We’ve more-or-less all been coping with the pandemic since early March.
During this time, I’ve seen a lot of people stressed and depressed to their breaking points, usually while also blaming themselves for not being able to bottle their feelings up and believing no one else is at their limit.
And that’s simply not true. Everyone is suffering, everyone is coping. Not just from the pandemic and the stress and isolation of avoiding the risk of infection, but from the other social ills of our world.
In a different vein, three different colleagues recently told me that I make blogging “look easy” because of the rate that I manage to output new blog posts here.
And if we take a step back and look at both situations, there’s a subtle theme here that I’d like to explore: The unseen.
Art by Khia.
Seeing Without Seeing
Everything you know about the world is an abstraction of the truth.
That isn’t some philosophical pontification, it’s a plain and simple fact. You don’t know what’s going on in anyone else’s brain at any given moment (especially if they have no inner monologue at all).
Under better times and better conditions, I’d say that the surest and fastest path to being mental unwell (depressed, anxious, etc.) is comparing your behind-the-scenes footage to other peoples’ highlight reels.
Social media is nothing but highlight reels.
Hell, this very blog is a highlight reel of the ideas I managed to flesh out into a coherent structure.
Nobody would ever have known the stress, frustration, and nihilism that goes into trying to come up with a topic to write about if I didn’t just allude to it in this sentence. My writing process is too informal to articulate and very unhelpful to anyone who has to write words for a living: If I can’t think of what I want to say and why, I don’t write. It’s that simple. I can’t force it. I’ve tried. And sometimes I have very strong opinions about certain topics, or something really funny happened, or I observed something really noteworthy that should probably be captured and immortalized in prose… yet, I just can’t figure out how to put it into words, so it languishes forever.
And yet, so many people are so over-exposed to this polished and curated filter bubble, I fear they’ve lost sight of the human experience, and how badly we all struggle and fuck up all the time.
The isolation sure isn’t helping.
The Political Queer Experience
Being LGBTQIA+ in the United States of America is quite an experience, whew, let me tell ya.
https://twitter.com/DogpatchPress/status/978408138612158464
https://twitter.com/NazifurReceipts/status/1325207247157301249
Sometimes I have to ask myself: Does anyone really believe that the Trump administration or the GOP is actually pro-LGBT? Surely nobody could have missed the memo? To wit:
It’s even worse when you hear from alleged “Gays for Trump” or even “Furries for Trump”.
It’s bizarre; how can so many people support someone who wants to hurt them?
Enter Dean Browning
Dean Browning is a political candidate from Pennsylvania who lost the Republican primary in 2020. He also runs a PAC.
When he’s not siphoning money from the pockets of gullible American conservatives, Dean Browning likes to pretend to be a black gay guy named Dan Purdy on social media to try to deceive the public about the Republicans’ intentions for the LGBTQIA+ community.
https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1326270305933942784
His cover was blown when he forgot to switch to his alt account (which apparently is owned by his adopted son?) to attempt to astroturf a critic. He then tried to offer “context” into the tweet.
Neither the original fuck-up nor his nonpology went unnoticed:
https://twitter.com/NerdyBlkGyrl/status/1326285558570692608
https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1326270324783132673
Sometimes the unseen gets revealed to us through truly spectacular mistakes.
What more is there to say?
Furries Improve Everything
I know I just talked about politics and we’re all sick of it, but I want to briefly visit this topic one more time for the sake of setting the stage.
Remember this?
https://twitter.com/thatbilloakley/status/1325152158866567168
Never one to miss a beat, Coopertom (the cat fursuiter from the infamous cursed photo) decided to remake this hilarious performance art of a gaffe in VRChat.
https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560
This blew up. You’ve probably seen news coverage of this event. It made The Verge, it made BuzzFeed. Hell, it even made PC Gamer.
For many readers, this is the first time they read about the furry fandom in a positive light.
For the first many years of the furry fandom’s existence, our media strategy was nonexistent.
We kinda just winged it (with apologies to avian furries), and the end result was an episode of CSI about furries that was so inaccurate and bad in its portrayal of the furry fandom as sex-obsessed losers that if you type “that episode” into Google, it’s the first search result.
Unfortunately, this has stuck in the public imagination for many, many years since. Almost every interaction I’ve had online has been colored by a history of bad press that the many recent years of fair coverage hasn’t abated.
As a result, almost nobody outside of the furry fandom truly has the slightest clue about who we really are, or how incredible the community can be.
Even most furries don’t know this!
Let’s circle back to Coopertom. What many of the folks who saw the news coverage of his VRChat world didn’t see is that he later posted this…
https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325912477209649154
…followed a few hours later by this:
https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1326000299954343937
I don’t think even Coopertom anticipated how much love and kindness he would be met with by the community he’s been a part of for at least a decade. He surely wasn’t counting on it. You can hear that much in his voice.
Everyone who hates furries because an old CSI episode portrayed us in an unflattering light–or because of the actions of a scant few individuals that did terrible things and are consequently not welcome in our community–has chosen to blind themselves to what this fandom is really about, and they will forever be Plato’s cave-dwellers as a result.
The furry fandom has always been about humanity.
Whether to celebrate or to critique? That depends on the individual.
Anyone who tells you different is missing the point. (To be explicit: The point isn’t sex, although we aren’t exactly prudes.)
Can We Take the Blinders Off?
A few years ago there was a TED talk to commemorate 1000 TED Talks, in which the speaker recursively used Amazon Mechanical Turk to summarize each of the talks into six words each, and then to summarize the summaries, etc. until he landed on a mere six.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5pklFtGthY
In the same spirit, I’ve been thinking what the six words that describe the furry fandom would be. (Spoiler: See the title of this blog post.)
