Bloggage 12 June 2020

Bloggage

12 June 2020

A Friday

By

Alexander Gordon Jahans

Today is a good day and I have hope so I think it’s time for a status report.

The wheel turns but the story remains the same.

The world today is messed up. It’s dark joke at this point that the apocalyptic scenarios keep queuing up to strike us in 2020. Fascists, a global pandemic, swarms of locusts, murder hornets, erupting volcanoes, the list goes on. 

My immune system is compromised so I dare not leave the house and the world outside is simultaneously bright, sunny and beautiful directly outside my windows and filled with police sirens and screams on a global scale. I feel as if I am under siege, trying to hold out against a virus that my government is too incompetent to deal with.

I should be screaming, I should be crying, yet oddly nothing has changed for me personally, if anything psychologically I feel in a better place.

There are challenges to be sure. The lack of a reliable supply of diet coke is stressful and my autistic taste pallete has been annoyed at not having the right kind of tomato ketchup but that’s hardly life threatening. Even the lockdown fever caused by anxiety over the pandemic and not being able to get out and do stuff has not altered circumstances too much. That might sound absurd to my close friends who know the personal problems I’ve been going through but nothing I have faced has yet crossed the threshold into being as bad as when dad lived with us and I was still at school. It does sometimes feel like living in a continual social cold war with the doomsday clock edging ever closer to midnight but even if it did strike midnight it still wouldn’t be as bad as my childhood.

I have an increased sensitivity to the feelings I do have so I do care about the hell happening to people outside my little bubble of relative peace. It does make me angry and upset to see that shitheads are defending black face while others are protesting for an end to systemic racism and a radical change to the way the police force is structured. I hate that transphobes are using the cloak of a warped understanding of feminism to protect their bigotry. I feel so sad and angry for everyone who has died because of the coronavirus and this government’s pathetic response to it.

Do not mistake my own personal feelings about my own personal situation for a disregard of the suffering going on in the world right now.

That said. I feel weirdly at peace in my own life. I actually think that’s why I have days when I wake up feeling anxious for no reason. I have been mentally clenching for so long and now I finally feel able to rest and admit the pain I’ve suffered so I can begin to recover from it. Which sounds and feels so fucked up but I think it’s true.

Little has actually changed in how I personally live my life. Since leaving university and being stuck in my hometown I was left without a real life social life anyway and since the diagnosis of Kallman’s Syndrome I have felt unable to work and the nazi stalkers have left me feeling under siege. The pandemic thus provides a simple explanation I can give to anybody to justify why I can’t work, have no real world social life and feel under siege. It provides an easily understood coat of pain to my messed up life. Even my imposter syndrome can’t argue with a global pandemic.

So much of my existence for the last five years has been about avoiding people, distracting myself from my problems and never leaving the house and now people understand. I don’t have to give multiple lengthy explanations. Everybody seems to grasp not wanting to be infected by the pandemic.

In a weird and messed up way I’m not even that mad in retrospect about facebook calling it ‘hate speech’ when I swear about white people being shits. The practical consequence is that I have stopped injecting myself into the narrative and remind myself to be calm and just let people hear black voices. The last thing the wo9rld needs is more angry white men.

Undoubtedly however a large part of the reason my current existence is easier is that I finally have the gaming computer I always wanted. It means I have been writing less but because I’ve been writing less I’ve been missing my walks less. The one thing I truly miss about going outside. (Don’t insist that it’s safe to go for walks. I’m immunocompromised, I don’t want to take the risk.) I have a taller desk so I’ve been able to cycle on my minibike again and that has meant I have continued exercise. I do however have a treadmill on the way and the perfect place to put it so I can continue having walks soon enough.

The storm has struck and it will be with us for a long time but for now I am doing alright. Now if you will excuse me skyrim special edition awaits. I am an Argonian siding with the Dawnguard and the Empire.

