Violent and Incoherent

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mar 5 2025. [REDACTED]. can't find my good pen. boss didn't show up today so i mostly fucked around at work. played ping pong.

I carry around a small, black book on my person at almost all times. It's full of tiny little entries like these. Date, name, action. Date, name, action. Date, name, action. The handwriting seems to get lost sometimes. There's a few different ways of writing the lowercase y in here. Sometimes it's two lines. Sometimes, it curls up at the bottom, like a small U and a big U under it catching up towards the right. It keeps varying in width. Sometimes I write a lowercase g so fast it looks like one of the lowercase ys, and I do a double take. "yoing to yoga session now". That doesn't make sense, unless it's yo-yo yoga.

There's some song lyrics in here that I recall from memory and scribble down sometimes. It's a grounding strategy. I think that the action of benign recollection helps sometimes. It feels like I'm discharging my brain onto paper, ferrous oxide pouring from my ears, staining my thoughts black. It's interesting to see how the song lyrics change in mood or tone, or whether I got them right when I look them up later. There's some Charli XCX in here, I think. Car Seat Headrest. Clipping. CHVRCHES. When did I listen to CHVRCHES? Who knows. Sure are a lot of bands that start with the letter C.

Oh, here's a song by a band that doesn't start with the letter C. It's Sudden Oak Death, by the Mountain Goats. With the two-line y.

Lose a little feeling in my fingers

This is artistic anathema. This is not good for you. It is not going to help you. At some point, I began to believe that your action of reading something like this would actively become detrimental to my integrity as an artist, despite that notion being evidently self-contradictory. Go it soes, as Vurt Konnegut wrote.

The notion of death of the author is something that gets brought up a lot. Specifically, it tends to get misinterpreted a lot to mean something about "separating the art from the artist", which is used by people who want to justify giving Kanye their streaming pittance or giving J.K. Rowling their endless sum of money for creating derivative wizard fiction. But, for my purposes, I am taking death of the author to mean Roland Barthes' theory that the author can't and shouldn't dictate some kind of "ultimate meaning" of their text. The second that the author puts out the art object, it is now in the hands of the reader to interpret. George Lucas can seethe.

This is something that I functionally take as gospel, especially since I've watched too many David Lynch films to believe in objectivity and I have too many chemicals in my brain. It's why I like Alex Garland's 2015 movie Ex Machina so much despite Alex Garland being a complete tool, since Ex Machina is about being a trans woman. Ask me about this if you want me to drive you insane! I don't believe that Garland intended this, because Alex Garland evidently seems to liken himself as some kind of "not-like-other-men" guy and yet he seems to believe that all femininity is rooted in suffering.

Regardless. I talk a lot about the annoyance of people misinterpreting death of the author to mean things that it doesn't.

Relatedly, let me lay out three major tenets about how I want people to interpret my work, in excruciating detail.

1. I do not believe that people should read my art as a statement about myself. I believe that I am the most uninteresting thing in my art, and I very rarely attempt to center my own identity and its convolution [sic] in my work.
2. I do not believe that I should tell you what my work is about. I think it speaks for itself, almost always. One of my recent works that I published, GABAPENTIN 300 MG CAPSULE; TAKE ONE CAPSULE BY MOUTH TWICE A DAY AS NEEDED FOR BACK PAIN (available in my ex-wife and i are still in our twenties), is deliberately obtuse and defies interpretation while repeatedly referencing another work that defies interpretation. I like it when art does this, and so I do it a lot.
3. I do not think I know what my own work is about. In general, when I start engaging with my own creative process, I tend to notice that my work almost seems to transcend me. I surprise myself as a writer, constantly; it feels like my writing is a living organism and I am just the one who's receiving it. In a way, it's divine revelation, if you want to be pretentious, and if you believe in being pretentious.

For a very long time ­— just about as long as I've made art that I consider to be "serious" — these tenets have been unquestioned fact about how I look at my own art.

I believe that I was subtly wrong, and I believe that I have been trying to shirk off vulnerability in the guise of "artistic integrity".

