Glove
An attempt at first person. Inching towards an answer. Brief recursions.
I tend towards being disgusted by my own writing style, in need of a revamp constantly. Over the past year I have revamped my book in tons of ways—changing POVs, tenses, maximizing it, minimizing it, rearranging scenes, styles, rewriting the same intro 30 times, starting from other characters, and I’m done. I’m sick of it. I want it more happy, I want it more sad, I want it more philosophical, I want it more abstract, I want it more erotic, I want I want. The only thing that hasn’t changed is my protagonist—he’s looked the same and acted the same through all versions, which for years led me to believe I must ‘hand it to him’.
In those couple of months prior to turning eighteen, I ventured to write my book solely in first person POV.
Doing this was hard. For a week straight I just rewrote the intro. Everyday, I’d read over what I’d written, despise it, then take to rewriting it disgustedly. All of it was entrenched in a preemptive disgust of doing the act. I felt I barely knew the poor guy.
So who is my dazzling protagonist? Or, who was he? Well, he was sauve enough, he was attractive enough, his own true personality was dislodged and lobotomized in how I thought a teenage boy would act, his fears were caught by the narration, thrown away, his inner qualms and contemplations non-existent, and he was popular in his respective spot. A good wrestler, a boy who wanted to wrestle, who had a good reputation and friends who cared for him.
The main caveat that continued driving me away from my own protagonist was that his was a journey of decline. He was this upstanding and expectant young man then, oh God, he commits an act of violence (oh no, ‘the horror’ Colonel Kurtz whispers) and only THEN does his life significantly degrade. And that is something that happens, but it doesn’t happen that much. And when it does it’s offset by weird manifestos and social media frenzies and the like, and that’s something that’s always interested me, the origin point so to speak, but it really doesn’t interest me that much. The making of a monster; well who the fuck hasn’t tried to dissect that? Everyone knows about THAT novel or THAT movie or THAT instance of a curly haired man shooting a Healthcare CEO in New York City. And my protagonist was going to be the next head on the Mount Rushmore of ‘regular’ men turned violent.
To start, I don’t feel like a normal girl.1 Maybe I am—I sure as shit look like it, and certainly act as such in social settings—but I’ve always been one very subtle but humiliating deviation away from girls I know. This is clear in those who know me, and I know as an objective fact that I’ve somehow unconsciously subverted all expectations of how women should act, in both their ostensibly good and bad ways. This is speaking from all perspectives. To the red-pilled men I am good because in part I agree with them but I’m bad because I’m the exact opposite of a woman they’d think would agree with them. To the normal, day-to-day lackeys, I am probably just whatever, a little too lurid for a girl if you know me, but nice and gentle on the surface. To most boys my age I am definitionally mid, bland. To my boy (and he is by all measures a normal, straight male) best-friend I am insane and extremely anal and sensitive. To my brother I am a sweet angel who, so I’m told, he’d do anything for, and to my dad I’m a sweet angel in over her head. Whatever concern family and friends have about me, it has never centered on my gender. Meaning, I’m not a kettle waiting to troonily burst in hormonal reprieve. I AM a woman, affirmatively, I am content with that, content enough.
However, my stories ever since I’ve written them have been vile, dealing with men, power, and men trying to handle power, along with masculinity or lack thereof with intent to rekindle with it. For example, my first full-length book I’ve written, in fact the first thing I ever wrote, at twelve (a piece of donkey shit), was about an esteemed Doctor turned criminal and how he nerfs both a woman (through sex & assumed love) and another male (funding his drug addiction) who reign his place of desire, and ends up succeeding (killing) them and winning. In the epilogue, he enthusiastically shakes hands with Richard Nixon.2
Every novel I’ve written since my initial keyboard smacks has been about men being violent to get what they want, and I’d never written these to show how wrong they are, I wrote them because, frankly, I was infatuated with this idea. Does this mean I thought about committing VIOLENCE, little old me? No. Too scared, too incapable. But I do sometimes think if I were born a male I would’ve been one of those lost in the fray types. Not a successful mafioso or a half-witted gang member, but an intensely bothered, volatile type, soiling the life begotten to him in attempts to imitate one of his hundreds of male descendants who did things similar, and likely losing, sorely and tragically. If not that then I would’ve been a rouge male writer credited for being, outside of his writing, an asshole. In both cases I still think realistically I would’ve been a loser.
