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[5:41 PM] macksting: Okay let's see where do I start.
So I joined a Communist Party club (don't ask me why they're called clubs, I have no goddamn idea) just before (and in part because) they were splitting from the CPUSA. Basically the entire Pacific Northwest CPUSA kinda disintegrated because there were old men and their lackeys who owned copyright and trademark on CPUSA stuff and were terrified and uncomfortable of the sudden drastic increase in interest in leftist stuff toward the middle or end of the Bush Jr. administration.
The club then helped found and became a chapter of an org called the CLP. Not the first CLP that's existed, prolly not the last; it's a straightforward and reasonable name for a communist party that's not related to the old Moscow or Chinese communist parties without abandoning good theory and praxis.
During the course of my membership there I did have to deal with some occasionally meaningful problems of working out some toxic masculinity; basically, as a person with Asperger's Syndrome who sometimes reads as female anyway, and was always sorta "sensitive" and "gentle" and stuff, and grew up short, skinny and with slow reflexes and nerdy and socially awkward, I had to overcompensate in a lot of areas in order to survive, which means there were some parts of my language and body language which I'd used to emulate that in order to get by, and they sometimes came off as threatening. Microaggression stuff which had once been a survival strategy (literally; in second grade I got thrown in front of a moving bus by five bullies in an incident which was anything but isolated), and these strategies had been largely useless since my junior year of high school. (I was now in my early 30s.)
[5:43 PM] macksting: But the problem with responses to microaggressions, and behaviors which can be mistaken for microaggressions, goes beyond the obvious when dealing with the mentally disabled. I could not understand subtle corrections of my behaviors, and overt corrections required that I be able to trust the person with whom I was speaking, something made increasingly difficult if I discovered anybody in the org was prone to gossip. If they were gossipping about each other, if they were forming cliques, what would that mean? What does that mean as regards me? I'm not part of any cliques. Cliques exist to exclude (and as I read it subconsciously attack and maybe even kill) me.
[5:44 PM] macksting: So we went through some emotional labor stuff rather formally, and I was asked to present my disability and a summary of what needs I understood to the party chapter.
I did, almost nothing came of it, and a few weeks later for unrelated reasons about half the membership left for another state.
[5:47 PM] macksting: We tried to rebuild membership, and got some enthusiastic new folks. One worked as a housepainter and put in a lot of long hours, the other worked in radio; they were husband and wife, with a few kids and honestly I like them.
But apparently I made them nervous regularly, I think, and they were dear friends of the person who, after the chapter was nearly eliminated by the mass move of folks to another state, was now the internal coordinator of the chapter. (Internal coordinator is half the old job of chairperson for a club.) Which wouldn't be such a big deal except I had slowly gotten the impression that she just didn't like or trust me at all.
[5:48 PM] macksting: She was now, not counting myself, one of only two people in the chapter who knew about my disability. My requests for concessions having fallen on deaf ears, and her friendship apparently out of reach, I had decided whatever. I'm privileged enough I can just soak it, right? Just... try to do what they want me to, be the person they say they want me to be, only voice an opinion when no other option is tenable, do the dishes, go along and get along. There's work to be done.
[5:48 PM] macksting: Which brings us to last March.
[5:49 PM] macksting: We were working with a local Anarchist collective. If that sounds ironic, I'm sure I can contextualize the matter for you, but suffice to say that around here commies and anarchists get along pretty well because both are mostly interested in activism, not in theory.
[5:50 PM] macksting: (Which isn't to say we don't have long arguments about theory, but we know it's a purely academic point unless and until things significantly change and our theories begin to become more relevant to our activism.)
[5:52 PM] macksting: The anarchists had a share-fare. Mostly attended by the local rather large unhoused population (a.k.a. homeless), and we were there (a) to help with the hard work and providing services, and (b) to table and get a survey done trying to suss out who was most impacted by certain housing-related fucked up policies and/or what those policies might be. Uh, point is we wanted to know where to put our efforts as a party in the local area.
