(no subject)

Been reminded of, revived into. That wretched feeling when you[1] are a sort of feminine genderqueer type person and feeling good about yourself, only for some woman to catcall you in the street or make you uncomfortable while you’re at work. Because what she sees apparently some man to be made aware of her regard without consideration for whether it is appropriate or welcome.

Just cuts you right down to nothing, just like that. Anything you might be feeling good about yourself, all gone because someone wanted to use you to feel good about herself.

[1] By ‘you’ I mean ‘me’. But word-flow.

What I have been silent on, for lack of a time to post

Suspecting I don't fit with any sort of conscious queerness. Too mainstream of a person mayhaps, or some other thing doesn't fit.
Don't like the feeling that I ought to do the same sort of celebratoryness that I see others do. If I tell myself that, it is like telling myself I am an incomplete person without religion?

Feeling adrift and lost, like I don't have a home that I fit anywhere. Has led me to repeatedly wonder if the problem is that some function in my brain which would normally experience community and belongingness is not working right. Although I shouldn't dare claim immunity to associated sorts of social manipulations, as I strongly believe that's false.

It's been hurting more recently (or I think it has - one cannot always trust memory, and what feels like a crescendo of pain might actually just be one continuous chord the most of which has dropped out of awareness into the past) as if I feel like I should have found belonging and it is just not working right. That I think is an error on my part; if I don't fit I don't fit, and re-cutting a jigsaw piece to place on the board solves nothing.

I had a largeish post somewhat accidentally written about how I feel I do not belong with various communities, mainly autism and trans women, which I lost access to posting when my Windows partition decided it was tired of usually booting up correctly. I don't mean to rewrite it here; the gist is that I feel sufficiently unrepresented by the prevailing narratives and concerns as to make a qualitative difference and that although I may hold technical group membership I am sufficiently divorced from the problems so many face that it would be misleading to label and count myself among those numbers.

My suspicion is it would be better all over if I were to practice regarding only the details of immediate circumstance in whatever problem I may face. More precise, less prone to sending me off spinning like a great gyroscope of uncertain reality, and hopefully less liable to appropriation or minimisation of anyone else's life.

It was called "Mother's Little Helper on the Couch"

A thing I just saw reminded me of an interview I listened to [there is a transcript available at the link] on All in the Mind a couple of days ago. They were talking to a psychiatrist / historian who had done research into gender and mental health. Apparently, a study he conducted had shown a shift in how our society conceptualised depression from the 1980s onward. A split, where women are perceived as having difficulties with housework, with socialisation, with their love lives, while men are perceived as having difficulties with work and hobbies but not so much the mention of feelings.

And a subsequent study showing a parallel trend over the same span in the notes they record about their patients. Changes in what we regard depression as being. He did not draw a conclusion as to A causing B, or vice versa, or any thing although I certainly have my opinions on which.

Toward the end of the interview, also noting research that black men are strongly overrepresented in diagnoses of schizophrenia, and that this data casts doubt on the prevailing model of it as a genetic illness, suggesting again a large social component.

[disclaimer that I am not presenting this as new or shocking stuff, but as something I listened to and found interesting enough to talk about]