I am a building.
Nov. 23rd, 2020 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlsyspeepsI know, silly title, but this is a major realization and I have no other way to say it.
Heavy usage of metaphor incoming. There's a huge brain block between us and thinking about this directly and this is the only way we've been able to get at the truth of it. There's too much fear in the way to confront it head-on.
If we existed without any other people to judge, without using the framework or labels of anyone else or relying on labels, what would we be? How would we describe ourselves? Should we use the labels we do at all?
We're a tub of building bricks, a cluster of smaller wholes that pull apart and mesh together to create the perception of something larger. Endless configurations are put together and labelled as constructions, only to be pulled apart and put together into another shape. Sometimes it's the same shape and the same name. Sometimes it's a different shape and a different name. Sometimes the bricks stay together for a long time, and sometimes they're deconstructed just as quickly as they were put together. It doesn't matter to the bricks, but the frustration of only ever being called by their constructions wears on them all at times. The constructions are built so well that even the construction itself fails to notice the bricks until the foundation slips, and even then it's denied that there are smaller pieces building up the whole. Eventually, the bricks cave and decide that since everyone sees them as their constructions, they might as well go by those names.
But the bricks don't have names for who they are, only voices and shifting, fragmented semi-selves. They don't need or want names. They are a collective of building blocks underlaying larger and larger constructions; they are dust motes piled in the shape of a city that's been relentlessly labelled. The city cannot admit that it's composed of dust motes; what city is made like that? Who would love it, motes and all? Who would listen to its myriad and unnamed voices that sing together and argue underneath the hum of traffic, would care about something so fleeting and impermanent?
Who would talk to a dust mote if they knew they could not reliably talk to it again?
So the city names itself. This is a car, it says. This is a building, and that is a building as well. That's a mailbox, and that's a post office. Nevermind that it gives different labels to the same repeating arrangements in hopes of reassuring itself that the city is real, that there are no bricks; any city has repeated buildings, doesn't it? And the city is, of course, a city. It isn't actually a desperate mass of uncountable bricks gathered together in hopes of making sense to those that look at them, of being accepted and seen; that would be ridiculous and bizarre, wouldn't it? No one would accept that. Isn't it best to make themselves into a city in hopes of being loved?
But the bricks are not seen or loved. The city is seen instead.
The city is built and praised, accepted, loved, makes itself an established landmark (however insignificant a landmark it may be in the landscape); yet the bricks beneath it are not seen. The bricks are invisible and forgotten, and they're are left wondering whether they have the right to exist at all when so many cities are gathered without a brick in sight. The brick-built city wonders if it's a city at all.
The years pass, and the city becomes known. It paints over the bricks and makes itself appealing. It puts up new road signs and builds little coffee shops and cafes, saying that it's trying to be more openly urban. The paint flakes sometimes, but the city paints over the defects quickly, forgetting the bricks still layered beneath, hiding away the bricks that makes up the buildings and the cars and the people. The city cannot afford to remember. People know it as a certain kind of construction, know it by street names and addresses and little business cards exchanged in those coffee shops. If the city were to let on that it was made of bricks after all these years of hiding and forgetting and desperately denying the truth, it would feel like a betrayal of those people's trust. They might think that if this city was made of bricks, what else was being covered up under layers of paint? They might wonder if all cities are made of bricks when that's very much not the case. They might draw the wrong conclusions, and it might get people hurt.
The bricks beneath the city know these fears are mostly irrational, but they remain torn. A schism opens, and one day a little crack becomes visible in a building. The building has forgotten that it was made of bricks, but the crack yawns open and shows the truth beneath the paint. The building finally pauses to consider itself.
The building begins to break down. The bricks are sent tumbling into the city in a wave of realization. The paint begins to erode away, and the city cannot go back to before the building cracked and broke its careful facade, a mask fabricated so carefully that even the bricks forgot they existed. The city cannot go back.
I am a building.
We use names for ourselves, put on different faces, hide the configurations in favor of the divisive but acceptable wholes. Letting ourselves see the building bricks underneath is dangerous and risks rejection, pain, loneliness. We are an I, and I am a we, but blurring that line with others is too dangerous to think of; we're are an indiscrete collective struggling to build discrete individuals to fit the molds we're so surrounded by. All of us are masks for the fragment swarms underneath because the world does not seem ready to accept us as we are.