[5:53 PM] macksting: I volunteered to help out, but
I didn't realize it was an indoor event in what amounted to a loud echo chamber
I didn't realize there would be constant shouting as they did some kind of interminable goddamn bingo game
I asked for several specific concessions to make the task easier on myself, and every single one of those fell through entirely by the end of the day.
[5:54 PM] macksting: The first and second of those were kinda my fault, since apparently everybody else knew. It prolly means something about the meeting format didn't suit my needs, but it doesn't change the fact that the information was made available.
[5:54 PM] macksting: The third is honestly more alarming and symptomatic in retrospect.
[5:55 PM] macksting: So I was overwhelmed by noise. I had somebody there who was supposed to help me take breaks, but he left in a hurry. See, he had party duties higher up the chain of command, and nobody else wasn't busy.
[5:56 PM] macksting: So now I was alone among strangers, trying to approach them and keep a brave face, and some of those strangers were regularly under a great deal of stress due to their living situations and not always very... polite.
[5:56 PM] macksting: Then, as scheduled, my wife shows up with our kid, who goes to play with the other kids across the room. I'm left watching him while she gets a massage, as intended. Which would be fine but nobody was able to give me a break.
[5:57 PM] macksting: At which point my kid falls, slides on the floor, and gets a long linoleum-burn across his hip down along his leg. It's shallow, vaguely bleeding and oozing, and clearly hurts like hell. He's deeply upset, we're looking for bandages, and the anarchists somehow can't find a fucking first aid kit? And somehow we didn't bring one either?!
[5:58 PM] macksting: And then the local anarch coordinator demands I wash my hands before handling the wound because they didn't realize I was the kid's parent.
[5:59 PM] macksting: So my kid is in considerable pain and I have to walk away to wash my hands to apply the bandages they couldn't find until now while I leave the table and our party's stuff unattended half a room away and everybody's still shouting and trying to be heard over one another and everything's loud and scary and I'm alone and frightened and sad and I don't know what to do and I begin to have a true and proper panic attack.
[6:00 PM] macksting: So we tend to my kid's wounds, my wife returns and takes over with the kiddo, and I return to the table, but at this point I need to leave. I really, really, really need to leave. And nobody from the Party chapter comes anywhere's near my table for an hour, and my mind is a rattling buzz of gross anxiety, and I really need a break and have needed one for a couple hours at this point before that disaster happened.
[6:01 PM] macksting: So the painter arrives, and I flag him down and he comes over and I say, "I need to leave."
him: "You need to leave?"
me: "I NEED TO LEAVE"
[6:02 PM] macksting: He balks, clearly shaken, but nods, sits down and lets me take my break. I know I've hurt his feelings, but survival mode has kicked in, and I know the damage has already been done there anyway. I probably mumbled an apology, I usually do, but simply getting those four words out around the verbal paralysis of panic and autism were not easy, so a mumbled apology might not have even happened.
[6:02 PM] macksting: And would have fallen on deaf ears anyway.
[6:03 PM] macksting: See, it turns out he'd come off a nine hour shift and was here to unwind. Which would have been incomprehensible to me; how do you unwind when everybody's shouting, everything's too bright and too loud, and not everyone's being nice to each other?
[6:03 PM] macksting: But I'd yelled in his face and put him back to work and abandoned him.
[6:04 PM] macksting: At the next meeting I tried to address what I thought were the main problems with how that went, but at first the only responses I got were,
No, that went great, it was excellent, let's do it again, shut up
and finally
The only problem here is you! You yelled at him! You're scaring him even now! Look what you've done!
[6:05 PM] macksting: So I apologized, had the first of what has been a great many little panic spirals about how I'd hurt another person, and left.
[6:06 PM] macksting: I considered attending the next meeting a couple weeks later, but instead e-mailed the internal coordinator that I would want an opportunity to apologize and make amends to the other fellow before I did so, and until we could address my misbehavior I felt like it would hang over me like a dark cloud and stop me from being able to focus at meetings.