Pride 2020

Before I begin I want to make clear that as I write this People are protesting the institutional racism of the police force and the horrendous brutality they employ against black people. I have been stalked by white supremacists and had to get the British police involved when they started sending things to my house. White supremacists have literally set up a wiki dedicated to harassing me and my family. They are complete and total scum who deserve to suffer. I am cis gendered and white so despite everything else I still have some relative privilege and I believe that Black Lives Matter.

Vote out Trump. Vote out the Republicans. Reform the Democratic Party to not be neoliberal conservatives and demilitiarize the American police force. If American people want to claim that I shouldn't get involved in their politics by suggesting that they follow their own damned constitution then I would remind them that it was American white supremacists who became obsessed with me. Being anti-fascist is to be human. Being anti-white supremacists is to be normal. I am not interested in debate or discussion.

Oh and if this does get posted to that white supremacist hate wiki about me and any neo nazi reading this I would ask that they think long and hard about what happened to the nazis in the second world war. Fascism is a con that is doomed to failure and pain for all concerned.

All that said here's my story of how I realised I was bisexual for Pride 2020.

Pride 2020

By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

As it's Pride I thought I would share my story of realizing I am bisexual.

2009 is the year I was reborn as a Doctor Who fan. It is also the year I started to grab a handle on my sexuality but given I was still years from knowing I had Kallman's Syndrome and getting treatment it was hard for me to feel anything for women, let alone the few specific kinds of men I'm into. Then Moffat's Doctor Who turned up.

It is no secret that I love Amy Pond but it was years before I realized there was a sexual attraction there. Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor however had me hooked from the start in a way I felt since primary school. There were always certain men that I looked up to , admired and wanted to be close to, wanted to like me. Given I was an autistic loner bullied by so many I thought it was just a desire for friendship. Whatever the case I felt that with Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor.

Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor is my taste in men. He is cute funny and innocent yet simultaneous capable of being calm, in control, ultra knowledgable and a flirty freak. He is slim, good looking and wears a suit well. He also is part of what I have since realized is as type for me: He is a trickster manipulator.

So Matt Smith's Doctor got me smitten and kind of turned on the heat underneath my sexuality so things could start to bubble.

Then I watched Farscape and fell in love with John Crichton. First it was the innocent "Oh I really like this character" then it was "Oh he's sexy and cute, I want to look like him" I started working out as I watched Farscape saying "I will be beefcake" then slowly I realized I was attracted to him.

It wasn't easy realizing my sexuality because this was happening during university when my parents began to finally separate and the nazi trolls were just starting to become obsessed with me.

I am still trying to understand myself and it is something that has to go on the back burner because the world keeps burning down around me. It's hard to focus on my sexual education and self realization when life keeps throwing shit at me.

General Election 2019

 You’re no use to me like this! - The Seventh Doctor

The dust has settled and the adrenaline is starting to fade. It is time to reflect. This cannot be remembered as just screams of outrage.

I haven’t felt such visceral anger since I realized nazis know where I live and were threatening my family. It’s as if all at once you are knocked to the ground and battered by the realization that your enemy is so much more dangerous than you thought they were. I am not a soldier or a politician. I am a man who gives a shit about the suffering of others and this result has left me so very very angry and depressed. I can’t fight this. I can’t stop this. There is nothing I personally can do to stop this.

The public have spoken and what they have said is alarming and depressing. I still believe in everything Jeremy Corbyn has fought for. I despise the centrists and I am so angry that the smug rich shits are smugly calling time on these moderate left wing values. We need these policies so much and I hate that so many are so stupid,. bigoted and selfish as to vote against it.

Ultimately though my rage can go nowhere and can do nothing. I am a volcano boiling away steam meaninglessly. I am a utilitarian. That’s why I stand by Corbyn’s policies. That’s why neoliberalism and conservatives baffle and anger me so. They stand in the way of all I see as logical and reasonable. Utilitarian Morality believes in the greatest good for the greatest majority. That same utilitarianism speaks to me now. I am no use to any cause I believe in, to anyone I believe in if I send myself mad raging at things I cannot change. Life has to continue. My strength will be needed for the times to come. I am not talking about any melodramatic political rhetoric either.

