As American as... ?

Because it is not American at all, it is an almost universal food - prevalent in almost every culture - which America has coopted, turned into a crap McProduct and shipped back out to the rest of the world claiming as their own.

I am an equal opportunity bigot. I hate all cultures...

http://www.moparpicturebook.com/70PSBirdWing.jpg

i want a car like that. bad. that color, too. avocado green, baby. avocado green.

bumping for an actual serious question

what do y'all think it means to be "american"?

i don't know what "american" means to people. like, america is a nation-state where i was born, where i live, whose laws i'm subject to. do y'all think "america" means anything else?

Try to see it as an experience. It goes a little bit beyond your ID, jurisdiction, and patriotic feeling (or lack thereof). It's not like you would be the same person if you had grown up on the other side of the world.

Obviously you can't generalize to 300M people, but there are a lot of things that we would immediately describe as very American (positive and negative).

American things

what do y'all think it means to be "american”?

funny, i was writing you email that grazes this topic

unrelated to my thoughts, i read an essay about this by Octavio Paz ('Imperial Democracy’) after the 2016 election that i’ve been meaning to revisit.
at the time i thought it was a little dated and a little naive, but very good.
it’s in this collection, free to borrow on archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/oneearthfourorfi0000pazo_g5l6/

One passage that stuck with me:

Ultimate ends, those that really count because they give meaning to our lives, are not visible on the horizon of the United States. Questions and answers as to life and its meaning, death and the life beyond, traditionally taken over by Church and State, have heretofore always been matters in the public domain. The great historical novelty of the United States lies in its attempt to return them to the private domain, the private life of each and every citizen.

I would start from the notion that patriotism is a stupid feeling for stupid people but indulging in it will just make you stupider

But the difference between how the rest of the world thinks of "America" vs "Americans" is pretty huge and the answers are different

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*m58HDlauZO0PEMlP_q_L6w.png

Not accurate, people are smiling.

I've been asking myself over and over again, for these past few months, "What is America?" I don't know exactly how to put into words, what I mean, but I'll try.

For me, asking "What is America?", it's a question very similar to when someone asks "What is a woman?" It's a question that seems obvious. I figured, for most of my life, of course I know what a woman is. But when I really dig into it, when I try to come up with a clear, coherent definition... then it becomes more fraught. To some extent "woman", like American, is a social construct. In addition, the people I hang out with... respecting my right to self-determination is a core part of their values. If I say I'm a woman, then I'm a woman. Full stop. In addition to this, I look like a cisgender woman, I sound like a cisgender woman, and I act in the ways that people expect women to act. This means that socially, I am recognized as a woman by friends and strangers alike.

This latter part is important because, in practice, my gender identity _is_ informed by empirical considerations. When I say I was "assigned male at birth", this means that I was born with an anatomically normal penis and testicles. There was never any serious dispute around the matter. Similarly, I was born to American citizens in a hospital in New Jersey, and this has, for most of my life, made me pretty unambiguously an American citizen. There's no real dispute around whether or not I'm an American citizen.

In the past few months, though, it's become increasingly clear to me to what extent being an "American", like being a "woman", is a... flexible legal concept. Between 2019 and 2024, my ex-wife filed and I filed paperwork to change my legal gender. The paperwork I have now isn't entirely consistent. Some documentation says that I'm "non-binary", some says that I'm "female". I got a COVID shot this week, and _it_ said that my assigned gender at birth was "female".

In addition, well, in early January, I received a passport, good for ten years, stating my gender as "female". I _think_ that's still valid? I'm not sure. Because the President is pretty adamant about the fact that legally, I am a man. The state of New Jersey disagrees. The state of Oregon disagrees. My official federal identity documents disagree. He says, though, that legally, transgender people do not exist, which means, I assume, that legally, I am a man. The American courts have, thus far, not conclusively rejected his right to make that determination.

And he is also saying, I gather, that birthright citizenship, that doesn't apply anymore. That being born in America doesn't necessarily make you an American citizen. Well, right now, he's not saying that _I_ am not a citizen, because I was born to American citizens.

"Woman" is also, however, a legal construct. I've filed paperwork to change my gender legally. My legal gender status isn't entirely consistent in a legal or bureaucratic sense. Some forms of ID list my identity as non-binary. Some list it as female. I got a COVID shot this week, and the paperwork they gave me said that my assigned gender at birth was "female". No such ambiguity exists around my nationality. There's ample extant documentation saying that I am an American citizen, that I was born an American citizen, that I have resided all of my life in the United States of America. I don't reasonably expect that the President will just up and declare that I'm somehow not an American citizen. That's not really the question I'm asking.

The question I'm asking is what is America? What does it mean for me to be an American?

I was watching a video the other day where someone - I think perhaps it was Mary Beard - was talking about the concept of citizenship. And she was talking about where, historically, we know the statement "I am a Roman Citizen" from. She said that there was procurator or regional administrator of some sort, and he was corrupt. And he condemned this man, who was a Roman citizen, to death by crucifixion. Under the laws and mores of the Roman Empire, this was not permitted. You weren't permitted to put a Roman citizen to death by crucifixion. And the Roman citizen in question protested strenuously. He said that the procurator couldn't do this, that he was a Roman citizen. And then the Roman citizen in question was crucified.

I think being an American means pretty much the same thing to me as being a Roman meant to that man. That's what I think.

What does it mean to be an American? It means I'm stuck here. It means that none of the other nations of the world aren't convinced that it would be of benefit to them to be a citizen. They determine this the way most nations do - economically. While I currently have a legal passport, while I currently _can_ leave the country, I don't know how long that will be good for. It also means that my legal identity, whether I like it or not, is tied to a political construct that isn't favorably disposed towards me and that regularly does things that go against my values, and that neither I or any of the other people who share my values have any legal recourse to oppose those things.

