Taste

ID: 3d09192b-999c-4842-963f-cc01124d3c2a

Crossposted to https://itihasic.substack.com/taste.

On my back on the floor, struggling to let air in, I heard his voice say, now is a good time to pray; and the thought that unlocked my collarbones to let me inflate, gasping, was please.

All the sense of self I had sloughed away from a thin string connecting bare moments together across years: an exam I couldn't face writing that got canceled; a class I loved, but missed too many times that year, too depressed to move from the bed, whose attendance record got thrown out; a visa visit whose timeline was too tight for comfort, that got scheduled in time for me to make it to that workshop. I remember a release of tension, a middle path between futile striving and giving up.

Please is not for serious things. My mother's various medical emergencies, for example, are all serious. In particular there's a certain 4:30AM I remember clearly: I was tallying up my options as I watched her pulse flutter in her throat at 200BPM, planning and replanning. I acted strategically. I didn't pray.

I feel a remembered contempt when I think of what praying might have felt like at the time. Please is a kind of frivolous helplessness, a superfluity. It's about God, it's about daddy. It feels like an argument from deserving. It carries in it the expectation that someone or something else is listening, and cares, and is able to fix it; and alongside, an admission of weakness, incapacity, the insufficiency of my own care. And besides that, please is for me, for my stuff. It's my job to be daddy for people I care about.

This essay is about Butter, by Asako Yuzuki.

There is a particularity to sensory input (well, to my experience of my sensory input), which I've been using as an entry point to a certain sort of trance state since I was very small. I slowly let a corner of a blanket, or the gentle air pressure variations of a fan breeze, fill my awareness; or I focus and unfocus my eyes, playing with bokeh using my ciliary muscles. Along the axis of some internal experiential dimension, I'm zooming in. Slowly, as the data unfolds itself into progressively higher detail, my consciousness grows quiet. The datastream holds my attention, fills up my awareness, uses up my resources - makes me less able to talk and think and multitask. It feels like a predecessor state for focus, and for flow.

Some way into this practice, I hit an inflection point where it starts feeling like bliss. It's almost the opposite of dissociative: dissociation feels like a zoom out, a distancing, a loss of fine detail. In here, I remain in intimate contact with my sensory experience. The consequences of that contact are amplified. It's harder and often horrible to do it with unpleasant sensations.

I do practice, in the sense that part of what I'm doing when I'm doing it is training to get better at it. There's a number of skills involved in making these trips good. Tastier tastes – more complex, more delicious – are more themselves – more delicious, but also more complex – in here; it quickly becomes hard to hold space for a sensation in my awareness until I hit that metastatic bliss point, until the clarity of what's coming in is transmuted into something rotating and flowing through. Steady concentration, of course; something like equanimity or gravitas to take things as they come, so I get less interference from the noise of my own reactions; and also something a little like faith, something definitely made in part of desire, but not really goal- or action-shaped, that nonetheless endows me with direction: the expectation/belief/knowledge that what's happening is Good, and I want it, and I can have it.

When I was a kid, I'd get there in three to five minutes, and settle in for as long as I was left uninterrupted. It was how I fell asleep. Nowadays, working through a few more decades of learned flinches, it's not so straightforward. Sometimes it just doesn't work. I've learned to respect that graceful failure, because I don't always get the warning. I once spent three years with debilitating misophonia, because of five idle minutes of playing with how subjectively loud I could make the echoes of squeaking shoes in a basketball court. And sometimes I'll be floating nicely along in the colors of a carpet, and a half-remembered pattern of someone's shirt will come to me, and if I'm not careful I'll spend the rest of my day trapped in Limbo, 2017.

I succeed or fail for mysterious reasons that feel kind of random; the habit of trying has been gradually deformed into a variable reward loop, i.e. a gambling habit. It's acquired sharp edges, hollowed out into its barest self – become a proper vice. Like any really good vice, it's gotten costly, and the lust for it gets worse and better every time I pay up. I sometimes get heartsore. I haven't yet gotten bored.

And like any good vice, I'm doing it alone - in a liminal space built to shut out the people, the context, the consequences. My bank account that just bought this perfume is somewhere else; my friend who's saying something from across the table as I sip this coffee is somewhere else; the coworkers I'm falling out of step with, as I stand staring at the light on the water, are somewhere else.

This is how I've always contextualized feeling: there's how you feel, and there's reality.

My elders and peers, however disparate their extractions and worldviews, have always seemed to be in agreement about the following:

• you work and you die;
• the qualities of the things you encounter along the way, their pleasantness or unpleasantness, are an interstitial superfluity;
• what occurs in the corners between the work and death is yours;
• nothing else is yours.

This has, so far, seemed to me like an essentially sound system of categories. Sure, (I reasoned, aged eight), the adults that governed me seemed to have the wrong arrangement of priorities for these things; and while I was under the power of these foolish adults, I'd of course be required to make compromises to treat with them. But! I'd eventually escape. Out there must be a less confused way of living, one that correctly subordinated work-death – reality – to what felt good. If I couldn't find any ready-made, I had confidence that I could roll my own.

