MOOP!

After my candidate exam, and after I got the results, and after everything else that was going on that week I sat and I processed and I wrote some words in my BehindTheWalls file. I wrote a longer entry there than any other I've written in this particular manifestation, and I feel it's an interesting turning point for my life as a whole. Absolutely not, you can't ask to know more.

Here is a line from the middle of it:

I was not fake. I was there. I was present. I was…what is the opposite of dissociating?

I'm pretty sure now the answer, for me, is dancing. Music: loud, howl along to a voice more powerful than my own, move body, move self, dance. If I am able to dance, and to sing, and to listen, and to pray, and to cast then I am more fully existent than I am at any other moment. Nothing else I do can make the spell-prickles run along my skin and the dark place that is my Self open and bear witness to the universe.

Reference, please, this entry about being a Demigoddex of Dance.

The corollary is that you have never seen me fully present unless you've seen me dance for myself. Despite my Truth that I will dance in subway cars and on rain-soaked streets, I am often more reluctant to do so before friends. Perhaps they will think me odd and it tucks the thing away.

(Perhaps they will think I am seeking attention. I am not performing for them, I am not performing at all. If I am dancing like the opposite-of-dissociating, it's entirely a selfish act.)

Anyways, tonight's playlist, howled along to and moved where permissible while riding my bicycle home on city streets:

Cheshire Kitten, s00j (Still sobbing, not-quite-back from someElsewhere of pain)
Alligator in the House, s00j (And ah, and yes, and this is the correct thing to do and of course I will move as I remount the bicycle it is a tango after all)
Go Away Godboy, s00j (Hail SJ, full of grace)
Glashtyn Shanty, s00j
Cheshire Kitten, again
Never Look Away, Vienna (I want to witness the beauty of your repair)
The Tower, Vienna
Level Up, Vienna (The last lines whispered with a wry grin outside 19 Banks street)
Go Away Godboy, again
Don't Stop Believing, Journey (Starting as I park the bicycle, and finished with me lying back on my own safe little bed)

If you don't think I'm a terrifyingly powerful beast, it's because you've never actually Seen me.

~Sor
MOOP!

Good girls aren't here.
For well over a year now I've been having intermittent trouble with feeling existent.
Good girls aren't here.

I feel especially strange at this revelation that it comes as I let Vienna Teng's "Level Up" swirl through my head. Eyes to the ceiling, hit just the right index card, ponder amused that I have not been a Good Girl today, I've been an Angry Cunt, and "Level Up" is suddenly not a song so much as an intense feeling of "oh _right_"

(This word choice is meant to be taken incredibly ironically, to a level I don't really want to discuss. I am not actually a cunt, and while I accept that some women choose to reclaim the word for themselves it still feels too much like an attack to me, even when I use it on myself. Cranky Feminist is probably a lot more accurate, but the term that feels best to my soul --if not my writer's ear-- is just Fighter.)

Or to quote my Everquest days, (approximately eight hundred years ago), ding!

Because it's been almost a year since Racheline posted that perfect series of words that made me realize just what it was that always felt so wrong. I was never in a sorority, don't think of my ability to disappear as art, am neither a libra nor object.

But the first time I read it, and damn near every time since, that last line hit me in the sternum¹ and slammed around mySelf. "How old were you when you learned that good girls aren't here?" Too fucking old and too fucking young. I have been a Good Girl my entire life, able to say "yes ma'am" and do whatever it is that's been asked of me, past pain or sadness or sense. It ties in heavy with being a Leader's Daughter, that commitment to do whatever needs to be done regardless of whether you want to or think you should. I will work myself to the bone to please you.

To this day I find it extremely hard, nigh-impossible to ignore or refuse direct requests, to the point where I actually advise that if you're trying to get me out of a negative emotion.

But Good Girls aren't here, and I want desperately to be. So apparently that means I have to fight, to push my way into existence, to demand that I _am_ here actually, and you better pay me the tribute I deserve.

I've not tied these together before, but I've known for several months now that I need to figure out how to be more in control of when I am a Good Girl and when I am not. This is a good data point.

Comments turned off because fuck you, today's been weird and awful and I don't want to talk about it.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: One of my favourite random questions I've ever heard from a child came from one of MommyRexes mini-giants, who asked her "where are you located in your body". I'm sure I was aware of the fact before I heard the question, but for years and years now because of it, I have been acutely aware that my Self is located directly between my breasts, wrapped hard around and against the sternum. That's what aches when I'm in emotional pain, that's what I curl to protect when I am scared, that is where *I* am stored.