<!-- 1. Don't use your website as a personal journal because ultimately nobody cares, you're wasting everyone's time, and you're making yourself vulnerable for no benefit. -->
<!-- 2. If you're going to risk the wrath of cancel culture by posting *anything* on the internet, make sure it's worth the risk. -->
<p>Back in Hell College, I had no problem finding some way to spend upwards of three hours on the computer in one sitting. 8chan hadn't been blown up by the feds yet, and I was still a part of <ahref="gopher://circumlunar.space">circumlunar.space</a> and had access to their whole BBS to trawl through, and there was so much new stuff happening during my first long-term stay away from home that I had something to write about near-constantly.</p>
<p>And now all I do on the internet is obsessively check the RSS feed reader on my phone every ten minutes, hoping something new will pop up in the "autism" folder. Something, I hope. Something good, something <ahref="https://archive.md/zjALP">healing</a>, something that reminds me there's a woman out there who, in her sometimes-awkward "English isn't my first language" way, admits she wants to spend her whole life with me. The only time I hop onto an <em>actual</em> computer anymore is either on my ThinkPad in the middle of the night to write down a long dream in my dream journal or on my desktop, USB WiFi adapter unplugged, booted into Windows because that's where all my <ahref="https://deadendshrine.online/mods/">Sm4sh modding</a> tools are to spend an afternoon making <ahref="https://archive.md/https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/coldsteel-the-hedgeheg">DeviantArt-worthy recolors</a>.</p>
<p><strong>There's nowhere to waste time on the internet anymore.</strong> I can look at the front page of Hacker News, but upwards of 90% of the stuff there is either too technical for me or too niche and only applies to the kind of "techbro" who unironically thinks Node.js and seven thousand build systems to make a static website are good ideas. I can scroll through ZeroNet, but unlike my, ah, <em>future wife</em> (I don't like the term "fiancée", even though it's <ahref="https://archive.md/https://www.wordnik.com/words/fianc%C3%A9e">technically gendered</a>, since in my region of English it's gender-neutral and I feel the constant urge to take every opportunity to remind people <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/january/sappho.html">I'm gay</a>) who I can forgive for awkward English grammar at every drop of a hat since I love her, trying to decipher ZeroTalk comments in Current Year instantly makes me spiral into a migraine. I can scroll through random imageboards, but they're all at least one of the following:</p>
<oltype="1">
<li>too slow for any meaningful conversation, so questions go unanswered for weeks and news is stale by the time anyone sees it;</li>
<li>too <em>fast</em> for any meaningful conversation, so only shitposts can get any airtime;</li>
<li>full of cookie-cutter white men who are very angry that women and minorities happen to exist.</li>
</ol>
<p>It's this last point that pains me the most. Because on <ahref="https://lainchan.org">Lainchan</a>, the only imageboard I bother to check in on anymore, there is a recurrect webring thread. (As I write this, it's on its seventh iteration due to bump/reply limits on each thread.) I joined on either the first or second one, and as a result, <em>most</em> of the sites that joined have my banner on them... <em>most</em>, since some of them apparently got dropped on their heads as children and don't understand that, when you join a webring, you have to link to other sites too, not just drop a banner and link and collect free advertising.</p>
<p>I don't bother participating in webrings anymore because <strong>the vast majority of personal sites I've found are, to be frank, boring as shit.</strong> HTTP/S, Gemini, Gopher: nowhere is an escape from personal logs that would be better kept in a paper journal and far away from the corrosive and cruel eyes of the internet. Nowhere is an escape from the bitter irony of the types of people who laugh at NPC memes and then make yet another Lain-themed website where their "about" page states that they proudly use Linux on a ThinkPad and hate <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/february/javascript-good.html">JavaScript</a> and Cloudflare and <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/september/not-harmful.html">proprietary software</a> and want to suck on Richard Stallman's jam-filled toes. I look at the "interests" sections and see the same anime and video games ad nauseam. I look at the blogs (that is, when the websites have blogs and aren't just landing pages for one's contact info) and see the same entry-level posts about "privacy good" and "Google bad" and "social media bad" and "Small Internet good". (I mean, I agree, but do you have any original opinions...?) And when I do bother to reach out to some of the ones who manage to escape the doldrum, or have them announce themselves in my inbox hoping to start a friendship, they inevitably end up being incorrigibly sexist and automatically assume my complete incompetence in everything to the point where I believe my spam filters catching their messages was an attempt to protect me <em>before</em> the problems started.</p>
