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clericbyers · 5 years

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learning to heal (interlude: thanksgiving ‘85)

excerpt: Mike hummed as he squeezed his arms tighter around Will and let loose a wavering breath against the top of his head. Will memorized every second of this moment as best he could, the comforting sound of Mike’s breathing, the warmth oozing from his skin, the difference in height between them that still left Will short enough to tuck his head in under Mike’s chin if he dared. He didn’t want this moment to ever end, but of course it did.

length: 12.1K words

POV: Will Byers

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tag list: @vaugency, @lifeinvirtualreality, @princestanley, @lgbtqbyers, @smhbyler, @ticomat, @lightswriting, @lithhiums, @lullabyers, @byers-remorse, @cstlebyrs, @lomlbyers, @babybyuns, @mavencslore ♡

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“Will!” Joyce called from the front of the house. Will looked up from his drawings and turned toward the clock, perking when he noticed the time.

“I’ll be right there!”

The young boy scrambled for his jacket and some shoes, yanking his bedroom door open as he raced to the front door where his mom stood. Excitement bubbled in his chest even though it had only been a month since the move. School was weird—new kid stress wasn’t fun in any manner—and he and El were still struggling with how to fit together as housemates and siblings. It was weird having a sister, let alone having a sister with supernatural powers, though those powers had yet to return.

Will twisted the door handle and stepped out onto the porch, holding a hand over his eyes to block the sun shining above. His eyes grew used to the light and he turned toward the driveway where a familiar car was parked. He couldn’t help the smile that broke out on his lips and he ran toward the car as he heard the door click open.

“Mike!” Will shouted, laughing when the other kid quickly whipped around to find where the voice came from.

Mike didn’t look too different, it was only a month after all, but he also looked a little different than Will recalled. Will didn’t think a month apart would make him start forgetting details about Mike’s face—the benefit to his crush, which still made him a little flustered to think about, was that he watched Mike so much that he had the boy’s face memorized—but Mike seemed off. More in shadows, less in light. His hair seemed more black than brown even under the sunlight and the typical chocolate brown eyes Will sketched out in the privacy of his room looked darker than usual. More coffee brown than chocolate, which was fine, food analogies aside, but it wasn’t Mike’s eye color.

“Dude,” Mike started and Will still couldn’t understand why Mike had started referring to him using ‘dude’ or ‘bro’, “I made it like I said I would.”

Will knew his smile was getting wider but he couldn’t care to stop it. “Just in time, too. Well, I mean it’s the 25th so there was buffer room but I’m glad you’re here now.”

“Me too,” chuckled Mike as he brushed a loose strand of hair from his eyes. Will unconsciously followed the motion of the other boy’s fingers, mentally caught in a loop of affection for how beautiful and strong those very hands were, and turned pink at the edges when Mike noticed and cocked his head to the side with a question. “You good?”

“Me? Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mike, please, you just got here. I should be asking you how things are doing back home.”

The other boy huffed and broke eye contact to stare off toward the street. “Things are going.” He turned back to Will with bright eyes and a smile but Will knew Mike. He knew this boy better than he probably knew himself and Will knew the smile and excitement was honest but not real. “Enough about Hawkins, though; tell me about your new life out here!”

Will opened his mouth to reply but a squeal from behind him turned both him and Mike toward the front door and Will’s heard plummeted. He tried, he really tried not to hold anything against El for liking Mike, but jealousy had Will in it’s snare and wouldn’t let go. He stepped aside to allow El to run toward Mike, who brightened and held out his arms to take her in a hug with joyous laughter.

Will bit at his bottom lip. He wished he could do that, run up to Mike and spin in his arms, drop to his feet and pull him down by the collar of his shirt for a kiss. The fantastical nature of it all made Will a little dizzy whenever the want penetrated his deeply rooted denial of the reality of the situation ever occurring. Even if he tried to tell Mike that it was okay to like him, that it was okay for whatever was happening between them to happen, Will wasn’t sure he really believed anything would change. The evidence was in plain sight right in front of him—Mike wanted El that way, not Will—and he needed to get over it already. Get over Mike.

“But what if you want to join another party?”

“Not possible.”

Yeah, he thought to himself as Mike pulled from the hug and gripped El’s hand in his own, not possible.