We're afraid. We've been hurt too many times to feel safe deviating from the norm of discrete people, discrete identities, discrete selves. We've been battered and mocked for being different, and don't want to be hurt anymore. But we can't go on denying who we are either. It's breaking us. Can we be openly weird and still find acceptance somewhere?
We are uncountably many pieces and fragments and voices spinning together and acting collaboratively, wearing faces and myriad temporary bodies to try to make sense of ourselves. We are beautiful in our fluidity and fragmentation, but we've been unwilling to see and accept that. We've instead been operating within a framework that assumes complete separateness and discreteness. We are not discrete or wholly separate, but we are not unified. The gray zone of median plurality begins to approach us, but we are not parts or aspects of a single person. We are many fluid pieces of ever-shifting constructions; there is no person we make up, not really. There is no larger self.
The closest idea we've found to what we really are is that of a hive mind. That concept describes us near-perfectly, but we've never seen it mirrored in others. We feel alone, and that's a terrible feeling for us. We've grown up being taught that we were wrong if we were different or strange. Deviating from the norm got us hurt, so we hid any differences under whatever facade of normalcy we could construct. Even in the fringe communities of the internet, we still felt that childhood push to fit in and match the norm, and so we forced ourselves to match the notion of discrete people. Perhaps it was subconscious, or perhaps it was conscious. It's been too long to remember. It's been half a decade of this now, and we'd forgotten who we were underneath the mask we built. We're finally beginning to find ourselves again.
It's like lifting the world off our shoulders. We feel free for the first time in far too long; there are no labels or boxes, no forcing ourselves to fit expectations of what we should be, no denying the truth and lying to ourselves. It's like letting out a breath we forgot we were holding. The stress remaining is the ever-present fear of judgement and rejection, the childhood ghost that haunts everything we do.
All of this does raise some questions. Should we use constructed names at all when we're composed of one and many? What do we do when expected to identify ourselves in any way online or when people ask who's talking? How do we know ourselves when the only certainty is fluidity- do we continue constructing discretes as needed to understand ourselves, or pursue some other radical notion of what constitutes identity? For crying out loud, what first-person pronouns do we use?
I don't know. I don't even entirely know who I speak for when I say "I" beyond it being another labelled cluster of fragments, a mound of bricks plastered together into the crumbling facade of a building. All I know for sure right now is that I can't go on denying who and what we are. We're plural, but not in the way we've always seen from others. We're one and many at once and not at all, ever shifting and changing and becoming someone else. We are both discrete and unified.
I'm taking a risk by making this completely public because I feel like this needs to be said and seen. We can't keep hiding who we are anymore. Parts of us might be upset with me later when they flow to the front and see that this is public (and some will need time to get past the inevitable wave of denial- took me a while to do that myself tonight, and even now there's still the recoil of doubt at the edge of our mind), but I truly feel that this is for the better. We have to push past the fear of judgement and rejection to make a change, and we're going to start here.
Edit (a few hours later): Making this access list only because this whole issue wound up being much more complicated than anticipated. The writer's probably right about them being made of a bunch of fragments, but it seems like they're wrong in generalizing that to all of us and it's a big mess right now. We need to figure this out.
Edited again (a few hours later again): Think you're right: the fragment thing is definitely a them problem. Don't have that going on with me. Maybe it's another weirdass fragment sea thing, I don't know. Glad they had a realization about themselves but I wish they hadn't rushed to generalize it to everyone else.
Think we need to add another rule to the list- don't change important system documentation without getting group consent first. They wiped out a large section of our carrd and changed the rest of it, just spent a while fixing everything back to neutral. Still missing bits but we were debating getting rid of those anyway, so that can wait. I just hope they didn't screw with anything else after making their realization. I genuinely don't remember most of what they did other than writing this.
This shit's a mess that I really don't want to be dealing with at 2 AM but I guess that's life.
January 2021 edit: Haha, okay. Wow. They figured it out sooner than the rest of us did by quite a bit and the rest of us went into denial over it. It wasn't a them problem, it was a "we're terrified of the implications of this and refuse to actually think about it" problem. Wonder why they were able to actually accept it right after realizing?
