General Discussion

[Emily]

Discord continues to make terrible decisions I guess :c

But forums forums forums! This is the natural state of people, posting on forums 

[Aav]

update! i am back in. they decided i was a bot and temporarily banned me!

[Catherine]

I didn't realize Discord was having problems. Hope it gets resolved soon.

Have you heard any good birdsongs lately?

Not recently, but outside my last flat there was a bird that loved mimicking like sirens, alarms, that sort of thing. It was a great little bird.

[Natalie]

I had a lot of time to read in my hotel room this week, so I've almost finished Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks. It's a really interesting one. The author grew up in this extremely rural southern town, and when she came out as a lesbian on a trip home from college, she was cast out of her church and harassed by peers and family members, but her grandmother decides to share a hometown story with her: "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man." Years after this revelation, Parks, now a west coast journalist, begins a decade-long project to sleuth out the life story and fate of the man.

Subtitled "A Memoir and a Mystery," there are a number of layers to the book. There's the emerging story of Roy, of course, the mid-20th century trans man, and there's the journalistic journey Parks undertakes to get those answers, but because of the duration of the investigation she's able to be very retrospective and probing about her own actions and intents - the areas where she fell short as an investigator in the early years of the process, her failure to fully understand her motives, etc. The story of Roy intertwines with the story of finding out about him intertwines with the story of Parks' own life and growth during the same period, and that means getting into the history of her closest family members and the strained and traumatic relationship she has with her mother, who's herself a truly tragic figure. The overlapping threads make for a really interesting arc.

One of the persistent themes throughout the book (at least as far as I've gotten in it) is the way people know and identify and relate to Roy in different ways - with different pronouns, differing ideas about who he was and what he was and what drove him. That theme doubles back on the author as well. Parks talks quite a bit about her struggle to connect with people during the earlier years of her life and this project, and the lines she drew between different parts of herself and her life which made the problem worse. She couldn't recognize or admit that the project was on some level a personal endeavor for her, and she wouldn't tell her friends about how she grew up or what it meant to her or how deeply her mother's actions affected her.

I've been thinking a lot about my own tendencies to put up those sorts of barriers, to not really share anything with people. And I can say it's out of concern of doxxing myself or because there's just no need to get into this or that, but the truth is that I tend to wall things off because I've done a lot of things in my life that I'm not proud of, and I judge myself for those things plenty, and I resent and fear the idea of people I care about judging me in that same way even as I know, rationally, that it probably wouldn't happen, that there would be some understanding.

I feel like I need to learn to be less cagey with people so I'm not just left alone with my thoughts.

[Catherine]

That sounds like a really good book, Nat. I'm gonna add it to my list!

I saw something lately that was basically like, if you regret things you did when you were younger then that just shows growth. There's a lot of stuff I did as a teenager and even into my twenties that is completely outside of my moral compass now, and stuff that I see done to those I care about and that hurts them. All I can do is challenge myself to grow and to provide better spaces than I made back then.

It can still be really difficult to talk about them though. I understand that fear of people seeing you in a different light and judging you. Take it as you're able of course, but if you ever want to talk I will listen and I will still think you're really cool. <3