“Will,” Mike called with a more genuine smile than before, “you wanna head inside and show me your new room?”

“Oh sure,” he said with a shrug, “but maybe you wanna check out El’s first?”

Mike was confused. “What for?”

“You two are,” Will crossed his two fingers together in lieu of stating the fact the two were a couple aloud. “I don’t mind really.”

Mike waved a passing hand. “Nancy and El can entertain themselves with Jonathan; I wanna see how much different your room looks.”

“Oh. Alright then.”

Will was silent as the trio made it inside, trying his best to ignore Mike and El’s whispering behind him. By the time he got to his room, only Mike was trailing behind him and he was eerily silent for being the one the Party would always pester about shutting up. There was some sort of tension now, equally unpalatable and unfamiliar, and Will didn’t know what to do about it. He thought they had made up before he moved away, he thought they were close again, closer maybe, but at least not so distant for there to be unspeakable tension.

The door to his room creaked as he opened it and though a large part of him wanted to look back and watch Mike’s face as he peeped inside, Will kept his eyes facing forward and approached his bed. Mike didn’t make a sound as he followed him and the silence was starting to be more suffocating, especially when the other boy shut the door behind him. What was he supposed to say? Why were his palms getting sweaty? Why couldn’t he look at Mike?

“This room is pretty nice,” started Mike with a small shrug. It brought Will’s eyes up from the floor to Mike’s face and when they made eye contact, Mike looked away first with a cough. “It suits you.”

“I should hope so,” Will replied quietly. This wasn’t like Mike. This wasn’t like Will either. Whatever happened between their goodbyes and Mike’s arrival changed something and Will didn’t like it. “Are you...are you okay?”

“Me?” Mike whipped around to face Will from where he was inspecting a Beatles poster. His eyes were wide with surprise and then melted into soft laughter. “I’m fine, Will. Really. Don’t worry about me now.”

“You’re just really quiet.”

Mike shook his head with a huff. “Nah, just don’t know what to say anymore. It’s weird, right?” The taller boy turned back to the poster and rubbed at the back of his neck. “We used to see each other every day and talk for hours despite that but we spend a month apart and I don’t know where to begin.”

“Too much to talk about?”

“Not enough.”

“You know you can tell me anything. Even mundane shit, I really don’t care. I just like hearing you talk. I miss that.”

Will blushed once the words were out of his mouth and he quickly turned away from Mike toward his desk where his drawings were splayed out all over the surface. The drawings that were, in particular, sketches of Mike. Oh shit. He turned back to Mike and hoped he hadn’t followed his line of sight, but Mike was still staring up at the poster. His cheeks were pink though and that made Will curious.

“I miss that, too,” was his slow response. Mike tilted his head just enough for Will to get a good profile view of him and, Will’s heart leapt in his throat. Mike was unfairly gorgeous and Will wasn’t immune to his charms in any manner. “El and I are...we’re not together.”

Will tried not to sound excited; it wasn’t as if he had a chance either way. “Like for good?”

“I don’t know. I hope not. Things have just been really weird with us lately.”

“It looked like you two were together when you hugged.”

Mike shrugged. “It’s always great to see the people you care about again after a long time. I couldn’t not hug her.”

But you didn’t hug me.

“No, I didn’t.” Will sputtered as he realized he said that last thought aloud. Mike turned fully to face him and raised a bit of a smug eyebrow. “Do you want a hug, too? Wanna run and jump for it? Pirouette, too?”

Will knew Mike didn’t know, Mike couldn’t know, but he hated how the other boy was unknowingly playing with him like this. “I’m fine,” he snorted back and if he sounded a little hurt with it, no one needed to know. “I don’t need a hug to affirm our friendship.”

“Well, that’s good for you but I think I do, so if you don’t mind,” Mike motioned for Will to stand up and then opened his arms wide. “Hug me, Will.”

This was strange. This was very strange and Will’s heart was beating so fast he thought he might pass out. Mike wasn’t one to shy away from physical affection but since he was with El, he had stopped being so proactive about it in general. Will still got the occasional hand to his arm in comfort, and sometimes they still sat pretty close together, but this? Opening his arms with a gentle smile and demanding a hug so blatantly without question? This was too much to handle.