Gain an edge of panic in my face

I keep dreaming in Homestuck fanfiction. A few months ago, I had a dream where Dirk said "Oh yeah, that robot body's gonna need a lot more pills." to Rosebot, who replied "What for?", and he said "Homosexuality." Life is strange like that.

I read Homestuck for the first time in late 2022, or at least I presumed so. Apparently I'd live-read it far earlier than that, but I forgot about that entirely. I then read the various post-canon works that people tend to have a love-hate relationship with, specifically godfeels, a work involving a very trans and very plural June Egbert. Quite literally, the idea of an alternate version of godfeels 2 came to me in a dream; what would happen if this happened, and Dirk wasn't there? What if he knew that this wasn't a canon timeline anymore, and killed himself?

I talked about this idea in the fanserver for godfeels, and I was encouraged by Sarah to run with the concept. It culminated in I Can't Retcon This, a miserably bad fanfiction that I have a hard time looking at. The ball never got rolling, although I had plenty of ideas, largely because I couldn't nail down Dirk's character voice. Regardless, it was the first thing I'd written in terms of long-form fiction in years, ostensibly. For the first time, I felt called to write.

As a result, I realized that... well, I enjoyed writing. I registered for a writing class in university, since I wanted an easier course load that semester due to my ill-advised teaching to teach, as the instructor of record, a graduate course as an undergraduate. (Don't ask.) I registered for a section of ENG-W 203: Fiction and Poetry, an introductory class for those who didn't have any particular experience in the English department of my university.

The syllabus came in. The tag-line was, and I shit you not, the haunting, nonlinearity, and repetition of fragmented memory.

Ah.

Search for some time to tell me just how long I've been here

I realized that I was plural in about April of 2022. At the time, my inclination was to be far more saccharine about it than I currently am, and immediately turn my system into a public-facing entity that everyone who interacted with me on even a small level had to deal with.

We had separate accounts back then, one for each alter in our small system. People could, and did, befriend one of us without befriending the others. We treated each other entirely as separate individuals, with entirely different interests, because that's more or less what we knew each other as — our system communication was piss-poor, and we didn't really believe it ourselves. Even now, I struggle with using the pronoun "we" in the first-person. Now read these two paragraphs again, slowly.

We experienced a very notable upheaval in our system structure in late 2022, a few months into our system journey and a few months into hormones. This was, notably, the fault of one Risk Serket-Tulips, who stated that we were holding ourselves back from various things we wanted to do in our personal life, none of which we feel particularly comfortable sharing here. We were in a lot of interpersonal relationships that were distinctly counterproductive, and Risk helped us cut that shit out.

So, we were entering this poetry and fiction class, specifically one that was designed around analyzing how trauma is portrayed in literature and poetry, while dealing with our trauma disorder and subsequent ego shuffling. Beyond that, we'd never had an artistic outlet before this point. We majored in mathematics and computer science; not much room for florid prose there. As a result, we wrote a lot of poems about being plural, and about system stuff. Over, and over, and over, riffing on the same themes like an obsession.

It was all about us. We didn't know how to write about anything else, because we were so focused on ourselves at the time — every week was a new fire to put out. At one point, we literally had a conversation with our professor, stating explicitly that we were always writing about the same stuff, and how we felt like we needed to move on. She said, in defiance, that if we were writing that much about ourselves, we were evidently working through something. She was right.

Overturn the place

The issue with writing about yourself in cryptic and poetic terms is that it changes your entire frame of reference about yourself to be forever unintelligible, hence why we're writing an extended essay about our feelings instead of vocalizing them like a normal person. The other issue that we faced is that we had to actually present our work, because it was for a class.

So we did! We wrote one poem that was almost verbatim a scene from godfeels, because that's what we were thinking about at the time. We wrote a poem that was about staring down a version of your past self, because we literally did that at one point. We wrote a poem that was just about our mom. We read all of them, in front of the class, line by line, accepting whatever criticism was present.

Everyone always read it as a transgender allegory. To date, we are fully convinced that people read our work from that era as a trans allegory because we are visibly clocky and get misgendered a lot. We're assuming a lot of malicious intent or at least subconscious bias with this, but come on — room full of cis people, and this tranny's reading a poem that uses two pronouns to refer to something that may be nebulously the same entity? It's gotta be about being trans. Not because of anything we said, but because of the we who said it.

