Indirect Control

Dear yous,

For the longest time I would struggle to play a song the whole way through.  I mean, I could do it, but it took so much ENERGY and so I was exhausted at the end.  There were so many things to manage: playing the right notes, singing on pitch, people looking at you.

Part of the thing is that I never really practiced songs the whole way through.  I took a more superstitious approach - if the environment was right, then I would naturally open up and could perform and feel great doing it.  I'd practice everything around the songs but never songs themselves.  I'd record songs, but rarely sing or record full takes.

I realized I feel the same way about intimacy.  I can only stand little bits and then I have to either escape or alter myself to feel better about it, because intimacy feels like death sometimes.

The thing about intimacy that feels important to me is the aspect of continuity.  Music is an intimate thing, watching someone perform, playing their heart out, or playing your heart out yourself.  It's like, can you trust that I'm going to influence the way you feel by projecting myself, literally, out into the room.  Can I trust that you'll accept me?

When I watch someone who is nervous and worried about hitting the wrong notes, I can feel that.  It's hard to build continuity.  When some is relaxed and just playing, the space fills with that energy. 

In interacting with others this weekend, I felt a sense of continuity on all levels.  Interactions felt continuous rather than discrete.  What I mean by that is my interactions with others usually feel tense and "incomplete" as if there's something more to do or say.   When I feel continuous like I did this weekend, my actions and interactions feel complete.    Each breath is a breath.  Each word is a word.  And I'm at a lever deeper than those things, connected to the environment and free to interact.

It's a process of opening and closing, preferably with intent, preferably with defenses appropriate to the situation, which may be none at all.  Lately, I've really been feeling this.  I've opened up but it's hard for me to maintain.  It's too bright.  I feel too powerful.   That feels burdensome.  If the environment notices me, I have to deal with it.

So, like learning to play a new song, you play it crappy for a while and mess up the words.  Play it 100 times and you don't have to think about it anymore.

I feel like that with intimacy at the moment.  I can kinda play the notes but I feel like a little scratchy violin student.  Open up, withdraw, open up.  I guess I don't need to be so extreme about it, but I still am realizing my power in this aspect.  I'm still acting out of the superstition.

If I can control the environment, then I will be OK.  I think that's a pretty universal way people handle things.

With love,
Casey

Acceptance

Dear yous,

I find writing to be a cleansing activity, but it's slow.  It's like Prozac.  It takes a few weeks for the plasma levels to build up and then suddenly there are words on a page and they connect and flow and things are good.  Side effects include emotional outlet, feelings of freedom, satisfaction.

This weekend I had a bang up time and am now feeling sad for the fact that it is over.  Sometimes particularly intense or intimate moments can leave me with with a hangover of sorts in which I feel the vacuum of mundane existence sucking me back down into wanting to be along again.  I don't now, it's not all bad. 

We had a gig this weekend and it felt great to play and then hang out afterwards.  And then get bunch in the morning.  I had long, drawn out moments of feeling myself, just OK to exist in spaces with other people, OK in my body, OK to talk or not.  Felt pretty fucking great. 

Plus, we went to an invite-only event at a person's house downtown last night.  The place was filled with artists and musicians and the types of people I resonate with.  I felt so at home there, just listening to the performances, watching occasionally, but mostly listening.  Feeling the space.  Being there, feeling the air on my face.  Feeling OK in my body and uncomfortable at the same time and feeling OK with that.  Being with my friends.  Feeling like there are communities of people I belong in.  It was beautiful.

Love,
Casey

Good Spaces Make Good Connections

Good morning, yous - and happy Thursday to ya.  It's a clear 52 degrees in the city of non-binary love and you're listening to Casey Kills Jobs on Radio 104.5.

Well, I'm broadcasting from the radio in my head, anyway....which at the moment is looping through a song I've been recording recently.  That's what happens, usually - record, record, record, looping starts, get burnt, recover.  I love it, actually.  But could stand to be a little healthier in the process.

At any given moment I'd say I usually have a song looping around in my head.  If I don't, it feels strange.  Music is my safety mechanism.  It's where I go when I don't feel safe, when I'm unsure.