[6:06 PM] macksting: I knew I'd been hurt, but I felt like building bridges again required I suck it up for a while, help him with his wounds, then return to my own at a later date.
[6:07 PM] macksting: Two months pass.
[6:08 PM] macksting: I've literally been losing sleep over the fact that I'm being talked about behind my back (true), shut out of politics by him not talking to me during the 2018 political season, apparently none of them give enough of a shit about me to do anything about it, and I have reason to believe I've hurt all of them at this point and that's torture to me.
[6:08 PM] macksting: And I get an e-mail.
[6:11 PM] macksting: The e-mail says basically,
We find that your behavior at the March share-fare was part of a larger pattern of toxic masculinity. You must address this problem if you wish to continue engaging in party business. We aren't going to provide you a structure for how to do so, nor are we going to tell you precisely what we mean, as we feel we've done so before. It is your responsibility to understand what we mean and to figure out what to do about it. You may continue to come to meetings for the foreseeable future, because we don't want to do anything formal about this, but you're on notice.
[6:11 PM] macksting: That's not what they intended to say, but everything I just said is an understandable and perhaps even inevitable interpretation of the e-mail.
[6:12 PM] macksting: It apparently sounded better in committee.
[6:12 PM] macksting: Cue the biggest panic attack I've ever had.
[6:13 PM] macksting: I quit the party. I tried my damndest to find a way to do so that didn't make me look like I was ragequitting over being told not to be a douche, but there was absolutely no way I could retain even the vaguest sense of sanity, health and well-being and still remain a part of that organization.
[6:14 PM] macksting: The party coordinator, when she found out about this from me as I attempted to enlist her help in quitting the org, was frankly fucking horrified.
[6:14 PM] macksting: I made super clear she really needed to hear it from at least two other people instead of taking my word for it, and getting me to tell her my side of the story had been like pulling teeth. I do not like talking behind folks' backs.
[6:18 PM] macksting: I wish I could say anything good came of that, but I don't think anything did. Me quitting and the hullaballoo did result in the internal coordinator quitting the party as well, which leads me to believe she feels she mishandled the whole affair. (There are less charitable interpretations of all of this as regards her behavior, but what would be the point of dwelling on those?)
[6:19 PM] macksting: Interestingly enough, somewhere in this process, during yet another literally sleepless night I began to think quite a lot about myself. It was thinking about the March event or thinking about anything else, so I opted for anything else.
[6:20 PM] macksting: And I started to revisit some old, less than charitable, less than gentle conclusions I'd come to about myself.
[6:21 PM] macksting: You know how he (we'll say he for now, I'm not caught up so I'm not sure of his pronouns presently) says "there's nothing wrong with that" while looking away in shame?
[6:24 PM] macksting: But instead of dialogue with a brilliant, empathetic girlfriend who helped unpack that closet, it was just me.
[6:27 PM] macksting: I didn't even have that comic to guide me. My guide was mostly Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 26, whose arc words are tattooed on my arm to tell myself not to be so uncharitable in my self-appraisal and that perhaps the solution to the hedgehog's dilemma is to revise my estimates of the harm I do to others;
[6:27 PM] macksting: and Julia Kaye's comic Up And Out, over the course of which she stopped using the name Jeremy.
[6:28 PM] macksting: (I don't usually drop deadnames like that, but her transition has been very public, and her old comics are stilled attributed to Jeremy, so I don't think I'm doing any disservice.)
[6:29 PM] macksting: It's one thing to say "there's nothing wrong with being kinky," but
a) that's not how it feels,
b) I was using it to invalidate actual gender dysphoria I was feeling,
and c) the old me was dead. Died in March.
[6:30 PM] macksting: Honestly, the rest is best described taking clips from my blog at the time.
