>>5790yeah, this is more or less the attitude I have had so far, the problem is that I inevitably end up hurting others when the relapse happens. I want to stop wearing people out, I want to stop falling into the pit of despair.
>>5791I have spent years of my life trying to train the trauma and it has gotten less severe in some ways but very much stayed in others. my own trauma still makes me vulnerable to experiencing more of it and when this happens I lose progress on all fronts.
I have hobbies, I have coping mechanisms, my problem is that I don't want to keep running away and I don't want to hurt others in the long and difficult process of healing.
>>5792if only things were so easy… this line of thinking brings you very quickly to the conclusion of killing the person who carries the trauma
>>5795I find identifying contradictions within my existence and within my mental state rather easy, I have a really hard finding a way to resolve the contradictions that isn't inherently introducing more contradictions.
see the last two paragraphs merge quite easily for me, the current superstructure pushes us to aspire for an idealistic normality, it is very hard for me to answer the question of which parts of my brain should I kill, the liberal capitalist answer to this question with "everything that strays from normality", most of them in practice instead strive for "everything that makes me less valuable to capitalism". now, neither of these seems like a good answer, your nurture shapes you as a human and while some traits are inherently obstructing our existence as social animals, many others are only obstructing our existence under capitalism, or under the broader superstructure (as in conditions created by our current capitalist existence).
now, I also understand that the understanding of normality is constantly shifting under capitalism and I understand that it can be useful to keep an idealistic model of normality but I just don't see it as very humanistic to kill parts of our very existence to accommodate for our superstructure as opposed to shifting our superstructure to better accommodate for our needs and necessities.
the intent with my opening post was to see what the answer other queer marxists have adopted towards this issue as someone who is struggling to find an appropriate one.
>>5796I am sure that this is at the very least part of the problem for me, I imagine you come from a very controlling social environment which ironically was the opposite of my very lax one. my problem was the lack of any real social support which made me very exploitable from a young age and as you can imagine this has put me in quite a few dangerous situations at an age where I absolutely shouldn't have had to deal with this kind of mental baggage.
I feel like by now I have a pretty good understanding of why I act the way I do to certain situations. I try to control my more unreasonable, emotional reactions to situations that reinvoke my most traumatic experiences. the problem is inherently that this takes a lot of mental fortitude to combat and under capitalism you cannot always be under a controlled enough environment to ensure you will handle every situation appropriately. handling badly one situation is obviously not gonna get you in a lot of trouble but over time this becomes unmanageable.
>>5800see, I don't have inherent issues with eating the dirt and watching things getting worse and worse both systemically and within my direct existence. I put my resentment towards the way things are towards direct action, community organizing, civil disobedience and analyzing the world under a marxist lens.
you could say that I am quite functional, I have a job, I have a permanent residence and I manage to mostly hold my shit together even when capitalism makes it really difficult for anyone to. the struggles I have come with existing within a social context, people describe me as principled, determined and direct.
this inherently reads as abrasive to a considerable amount of people and this is before you even account for my inherently anti social reactions to specific traumatic social scenarios that when not under control turn me even less socially tolerable (I have PTSD from domestic violence, state violence and experiencing multiple sexual assaults).
>>5803I kind of agree, I see the
>im giving the capitalist society that deems me a "freak" the winpart as inherently reactionary but I understand the deeper sentiment of not wanting to conform to the capitalistic idealism of humanity.
I am sorry for not sharing more potentially insightful yet directly personal anecdotes and examples, as well as keeping it rather superficial. I feel a certain amount of hurt in sharing some of my life experiences and I have some degree of concern for my personal safety in sharing some of these in a public anonymized place like this one.