From good to different

When I was very young - and when I say "very young", I mean something like thirteen or fourteen - I liked who I was, and I thought at the time that this meant I should never want to change. Which makes sense, in a way - if you like something, why would you want it to change? You like it just the way it is. But again, I was very young, and nobody really has anything figured out when they're very young, and the things you hold with great conviction may change into different shapes of idea or even be discarded altogether, hopefully for the better.

I grew a little older - and when I say "a little older", I mean something like fifteen or sixteen - I was a bit of a different person than I was when I had the idea that I didn't want to change. The overall shape of my personality and interests and way of going about things wasn't that different from what it was like before, and one could see how it had progressed into its current form compared to what it used to be, but it was different. I didn't entirely like myself, but that's natural for somebody of that age. And in the vast most of cases, it was less that I didn't like the way I was so much as I didn't like the way others treated me because of who and what I was. I didn't think about changing very much during that time. I don't know why. If someone had asked me about whether or not I would have wanted to change myself, I don't think I would have said yes.

And then I grew a little older still - now we're at something like seventeen or eighteen - and I had at this point begun to examine a number of ideas and philosophies that I had been vaguely aware of until then but hadn't really begun to form my own opinions on until that time. I suppose this sort of thing is to be expected, or at the least, it isn't unusual. Some of these were ideas I had to apply to the world around me, and some of these were ideas I had to apply to myself. To tell you what they were and how I went about doing that is a long story and best saved for another time, but one of the conclusions I reached was that:

1. Things change.
2. People change.
3. That's okay.
4. That's actually kind of fantastic, because if you're the one doing the changing, you don't always have to change for the worse.

Isn't it true, though, that some changes are not for the worst or even for the better but just for the different? There are different kinds of good things. Salvador Dali's art is good, and Vincent van Gogh's art is good, and Carson Ellis's art is good - or at least, in my opinion they're all good. But they're all quite different, aren't they? Yes. They are.

And when I made that revelation, the idea of changing as a person became exciting to me. I could be all sorts of people in my lifetime, with different ideas and traits and interests and ways of doing things. There was more than one way to be an interesting, awesome person. If I changed - not on purpose, mind you, but as a matter of how things work - then I could be any number of such people. The fact that I have taken so many fantastic forms and am yet to take many more is one of the most exciting facts of my life as I understand it now.

I'm still very young - and when I say "very young", I mean that I am twenty and in a few months will be twenty-one - but I think I understand a few things, and I think that one of those things is that change is not always bad, nor is it always good, but sometimes change is simply a good thing turning into a different good thing. Does that excite you? I hope it does. It excites me.

I hate love

I hate love.

Not REALLY, but I made a statement to this effect on another social media website that I'm on. I made it pretty casually, too - I was talking about why I dislike Valentine's Day and why I was happy that Caustic Soda (my favorite morbid podcast) had made an episode about love just in time for Valentine's, "because I hate love and this makes everything better" - and someone asked me to expound upon what I meant when I said "I hate love".

My response got very long and I figured I'd share it on this blog because I think it has some value.

Firstly: I don't actually hate love. When I say "I hate love", it's a case of both hyperbole and incorrect word usage. I don't hate love; I hate cruelty, I hate bigotry, I hate abuse. Those are examples of things I actually hate. I don't even "hate" love in the same way that I "hate", say, spiders or hot weather or grape-flavored candy. Those are things I strongly and unambiguously dislike, albeit not to the deep, profound extent to which I hate the aforementioned Actually Hated things.

When I say "love", I don't mean just romantic love, either. As most of you know, I'm aromantic, and I therefore feel alienated in the face of statements and sentiments that consider romantic love to be universal or necessary on an individual level as well as in the face of romantic love itself. Honestly, romantic love itself just. Alienates me for some reason or another. It's not even romance repulsion per se, in that I'm not like "ew romance get it away from me" - sometimes I'm like that but not always or even most of the time. It's more like "what is this even, does not compute" and my computer brain just sort of crashes in the face of something it can't process but is trying to process nonetheless. (Does that mean I have a weak mind? Probably.)