So I joined a Communist Party club (don't ask me why they're called clubs, I have no goddamn idea) just before (and in part because) they were splitting from the CPUSA. Basically the entire Pacific Northwest CPUSA kinda disintegrated because there were old men and their lackeys who owned copyright and trademark on CPUSA stuff and were terrified and uncomfortable of the sudden drastic increase in interest in leftist stuff toward the middle or end of the Bush Jr. administration.
The club then helped found and became a chapter of an org called the CLP. Not the first CLP that's existed, prolly not the last; it's a straightforward and reasonable name for a communist party that's not related to the old Moscow or Chinese communist parties without abandoning good theory and praxis.
During the course of my membership there I did have to deal with some occasionally meaningful problems of working out some toxic masculinity; basically, as a person with Asperger's Syndrome who sometimes reads as female anyway, and was always sorta "sensitive" and "gentle" and stuff, and grew up short, skinny and with slow reflexes and nerdy and socially awkward, I had to overcompensate in a lot of areas in order to survive, which means there were some parts of my language and body language which I'd used to emulate that in order to get by, and they sometimes came off as threatening. Microaggression stuff which had once been a survival strategy (literally; in second grade I got thrown in front of a moving bus by five bullies in an incident which was anything but isolated), and these strategies had been largely useless since my junior year of high school. (I was now in my early 30s.)
[5:43 PM] macksting: But the problem with responses to microaggressions, and behaviors which can be mistaken for microaggressions, goes beyond the obvious when dealing with the mentally disabled. I could not understand subtle corrections of my behaviors, and overt corrections required that I be able to trust the person with whom I was speaking, something made increasingly difficult if I discovered anybody in the org was prone to gossip. If they were gossipping about each other, if they were forming cliques, what would that mean? What does that mean as regards me? I'm not part of any cliques. Cliques exist to exclude (and as I read it subconsciously attack and maybe even kill) me.
[5:44 PM] macksting: So we went through some emotional labor stuff rather formally, and I was asked to present my disability and a summary of what needs I understood to the party chapter.
I did, almost nothing came of it, and a few weeks later for unrelated reasons about half the membership left for another state.
[5:47 PM] macksting: We tried to rebuild membership, and got some enthusiastic new folks. One worked as a housepainter and put in a lot of long hours, the other worked in radio; they were husband and wife, with a few kids and honestly I like them.
But apparently I made them nervous regularly, I think, and they were dear friends of the person who, after the chapter was nearly eliminated by the mass move of folks to another state, was now the internal coordinator of the chapter. (Internal coordinator is half the old job of chairperson for a club.) Which wouldn't be such a big deal except I had slowly gotten the impression that she just didn't like or trust me at all.
[5:48 PM] macksting: She was now, not counting myself, one of only two people in the chapter who knew about my disability. My requests for concessions having fallen on deaf ears, and her friendship apparently out of reach, I had decided whatever. I'm privileged enough I can just soak it, right? Just... try to do what they want me to, be the person they say they want me to be, only voice an opinion when no other option is tenable, do the dishes, go along and get along. There's work to be done.
[5:48 PM] macksting: Which brings us to last March.
[5:49 PM] macksting: We were working with a local Anarchist collective. If that sounds ironic, I'm sure I can contextualize the matter for you, but suffice to say that around here commies and anarchists get along pretty well because both are mostly interested in activism, not in theory.
[5:50 PM] macksting: (Which isn't to say we don't have long arguments about theory, but we know it's a purely academic point unless and until things significantly change and our theories begin to become more relevant to our activism.)
[5:52 PM] macksting: The anarchists had a share-fare. Mostly attended by the local rather large unhoused population (a.k.a. homeless), and we were there (a) to help with the hard work and providing services, and (b) to table and get a survey done trying to suss out who was most impacted by certain housing-related fucked up policies and/or what those policies might be. Uh, point is we wanted to know where to put our efforts as a party in the local area.