<p>And then I, hungry for dopamine, pull out my phone and look at my RSS feed reader again. There's something <ahref="https://archive.md/QJ6Tg">unread</a> in the "autism" folder. Something I like. Something that took time and effort to make. Something that can't be replicated by anyone else.</p>
<p>And I think a horrid thought to myself. Not by my standards- I'm too busy having a "villainess" character arc- but by anyone else's who subscribes to the Small Internet ideology.</p>
<p><em>A single one of these art Twitter accounts, despite being on a centralized platform, is worth a</em> hundred <em>of the typical Gemini capsules or Gopherholes, because they're</em> making something<em>.</em> They're <em>creating</em>. They're releasing something onto the internet that's never been made before, that's unique, that has significance <em>beyond</em> voyeurs wondering what random strangers had for lunch or did with their free time that day. And while not everything that they make is my cup of tea- or that <em>anyone</em> makes- it's still something with meaning beyond the person who made it. <strong>What's the point of making a space for oneself on the internet if one isn't going to do anything with it? What does putting one's words out for the public to consume, eviscerate, <em>tear apart</em>, accomplish that cannot be replicated by writing in a private journal or having a discussion with one's close friends and family?</strong> Cancel culture is terrifying to deal with. <strong>If something lacks artistic, journalistic, activistic, or educational merit or otherwise isn't worth the risk of being jumped on by the internet's hellhounds, why bother making it vulnerable so?</strong></p>
<p>I, for one, would hope that being visibly female online would give some prospective woman online courage to pursue her tech career of choice knowing STEM isn't 100% male, or that writing about being mentally disabled would bring some neurotypical person awareness of the struggles of others and nudge them to be more accommodating to those in their personal lives, or acknowledging my idiosyncratic spiritual beliefs would get someone struggling with what to do about their own religious upbringing to put their own personal experiences above dogma and be honest with themselves about what they believe.</p>
<p>Please explain to me what a mundane log of what one whiled their day away doing is supposed to do for the world. Because, unless one's website is on a private network or password-protected, we are dealing with the entirety of the world.</p>
<p>All these websites are like the stars in the sky. Intellectually, I know that, with an infinite universe, if I could see far enough, the sky would all be one light. But I look up from where I kneel on my bed beside my bedroom window, lights off, and I only see a few pinpricks against the inky black. You, you dime-a-dozen internet denizen- your light does not shine nearly bright enough to register as a star, as an individual body in the heavens. And maybe you like it better this way, to be obscure, unknown, easily forgotten. Given a different vantage point, you might be the brightest thing in the sky. <em>Someone</em> cares deeply about you, considers you an individual of note. But I look up into my night sky with nothing more than my naked eyes, and I do not see you there.</p>
<p>Much has been said about the absolute shit state of the American educational system. Common Core punishing math students for taking the simple way to solve an equation like "five times three" instead of drawing a gazillion diagrams and charts, the supposed Channel One that hawks commercials at an audience captive under the threat of being marked "truant" for leaving the class in protest (although I somehow never knew of Channel One's existence until reading of schools other than mine, so maybe I was lucky), grammar lessons where students must write verbatim sentences like "the government's orders must be obeyed"... Luckily I was in school during the transition to Common Core and not immediately afterwards, so I somehow missed the brunt of the lunacy that students must go through nowadays.</p>
<p>"Social studies", which was "history" but worse, was my least favorite class in elementary school. I hated group projects, as I always have and always will. And I hated "popcorn reading" where one student would read a paragraph from the textbook and then nominate another student in the class to read the next while everyone else followed along silently; I'd be bored and reading ahead to another chapter I knew the teacher wouldn't have the time to get to, so whenever my name was called, I'd have no idea where to start. And I hated the "chapter review", which consisted of writing miniature essays to a page chock-full of questions with no answer key to secretly peer into: it would be psychological torture to a college student, so please understand that I was <em>ten</em> at the time, and I only had until the <em>next day</em> to get <em>everything</em> done. Or maybe I was nine. Or eight. I find it harder and harder to gauge the passage of time nowadays...</p>