I have been so angry today that I have barely slept and have given myself RSI furiously playing Fallout 4 to distract myself from this. I am making myself ill achieving nothing. I have been telling myself over and over today that “I can’t do it.” That I can’t change what has happened. That is of course true but I can still live. I can still provide what little solace and support to those around me as I do bring. I can live and live as well as I can so that I am able to help those I care about. I am not the Doctor and I am not the Sole Survivor - as the player character of Fallout 4 is called - I can’t topple evil regimes or bring people together. I am not that important but I do mean something to a few people and those people would be the worse for my absense so I must continue. I must let myself be.

We may not be able to do anything about the terrible monsters we face now but we can try to keep living in hopes that together we can do something to stop the monsters later.

Toxic Masculinity

Toxic Masculinity
Or
Why Being Good Matters To Me

by
Alexander Gordon Jahans

I keep revisiting the guilt over that damned fanfic in my mind. I wake up at night thinking about it and wishing I could apologise. Wishing I could make it right. Everything I write seems to evolve into a reprocessing of my grief and guilt about writing it. Why? At the very time that was going down I was being diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome, suffering from depression and nazis, literal goddamned nazis were sending stuff to my house. Even my own father was taking his frustration at being divorced out on me. Yet it’s the fucking fanfic I keep coming back to.

Let me be clear, I am not a saint. At school I was bullied relentlessly and my own desperate frustration and anger caused me to have anger issues that would sometimes cause me to explode at others. In hindsight my naive crushing on women was perhaps expressed so awkwardly at college and university that while I know my actions never harmed anyone they may well have freaked people out. They didn’t know who I was and what I was capable of after all. So I have regrets, serious regrets, but it’s the fanfic that haunts me and I don’t know why. Why this thing? Why is this what causes me so many sleepless nights?

I think it’s because the fanfic is the clearest instance I can think of where my actions caused harm and I knew at the time that the inclusion of THE problematic scene was risky. This is like living with low level anxiety your whole life and one time you ignored it and things went disastrously wrong. Except did it really go disastrously wrong. The fallout certainly feels it but I have no proof that anyone was harmed by what I wrote. Indeed the person who most saw things wrong with what I wrote seemed an impenetrable strong personality that gave no fucks and just decided it was a messed up thing to have written that indicated things about my character. That’s the key though. The thing I wrote was stupid and I felt that was possible at the time and these people proved it then effectively decided that it was proof I was unsafe to be around. That I was unworthy and not a good man.

I regret many things about how I handled those events but I absolutely do not regret championing the cause of trans and/or non-binary people who want a safe space. People deserve to feel safe and if that means shutting me out then so be it. Safe spaces are important even if they are denied to me. I think though that it is the implication that I am unsafe, that I am not a good man that burns with me.

You see at university I went by Gordon Jones to distance myself from my family and my bad experiences art school but when I entered my final year of university I took up the name I had in school as a reminder to myself that I could survive no matter how bad it got. Alex Jahans the boy had survived more than a decade of relentless bullying and I knew I would need that strength when university ended. Becoming Alex Jahans again was a promise to myself that I would survive because it would be tough and I needed that strength so much because I had no idea just how much shit was waiting for me as university ended. The problem is that implicit within that promise was the idea that Alex Jahans is good, pacifist, he does no harm.

You see at school I was bullied by everyone and then I would get home and my father would scare the hell out of me with his shouting. Let me tell you the word ‘Sugar’ is goddamned terrifying when your dad is towering over at you and bellowing at the top of his lungs as he is literally foaming at the mouth with rage over some stupid bullshit. I defined myself as a pacifist and better than other people because I had to be.

The last few years have seen me come to terms with the fact that my memory works such that I can see through the cycle of my father’s abusive behaviour where my sister can’t. She sees the latest bridge of abuse to get past. I see every bridge my father has ever forced me to cross. I am not blind to the complexity of the situation. There are things I miss about him and he isn’t wholly evil and sometimes his actions are understandable. They aren’t justifiable. They aren’t normal. They definitely are not good or acceptable but sometimes I understand how desperation, frustration and anger has driven him to such actions. The problem is that none of the good of my father is worth a damn while his pattern of abusive behavior remains. He is a dangerous man and the bogeyman me and my mother define ourselves against.