[5:53 PM] macksting: I volunteered to help out, but
I didn't realize it was an indoor event in what amounted to a loud echo chamber
I didn't realize there would be constant shouting as they did some kind of interminable goddamn bingo game
I asked for several specific concessions to make the task easier on myself, and every single one of those fell through entirely by the end of the day.
[5:54 PM] macksting: The first and second of those were kinda my fault, since apparently everybody else knew. It prolly means something about the meeting format didn't suit my needs, but it doesn't change the fact that the information was made available.
[5:54 PM] macksting: The third is honestly more alarming and symptomatic in retrospect.
[5:55 PM] macksting: So I was overwhelmed by noise. I had somebody there who was supposed to help me take breaks, but he left in a hurry. See, he had party duties higher up the chain of command, and nobody else wasn't busy.
[5:56 PM] macksting: So now I was alone among strangers, trying to approach them and keep a brave face, and some of those strangers were regularly under a great deal of stress due to their living situations and not always very... polite.
[5:56 PM] macksting: Then, as scheduled, my wife shows up with our kid, who goes to play with the other kids across the room. I'm left watching him while she gets a massage, as intended. Which would be fine but nobody was able to give me a break.
[5:57 PM] macksting: At which point my kid falls, slides on the floor, and gets a long linoleum-burn across his hip down along his leg. It's shallow, vaguely bleeding and oozing, and clearly hurts like hell. He's deeply upset, we're looking for bandages, and the anarchists somehow can't find a fucking first aid kit? And somehow we didn't bring one either?!
[5:58 PM] macksting: And then the local anarch coordinator demands I wash my hands before handling the wound because they didn't realize I was the kid's parent.
[5:59 PM] macksting: So my kid is in considerable pain and I have to walk away to wash my hands to apply the bandages they couldn't find until now while I leave the table and our party's stuff unattended half a room away and everybody's still shouting and trying to be heard over one another and everything's loud and scary and I'm alone and frightened and sad and I don't know what to do and I begin to have a true and proper panic attack.
[6:00 PM] macksting: So we tend to my kid's wounds, my wife returns and takes over with the kiddo, and I return to the table, but at this point I need to leave. I really, really, really need to leave. And nobody from the Party chapter comes anywhere's near my table for an hour, and my mind is a rattling buzz of gross anxiety, and I really need a break and have needed one for a couple hours at this point before that disaster happened.
[6:01 PM] macksting: So the painter arrives, and I flag him down and he comes over and I say, "I need to leave."
him: "You need to leave?"
me: "I NEED TO LEAVE"
[6:02 PM] macksting: He balks, clearly shaken, but nods, sits down and lets me take my break. I know I've hurt his feelings, but survival mode has kicked in, and I know the damage has already been done there anyway. I probably mumbled an apology, I usually do, but simply getting those four words out around the verbal paralysis of panic and autism were not easy, so a mumbled apology might not have even happened.
[6:02 PM] macksting: And would have fallen on deaf ears anyway.
[6:03 PM] macksting: See, it turns out he'd come off a nine hour shift and was here to unwind. Which would have been incomprehensible to me; how do you unwind when everybody's shouting, everything's too bright and too loud, and not everyone's being nice to each other?
[6:03 PM] macksting: But I'd yelled in his face and put him back to work and abandoned him.
[6:04 PM] macksting: At the next meeting I tried to address what I thought were the main problems with how that went, but at first the only responses I got were,
No, that went great, it was excellent, let's do it again, shut up
and finally
The only problem here is you! You yelled at him! You're scaring him even now! Look what you've done!
[6:05 PM] macksting: So I apologized, had the first of what has been a great many little panic spirals about how I'd hurt another person, and left.
[6:06 PM] macksting: I considered attending the next meeting a couple weeks later, but instead e-mailed the internal coordinator that I would want an opportunity to apologize and make amends to the other fellow before I did so, and until we could address my misbehavior I felt like it would hang over me like a dark cloud and stop me from being able to focus at meetings.