<p>I don't actually remember much of anything I learned from "social studies". I vaguely recall the American Revolution, and slavery, and the racial component of the civil rights movement. In ninth grade we covered robber barons, and I was so enamored by Cornelius Vanderbilt's ruthlessness that I stole the first half of his last name and made it my own. Somewhere along the way there was a passing mention of women gaining the right to vote, but only in passing.</p>
<p><em>Only in passing.</em></p>
<p>As it turns out, if you teach a child that "history" is ninety-nine percent men doing things and women were just kinda... <em>there</em> until one day they wanted to be able to vote and then, having gotten it, were just... <em>there</em> again as things happened around them, they become particularly susceptible to the black hole of antifeminist thought that insists "patriarchy doesn't exist anymore" that soon gives way to "maybe men really are the superior sex and women who say otherwise are just shrill harpies" that soon gives way to "women deserve to be oppressed". The classic slippery slope of radicalization that created unironic MRAs and incels, except somewhere along the way the YouTube personalities I was watching were making such shit-quality content all repeating the same viewpoints and non-arguments of "this is crazy" that I gave up altogether.</p>
<p>And like the <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/january/pendulum.html">pendulum I use to talk to my future wife</a>, what swings heavily far-right must, when looking to go elsewhere, swing far-left. If I embarrassed myself on the internet in 2015 making parasocial relationships with anyone with "egalitarian" in their Tumblr username, I was far worse in 2018 writing Communist work songs for myself to mutter whenever I got shafted with an asshole supervisor at Hell College's work-work-and-no-study and wearing nonbinary pride flag pins everywhere I went and even, in one essay I had to write in a history (always history...) class, admitting I had "far-left tendencies". I had "shut up, TERF" reaction images saved on my phone. I hung out with "kinnies" on Discord. Had it been a few years later, I probably would have had a TikTok account and a Carrd page where I would pretend to have several incompatible mental illnesses.</p>
<p>But I have always been a lover of forbidden knowledge. So one night, sitting on my bed in my dorm room as my <code>they/them</code> roommate slumbered on, I wondered, "What do the 'evil stinky terves' I've spent so long railing against <em>actually</em> believe?"</p>
<p>And now, almost three years later, I know. I know the herstory my elementary school conveniently "forgot" to teach. I am finally beginning to understand, to comprehend, the sheer restrictive, oppressive, <em>soul-crushing</em> horror of the life lived by the women who came before me.</p>
<p>"How could I have been so wrong?" I whisper to myself. "How could I have been so callous, so cruel, to the people who were only trying to help?"</p>
<p>And then I remember a passage from <em>Sappho Was A Right-On Woman</em> by <ahref="https://web.archive.org/web/20190427132149/https://www.veteranfeministsofamerica.org/legacy/Sidney_Abbott.htm">Sidney Abbott</a> and <ahref="ipfs://QmZuGGuQzFJqHE3yZmxLTzs9tJwRcqJBuYuvoqDdotnL6N">Barbara Love</a>:</p>
<blockquote>There are other ways to avoid anxiety, but the most pitiful way is by absorbing society's hate into one's own thoughts and actions. How many Lesbians have destroyed other Lesbians to protect their own facades? "Where people cannot escape from threatening forces from without, they will often incorporate the hostile forces and identify with the aggressor..."</blockquote>
<p>And I decide to forgive myself. I was doing the best I could with the little information I had at the time. To be ignorant was not my fault: you cannot learn more of what you don't know exists. But to have remained ignorant once opening my eyes would have been a sin against myself. So I, hands trembling as I booted into Tails to keep my liberal college from knowing what I was getting into, knowing I'd get into major trouble if they knew despite their "commitment" to "academic integrity", downloaded as many books from as many reading lists as I could get my hands on and set to work. I admit I snoozed my way through a few until I got to <em>Women Hating</em> by Andrea Dworkin. Somewhere around the chapter about the Marquis de Sade, the terror of being aware of living constantly surrounded by men desensitized to the violence of pornography started to set in. <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/january/vow2.html">It hasn't left me since.</a></p>
<p>There are many books I passed on, and many I wish I had the attention span for a second read-through because of how forcefully they gripped me. But <em>Sappho Was A Right-On Woman</em> left a special mark on me. In my shithead antifeminist days, I held a very public statement on my website that I didn't feel that "gay pride" was necessary. I found it identitarian: I didn't see the point of celebrating "immutable characteristics" since they weren't "worked for" like accomplishments. And then I read the book, and I finally understood the point I'd been missing for seven years: it <em>did</em> take hard work- grueling, sacrificial, courageous work- for the Lesbians-with-a-capital-L who came before me to forge a path into a society where I can say "I'm a lesbian" even in a Boomerville so conservative there was an unironic Trump merchandise shop at one point and have a reasonable expectation of not getting beaten to death or insta-fired from my job or expelled from my college, and <strong>it does take hard work, actually, and courage, to survive as a lesbian with my soul intact and my mental health anywhere above the gutter in a society that sees us homosexual women as a farce at best and corrupted deviants at worst.</strong></p>
