You Don't Have To Be Perfect

You want to be perfect.

You have the image in your mind of a Justice Warrior who does everything right. Justice Warrior has absolute clarity of moral vision one hundred percent of the time, and invariably acts on this clarity in a way that is unimpeachably perfect: perfectly intersectional, perfectly respectful of the dignity and worth of every human being, perfectly right. Justice Warrior never fucks up. Justice Warrior has fully extirpated all internalized -isms and never perpetuates oppression in any way. Justice Warrior never runs out of spoons.

And Justice Warrior is overflowing with love for all people. Justice Warrior is so sensitive to the needs and feelings of others that Justice Warrior can enact the righteous work of ending oppression without hurting anyone's feelings. Justice Warrior knows that love and justice are not in opposition, and walks a perfect balance of combating systemic issues and educating individuals; of radicalism and meeting people where they're at; of righting wrongs and connecting with people; of justice and love.

You will never be perfect.

You can't do it. You can't be the perfect radical, you can't be the perfect friend, and you sure as shit can't be perfect at both.

You need the imaginary Justice Warrior. You need this picture in your mind, as something you can strive toward (even knowing that it is unrealistic and you will never get there). You need at least the concept of perfection, to feed the fire for love and justice in your heart.

But also – and this is crucial – when you're feeling crushed by your own expectations, when you're constantly feeling like an utter failure because you can't possibly measure up to the image of perfection in your mind, you need to remember:

You don't have to be perfect.

Refiner's Fire

This Lenten season, I have given up self-loathing.

I'm doing okay so far. Not great, though I never expected to stop hating myself altogether – you don't lose the habit of a lifetime just by deciding to give it up for Lent – but I've at least managed to steer clear of wallowing.

In the week or so running up to Ash Wednesday, it was very, very bad. Curl-up-under-my-desk-and-sob bad. Sit-in-the-back-seat-and-cry-silently-to-myself bad. When I get mired in it like that, it's very difficult to extricate myself, because it's self-perpetuating: I hate myself, and then I hate myself more for being so self-absorbed as to be thinking about how much I hate myself... It feeds itself.

So on Ash Wednesday I said to myself sternly: This ends now. For the next forty days, there will be no wallowing.

I've kept to that resolution pretty well, I think. Usually it present itself as a very stark choice between paths – THIS WAY TO THE QUAGMIRE OF SELF-LOATHING – and I just have to force myself to pick the sunny one. (No, inner voices, you're the worthless pieces of shit.) Unfortunately, I have not yet found a way to shut off the constant lower-level white noise of self-hatred that accompanies my every waking moment.

It feels as though that low-level stuff has stepped up its game in the past couple of months, but I don't think this is actually the case. I think what's happened is an increase in my self-awareness, to the point that I am now fully cognizant of (a) just how much self-loathing I've been carrying around in my brain-holder and (b) the possibility that maybe I should be trying to change that. (I also blame heightened self-awareness for the amplified gender identity struggle, which is not an entirely separate issue from the self-loathing one.)

This is not easy. Externally, my life is as close to perfect as it's ever been, and maybe it's because I feel I don't deserve such happiness that I torture myself so.

Fiction used to be enough. For at least a dozen years now, I've had one particular ongoing fictional world in which I spend at least a little time every single day. It sufficed as a channel, a coping mechanism, for my self-loathing (and, actually, some of my gender issues too). But lately that's not enough. I can't funnel it all into a world of my imagining anymore. I can't pretend my brain is made of tiny boxes. The walls are coming down, and I don't know what to do.

But, in my moments of optimism and faith, I can believe that what I am facing right now is the refiner's fire, and that I will be purified.

You Are A Boring, Selfish Jerk

It's a fundamental tenet of my theology and my anthropology that admitting you are a boring, selfish jerk is the first step on the lifelong road to not being a boring, selfish jerk.

The trouble is, sometimes I find myself unable to take any other steps.

When I haven't written anything in a while, it's usually because I've been getting bogged down in self-recrimination. There's no point. I have nothing to say. God, I am such a boring, selfish jerk.