[6:06 PM] macksting: I knew I'd been hurt, but I felt like building bridges again required I suck it up for a while, help him with his wounds, then return to my own at a later date.
[6:07 PM] macksting: Two months pass.
[6:08 PM] macksting: I've literally been losing sleep over the fact that I'm being talked about behind my back (true), shut out of politics by him not talking to me during the 2018 political season, apparently none of them give enough of a shit about me to do anything about it, and I have reason to believe I've hurt all of them at this point and that's torture to me.
[6:08 PM] macksting: And I get an e-mail.
[6:11 PM] macksting: The e-mail says basically,
We find that your behavior at the March share-fare was part of a larger pattern of toxic masculinity. You must address this problem if you wish to continue engaging in party business. We aren't going to provide you a structure for how to do so, nor are we going to tell you precisely what we mean, as we feel we've done so before. It is your responsibility to understand what we mean and to figure out what to do about it. You may continue to come to meetings for the foreseeable future, because we don't want to do anything formal about this, but you're on notice.
[6:11 PM] macksting: That's not what they intended to say, but everything I just said is an understandable and perhaps even inevitable interpretation of the e-mail.
[6:12 PM] macksting: It apparently sounded better in committee.
[6:12 PM] macksting: Cue the biggest panic attack I've ever had.
[6:13 PM] macksting: I quit the party. I tried my damndest to find a way to do so that didn't make me look like I was ragequitting over being told not to be a douche, but there was absolutely no way I could retain even the vaguest sense of sanity, health and well-being and still remain a part of that organization.
[6:14 PM] macksting: The party coordinator, when she found out about this from me as I attempted to enlist her help in quitting the org, was frankly fucking horrified.
[6:14 PM] macksting: I made super clear she really needed to hear it from at least two other people instead of taking my word for it, and getting me to tell her my side of the story had been like pulling teeth. I do not like talking behind folks' backs.
[6:18 PM] macksting: I wish I could say anything good came of that, but I don't think anything did. Me quitting and the hullaballoo did result in the internal coordinator quitting the party as well, which leads me to believe she feels she mishandled the whole affair. (There are less charitable interpretations of all of this as regards her behavior, but what would be the point of dwelling on those?)
[6:19 PM] macksting: Interestingly enough, somewhere in this process, during yet another literally sleepless night I began to think quite a lot about myself. It was thinking about the March event or thinking about anything else, so I opted for anything else.
[6:20 PM] macksting: And I started to revisit some old, less than charitable, less than gentle conclusions I'd come to about myself.
[6:21 PM] macksting: You know how he (we'll say he for now, I'm not caught up so I'm not sure of his pronouns presently) says "there's nothing wrong with that" while looking away in shame?
[6:24 PM] macksting: But instead of dialogue with a brilliant, empathetic girlfriend who helped unpack that closet, it was just me.
[6:27 PM] macksting: I didn't even have that comic to guide me. My guide was mostly Neon Genesis Evangelion episode 26, whose arc words are tattooed on my arm to tell myself not to be so uncharitable in my self-appraisal and that perhaps the solution to the hedgehog's dilemma is to revise my estimates of the harm I do to others;
[6:27 PM] macksting: and Julia Kaye's comic Up And Out, over the course of which she stopped using the name Jeremy.
[6:28 PM] macksting: (I don't usually drop deadnames like that, but her transition has been very public, and her old comics are stilled attributed to Jeremy, so I don't think I'm doing any disservice.)
[6:29 PM] macksting: It's one thing to say "there's nothing wrong with being kinky," but
a) that's not how it feels,
b) I was using it to invalidate actual gender dysphoria I was feeling,
and c) the old me was dead. Died in March.
[6:30 PM] macksting: Honestly, the rest is best described taking clips from my blog at the time.
[6:33 PM] macksting: Anyway, I should rest. I'd apologize for the wall of text, but I think you more or less expected one.
(edit 3/2/2019 for misgendering)
