Sometimes, I just want to give up. Well, lots of times. It’s much less of an impulse now and not nearly as strong, but it’s still there. My brain is tired. I am tired of always trying to be “normal” or anyithing remotely close to it. Here is my post from yesterday in which I talked about struggling to differentiate between my brain being broken and it working as intended (but just differently than other people’s).
I could just say fuck it and go to bed at six or seven. There’s no real reason I can’t do that–it’s not like I usually have to get up at a specific time. Well, one day a week and two other days every other week I have a set time to get up, but that’s not a big problem. Only one is in the morning and would be a real problem.
I want to be…not normal, per se, but not such a weirdo. I’ve written about this before. I’m not one of those who is slightly odd or just one deviation from normal. I’m a freak. However, not in the way that, say, artists are freaks. I don’t drink or do drugs, so that makes me an outlier for that group of people as well.
In fact, I don’t do groups in general because I will never fit in. That part doesn’t bother me because I’m used to it and I’ve given up the hope that I will find a group that is my people. Not because I don’t think there aren’t people who are my people out there–it’s because groups tend to fall to the lowest common denomination.
Hm. That’s not quite what I wanted to say, either. It’s really hard to explain without making it sound like sour grapes. I’ll try my best. When a group of over, say, ten people (actually, maybe even over five) gather, there has to be a code of conduct, whether it’s verbalized or not. Maybe not so much a code of conduct, but any group needs norms.
The problem is the more people a group has, the less the ability and/or desire to monitor behaviors. And, because groups are microcasms of the world around them, that means that all the things that are wrong in the world at large will always be present in a group.
This is why there needs to be explicit rules and miscreants need to be dealt with swiftly. Conventions learned this the very hard way. Many of the comic/gaming ones are, well, were filled with misogynist bullisht. And racist bullshit. The groups who put on the cons tried to ignore the problem for a long time, but it reached a tipping point, and it exploded messily all over everything.
I don’t know how the tipping point happened, but afterwards, many cons started having posted code of conducts and got more serious about making their minority con attenders feel safer. It’s become a standard, and now it’s weirder not to have a code of conduct than it is to have one.
The bonds that tie a group together are also the water that dissolves the bonds. Or something. What I mean is that reverting to the mean is both a positive and a negative of a group. Yes, it’s good to rally around common bonds, but it can also be a restraint.
I’m someone who takes the path of least resistance as often as I can. Why make it hard if it doesn’t need to be? I1m also conflict-avoidant for the same reason. That means that I’m not going to bring up anything that makes me unhappy in a group until I can’t ignore it any longer. But, even then, chances are I will just walk rather than bring up the issue.
I know this isn’t a good thing. It is one of my flaws that I wish to change. And, to be fair to me, I’m better at it now than I was decades ago. Taiji has helped me with this as it has with everything else, but it wasn’t a magic tonic that could cure everything wrong with me. It made life so much better, yes, but it didn’t make all my problems disappear.
Back to groups. I have belong to several over the years, I have never felt like I fit for several reasons. One, most of the groups werce started because of one issue. Such as racism against Asian or sexism in American culture. I got quickly frustrated because I can’t separate being Asian with (then) being a woman. Or being queer.
It’s all connected, and so many people want to treat each as if it’s a discrete trait. That happened to me so many timese in college. It was frustrating, and I gave up trying pretty quickly. This was before intersectionality was recognized at all , but even that did not help. Why? Because I happened to be all the things that were ignored. Bisexual, Asian, areligious, etc. Being a woman was recognized, but not when I wanted to talk about being an Asian bisexual woman.
When I was in the Asian group, they didn’t want to talk about women’s issues. When I was in a feminist group, they did not want to acknowledge racism. And, again, when intersectionality became better known, Asians were ignored. We are the invisible minority (along with Native Americans), and I’m resigned to it.
I’m pretty much resigned to being the overlooked minority in each category, and it doesn’t help that I chose yet another label (agender) that no one knows even exists. And that I have to explain what it means. Which is hard to do because I don’t even know what it means, exactlty. I just know that I really wish I never had to talk about gender again. I also would be really happy if I didn’t have to think about it, either. But given that my government is attacking me and mine, that’s not that possible.
Or rather, it is possible, but I feel like I want to protect my kin. I’m torn, though, because it’s not like my lack of gender actually affects me on the daily. The lack of a gender isn’t anything to focus on. It’s like being areligious–I rarely think about my lack of faith. But in general, gender is much more prevalent in day-to-day life than is religion. It’s easier to ignore religion if you want (although not so much the outreach of said religion).
Well, I went off the railsyet again. I’ll try to get back to the topicin tomorrow’s post–or not. We’ll see how I feel.