Will fell into the hug anyway because he was weak-hearted and Mike was warm, familiar, homely, beautiful, everything Will wanted but couldn’t have in a single human being. If he couldn’t have Mike the way he wished for, he would definitely take advantage of whatever Mike was willing to offer him. Consider himself spoiled given Mike usually gave Will everything—everything but his heart apparently—but it was a type of spoiling he realized he missed most of all.

Mike hummed as he squeezed his arms tighter around Will and let loose a wavering breath against the top of his head. Will memorized every second of this moment as best he could, the comforting sound of Mike’s breathing, the warmth oozing from his skin, the difference in height between them that still left Will short enough to tuck his head in under Mike’s chin if he dared. He didn’t want this moment to ever end, but of course it did.

Will turned to hide his face so Mike couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t read whatever emotion plastered itself onto his face. He only turned around when he heard Mike take in a shaky breath, worry taking over his mind as he watched Mike’s shoulders sink with a shuddering sigh.

“Mike,” he started hesitantly, “it’s okay if you’re not okay.”

“I’m fine,” he spat back, glaring at Will as he crossed his arms. His eyes were rimmed with tears and it broke Will’s heart to see his friend so hurt and unwilling to open up about it. “I’m perfectly fine.”

Will frowned. “Do you need another hug?”

“I, uh,” Mike laughed and shook his head. “Our friendship has been reaffirmed in full. We’re good.”

“Okay.” Will plopped onto his bed and kicked his legs through the air. “Do you know where you’re staying over while you’re in town?”

“I think my mom got a motel but I don’t mind staying overnight here since we’re only up here for, like, three days.” The lanky boy turned as he inspected the poster covered walls of the room. “You wouldn’t mind if I stayed over in your room, would you?”

“It’s not a problem.” Will sent his friend a soft smile. “I’ll get my spare sleeping bag from the closet; you can take my bed and I’ll take the floor.”

“No, no, I’m the guest invading your privacy in your room. The floor is mine.”

Will snorted. “We are not about to fight over who takes the floor.”

“Of course not because I’m taking the floor.” Mike motioned to the ground near Will’s bed and clasped his hands together. “In fact, where is your frog plush? I’ll use it as a pillow so you don’t have to grab a new one for me.”

Will blinked a few times. “I, uh, it’s on the dresser.” He motioned toward it and then frowned. “It’s not very comfortable though. You know it’s really not a bother to get another pillow. You should at least be comfortable if you’re gonna be sleeping on the floor.”

“Don’t worry about it; it’s not worth the hassle. I’m here for three days, right?” Mike walked toward the door with a smile. “I’ll get my bags and tell my mom I’m staying over. See you in a bit.”

Will nodded but watched Mike leave with confusion in his gaze. He couldn’t put a finger on it, but Mike’s entire energy was so jittery. It was like he couldn’t settle on a single emotion and kept bouncing between excitement and this more maudlin aura that made Will’s heart clench a little desperately. He wondered if it was because Mike was still sad about him and El not quite being together. Will didn’t know what was going on between them; he never eavesdropped on their conversations and El didn’t talk much to him about her and Mike, but he had most definitely thought they got back together and were trying to be a long distance couple.

He sighed and grabbed the sleeping bag and a pillow despite Mike’s request for the froggie plush. He organized the papers on his desk so his doodles were hidden deep in a stack under the recent landscapes he’d been practicing recently. He wanted to be able to sketch the scenery he saw out here, the way the trees bend in the wind, the way the sun bleeds yellow into the blue of the sky and blends purple and orange out of it. After the move, Will bought new art supplies since many of his old ones were tossed out for the sake of compaction for moving. He wasn’t too upset about it, the new copic markers and graphite pencils in his collection taught him new ways to practice shading and line art. Will could spend hours on a single portrait, watching the way his pencil danced across the page in shy spurts shading the shadows that played against the curvature of bodies and sporadic yet oddly intentional messiness found in nature.

Art was the way Will could express himself the most and he took that seriously while struggling to fit into a new town. Usually he turned to D&D but El wasn’t interested in creating a character and D&D really wasn’t the same without listening to Mike narrate a campaign with his wild onomatopoeias and exaggeratedly elaborate prose. A sigh took Will’s chest and he released it gently with a hand passing over the top sketch of the first sunset he ever saw from the porch of this house.