Every time we got feedback, our blood began to boil. We kept writing this intensely personal art, because we were not able to feel seen; we weren't able to deal with the existential crises that come with being plural, so we kept making poems about them. In our head, if we could drag just one singlet down to our level, to feel the fear that we felt constantly for just a nanosecond, it would be worth it. It would be worth it, because in that nanosecond, we would be connected to another human being. It was selfish, but it was real.

Feel like each time my efforts fail

The issue is that you can't actually make someone read your art the way you want it to be read. Art is limited, and it definitely isn't direct communication — the thing that you should probably do if you're trying to express complex emotions. Art is not an analytic essay. If a piece of art could be an analytic essay in full, able to be fully and completely expressed by a CONTENT EXPLANATION!!! ENDING EXPLAINED MOVIE 2025 video, then we generally do not find it interesting. You could have just told us the thing you wanted to tell us, but instead you obfuscated it for no reason. It's why Darren Aronofsky is a fucking hack.

But we kept getting more, and more frustrated with our work, like we were doing something wrong in our communication. We felt like we were messing up by not making people feel the thing we wanted to feel, and we got frustrated enough that we decided to give up on it entirely. In one breath, we screamed "FUCK ART", and then created what we, at that point, considered to be the best thing we'd ever made.

It was called self stuff, and it is probably our most read work to date. For the final project for W203, we were assigned to create a compilation book. We had our then-girlfriend do the typesetting and laid everything out meticulously into two tracks like the recording at the end of The Great Ace Attorney, to try and express a kind of mutualism between the "trauma-y" and the "healing-y" works in it.

We added three essays; an introduction, an interlude, and an afterword. Each of them provided express context for exactly what the prior or following works were about, because we felt like we were doing a bad job with them. We wanted people to know that we were talking about our plurality, because we needed people to understand us. We needed to be understood, at all costs. We even added an alternate title, with all the subtlety in the world: none of our work is about being trans, a thought stolen from the opening track of Ada Rook's 2022 album ANGEL DEATH NO REDEMPTION ANGEL CURSE I LOVE YOU, which is not an album we listen to anymore.

We thought it was great at the time, because we had never created something like it. It was a product of intense frustration, and a desire to be seen, and a desire to be known. We wanted people to understand us without doing all the messy people-work, to simply understand us through our work, and we thought this was our key to getting it done. We assumed that we could just send it to someone, and they would suddenly know us better.

Hell, we're doing the same thing right now. Don't pretend like you can't see it. We're spilling our thoughts into an essay, because we don't know how to communicate how we want to be referred to. You can see that as clearly as we can, right?

Are you enjoying yourself? Is this fun for you? I told you as much. This isn't going to help you.

The whole hillsides disapprove

It took a few months for us to realize that, in fact, we did not create hot shit. In fact, we committed something that we considered to be an "art sin" in the CJ the X sense, where we forcefully imposed our will onto our audience. Not just that, but we did so as a means to communicate something about us that we were, frankly, too afraid to put into words.

Earlier that year, our roommate called the police on us and said we were violent and had a knife. This was because he had a string of abusive behaviors, and we said that we were willing to remain roommates with him because of logistical reasons, but we didn't want to talk to him. He, as a result, stated that our plurality was making us violent and irrational, despite our prior attempts to be open with him about it. He stated that our Risk fictive (again, godfeels keeps coming up) was too much of a left turn, and despite the evident self-confidence that she helped us cultivate, that we just... changed too much too fast, and he moved us into the box of "abuser". It wasn't until months later when we read Whipping Girl by Julia Serano that we were able to recognize this as a blatant instance of transmisogyny; we, as a trans woman, were either an uwu soft baby or a violent abuser. For the first time, we asserted boundaries with him, and he immediately turned his back on us.