In my maturity I have realized that these stories have sucked but the underlying motivation behind them still sticks, that is, to write a male character who is both me and my groom, who harbors tumultuous amounts of bitterness towards the men & women around him, however being reticent towards these feelings (ignore the book example I gave), being socially adequate but personally abhorrent, and being guiltily violent.
Is there a reason for being drawn to this? I don’t know, I always was. Although, I think there was a small, distant glimpse that didn’t change my trajectory but gave it proper axis. This was an interaction with my dad I had at thirteen.
Following the Doctor story, I’d gone on to write a story about a 26 yo male whose dad was a cult leader and, in his quarter century age, he discovers the cult is back. I was enthralled by the anti-hero narrative. Embarrassing to admit, I bought Joaquin Phoenix’s signature JOKER suit, to fuck around my room with and listen to Gary Glitters ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll,’ so suffice to say this protagonist was going to do bad things for a good outcome, yadda yadda. I wrote some of this and sent it on to my dad, requesting he read it. Some days later, after he begrudgingly read it, he came into my room for some commentary.
I noticed, pretty late in (I myself was even girlishly convinced!) that he was using the pronoun ‘she’ to describe my protagonist. Defensively I corrected him. He retorted, angering me, saying ‘I got zero impression whatsoever that the man narrating was a MALE.’
I have since re-read this story. It’s purple prosey, it’s stupid, but it’s not screaming woman. In which case I will come to thirteen year old me’s defense: my dad doesn’t read, has never read, in fact he’s basically dyslexic, powering through and reading it only because the premise sounded interesting. He’s a splatter-punk kind of guy, action movies and gore—the prose was very melodramatic and stuffed but think about Proust’s opening of In Search of Lost Time or Pessoa’s most vicious excerpts in The Book of Disquiet. Any writer with a lot to say, really. Mine was a far-cry from that level, but you get what I’m saying. Male writing doesn’t have to be fight-club sixty seven thousand times. He has never read, though, so I don’t fault him.
But thirteen year old me rode the high-horse. I was angry at his complete misunderstanding and ventured on an oblivious quest: to write like a male. Ok…how…being so young, I thought of the immaturely obvious: Objectify women, be racist (‘yes.’ A man restacks), be belligerent, kill spiders, be Gypsy Crusader with his awfully provocative comedy gun and background, kill, be incredibly horny, tweet about the downfall of men caused by feminism, etc etc…is that right?
But I continued on musing for the proper male figure to be realized, transfigured in full. At fourteen and fifteen, I figured an answer to that damning question: Yes and no. Yes because these behaviors are overwhelmingly male behaviors, no because if such is the case why have males been the best at explaining our most complex feelings and philosophies, yes and no because the former accidentally answers the latter. I saw that males overwhelmingly produce every heterodox thing that happens despite firstly inventing the ideals to be opposed, on both sides of the spectrum. This is XY; OK. It’s logically explainable. Jesus Christ and Jeffery Dahmer. Schopenhauer and Elliot Rodgers (but there’s a connection here actually). Alexander the Great and Chris Chan. Men losing their limbs in war, scratch that, BEING in war, initiating it, etc. Men inventing entire phenomenologies. Men raping at the speed of jack-rabbits. Ask me about MY biggest red-pill at fifteen and immediately I would say the male to female IQ bell curve. This was another explanation.
Of course, if you have any conception of what heterodox behavior is, women do such too but we’re not nearly as prone to it as men and it’s always undercut by our womaness. It must be taken into account, it is not expected. It is speculated (and biblically supported) that a woman’s highest form is an unapologetic embodiment of her femininity, even said by Nietzsche (doing the thing) to be more perfect than a perfect man, not that which contends with a man—in short, a great woman is different from a great man. And it doesn’t involve what I’m doing.