Loud yelling tore Will from his thoughts and he rushed toward his door to open it and find Mike and El arguing in the front doorway as Mike held his overnight bag in hand. Mike looked way more haggard, more tense and extremely irritated by whatever El was saying. She had anger blazing in her eyes and was gesticulating wildly as she spoke. It was odd to see from someone who controlled her motions deliberately after years of being trained to do so. El’s emotions were always leaning toward the extremes, Will had quickly learned when sibling irritation took to the air and he and El sat on opposite ends of the couch pretending the other didn’t exist.

“What did you expect from me?” Mike asked belligerently. “I’m here for three days, El. You can manage.”

“That’s not the point I’m trying to make and you know it.” El snarled as she stepped into his space. “You need to decide.”

“I already did and just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean I’m changing it.” Mike barked before stepping back. “I’m dropping my shit off; when you’re done with this,” he waved toward El and she scoffed with a roll of the eyes, “I’ll be back to talk.”

With that final word, Mike stormed down the hallway past Will and haphazardly tossed his bag into the room. He didn’t give Will a single glance when he popped out the room and brushed his way by to head back outside. El stood by the front door watching him and then twitched her hand subconsciously when the door slammed shut behind him. Will didn’t know what to say and he most definitely did not want to intervene in on a spat between his friend and his not-girlfriend, but he didn’t like seeing either person upset.

“You okay?” He asked as he made his way to her side. She gave him a glance and then glared toward the door.

“Mike is being an asshole.”

“He does that sometimes.” El laughed and turned to fully face Will. He smiled and stuffed his hands in his pocket with a hum. “You wanna talk about it? Get it off your chest.”

El bit at her bottom lip. “He is...he is confused. I can tell but he won’t say and now he is avoiding me. Does he not trust me anymore?”

“No, he does. Trust you that is. Sometimes people can’t say what’s on their mind.” Will looked back at the door and felt a tightening in his chest. “It’s not because we don’t trust anyone, it’s mostly because we don’t trust ourselves.”

“That is,” she scrunched her nose as she scrounged for a word and her eyes went downcast once she settled on one, “sad.”

Will smiled self-deprecatingly. “Yeah. It kinda is. But don’t worry about it, Mike’ll come around. He always does.”

“Yes, he does,” she said dreamily and Will felt jealousy rise in his chest again and make him feel a little sick. “Do you want to watch a movie tonight?”

“All three of us?”

El nodded with a light smile Will was happy to see on her face. “Jonathan and Nancy too if she wants.” The girl turned toward the window where the aforementioned two were standing chatting together. “Nancy looks pretty today.”

Will raised an eyebrow as he followed her gaze. Nancy had sort of been a big sister presence in his life while being so close to Mike growing up. He never really saw her as pretty, but he could admit that she was kind-hearted and sweet and was always there for Will when he needed it, even if she was gruffer with Mike. Not seeing Nancy as pretty wasn’t saying much anyway since Will’s attraction toward girls was non-existent.

He shuddered at that thought and then gave El a nudge with his shoulder. “You can go on and ask them to join us. I’ll find a movie and talk to Mike.”

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#byler #byeler #will byers #mike wheeler #el hopper #stranger things fic #lth #learning to heal #lth fic #lth interlude '85 #fic #st fic #we getting some flashbacks up in here!!#thank you to everyone supporting this!!

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centaurrential · 4 years

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The first.

The nice thing about blogging is that one doesn’t need to follow a strict academic essay structure: the issues and concepts I want to write about are always architectures built upon some underlying causal, foundational plot. It would be nice if we could hyperlink the written representations of our thought processes, but alas, that is one domain in which modern technology has fallen short. You might see that I jump around between topics, but I promise there are connections everywhere. So, here we go!

