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In my defense, I did actually draft a whole post about my history with blogging, but then I thought Dreamwidth deleted it, and when it turned out the post had in fact autosaved, I reread it and it was ramble-y and I didn't feel like editing it. And then I didn't know what to write about, I kept finding more urgent things to do, you know how it goes.
Something I have been meaning to do, though, is tackle some of the journaling prompts from Devon Price's book Unlearning Shame. Price is a Chicago-based sociologist who's Autistic and trans. I first found him through his Tumblr blog and liked his writing, and then realized he has a whole ass PhD and multiple books! What I really liked about Unlearning Shame is that Price takes an evidence-based approach grounded in both psychology and sociology to see what kinds of messaging can actually be proven to help people on an individual and collective scale. Basically, the book is all about how being mean to yourself and others doesn't actually work to change behavior and outcomes--it's just Puritan brain that tells us that's how we should be.
It's honestly wild how everyone in this culture has religious trauma by extension of just living downstream of Puritans and Victorians. My cocktail of religious trauma includes a shot of Catholicism, a mixer of evangelicalism, and a garnish of Eastern Orthodoxy--but that's a story for another time. The throughline is: fucked-up ideas of self-worth, laziness, work, and pleasure. A few months ago, I nicknamed the shamey part of my brain "Brother Aedelbert." (I'd just read Name of the Rose ok) The idea was that whenever religious trauma brain tells me I should be suffering or feeling guilty, I can just say, "Shut the fuck up, Brother Aedelbert." My roommates and I even invented lore for Brother Aedelbert. He is a peasant who became a monk, learned to write, and devotes himself to the scriptorium day and night in the hopes that he will one day be the abbot. But alas, the nobleman's son is going to get that post no matter what. Also, Aedelbert and the nobleman's son are in love and have homoerotic rivalry about it.
Anyway, Unlearning Shame is basically just a bunch of better, more grounded strategies for saying Shut The Fuck Up Brother Aedelbert.
Here's some questions from the section titled "Symbolic Sacrifice Exercise."
Try to think of the ways that you might use other people as symbols of larger problems. Is there anyone whose actions always annoy or infuriate you because they remind you of bigger issues happening in your life? ...List some of the individuals that come to mind, and some of the behaviors they engage in that frustrate you.
Price writes: "Once I take a minute to 'zoom out'... I can see that what's needed is a lot more complicated than punishing a single person who gets on my nerves." And zooming out "forces me to put my focus back on the systems that have failed us, not the people whom I've decided are failures."
Writing about these people doesn't erase the deep harm and grief Antonio caused me, or the way Kyle contributed to a hostile work environment. I do not feel any more inclined to forgive them, despite what Brother Aedelbert has to say on the matter! But I also don't want to punish them. I kind of just...want to not think about them at all. Now that I've written about those emotions, I do feel more empowered to actually make choices in my life and put my focus on larger systemic issues, like Price suggests.
Ironically, this framework reminds me a lot of Brothers Karamazov--but we don't have time to unpack that right now. I'm too sleepy. Maybe there's not just a Brother Aedelbert inside me but also a Brother Anastasios.
Maybe tomorrow I'll do the "Symbolic Consumption Exercise"--that looks fun!!
Something I have been meaning to do, though, is tackle some of the journaling prompts from Devon Price's book Unlearning Shame. Price is a Chicago-based sociologist who's Autistic and trans. I first found him through his Tumblr blog and liked his writing, and then realized he has a whole ass PhD and multiple books! What I really liked about Unlearning Shame is that Price takes an evidence-based approach grounded in both psychology and sociology to see what kinds of messaging can actually be proven to help people on an individual and collective scale. Basically, the book is all about how being mean to yourself and others doesn't actually work to change behavior and outcomes--it's just Puritan brain that tells us that's how we should be.
It's honestly wild how everyone in this culture has religious trauma by extension of just living downstream of Puritans and Victorians. My cocktail of religious trauma includes a shot of Catholicism, a mixer of evangelicalism, and a garnish of Eastern Orthodoxy--but that's a story for another time. The throughline is: fucked-up ideas of self-worth, laziness, work, and pleasure. A few months ago, I nicknamed the shamey part of my brain "Brother Aedelbert." (I'd just read Name of the Rose ok) The idea was that whenever religious trauma brain tells me I should be suffering or feeling guilty, I can just say, "Shut the fuck up, Brother Aedelbert." My roommates and I even invented lore for Brother Aedelbert. He is a peasant who became a monk, learned to write, and devotes himself to the scriptorium day and night in the hopes that he will one day be the abbot. But alas, the nobleman's son is going to get that post no matter what. Also, Aedelbert and the nobleman's son are in love and have homoerotic rivalry about it.
Anyway, Unlearning Shame is basically just a bunch of better, more grounded strategies for saying Shut The Fuck Up Brother Aedelbert.
Here's some questions from the section titled "Symbolic Sacrifice Exercise."
Try to think of the ways that you might use other people as symbols of larger problems. Is there anyone whose actions always annoy or infuriate you because they remind you of bigger issues happening in your life? ...List some of the individuals that come to mind, and some of the behaviors they engage in that frustrate you.