One of the quiet joys of recent years has been watching how my mother has bloomed and developed into a different more rounded, happy and productive individual without my dad there to stifle her dreams, confidence and desire to improve things around the house. I am sure that part of my improving mood can be owed to fading scars of his behaviour. Slowly the effects of him upon our lives are being assessed for their worth with the bad parts being discarded and replaced with better stuff. We are healing.

So that’s why not being a good person cuts so deeply. That’s why the possibility haunts me. That’s why it used to madden me that I had no explanation for what they accused me of. Without an explanation of what I did wrong I can’t stop doing those wrong things, I can’t become safe again, I can’t become good again. Except maybe I never can. Not to some people. After all if you knew a man murdered someone once it wouldn’t matter how reformed he was you wouldn’t feel safe around him so why should a trans person feel safe around someone who once wrote transphobic things?

Even if there was some simple explanation that I could easily work with they don’t owe me that. Victims of oppression don’t owe their oppressors compassion and explanations, even if those oppressors did so accidentally. I fucked up and this is my mess to deal with. The problem is that I still don’t know how to deal with it. That cis privilege comes with ignorance of the perspective of a transgender person. I can do research but I can never truly know how it feels to be trans and/or non-binary so now every time I am around them I have anxiety that I am going to fuck up again and cause my social life to disintegrate and I know that sometimes when I ignore my anxiety things go very badly wrong.

This incidentally is why disagreements on twitter have caused me actual panic attacks before and why I have withdrawn from it. My autism means I am playing a continual game of Russian roulette whenever I talk to people online. If you fuck up and say the wrong thing in person you can apologise and learn from the experience. You fuck up and say the wrong thing on twitter or facebook and people will be sharing screencaps of it decades later.

Maybe that’s right? Maybe it is better this way but what the fuck do you do if your past is littered with such literary landmines of stupidity? I know myself and I know what I have or have not physically done but my autism means I can never be sure what I have said will be taken how I intended it. I have had other autistic people say they would not have made the mistakes I made. Has it been codified somewhere medically that autism causes a lack of social skills but always leaves someone mentally cognizant of any and all possible ways they might unintentionally be discriminatory or bigoted so such actions are definitively due to wilful bigotry and not unintended misunderstanding?

Heck there is another complexity to this that sometimes I have called women out for bigoted statements and they have called me sexist for daring to say a negative thing to a woman. How the fuck do I take that? What is the response to that? I am an autistic person with Kallman’s Syndrome and Growth Hormone Deficiency who has been bullied, abused and stalked by nazis. Surely I have a right, a duty, to call people out for being bigoted? At the same time I am a cis white man who likes women and was raised under the patriarchy so I am privileged and probably have some latent sexism, racism and heteronormativity to fight against.

This isn’t easy. Which is why I think the deconstructivist era of the 90s sticks with me. I don’t get to pretend I am definitively a good guy anymore. I have a black mark against my name and I have to live with that and the possibility that I might fuck up again. Women get to have golden age superheroes who are beacons of hope and love. Cis white men have to live with the complexity of being part of the patriarchy whether we like it or not and how we fight against that toxicity within ourselves and within our communities.

Right I’m going to get some tea.

Acceptance

Acceptance. It was my yearly theme. The thing I knew I had to work on this year. There are problems in my life, things I can’t change, they prevent me living a life I wish I had. I am alive and I have happiness in this life but with this happiness is always frustration at my inability to make things better. So this year I resolved to leave that frustration behind. There are still problems that I have to deal with as and when they come up, little things I need to work on but that’s fine. It’s the things I can’t change that hurt the most.