I’ve been hesitant to write about what ignites my passion the most.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

For one, save for some semblance of a university degree I attempted to put together years ago, I have little in the way of ‘respectable’ credentials. I rely on my own observations of what is happening around me. A high school friend once revealed to me a technique in visual arts that has stuck with me since. “Draw what you see, not what you know to be there.” I have applied this not only to achieve realism in the scant visual artworks I have produced and which have gone unseen by most others, but also to compose a coherent understanding of my world--or in other words, everything I feel. This “motto” of sorts shows that we often ignore details about our experience that are in plain sight. Despite holding this key, I am well aware that I have not necessarily earned any institutional authority to write on the matters that compel me so--yet, as a person who has simply lived and observed, I still feel that I should express myself, for what ever it may be worth.

Second, though my risk of legal and political persecution in some form or another is not as dire as was obviously the case in the past with established thinkers, I’ve felt compelled to dress my thoughts in verse, marching what I think are critical ideas down the runway, letting the audience gently scrutinize the layers of different conceptual fabrics in motion rather than to place what is thought to be controversial on a podium, open to the personalized savagery of modern “progressive” critique. Misunderstanding is a very real fear of mine as I believe it is one of the greatest tragedies of the human condition. I suppose, as a sensitive person who is deeply emotional and deeply invested in my own thought as a means to a better world, my intent up to now has been to create a buffer of some sort between what I theorize and the ideology-driven hate that tends to characterize Internet culture (which, incidentally now, always carries a ‘social media’ component with it). But I don’t wanna hide anymore.

Something I’ve noticed about that very vehicle for thought is how utterly unforgiving it is. Someone uncovers a person’s past involving a stupid, ignorant mistake along the lines of political incorrectness and suddenly all the good they may have recently put into the world evaporates because there is some sort of twisted expectation of social perfection we’ve adopted--even though there is some overlap between this absolutist, impossible approach to other, equally fallible human beings and the tendency to wax poetic about one’s own cathartic emotional experience, along with a new awareness emerging from the remnants of self-destruction, and forcing ‘compassion’ toward oneself in light of one’s mistakes.

The message is that “I” can learn, but “you” cannot. It seems that people are so volatile these days, they’re ready to pounce without really thinking about what a person is trying to say in earnest. And while I believe that we should work hard at our collective and individual duties to skepticism, I cannot condone, to the furthest reaches of any influence I may have, the deadlock of pseudo-critical thinking when it involves scapegoating and self-righteousness.

I sense (and feel) a lot of (justified) anger, and many well-meaning individuals are looking for a place to which they can direct such intensity. The unfortunate thing is that the fire mutates into hostility toward people who don’t deserve it. Shuffle formless anger into boxes designed to look nicely and glamorously radical, and chuck it at those who--excluding the really terrible people in the world--are honest and serious about answering the questions of “how to achieve the maximum possible distance from pain”, and, “what is, essentially”, and you’ve got a problem on your hands. Nothing is ever as simple as we’d like it to be.

And by the way, I find the dismissive “ok, boomer” attitude reprehensible. Like, OBVIOUSLY there are going to be differences among generations in “opinion” and lifestyles and so on. And obviously past generations have made what we now deem to be ‘mistakes’. But just like any individual who may regret past actions, whether personal or professional, one makes decisions supported by the most convincing reasons they can muster, and so they do the best they can with the knowledge they have at hand, at some particular moment. Maybe some visionaries in the past were able to extrapolate from the contemporary and predict what would happen in the future. Even if their equivalents exist in society today, we will not know for certain the downright traumatizing effects current societal mechanisms could force to manifestation in the years beyond, until they actually become fact. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And, there is wisdom that only comes through living life. That, I’m afraid, is not up for debate.

I must say this here, now. I realize I’m walking on eggshells with what I’m about to say. But, while it is clear that there is a significant degree of ‘white privilege’ in North American society, I’d be careful to declare ‘privilege’ an inherently white experience. It is an historical reality (and is therefore biased). Not all ‘white people’ are the same; and it is CERTAINLY not the case that it has only been ‘white people’ that enforced slavery, for example. And it is definitely true that different members of different religions and different races and different ethnicities and different cultures and different dialects have, historically, perpetuated evil across many axes. Furthermore, I believe that the explicit and intentional denigration of ‘white people’ MADE BY WHITE PEOPLE THEMSELVES is probably one of the greatest expressions of white privilege. How secure must one feel if they can freely diss their ‘own kind’ and know that nothing diabolical will happen to them? We owe justice through opportunity to people we have marginalized, but that is not the way. I just think that people are either willfully ignorant, accidentally ignorant, or have forgotten that all kinds of people can be villains, and further that a truly corrupt person will even torture people with whom they may have a great deal in common.