This project started looking harder and harder as the years went by. Work and death are each formidable foes, and, as I slowly discovered, strong allies besides.

Two categories, the Within and Without; Two enemies, What I Had To Do and What I Couldn't Not Do; Two goals, Feel Good and Escape. Dichotomies make for a lot of accidental overloading, because the brain really likes to do dimensionality reductions. Eventually I had two selves, two agentlike entities that regularly claimed use of the word I in my head, that decided each duality was a battle, and picked sides and drew lines. There was the me that solved problems, that ate preference and shat action; call it Deal. And there was the part of me that breathed and read trashy fanfiction and ate junk food and demanded vacations: call it Feel.

They fought raucously, the multidimensional complexity of the problem space proving excellent ground for a ceilingless permawar. My body, mind, endeavours, and relationships all broke down with regularity; I felt like a temperamental car or printing press. The reasons for each calamity always seemed locally mysterious, even though the global architectural catastrophe was always clear. Explaining it felt exhausting, demeaning, repetitive, because at a good explanatory distance it always seemed so simple. Here reproduced: Deal spent most of its effort trying to do things, but always felt like very little got done. Feel spent most of its effort trying to enjoy things, but barely managed even satisfactory rest. I lurched from coup to coup, feeling like I was different people from week to week.

Concerns drifted between jurisdictions. I felt care for people, but somehow as the years went by that care ceded, with little protest, to Deal. As the duty of care started to weight heavier on me, as the work relationships began to interfere with other life projects, my relationship-concept slowly underwent a shift in extensional definition from a system of emotions to a class of tasks.

It seems like some part of those other projects – the "personal" ones – got flushed back the other way. Sometimes, a mysterious signal flare went up from behind what ought to have been Deal's line of control: please. The self who must pass exams ought not, properly speaking, pray.

Butter is the kind of book that I want to send people into cold. In the Age of Infohazards, it's become way more rude to exhort someone to look at something with no context; but fuck that, sometimes I want to let a book do the work it's trying to do without getting in its way. Yeah, it will change you. No, I don't want to risk immunising you by telling you how.

Against my better instincts, I'm choosing to try threading that needle: can I, without immunising you, tell you how? The thing is, I always want so much to talk about books I've just fallen in love with, because I'm changed and I'm often feeling vain about it. Reading a really good book has things in common with getting a really good haircut. Look at me! Notice anything new?

Roger Ebert could do this. Who was it that said that the best and the worst critics were autobiographical? It might have been him.

So let's give it a shot. Let's see if it works, instead of quite talking about Butter, to talk about me, in the wake of Butter. I think it's a great strategy, actually. Being a good lambda-fetishist, I seem to have found a maximally self-referential way to do the assignment as described. Like any good hedonist manifesto, this book cares quite a lot that you actually eat the cake, and pay attention to how it actually makes you feel.

To start us off: it's chick lit, which delights me. It's not even chick-lit apologia: it doesn't bother with the fig leaves I've gotten used to, attempts at preempting the shame of being enjoyable in a low-brow genre sort of way. It doesn't waste time getting performatively hyperbolic, broad, ironic, lampshade-y. It gets on with it.

It's so weird, actually, to read something recent that doesn't try to tell you what it is. I do have to do the actual work of classification myself.

I'll show my work here. Part of what makes it genre fiction is the structure: it's largely written in chronological order¹, third-person follow, in unassuming but competent window-pane prose, paced like a page turner. The sentences pool where a character's attention pools, tighten into action-y causal accounts in anxious moments, gallop right along with you at the crisis points – but slily extend themselves, adding logical complexity and indirection to trip you up, deliberately sabotaging the pace with just enough load-bearing detail to require you to rescan, ratcheting up your impatience—

Come to think of it, it has a decent amount in common with airport thrillers.

It keeps to the thriller beat sheet: the framework isn't superficial flavoring, no mere homage. Butter has faith that it can tell itself from within its tradition. Thats not to say there isn't some remix, at least from where I'm sitting reading a translated Japanese work. I thought I saw some tropes sprinkled in from that sports-shōnen-adjacent genre of jōsei that pursues a female protagonist through an awakening of passion for a career - think Real Clothes, Seiyuu Ka!, Skip Beat. The mysterious talented senpai shares a character sheet with the femme fatale; the investigation dances a waltz with the discovery; the faceoff sings in chorus with the final match.

God, I want to be Asako Yuzuki when I grow up.

The cartoon media execs in my head would never publish it as an airport thriller, though, because absolutely nothing of masculine interest is ever at stake. The only male stakeholders with any plot weight are

• Murder victims #1-3
• the Scandalized Public, who are afraid for the novel demographic risk that seems to have arisen for one's bachelor older brother
• Our main character Rika's supporting cast, who mostly participate by having plot-relevant opinions about her.