So in a sense, given this and still living extremely, I thought myself an inherent aberration, but believed it could not be any other way. Perhaps I still do. Perhaps I am not an abomination. I aspire to womanly heights, namely motherhood, but I think of writing alongside it.
I could talk about these gender proclivities all day.3
“The main caveat that continued driving me away from my own protagonist was that his was a journey of decline.”
So, by the time I turned seventeen, I had a relatively BASED view on men vs. women. Mostly conservative, blockaded by passionate readings of philosophies and the like. Seventeen (and sixteen) was, coincidentally, the year I stopped writing archetypal male characters. As I mentioned before, I always, before my dad’s criticisms, had an inclination to write these great male stories of triumph through death and virility, but his criticism made me try to figure out WHY those things were male. Of course I sort of already had a gauge on it, I just needed a buttress, something to cite and/or lean on.
At seventeen I still ventured to write a distinctly male character, but this time I could definitionally place him. Some of my most shameful fantasies involve people priding me on my ability, as a women, to write a character so terribly male that, hell, I may well be one. Until that point I’d either made my males too queer in a Frank N Furter way or too traditional in Matt Walshy way. It was almost a strange amalgam of the two, enough for Frank N Furter to be offended, and enough for Matt Walsh to call me woke. That is to say they were quite the hyperbolic men. Now, after my pertinent research, I suddenly crafted a character that seemed to transcend that.
To begin, he was the most normal person I’d ever written. My characters, even the female ones, always had incredibly dramatic problems—skin diseases, murders to resolve, suicides amuck, weird cultish activities, Ethel Cain type religious trauma, prostitution, scams, but this new Mister had none. I decided to make him from my hometown, with a relatively normal family and social life—all the conventions at the beginning, he embodied. The book literally began with him working at a Hibachi restaurant with his stoned out friend. The only anomaly was his sister, who drew a fist through the family’s conventional firmament and soared to Columbia University, becoming one of those New York phenotypes. My protagonist, however, was not brooding and he wasn’t dark nor pessimistic—he didn’t harbor severe opinions about anything, he responded to the climate, save for some funny bits. Ride the wave. But then he is depicted as giving his dad a concussion on one fateful night after which he is thrown in jail, where his sister is first introduced via bailing him out (dad didn’t press charges) and he is given some form of mental health leave from school (this exists, I once did it) wherein his sister takes him to live with her. His sister pitied him in a way that doesn’t compromise her politics, so she didn’t actually pity him. Our Mister meets her boyfriend—he’s weird, artistic, autistic, symbolic, sees something in our numb-skulled Mister that he misses, he becomes symbolic through something not worth discussing, it gets existential, it gets preposterous, Mister realizes it and heroically silences the boyfriend while also reconciling with his dad and it’s all one big carbuncle, relatively regular. Except you don’t really know anything about our Mister other than he’s occasionally violent but it’s fine because he apologized. He goes down and goes up again. OK. Twas the freshman year creative writing lesson—you must create drawing line on a chalkboard an arc for your character.
The only difference between this Mister and those preceding him is his violence was retaliatory, not a means. Which is more common but less interesting. It’s unresolved but gets paraded as a bad thing, a thing he must atone for via this later arc of quiet but properly moral and unambiguous destruction. Except you never really knew why he concussed his dad, you just knew that he could. You just knew, in that brief scene, that there was potential for masculine demolition but guarded by impartiality and Top Gun type heroism.
How can you not know anything about him despite it being written in first person? I was hard-pressed to find the answer to this question. Visions, certainly, permeated my mind—aesthetics, movements of his, faces he’d make, but certainly his true disposition got lost in the ether. Perhaps it is a mistake of my own writing—perhaps I was bad at it, unable to, thus, incorporate his thoughts properly, or, I wondered, if still I was improperly understanding him. This bothered me—months I spent coddling this narrative, hellbent on it’s themes, it’s larger means, not being afraid of what hypothetical pushback it might eventually garner, locked and loaded to defend my Million Dollar Man as the new American hero. But—what the fuck?