I tend to think that ‘intersectionality’ is a seriously important concept and is most empirically aligned with individualism. People move around more, cross-cultural contact happens more; global connection ushers cuisine, rituals and traditions, spiritual beliefs, and languages into landscapes that were previously barren of particular social technologies. The result is a person who may have many characteristics sort of in common with others who share those qualities in a scattered manner, but unless one of those forces was exceptionally prominent in the person’s life, the commonality is negligible.

Emergent from this phenomenon is the serious tension between individual self-actualization and the requirements for so-called proper functioning of the broader ‘community’ to which one feels they belong. The needs of each can often be at odds with one another, and it doesn’t appear to be an easy task to resolve this conflict. I do know that sacrifices will have to be made, as there is always a price to pay; I almost think of that as a universal law.

When I was 19 and took a philosophy of feminism class, I started noticing what problems arise when a mode of thinking is assumed to apply to a particular “community” (loosely speaking), just because its members all share some intrinsic quality. In the particular case I’m talking about, it was “being female”. When someone speaks the word ‘feminism’, it is loaded. You have liberal feminism, eco-feminism, radical feminism, third-wave feminism, black feminism, post-colonial feminism, and so on. The relevance of these various types is stretched so thinly throughout the human landscape that one could legitimately wonder why those theories should even be considered to have anything in common. In other words, how can you possibly come up with an ethic of revolution that applies universally to, I dunno, how many billion people in the world? Here’s a situation: women in the West, particularly in the Deep South, are fighting for their choice to have an abortion. Meanwhile, in some parts of India and China, female infanticide is more common than a decent person should like to admit, and that’s not because Indian and Chinese women want it! Asking someone who is thoughtful in ANY respect if they are a feminist is like asking someone if they believe in God, and that is not, nor should it be, an easy question to answer.

To be clear: what I am talking about is definition, and if you break down the etymological components of that word, you see that it is about deciding what sorts of conceptual boundaries must be drawn (the finiteness)--to determine what is included, and also what is excluded. My belief is that it is actually the interplay between those qualities intrinsic to a person and external forces placed upon us that dictate the degrees of self-satisfaction and happiness we experience.

That pain is to be avoided is generally unquestionable, though the finer details of rational action (because I do see the treatment of pain as an issue of rationality, and as something more fundamental to the exercising of rational action than market economics is) are still up for debate. And, I suppose, that is the case for many injustices that an active, voluntarily thinking society wishes to eradicate. I’d like to return to that topic some time in the future, but what concerns me today is the issue of essentialism.

Essentialism has been a problem for philosophers for a really long time. Often it is conceptualized as “what makes something that thing”, but in my view, Essence seems to lie in the realm of the experiential. In one minor paper I wrote for a metaphysics class, I argued (incompletely) that an object’s ‘essence’ could be partly defined by the function one identifies when they come into contact with said object. For example, because even though chairs can be made up of different numbers of legs, or be of different colours, or be upholstered or not, we place them into a category of ‘something to be seated upon’. But then again, there are many things that can be sat upon, and, on the other hand, one does not look at a real life dog and think of it as an object that innately serves a purpose, let alone is built for one.

So why am I talking about what seems to be an obscure and useless topic?

It is the utility of Essence that gives form to our experience. And for those who believe that we erroneously categorize and judge every single damn thing we come across in our lives, go ahead and try to reverse neurological evolution through time of geologic scale. I mean, this mode of existence came to be before we even defined what ‘values’ were.

