destroy all humankind.
Hello! I am now realising that I am doing that thing again where I keep my drafts in my drafts for so long that a whole month has passed and I don't feel like posting that draft anymore. Sometimes I have too many things to write about, or the thing that I want to write about is too big, and I can't get the distance I need to actually form the sentences I need to be understood.
When I'm lucky, it just comes out as nonsensical, and sometimes I do end up posting those. Other times, I think I may sound too mean (?), because a lot of people (that is, NTs) seem to think that describing things and/or situations as they are is the same as criticising that thing or situation? But this isn't about that, because I'm going to ignore all the drafts.
Last December I wrote about how calling me by my birth name isn't a deadnaming situation, and generally it still isn't, but recently I've found myself flinching a bit when I hear or read that name to refer to me. And I think the main difference is, there are people I honestly don't give a shit about, aka the general public, who are free to call me by my birth name and use whatever pronouns they want for me, and there are people I've explicitly invited to use my correct name and pronouns for, and chose not to. (I'm not talking about people forgetting. Forgetting every now and then is normal and fine. No apologies needed.) And it's this latter group that's been making me feel unsafe around them.
In the earlier days of my buttondown newsletter, I think I wrote about the manga Our Dreams At Dusk and how it made me feel a kind of grief for my younger self for never finding this sort of queer community (I also once dreamed of creating a similar kind of safe space) - although I guess I did have more support than many teens in the same situation, I think, in the form of the witchbaby e-group.
I feel like I will forever wish to have that feeling of community again, but at the same time, may never find it - sometimes not because it doesn't exist, but because my anxiety when it comes to group situations kind of prevent me from actively seeking them out now. I don't know why or how I managed to befriend the witchbabies I did; perhaps this thing that prevents me from participating in group type situations hadn't taken root yet. (I have other theories, related to past trauma, but these are some of the things that are too big for me to be able to write about clearly right now.)
The reason I'm thinking back about this is another manga that I've been reading - Destroy All Humankind. They Can't Be Regenerated. This is a manga about two very different kids in junior high in the 90s (peak nostalgia!) that have one thing in common - their love for Magic: The Gathering. I started reading it for the MtG, of course, but as I read on, I got extremely invested in the characters, and wondered why this one local game store they go to aren't full of gross men that would harass (whether by being hostile, or by being pervy, or just making stupid misogynistic assumptions like "are you here to buy something for your boyfriend") anyone perceived as female that entered the store? Is this because it's a manga written by a dude in around 2017, so he would have barely noticed that stuff, and barely remember it if he did notice? Or is it because the gaming scene was just different in small town Japan?
I started reading this because I liked the premise - the manga is exactly the sort of shonen manga that I liked, using that "sports manga" formula where a character just delves deeper and deeper into something they loved and gets better at it. (I do realise that it's at least partly because these characters are "special interest" level obsessed, rather than just being "motivated" or a person with a fun hobby) Usually in this sort of manga, there's a school club where the members support each other as allies and rivals. For Destroy All Humankind, the kids had a game store, and its regular customers.
Like Our Dreams At Dusk, I found myself really wishing for this, and while at the same time I'm aware that game stores do exist here (albeit only in atas places) and they're a lot better than what they used to be like (judging from what I've seen on their social media, since those areas are still too atas for me), I know that even if it's next door - like the zine store Tokosue - I would be too anxious to actually go there, let alone talk to anyone there. So, it's less of a "I wish we have a [insert community here]", and more of a "I wish I was more extroverted" or "I wish I didn't have social anxiety", although the latter feels weird to say because as bad as it is for me, it's still not as bad as a lot of people with social anxiety. (It's the 'tism. I can mask it better because I have years and years of experience with masking.)
And why am I thinking about all this? Well, last night I had a weird dream. I don't know where or who I was in this dream, except I went to a place that felt like Pasar Seni, but not like how it is now - more like how it was in the late 90s, and I (or rather the person I was in the dream) was thinking of going to a store that was apparently a sort of punk collective that did comics and zines and ttrpgs (and ttrpg/comic zines). In the dream, the store was about a 25 min walk uphill from the train station... and looked like the Nazareth (which is a building in my high school, where my classroom was.)
The person I was in the dream had never been to the place but had always wanted to go, but were like me enough that they were too chickenshit to actually do so. So I decided to take a grab home... and the grab driver was someone who was a respected indie comic artist? (Not someone who existed irl btw.) And I was like, this person is working as a grab driver... while he was on the phone with some friends and he said he could give them a ride. While I was still in the car. He didn't even ask if it was okay? And three people piled in and he dropped them off to that nearby place that looked like the Nazareth, and realising where I was I asked if it was okay to stop there for a bit. The person I was in the dream ended up spending the rest of the day there, hanging out with a bunch of the store's regulars... and then I woke up feeling puzzled about dreaming all this at all, and coming to the conclusion that it must be because I've been reading Destroy All Humankind.
One of the drafts I abandoned was written on a day when I felt particularly haunted by Elisa Lam. If you don't know who she was - Elisa Lam was a 21yo Canadian student who disappeared while staying at the Cecil Hotel in LA, and whose body was eventually found in the water tank on top of the hotel. I was thinking about her blog posts, and ended up looking them up and rereading them, thinking about how some of them mirrored my own posts and journal entries from my late teens and early twenties. I wasn't as into fashion and art, of course - it was j-rock and folklore instead. I was thinking about the state of my mind when I was in Norfolk, of the times I used to climb the water tanks on the roof of our then-KL apartment, the times I reread Nowhere Girl. I think about the epigraph on Elisa Lam's blog - "You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life." (Chuck Palahniuk) and about how this is probably a common feeling for young people, although for some it never does go away.
Like, they say "it gets better", but sometimes it really doesn't. And sometimes, when you kind of want breakfast but only have 1.95, and the world is shit, and there's nothing you can do about it, zines and comics and ttrpgs are the only things that can keep you going.
Drink lots and rest more!! Think of me when you have breakfast and enjoy having food! :p