So much of growing up as a cis boy is to do with the myth of the heroic knight slaying monsters. Goodies defeating baddies. There is something ironic about a nation of boys with daddy issues growing up watching stories about heroes with Daddy issues. At university I wrote that TV raised me and my lecturers could not fathom what it meant. My parents weren’t neglectful about the physical stuff, not generally, but everything I learned that made me I learned from TV.

This is why I think it has been so hard for me to realize the extent of the complexity of the world. I grew up on narratives about heroes and villains. About monsters and victims. I grew up a victim of bullying and abuse therefore I could not be culpable of bad acts and did not have to examine myself because I had to be in the right as others had hurt me. That’s why I had that anti-feminist phase at university. The feminists hurt my feelings therefore I was the victim and they were the bullies, therefore all feminism was bad. The possibility that good people could do bad or stupid things, that bad people could have elements of decency or even that individuals could be complex and not so easily defined or predicted wasn’t within me.

Oh I thought it was. I thought I understood. I knew to be careful about not being violent myself in school. I said pointedly that I judge actions, not people, back before the shattered facebook group disintegrated. I thought I was so smart. When that group disintegrated I was scarred because how it broke apart left me irrevocably confronted with the fact that people are not so easily predictable. I felt hurt and betrayed by people who acted out against me for reasons they clearly thought were just and how things spiralled from then outside my control leaving me with no place to go. Someone had to be the bad guy and over the last few years I have oscillated back and forth because if I’m the bad guy then surely I should be dead. That is what happens to bad guys in fiction. Or they were oversensitive and cruel traitors in which case they were the bad guy so fuck what they think.

I was so convinced I was the victim after school and then I got bullied in college and university, nazis stalked me online and my own father gave me nightmares. I defined myself as the man who is moral in the face of abuse. I could not be wrong. I could not have acted immorally. I still don’t think that - knowing what I did then - that I acted immorally. Yet I demonstrably made the wrong decisions as enough people left me that they were presumably negatively affected and considered my actions immoral. They don’t write stories about the heroes offending people because of their ignorance online. I had no frame work for how to deal with this.

In a way this situation is typical of the problems I faced. A complex mess where I was hurt but I had no idea of how to proceed. My very apologising led my nazi stalkers to target the victim of my terrible writing. What little action I could do made things worse. I am still apologising to the air years later because of the negative consequences my writing caused. There is something bitterly, horrifically, ironic about how an incident where people accused me of being transphobic has led me to literally be anxious and afraid of trans and non-binary people. The person I wrote a 50k fanfic to I now avoid for fear of the memories and regret.

The reason I actually wrote a magic potion to make the body fit how you perceived yourself was because around the time I wrote that fanfic I had been diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome and had just been beginning treatment. I am a cis man with tits who needs regular painful testosterone injections. I have been misgendered and I know how deeply that cuts. I also have what the medical community has helpfully termed a micropenis. It’s like they named it for maximum stigma. I would gladly drink a potion made from shit, piss, vomit and jizz if it meant my body looked like it’s supposed to and worked like it’s supposed to.

I actually looked into penis enlargement and with current technology and medical experience you basically have to choose: Do you want a functional dick that feels everything or do you want a pretty, normal sized dick? So I’m sticking with what nature gave me.

I am not trans or non-binary (probably) but I have been misgendered and I do experience what I think is dysphoria. My experience is different. I wasn’t assigned the wrong gender at birth. I was assigned the right gender, my pituitary gland just didn’t work right so my body got confused and decided to present me with a feminine physique. The testosterone injections have massively helped course correct things but they can’t fix everything and I am still left with the mental scars.

Then there is the economic issue. So many of us are trained to think of disability in big simple obvious ways. Can you get up the stairs or can’t you? Can you walk? Can you physically do stuff? The thing I have realized is that my autism and low energy from Growth Hormone Deficiency (Another problem due to a bust pituitary gland.) have left me intellectually able to do some stuff but not psychologically able to do other stuff. It seems counter intuitive. I went to college and university. I clearly can do intellectual work to some degree. The problem is that college and university want to accommodate you ability to get the work done. Jobs aren’t. I just cannot compete in the current work environment because I can’t do phone calls, I can’t stick to schedules and I suck at bureaucracy and social skills. These are things I cannot do due to my disabilities. I am thus stuck on Universal Credit, unable to claim disability pay, unable to get a job.