Tangentially, my introduction to the study of philosophy started with the great divide between ‘rationalism’ (ie. some inherent structure which creates the capacity to ‘know’ already exists in a person at the time of birth) and ‘empiricism’ (the school of thought where a person only collected knowledge through experience after they were born with a ‘blank slate’ of a mind). I never understood why the distinction between rationalism and empiricism was so important, because it seemed so obvious that our system of moving through the world was a combination of the two. We see now that the belief in one to the exclusion of the other is just plain stupid: genetics, epigenetics, logarithmic counting in BABIES, education, debate, and research, all contribute to an individual’s understanding of the world. (It is this idea, too, that contributes to my belief that free will is an illusion [though a helpful one at that] and that ‘luck’ is an epistemological concept. I will also use this idea to, eventually, communicate my argument that astrology is theoretically plausible, but that involves discussing archetypes and the cyclical nature of our known world...) Note: “Epistemology” is the study of knowledge and how we come to accumulate it. I went on this tangent because I think we need to demonstrate a great deal of respect for both pre-existing neurological realities and the staggering potential of science to teach us about our environments and ourselves. There are some core things about us that we would be wrong to ignore, and unforgivably so if the sound science is right there.

We do not typically go through life coming into contact with objects or people and checking off items on a list that comprise criteria for something being what it is (unless, of course, you’re prone to collect little hints as to whether a potential lover loves you back or not.....). To do so would reduce the fluidity with which we interact with externalities. That being said, I can conceive of a time when one goes outside for a cigarette in the night and watches a creature (as I just did) that may be a cat, or that may be a raccoon, cross the road. You peer at this creature for several seconds, up until the point that you conclude, and are certain, that it is, indeed, a cat. It is then that you can move on with your life. Perhaps what helped you to come to this conclusion was a short list of criteria that separate catness from raccoonness. Obviously that would be more efficient than consulting an exhaustive mental list of “cat properties” and comparing it to a similar list, but of “raccoon properties”. But even so, by the time you’ve witnessed the cat/raccoon, you’ve already filtered out any possibility that the creature might be something else, like a stray dog, or a lizard, or a floating chair. In conclusion, I propose here that context is essential to Essence. And Essence is a fully whole sensory experience, insofar as your sensory faculties work. This is why it is so hard to define.

The social relevance of the concept of Essence is becoming more important with the emergence of identity politics, the crises in feminism, “queerness”, the feminine/masculine dichotomy, and even paradigms in psychological health. Inherent to Essence is continuity, and no one can argue against the notion that we rely on general continuity to go about our daily lives.

But out of continuity develops expectation. Expectation is immensely helpful for the reason I laid out above. Additionally, in public, we rely on a common yet tacit understanding that individual members of the public will behave in a way that is safe and appropriate for everyone. The problem is, if you have experienced a good chunk of your life, well into adulthood, having never seen an unfamiliar and idiosyncratic expression of certain properties, why WOULD you do anything else other than fumble in your acceptance that that is the way something is? Your mind scrambles to organize what you are interacting with in the way that makes the most sense.

I was once accused of being an essentialist because of some remark I made referencing biological differences between men and women. I wondered if the dude was joking because I really cannot grasp why someone would think that the differences are trivial. Lately I’ve toyed with the conclusion that there must be something essential, something bounded, about the way we express ourselves, which matches what we are that isn’t seen by absolutely everyone, including exuding femininity or masculinity. If there wasn’t something essential about these “descriptions”, why would anyone make an effort to look a certain way in the first place? Or, why would anyone have a subconscious tendency to adopt certain characteristics? The point I’m trying to make is that communication in the form of appearance is just as important as a verbal explanation of something, and can in fact be more truthful than what is verbally expressed. Whether one wants to admit it or not, you are offering information that allows others to draw conclusions about you. And it’s not that you merely fulfill a checklist of the sort that I mentioned earlier. It is that, often, though not always, each separate quality supports all the others, forming a sort of “mesh-like” coherence. If there wasn’t something essentially feminine that you identified with, or something essentially masculine that you identified with--if these things didn’t matter--there would be no point in going to great lengths to change your appearance to communicate something. (And I think this holds even in the case of the non-binary person.)

Of course, judgments are made all the time about people, which have nothing to do with being transgendered or cisgendered. A person asks you your age. Why? Because they’re collecting information about you and the particulars in the category of “age” should reveal something about you that you’re not stating explicitly. And this information is only grounded in other information the inquirer has about you. And the only reason this information might be reliable is because a consolidation of an individual’s past experiences tells them that a certain age represents an axis of consistency of mentality and/or behaviour. The deductions we make are not always accurate, but if we didn’t instinctively think of this information as important, we wouldn’t seek it!