Everything else of note is women's careers, women's crimes, women's friends, mentors, relationship troubles, regrets, confidences, betrayals…²

And more subtly: it has something like a feminine approach. What you might call yin: an accord swirling delicately in the background, something like an opinion of how things work that makes up the plot struts: people in here seem to do a lot of receiving, surrender, indulgence, support, manipulation, intuition, rhetoric, wiles. It's weird in a way that you'd think twice about shelving next to a Jack reacher novel. In a thriller, I expect agency to operate in "active" modes. It feels like altogether a different subset of language ought to be used for talking about doing things in ways that are more socially mediated, less obtrusive, less attributable.

High agency, low action. Causing the world to move, but largely indirectly. This is gendered, and I know it is, because it makes me think uncharitable things about the female characters in the book, biting little jibes in other people's voices inside my mind.

Let's zoom in a little bit.

How did it taste?

– our main character, Rika, has to answer that a lot. Whatever the food is that's being discussed, her prospective interview subject, Kajii, usually requires her to eat it and see for herself. There's no small amount of forbidden thrill baked into this dynamic: "Oh, well, I have to eat the cake, you see. She'll know if I'm lying. It's a test. I can't risk failing and losing her interest - this could be my big break." Forcefeeding kink or D/s sensation play? You decide.

Kajii is a novel portrait of a tradwife sensualist. Not so uncommon! YouTube's full of 'em. But before getting to know her, I hadn't ever registered before how impressive a feat of memetic engineering it is. Women, feeling? How do you live and breathe the incessant, pervasive hatred, the conditional approval, the behavioural cues towards contempt, accept all the premises that validate all that ill will, and find a way to transmute it all into thriving?

…I think this is what happens when you actually let Feel win?

No wonder our intrepid protagonist finds it compelling: at this point, I'm compelled. Sure, it's her work, it's her passion, it's journalism: but even with all those constraints and commitments, her mandate has a lot of room in it. She takes a specific creative decision, the one where she listens to Kajii and does what she says. She commits in letter and spirit, and maybe even a little past that, to immersive learning.

And inside this choice, a sneaky little bit of self-reference has crept in: Kajii's entire deal at this point is that things taste good, and rejecting good things is perverse. The number of second helpings Rika takes is, in one way, a commitment to this tack of immersive engagement that she's chosen to take with her quarry; but in another way, almost tautologically, she's doing what she fucking wants to.

Sometimes you have to make yourself these tiny pocket dimensions of pretext as a localized antihistamine for pervasive cognitive dissonance: when you've grown too accustomed to seeing things one way, and that way is in gridlock with everybody around you, there is no escape without a little stratagem. It pays to find or forge a hall pass into a little liminality, where you can catch your breath and do some exploring. In her journalist persona, Rika is just fine going to unreasonable lengths to taste some fucking cake; it shortcuts past the part where she'd otherwise argue herself out of it. And even once she no longer needs the pretext herself, it serves as good social cover, skipping the endless variations she can expect to have on that same argument with each stakeholder in her life.

Is the pretext – that this choice is an instantiation of her commitment to journalistic method – ever real to her? Does it ever stop? Pause before you start grasping for an answer: that's part of the mindfuck. When you take off a mask after a long while, parts of it stick to you, and parts of you stick to it. You have to live for awhile in the uncertainty over which is which, and sometimes you don't get an answer.

Kajii in fact wouldn't settle for anything less than verisimilitude, and true lust for buttercream is out of Rika's ability to even simulate.

Cool cool cool: our intrepid reporter person has successfully bootstrapped herself into experiencing the pleasures of the flesh, guilt-free. She's now sort of swimming around, eating and shitting and fucking just a little bit differently, altering the pH of the social water she's been swimming in her whole life so far.

This was where I started getting scared for her.

Zooming in is a rootkit for the cop in your head. You can spend your whole life alienated from your own wants; but all it takes to learn how to want well is to get up close and personal with how things make you feel. Do it just once, and it doesn't take long before you find yourself seeking more: past the point where the sensuality of it makes you and others awkward; past the warning signs your friends are sending you in awkward DMs; in defiance, covert or blatant, of the tacit mutual enforcement of norms we're all doing to each other all the time. You will, inevitably, eventually want what feels good more than you want to be respected by the folks who are watching you. You will, inevitably, eventually have to contend with your new ego-breaking social reality: you're cringe now.

If that doesn't matter to you (or you think it shouldn't matter), how's this? You might stop caring about how you make others feel at all. You might stop caring what they think. You might decide that reality doesn't really matter, not like feeling does.

Feel and Deal don't actually have a moral victor between them.

We've all got some allergic defenses built up to keep us safe from the Great Hedonist Anti-K-Hole. It's prosocial for (at least some of) us to be able to override our immediate impulses, especially if it's at the behest of someone you love and/or someone you fear.³ If you've ever had this experience – if you've ever become aligned with an external source of approval to the point of becoming alienated from your own desires – you might find that perceiving desire in a third party grosses you out just a little bit. Do you feel that? That's shame. It keeps you safe from forgetting how others feel about you.