If you have read any of these paragraphs and are thinking to yourself “Yes but what if...” then understand that such questions have been plaguing me for years. This is my life now. It may be fragile and it may be temporary but this is it and I think as the year draws to a close that I am accepting it at last and finding peace.

Bloggage 12 07 2019

Bloggage
12/07/2019

By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

I have had family round. It’s been great. Sometimes hard but great. Yesterday I slept near non stop, only waking briefly to use the toilet, let the cat in or out, take my meds, eat something and watch something to overwrite the still fresh and seemingly so important memories. I wondered why I slept so damned much but now I get it.

I am autistic and it is part of me but because it is an inextricable part of who I am I forget it’s there. Autism is like walking around with lime green skin that appears perfectly normal to you. You only notice that you have it because of how people react to you.

Socialising is hard for me. Social skills have to be consciously remembered and they are different for each person. With family round I have been very social and that has come at a cost. I was famished constantly while they were round but the last two days my appetite has been near non-existent. I thought it was a bug until I remembered I was like this before family stopped by to visit. My body was so consistently tired from the strain of fitting in that it raided energy where it could.

I do not regret the choices I made. I love my family. I love those I consider family. I know the choices I made to be present for them and I know they were not ungracious or selfish about it. We had a lovely time but that time is over now and real life resumes.

I am not yet at the stage of doing 5 mile walks every day, not least because of the heat and I fear my body shall require me to rest more yet, but I am better. I have rested and I am starting to piece my life and normality back together. My brain abhors routine but such stability as I have is being put back together.

I can’t go from nothing to normal in an instant. I need to let myself rest as much as my body feels necessary given that family time has clearly exerted a cost but I will start walking again. Short distances every few days at first but I will build up that muscle. Once my psyche has recovered from the social strain I need to reread the fiction I was working on and get back to the writing mindset. It won’t be easy. I know it won’t be easy. I will do it though.

I have reached the surface after a long time in the depths of socializing and I am happy to breathe clearly again in the light of a new day. Things will be okay.

A Good Day

A Good Day

A bloggage
By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

The last 5 months have been hard for varied reasons I can’t talk about. Those hard days are not quite over but the end is in sight.

To be present I have been playing pokemon. A game I can pause and quit quickly but is engaging enough I don’t go stir crazy. I completed Sapphire and FireRed then completed the Kantodex in LeafGreen and have now started on completing the Hoenndex in Emerald. I have been climbing mountains of my youth to tread water during these hard times.

My diet and lifestyle has been shit due to stress and I have not walked as often as I like to. It has made me anxious and fractious. Gorging on cheap food to keep my inner demons at bay because my family needs me.


Lately I have had a week of reprieve. Not a total reprieve because I had to get a testosterone injection done yesterday but I have had time to recover. It feels like slowly coming up to the surface from a deep dive, the pressure easing off day by day and I just took my first lungful of fresh air at the surface. I know events will send me back down again soon but for now the sun is shining and I can breathe easily.


I listened to the audiobook of World War Z during the last 5 years of chaos and darkness and have found myself relistening to it at another hard point within these trying times too. As a scarred survivor of abuse and embarrassing diagnoses I found applicable stories within that fiction that have helped me in these times. One passage in particular has struck me. When the survivors retook the American continent from the zombies they started the crack up and lose it. The people who survived the Z war were hardened people who could take this grotesque world but what made them lose it was realising that they were home and victory, normality, was in sight. When terror is all you know peace holds a nightmarish quality all its own. Like a non-newtonian liquid melting away when it stop being struck.

I feel that tension today. After 5 months of particularly bad poverty and utter shit happening there is peace and relative plenty. I can relax for the first time in so long. I will not panic about the change or allow myself to melt under this reprieve from stress though. I am going to listen to Cortex and go for a walk. today is a good day.