feeling makes me miserable. It paralyzes me, leaves me overwhelmed and unable to see the way forward. For whatever reason, this idea that is so inspirational to so many people – the idea that we don’t have enough time – doesn’t help me.
I’ve been putting a lot of work recently into teaching myself that I have time. That tomorrow is real. That if I don’t do everything right now, it’s not the end of the world. That I get to choose what to do today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. That I have time, and that and there are no wrong answers for how to spend the time I have. And that there are so many good things I can choose to fill my life with.
I think life is worth living because it is,not because someday it won’t be. Life itself motivates me. It’s what works for me.
Does death define life? Not my life, at least. Not for me. Life is when I’m living. I’ll figure out the death part when I get there.
With the recent releases of EncantoandTurning Red, I’m realizing that Disney (and Disney/Pixar) films seem to be moving into a “let’s explore intergenerational trauma” trend, and I am very much here for it. But I want to talk about an intriguing reaction I’ve noticed people having to both of these movies. It’s an intriguing kind of negative reaction, even from people who say they liked the movie overall.
Since the reaction is to the way these two movies end, I’m going to put the rest of this post under a Read More and a spoiler warning.
EncantoandTurning Red are both movies in which a young girl is put under a destructive amount of pressure by an elder female family member. For Mirabel Madrigal, the pressure comes from her abuela, Alma; for Meilin Lee, the pressure comes from her mother, Ming. Both Mirabel and Mei feel that they will never be good enough for their family, no matter how hard they try. And both Alma and Ming’s behavior is a response to their own trauma. Alma is still suffering from the loss of her home and her husband, and Ming not only suffered from the same expectations she puts on her daughter from her own mother, but she also has terrible memories of the day she lost control and injured her mother.
By the end of both movies, the girl and the matriarch come to an understanding. Mirabel and Mei learn why their respective family members are the way they are, and Alma and Ming apologize for the harm they’ve unintentionally caused to a child they love. Mirabel and Mei ultimately forgive Alma and Ming, and the movies portray both families as happy and loving in the end.
I keep seeing people react to these movies with an interesting kind of negativity. They don’t like that Mirabel and Mei forgive Alma and Ming. They see this as harmful – that these antagonistic matriarchs should not be portrayed as deserving of love or capable of growth and change.
There are lots of stories – lots of Disney and Disney/Pixar movies – in which villains are unforgivable and incapable of growth and change. And still, for these villains, there’s always a fandom. There’s always someone who will claim that a villain who never apologies or changes, a character whose film portrays as undeserving of love, is actually misunderstood. I won’t bother giving examples here, because I know you already have one in your head.
I see nothing wrong with being a fan of a villain (though I do think it’s a little silly when people try to pretend that their favorite villain did nothing wrong when their behavior in-story includes things like, you know, murder. If you’re gonna like a villain, own it!).
What I find interesting is that the kind of grace people give to antagonists with no redeemable qualities is not being given to these antagonists who apologized. I find it interesting that people see a character learning from their mistakes as harmful.
Is it harmful to say, “people can hurt you without meaning to?” Is it harmful to say, “sometimes people can learn from their mistakes?” Is it harmful to say, “the pain we feel can cause us to hurt the people we love, and that doesn’t make you an inherently bad person, but it does mean that you should be careful not to hurt other people and make amends when you do hurt them?”
I don’t think it’s harmful to say this. In fact, I think it’s more harmful to say the opposite.
If we only ever portray harmful behaviors as a thing that an irredeemable villain would do, we miss out on the vast majority of real-life harmful behaviors. We make it impossible to look at ourselves and our impact on other people with a critical eye. We encourage the belief that if you are a good person, then you must be incapable of causing harm, so anyone who comes to you and says, “You hurt me,” must be lying. We also encourage the belief that if you do anything wrong, ever, then you must be a terrible person, forever.
Yes, irredeemable villains exist in real life. Yes, there are abusive parents and grandparents who never learn or change and therefore do not deserve forgiveness. But there are also people who CAN learn and change. Both are true.
The stories we tell shape the way we’re able to think about and talk about the world. I find it very encouraging that we’re less and less likely these days to see an irredeemable villain in a Disney or Pixar movie. By encouraging empathy, by allowing us to relate to and live through someone fictional for a little while, the stories we tell really do shape our society, and I’m all for encouraging people to see the world as a place where people can improve, where we can acknowledge and fix the harm we’ve caused, and where love wins in the end.
I made a TikTok account mainly because of posts like this one - examples of random people taking a funny sound, usually made by an animal, and accompanying it with music. At first it’s one person, and then another person duets the video with a different instrument, and then another, and another, until suddenly it’s a whole klezmer band with vocals and everyone is having a grand old time, including me, watching the video.
Duet chains like this highlight how TikTok has managed to tap into one of my favorite things about humankind. Sure, it’s a social media platform - much like the one I’m writing on now - and it can be used for good or ill. But TikTok’s duet feature taps into the innate human desire to do things together, to have fun together, to make things together. And the things we make together are things that couldn’t have existed with the contribution of just one person. When it comes to TikTok chains, the more people who contribute, the better, the funnier, the more musical it gets.
We have this stereotype of the lonely artist alone in their studio, and perhaps some people function well in that kind of a setting. But there’s a reason I have the word “collaborator” on my business cards. I wholeheartedly believe that you cannot create the most joyful art alone. Humans like to create together. We’re good at it. We should do it more often.
I don’t talk much about my day job on this blog, but today, I’d like to talk about it. Since October, I’ve been on a temporary assignment with Disney Live Entertainment as a Show Writer. I started out working on a couple different projects, but then I was assigned to help with documentation for the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser immersive experience.