Who did I think I was? What do I know about this arc? What is this male I burgeon and why is he not only NOT different from those I’d written before but WORSE?
I hated him, this everyman. This Gen Z Disaffected Youth Searching For Purpose Being Reduced And Manipulated By It Then Overcoming It Leading To A Kind Of Deification However Vapid He Was In Disposition However Undeserving. My hatred of the story was so potent I began writing something I’d never done before—a semi-fantastical novel, set somewhere else dealing with modes and religions and characters so opposite to Mister that I’d begun seeing him as not only a poorly written character but a shitty one as a whole, better off dead, disliked by everyone including his creator.
I turned eighteen in November of 2025. I left school a semester early because of my regularly scheduled neurotic tweak out—I’ve done it since pre-k—and moved from my childhood town back to Florida. My family suggested therapy, and of course therapy was in the cards hundreds of times prior, leading only an empty look from the therapist and a meek ‘there’s nothing wrong with her, maybe some anxiety but not really,’ and was back at home for Christmas Break with everyone worried I wouldn’t graduate high-school.4
Going out into the kitchen garnered negative, cruel commentary at my ineptness, things I knew were true. I went to bed at eight o’clock AM and woke up at three. I tried to write my dad an essay on why I couldn’t go to school, but I had no proper answer. Something about tedium? I didn’t know, it was sacrosanct, I’d done it since birth; how to explain an infant.
Around March of this year, I began to have otherworldly stomach issues, and was hospitalized three times, wherein they found nothing wrong with me. I was wailing in pain; I promise, I’ve never done that. I began to have unlike-me reactions to medications—I am now allergic to Ibuprofen. I continued, for no reason, to get skin problems. Splotchy places, hives—my calves itched for two months and appeared as a scarred mess. I wasn’t sure if I was purging something or if it was infecting me. A month hadn’t even passed since the hospitalization and I contracted what was, to me, being mortified by barfing, Ebola; Rotavirus. Some Frankensteinian strain of Norovirus, except it wasn’t, it was completely separate, longer—God help me so I don’t get Norovirus now. Being devoutly Catholic (cradle, but the only one practicing) I thought I was possessed by a demon of slothliness.
So, the first half of my eighteenth year consisted of sitting in bed doing nothing, in part because I was in pain, but also because, like everyone else, I’d seemingly done the inverse of what I’d planned to by this age. This was brought to life in my College decision—I’d always been a New York City yearner, but unfortunately was too unqualified to get into any of their Universities. On top of that, I SWORE I despised Florida and now I miraculously like it and am going to College here. Majoring in something I’m mildly interested in, the only up-side being I’m getting an apartment, not a dorm with some retard. In that first half, this was a raw change—cause for a lot of reflection. I felt like a large Wind Turbine just winding in the middle of nowhere, isolated in my house where it takes ten minutes to reach a main road, namely, civilization.
I’d think, sometimes, that my desire to be a writer had ended. I lost the giddy sensation, the pop-up idea that elicits a jump toward the laptop or notebook, scrawling with a smirk, then continuing on in imagined view of my narrative. I began nightmarishly thinking it was a means of coping for my decrepit social life, or something I’d only pursued because I wanted to be different than others, rather than that I was. As in, a manufactured disconnection from myself and others, which was supported by my family—but why would I do that? What would it get me? If that was my true disposition I would’ve chosen an obviously lucrative path, distancing myself in the form of entrepreneuership or something that’d easily posit me as superior. I felt I had nothing to write about—was told so too.
Worse, I felt my life was ending, but then—what life had began? Tallying up my life’s accomplishments you’d get nothing, save for the mandatory K-12 completion, however even that was by the skin of my teeth. Every photograph of me taken in my childhood, if seen by some administrator, would be cause for government intervention. Social services. Sitting on a horse I am miserable in my fru-fru shoes and green bow. Getting a pedicure by a sweet Vietnamese woman whom I couldn’t understand, too short to be reached in the regular chairs, opting to come closer for efficiency reasons, I am miserable in pink dress. Standing ovation for being a Gold reader, I stand there miserably with my certificate. Permanent restlessness in sickening car-rides, yelling fueled trips, commotion on the brain as if trudging through forever panic, sitting on the slowly breaking seat of my dad’s financial breakthrough we once worshipped now finding tasteless though with zero results of our own. Everyday I found happiness only in bright light cogitations and constant imitations of a life several impossible jumps away, and watching the world implode on my abstract reveries led to hatred of their intervention, and, since as a child I couldn’t distinguish their imposition from tender appreciation I hated them as people, too. Enemies of the bigger picture.
