Drawing Blood
Hey beautiful people,
Life is beautiful. A friendly reminder. :)
Tomorrows and Thursday’s events:
Writing Meditation w/ Davood Gozli. Every Wednesday @ 9:00 AM ET. RSVP here: April 29th.
Human Systems Life Action Redesign w/ Sara Ness and Anne-Lorraine Selke. April 30th @ 2:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Shame Breakthrough Bootcamp w/ A.J. Bond. Every Thursday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here: April 30th.
Existential Dance Party w/ Collin Morris Every Thursday @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here: April 30th.
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April 28, 2020
At the knife's edge, the truth will bleed out.
I was hoping to address some disparate thoughts, and sound less like a comic book in this entry. I have a desire to plug back into the world. I started these journals over a month ago, on March 23rd, and ever since I was captured by this Stoa project, all of my focus has been on it, as if it were a new lover I cannot stop thinking about.
In my first entry, I mentioned that I was frantically reading the news all the time. Now I do not know what is happening at all with COVID-19 or the economy or any of the narratives that the MSM have been proselytizing. It is a foreign world to me, and my life has an otherworldly feel to it. I am living with the felt-sense that tomorrow is dead, and I am living as if there were no future, except vague fragments of us dancing around the bonfire.
My working theory is that a person has to risk going crazy, in the right way, in front of others, to attempt to start a new world. However, I can flip perspectives, and see that this could be just a comic book rationalization for my having almost gone crazy, because I was overworking myself. I do not know what is true, in the correspondence theory of truth sort of way, but it is obvious to me that the latter perspective is not a beautiful story, and what Camille said was accurate: I want a beautiful story.
I never fit in, in the old world, the Game A world. There is an ugliness to it, a fakeness, a deadness. Its priests and foot soldiers are good at lying and bullshitting. My whole being revolts when I try that. Not only do I have great difficulty lying or bullshitting, but I also am not skillful at justifying a life of compromised truth, supported by some impressive mental gymnastics, just to get some verisimilitude of authenticity. Besides, I am not intelligent enough to be a mental gymnast.
More simply, I am compelled to tell the truth, especially the truth that desires to be spoken, because telling the truth is deeply nourishing. I am not interested in letting some tacit intersubjective script of how one should conduct oneself in interpersonal interactions stand in the way. Wisdom cannot be measured, or if it can, it cannot currently be measured. Sometimes you have to break the rules in order to create a better world, and it starts one relationship at a time.
It is possible that, in order to be more effective now, I have to start acting or pretending to be mundane. I can see the strategic element here, for sure, but I am not convinced that one should be mundane. When there is choice as to what story to bet on, and narrative choice exists when there is no certainty as to what is true, then it seems wise to choose the beautiful story. Mundane is safe, and there is a certain intersubjective comfort with it. The truth does not bleed out when you are safe though, and I want it to bleed, in the right way. At the knife's edge, you always draw blood.
Ever since I started this project, so many amazing people have come into my life. Beautiful people. People I want to dance with, rap with, ask questions with, and, most importantly, cry with. And I am not afraid to cry anymore. I am changing, I am becoming more compassionate and empathetic. More loving. I am becoming a better man. I am becoming a whole man.
Speaking of being a man. The beautiful woman who proofreads these entries, conveyed that she thought I was conservative, while reviewing the past few entries. I imagine it was due to my writings on the masculine and feminine, which sound as if they could be coming from the mouth of Peterson himself. While I did have a conservative moment in my life, and a reactionary one, I also had a liberal moment, and a progressive one, and an anarchist one. For the record, I am not aligned with any political thought at the moment. I am up for grabs.
A.J. Bond and I are going to have a chat about shame and sexuality today on my podcast, and he mentioned that he has some push-back about my use of the masculine and feminine language. While it seems as if I am conflating the masculine with males, and the feminine with females, my post-structuralist muscle is developed enough for me to untether the two.
I am open to the argument that these should be untethered, for the sake of societal progress, or fused together, for the sake of societal stability. I do not have a dog in that fight, and my sense is that the wise answer will be nuanced. When I write about the masculine, I am relating to it from my localized experience of being a heterosexual male, and I do not mean to project this experience onto others.
Raven said that she got the impression that I was completely heterosexual. I agreed at that moment. I recognize that sexuality is complex, and it is a spectrum for a lot of people, and I always felt that I was fully on team heterosexuality, given my deep sexual and emotional desire for women. But feeling into that, the story may be more nuanced, and I sense it relates to my inability to dance well.
I am looking forward to talking to A.J. about the time in high school I was worried that I was gay, and felt shame about it, and about that one time I masturbated thinking about a man. Maybe it is time to stop shaming this aspect of myself. Maybe it is time for me to find my inner queen.
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