External validation doesn't really help. In fact, my psyche can get quite creative in trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of, say, having many awesome friends whilst knowing myself to be a boring, selfish jerk. At best, I am cheered that I have at last developed some ability to pretend to other humans that I am not (entirely) a boring, selfish jerk.

After all, what is human interaction but a continuous endeavor to pretend to one another that we are not (or, to put it less cynically, to try not to be) boring, selfish jerks?

And how am I supposed to live out the sacred mantra Be True To Yourself when even I can't stand my true self?

I think seminary probably has a higher-than-average concentration of people who loathe themselves. I think an acute awareness of and furious frustration with your own total depravity can be a very powerful motivating factor to orient yourself toward the Ultimate.

Sometimes, though, it swamps you. It's not that life doesn't go on. It's not that you don't still have plenty to enjoy and be grateful for. It's just that you go about it all stooped under the consuming burden of self-knowledge. And what are you supposed to do with that?

What do you do with all that self-loathing?

27 Days Later

That's all I fucking need, I think furiously. I check my planner: 27 days. Lately the intervals have gotten a few days shorter, hovering around the textbook 28, but flow duration is still longer than average. I've had 17 days off.

Looking at my planner, I remember what I thought last month, and the month before, and the month before that: That's all I fucking need. I think back over the past decade. Ten years – that's approaching half my life – I've been putting up with this monthly exodus of dark matter, and not once have I been able to feel anything remotely positive about it.

Every month: That's all I fucking need.

Fifteen years old, in the bathroom, crying and cursing my body for its monthly betrayal, uncontrollable, infuriating, pointless. Twenty-one years old, in the bedroom, being upbraided by my girlfriend for my squeamishness about bodily fluids. All the years in between, growing into feminism, learning to deconstruct my internalized misogyny, reading Steinem, finding out that many women see this as something empowering, something beautiful, something to celebrate.

I don't find it empowering.

I don't find it beautiful.

I don't want to celebrate it.

I'm utterly sick of trying not to hate it. I'm sick of trying to locate some essential femininity in it. Sick of trying to see it as emblematic of the life-giving facility of the female body. Sick of trying to view that same facility as a source of power rather than a source of visceral horror, something I would gladly relinquish given half a chance.

I hate it, this thing my body does. I want to be rid of it.

Dear NBC: About Community

No rational human could deny that our world is a very sick and broken place. (Well, maybe some dead white guy could.) Wars rage; people are beaten and raped; children die of preventable diseases; vast social and economic injustices crush lives in every way, from the smallest microaggressions to the ongoing famine no one is talking about in the Horn of Africa.

Yea, this brief tragic life is a vale of tears.

And yet, in the midst of all this horror and suffering, there arise, like shimmering soap bubbles on the wind, tiny glimmers of hope and beauty. These small moments of grace must be cherished like the fragile butterflies of love and happiness they are – not trampled under the jackboots of dream-crushing.

Community is one of these delicate flowers of blessing putting forth tentative blossoms of joy on the dung-heap that is this world. Last year I proved, using the most stringent scientific method, that Community is the best sitcom on television, and everything I said then holds true with cherries on top.

NBC, I understand that you are a business. Profits are your priority, and in comparison to the other three big networks you are struggling. But please, spare a thought for the bigger picture. In these times of unprecedented corporate greed, when the spiritual and artistic aspect of human existence has been almost entirely subsumed by the money-grubbing of the wealthiest among us, it is absolutely vital that Art be fostered wherever it raises its precious head.

Will future generations judge us on the profits we posted for this quarter, or on the lasting legacy of sublime emotional truth we produced?

Community is a flickering candle-flame in the long dark night of the collective human soul. For all our sakes, don't snuff it out.

BRB, Sobbing Forever

"'Community' Benched".

'COMMUNITY' BENCHED.

Excuse me. I... I need to be alone right now.

(And yes, I know it's not technically canceled yet, but springs to mind something about writing and walls.)

London Riots, Media Narratives, "Scum"

I used to trust the media to tell me the truth, tell us the truth

But now I see the payoffs everywhere I look

Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?

Revolution calling...

--Queensrÿche, “Revolution Calling”

First of all, that is an awesome song off a seriously awesome record. Second of all, it is some cold hard TRUTH.