I heard an interview with Josh Homme of Queens of The Stone Age and he was talking about an accident or something he had, a life event where the music in his head stopped.  And he was distraught about it.  I hear that cuz I've been there.

When the looping is just music, especially my own music, when I'm working on a song, singing vocals, doubling them up to give it that nice Elliot Smith vibe, then life is just grand.  I feel ALRIGHT up to here with smiles all around.  That is my place.

I feel safest singing into a microphone.  And on my own songs, the place my voice has, the space it occupies is a space that I create.  It's a beautiful place to be, and also sometimes a very lonely place to be.

On the topic of spaces, yous, I wanna talk about what space means to me.  Not outer space the final frontier.  Inner space.  Body space.  Room space.  Consciousness space.  Allowing others into this space.  Allowing yourself space.  Interacting with and in others' spaces.

When you walk into a room, any room, there is a field of possibility that exists.  If the room you walk into happens to be the red-curtained one in the original Twin Peaks, then there's some weird shit going down and the possibilities of what can occur - how the environment will respond and how you respond to the environment - are going to be confined to that weird little space.  The little bellhop will start talking backwards and then the show ends for 20 years.

Normally the spaces I walk into are not that weird, most of them are pretty mundane.  My apartment.  Stores, restaurants, friends' places, parks, gardens, sidewalks, roads, cars.  When am I not in a space or dealing with the issue of space, living in a city, living in society?

This issue of space is one I feel very deeply.  In my experience of the world I either have no space or have all the space.  I guess I like to be the center of attention.  I like the stage!!!  I want you to notice me but then I'm not really sure what to do after that, usually.  So I keep to myself.

The reason I feel this way is because I've had my space violated at a young age, my body space, my spiritual space.  My sense of self did not develop in a healthy way.  My sense of space is distorted.  I experience distortions of scale where people far away feel close and threatening.  Almost all energy can be threatening at various times.

When I speak of space here, I must recognize that there are two related, connected, yet distinct spaces: internal space and external space.  Well, and we can probably further distinguish between physical internal space (your organs and stuff) and mental internal space (thoughts, feelings, emotions).  I'm going to talk about the latter.

My internal space usually feels small or non-existent.  At some parts of my cycle it can feel as large as the earth at least, or larger than myself, who knows.  Sometimes I feel like a mountain, steady, sturdy, a rock indistinguishable and inseparable from its environment.  Sometimes I just feel like my normal self within the confines of this body.

How I feel of my own internal space determines both how I respond to the environment and how the environment responds to me.  When I say environment here I'm referring more to people, interactions with others', though I have experienced the environment proper respond in a larger sense, what you might call God and which I prefer to call Consciousness proper.

If my internal space is small, neither my body nor words can seem to find a space anywhere.  When my space is beyond myself, I perceive that others are threatened by me.  Or maybe I am threatened by everyone.  I feel super aware.  I feel like I could rip you to shreds psychologically on one hand, if I needed, and on the other hand I can feel the most overwhelming sense of compassion and love for everyone.

So if my space is small, I am threatened because the world appears larger to me, as if I was a kid.  I experience this in a real way sometimes.

If my space is large, I am threatened by others because I perceive, correctly or incorrectly, that others are threatened by my presence, that my expanded sense of self awareness makes others feel self conscious and so I feel self conscious and the whole mirroring thing starts.

When I had a psychological break several years back now, it was my awareness of mirroring and body language that really freaked me out.  I suddenly found myself in this massive moving, undulating, writhing, wave of human existence and I didn't really feel part of it, only observant.

It started when I noticed that sometimes while out drinking I would take a sip and others would do the same.  Or I would unconsciously take a sip as well, mirroring and reacting.

If I feel no sense of space for myself, though, then I can only observe reactions but have no sense that "I" am the one either being the mirrored or mirroring - in other words, there's motion but no one's doing the motion.  Emptiness.

For me, in those initial moments of waking up to this stuff, the void, emptiness was also filled with my swirling anxious thoughts about what was happening, always calculating what to say next, acting out of a set of rules.