I will now apply the above problem to sort out why we are in such a mess, socially. First of all, the person is born into expectation of behaviour. That expectation depends on their sex at birth (assuming the person is not intersex), their social, economic, political class, the levels of education their immediate family members have achieved, their spiritual practices, et cetera. It seems to me that feminism arose in the first place because of the particular kind of anticipation of behaviour that swirls around whether you have a testicle-penis or a uterus-vagina combination. The traditionally ‘male’ realm was the unexplored frontier to many women; it was one of excitement, possibility, and opportunity, and arguably more freedom than the domain to which women were typically assigned: the home. Women can produce babies, and if you could produce babies then you SHOULD produce babies, and you should care for them too. And not only that, but by virtue of the fact that you are a mother you can’t even fathom leaving your babies behind. I haven’t yet come across a proper articulation of why this point is so crucial to understand. The women who have the term “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) slung at them are attacked by people who don’t understand that this fundamental difference in expectation between female-born individuals and male-born individuals is looming in the background, and how damn well important it really is, because it inevitably shapes a person’s perception of the world and quite possibly the expectations they have of other people! And the perception that falls upon you isn’t just something you can shed on a whim. And also, why are people surprised that this is still an issue? Even as advanced creatures we still succumb to evolutionary forces. I don’t think any reasonable person could say that “you aren’t female even if you feel female”, but it’s not about how you “feel”. It’s about what happens between you and people once they figure out a vital fact about you. It’s about the context in which you, a whole being, operate. You want to talk about oppression? I think your self-identity being misaligned with how other people think you should be is pretty high up there in the ranks.

So, to digress a little: the notion of changing yourself and making an impression on strangers, making a difference in the world, is intoxicating. But we enter dangerous territory when visions of child-rearing and home care become afterthoughts. Child psychologists have identified the age range between 2 and 4 to be particularly crucial in socializing children; it is at that age that they are the most impressionable with regard to how they learn to interact with others. That’s not really a huge window to make sure you ‘get it right’. I think the family unit, whatever its configuration may be, is pretty foundational to the rest of society. While many people presently carry harmful opinions about things we don’t understand, and changing those opinions tends to be rather difficult, the most radical, most powerful thing we can do to initiate reform is to make sure the children we are responsible for grow up valuing honour, kindness, and a sense of duty and justice, not just in relation to themselves and their immediate families, but to society as a whole.

People are throwing tantrums because society hasn’t given itself an overnight makeover. I think that anyone involved in politics understands, either consciously or unconsciously, that even though political institutions and bureaucracies were created by real people, they’ve sort of become fragmented away from human life and are entities of their own, floating above our heads like clouds in the higher atmosphere, and which do not have any readily identifiable boundaries. It appears that the various bodies of legislation and bureaucracies have become so bloody complex in correlation with the complexity of human interaction that they seem almost impossible to disentangle. Furthermore, ideas take a long time to die...if they ever even do.

Rather than viewing child-rearing as a burden, I choose to view it as the greatest responsibility and the greatest tool we have for genuine change. I feel, honestly, that sometimes we waste energy trying to convince people of something where there is no convincing possible. We often preach to the choir because they’re the only people who make us feel heard--but our own little choirs already know and believe what we know and believe.

So. I think, once I reviewed what I said above, that I’ve attempted to illuminate a conundrum about simultaneous utility and danger found in the act of expecting. This “study” of sorts is a microcosm of a world where darkness and light are aspects of all things. I’m convinced that the formulation of potential is expressed in binaries, but unlike computers, we are able to interpret ambiguities, and in many pockets of society people are tolerant of self-expression. With so many belief systems up for grabs, and with the world as it is in its ebbs and flows, it is up to the individual to craft their own transcendent values as a way to “orient themselves”, as Dr. Jordan B. Peterson put it. Be mature and do not dismiss nuance. Challenge yourself. And for God’s sake, the next time you’re thinking of buying that innocuous avocado that’s become the symbol for the Millennial generation, ask yourself what is more important: dismantling violent and antisocial Mexican drug cartels, or supporting Mexican farmers who are trying to make their ways through life, just like every. last. one of us.

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