We had an event a couple weeks ago to celebrate the cast and crew of this experience, and the Disney company shared this picture to social media afterwards. You can see me if you zoom in on the far right, with my hands clasped in front of my goofy grin.
You know how when you’re networking or interviewing for jobs, people like to ask you, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I’ve struggled a lot with that question. I have a very clear image of who I am and what I love to do – I’m a writer, a creative writer, my passion is in storytelling. But I have a hard time taking that passion and smushing it down into a simple little, “In five years I will have X amount of published works and be working for Y company,” or something like that.
But in 2017, I was doing a heck of a lot of networking and interviewing, in the months leading up to that amazing day where I picked up the phone and the recruiter told me I was gonna be the next Disney Live Entertainment Show Writer Intern. People were asking me the “five years” question a LOT in 2017. So, I had to come up with an answer. Here’s what I would say:
“In five years, I see myself standing in a crowd. And the crowd is watching some kind of show – it might be a play, or a movie, or a theme park show, anything. Whatever it is, it’s something that I had a hand in writing. And I’m happy that the story has finally come to life, but I’m also listening to the crowd around me react. I’m thinking about their reactions – if they’re reacting the way we thought they would, or if there are unexpected reactions. And I’m already thinking ahead to how I can learn from those reactions to make the next story I write even better.”
Now, back to the above picture. I take confidentiality agreements really fricking seriously, so I don’t feel comfortable saying too much about this event in this blog post. Suffice to say that just off-camera, someone is standing on a stage and giving a speech. A speech that I wrote.
In this picture, you can see my smile, but you can’t see how badly I was shaking. I stood there in that crowd, right in the middle of everyone laughing, and cheering, and applauding long after the performer left the stage, and all I could do was smile, and tremble, and think that I had never been so proud of something I’d written before.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized why I was so verklempt – because in that moment – in this picture – I am exactly where, five years ago, I said I would be in five years.
And this might seem ironic, but… I am at a loss for words.
My hope for the future is that we will do away with “should.”
Should I kiss him tonight? When should I hold her hand? How many dates should we go on before we have sex? How much relationship experience should I have by the time I’m thirty? Shouldn’t I be married already? When should I tell them, “I love you,” or should I say it at all? Shouldn’t I be feeling something more, something special, something different? Shouldn’t I value this relationship more than any other?
There is no objective “should.” There’s no checklist, there’s no schedule, and there are no requirements. I hope we stop talking about our lives and relationships in terms of “should” and focus on what actually exists – what we want, and what we do.
I hope we put greater emphasis on getting to know ourselves and our needs, and on getting to know the people who matter to us and what they need. I hope we use that knowledge to make decisions that will make us and other people feel happy and safe.
The only “should” I want to keep is that we should be good to each other. Everything else is communication and self-reflection.
Here’s a Throwback Thursday Thoughts for Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week!
Recently I started writing in a journal every night before bed again. It’s something I tend to do for a few weeks and then fall out of the habit. Journaling helps me slow down my thoughts so I can fall asleep. I also like the thought of having a written record of what was happening in my life and what I thought and felt about it, because frankly, I don’t trust memory.
I’m saying this as someone who has an objectively good memory, especially for stories - I don’t trust memory. I trust it even less after getting a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. Memory isn’t a recording; it’s a re-telling. Memory is the story we tell ourselves about what must have happened to explain why we feel and behave the way we do now. I’m not saying that memory will always be incorrect; I’m saying it’s nigh-impossible for an individual human to separate the true parts of that story from the constructed ones.
I have a false memory of sitting in the back of my parents’ minivan. My mother is driving the car and my big sibling is in one of the other back seats. The car stereo is playing “Helpless” from the musical Hamilton,and both my mom and my sibling are singing along. I can hear them singing along to the “oooohs.” I can see them smiling as they sing.
I know that this never happened. There were many family road trips when I was growing up. Most of what we did on those road trips was sing along to musicals. But I was already in college the first time I heard Hamilton.There would never have been a family road trip where I was a little kid in the back of the minivan, listening to my family sing along with Elizabeth Schuyler.
To my brain, it would make sense for this to have happened. I feel like it happened. I can hear it. I can see it. It makes me happy to think about. But I objectively know it never happened. I’ve never heard my mom sing along to the Hamiltonsoundtrack, but my brain knows what it would sound like if she did.
This is a harmless false memory, but for me, it exists as a warning. What else might I feel so comfortable believing to have happened to me, but actually never happened? What else might another person confidently tell me happened to them, not knowing they’re mistaken? I look at the past with caution and a critical eye, and I am very wary of people who would try to keep written records of events out of our hands. What was written down - as many different written sources as we can find, written as closely to the events as possible - might be all we can really depend on for the truth.
I’ve had multiple reasons recently to think about how there are many kinds of oppression, and they’re all terrible, but people will claim that one is worse than the others – with the strong implication that the Worst Oppression is the only one we should talk about or try to fix.
One kind of oppression involves people immediately looking at you and hating you and seeing you as less than human.
Another kind of oppression involves knowing that anyone around you, any person who has treated you humanely so far, might one day reveal that they hate you and see you as less than human.
Both kinds of oppression cause harm. Both result in trauma and misery. Both have led to segregation, dehumanization, systemic persecution, and genocide.
I’ve had enough of people trying to tell me that one is worse than the other. They both need to be acknowledged, talked about, and stopped.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: claiming that someone else does not experience oppression is not useful. Claiming that one kind of oppression is uniquely terrible or uniquely ignored is not useful. The goal should be ending all oppression, together, forever.