Videos of children in full-view concerting for parents and friends alike—my brother, the superstar comedian, wiggle-worming to both my laughing parents, and I, disappearing to my own space, pretending to be him, attempts always soiled by their demanded privacy. The boring youngest sibling tries to do what her elders do, eliciting zero commentary because it was only cute that I wanted to be like them, nothing of my own talents. Speaking to my peers in my earliest teenage years at the same cadence and throwaway style as my friends I’d seen, just seconds prior, though at my chance to jester I got at the very most a look, so instead I retreated to my room and acted on their wall selves, concocting party scenes where I was them, the wall me, the wall them, the wall wishing it were me, speaking so gracefully and nonchalantly.
Mostly, pulsing in the middle-ground. Normal in that I don’t belong in a mental hospital but have been threatened, multiple times, to be sent to one. Socially adept in that I can bear, and even enjoy, the small questions at check-out lines and laugh when it’s permitted and cry as such without seething about normies, but socially inept in that it seems not an interior catch or personality defect that prevents me from blossoming but a certain fuming or false sense others sense in me, that pushes them away5. Intelligent enough to pass easily, but unmotivated to fester those academic inclinations into something understood, something that’d earn me a tassel on my graduation gown. Living, majorly, in the wispy makings of others posing as they are mine, identities flung about my bedroom like cuts of jiggling meat awaiting their slice and becoming, meat-suited fledgling stomping about reclusively, there I am, all the time, allowing myself the imagery and design but abandoning the do.
So, my entire life, either a misery at the closest most reachable, and real, parts of it or an empathetically pathetic rendition of others lives which resulted in one talent: getting others.
For all my inabilities, there is one singular thing I can say I am good at. Most are able, and well, to see and accurately guess people’s lives—this is shown in a comment section of a video featuring a nice old lady, wherein people estimate her values, what she likes/dislikes, etc. What makes me different from these? I believe the main difference is that where they benignly know, I morbidly get and compulsively complete. And that is not to say I can lay out this old lady’s life, her fears and points of escape, her coming to’s, who she truly loved—those are all still guesses, and howsoever they may be accurate, they are still predicated on a guess and an unconscious physiognomy analysis. I have an entirely net-negative, broadly unholy inclination for completion.
Some form of a formless chameleon. Seizing that outputted image and inhabiting it and compulsively making myself into your final life, what I perceive are your disjointed day-to-day activities fairly inhabited in my then outputted mannerisms and way of speaking. So I am completely reactionary only I become you in a kind of reconstruction and what I assume yourself is molests my own head—this old woman, I have fifteen versions of her cassette-tape re-running hunched walking about the house measuring her naso-labial folds, the complexity is in those slight activities, randomized to me, nothing more complicatedly guessed but those habitual people motives, and before long I am measuring my own mouth in the mirror, not because I have become her but because something invented, neither her nor I, has.
So hybrids, you and I. I get a certain feeling of you, a half-patented figure not plagued by biases on my part, you are infectiously completed by me living and fragmented, I am the recipient of thousands of variations of you and yours, but unfortunately this is a hellish trait because all-in-all we purport a certain ghastly and calcified version of ourselves to others and stick our gloved palms out in welcome but for all the intentional digressions and dissimulations I am standing there with O.J Simpsons ill-fitting but perhaps only shrunken in time self-same glove prepared to somehow, and only for my analytical gain, grant you glove-to-glove contact. And I don’t even want to.
But if I forced that glove on I’d be the murderer—I’d be a fully formed contemptuously perennial person moving about the world, and with every handshake the glove would get tighter and eventually rip, resulting in, I predict, a final completion of myself real but therefore finished.