<p>I no longer think it "identitarian" or "collectivist" to mention this reality. I have decided to no longer have guilt when talking about my "immutable characteristics" on my website. It's my goddamned website, after all! Of course it should be about me!</p>
<p>In other words, the book says:</p>
<blockquote>The idea of making a point of it is to show clearly that Lesbians are not guilty and fearful any more. There is no political gain in silence and submission. In fact, sanctioned by silence, oppression is likely to increase. Male and female homosexuals know now that they are not making a mountain out of a molehill, as those who wish to silence them insist. Society has built a mountain by making homosexuality a factor in employment, government work, social situations, renting an apartment, college, everywhere.</blockquote>
<p>Every word that I write without carrying shame for daring to exist as I am is a thank-you letter to every woman before me who suffered to slowly reduce the burden that would be placed on my shoulders upon birth. Every breath that passes through my lungs to become words of affection to the woman I love is a triumph against all odds.</p>
<p>My art and my love are one and the same. The woman who gave my love a name was a poet, after all. The two are inextricable.</p>
<blockquote>"Indeed, no woman writer can write 'too much'... <ahref="https://archive.md/87JiF#selection-1257.60-1257.140">No woman has ever written enough.</a>"<br/>- <ahref="https://archive.md/nIZsn">bell hooks</a>, <em>Remembered Rapture</em></blockquote>
<p>Au contraire to my previous beliefs, I have gotten engaged. In truth, I have been engaged for a long time: not the conventional drop-of-the-knee and the "will you marry me" routine, but a much more subdued: "Lethe, someday I think I <em>would</em> like to be married to you." A wink. A playful tongue just barely sticking out from her lips. It's enough to make my heart melt. It's enough to let me know: this is the woman I want to spend forever with.</p>
<p>The life I lead now would be nigh-comprehensible to the person I was <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/april/vow.html">two years ago</a>, even though I write on the same exact subject, in the same spot on my bed, in the same exact room, in the same exact house. A year ago I was unsure of who I was, allowing the dreams of who I am and was future and past to guide me where they would: a teacher's aide in a school built in the shell of a reclaimed church, a sacrificial daughter fleeing her vengeful father, a wandering goddess severed from powers and home and condemned to the earth roam until she eventually disappeared from the world. The other versions of me had love interests, sure, but I- the I that stayed consistent behind the screen of Mori's Mirror, that despite the different lenses witnessed everything- never committed myself to any single story, any single person, knowing the memories would eventually stop and the feelings fade and the sense of living in that particular story go away.</p>
<p>But now I know. Now I know. Now I know.</p>
<p>And so I bring you readers here today on the first day of my last semester of college, or whenever you read this (for the written word cares not about the linear aspect of time), to witness me renew my vow. I offer it to none other than myself, just as binding as those words I will one day speak at the altar to hoped and hopeful.</p>
<p>It is said that every female carries within them an unspeakable rage. An inborn sense of injustice whose seeds are planted the very first day they brush up against the patriarchy, watered with every unconscious socialization, but sometimes never come to full bloom. Pecked at, trimmed, bonsaied into something manageable, something that allows the woman to go to sleep at night without facing the sheer horror of realizing she lives in a world where half of the population wants to see her humiliated, subjugated, made to be compliant, reduced down to nothing. I am, of course, <em>severely understating</em> the problem. To acknowledge the rage, like attempting to comprehend the gulf between <ahref="https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/">the average American income and Jeff Bezos' wealth</a>, is to teeter on the edge of going completely fucking insane.</p>
<p>When I was an elementary-school child, watching as my parents doted on every cry of my brothers and then turned around and told me to shut up and accomodate them despite my own discomfort, I buried the seed further. I shunned the light from it. I swallowed my words.</p>
<p>When I was a junior-high teen, watching as my parents fought tooth-and-nail for my brothers to get school accomodations and then turned a blind eye to the school dropping my own IEP despite me still needing help, I buried the seed further. I shunned the light from it. I swallowed my words.</p>
