What They Dont Tell You About Prolonged Periods Of Introspection And Careful Observation Is The Harm

What they don’t tell you about prolonged periods of introspection and careful observation is the harm that can come from being totally alone in that process, with no one to remind you that feeling, learning, watching, and healing are communal. When lonesome thought is fetishized, you feel obligated to suffer in silence, to see all struggles as individual rather than collective. You tell yourself that maybe you’re just growing apart from things you thought you knew, that you’re not doing healing right, and this must mean you’re just inadequate. And at some point, you obsess over this cultivated lifestyle of being quiet, small, and invisible as a means of personal protection that you feel forgotten about and in the end, you have no one but yourself to blame.

Sometimes I wish I could speak and write like I used to. But the more I see and interpret, the less I speak because I become increasingly aware of my own mental boundaries as well as the structural limitations I didn’t want to know existed. And the less I speak, the more I simply think myself into non-existence – or at least, what feels the closest to thinking but not really living.

What does it mean to be seen without desiring all of the accompanying narcissism that attaches itself to forms of recognition? I’ve been thinking and re-thinking the politics of recognition for almost exactly half of a year. Recognition is something so paradoxical to me, and thinking about it is bound to drive you to a point in your mental health where any mention of soap-bathing, bubble-blowing “self-care” rituals make you want to disappear a little more with each passing day. I wonder what it does to a person to ponder alienation in alienation for this long, in addition to all of the recognition rituals that compensate for it. My heart hurts just trying to wrap my mind around that.

I grabbed coffee with a friend I admire so much yesterday, and I asked her if she was feeling this way, too. She said something I knew to be true, but so desperately needed to hear and be reassured by: “Everyone is feeling this way. This feeling is political, not just personal. It permeates daily life and it’s only getting worse and worse.” And I can feel it all the way from Egypt to the United States, the two places I keep escaping for each other only to find myself retreating again for the other. The current global crisis in capital that is building up is wreaking havoc on so many of us in the most insidious ways imaginable. But even attempting to communicate this is difficult and frightening because alienation is so often strategically pathologized, misdiagnosed as “depression”, and written off as individual suffering. And so, we all suffer in silence.

“no homo” I whisper as I look at my garden of pea plants. The progeny had expressed a 1:2:1 ratio of phenotypes. I am Gregor Mendel. 

hello stands for “hell of a day to say nice things about meadow”

I know adverbs are Controversial, but “said softly” means something different than “whispered” and this is the hill I will die on.

Controlling us via our bodies is a core component of misogyny. The depersonalization of women’s bodies and deconstruction of us into parts, into sundered physical components we don’t personally own yet must tend to as communal property, is traumatic and intended to be. The body of a woman, in irreducible actuality as such, is never extraneous to womanhood, to misogyny, to gender as a construct; all are entwined.

To declare womanhood, meaning women’s lived experience, somehow a distinct, independent metaphysical essence unconnected to our material selves is as malicious as it is nonsensical. Yet, as women, by assignment or by recognition, our lived-in selves—our own bodies—are already so estranged we’ll accept such a ludicrous declaration when presented as some principled if esoteric means to overcome its own paradox.

Treating our embodied selves as meaningless and uninvolved impedimenta of no relevance to Actual Womanhood can seem ideal, almost, when misrepresented as recourse instead of what it is: more control wielded over us, more denial of womanhood as a complex and diversiform material experience.

To declare misogyny via material association, via bodily deconstruction, a nonentity is a strange loop of a misogynistic ouroboros. The societal discomfort caused by reclamations of women’s physical selves as our own private territory is so immense we’re afraid to say its name. The simplest acknowledgments of women’s selves as material and as material which inherently belongs to us, as women, as people, are derided and labelled suspect by any means convenient.

That bodily alienation can serve liberation or inclusivity or any good end is a lie; it serves only control. Warping it to appear distinct from more plainly status quo edicts on women-as-body-parts and body-parts-as-women is universally pernicious—except to cis men. The cis male embodiment alone is unimplicated, unimpinged upon. That speaks volumes (and by “speaks volumes” I mean screams misogyny).