Dear yous,
It's been a little while and that's alright, cuz I've been living life. Playing music. Recording music. Eating. Working. Sleeping. Hanging out with friends, all that life stuff. Some of it's been pretty fun and amazing.
I have to tell you, though, and this is my reason for writing you today, yous - I'm a little heartbroken, feeling some of these feelings around all this stuff going on with "me too" and sexual abuse / assault in the news and on Facebook. This may be a CW but I talk mostly high-level about it below.
OK, let's start with the positive. On the upside, I think it's amazing that this is being discussed publicly at the level that it seems to be. People are coming forward with their stories and there is light being shed on the issue.
In some ways, I feel like I should feel good about this, because now this issue that I've had no words for suddenly has a lot of words around me, but of course, we're dealing with the topic of sexual abuse, and so no aspect of that is really easy or fun to deal with, in my experience. Well, that's not true. There is another, more positive side to it, the healing side, and that's the side I'm aiming for here.
There have been reactionary posts I've read where there is a "we men" kind of mentality. That stirs a reaction in me. It feels dangerous.
And to be clear, I'm not talking #notallmen here, I'm taking about comments like "we men need to shape up" and "what are we going to do with this toxic masculinity that we have?"
Again, here, I feel like I should feel good because there are words pointing to real things and real problems, but for me this doesn't go deep enough and, at the end of the day, it's the fact that these two example sentences encapsulate the very thing they are trying to expunge, that gets me.
It's the idea that there is something to be done and that this necessity of doing is inherent to being a man. Furthermore, the doing in this case is to rid the self of the toxic nature of....itself. In other words, if I identify as a man, which I have personally for a while, then I feel this overwhelming sense of having to "do something" about myself and my feelings, mostly the sexual ones. My self as a man is eternally struggling in manhood to either be a real man or to rid myself of the toxic things that go into being a man. That's a real shaky place to be and so that place we call fragile. Weak. And so the cycle continues.
Now, the thing is, I don't really identify as a man. I reject that, consciously. To me, that is not fundamental. I am consciousness. I am whole. I am complete. I am right now. I just fucking am.
And so are you.
And so we all are.
And there are different "we's." Some of the we's are not compatible with each other. But this is not fundamental.
"We men" is really not compatible with "we women." "We women" is a grouping, I feel, of survival, of necessity. If out in the world you experience constant bombardment of eyes and slurs and hands then to group with others who have this experience makes sense. It's protection.
If in the world you experience the ability to sit at a bar and talk to your buddies about the serious 10 at the corner, then "we men" in this case is a grouping that ensures you continue to have that ability.
The thing is "we men" are on the power side of the social dynamic even if we don't want to be or choose to be or even if we feel powerless most of the time, as I do. The whole point of this side of the power dynamic is to keep this power dynamic going. And power dynamics are built with language. And, shout out to evolution and nature and all that stuff upon which this is built, don't want to deny our animal nature here, but we're not at that level, any longer, you know?
I present socially most of the time as a white male and so when I walk into a room, that's what most people will see and that's the assumption most people will act from. The power is given me by others simply by how I look, how I was born. I am not comfortable with that. In others' experience of the world, their power is taken simply because of how they look, how they were born. I am not comfortable with that either.
This is what it all boils down to yous, that burnt, calcified deposit on the bottom of the tea pot you left boiling too long, too many times: it's power. Boogie woogie woogie.
Power, power! What the fuck is this thing we call power!? I don't know, yous, I'm feeling a little exhausted at the moment talking about all this stuff.
Really, what I want to share, if I can be vulnerable with you for a minute, is that I don't know where I fit into this whole thing. I am not "we men" and I am not "we women." I am "we non-binary" maybe, but I don't know what that means entirely, yet. I feel like I've tried to be "a man" and have failed, only succeeding in abusing myself for my failure, mostly with socially acceptable substances an in socially acceptable ways.
And I'm not "me too" either, in the most recent Facebook sense, tho that feels closer to the truth. I'm not "me too" because this particular social campaign is focused on women having the chance to speak up about their experience, and I have not experienced life in this way.
But I am a me too in the sense that I was abused as a kid, I have sexual trauma in my past. The diagnosis is Complex PTSD. I like that because I feel complex af. And also anxious most of the time. So there's a grouping I'll take.
So here's the fundamental question I'll leave with: how does one effectively use language to heal the traumas the language itself, and thought patterns built upon it, are perpetuating?
With love,
Casey
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