08.01.020

Schooling taught or fostered in me a need to detect and recognize patterns; analyze. It took away the feeling, the gentleness, the human need to get lost in and carried away by a story. We had to smash beautiful things and pick them apart to find their atomic nature, the singular key to beauty, what exactly it was that made us feel. There was no emphasis on the feeling.

Recognizing incongruencies in patterns today gives rise to indignance and anger, and-- because of traumas and life lessons (in kindergarten, I once killed a guinea pig with malice flickering in my veins and severe guilt and emptiness following after), I have also learned to subvert anger into sadness, turning it in upon myself so as to not externalize harm.

I am now poised to let anger go when it does not serve me. I am willing to learn to feel it, and let it pass, without holding on to it. It is acid eroding my organs, voltage shorting out my synapses, hot metal crisping my flesh. I have ground away too many teeth, my jaw now misaligned (that may be from ten years of too much serotonin and not enough queering of the self: where is my gentleness, where is my vulnerability, where did I leave the child who didn't need to understand everything first, and quickly, and well-- where is the kid who was terrified to leave his mom and dad, where's the kid who could cry, who WOULD cry, where have my tears gone).

I learned to survive. I learned how to perform, to be not myself, to recognize and reproduce patterns for my then, current, and someday foreman-- I got rid of the feeling, and I want it back. And I've been made a weapon; I've been turned vitriolic, volatile, yet I retain that atomos-self; I have contained within me, all this time, the knowledge to rebuild.