on being gwyneth

c* used to insist that i was particularly intolerable in the day or so immediately following my shot. right now i can believe it. i’m having one of those “i probably hate you and i don’t even know you” days.

i have always resented the idea that the process of “socialization” amounts to “getting used to the fact that the world is full of stupid, vicious assholes.”

many months ago, someone i once considered a friend compared me to a comparatively well-known psycho in the online trans-sphere. being a thoroughgoing narcissist herself, it never occurred to her to actually bother to explore what she thought she saw in me, what might be going on in my own heart and life that could give rise to whatever led toward her own characterization of me.

i took that as a kind of license.

i consciously gave myself over to a lifelong tendency toward dissociation and fracturing, distilling those parts of my persona that others find variously abrasive, cryptic, thoughtful, etc. into distinct partitions. i compartmentalized and focused all that anger or intellect or whatever that people think they see when they focus on a single facet. “wholeness” seeming a lost cause for me, i gave free rein to an internal chaos that organizes itself by seeping out through differently-shaped apertures in my personality.

i’ve never been a multiple personality, but it did reach a point (which has not really receded), where the effect was of leaving my selves messages in lipstick on a mirror.

but the core shut down. the real me, the gwyneth behind cigfran, became more and more self-editing. behind all those defensive – and offensive – postures, i hid the sadness and fear that have been slowly taking over my life.

i can’t do that anymore. i can’t pretend to be stoic. i’m depressed and terrified… some days suicidal but most days just grey and mortal. i’ll spare the litany of specific woe for now – most of which is repetitious, mundane and all too common – but nothing feels right, now. i feel like i’m riding the wave of a lifetime of mistakes, a sloshing crest of my own bad karma catching me and bearing down on the miserable shore of a pointless death.

i can’t suppress this anymore, or i’ll suffocate. this is who i’ve become over the past few years, and if i’m ever to maintain a shred of the dignity of honest self-expression, this is what i need to expose. this is my dark, and it has a voice.

When all is lost, spite will get you through the hard times. If not, at least you’ll have the satisfaction of inconveniencing your antagonists with your last breath.
—ectoplasmosis

a friend of mine once declared that if you’re crossing the street and a quick glance reveals a looming car taking high-speed aim at you, the thing to do is lay out sideways in midair as it strikes, making damn sure that they’ll have a hell of a time picking pieces of you out of their ruined grille.

the erinyes. the eumenides. the furies. i would like to think sometimes that the one who rides me is Tisiphone the avenger, but i rather suspect that she’s Megaera, the demon of envy and anger.
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were i less risk averse (what a pretty way to say “coward”), i would be making preparations to move us out of here, and probably across the country, now.

alison is about to complete her final necessary certification exam. unemployed for a year and a half, with only a paltry prior history, she is effectively a blank slate. there would be no meaningful difference in introducing her to the job market here, or just about anywhere else with similar market conditions. but wherever we are, is where we are committed to for at least a few more years, as she works to establish her track record, which is the requisite for any of our long-term goals.

but i’m not ready. i have too much debt, particularly the large part tied up in the loan i took to get us to thailand… a loan which i cannot possibly transfer or pay off, should i leave this job.

and so i remain, as i have for nearly forty years, knowing that i’ll be in my early fifties before i ever see a place i’ll be able to call home again.

and let the snow of another winter fall on me, fixing me more firmly in the ice.

one of the more biting yawps on the (friend’s vanity project) CD i just finished producing is written from the perspective of a transwoman who has just been accused of wielding male privilege. its essential message is, “you know what… i lived a shitty life being abused as a fag and struggling to be something no-one was humane enough to even acknowledge, and now i’ve got to put up with your paranoid bullshit, too. that’s my male privilege.” i’d always known the song was written in response to an actual person and her attitudes, and the author just recently sent me a link to this person’s artist bio in a woman’s music catalog. the majority of the bio is taken up with a question/answer format, addressing such burning questions as “isn’t she a man hater?” and so on. the promo pic in the fragment my friend sent me showed an almost canonical middle-aged, sharp-eyed lesbian woman, strongly signifying on all fronts. after viewing the online bio, i sent my friend this comment:

you know, i am thoroughly sick and tired of self-serving dykes who pretend to call for the overthrow of normative categories, only to embrace them for themselves (when was the last time you couldn’t read one of these people from a mile away?) and to place trannies in an impossible double bind.

i am also way, way past giving a shit what any of these assholes think of me.

check out her actual page on [the site]. almost the whole thing is a defensive screed, justifying what is apparently an infamously shitty public attitude.

what a creep.

who gives a crap.

i am not a symbol or an agent of jackfuckall. i am not the patriarchy or the matriarchy and you know, sometimes i weep real tears because it gets just little lonely out here without the strong peer group that even modern sexual minorities now take for granted. and sometimes i regret that my own attitudes push me further and further away from the simple answers with which i tried to enter this process years ago (hey dammit, i’m a woman!), but the more i catch even a whiff of this kind of shit from any corner of various smugly-policed subcultures, the more i say “fuck you” and turn my back on it all, even at the expense of my own certainty and ease.

i really just can’t stand it anymore.
political news and commentary is as addictive as p*rn, especially when you feel invested in it to any degree.
but it’s also emotionally – and even intellectually – debilitating to someone like me, particularly at this moment when i’ve got so much that’s so important to me, balanced on the blade.
i’ve become even more bitter and fatalistic than is usual for me, and i’m not the person anymore who can feed on the fear and loathing, and turn it into personal rocketfuel.
so for the next several weeks, perhaps even into early next year, i’m turning off my political bloglinks, and will limit my access to current events, to whatever i pick up on the headlines in the evening.
this will give me some breathing room to finish up, or even further pursue if necessary, some thinking and commentary on “the gender shit”, and then to move on to something – anything – i’d much rather have filling my head right now…
epistemology. digital signal theory. icelandic sagas. edo…
anything to clear this black, burning sea of crap out of my head.

truly, the only thing more pathetic than an empty, craven loser with no values, feelings or opinions beyond whatever effrontery they affect because confrontation gets attention, or because being spiteful is somehow cool, or simply to indulge their little pyromaniac urges…

is the idiot who enables them.