Thoughts surrounding a first published work...

[makz]

Whoa, it's out. It's done. If putting it somewhere other people can read it is the last step in writing something, I have, for the first time, finished a piece of fiction meant for other people to read.

I'm 37 years old and publishing my first fanfic.

The creator of the original work was 37 years old with many other shows under his belt when he came up with two of those characters. I'm not really winning, if it's a contest (lol), but I'm very grateful for the inspiration, for the little push to put something of myself out there.

In the interim between finishing and now, a couple of things have happened that coincided with the things I was trying to get across to myself, while writing it.

Firstly, a certain manga author posted on social media that they were feeling, as a creative, that they couldn't figure out with whom responsibility lay, to change society, and were dragged down by those thoughts. An author commented on that post, saying, "It's fine to deploy your AT Field and sleep for a while."

That was probably the advice I most wanted to hear.

I read that, felt a little better about life, and two hours later heard that my country had once again bombed a country in the Middle East. Suddenly, I am thirteen years old and wondering if my male classmates will be conscripted, and why none of their parents seem particularly concerned with any of that. Why am I, who am actively being bullied by most of their sons, the only one who cares whether they live or die; whether they become murderers or live peaceful lives?

In the present, where I am 37 years old, I'm doing well, and that gives me anxiety. What right do I have to do well, right now? In this country, under this government? What right do I have to go to work and eat food and sleep at night and wake up in the morning and act the same as I did last year and the year before, and have it finally mean something for my future, to finally be making enough money that I'm not constantly nervous about whether or not I can keep myself fed?

Is it really okay to sleep through the night right now, like this?

It's unsatisfying to hear the advice that I should take care of myself first, if it comes from a well-meaning and loving relative who once told me that we had ought to turn some other country into a wasteland to satisfy our own collective desire for revenge. I have no intention of listening to that kind of self-serving logic.

I was raised better than that, I would like to say.

My anxiety is kind of tied up in the fact that, to help, it seems I need to be in one place, it seems I need to be part of a strong community, and maybe in the past this would have been possible for me, but now I'm just floating around from city to city for work, without even bothering to set up internet in my apartment, because how often can I expect to spend time there?

The people who are doing the big things are all fancy people with higher degrees who have infiltrated political scenes full of insufferable people with terrible attitudes towards their fellow man, and the people who are doing the small, consistent, perhaps more meaningful things are all housewives who have availability during the weekday because they don't work 9-5 jobs. That's how it seems to me.

So if I had been able to perform academia properly, I might be in one camp (but I failed), and if I had been able to perform heteronormativity properly, I might be in the other (but I didn't even try that hard), so I'm just tracing the steps of businessmen who killed their hearts. I don't even get to be a part of a counter-cultural animation production crew or something; I'm just making the ones and zeroes go vroom.

This is all unfair. It's unfair to me and it's unfair to everyone who is making it work, helping out somehow, despite being in neither of those camps.

I'm not about to make myself the main character; my assistance wouldn't be essential to anything one way or another. The proof of that is that I did fail spectacularly to make any inroads into having the kind of community that would make me useful to a greater whole. I'm an awkward introvert at heart, I'm a traumatized child at heart, I can't trust people like that at heart, and I thought we had the kind of social contract that would allow me to just coast along in the background, playing around at the whims of my inner child in my hard-won free time from being a corporate drone.

But it feels bad.

That relative, who gave me the advice I can't feel in my bones, was a soldier once. He didn't see active duty or anything, even though he was deployed during a war. But to some extent, I've always wondered if just going through basic training warps your perception on what might be considered a "reasonable response" to violence.

I tried writing a little bit about that, too, in the thing I published. Then, today, this article came out.

I've been keeping a lot of notes, mostly about the inside of my own thought processes, since before this second go-around under this administration, coinciding with becoming a big fan of this robot cartoon about human connection and violence. The fact that I was able to publish anything at all, for the consumption of others, is a result of all of that careful note-taking, constant rumination, consistent attempt to communicate some idea outside of myself.