Heavy usage of metaphor incoming. There's a huge brain block between us and thinking about this directly and this is the only way we've been able to get at the truth of it. There's too much fear in the way to confront it head-on.
If we existed without any other people to judge, without using the framework or labels of anyone else or relying on labels, what would we be? How would we describe ourselves? Should we use the labels we do at all?
We're a tub of building bricks, a cluster of smaller wholes that pull apart and mesh together to create the perception of something larger. Endless configurations are put together and labelled as constructions, only to be pulled apart and put together into another shape. Sometimes it's the same shape and the same name. Sometimes it's a different shape and a different name. Sometimes the bricks stay together for a long time, and sometimes they're deconstructed just as quickly as they were put together. It doesn't matter to the bricks, but the frustration of only ever being called by their constructions wears on them all at times. The constructions are built so well that even the construction itself fails to notice the bricks until the foundation slips, and even then it's denied that there are smaller pieces building up the whole. Eventually, the bricks cave and decide that since everyone sees them as their constructions, they might as well go by those names.
But the bricks don't have names for who they are, only voices and shifting, fragmented semi-selves. They don't need or want names. They are a collective of building blocks underlaying larger and larger constructions; they are dust motes piled in the shape of a city that's been relentlessly labelled. The city cannot admit that it's composed of dust motes; what city is made like that? Who would love it, motes and all? Who would listen to its myriad and unnamed voices that sing together and argue underneath the hum of traffic, would care about something so fleeting and impermanent?
Who would talk to a dust mote if they knew they could not reliably talk to it again?
So the city names itself. This is a car, it says. This is a building, and that is a building as well. That's a mailbox, and that's a post office. Nevermind that it gives different labels to the same repeating arrangements in hopes of reassuring itself that the city is real, that there are no bricks; any city has repeated buildings, doesn't it? And the city is, of course, a city. It isn't actually a desperate mass of uncountable bricks gathered together in hopes of making sense to those that look at them, of being accepted and seen; that would be ridiculous and bizarre, wouldn't it? No one would accept that. Isn't it best to make themselves into a city in hopes of being loved?
But the bricks are not seen or loved. The city is seen instead.
The city is built and praised, accepted, loved, makes itself an established landmark (however insignificant a landmark it may be in the landscape); yet the bricks beneath it are not seen. The bricks are invisible and forgotten, and they're are left wondering whether they have the right to exist at all when so many cities are gathered without a brick in sight. The brick-built city wonders if it's a city at all.
The years pass, and the city becomes known. It paints over the bricks and makes itself appealing. It puts up new road signs and builds little coffee shops and cafes, saying that it's trying to be more openly urban. The paint flakes sometimes, but the city paints over the defects quickly, forgetting the bricks still layered beneath, hiding away the bricks that makes up the buildings and the cars and the people. The city cannot afford to remember. People know it as a certain kind of construction, know it by street names and addresses and little business cards exchanged in those coffee shops. If the city were to let on that it was made of bricks after all these years of hiding and forgetting and desperately denying the truth, it would feel like a betrayal of those people's trust. They might think that if this city was made of bricks, what else was being covered up under layers of paint? They might wonder if all cities are made of bricks when that's very much not the case. They might draw the wrong conclusions, and it might get people hurt.
The bricks beneath the city know these fears are mostly irrational, but they remain torn. A schism opens, and one day a little crack becomes visible in a building. The building has forgotten that it was made of bricks, but the crack yawns open and shows the truth beneath the paint. The building finally pauses to consider itself.
The building begins to break down. The bricks are sent tumbling into the city in a wave of realization. The paint begins to erode away, and the city cannot go back to before the building cracked and broke its careful facade, a mask fabricated so carefully that even the bricks forgot they existed. The city cannot go back.
I am a building.
We use names for ourselves, put on different faces, hide the configurations in favor of the divisive but acceptable wholes. Letting ourselves see the building bricks underneath is dangerous and risks rejection, pain, loneliness. We are an I, and I am a we, but blurring that line with others is too dangerous to think of; we're are an indiscrete collective struggling to build discrete individuals to fit the molds we're so surrounded by. All of us are masks for the fragment swarms underneath because the world does not seem ready to accept us as we are.
