this made me teary and also laugh

oxxenfree:

Women in my Tumblr world: I love and respect you and your feminist boredom, your spoons, your draft purging, your archives of feelings, your boundaries, your overshares, and I want for you in life to always feel safe and I’m so sorry for all the fucked up things that masculinity has done and continues to do to you. I’m going to hold myself and the men/boys in my life accountable for that.

read the whole thing, but. “your spoons”!

draft #8: the one picture saved in my drafts from the other night. i cleaned my apartment tonight, too, there is no longer that pile of stuff behind me. gratifying, but not as gratifying as the feminist permission slip tumblr purging. 

draft #7: reasons i did this, not an exhaustive list (i forgot about this and have said it all before in better ways but i am sort of glad i made a list and that i am publishing it after that post about being called rational)

• because i felt like i was sent to the hospital and lost control of my story and wanted it back
• because my ex-boyfriend was always telling me i wasn’t open. as my therapist said, “well, i guess you showed him” 
• because when i lost him, after losing my boyfriend of 10 years, i felt like i lost almost all of my institutional memory. this is it 
• because i found that tumblring about what happened transformed my feelings almost instantly; no matter how bad i felt i all of a sudden felt…less bad or even happy 
• because i love adventures, especially adventures that involve my not leaving bed (professionally creepy, feeling thrills, let’s see what happens if i do this thing, etc.)  
• because archiving, confessional culture, feminist art, narcissism, affect, and tumblr are what i write about 
• because i am happy to keep other peoples’ secrets, but i find it nearly impossible to keep my own 
• because i really believe in feminist truth-telling 
• because i really believe in following terrifying feelings 
• because i think my ex is a wimp 
• because i spent a year and a half trying to explain things to him that he both willfully and just totally idiotically didn’t get and once you start trying to explain it’s hard to stop 
• because i had time 
• because fuck that guy
• because i can and i know other people can’t, which makes it more imperative, maybe this means that eventually they can, which is maybe the same as feminist truth-telling
• because i know better and it still happened 
• because—if i am remembering this correctly and i haven’t talked to my father about this since it happened—my ex-boyfriend gave my father a list of nicer, long-term mental hospitals i could stay in and told him that i have “a dark side” as though i am just a crazy girl that needs to be put away instead of someone that had a drug interaction and that he terrorized during that interaction 
• because there’s a crazy girl narrative, which i respect, but that’s not this narrative and there are and therefore should be other narratives 
• because i theorize everything
• because i like feeling like part of several feminist legacies (incarceration, personal writing, narcissism, etc.) 
• because i am putting myself back together, tumblr fragment by tumblr fragment 
• because it’s fun 
• because i can only understand things by writing about them 
• because i’m not really a narcissist (though i’ll still say i am), but i am a slight exhibitionist 
• because it’s more fun given that he would never think i was that much of a narcissist, or an exhibitionist, which is only one of the many things he did not even begin to get, which i think drove him crazy, because he is a total control freak 
• because i am not a control freak and i am interested in unpredictability 
• because it makes it okay
• because i had to fucking give up my valuables and they would only let me keep $5 and it wasn’t in quarters and i didn’t have enough quarters to call anyone and you had to get up really early, when that woman first started screaming, and go ask a nurse if they had change, and if you got there any later you would not get quarters and you spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how you would call your parents and whether you could use feminine wiles—while you looked the worst you have ever looked save for that bad spell in 1989—to get a nurse to tell you if they had talked to your parents and when they were coming
• did i mention fuck that guy? 
• that’s not the main reason, though

i wrote this note to myself at 4:30 AM last night and haven’t figured out an alternative yet. 

DRAFT #6 LOL. i figured out an alternative. 

draft #4: more small good surprises (apparently never published because it’s a little O: The Oprah Magazine)

i was leaving the wine store when i saw mike i think with his girlfriend. i’ve been half-hoping to run into him whenever i walk outside, but before i had to make the decision about whether to say hi—i didn’t really want to spring myself on his girlfriend, it seemed like it should be his decision—i ran into another friend. she is defending her dissertation on tuesday, the day my exams are due, and deciding about whether she wants to take a big job overseas. she was like “would you take it?” and i said that my life is so far from what i thought it would be two years ago, who knows that i would do. she agreed. then we decided to get drinks when she gets back from her last interview. i think this sounds fun and i am comforted to know that mike still lives in my neighborhood—i thought maybe he had moved away—and now i just have to stay up late and finish this essay and comb over everything tomorrow and on tuesday, at noon, we are celebrating. the reservations are already made and they are outside. 