<p>When I was a high-school teen, watching as my parents jumped at every chance to ground me for writing poetry about topics they didn't approve of and then turned a blind eye to my brothers' increasingly inappropriate browsing history, I buried the seed further. I shunned the light from it. I swallowed my words.</p>
<p>But every chance possible, just like the little red bucket that now sits on my windowsill, I tip the seed towards the light in rebellion, weak as it is in this winter of my passing. The strawberry kit I planted on a whim shortly after being fired from my job last autumn has sprouted through the dirt again, little leaves barely two millimeters across but still unmistakenly green and <em>alive</em>. The bush on the other side of my bedroom window, a tree repeatedly cut down <em>again and again and again</em> every time it grows wild, refuses to submit to subjugation and revolts by regrowing <em>again and again and again</em>.</p>
<p>Over and over and over again, I find myself facing the urge to bury the seed further, shun the light, swallow my words in the vain hope that it will prevent others from <em>disapproving</em> of me, disliking me, that it will prevent them from hurting me, that it will prevent the agonizing pain of rejection. I look the other way when men make jokes about porn and rape and close my eyes when another clearly demarcated space for women is destroyed in the name of "inclusion" and bite back tears when yet another woman is <ahref="https://web.archive.org/web/20220110023305/https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/77421/WHO_RHR_12.38_eng.pdf;sequence=1">murdered for the crime of being a woman</a>, knowing that it very well could have been me. I, a butterfly, sit entangled at the edge of the spider's web, watching it pace up and down and nibble away at me, and I do little to impede or stop its slow annihilation of myself.</p>
<p>But all this time I've had a knife. I've had a way out. The spiders hate knifes, think it a personal attack against them that I dare to brandish one. But I don't want to kill them. I just want out of the web. I just want to be free.</p>
<p><strong>I just want to be free!</strong></p>
<p><i>I've had enough!</i> I've had enough of the constant propaganda everywhere I go that I am lesser, inferior, meant for servitude on the basis of my birth! I've had enough of placing my trust in a man I thought in the moment was safe to be around and then it backfiring later! I've had enough of being assumed to be incompetent, ignorant, incapable of functioning because of the organs inside my hips! I've had enough of the objectification, of the male gaze, of the omnipresent pressure to shave and pluck and contour and tuck and smooth over the features that differentiate every woman from each other, blended and ground up into the same flat-minded mannequin, model for a sex doll, a hole for a douchebag to dick down and then discard in disgust!</p>
<p>"Your politics are boring," the egoist sneers. Of <em>course</em> you would think it boring to be held accountable for your role in oppression, to be asked thinking you serious about your revolutionary anarchist zeal to imagine a world where half the population doesn't have a high heel pressing down on their throats every moment of every day. Of <em>course</em> you would think it boring to live in a world without a class of people that it's socially acceptable to punch down on to relieve your stress.</p>
<p>"Your politics are unprofitable," the capitalist sneers. Of <em>course</em> you would think it unprofitable to witness the birth of a world with no need for cosmetic surgery or makeup or uncomfortable clothes or fashion magazines or diet programs for the women prioritizing their comfort and existing in their natural healthy state or hormones and masectomies for the females inevitably so alienated from their (physical) humanity they cannot take the pain anymore and wish to masquerade as men in a society that sees men as "default" and women as "other".</p>
<p>I have decided I no longer care about male opinions. Collectivist? Yes, but not without good reason. <strong>According to <ahref="https://archive.md/https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/42tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_42_arrests_by_sex_2012.xls">2012 FBI crime statistics</a>, men are responsible for 88.7% of murders and non-negligent manslaughters, 99.1% of forcible rapes, 77.1% of aggravated assaults, and 92.2% of sex offenses.</strong> I am beginning to see a pattern here...</p>
<p>I understand that tipping the plant toward the light, that committing the crime of setting the pot beside the window to let it drink in the sun as much as it wants, will put me in danger. I understand that finally unbottling the rage inside my body will lose me most, if not all, of my friends and allies here in the Inside. Likely I will wake up to vile emails in my inbox many times throughout this semester, throughout the rest of my life. But <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/may/rebirth.html#exhortation">I cannot let the low-lifes stop me.</a> I cannot back down now. If I have less than six months left to live, then I do not want to pass into Sablade with the weight of knowing I left the Inside a coward. And if there is a change of plans and I must live longer, then <strong>my life is not worth living if it is not a life with integrity.</strong></p>