Well, that article was all about the PTSD that comes with both being a soldier and with sitting in a society that keeps doing this to its young people. Those young people who, yes, make choices about enlistment, none of whom are forced at gunpoint, none of whom are threatened with prison should they not enlist.

Teenagers are not children. But, in so many cases, teenagers and children alike are kept from autonomous action, are objects instead of subjects, and are forced into situations in which self-advocacy is impossible. The brunt of my own trauma is the result of being unable to simply make choices that could have eased my own suffering, or of having other people see me as a somewhat disposable prop in the background of their own lives rather than a living human being with feelings and thoughts outside of themselves.

Maybe the world would be more just if we let teenagers make choices about their lives, and if we let children decide whether the place they're in is the place they ought to be. Certainly, several of the situations to which I was subjected would have been alleviated if I could have simply stood up and said, "I'm not going to this school anymore; I'm not going to this doctor anymore; I'm not doing any of this anymore. I'll help you figure out alternatives; I've given you alternatives, so let's explore some alternatives, because I'm done."

But at the same time, the only thing that kept me from also enlisting in the military was that a friend said they'd cut me off forever if I made such a short-sighted choice. At the time, I more or less knew that I didn't have the wherewithal to figure out how to graduate college as a first-generation student. I couldn't figure out how to work with the administrative staff to fill out the credits necessary for this or that transfer plan to this or that four-year school from a community college. I couldn't figure out what to do if a class filled up; if my problems with chronic illness kept me from one too many classes; if I just hit a wall somewhere.

Compared to all that, the prescriptive nature of the military sounded easy. If they would take me, broken lungs and nonexistent immune system and all, maybe I could have some kind of certification or degree or path to such a thing, at least, at the end of all of that. But my friend told me, "I'll never speak to you again," and that was more important to me. We're still friends today. I do not have a four-year degree. I don't regret not having a bachelor's degree more than I'd have regretted joining the military, surely. But also, not all teenagers have good friends like that, and not all teenagers trust their friends to that degree.

(Even as an older twenty-something, military-sponsored offerings targeted women who were interested in cyber-security, promising fully-paid specialty programs; probably single-track, guaranteed open-seat classes; which sounded like a dream to me. I considered simply not telling that friend, going and doing whatever time was required of me, and misreporting my location and activities for a few years, but I am inherently terrible at subterfuge and only ever tell anyone the truth. I have no practice at all when it comes to lying.)

So it's also true that many teenagers lack the perspective to make choices that won't destroy them by inches or all at once. And to say, "but it's still more inherently just to let them decide for themselves" is probably insufficient, as a strategy to actually look after future generations.

I think it's probably a holistic problem that needs holistic answers, and until all of society changes, all of society won't change. I also think that the fact that we keep being blocked from progress as a society is a largely astroturfed project of a few very wealthy people with their hands on the levers of power, and I'm not nearly as nice of a person as the author of that article, even though I understand their logic.

I decided, in the first place, to try publishing something because I don't know how long I'm going to be able to keep watching all of this happen. It's only been 37 years. Maybe I'm definitionally impatient. But I feel like, if I'm going to try living, I might as well live loudly, because who knows when I'll decide to stop. The more society falls apart around me, the less I want to participate, so while I can still keep my eyes open, I'll try to leave something of myself in this space. Maybe all that will do is train some computer algorithm on how to whine at a certain pitch. I don't know.

But even though I don't feel like celebrating the fact that I finally published something, that other people are seemingly enjoying that something, the fact remains that I did publish something. I did something. It's probably very ineffectual. It's probably completely unrelated. It's probably just a brief and insignificant weakening of a single person's AT Field for a single instant, which will largely go unnoticed by anyone. But maybe I'll force myself to live long enough to do it again. Maybe I'll keep doing it again and again until I am an octogenarian; who knows.