To me, it's quite alien to place shame anywhere near desire: even though they aren't contradictory experiences, I learned them as being in tension. When I was trying to want again, shame was loud in my ear. It was unpleasant. I wanted to find a way to shut it out.

My little sensory trance trick was great for this. One good hit of whatever-this-is: if it's good enough, reality falls away.

So for awhile, my enemy was just…Reality. What I hated was the place where you work and you die, and how things actually taste is incidental, superfluous, interstitial, of no concern, merely contemptibly epiphenomenally Yours.

What happens when a woman eats? Rika, at one point early in the book, mentions her weight, and a little later Kajii's; t nearly gave me an anxiety attack.

A few months ago I was trying to explain what my dysphoria felt like to my cousin. I just hated my hips, I told her earnestly: I used to think they made me look fat, but looking back at those college photos I hated, I was so skinny (in quasi-worshipful tones), so skinny. It was just my hips - the generous curve of them, the tapering of my quads in towards close-set knees, the ass I love to shake but hate to see in photos, the stomach that came free with the tits I got rid of, the love handles that came in with the ill-fated year of mood stabilizers and the late-night anxiety-attack chip binges, the shallow bowl of a pelvis that has stretched every shirt hem I've owned since 2009. I'm just not built for how I want to look. Nothing I wear hangs on me. There is no way I can stand that makes me look thin.

My attractive, childless, feminist Gen X cousin, who can read anybody for filth and knows my faultlines from her own mirror, did what she does, as gently as she could. Babe, how is this any different from the stories I was telling myself whenever I looked at Kate Moss in the aughts? We came up in the same era. I'm not trans, and I don't know what that's like, but I fucking know what magazines you were looking at in the checkout aisle, age eight, and I know you've got this poltergeist knocking about in there somewhere. I take you at your word that this hurts for you in a way you can't explain and I don't get. But just tell me how it's different. At least tell me that it's different.

To be quite fucking honest, I don't have a good answer for her. I don't want to be thin-and-feminine, sure; I don't want to be femme at all, exactly. But I do want to be Emma Watson in her Wallflower era. I want to be Evie Sedgwick, Trent Reznor, young Carmen dell'Orefice in a leopard-print hat. I don't want tits, but heroin chic never had tits. I don't want to be white, but hey, check out Khloe Kardashian, Rachel Zegler, Halle Berry, Rihanna. Here's Deepika Padukone in Om Shanti Om, blackened eyes huge in her face and ankles like a gazelle's, and my mum in my ear telling me she had to gain weight before the director would let her film, because she didn't have enough curves for Old School Bollywood Glam. Here's Yoon Eun Hye in Coffee Prince, taping her chest up, hips like a boy's, passing.

I want to be a cartoon that lives in my head, pieced together by a childish scared background process out of an infinite stream of skinny people. I want to suffer like the American emo kids I sat next to for a year, who wore their suffering in ways legible to me, poetry in a cultural language I learned a little too early. I want to be cast from the same die as my first encounters with genderfuckery, go about my day suffused with that same peculiar, illegible intensity that their low-res arms and hair and boyish mannerisms inspired in me, take for myself the same refuge I took in their obvious consensus-fuckability, do everything I can not to disturb the illusion that we are similar enough that their worth can transitively imply my worth. I want to be every sharp collarbone, every protruding hipbone, every flat stomach, every skinny fucking arm, every delicately androgynous chest. I want to be known on sight as serious, spare, ascetic. I want my movements to take up so much more space than my stillness that you have to rear back a little bit every time. I want you to be worried for me. I want you to be scared of me. I want to be dense, emotions packed in and radiating, threatening at all times to go nuclear. I want to be a line of action. I want smaller hips.

The internet dwells, lovingly, on Kajii's seeming unfuckability. How on god's own earth had this – this fat woman – seduced anyone at all? All other details are gravy – her draw as a story is her body politic. She's powerful, but illegible. A counterexample of something, and everybody's sure they know just what it is. But people do heinous things every day – it's her unfuckability that keeps people coming back to what she did. Oh my god, she did all that and she's fat.

See, that's the real magic trick of our Subject. Fuck whether Kajii is delusional: how the fuck is she doing that?

It's clear from the word go that Kajii's model of reality corresponds lightly, at best, to consensus reality. For the most part she's not really concerned with hard evidence of anything, except for how things feel to her. It sure feels fair to call that delusional.

But her mode of operating seems to actually work for her. It feels fair to call that sane.

It's not that complicated, really. We're all delusional to more or less the same levels: she's just weird, because the way she sees things isn't for you⁴.