One of the things I love about social media is its ability to tell us what's really going on. The more I engage with the blogosphere, the more I understand how mainstream news sources are all skewed to a certain framework. It's not a great conspiracy; it's not even necessarily a bad thing – it's just that every part of the media has an agenda. Value-neutral example: earlier this year, when all the US news sources I follow were glued to the protests in Wisconsin, the only US-related item in the BBC evening news was coverage of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. That's because the BBC's agenda is to be the British Broadcasting Corporation, so it skews Britain-centric. What's important is to be aware of the skews and biases in the media you consume – and, ideally, to vary your news media diet enough that you can piece together a picture of the world by seeing it from different angles.

What's astonishing to me is how many people I know are uncritically consuming the mainstream media narrative of the London riots.

David Cameron has called them “criminality, pure and simple” and promised a tough response. An awful lot of people are being very vocal about their agreement with his rhetoric and his tactics.

For days now my Facebook feed has been flooded with snarling, reactionary calls for the protestors' blood. When I posted a request for people not to use the nasty, dehumanizing, highly prevalent term “scum”, I got a wealth of “but they ARE scum!” responses.

Now, I joined Facebook when I started university, so my Facebook friends are primarily people who are attending or have recently attended one of the world's highest-ranked universities – which is a nice way of saying that my friends are predominantly white and middle-class. And, as much as it sickens but doesn't really surprise me to see the awful violence spreading across England, I'm sickened but unsurprised to the same degree to see my Facebook friends spew hatred and violent rhetoric about the rioters.

I don't condone the violence. Obviously. But the braying self-righteousness of these responses is indicative of people who don't want to try to understand. They're not prepared to engage with the complexities at hand. They're not willing to examine the socioeconomic and political contributing factors. It seems to me that they just want to point the finger at looters and arsonists, declare their moral outrage, and sit back feeling smug that they would never act like those scum.

Well, how the fuck do you know that?

Youth unemployment is over 20%. Not everyone can get into a top university and rely on the mater and pater to support them financially (speaking, I hasten to add, as one who did and is doing exactly that). Not everyone can broadly trust the police to not kill them. Not everyone is white and middle-class. Who the hell are you to judge people “scum” when you haven't even tried to understand where they're coming from?

To you, it's just teenage hooligans embracing their greed and lust for violence. To you, it's just mindless criminality. Why not consider the decades of disenfranchisement and poverty, the long-term unemployment and feelings of hopelessness? Do those not factor in at all?

Read this article. Read the comments on this Shakesville piece. Try thinking critically about the narrative spoonfed you by the media-political complex. And chew on this for a second:

Though I'm a peace-loving, Jesus-loving, violence-condemning hippie radical of the far left, it's not the riots that are making me despair for humankind. It's you.

Oh, London

I may have grown up in Alabama and Kenya and Scotland; I may be about to move thousands of miles away; I may have spent only about 15% of my life there - but, if there's anywhere in the world I consider home, it's London.

London! The very name sets my heart beating faster. City of culture unparalleled. City of sprawling humanity. City of my life's significant moments. City full of my friends and relatives.

Oh, London. Looking on from the outside, I don't understand what is going on; but my heart is very much inside you, burning as you burn, breaking as you break. Plague and fire, 7/7 and Blitz: every threat you've outlived has left you shattered, yet stronger.

I'm afraid and I'm appalled. I can only pray that people will come to their senses. I can only pray that the ones I love will be safe. I can only pray that my beloved city will cope.

London, my London... Be strong. Have faith. Bear up. You are Neverwhere, you are Un Lun Dun, you are Mother London. You are London. There's nothing you can't face down.

On Norway

My heart goes out to Norway at this time. All the people who lost their lives, all the people mourning loved ones, all the people whose world was rocked by this violent atrocity – may peace and comfort be with you all.

It's my prayer that we in the world can look to this horror and learn from it, so that some sliver of good can be forged from the hurt and death.

I hope other countries – particularly the US – will be moved to take seriously the threat of terrorism from fundamentalist Christianity.

I hope Islamophobes will be led to understand that Islam is no more an inherently violent religion than Christianity is, and that religiously-motivated acts of hate and murder are always the work of sick individuals twisting and distorting the name of Love.