Those rules were explicitly designed, or maybe it's more accurate to say that those rules explicitly developed as a means of emotional protection.  By ensuring I never really connected with anyone, by keeping my emotional distance, I could feel safe, I would *be* safe forever, so it seemed.  I could be myself.

Fast forward several years and here I sit, aware of my mental rules, slowly deconstructing them, slowly living a more authentic life.  I'm aware of the root causes of a lot of the self destructive patterns I have and so now am longing for a space to connect with others on this stuff.

I have fostered several safe spaces for myself.  Some of them are empty - like my office.  Some of them involve other people, like group therapy and a masculinity group focused on healing.  Some of the spaces exist as relationships with other people.  I value all of these spaces highly.

If I can be honest with you, yous, it's that I'm struggling a bit.  I have all of these great external spaces and a better sense of internal space now, that's great.  I feel like I'm making progress.  But there are all these suggestions of starting groups on my Facebook page, to connect and relate about healing from sexual trauma, and I'm not sure where I fit in.

Part of that unsureness is I'm realizing how the labels we use to classify sexuality and gender apply to me...or kindof.  I'm confused.  I feel like I know myself.  I know my authentic self.  The labels are merely descriptors, tools.

If I'd have to classify myself with these labels I would say with regard to gender I'm agender or genderfluid, meaning, first of all, that I see gender as a social construct, and second that my authentic self is non-gendered or my sense of gender can vary.  Meaning I feel feminine sometimes and masculine sometimes but most of the time I don't feel either of those two.
 
With regard to sexuality, I would identify as demi-pan-sexual.  This means that I only really feel sexual attraction to people I already have an emotional connection with and the gender of that person doesn't matter to me.  There's also a distinction made between sexual attraction and romantic attraction and those can differ for some.  For me, they're mostly the same.

So, yous, all of this is new to me.  The labels, I don't care about so much.  I take them as helpful descriptors to help me find others who have similar experiences, to help me find safe spaces.

Part of the thing I've been struggling with recently is where I feel safe opening up about my sexual trauma with others.  Not in a "here's my trauma" kind of way but in a connected, grounded, healing, supportive kind of way.

It's like this: I probably feel safest in female-oriented spaces but can sometimes feel unsure, at least initially, of whether I belong or whether my presence will be threatening, as male presenting.  I feel safe in the masculinity group, but unsure about really opening up about my trauma.  The truth is neither a space focused on masculine energies nor feminine energies feels completely OK for me.  It always feels like one half of the waveform is missing.

So, I guess, let this be a prayer.  I believe in the power of offering up wants and desires to the general Internet because I see it as a conscious thing, ultimately comprised of humans consciousness, so:

Dear Consciousness,

Please help me be productive and healthy and connected to others.  Help me live from a place of compassion for myself and all beings.  Please take all these mental details and anxieties from me so that I may live a healthy, productive life.  And please help me find a space where I feel I can truly open up again, in the larger world.

Love,
Casey

I see you glowing...are you toxic?

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

Do I Trust You?

Dear yous,

Fuck off.

I'm sorry, that came off a little harsh.  What I meant to say is that I probably don't trust you all that much, by default, if we haven't met before and interacted...for at least a few months.  Maybe a few years.

Intimacy is slow for me.  And "Fuck off" is kind of my default mode.  By default, you are not to be trusted until I know you're not gonna hurt me.  That you will respect my feelings and boundaries.  This world does not respect boundaries by default, and so I have to try extra hard to make sure mine stay intact.

If you violate my boundaries, I probably will stay away from you.  I probably won't say anything.  In my mind, I'd really like to scream "Fuck off" in your face, but that never really happens.  The best I can seem to do is to scream anything at the top of my lungs, mostly when I'm alone...or maybe walking down the street, because it's OK to scream on the street here.  I like that a lot.

All this fuck offery, obviously, of course, is not becoming in terms of establishing relationships.  That's my problem, yous, is that I'd really like to get to know some of you on a deeper level, but my fuck offery won't allow it.  I put up a huge barrier up front and if you stick around long enough you'll see past it.  Or another way to put it is if I can trust you to deal with my fuck offery long enough, we can become deeper friends.  Whatever.