Love is a really really weird thing to me. The lie I tell most often is "I love you", and I tell it to family and friends alike. (I don't tell it to romantic partners because I don't have any, which is a good thing for everybody, but if I had them, rest assured I'd tell them that lie, too.) I say it often just as a social thing (a means of making people feel better in the face of certain situations, of maintaining a social structure others view as being held together by love, something that makes people happy, et cetera). I say it so often that it means anything outside of the ways in which I use it. But honestly, love doesn't make sense to me. No forms of love make sense to me. I like people, sure, but I like them the same way I like my favorite books, or English Breakfast tea, or overcast days. 

Sometimes I like them so much you could almost say I love them - not actual love but a specific kind of not-actual-love that's comparable to the previously-discussed not-actual-hate. 

Sometimes I love people like I love the Voynich Manuscript - I'm so fascinated with them and I think they're so beautiful that I have intense and consistent feelings of appreciation and fascination and happy feelings for them. Sometimes I love people like I love this one pen I have - someone once summarized my feelings towards that pen as, "This is my pen; there are many like it, but this one is mine", and I get like that about people, too. Sometimes I love people like I love the place near my house where the library and the taco shop are - they're deeply familiar and I feel comfortable and relaxed around them, like nothing bad could ever happen when I'm in their presence. Sometimes I love people like I love my anti-anxiety pills - they keep me sane and frankly I need them.

The thing is, even though I've described me having Real Feelings towards people, these feelings are still comparable to those I feel towards objects. To be honest, they're not just comparable - they're almost exactly the same. And the only reason I say "almost exactly" is because I don't believe it's possible to have the EXACT same emotions towards two different things, but they're so similar they may as WELL be exactly the same. I've been told by therapist and layman alike that I see people as objects, and I agree. I don't experience empathy, and I don't see others as People the way I'm a "People". I can care about them in a way but only in the way you'd care about an object you really cared about. Is that love? Maybe. But maybe it isn't. It's certainly not the kind of love people are talking about when they say "love makes us human" or "love conquers all" or "all you need is love" or "there is no greater thing than love". Regardless of whether or not these statements are true (and regardless of whether or not the people saying them are talking exclusively about romantic love or not), I personally believe they're all talking about something that really exists, in much the same way that it's possible to say false things about something that's real. I don't experience the real thing they're talking about. 

And I hate that. Not in the real-hate way, but I hate that I can't experience the thing they're talking about, and I hate that I live in a world where the thing they're talking about is so prized, and I hate that love - romantic, platonic, familial, whatever - truly is a common human experience (in that it's an experience that humans, regardless of (a)romanticism, commonly experience), and I hate that my lack of real love is one of the things that detracts from my humanity, and I hate that any statements about love just remind me (consciously or unconsciously) of how inhuman I am, and I hate that love exists.

When I say "I hate love", what I really mean is "my experiences with and ability and lack thereof to experience love - platonic, romantic, familial, and otherwise - are such so that I am alienated and made unhappy by discussions of love, and, indeed, the existence of love itself".

But of course it's easier to say "I hate love".

To ruin someone's day

There was a time, very early on in my Submitting Stuff To Publishers career, where my justification for sending people things was "to ruin someone's day". The implication was that my poetry and stories were so terrible, so awful, that to force someone to read them would effectively ruin their day. To send my writing out there was to doom someone to read it and thus to doom them to a day that had been irreparably wrecked by exposure to my creative processes. My stuff was just so bad that it had the power to ruin someone's day.

And I liked that.

I wanted to ruin people's days. And I wanted to ruin people's days with my writing

I sent out my stuff to literary magazines and blogs and stuff with the justification that I was doing so to ruin people's days. I got a lot of rejection letters but I also got a few acceptances and all because I wanted to ruin people's days. Incredible.