It is that emotion that caused us to be too afraid to put our plurality into words, because whenever we did, it kept happening. Our abusive ex, who we were still in contact with at the time, said that we were changing too fast. We lost friends left and right, and we ended up knowing very few people that we talked to prior to January 2023. Our social group collapsed around us like it was made of crumpling paper, and we ended up with a collapse so intense that it is difficult to describe in linear time. We, instead, bounced back by dating someone who was only into us out of some kind of perverse sense of obligation and a knifeplay kink (who, additionally, was the person who typeset self stuff). We were fundamentally shaken.

It only got worse. We mentioned that we were plural to people, on occasion, but we never did anything to talk about how we wanted to be referred to. If you're reading this now, this is probably how we talk to you; you know, nebulously, that we are plural. You do not know who is writing this.

You think "Tulips" is writing this, but that's not a person, is it? There's nobody in this system named Tulip. You don't know anything about me.

Feel like a man whose veins have frozen overnight

This emotion is what sparked the creation of take fucking whatever, which is a piece that we, prior to writing this, refused to give any context on. It's about our emotions with regards to self stuff and its publication, and about how frustrated we got when it felt like other people were imposing reads onto our work that we hated. It's a very unsubtle metaphor, where the camera person who's in the footnotes almost takes control of the story as the commentary track begins to overpower the actual interview itself. We are still proud of this work, but we didn't want to write about what it was about. That's a violation of all of our artistic tenets.

We conceptualized it as a kind of swan-song for the early era of our art where we were self-focused and writing poetry about it. It would be the last thing, we said. Never again.

During the publication of that work in Culture Hell Forever, Vol. 1, we had a conversation with Julia Norza, the editress-in-chief of that zine. We talked in much more explicit terms about what take fucking whatever was about, and about how we felt about it. She said, in plain terms, that what we did with self stuff was something you had to do in your 20s when you're kind of insane; you have to write about yourself. It's a thing you need to do before you move on from it, and that's what we thought we were doing. We were moving on.

From there, we wrote ARBITER, which is more or less not about us. We viewed it as a major artistic break when we started work on it, even though work is (still) slow due to early chapters being written while somewhat manic. We're very proud of it, even with all of its thematically relevant prohibitive incoherence. It's one of the first works that we can look back at and say it's okay, at the very least — we don't tend to be very positive about our own work.

But we didn't express the emotion that we wanted to express.

Lying there trying to move

Even now, we can only express it in long-winded rambles. We have no words for it, because the words do not exist. It is the emotion that you feel when your existence becomes private information; when your entire life becomes endless layers of pretending and masking. We're afraid of it.

We've been continually reprimanded for being plural. We've been denied care by therapists who've told us that we were less than full people, that our existence was a maligned coping mechanism that we need to fix. Every time we've opened up like we are attempting to do now, we've been hit in the face with the grim reality that it's just too weird for people to comprehend. We've coped by simply ignoring it, by pretending to be a constant in a world of change both internal and external. We feel childish just for expressing our thoughts into the world, we feel childish for being mentally ill. We gave up.

What gave up, as well, was our art. We've actively avoided talking about some themes that resonate with us because we're afraid of what happens when we look in that mirror. We thought that death of the author, in a perverse misreading, was an excuse to avoid imposing our will onto our work, to say "it's about what it's about", to ignore the emotions and the process of it all. But what is art if not process? What are we if not process?

I'm tired of it. Almost all of us are tired of it, but I'm tired of it. Vulnerability is difficult, and it is nightmarish, but it is the only way forward. We found safety, finally. We have two loving girlfriends, great friends, and people who are willing to treat us the way we want to be treated, even with our aversion to articulating it. So, after this rant, let me lay it out in the plainest terms I can manage.

We're plural. If you would, please ask who is fronting when talking to us, we prefer that. We don't want to plaster our names on a website or anything, because that makes us feel a little bit like collectible tokens you get in a grab bag. But we are here, and we want to be seen, and we want to be known. We have spent time in the intelligibility mines, and time in the inscrutability mines, but we ultimately have come to the conclusion that we need to move forward.

The only way to become known is to make yourself known. I'm sorry. I know it's hard. But you have to do it.

- Alix, Rachel, Bee, Dare, some others