What I'm really trying to say, yous, is that I feel just as defeated and depressed as I have been - I can't seem to shake the thing despite little moments here or there.  I am alone most of the time and when that happens it just takes too much energy to reach out.  To make an effort to connect.  So here I will be until something external comes along to change it or until I change it myself.  Who knows.

Part of me isn't worried.  I've been here before.  I will find a new gig for money, and that will hopefully be good for a while.  I'm getting married.  That's good.  Lots of good stuff in my life.  But, of course, the external stuff doesn't so much matter when the internal stuff is shitty.

If you've read this far, yous, then we might just be friends.  You put up with my front long enough to see that I'm really feeling vulnerable, unsure of how to deal with these feelings.  If nothing else, I reached out this way for the day.

Time to give myself a fucking star.

Peace,
Casey

Because Jesus Said Some of You Suck

Dear yous,

I went to Outfest yesterday and it was cool.  Probably the most surprising thing I saw were the Jesus people rattling off calm, God-backed words of damnation.

I mean, I guess I'm not surprised that they were there.  It would be almost weird if they weren't.  But I honestly don't get their whole jawn.

That's not true.  I get it.  I understand the reasoning.  I understand the belief structure.  I grew up with that.  The thing that really gets me is that it's just so *invasive.*

If you asked the Jesus people why they were there, they'd probably say they're looking out for our own good by preaching the good word.  When your belief structure makes it OK to go into other people's spaces and let them know that they are not OK as they are, that's motherfucking invasive.

Of course, Jesus people have the legal right to be there like everyone else in a public space like that.  They'd probably argue that queer people are an invasion of their space.

But man, we're all humans, yous.  We all gotta deal with the fact of being human and all the day-to-day things that must occur in order for life to continue.

And you know what, yous, in the spirit of the whole thing, I'll just come out and say it: I'm bisexual.  I'm genderfluid.  Non-binary.

And you know what? WHO THE FUCK CARES?  Why do some people care so much what I do with my body, huh?  If you care enough to let me know unsolicited, then you're invading my space.

The more troubling thing to me is the culture of abuse we live in, that normalizes invasion of other people's spaces, that silences abuse victims and silences the oppressed, a culture that's heavily divided, that doesn't see itself as same.

THAT's gonna fuck me up way more than what I do sexually with this machinery that god gave me.  According to your rules, Jesus people, what your god gave me is shameful, and must be hidden, and must be attacked.  Where's the logic in that??

If you really want me to be healthy, Jesus people, healthy and happy, then you'd be better served with signs that said "Eat Healthy" and "Exercise Regularly" and "Love your neighbor as yourself." ...you know, as Jesus said.

Love,
Casey

The Structure of Freedom

Dear yous,

This is my writing from yesterday.  I'm only doing it to get a sticker, see.

I have a daily habit going, a writing habit, and I give myself a sticker, a smiley face or a star, each day I write.  Imagine the days of the week, all 7 of em, laid out as a circle.  Each day is a circle and each day I write I get a sticker in the circle for the day.  At the end of the week, if I got 7 stickers, then I get a big sticker in the middle and maybe a reward (still figuring that part out).

I - or I should say we - my partner and I have a few of these going now.  One for playing a song every morning.  One for meditation.  One for yoga.  One for gratitude.

So far it seems to be working.  Have 5 consistent weeks of playing a song every morning and 4 weeks for the others.  Now I look forward to these things when I wake up.  It's some sort of structure.

I guess that's one thing I've learned: lack of structure <> (does not equal) freedom.  Living with no structure is hard and freedom is a mental thing.  And too much structure <> safety.

The problem I had was that I had all this structure but no idea why it was there or why I was living in it.  So I gave up the structure....and now starting to build my own.  Structure, in terms of day-to-day life, really boils down to habits and thoughts.  Mine have developed into some pretty unhealthy jawns and so now the work is to reprogram myself.

So even though, technically, I didn't write during the day of yesterday, I'm writing now.  And so that counts.  And I'll give myself a star for today, because that counts as well.  And, yous, give yourself a star today just for being fucking alive and making it this far.  Cuz sometimes that's hard, you know.

Love,
Casey