Like everybody, Kajii carries around a little habitat with herself; hers just deviates from what you'd expect because her survival toolkit needs shit that Baseline Citizens don't need. It's packed full of bespoke pretext and delusion: sophisticated pocket dimensions of generous size and scope are the only way she's even going to live long enough to everything she cares about. Chief on her list of ideological commitments, the rootkit that makes the rest of it possible, is feeling good; and the second, the only viable defense against the overweening moral authority of the social contract, is a commitment to making others feel good.

It was here, as I really started to see the shape of this, that I started to feel the ice cleaving in my own soul. I started to understand what drew me to her. I embraced it. My revulsion faded; I felt a longing to be like her.

Two drives, zoomed-out and zoomed-in, Feel and Deal, want and care: the conviction that one of me has to be daddy, and the conviction that a kid deserves to get what they want. Ultimately, a forgivable architectural misstep. Respectable. Pleasantly easy to refactor. Perform a little phagocytosis; metabolise Reality into ephemera and flotsam within the gleaming pool of Mother Sensation.

This stuck little knot of pain, this dichotomy that had metastasised into a duality, these mere modes that had been accruing layers of associations for decades until they gained a facsimile of sentience; the private pro-ana Pinterest board that lay stranded and gasping in a demilitarised zone of my internal permawar, the professional/interpersonal/ideological mandate to Be Daddy— —the whole edifice gently took its first step into the light, and died smiling; incidental collateral damage of a character study in the process of its revelation.

I'm not for you.

Kajii meets all discussions of her frame with dismissiveness, distraction, contempt. How her body responds to eating is good. How others feel about what she looks like is besides the point. No wonder an entire novel's worth of characters are caught up in her drift; I'm caught up.

Get it together, itihas. What am I seeing? What am I feeling? What does this mean, what is it a solution to? Can I just … do that? Decide which parts of reality are – real, salient, morally worthwhile – and just … ignore everything else?

Let me find some cold water. I don't care how good that felt, it doesn't make any sense.

All these meals and steps on the path to self actualization are very nice, thank you, but people are still going to "ma'am" me reliably because of how my ass looks at 60 meters. We must work and we must die. I can choose the delulu: the internet is full of people who have cured themselves of shame by excising their connection with reality. But I don't want to live like that. I care what is actually the case. Just because Reality will kill me doesn't mean I don't love it.

A curious inversion occurs as the book wears on: that original framing device, that near-anaphylactic response Kajii elicits in people, starts feeling interstitial. Even as the cast of characters keep bringing it up, even as it finds odd ways to insert itself into the plot and the dialogue and the interstitial moments, the original question takes up less and less attention. It starts feeling like how the more boring voices in your head sometimes feel: like there's a spirit in the radio waves, possessing the people and machines around Rika and saying things with their voice, doing things with their hands; getting steadily louder and more insistent the less interest she has in what it's saying.⁵ As our attention spirals in, the woman at the center starts looking more and more mundane. She makes sense now. It's a mode of knowing akin to how one comes to know Tumblr blorbo: she's a beloved pile of tropes that woke up and blinked its big wet eyes at us. She's fascinating, she's endearing, she doesn't have to be right because in this chat we support women's wrongs.

There's something odd about that spiral inwards that keeps behaving like this – all the way out the other end, we find a different flavor of Equanimity altogether, and a different clarity that comes with it. Zoom in to the empty spaces inside the atoms, the silent spots between the incoming packets of sense data, and you're living in the realm of structure and interpretation again. You figure out how things are made, and a deeper, less contextually changeable love forms.

Every single woman in this book is hot. I mean this is the gayest way I can possibly mean it.

The rhythm of Sapphic seduction fucks me up every time. It is entirely void of one kind of fear, and suffused, dripping even, with a subtler, arguably tastier, fear. I've felt it often, e.g. meditating evenly on a collarbone lit up in stripes by the sunset coming through a window grille, while its owner speaks of the fair-skinned unloquacious boy that can be seen playing football outside said window. Maybe you can capture it with the question: where is my love going? Or maybe, what is my love for?

When I was younger I loved this wondering; other people are one of life's more enjoyable delicacies, and spending too much – time, thought, money – on them add a little spice.

When I was twenty, I spent awhile as my mother's primary caregiver, and abruptly stopped caring about anybody at all.

Like I said: past a certain point, caring becomes too complicated, too hard, and too painful to allow yourself to Feel.

There's only so much I can say about how women relate to each other in Butter without spoiling the effect of it. My pre-registered retreat hopefully works here also: how did it make me feel? It broke my fucking heart, is what it did. I felt cracked open. I had forgotten what it was like to care about a woman. I don't know what it is, I already told you I am not the person to ask about gender. I just know I've never gotten out of a feminine relationship, platonic or otherwise, unscathed.

There's just something about how and how much they care. How seamlessly the interior of others becomes a feature of their own interior. How richly they create vicarious preferences. How deeply a woman, in the modes of being that live in the center of the fuzzy semantic cluster of womanhood, can understand.