Finished. Cerebrally genderless, fingers swollen in the too-tight leather of a rutched glove, behind each rip lie sweating the padded fat of knuckles unscarred by combat and commitment, a life decorated in blank milestones and seamless accolades, disgruntled and nearly emotional at all interactions as they spar their glove to mine and with each interlock theirs suits the hand better while mine loosens, splits at the wrists and cuticles. Map out the arc of completion through climax and insighting events and there would be either a complete flatline or some kind of self-imposed up and downs however recursive and realigning itself consistently with past. Upon seeing myself that way, what with my torn glove and all, they would shake the hand anyway but be fraught with the why. Why the insistence on forcing it on, may well take it off and be the real self everyone suggests to be online yet contradicts. Let this individual be the first true beholder of themself. Of course, you see sheds of skin but I want the glove on, I want it to maintain its hold. Can’t buy another because this one is mine, that which I murdered with—it fits, I’m making it, so dare not acquit. That which I beat, paralyzed, and concussed all modes of socialization with, this one, my possessed, my burden. Not the decline. In fact I’d even suggest the glove grew shape with me this way, extra fabric at the fingernails all throughout childhood and teen years, and though it’d mean I’d no longer be porous and adaptable with loose leather I one day decided, better try. I admire the challenge.
But now I’ve arrived at the latter half of eighteen. School is a final blasted fatigue. The people, insofar as I knew them, form similarly. Everyone orbiting with a post-consensus freedom, tears at graduation. I didn’t see them. Listen, I saw them indirectly but that was enough. Always the funny dances and the fan-fares and the restaurant visits afterwards full of reminiscing memories over Taco Bell cheese dip and all other fattening accoutrements. They all posted about it—always, the ceremonies, ending at night. Why? Because the two hour motivational speeches half written by AI take the majority of the time, because some insufferable maniac lumbers to the stage and flicks his tongue at the live footage, because some black girl lifts her gown and shakes her cottage cheesy behind at the screen, leading to ten minutes of having to make sure that doesn’t get leaked, because some nerdish valedictorian spews some faux-meaningful words about chaos and society and transcendence, because girls in busted mini-dresses and all their tassels and decorated hats form a teeming hellhole up and then around the exit to the high-school? It’s commemoratory, I understand—if I had half a mind to appreciate these sentiments—which is to say I allegedly lack even a HALF—I’d be alongside them, grinning, lifting my gown faggotishly to avoid a puddle before while I bring my vape to my opposite hand—but I can’t and it’s a bad look on my part. I know. I know it’s actually damning. Because everyone begins to wonder, well, if I’m unenthused by practically everything what stops me from ending it. And then there’s my friends, I swipe past them, however without a whisper of FOMO, happen to, while I pensively orbit other apps, and they’re posed with the four-fingers all prepared to send it off to college, wherein it will be a repetition of the same neutrally adolescent behaviors, namely drinking and fucking. At which point, I am not sure where I’ll be. Off to my own, same instincts for reclusion and suggestions of similar behaviors both explaining and condemning my past. Undeserving of a fruitful future, well, I’ll bear this cross. It’s invisible so only I can.
And everything gained from the 5th grade year of full sentience to now is a gentle, unprodding baselessness. Even the most invigorating and seemingly eventful moments of my life were not on purpose—not as in the spontaneous interaction or the trajectory going in the wrong but later useful direction—I mean that, yes, I was a full contributor to these moments but lapsed them in a full-fledged larger plan or distraction that halted them from being additives to the larger plan and made them, instead, seeing as I was so focused on the plan before, during, and after them excluding them, a misnomer. So nothing I ever did is worth talking about in the bigger schema. And to tell you the broad-stroked truth I am afraid this glove I’ve put on will never come undone. Moreso, I am afraid that it will become so worn and tattered by constant, albeit elicited by me, interplay that it will become indiscernible from my own hand. That would be especially indecent because it didn’t even fit in the first place, so it wasn’t as if there were finally cracks, it became finally weathered, and, unlike all else who bear these gloves, theirs morph into their own at a kind of equal pace—skin becomes glove, glove becomes skin—neither dominates the other. In my case it would be the glove the eternal Satan-skin. Already it is no good of a glove to be wearing, but I am not it. However, with my time encompassed, and if my worry stands, then I will be. I will be taken.