- My dad: Immediately the first person that comes up, of course. He is a deeply religious man who was raised Catholic in Central America; converted to become Baptist at age 12; survived and escaped civil wars thanks to Baptist communities; went to Baptist colleges in the States for undergrad and grad school; married a woman he met at Bible study; and now works as a chaplain at one of those universities. He is well-educated, and his opinions don't fall along party lines. He is pro-immigration, believes in climate change and vaccines, but also vehemently against abortion and gay marriage. He voted for Trump twice, probably three times. A few years after his first wife (my mom) died, he uprooted my twin and me from the church that had raised us + cared for our mom because that church had dared to host dialogues about whether they should marry gay people post-Obergefell. We church-hopped. He married an Orthodox Christian convert. My twin and I almost converted to Orthodoxy. Then we apostasized and came out as gay as our dad returned to the Catholic church, where he is now a music minister. What frustrates me is how my dad can understand systemic issues like how border policies kill people, and engage in activism and humanitarian aid to fight those policies and help those people, and still not care about human rights at all when it comes to gay people. He's got plenty of phobias aside from that--he's made anti-Black and fatphobic comments all the time, and takes a weird approach to gender despite not being much of a macho. I hate that he hates gay people so much that he went back to Catholicism, despite not even liking it all that much, when he could have joined a more liberal Christian denomination. I am furious about the medical neglect I experienced living under his roof. I despise the authoritarian, adult supremacist way he parented and parentified my brother and me. I no longer speak to him over the horrible things he said when my brother came out as trans. I don't call him Papi anymore. I refer to him by his first name. Let's say it's Antonio.
- Former coworker: Let's call him Kyle. Kyle is a thirty-something white guy (apparently a little Mexican in there?) who worked at my former workplace, an elementary school. We both tutored reading. He was there because his mom worked there, and medical/housing emergencies in his family had drained his savings--he was going to retire early off of crypto. To be fair, he was very polite to me and super sweet to his students. But also, he loved cops and dressed for Halloween in a bulletproof vest with a real baton. He wanted to be a security guard. He told our other coworker he would vote for Trump because "he didn't know Kamala's policies." When I told a coworker I liked her skeleton-patterned pants around Halloween, he said he agreed but you never know what you can say anymore Because Of Woke. As in, he either pretended not to know, or sincerely didn't know, the difference between sexual harassment and telling someone you like a pattern. He also repeated blatant misinformation about the Central and South American migrants arriving to our city. He has tattoos about his Swedish ancestry that feel a very short step away from you know what.
- Antonio: Well obviously, we share DNA and a last name. We share the experience of being in the same multicultural, multiracial family. We are both Latine. We are both artistic and somewhat gender nonconforming. We are both extremely stubborn, probably because of the Autism that we both almost certainly share. We both have depression, anxiety, and some variety of PTSD and probably AuDHD. We both went through religious changes in our lives. We both had a difficult upbringing, even though his was objectively worse. We both lost the same person--my mom, his wife--and were never the same afterwards. We both felt out-of-place in our majority white community. We both went to Christian-affiliated colleges. We both have impossibly lofty ideals. Oh, and we've both been in love with members of our own sex--that's a wild one.
- Kyle: We both worked the same low-wage job. We were both low-income. We are both--apparently?--ethnically ambiguous. He says people often think he's Puerto Rican, but I never thought he was anything but white. Lol. We both care about our families and our students. We had some of the same students.
- Antonio: Antonio has had an impossibly traumatic life. The one thing that ever brought him any sense of stability was his religious practices and communities. He has a very black-and-white view of the world, one that happens to put him very near the top of the hierarchies he lives in as a Latino cis man--but it's precarious, it's conditional. He grew up in one of the most homophobic and transphobic societies and lived his adult life in one equally bad, and he was almost certainly punished for being on the sensitive, emotional, even effeminate side. Any hint of queerness in himself is terrifying because that would make him lose everything he's gained. He'd be a refugee all over again, essentially. And he was raised to see a child, especially a daughter, as an extension of himself--so for me and my brother, who were raised as girls, to now be queer and apostate must feel like he himself is also in danger.
- Kyle: Again, he's precariously perched at the top of the hierarchy. He has had a taste of what the rich have, and now he's back in low-wage work. He's not getting what he was promised, and he probably does not feel very privileged, because he's not, so he sees things talking about male privilege and white privilege as things that don't make sense probably.
- Antonio: Absolutely. I always could tell he was seen as weird and other--too exuberant, too Latino, too info-dumpy, too socially awkward while also being sociable, and not even ashamed of it. As I learned to mask, I battled to try to teach him to mask as well. Because just like he thought he had to take care of me, I thought I had to take care of him--I had to pad over his "weirdness" so we were acceptable to the "normal" folks who formed our community and safety net. I'm also terrified of repeating the same adult-supremacist ideas in my own teaching instead of breaking the cycle. Also, maybe I come across as just as self-righteous and hypocritical as he is.
- Kyle: I'm afraid people will judge me by the external factors of my life--poor, under- or unemployed--rather than my real talents. Or that I'll come across as having the same level of white entitlement and cluelessness. Or even that I don't come across as Latine enough.
Price writes: "Once I take a minute to 'zoom out'... I can see that what's needed is a lot more complicated than punishing a single person who gets on my nerves." And zooming out "forces me to put my focus back on the systems that have failed us, not the people whom I've decided are failures."
Writing about these people doesn't erase the deep harm and grief Antonio caused me, or the way Kyle contributed to a hostile work environment. I do not feel any more inclined to forgive them, despite what Brother Aedelbert has to say on the matter! But I also don't want to punish them. I kind of just...want to not think about them at all. Now that I've written about those emotions, I do feel more empowered to actually make choices in my life and put my focus on larger systemic issues, like Price suggests.
Ironically, this framework reminds me a lot of Brothers Karamazov--but we don't have time to unpack that right now. I'm too sleepy. Maybe there's not just a Brother Aedelbert inside me but also a Brother Anastasios.
Maybe tomorrow I'll do the "Symbolic Consumption Exercise"--that looks fun!!