When you get up close with somebody, you let their way of seeing things infect you. their priorities become your priorities. My the mundane alchemy of human social bonds, you become their bonded servant, remunerated in their approval. It's scary. It's dangerous. Do you know just how much people can do to you, once they have your attention? Do you know just how much of yourself there is to lose?

I miss it.

I don't understand.

I am not good at thinking about gender. The feminine socialization is a thing that happened to me: I don't presume to know who I am in its wake, or who I was before it. I can't claim to have more than fragmentary memories. I didn't grow up embedded in a stable culture that has a playbook for how it treats each social class that hasn't changed for generations and that anyone involved in childrearing is a reliable reference for. Some shit happened to me, nobody can attest to it, I grew up. My current state is hard to introspect upon and my history is hard to reconstruct, is what I'm saying. Where do I get off talking about the phenomenology of the world's oldest biggest class divide?

Let me give you an example: when a speaker's voice is too high pitched, is it the misogyny or the misophonia that make them unbearable for me to listen to?

Here's another: until COVID hit, doing chores would stir up seemingly bottomless reserves of resentment and rage. It took about four months of isolation before clean clothes woke up in my hands as an artifact of my own care, as joy I'd chosen for myself with my own work. Did I resent:

• women's work?
• the work I was disproportionately assigned to help with at home?
• the work I felt too guilty (and scared) to turn down because otherwise my overworked mother would have to do it herself (and would yell at me about it)?
• work that felt less valuable than writing, coding, research, meetings?
• work that felt less me than writing, coding, research, meetings?
• the sheer grossness of it all? Messy reality that refused to go away just because I deemed it ugly and unworthy?

When I first came to the conclusion that I was trans, I spent a year first thinking about whether I was just a misogynist. I came to the conclusion that I am, and I've got to fix it, but there's something else in there, and I think that means I'm trans anyway.

I'm glad that I had done at least some of that work by the time I found The FTM's complete illustrated guide to Looking Like A (Hot) Dude.

In terms of size, the normal body fat range for women is 21%-33% (18%-24% for men), and anyone telling a cisgendered woman to aim for less than 20% body fat deserves a dick in their goddamned eye, but…

But…..

But we are not cisgendered people. When it comes to transsexuals, your weight distribution betrays your sex hormones. I wish I could tell you something else, but it's true.

Fact is, men and women have different body shapes (duh) and some of it's bones – which you can't do anything about – and some of it's muscles – which you can, more on that later – but most of it is adipose tissue, aka body fat. Where your body stores fat is controlled by your sex hormones; people with testosterone stash it in their gut, while people with estrogen carry it in their thighs and butt. Even if you're perfectly well-proportioned as a female, you will never hate your body more than the first time you try on men's trousers. (Again, more on that later.) Your hips ensure that you'll be wearing a size considerably larger than a man of the same BMI, it's not flattering and it doesn't look right.

It's not that you have too much fat, it's that you have it in the wrong places.

Growing up a girl means you have to be hot to be considered high-status – which, via the halo effect, means that it affects every dimension in which you want to be perceived.

Wanting to be something other than a girl, apparently, still involves losing weight. You can feel, supposedly, however you want about yourself, but them's the breaks when it comes to Reality.

You know, something's off here too. Why does Reality come to me so full of these lose-lose situations?

There's this funny thing that happens, when you try to get inside a hierarchy, and try to play by its rules…

It's hard to object, at first; every culture has its enculturing process. A functional bank or newspaper should be allowed to remain functional at all, and the incompatibilities you'll face at first will be subtle enough, and pervasive enough, that you will probably always find it easier to adjust your own stance, a little bit, just so that it rubs up against you less. Eventually, you realize that the perspective that matters, the one from which these things are adjudicated, is the institution's. An effect is deemed subtle relative to the jurisdiction of the the highest appellate court you can take it to, and the collective epistemic apparatus shared by all constituents thereof. For you, a Happening might be breaking your life apart, violating your body or your mind, stealing your friends, ruining your career, threatening your housing, warping your own ability to protect yourself…and is still very likely to remain invisible, a Nonevent, in the eyes auspices of the Big Multiagent Machine you're living and dying in, whose effective mandate has been handed down by the same evolutionary mechanisms that dreamed you into existence: Above All, Keep Running.

We adjust to being eaten by The Firms however we can. We're recast in the images of a whole new list of perversions; a new season's rogues' gallery of archetypes.

• Reiko the Professional Housewife, who has trained in the workforce for the chance to show her children a good life, and never mind the walls of the Middle Class Habitable Zone closing in on her family and the man she's in this with who's starting to look a bit wild around the eyes.
• Mizushima the Superboss Supermom, who works a job and does all the housework and makes the compromises necessary to keep both running well enough to be going on with; who isn't quite sure how to answer her proteges or her daughters when they ask when, or whether, it starts getting good.
• Rika the Girls' School Prince, who can't separate her passion for her career from her asceticism, her drive for perfection, or her sense of honor.

