This (therefore) will not have been a blog.

i borrowed that sentence, the only full one you have read in this post so far, from Jacques Derrida. it is, this first sentence that is now one of two on this page, almost identical to the opening line in Jacques Derrida’s not-a-preface section, Hors Livre: Outwork, Hors D’oeuvre, extratext, foreplay, bookend, facing, *, prefacing that he published in 1967 (I think) but which i read in a book published in 1972 that is Barbara Johnson’s translation of Jacques Derrida’s french words. this paragraph is my citation.

naming things that look different feels important to me only because if i do not do that naming work then others might not recognize what i have done as different, in fact, they might not recognize what i have done at all which means my labour goes un-noticed and i might die, or risk not being compensated for my labour which is kind of the same thing i think because if what I do is not recognized by someone else as valuable labour then i can not earn money and we need money to live in this current stage of how we are told we have to live (not life but something like life, something close enough to life that so many of us do nothing about how we are not allowed to live) and so i name things that i have done by names that others are familiar with so that they might notice that what i did is the labour they we are supposed to do, like cite things from other authors, but it just looks different and i do this naming also so that they recognize my labour but also maybe so that i am allowed to exist or at least give myself a chance at being allowed to exist in the way that i need to because i’m usually told to ‘smarten up’ or ‘get over it’ or accused of ‘making unfounded knowledge claims’ or of ‘coasting’ (passing of my non-labour as labour i suppose and so clearly sometimes my attempts to allow myself space to exist backfire) and sometimes i’m told not to do things like ‘stop being so difficult’ or ‘stop over-complicating things’ or ‘stop being so sensitive’ or stop, stop stop, and because i feel invisible when i’m asked to do or not do something so that things can keep going on as planned without anyone ever caring about whose fucking plans or where the plans came from or what they are doing to us or them or our relationships between us and them, you and me, i and i, and why wasn’t i ever allowed to see these plans before i was expected to take them up as my own and i think i’m so sore because i keep bumping into things that others seem to just move around even when the things they move around are important but because they have the plans they are able to decide without having to decide about what is important to pay attention to and they laugh at me when i ask them to pay attention to something even if it hurts me when they don’t and so i continue to try (not) to exist unless someone wants to know about my pronouns or they’re scared i might need to use the bathroom and accidentally assault someone.

i remember when i was younger, i was the age where i would go out for a family dinner to a restaurant and i’m old enough to go to the bathroom by myself but not old enough to go to the restaurant by myself and so i suffer through a tense ‘family’ meal in public because this is what families do even though no one wants to be there or maybe its just me that doesn’t want to be there and i’m the only one suffering and i’m not sure we can really afford to be there and based on the way my dad acts about paying this bill it sure feels like we can’t but he talks about all bills the same way but that doesn’t make me any less confused about why we are at the restaurant to begin with if he can’t afford to pay any bills and i’m wondering if it was because my dad was sick of hearing my mom complain about having to always do the cooking and so he took us out to eat so that she didn’t have to do the cooking but restaurant food was harder to control because there is usually butter and oil and fat and i was scared of eating butter and oil and fat because i was told it “goes straight to your hips” and i didn’t want my hips to look big and i was scared of my boobs getting bigger and being skinny meant i could hide in baggy clothes two sizes too big or later it meant i could wear clothes two sizes too small and boys would like me which was proof that i exist but also that i was doing it right, that i was good and also my mom was so scared of getting fat that getting fat must be bad and because i needed to be good or else i would get grounded again or soap in my mouth or the belt on my ass or yelled at or told how disappointing i was or sent to my room without dinner or have something i liked get taken away i never knew what to order because everything seemed like it had too much fat in it and i couldn’t risk eating any of those things because i needed to be good and the tension of choosing something i didn’t want to eat and then sitting there knowing that i would have to eat it because i had to otherwise i would be accused of being ungrateful or of ‘something being wrong with me’ which meant i would be made fun of for not wanting to eat the thing that i didn’t want to eat and because the tension of sitting there in anticipation of the food i didn’t want made my body tense with vibration, i sought refuge in the bathroom.

i used to seek refuge in the bathroom. i could excuse myself and get up and go and i would sit in there, on the toilet looking for something funny written on the bathroom walls because phones to scroll weren’t a thing and so i would stare at the back of the stall door and when my ass went numb from sitting there i would get up, sometimes not even having peed at all, flushing the toilet paper i used to line the seat just like my mom had told me to do and then i would wash my hands two, three, four times while i stared at myself in the mirror wondering, scanning my body for an ounce of extra fat while avoiding the eyes of the person in the mirror because i couldn’t bear to face them because i knew that even if i worked hard enough to be better than everyone else, it would never be good enough because i didn’t really care about being better than anyone else, i just cared about wanting to be good enough so that maybe i could be left alone and this just meant that i had to be better than everyone else because otherwise i had no metric to know how good i was and so to be good enough meant i had to be better than everyone else otherwise i fell somewhere in the middle and i didn’t know how to judge whether the middle was good enough and being good enough was the only hope i had at being left alone so that i could do what i wanted to do even though i didn’t know what that was and so i would wash my hands at the same time that i would be staring so that if someone came into the bathroom i could look down quickly and they wouldn’t know how long i had been standing there for and I could finish the fifth round of hand washing and slowly dry my hands before using the paper towel to open the door because touching the handle is gross and head back to the table where the people i live with and who brought me here were sitting, waiting for me and my dad would ask me what took me so long and my brother would cock his head at me and chirp yeah, what were you doing in there and i would look at my mom who would say nothing but look at me with pity or worry or something but her look of expectation that i explain myself made me feel even shittier and then i would deny that i took long at all and claim that i was doing nothing and then everyone thought it was because i had my period and was doing girl stuff but was incompetent at doing the girl stuff i was supposed to know how to do (which i mean they’re not wrong i guess) and because they thought blood and vaginas are gross they didn’t ask any more questions and for tough guys they sure are scared of blood but i don’t know what my mom’s excuse was but the bathroom meant i managed to avoid table talks which made me more uncomfortable than the refuge of the bathroom.

disclaimer: i write like this a lot and never share it because i’ve been told that this type of writing belongs in a journal which i think is meant to mean that its not very good or worthy of others’ time and because i want to be good, i do what i’m told and keep it in my journal and for some reason, today, i decided that its not possible for me to waste someone else’s time simply by writing and sharing because they can choose what to do with their time and if they don’t want to read this then they don’t have to and i’m not forcing them to do anything with their time so please enjoy this as it is, or don’t and if you want to share this, i would actually love it if you did but don’t tell anyone that i want you to share this because they might think i think i’m worthy of sharing which i don’t, i just want someone to read my work and tell me that they liked it even if i won’t be able to believe them when they tell me.