“I hate being an immigrant, I hate having depression, I hate being a inemotional socially progressive person, but I live comfortably with it and have no reason to hide it. If I can embed it into everything I say, maybe I can contribute to making the world a better place.”
As you are pleasantly or non-pleasantly or non-caringly aware, I tweet a lot of shit. Not only that, but I tweet a lot of peculiarity. Like that activist who makes everything about race, or that downer who constantly whinges about how their life sucks, or that person who makes your entire feed a bunch of D A N K M E M E S, I’m probably breaking a lot of Facebook etiquette.
There’s an old saying I’m pretty sure I didn’t make up, that “Nobody is as happy as they seem on Facebook, as outraged as they seem on Twitter, or as competent as they seem on LinkedIn”. In many ways, possibly through self-selection and possibly because most people who are similar to me who aren’t me are wise enough to know better, this is why I occasionally get one of the two assessments shot my way
Let me tell you when I first discovered twitter. I signed up and basically did nothing with it for at least three/four years. Because one of my current room-mates invited me to a hackathon in a gaming co-op space, I followed a couple game designers because I liked their games. And then it turns out they were trans. And it turns out they had really interesting things to say about identity politics. It turns out a lot of people who are completely fucked over by crystallized outdated identity assignments have some really interesting creativity and ambivalences towards fixed identities in general. One of them in particular publicly performed with a gender of dolphin. Someone declared their gender as dolphin. And they ran with it. Not as performance, not as an art piece, but as some dumbass shit they posted while taking selfies and playing video games and talking about their lunches and dates.
I thought that was really rad. And I realized that there was something there for me in that ambivalence and open disdain for such baseless assumptions that hold up the unit of existential knowledge. That’s when I decided I wasn’t human. I checked out. If someone’s gender could be dolphin, well then why did I need to identify as human?
Here’s what being human means to me. It means people would get upset when I didn’t understand concepts of empathy or social dynamics or priorities and say “but that’s just what we do, that’s what makes us human.” And in whatever argument or strife it was (I apologize for bragging but I feel 95% comfortable saying that even at my worst moments I was never purposefully hurtful even when I was inadvertently so) I always had to deal with being told that I was spurning invisible rules I could barely sense and whose composition I had no awareness of. And other people could barely express it, it was so ingrained in them. And they would disqualify me with their words … I would disqualify me with my acts.
Let me tell you what being an immigrant has been like for me. For me it’s been spending 20+ years living in a world where I’m playing a game with secret rules that everyone else knows. Or, if everyone else doesn’t know the rules, they at least know the rules exist. A lot of social interactions were like that, I could see people striving for values and I had no idea what they were. Whatever they were, they didn’t interest me (I suppose I had values of my own, though until university’s philosophy courses I didn’t really think about premises like that.) I have been bungling around those secret rules of childhood friendship. I have probably bungled these secret rules for adult friendships. I have bungled those secret rules for university. I have bungled those secret rules for relationships. I have probably bungled those secret rules for membership into the computer science mythos.
And here I am bungling them for how one writes status messages on Facebook.
Let me talk to you about my depression. It’s pretty light-weight, really. Every month or so, my brain starts sending out evaluations that I am one of the least valuable/qualified members of the population and that I bring nothing of value to anybody. It sends these out over and over and over again. Every action anyone else ever does is to be compared against my own, anything which they are is an accusation of that which I am not.
Then, as quickly as it started, it goes away. Usually there’s at least one sleepless night in which I have to deal with an entire life of having to deal with this, the only options seeming to be dulling medications or evasive manoeuvres. I think about the footprint of my legacy and how I yearn for it even while my above alienation from Your Secret Rules gives me no motivation to enhance your world in any way. Somehow I want very much both of these things, to not feel worthless by your rules (my interpretation of your rules) and yet I want nothing to do with your world.
But the way to achieve the former in those dark moments is to play by unappealing fragments of your fucking secret rules that I have reverse-engineered. The alternative, to disappear … well, there are logistical concerns. People would be sad. I’d need someone to take my lease and my cats.