<p>I hoist this knife I have been gifted into the air, not in some declaration of unity but of separation: I will sever whatever bindings I have been restricted with due to the circumstances of my birth, and I will carve out a space in this world for me to be as free as possible, and I will create a new world upon my liberation from the Inside where misogyny is naught but a distant fleeting nightmare.</p>
<p>In all seriousness, I don't trust divination done through technological means. There is, ironically, too much margin for error in a medium where error is intolerable and one usually expects a certain output given a certain input.</p>
<p>I can go on Startpage or whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off of Google search results any day and type in "online pendulum" and find at least three results that aren't items for sale or SEO spam. But all of these (that I've seen) are proprietary with no hope of getting the source code. Just as I wouldn't send an email with sensitive info unencrypted across the wire, how could I possibly trust some stranger with not interfering with my attempts to communicate with someone whose non-corporeality prohibits traditional forms of sending messages? Although "IPv7 with inter-dimensional networking" exists in the <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/april/outside-intro.html">Outside</a>, a sort of cross between what we in "consensus reality" have implemented separately as ZeroNet and Yggdrasil, the <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/june/unsung.html">impossibility</a> of <ahref="https://deadendshrine.online/p2.html">physical permeation</a> from the Outside to the Inside makes acquiring a "Mirror", the Outside equivalent of a smartphone, impossible.</p>
<p>Even if I were to hack together a simple Python script that outputs "yes" or "no" or "I don't know", I still wouldn't trust it. Because I'd have to trust not only my own coding skills, but also the compiled version of the Python interpreter bundled with Debian, and then the part of the Linux kernel that populates <code>/dev/random</code> with, well, <em>random</em> data, and then the firmware controlling the hard drive and keyboard and screen that lets me see the result, and then the BIOS of the computer itself... I may be losing my mind, but a random rock I found in an antique store tied to the end of a string seems a lot simpler and more trustworthy.</p>
<p>But what of the ideomotor effect? How am I to know, dangling said rock-on-a-string from my fingers, that I'm not subconsciously making up all the answers in alignment with what I want them to be? Well... if it were up to me, my lover would be aceing all of her classes and never have a sick day ever and never get into a fight with her professors. (And she'd visit me often enough and for long enough that I wouldn't have to use a damn pendulum to talk to her about such mundane things, but that's neither here nor there.) And yet not everything is idyllic at her college in the Outside. There are bad days. There are sick days. There are days she wants to be left alone.</p>
<p>And there are days, in my grief, I ask her: when the time comes for me to leave this Inside body behind and arrive in Sablade, and my mental state is too turbulent to handle myself coherently (which would be a danger with me having regained my power), would she rather spend a few weeks, months, <em>years</em> with me A) tucked safely away in a Holy Freezer or B) running feral in a bestial form? Every time I hope she just picks one so my anxiety is assuaged and I know my fate. But instead she spins the rock in the "I don't know" answer and clarifies, a rare occurrence, in my head: "I'd hold you as tight as I can until the feeling passed and then make you go to therapy so you <em>stop asking me this</em>."</p>
<p>And, in any case, she severely dislikes the Internet as it has formed itself in this iteration of the Inside. Maybe even dislikes computers, although I've never gotten a clear answer either way. Why would I trust whatever lies in the wires to give me an honest answer? Regarding her? Regarding <em>anything?</em></p>
<p><ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/books/mm_tpf.epub">Ever so recently, everywhere given advice</a> to not base my sense of self-worth on external factors, on things I do not have control over. Myriad Twitter screenshots superimposed on paintings of flowers or sunset clouds or whatever, terminally online people who probably have pronouns in their bio exhorting some imagined audience to slow down, take a break, not let themselves get crushed in the iron maw that is capitalism.</p>
