Apathy and Angry White Girls…

I’m not a happy person any more than I am a social one. I tend to bite that back though. See people like happy, as long as you smile you’re obviously ok. I’m kind of fucked over by this. On the one hand I don’t want the people I like to worry about me, or to not want to be around me, but on the other hand there ain’t that much sunshine in my life.

There ain’t that much sunshine in anyone’s life.

We live in a world where kids beat the shit out of other kids for kicks and thrills. Where porn has become art and art is the realm of pretentious pricks who don’t know how to do good porn. I live in a world of apathy, neglect and suffering and it once pissed me off. I listened today to a woman whose husband damn near killed her in front of her son and then, when he got out of jail, waltzed into her home and no one did shit about it, not child services, not the police, no one. He’s still there. I am one of the many women who are among the survivors of sexual abuse that never told anyone due to fear of very real punishment and cruelty I would receive, as a result, by those I should have been able to turn to. I know so many people who are the victims of domestic violence as adults and increasingly more that had it started as children. Emotional, physical, sexual and mental abuse is rife. We’ve bought into the world a class of children that don’t give  fuck because they are taught from childhood not to give a fuck.

I’m horrified. No longer at the world around me but at myself.

I lost myself somewhere between smiling sweetly and being kind to people for the sake of those who want to see that smile. I’ve become almost entirely numb to the horror this world inflicts on me at every turn. I watch the debate about Polanski rage in silence, no longer giving an opinion or a thought to it for more than the 5 seconds it takes me to read the latest post. In fact my only comment regarding Polanski has been regarding why his art should not be shunned and regarded as less because of his crimes. Pathetic really. I turn a blind eye to fights, I have learnt to loath my physical self instead of celebrate the good it brings to me, I no longer fight for my right to speak uninhibited and I no longer create.

That is perhaps the thing I truly miss. I stopped creating, because I can’t create if I don’t care. At least I can not create anything of substance anymore. The creative process is a response to the world around you, not just taking your imaginings and putting them on paper. It should reflect the world as you see it, as you perceive it… there’s nothing there anymore.

Except when there is…

Perhaps it’s a change of scenery, perhaps it’s a realisation that I can’t live this way or perhaps it’s just that I have a love affair with some mad, strongly opinionated, educated and socially aware artists, writers and people, but I’m slowly, in little moments sitting up and paying attention.

Warren Ellis’ “Shoot” made me pay attention and think.

Reading this post by a prominent lawyer who deal in child abuse cases made me want to explain in cold, precise language why the BS I was dealing with at the time really was BS to the person filled with stupid. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to use those words in the directions of the customers.

I have had people talk to me about other people and heard the word “Why” an awful lot. Why does he do this, why doesn’t she do better, why is he like that. And I just sort of shrugged or tried to gently explain it to them…

And, some where inside, I’m screaming. I’m screaming shut the fuck up. Can you not even begin to try and understand what has happened, can you not actually comprehend the idea that someone, somewhere has done something truly horrific to another human being and that this human being, the one you are standing here judging, is not ok and needs help not your judgement. can you not see the struggle and fight, can you not acknowledge that. And “I know people who’ve been through it/worse/something similar and they cope better/have dealt with it” is not appropriate. We are each our own people, no two of us will ever feel or react the same way. Can you not understand that…

And I shrug it off and change the subject, because it’s easier that way. It’s easier to let the subject drop than to point out that maybe, just maybe, you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.

Heh, and suddenly I’m stirring, and there’s fire and I feel, for the first time in a very long time, as I write this sentence, articulate and able. Capable of expressing what’s there. Apathy is a drug, the drug, of my generation, and to some, maybe less, maybe more, the generation before me. It’s not a word in those that have come after, they’re a whole new ball game. I don’t like drugs. I’ve thought on and off about experimenting with mind altering substances and it always comes back to the same thing.

I don’t like drugs.

Not those I ingest, inhale or inject.

Not those that society creates in my mind as they call for conformity and a smile.

I shrugged off conformity a long time ago. I accept social standards as they are necessary in my life in order to do things like get a job so I can eat, but not conformity. So why is it I still fell prey to apathy like every other well conditioned little thing out there?

Answer’s pretty easy really. I decided I wanted to try being on the other side of the fence. I wanted to have people around me who wanted my company and liked me. So I stopped reading, I dumbed it down and eventually I stopped raging and lost what I was.

Somehow this doesn’t sit well with me. I’m not a teenaged rebel anymore. I never was a teenaged rebel to be honest, I always picked my fights carefully and fought them in the mediums I knew well. Letters and art, conversation and education. So I’m not a rebel, yet I’m no longer content, either, with putting on a smile and dumbing it down. I’m tired of flittering fantasy’s in my head and penciling pretty lithe figures. I want to challenge and be challenged, I want to see and I want to hear and I want to hate it.

It smells bad down there in the muck and mire, the shadows cling and the dirt never seems to get out from under your nails, no matter how much you scrub the bad taste is still in your mouth, but it’s preferable to this sterile, tidy, and numb little world I’ve found myself in.