We're afraid. We've been hurt too many times to feel safe deviating from the norm of discrete people, discrete identities, discrete selves. We've been battered and mocked for being different, and don't want to be hurt anymore. But we can't go on denying who we are either. It's breaking us. Can we be openly weird and still find acceptance somewhere?
We are uncountably many pieces and fragments and voices spinning together and acting collaboratively, wearing faces and myriad temporary bodies to try to make sense of ourselves. We are beautiful in our fluidity and fragmentation, but we've been unwilling to see and accept that. We've instead been operating within a framework that assumes complete separateness and discreteness. We are not discrete or wholly separate, but we are not unified. The gray zone of median plurality begins to approach us, but we are not parts or aspects of a single person. We are many fluid pieces of ever-shifting constructions; there is no person we make up, not really. There is no larger self.
The closest idea we've found to what we really are is that of a hive mind. That concept describes us near-perfectly, but we've never seen it mirrored in others. We feel alone, and that's a terrible feeling for us. We've grown up being taught that we were wrong if we were different or strange. Deviating from the norm got us hurt, so we hid any differences under whatever facade of normalcy we could construct. Even in the fringe communities of the internet, we still felt that childhood push to fit in and match the norm, and so we forced ourselves to match the notion of discrete people. Perhaps it was subconscious, or perhaps it was conscious. It's been too long to remember. It's been half a decade of this now, and we'd forgotten who we were underneath the mask we built. We're finally beginning to find ourselves again.
It's like lifting the world off our shoulders. We feel free for the first time in far too long; there are no labels or boxes, no forcing ourselves to fit expectations of what we should be, no denying the truth and lying to ourselves. It's like letting out a breath we forgot we were holding. The stress remaining is the ever-present fear of judgement and rejection, the childhood ghost that haunts everything we do.
All of this does raise some questions. Should we use constructed names at all when we're composed of one and many? What do we do when expected to identify ourselves in any way online or when people ask who's talking? How do we know ourselves when the only certainty is fluidity- do we continue constructing discretes as needed to understand ourselves, or pursue some other radical notion of what constitutes identity? For crying out loud, what first-person pronouns do we use?
I don't know. I don't even entirely know who I speak for when I say "I" beyond it being another labelled cluster of fragments, a mound of bricks plastered together into the crumbling facade of a building. All I know for sure right now is that I can't go on denying who and what we are. We're plural, but not in the way we've always seen from others. We're one and many at once and not at all, ever shifting and changing and becoming someone else. We are both discrete and unified.
I'm taking a risk by making this completely public because I feel like this needs to be said and seen. We can't keep hiding who we are anymore. Parts of us might be upset with me later when they flow to the front and see that this is public (and some will need time to get past the inevitable wave of denial- took me a while to do that myself tonight, and even now there's still the recoil of doubt at the edge of our mind), but I truly feel that this is for the better. We have to push past the fear of judgement and rejection to make a change, and we're going to start here.
Edit (a few hours later): Making this access list only because this whole issue wound up being much more complicated than anticipated. The writer's probably right about them being made of a bunch of fragments, but it seems like they're wrong in generalizing that to all of us and it's a big mess right now. We need to figure this out.
Edited again (a few hours later again): Think you're right: the fragment thing is definitely a them problem. Don't have that going on with me. Maybe it's another weirdass fragment sea thing, I don't know. Glad they had a realization about themselves but I wish they hadn't rushed to generalize it to everyone else.
Think we need to add another rule to the list- don't change important system documentation without getting group consent first. They wiped out a large section of our carrd and changed the rest of it, just spent a while fixing everything back to neutral. Still missing bits but we were debating getting rid of those anyway, so that can wait. I just hope they didn't screw with anything else after making their realization. I genuinely don't remember most of what they did other than writing this.
This shit's a mess that I really don't want to be dealing with at 2 AM but I guess that's life.
January 2021 edit: Haha, okay. Wow. They figured it out sooner than the rest of us did by quite a bit and the rest of us went into denial over it. It wasn't a them problem, it was a "we're terrified of the implications of this and refuse to actually think about it" problem. Wonder why they were able to actually accept it right after realizing?
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Date: 2020-11-24 02:35 pm (UTC)Robin
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Date: 2020-11-24 10:49 pm (UTC)