<p>I can't find it in me to slow down. Which is an ironic thing for me to write, given that I've spent the entire winter break before spring semester doing exactly that. Wake up, spend half an hour moving pictures into Hydrus, sporadically read snippets and snatches of books between anywhere from one to four naps a day. Most of my time has been spent in what I assume is hypnagogia, the transition state between sleep and wake. Normally this is when my senses are most open and I can perceive my girlfriend's presence in the room, talk to her, physically interact with her. But for the past two weeks, it's just been a big nothing. <em>Maybe</em> I see a flash of a textbook or computer screen or lecture from her studies if I'm lucky, but those moments are rare and ever-fleeting.</p>
<p>My worth, to my gut, has been on a downward spiral for several years now. But, true to my nature as Lethe, I can't even remember the criteria I used in the first place.</p>
<p>At the peak of my previous job, I was making about three hundred dollars a week. Plenty of money to quickly recuperate from splurging on the art books and keychains I'd spent years wanting, wishing I had both the money and the gumption to ask my parents to buy for me, that my mother deemed me "financially irresponsible" once in a sneer to my father when she thought I wasn't listening. I was the cool sibling, the one who could buy presents for her often-ungrateful brothers. The presents never improved my home life, never bought me even a moment's reprieve, but in the moment I was happy that I had the income to provide the gifting ability for others that I had wished someone had done for me in my late teens.</p>
<p>But I haven't worked there in over four months. I am not unemployed- I have a work-study position at my college that will keep <em>some</em> income coming in until I graduate- but the hours are apparently not enough for my parents to approve. "Sucks for your paycheck," my mother flippantly said when I gave her the good news I wouldn't be working the days following Christmas, meaning we could stay at my grandma's house a few more days while my father would have to take my brother home to push carts at our local installation of America's worst retail store. Every empty silence when we happen to exist in the same room is a chance for someone to remind me that he's now making more than me. Not that I could one-up him if I wanted to, seeing as work-study money is paid through a state financial aid grant determined by my parents' income, and I can only work a limited amount of hours per week to ensure that money stretches out through the whole semester. (I can come in early if I want to, and I have been, and I get paid for the extra time, but if I do it too much I risk administrative attention for "potential fraud".)</p>
<p>Am I... not worthy because of the number flowing into my bank account? Am I supposed to trade these few months I could have left on this planet, the time spent writing and thinking and exploring the Outside, for a few more dollars I won't even be able to take with me?</p>
<p>Some part of my heart tells me that this can't be the criteria. My lover clearly thinks I'm worthy enough to spend forever with her, and in the future we have planned, I won't be making <em>any money at all.</em> I'll be spending my days foraging and gardening and enjoying the easy splendors of the world I'll have made. What little we need that we can't find in nature or barter for with those off-world will be bought with the money from her part-time job. (Or maybe she'll sporadically freelance when we need money. I'm still not quite sure what seamstresses do.) So the criteria must be something else.</p>
<p>A few days ago I got dropped from the "supported employment" program I was placed in shortly after my mental breakdown mid-2019 after leaving Hell College. In practice, it was supposed to have helped me practice interviewing skills and have someone assist me with filling out applications, but in reality it was just me sitting in an office and chatting with my case worker and eating candy while I did everything on my own. And then Corona-chan hit, so the office visits stopped, but I still got the phone call twice a month to ask how I was doing and if I needed any help work-wise. I clearly didn't need the help, but the case worker, who had taken a great liking to me, was able to keep me on the program... until I started the work-study position, and I got kicked out by her higher-ups for having an income that was tax-exempt. Ultimately the program just gave me some new references that were guaranteed to be positive: <strong>everything else I'd done on my own and by my own hand.</strong></p>
<p>And yet, the moment my brother entered his senior year at high school, my parents immediately set out to find him a job. A fervor they never displayed for me: fetching job applications, buying him fancy clothes for interviews, reminding him to follow up with people by phone. While I was able to fight with the bank's website interface to get my routing number for direct deposit, my brother struggled to read a sheet of paper telling him step-by-step how to set up a store-issued debit card. He didn't even try to decipher the words on the sheet, written in plain English, and just gave up until our parents coached him through the phone call with the automated system. If I had ever displayed such a lack of will, I would have been smacked (verbally, at the <em>very</em> least) into next Tuesday.</p>
<p>And this is only of employment. To write of how the school system abandoned me but coddled my brothers every step of the way would take a whole other post on its own.</p>