This appears to bother me. Let me clarify why.
Not because then the certain glove-me hybrid is seen by the people. Me is fine (wanted) and the glove is already seen by people. This is why I am where I am—this is, and admitting so unwillingly, why I didn’t attend graduation and fussed out of exhaustive livelihood for so long, God help him. But if I become the glove, if my mind is somehow contaminated by the unrevised and misinterpreted tales of my external self, then I will remember them as my own. I will develop them.
If that happened then I’d no longer have reference. Yes, I lack reference to goodness and to accomplishment but I mean a reference back-hind to the inner motivations that propel those things. Certainly it is not an end all be all scenario, I will not die not having achieved intended applause and whatsoever festered inside me, that is what I think now, but if I grow older and reach this configuration I’ll be without that. I despise the idea of having severe attentiveness to others at the expense of myself. Just a spit-ball example—my fucking grandmother. I don’t know a thing about her except she’s nearly killed her autonomy in the ‘selfless’ act of seeing others. This is seen as a wonderful trait—my whole family reveres her for these qualities and yet I see some hag without even a goddamned glove to dissimulate what non-qualities she had in the first place. Makes me glad, at the very least, that I have one. But if I lose it. I don’t want to be some bygone, identity-less person, obsessing these narratives and structures of someone else. And I know I won’t but I haven’t solidified it yet so I know only internally. If I’m right, that’d disappear.
This is not quirktastic. I imagine, if this is being read, there is an attempt to sort me going on. You’re sensing pick me, performative, etc etc. I’m not autistic, not diagnostically, and I’m not a quirky or weird girl given their conventional associations. I like those girls but oftentimes was driven away by my own contempt and cruelty, that which made me think of them as TOO weird and vice versa, funnily enough. In my measly history I have a persistent streak of my girl-friends being extremely popular. As for the alternative girls (I’m just assuming that’s where you’re thinking I am, if not quirky) I’m mostly too afraid of them to be their friends, and I’m too afraid of drugs. I’ve had one friend like that but we never clicked. I was quite overwhelmed by her. Again, my bestest friends are those who fucked me over, who didn’t include me, who shit-talked me both directly & indirectly, but in private we would resoundingly enjoy ourselves. Thousands of Instagram follower types.
And I know it is wrong and presumptive of me to ascribe such binaries, but abstractly that’s what they are. They exist in the male universe too. Frat boy, stoner, etc. There are probably depths in those fitting in these categories, but the point is that even though that is true I still don’t fit there. It always fades. And that’s not to say I have a depth so vast it traps me outside, but it is to say that these types are all indicative of some sort of disposition, they give you a, howsoever false, idea of who you are both to yourself and others. I think I was looking for an easy way to explain to people that I was a certain way—that I was a certain something.
All I have explained in the preceding section I discovered upsettingly, by the way. Reading Schopenhauer’s essay On Women made me cry—true mostly, not true, not true at all, and since then I have come to the conclusion that some parts are true, some are ridiculous; and I understand the playbook, ‘but that’s not me,’ but I do seriously think there are plenty of women who could’ve had him writing more positively, plenty more than plenty not. Aside from Schopenhauer, most philosophers have had similar opinions. This comes with the territory. However, with the abundance of insightful, and oftentimes valid, critiques of their philosophy, it would be strange if the female department was the one place they suddenly became infallible.
I am, again, standing barren on this topic, because I mostly hate everyone’s thoughts on it from all angles and most would probably hate mine. If there is a real, fenced partition sorting those of whom’s opinions I imagine would take a side, or simply sit on the fence, I am not even there.
I DID, obviously, with flying colors. But my colors aren’t flying incredibly high due to me only getting good grades. Other than that I didn’t do shit in high-school. The colors are gliding, I suppose.
This falls back on me at the end of the day, despite its framing. I take responsibility. ✊