"Shit, is anyone writing about Tumblr poetics? Tumblr poetics would be, calling on Barthes, the study of “how [Tumblr] meaning is possible, at what cost and by what means.” Not itself the question. Contains the polymorphous questions. How are we involved in the project of alternative myth-making? is a more fancy way to ask, why does it matter what we here, in Tumblr-land, tell each other? Because, the Poetics of Squeamish Pleasure!"

—oxxenfree

So relevant to what I will call my “research interests” which are, in fact, the things I am researching in school right now in combination with the things that I like to talk about on tumblr: archiving the internet (especially archiving the archive of Internet) and how that can create a public memory (tumblic memory), the maybe opposite of “sedimented space” (excavating and then mapping shit that’s on the internet), very specific conventions of word-image relationships (not quite memes but not quite not memes), especially ones that become dated quickly (and how we remember/decide what makes a meme relevant in a time/place), how we synthesize all of this into a narrative history/memory of shit that happens on tumblr, and also Mark Hoppus songs about AIM.

(via rgr-pop)

DRAFT #3. most of the 400-something drafts are reblogs, and some of them i think about a lot but lost the momentum with posting and then it felt too late, but i still wanted it on my tumblr, and this is one of those. 

(Source: future-imaginary)

draft #2: i obviously didn’t post this because it sounds (is) trite and can only work as part of something a lot longer, or maybe not at all, and i feel like i’ve made this point in several different posts, but i can’t help it, i still love this story

one time when i was a teenager i once complained to my father that i couldn’t wait until everyone stopped acting like they were in high school. “oh honey,” he said. “everyone always acts like they are in high school.” i was appalled by this and for years felt like his worldview was irreparably dark. of course he is right and everyone always does act like they are in high school but the thing he didn’t tell me is that i would almost never care. i forgive him. 

draft #1: on the expediency and not of depression

tomorrow i am seeing one of my best friends with whom i have been friends since 1993. months ago, when i told him about the breakup and the hospital, he emailed me a summary of the sine-cosine waves of my mental health history. “you will bounce back” he told me.

totally. i mean, i did in 1994, the last time i had a major depressive episode. i was really depressed from the time i was about 12 maybe until about 21 or 22. i was on and off antidepressants for the last few years of college and for about five minutes during those nine months i lived in LA. 

there was this time a year ago when my ex-boyfriend and i were in my apartment and i was sobbing—i would like to note i’m pretty sure that he sobbed first—and was like “i never thought i would feel like this again.” this is true. i hadn’t been depressed in 15 years. no therapy, no medication, mostly getting flown to las vegas on a private jet for a private celine dion show and laughing with my then-boyfriend while watching paris hilton dance on tables at some party before she was famous and being an editor at the times and getting into a phd program. 

the scariest thing that has ever happened to me—way scarier than the actual hospitalization—was being depressed after being not-depressed. 

what really fucking sucked was that my ex-boyfriend would use his knowledge of the situation as a way to downplay his own shitty behavior. it wasn’t that he was an asshole for not bothering to take three hours of his life and move all of his ex-girfriends’ stuff into a closet or for endlessly promising me he would go on vacation, have dinner with my friends, go to the doctor and deal with all of his medical issues; the reason i was upset was that i was had a history of depression. 

like, okay. but i hadn’t been depressed for fifteen years. i mean, if you want to play that game, fifteen years ago he was an insecure nerd on the bowling team. (also i saw him cry all the time, and also punch a wall once, and i didn’t blame it on anything. i was just like, “wow, this fight is getting major.”) 

of course, when my father had to embark on his rescue mission—one patriarchy traded for another—he didn’t ask questions or blame me for anything. he said that during the brief moment when [redacted] and i were going to get back together he had told his wife “this is the worst thing that could possibly happen but i will support her no matter what.” but he also said something that i can’t even remember that was like “well, we know how it can be for you.” 

as my therapist pointed out, my family, and this particular boyfriend, have a way of abdicating responsibility—remember that time in college when i found out (again) that [redacted]—by saying that i have a history of depression. 

sure. let’s end with a quote from aliza again: “i don’t believe in crazy women. i only believe in bad men.”