I hope moderate and progressive Christians will feel compelled to speak up, condemning unequivocally the brutal distortion of our faith and all the inflammatory rhetoric that paves the way for actions like Breivik's.

I hope Europe will take to heart the terrible cost of far-right extremism, especially those parts of the continent that seem to have forgotten what happened last time it was allowed to gain a foothold in the West.

Come on, humankind. Let's try to do it right this time.

That's The Thing About Living In A Capitalist Kyriarchy

You have to participate.

Unless you're one of the lucky few with the ability and the spoons to opt out entirely (and probably even if you are; I've not visited any self-sufficient, totally egalitarian collectivist communes lately), you're not only psychologically tainted by the bullshit kyriarchal norms into which the culture has been indoctrinating you from the moment you left the womb/test-tube/mothership [delete as appropriate]; you also have to actively participate in oppressive systems. By which I mean, you need food and shelter and healthcare and entertainment; for which you need money; for which you need a job.

More and more, I'm convinced that capitalism as we know it is fundamentally not an okay system, and it's not just 'cause I'm lazy. (I am, but I have ideological objections too.) I'm still in the (probably lifelong) process of forming my exact political beliefs, so I'm not yet sure whether my objection is to capitalism as currently implemented – the “it's a good theory, but doesn't work in practice” line so often applied by left-leaning moderates to communism – or (hello, Karl) to the very theory and idea of capitalism itself. At this end, I suppose it doesn't matter terribly: either way, I'm compelled to participate in and contribute to a system I think is profoundly wrong.

What I want to do is establish a coherent ideology for myself, and seek ways to enact that ideology in the world. (Isn't that what we all want?) In order to do that, I'm going to grad school, which means I'm participating in and shoring up a classist and discriminatory system. (By “discriminatory”, of course, I don't mean the practice of discriminating between those with the aptitude for graduate study and those without; I mean the complex network of socioeconomic circumstances that contrive to deny aptitude its fulfilment.) In order to go to grad school, I need to save money, which is why I currently have a job.

Don't get me wrong: I quite like my job. I know, it weirds me out too, especially since my first experience working in the world of customer service was so completely disgusting – but that's a story for another day. My current job is pretty decent; but sometimes my ideals are clashing headlong with the requirements of my job.

I want to call out my 70-year-old coworker, of whom everyone – managers included – is a little afraid, when she's being racist. But I don't. I want to beg everyone that asks for a ticket to The Hangover Part II to reconsider this disastrous life choice and instead see a movie that isn't quite such a hatefully offensive piece of garbage. But I don't. I want to give servicemen and -women the same discount we give students, because having a student discount but no military discount strikes me as classist. But I don't. I need to keep this job, and I need a good reference when I leave, so I keep my mouth shut, I don't rock the boat, and I betray my beliefs so that I can continue to participate in a system that is also against my beliefs.

Is it craven? Undoubtedly. Is it pragmatic? Absolutely. It's compromise; it's jumping through hoops; it's a deal with the devil.

It's living in a capitalist kyriarchy. It's how it works.

A Question

Do you ever wish you could just switch it off? Just stop caring? Do you ever wish you could dial the empathy right down to zero for a day?

Do you ever wish you could sit down at the computer and not feel the obsessive urge to watch The Rachel Maddow Show and check AlterNet every ten minutes? Do you ever wish you could swear off the social justice websites for a while, and only read about pop culture and funny kittens?

Do you ever wish you could read about Western foreign policy without a welling sense of shame and dread? Do you ever wish you could contemplate worldwide human rights abuses without feeling sick to your stomach? Do you ever wish you could accept war and poverty as unfortunate but unchangeable facts of life?

Do you ever wish you could walk past a homeless person without being swamped by guilt and sorrow? Do you ever wish you could pass the sick kids' hospital without feeling your eyes fill with tears? Do you ever wish you could witness the gap between rich and poor without raging against the injustice?

Do you ever wish you could watch a TV show without internally criticizing its depiction of people of color? Do you ever wish you could see a movie without wishing for better representation of women? Do you ever wish you could engage in feminism and LGB activism without getting incensed by the frequent erasure of trans* people?

Do you ever wish you could stop caring?