She feels she deserves to live like a bachelor. She wants to be admired on her own merits – that is, the merits she likes to own. She retreats, in her fear, into masculine presentation, carefully winnowing away any suggestion of amenability. A good meal puts a shine on her fingernails and makes her want a wife. She never again wants to have to be the one who cares.

I find myself agreeing with her. It really fucking sucks to care. It's a raw deal. Caring about yourself is hard enough, and caring for others is even worse than that. It's the only unwinnable game: nobody's ever happy, least of all me.

I learned early not to ask for what i wanted. It's actually quite complicated to make sense of our wants from the mess of pleasure and pain we're getting thrown at us from birth; some of us maybe need a little more help figuring it out than others. (Ask me how much water I've drunk today.) It took awhile for my childhood adults to admit that they didn't have the time, but they really, really didn't have the time.

For all that, I speak forbearance as a second language at best. Getting more of the pleasurable thing often seems impossible or absurd or evil, but I at least know that I want more of the pleasurable thing. Put another way, Feel has never once been all the way out of the game.

I have learned to expect, however, that it will somehow turn out to be impossible or absurd or evil somehow. Of everything pleasurable, I ask from morbid reflex: Is it feasible? Is it finite – is it too finite? What does it cost? Does it cost somebody else? Will it make me die sooner? Will it drive me insane? Will wanting it or getting it mean that I hurt people?

Here's what it comes down to, once we unbake all of that to find the generative question. Are my feelings real?

Well, when you put it like that: of course they fucking are.

How the hell else do I determine, via the trace quantities of various hyperspecific organic compounds in a curl of butter marks it as cultured, or stale, Amul vs Nandini, melted vs browned vs ghee? Of course the data coming in from my tongue is real. Of course my refusal to eat the rancid-smelling toast is actionable data in line with my interests. Of course my lifelong aversion to peanuts would have saved me many migraneous afternoons over my lifetime if someone had listened to me complain about them "tasting nauseous" and fed me fewer peanuts about it sooner. I trust my tongue. I trust my skin to tell me which shirts I will be miserable wearing. I trust my reflexive, quite frankly rude reactions to art and music, even as I contort myself into anxious pretzels trying to reconcile those reactions with the accepted preferences of my ingroup. Never mind my class-conscious convictions, I trust my gut about which workmen I let in the house.

The battle lines stopped making functional sense well before we started treaty-writing. Subtle gut feelings have always richly informed how I move through the world, and my strategic choices have always changed how I feel about things. My entire professional career so far has been an exercise in learning to love. Conversely, I've only ever managed to hold on to the beautiful things by working for them. I've got to zoom in to know just how far I can push my boss before my proposal gets refiled from the Impactful to the Risky bucket; my getting caught up in how her tone of voice reminds me of my mom is getting in the way of my being able to Feel usefully. I've got to zoom out to understand that at least a little part of why I dissociate when I see photos of myself is downstream of Kate fucking Moss.

And yet — zoom in. Nobody else but me really belongs here. And, well, when you zoom out, my ass is still getting me clocked at 60 meters.

Zoom in: It feels a certain type of way for me to be writing this – this, right now. Zoom out: there's something specific I'm trying to do, here. The sense-experience of this moment is full of echoes, my working memory overcrowded with aesthetic imprints. The structure is is too far up and just because I can't see it from down here doesn't mean that I'm not fucking it up.

Of everything pleasurable, I must ask, what will happen if I get it?

Sometimes it's your waistline will have that cake in it, and it will be really fucking tasty on its way there. A relatively harmless example, all told. Who cares? Maybe that's how everything is. Maybe nobody has to be daddy.

Sometimes it's that I don't want to be helping anymore, but if I don't someone will lose a year off their life. Sometimes it's I can't possibly be wrong about this, but this guy has receipts.

That happens a lot. I want this not to be the case, but it is.

It's not like Kajii's a good person. It's tricky to admire an interesting villain; usually it feels like you have to retreat, to zoom out, to get your head on right. And yeah, that's a fair strategy; I actually do care about my highfalutin' moral standards that apply to all humans even if only inside my own head.

But this sets up the battle lines along the same old tensions: that getting up close will only ever get you eaten.

I am delighted that she gets to me, because I miss having really compelling villains but also because I miss seeing them soundly defeated. This book doesn't line up all its ideological ducks in a row, and it doesn't need to. That's not the point. The point is to learn true things that only you are in a position to know. To discover subjectively, but persuade intersubjectively.

Go learn something, come back and tell us what it was. Despite the phenomenological privacy of the gustatory sense, we can still ask, meaningfully: how does it taste?

(Can you feed it to me? Can you eat some of it yourself? Can you charge mean exorbitant amount of money, so I can feel like I've paid for your care and feel safe trusting the food you've made?)

There's all sorts of ways to convince someone of something: but you've usually got to convince them, as a prerequisite, that even if it's only in this one case, you've got their best interests at heart. Chief among the ways to convince someone of that is just to be (or be perceived as) a woman. It's a woman's job to care, you see. They're designed for it.