Whether you’ve been a furry since the days of SomethingAwful trolls or are just discovering your interest for anthropomorphic characters, you’re not alone.
No matter how depressed, frustrated, stressed, angry, despaired, hollow, hopeless, or scared you might feel about your life, it gets better.
This video was made before the pandemic, but it hits differently after:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waAVJtE23Wo
If I can be said to be coping well (and making blogging seem easy as a result), it’s simply because I’m privileged to have so many good friends to lift up my spirits. It’s not a reflection of me being somehow special, and it isn’t a poor reflection on you or anyone else if you aren’t.
But on the other paw, I utterly failed to gripe about a recent irksome instance of sensationalist cryptography reporting, as well as the recent anti-encryption legislation in the Five Eyes nations. So maybe I’m not doing as hot as some of you might think I am? Win some, lose some.
https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1326373134161862657
https://soatok.blog/2020/11/11/youre-not-alone-it-gets-better/
#coping #happiness #LGBTQIA_ #mentalHealth #pandemic #Politics #Society
I rarely think about the labels that describe me.That isn’t because of privilege (I spent many years painfully aware of them), but because my friends are incredibly supportive and we’ve been able to cultivate an environment where I’m not constantly reminded of why I don’t “belong”. (It took many grueling years to achieve that, and I’m still reminded of my weirdness if I leave home for any appreciable length of time. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a homebody.)
The majority of people don’t think about their labels either, but for privileged reasons, until a minority calls it to their attention. Then you get almost-comical indignant hot takes of the “don’t call me cis, that’s a slur!” variety.
At least, they would be comical if they weren’t so stupid and dangerous.
Identity
Identity is a funny thing. I actually find rather insulting the proposition that you can take the vast diversity of the lived experiences of billions of people and compress it into one bit of information.
“Are you a YES or a NO?” “Are you X or Y?” “Are you good or evil?”
Labels are a lossy compression algorithm. They’re meant to simplify and convey ideas so they’re more broadly accessible and easily understood. In practice, people are overly reliant on them, and they become a crutch.
Sure, you can think of me as an androsexual, demisexual, cisgender male with a dhole fursona, but do most of us even know what that means?
Most of us just simplify our identities to, “I’m gay”. Art by LindseyVi.
Pride
Pride is a protest against unjust systems. Pride started with a riot in response to police violence and discrimination. You probably didn’t learn about Pride in great detail in history class (if at all).
Pride parades in recent years have been co-opted by what some call “rainbow capitalism”.
I wish I knew the original source for this meme.
And this obviously feels really gross, but at the same time, it’s often somehow forgivable that companies use Pride Month (June) to show active support for their LGBTQIA+ employees. (If nothing else, it assures us that we won’t suddenly become unemployed if someone accuses us of falling in love with a person with the “wrong” phenotype, etc.)
There are currently a lot of hard conversations taking place about a different target of police violence and discrimination.
I hope that the protests happening today will result in the change our world needs, so that everyone can live equally without fear or shame for who they are.
This will almost certainly require dismantling racist systems and rebuilding them without the tainted legacy they originated from.
That being said, I’ve never really been fond of the emotion, pride. It feels inherently reckless to me. At the same time, I acknowledge it’s a great foil for the emotions that bigots want us to feel (fear, shame, despair, self-loathing, etc.). If that works for you, I’m happy. Keep on keeping on.
Rather than pride, I’ve always sought contentment and joy in my life.
Authenticity means a lot to me, and being fearlessly and shamelessly me is something I shouldn’t have to work for or feel proud about; nor should anyone else.
Contentment and joy… there used to be another word folks used to encapsulate that genre of emotion: Gay.
It always comes full-circle, doesn’t it?
A Dream To Seek
Art by Khia.
Society has numerous institutions and systems that are designed and implemented to ensure discrimination and injustice against people who are different than their architects.
As long as bigoted institutions and systems exist, society will always need movements like Pride and Black Lives Matter to resist atrocity and inspire loud authenticity, in equal measure.
So it might sound odd to say without the above context, but as a strong proponent of human rights and equality, I dream of the day when these movements no longer need to exist; for the day when their job is done and we have moved past the specter of hate that continues to haunt each generation that survives its direct violent influence. I say this knowing that this day will probably never come (at least in my lifetime).
Until bigotry is abolished, and bigotry’s apologists recognize that they’re little more than asymptomatic carriers of that vile psychic pathogen, I will continue to strive to enable everyone I can reach to enjoy the same peace that my friends and I have built at home.
No matter your sex. No matter your gender. No matter the gender(s) you’re attracted to (if any). No matter your race or ethnicity.
The labels people use to describe us shouldn’t condemn anyone to a life of misery and injustice.
The day we cultivate a society that is absent of, and resistant to, the kind of hate and discrimination we’ve seen for centuries will be a day worthy of pride.
And the only way to get there is to acknowledge a simple truth: Black Lives have to Matter in order for the superset (“All Lives”) to Matter.
What Do Your Labels Mean?
This will probably be my only Pride Month post on this blog, so I suppose it makes sense to explain them.
I’m a guy, who’s attracted to guys (thus, androsexual)… but I don’t exactly have a “type”. I have to genuinely like a person to find them attractive. That’s the demisexual part.
Most people understand being gay, conceptually. Asexuality might also click readily without a lot of exposition.
Being demi is weird: You spend a lot of time wondering if you’re asexual or not, until you actually develop feelings for someone else for the first time.
Cisgender just means “not transgender”; that is to say, I identify as the same gender I was assigned at birth.
If that’s helpful to know, cool. But you don’t have to think of me in those terms. I’m just Soatok.
https://soatok.blog/2020/06/09/pridemonth/
