Naila and I have been online friends for a long time now. We met on Tumblr, as girls do, and I was immediately stunned by the viscerality of her writing and how it stood out in both truth and beauty. I always thought work like hers, brutal and magnificent, needed a place to exist beyond Tumblr, recognizing that truly good work is often either overlooked by circle-jerking literary journals or rarely published due to the principled writers’ natural aversion to fame or the need for recognition. She was one of the reasons behind my foray into the magazine world, because people like her actually do deserve to be read.
I’ve said it a million times: she is a Genius, one of the great thinkers of our time, a rare beam of true perception. It is an honor to speak to her and be read by her. I feel a certain level of intimidation. Reading this, it is clear I’m nowhere near as capable with words as she is, but hopefully, this will be an enjoyable read, regardless of the gap in eloquence between us.
I’ve had to break this down into two parts. The second will be released next week for paid subscribers.
Sara:
OK, so one thing I feel that we have been talking about for years, and that you also just wrote about on your Substack, is the importance of being Difficult. Having to be less passionate or emotional, to have to apply some restraint on yourself, is a constant draining reality for me. I often feel that I am sacrificing some part of myself or worse, of the Truth, when I have to put water in my wine. And I am inevitably punished for it, for speaking too much.
Naila:
So, 100% with you on this. Over the years, I have been burned and spurned and used as a catalyst for Other Action and dropped/abandoned/flipped on — I’m sure you can relate — and it solidifies each time various Wounds, but it also has exposed this profound spiritual bereftness people possess. They are not only desire damaged and romantically bereft — they are like internally mutilated. Timid and afraid of life.
And this impulse to shrink and contort into smaller, more palatable intensities of ourselves naturally comes out in response to repeated spiritual violations and emotional devastations.
Yet it never lasts. There’s no way to like, actually do that, without turning your back on yourself and I don’t believe either of us is capable of that kind of self-betrayal in the long run.
S:
Wow, I knew talking to you about this stuff would make me emotional (you are such a perfect Pisces!) but damn, “used as a catalyst for Other Action” resonates through me. Pain.
I think I realized this when I started having sex, or craving intimacy, that this “spiritual bereftness” you describe exists everywhere; there’s a casual cruelty that is totally societally acceptable (even encouraged) and only going to get worse.
And yes, there is no way of doing that without turning on yourself, of betraying yourself. Which, of course, capitalism invites at every turn and you can see that MOST PEOPLE heed the advice and shrink themselves without even a second thought.
You’re right, though, I could never do that, we could never do that, but that’s not the high horse everyone thinks it is. It’s just endless cycles of suffering, of as you described it: catalyst and abandonment.
N:
Casual cruelty is a great phrase. This kind of spiritual violation people commit against one another IS casually cruel. That is probably what makes it so much worse than like some kind of calculated assault. What a void !
Many components to this, and I think over the years, and over hundreds of conversations with friends and observations and experiences etc., I’ve found that some of us — Cixous calls us the clandestine beings watching over the double flame — are in pursuit of truth (this is just my phrase), like actually committed to truth and justice, beauty, love (what is love if not all of those things?)
And this is a lonely lot in life, if we think of every ancient image of truthful women. Medusa, sibyls, witches.
What were they condemned to ? For seeking ?
But of course, we yearn and continue to always dare and (what I call) turn towards — and this is life!!!! Yes!!
S:
I remember the first time I saw an image of Medusa I was a child, very young and I was mesmerized, I Loved her with all my heart, I had this deep and true empathy for her despite not knowing the lore or whatever I was just Perfectly Stunned by Her.
N:
I was always a folktale/myth kind of kid, so my early introduction to her was probably from a book, and I always respected her or just like “understood” somehow, the condition of isolation or rejection. This carries on and on with different women or feminine expressions in myth, obviously, but medusa resonates so deeply across the board I think, because the vindication of the crimes committed against her laid only in her continued existence as she was. She soldiered on.
like I am personally disinterested in Revenge — it requires this commitment and strategy that I can respect in other people LOL but in myself it feels withering and destructive. I am very much interested in holding the mirror up and forcing people to confront themselves. I have accepted this about me. I don’t know everything and I’m not always right, and I make no claims to these things. But there are some indications of people’s character (or lack thereof) that need to be EXPOSED directly back to them. I don’t mean writing paragraphs out on social media to get people to cancel someone or something arbitrary and snitch-y.
I just mean telling the truth. Without any tempering or manufactured comfort in it. This is my acceptable response to casual cruelty — and with my mars in Aquarius and mercury in Aries I think I am very good at it !
S:
The condition of isolation or rejection is indeed so gripping and familiar you have no choice but to at least acknowledge it within yourself.
Ok, revenge talk is interesting. As an astrological aside, your disinterest for revenge is such a mutable sentiment to me — it’s your Pisces sun and Gemini moon, you have no interest in revenge because it requires truly exhausting focus and Gemini needs variety and Pisces is love or despair but it’s rarely revenge.