Let me talk about that last line a bit more. It’s a taboo to be be that kind of unhappy. It’s a taboo to live with that level of unhappiness. That’s supposed to be a lowest point, a cry for help, the moment in which one goes out to seek help or change one’s life around or whatever. But you know, I will never change the secret rules of this world, the ones I am so at odds with. I will also never change the very clear rules of my brain, the ones which turn on and off the right chemical taps when it (at predicable intervals) pleases. I can react however I please to them, but they will always be there.
If you’re not depressed or an immigrant. I don’t expect people to grok this. Don’t even bother, these are my secret rules that you have no part in. Even as an immigrant or as someone who is depressed, I have to assume our experiences are different enough that I can only get perhaps an abstract sense. I can feel a limited kinship, but these are often the kinds of things we must face independently.
But not alone. Those people in category 2 … they friend me out of nowhere. They sit beside me having only seen me at social events. They read my twitter or Facebook and they flash me a secret understanding. “I know what you’re talking about. I’m glad you’re saying it.”
I don’t like talking about my good qualities. That’s goes against my Catholic brainwashing. So does talking about my struggles. If I don’t eat my life when there are children starving in Africa. Or women dealing with the glass ceiling. Or indigenous people and/or black people who I will rarely, if ever, see as a peer in my cushy professional class. Intersectionality has been a pretty great replacement for catholicism. Privilege is a pretty good replacement for original sin. If I believed in anything, I would be so thankful to it/them that the only oppressions I face are ones my own brain creates, and that I struggle in society because of its ambivalence, not its bigoted hostility. I’m so safe in this world, except from myself.
Let’s talk about safety. I’m basically a big burly white brown dude. My passion is working on the vehicles which is the easiest for modern capitalism to ride. I am rewarded quite well for my endeavours. I apologize for this boast but my layoffs are better than so many people’s employment. The secret rules that make me feel awkward kill other people, actively or through negligence.
If there is anything I should apologize for, it’s that I can’t use that safety to yell at the people who need to be yelled at. There are enough angry cis dudes out there, and all I’d do is accelerate the cycle of dark nights. I apologize for never helping to create works for the endeavours that would actually clear the secret rules But I can’t bring myself to learn the rules for those either.
But what I can do is use that strength to just walk around wearing this awareness. I can be nonchalantly open about how my depression works, in the hope that it will provide some kind of insight for those who can’t afford to be so open about it. I can be open about my alienation in the hope it enables the kindergarten understandings to understand the kind of people who truly suffer for our normativities. I can try to live a life where I refuse to enjoy so many of the things we’re “supposed” to enjoy to make ourselves comfortable, at the systematic expense of so many others.
I think I can even do that while enjoying myself. My discomfort is a thing I can shrug off into text, alongside pictures of my coffee-making, deliciously weird music, strange movies, a decidedly unapproachable programmer-punk aesthetic, and so on. My depressions are the embarrassment of bottles on a crowded bar; people might be shocked and disturbed that I have so many, but if I was drowning in it there’d be nothing unconsumed to display, right?
Every espresso shot is me triumphing against life; every day I understand computer science is a victory, every moment someone says “thank you for talking about the things you talk about” is a named reason to exist.
And I’m going to do that by being as honest about my opinion of my life as possible.
Let me summarize the above into a TL;DR
But lastly, it’s entirely possible that I inadvertently stress people out who don’t need that stress in their life. There are plenty of people on Twitter I respect who are rad in so many ways who I don’t follow because their manifesto and awarenesses of the world make me want to lie down and die. It’s entirely possible I’m that for you, and I’d encourage you to isolate yourself whenever you needed it.
Also, if you ever want to openly talk about stuff like this and don’t want to worry about saying or doing or thinking the right thing, I will help you out as best I can if you ask. I don’t know what I have to offer, but I will at least promise that my priority is to making the world a nicer place for everyone and making people feel more comfortable with their own self-conceptions over any form of correctness or expectation. Fuck it. I want this world to be a place where people can be at their worst at any time, where people’s bests always look out for everyone around them, and where people’s worsts can be had in such a way that nobody is hurt as the price of it.
That’s it. Thanks for allowing me this indulgence.