Once again I ask you – did I resent house chores because they were:

• work I was assigned at birth, never mind how I might feel about it?
• work that my mother asked me to do because I was the only one who she felt like she could safely ask?
• work that shirking would lose me her approval, and with it my sense of safety in a scary house?
• work that would never get me out of the house, get me money, or get me any chance at escape?
• work that nobody recognized, cared about, looked at, admired?
• messy fucking reality that refused to arrange itself into kinder shapes just because touching old food made me want to throw up?

An overloaded dichotomy, to be sure.

Any system you're in, whatever it is, works, you see: by which I mean that its existence is proof that it has somehow found a way to convert its available resources, you included, into a way to Keep Running. It's likely you don't notice a lot of whatever that machine is made of; it's likely you never have and never will; and that if you do, nobody around you will agree with you.

All I want in the face of this system I'm in is to take one step back from it. I don't hate reality even though it will kill me. I don't mistrust my feelings even though they cannot keep me safe. The permawar isn't me. It's just mine.

One step back. Let me get a good look at you.

Not-asking is a hard lesson to unlearn, and I've been doing it piecewise for a long time.

The social contract, for example, makes it easier. There are requests that are as easy to make as saying "excuse me", like for instance asking someone to keep to their place in line. Other entry points, in escalating order of how difficult I've found them: asking coworkers to do their job; asking a college admin to double check a fee number; asking for accommodations at work; asking for something else to eat at a friend's house.

It's also always been difficult to ask myself for a week off, a sushi dinner, or some time to sit down and fucking write. I'm ambitious, but guilty about allocating my own effort to things I find important. It makes it easier to do a thing if somebody agrees with me that it's worth doing. It's a little bit easier, in other words, if I have a pretext.

I want to do stuff that I know nobody else understands yet.

Reductio ad absurdum…? Watch me send myself a crying emoji about it. I'm on month four of a self-imposed vacation, because for the first time in my life I have the runway and no further obligations. I'm out of excuses and if I don't do it now I never will.

And in month four, on the other end of a bright yellow detective novel, I realized that I want more than just coworkers and investors. I want care. I want love.

Nobody understands what I want to do yet, for the quite mundane reason that weird ideas, weird gut feelings, are hard to explain. Nothing sufficiently weird makes any sense without illustration, i.e. at least until somebody's halfway done with the doing of it.

If somebody else bets on the yet, they'd probably make a good coworker or a good investor. If I like them, or share morals with them, they're even a good comrade-in-arms.

But god help me, I want people to love me for me.

The help I could really, really use, all the damn time, the vitamin I've been missing all my cussed parentified female-socialized twice-exceptional life, has been for people to say, I trust you with yourself. I want you for yourself. Do whatever you're doing, do more of it. I want people to say the thing: you do you. I want the Nickelodeon affirmation, the just be yourself. The conditionless here, have this. And see, I think that's what I learned here – how to let the air in. Fortunately - marvelously, paradoxically – receiving this love is nearly the same emotional move as giving it.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Here we have a mode that I'm coming to think of as yin. It feels like acceptance, surrender, please. Like allowing. It makes for a really good way to orient, with a minimum of fear, to unpredictability; self-evident in retrospect, the simplest correct solution. If you don't have a frame that explains a thing you have just encountered, let the data in. You ask as many questions as you can and you see what happens. You feel it out without contending that one explanation or other might be true. I've always hated being wrong. It's always felt like shit. I don't think I'm alone in this? And yet when I'm confused, and I respond by trying to just let the data in, and I ask for love, it doesn't hurt. It feels the same as trying to taste something.

Reality is not necessarily your enemy. Reality will fucking kill you. Reality is that you work and you die. Reality is also love.

Yin is interesting. Part of it is about how you know things, and part of if is about how you do things. You want to find, in every moment, the richest data and the least disruptive action you can take. Piece by piece, the avalanche of knowledge overwhelms the need for sweeping strategy; your theories of change get more and more powerful, and the smallest winning move gets smaller and smaller, until it seems like most of the time you're doing nothing at all. It feels like the rising sea. It feels like doing nothing and the peasants of themselves becoming enlightened.

At least, that's the hope. My flavor of neurodivergence appears to come with the connective tissue fuckery, fatigue, and can't-quite-workplace levels of nonstandard sensory processing: In the battle to do as much as I damn well can in the time that I have, I will take every do-less-achieve-more gamble I am offered.

God. That's what it comes down to, in the end, doesn't it? In the end, I will lose. Reality will fucking kill me. There is so much to be done, and I will not be able to do it all.

In the hair's breadth, the needle's eye, between losing and giving up, I have learned that I say please.

Can you find the same breath inside your soul? Try it sometime. When it would make all the difference in the world for something very small to be just a little other than it is right now: can you find this same note singing in your own soul?

This node is a singleton!