Now me on the other hand, with my fixed rising and LEO moon, Scorpio rising of all things too, does often feel the need for revenge. I have enough ego to be able to delude myself into thinking such a thing is necessary. I rarely go through with it, though, but it is usually a deeply enjoyable fantasy. I also often feel that my poems are revenge enough, I feel deep pity for the men I trap into poems, forever frozen in this unflattering portrait, idk it’s all I can do, I have Pisces Mars! I do it romantically! That’s how I turn you to stone lol
In response to your last thought, telling the truth, I definitely agree, Gemini mercury means I gossip, I talk, I tell, I write. It’s like you said, about holding up the mirror. I am the mirror and I hold it up too, like absolutely that we get to write and talk about the things that we WITNESS because that’s the thing — we fucking witness each other. I don’t even know if witness is the word I want to use, but more so that we reflect back to each other and that this very human, vulnerable exchange is now seen as a fucking AFFRONT to this culture of calculated curated image. Any challenge to that image is then going to be called gaslighting or something, and immediately vilified.
I’ve always thought one of life’s greatest pleasures is being roasted by someone you love, someone who Knows You, all of you, and who can hold up that mirror and let the truth shine through. This is what being Seen is, but we’ve managed to fucking pervert that too, the meaning of being Seen and Known. Neoliberalism has twisted that shit into some narcissistic, histrionic validation game instead.
S:
Something else I want to talk about is what I call the sanitization of love. I’m not exactly sure how to word this, just that as we can observe there is an obvious flattening, disconnected, apathetic, complacency setting in. People are depoliticized and depressed. And this has affected our capacity for intimacy, right, like on the flip side of singlehood, I know so many couples who are “surviving” year after year, avoiding break ups because they are avoiding the truth, never challenging themselves to grow, settling into bizarre deformed “domesticity” idk how the fuck we can even speak of the idea of The Home without truth, but here we are!
Is love an endurance sport? Is longevity proof of anything? Stagnating but together, and that’s somehow better? not pathetic? One could argue it is even more pathetic to drag someone else into your denial and then brag about it but…you know.
I think we’re so afraid of pain (like Byung-Chul Han says, the palliative society) but an intolerance for pain is intolerance for love. period. full stop. I am always screaming about this lol, but I can’t stand it, this cowering in the face of the peaks and valleys of love. It reminds me of this Jonathan Richman song, True love is Not nice. He sings:
Well it hurt from the bottom/and now it hurts down in your soul/that’s because, true love is not nice/and it brings up hurt/from when you were five years old/oh pain, pain, pain/ain’t that just love’s name?/love can bring up fear from way down low/
Love, to me anyway, is an opportunity to transform and be transformed and that is NOT always going to be pleasant. It is going to, god forbid, trigger us.
N:
Sanitization is a great way to put it ! And those lyrics are very relevant like absolutely love requires both to traverse the threshold of difficulty — to love what difficult is ! What is difficult in the other, as well as what is difficult TO DO IN LOVE.
People are — and this is where I flip flop a lot — either unwilling or incapable of moving beyond this labyrinth of self-incest and out of non-narcissistic love (recognizing what is of you in the other or vampirically sucking what you want from them). They want a contract or layout constructed before they move beyond — and this is anti-love.
We burn ourselves trying to coax them out of this kind of Lack.
I don’t KNOW if these people are barren. It seems flippant to write them off this way. I do think a majority of people are bereft in the way I described earlier and how you described, and this leaves them to writhe around in cowardice — in inaction, in selfish action.
I’ve thought about this as well and have identified a few components to this phenomenon — like culturally, people are screen damaged (not my phrase!) right, screens are like surrogate reality, they are porn-brained wrt women specifically, they are apathetic and have no politic of shame nor fun — too cool for excitement, too desire damaged to seduce and to ignite passion as you mentioned.
So, this all accumulates, and what do they have ??? No defining characteristics. NO INTEGRITY. They believe in nothing — they will sacrifice for nothing. And there are so many faces to this kind of low-stakes addicted, non-personality. And we inevitably encounter enough of them that we believe we are the problem because we are the constant factor —- but actually, we are not the fucking problem lol
S:
When you say you flip-flop on whether its unwillingness or inability, it’s like, we have to flip-flop on that because if we don’t, we’re just dooming ourselves and others. I also think this, though, and I lean toward unwillingness because unwillingness defines the capitalist consequences of a society that is entitled and self-obsessed and reliant on ego and pride. I don’t want to. What’s in it for Me?
I think when we’re talking about these people, the possibly emotionally barren, we’re referring to Most People here. Not to make exceptions of ourselves, but I already think we have, established some minority status to being emotionally willing in a world that is as you put it , staunchly Anti Love. Most people are emotionally sick, this is the preferred capitalist state, always trying to fill the void, always chasing the dragon. It’s more pervasive than I think anyone realizes.
Passive addiction will absolutely turn to inability, like if it’s petulant unwillingness or willful ignorance now, it will fucking morph into a full-blown inability soon enough.
The idea of integrity is so fucking lost on most people, it is mind-blowing to me. Like truly, the western mind and heart are so fucking devoid of it, incapable of prioritizing it the way it needs to be, incapable or unwilling, again, either way, to see it as a necessity to be human. Without integrity, as you said, we are nothing! We are perfect idiots, useful zombies, ideal consumers, and doomed never to see revolution of any kind.
Stay tuned for part two, and don’t forget to subscribe to Naila’s Substack.
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