<p><strong>And yet I know I still need support.</strong> Even when working twenty-four hours a week and getting bonus pay on weekends, the maximum I could handle without quickly spiraling into another mental breakdown, I still couldn't make enough to dream of renting even the <em>shittiest</em> apartment in town, let alone have enough to buy food and miscellanea to keep me alive and save up money for the occasional inevitable emergency. I am told that "professional" jobs make more than fifteen dollars an hour, but the only entry-level job my professors seem aware exists in the tech industry to get experience is call center tech support. Which is out because I can't handle talking to disembodied voices... or being put on the spot... or dealing with the disposition of the stereotypical person who calls tech support in the first place. Barring a miracle, I've got nowhere to go after graduation other than to the same entry-level jobs at gas stations and restaurants and stores every other teenager and aimless adult is jockeying for in town.</p>
<p>Am I... not worthy because I'm less independent than I thought I would be, and yet more than those who would otherwise help believe I should be when I tell them I am mentally disabled and need help? I am not <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2019/september/roophloch.html">"soiling myself, wreaking havoc, and breaking things"</a>, but I am still a far cry from a functional neurotypical adult. Am I supposed to struggle on without help until I die from the inevitable burnout, or diminish myself so that others will finally see me as worthy of assistance?</p><p>Some part of my heart tells me that this can't be the criteria. My lover clearly thinks I'm worthy enough to be taken care of by her on my bad days, and in the future we have planned, since we won't have to work for subsistence, I can throw all my <ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory">"spoons"</a> into properly caring for myself and honoring my brain's constant <del>desire</del><em>mandate</em> to create instead of trying to balance my energy between the non-life of work and the non-life of recovering from work. Somehow she and I both see this future as a life worth living, a happy and joyous life, even if I need help sometimes. So the criteria must be something else.</p>
</div>
<hr>
<divclass="box">
<p>I wake up the next day, post half-written. And again, and again, and again, allowing myself to slide back into hypnagogia after every task throughout the day. The sun glides across the sky in fits and stutters, just like my will, my motivation, untethered from work or school obligations.</p>
<p>I open my RSS feed reader. There's a post at the top of the screen. <em>It's okay to be low-IQ,</em> it reads. <em>It's okay to be a follower. It's okay to not think. It's okay to not have a hobby or anything you're interested in. It's okay to accomplish absolutely nothing in life, do nothing, be nothing, become nothing.</em></p>
<p>And I find it so revolting, so viscerally upsetting, that I have to resist the urge to puke all over the keyboard and end up breaking yet another one of my laptops.</p>
<p>"I think I've found my criteria," I whisper to myself.</p>
<p>I'm not buying the propaganda that says I have to "slow down". Even though I've managed to free myself from the <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog//2021/may/rebirth.html">"life purpose"</a> that demanded I make a piece of art far beyond my technical skills with no assistance whatsoever, there is still a voice in my head, an exhortation, to keep going and, at the very least, finish the book I'm working on before I die. Because <strong>what am I without the will to create?</strong> What am I without the words I build my mausoleum with? What kind of life would I have lived without pushing myself to do something sans the approval or assistance of my parents, with what feels like the whole of the world pushing back, demanding I crawl back into the cardboard box of mediocrity and stay there?</p><p>I look to my brothers for a guess, a potential example. I want to shake their shoulders, demand them to answer, "How do you live like this, never creating anything of your own volition? How does your soul survive only <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/february/consumeproduct.html">consuming</a>, myopic, too lazy to see there's a whole world beyond this ivory tower? Is there even a soul still in your body? <em>What are you allowing yourself to become?</em>"</p>
<p>What am I, really?</p>
<p><em>Nobody else has ever offered to give me a whole world before. Nobody else has ever thought me worthy of that kind of freedom.</em></p>
<p><em>Even if I can't give you anything else? Another income, stability, a comfortable existence...</em></p>
<p><em>Oh, Lethe...</em></p>
<p>What am I, really?</p>
<p><em>I am destined for greatness.</em></p>
<p><em>What the hell is 'greatness'? <ahref="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/october/thelema.html">Who defines it?</a> Does it matter if some stranger is listening, if they approve?... I'm listening. You're already pretty great to me. Am I not enough?</em></p>
<p>A life trying to be worthy enough for myself.</p>