I think being an American for me, on balance, is a lot more like being a woman is than it is like being white is. Being white is a fixed quantity. It's a fixed quantity. I don't think of it as a good thing or a bad thing. It's not something I like or hate, not something I'm proud of or ashamed of. It just is. Being a woman, though? I'm glad I'm a woman. I'm proud to be a woman.

I think men are fantastic. I do love men, love men dearly. Patriarchy, that I'm not such a big fan of, but men? Men are amazing. That said, I wasn't ever really proud to be a man. I pretty much hated being a man, in fact. I just felt like, you know, I had to be. That I didn't really have any choice in the matter. Looking back, I didn't really have a choice in the matter, not in practical terms. I'm glad things are different now. As hard as things are in other ways, it's just an incredible source of joy for me to not have to pretend to be someone I'm not.

I would start from the notion that patriotism is a stupid feeling for stupid people but indulging in it will just make you stupider

i think it's a normal impulse for people to want to take pride in their communities. i tend to be pretty cynical, and i find the mainstream american expression of "patriotism" to be pretty tacky (and also frequently aligned with nativist and xenophobic sentiments, but i don't think these things need to go together), but i've found you don't really get anywhere by shitting on people like this, and calling them stupid when you don't know anything about them or their lives, and it's usually a lot better to flip it around and lead with the kind of community building that is, for me, at the core of leftist politics

I didn't suggest telling other people their stupid foibles are stupid

i think it's a normal impulse for people to want to take pride in their communities. i tend to be pretty cynical, and i find the mainstream american expression of "patriotism" to be pretty tacky (and also frequently aligned with nativist and xenophobic sentiments, but i don't think these things need to go together), but i've found you don't really get anywhere by shitting on people like this, and calling them stupid when you don't know anything about them or their lives, and it's usually a lot better to flip it around and lead with the kind of community building that is, for me, at the core of leftist politics

― budo jeru

no i think that's interesting, yeah, it _is_ normal for people to want to take pride in their communities. like for instance, i _am_ proud of being a woman, and i think people who are men, i think it's normal for them to be proud of being men. i don't know what it means to be a man, really, any more than i know what it means to be a woman, but i figure it means _something_. the same way, if someone's non-binary... like, for a lot of people who are non-binary, including me, "non-binary" isn't a positive identity. i don't mean that "non-binary" doesn't mean something positive to me, it just means that "non-binary" can mean a whole bunch of different things to a whole bunch of different people, that if i look at the other non-binary people i know, there's not this one "identity" that we all have in common. the only thing we all have in common is that we find value in expressing our gender, or lack thereof, in ways beyond just saying "i'm a man" or "i'm a woman". even though the only thing we have in common is that we're all different from "normal" people in this one particular thing, that is something that we have in common and it's really meaningful to me, on a direct, interpersonal level.

but i'm not proud of being white, and people who say they're proud of being white, i find that pretty viscerally disgusting. cuz what i've found is that when someone says "i'm proud of being white", what they really mean is "i'm proud of being bigoted". i don't really feel like i've ever been part of something i could call a "white community" in any meaningful sense. being part of a community is like... if me and someone else are different from "normal people" in a similar way, that makes us part of a community. i guess that could be qualitative or quantitative, cuz for more than 14 years i've been a poster on a message board called "i love music". so i guess that means something to me, being someone who "loves music". that's something i have in common with other ILM posters.

i don't feel the same way about being an american that i feel about being white. from the age of 17, i've known, on a personal level, people who _aren't_ american. i have this sense of being an american as something distinct from being "normal". when i talk to americans, i have things in common with them, meaningful things, that i don't have in common with someone who's, for instance, british. not better, not worse, just different. different people have different feelings, _i_ have different feelings. in some ways i'm proud of being an american, in some ways i'm ashamed of being an american. i don't know exactly what being an american _is_, but it means _something_ to me.

when i look at people who voted for the president, who supported the president, when they talk about being proud to be an american... the sense i get is that they're proud to be an american in the same way that a lot of white people are proud to be white. and if someone says they're proud to be an american in that sense, that disgusts me every bit as much as someone who says they're proud to be white. and i look at america... not just under trump, but going back a long time before. the disdain with which the GHW Bush administration referred to Portland as "little beirut". yeah i am proud of that, that republicans think that portland is like beirut. i've had friends who lived in beirut, and it's not really true, we're not really that much like beirut, but if someone's going to treat me like they treat a lebanese person because i live in portland, you know what, i don't feel like that's anything for _me_ to be ashamed of.

i don't know exactly what "america" means to me, and that's fine, really. more importantly, i don't know how to reconcile what "america" means to me with whatever shitshow the president is putting on this week. it's not, like, it's not that the damage he's done is irreparable. it's more like... nobody with any remote possibility of having power in america, nobody is empowered to say that being an "american" in the sense that donald trump means it, that being an "american" in that sense is bad. in that case, what _can_ it mean to be an american?

-

in some ways it feels a little like being a christian. i don't think of myself as a christian. i guess technically i'm a christian, technically i'm a roman catholic. i don't think i've ever been excommunicated. there's not really any reason for them to be excommunicated, nor any reason for me to seek to be excommunicated. if the roman catholic church says there are a billion roman catholics in the world, they're probably counting me as one of them. i guess they can do that. i don't go to church or anything. there are probably some churches that would have me. i don't go to church, though.

because when i look at christianity institutionally, the people with power in christianity are people who preach love and practice hate. i know that christianity as a whole isn't, in principle, like that. i think it's likely that most people who call themselves christians aren't, themselves, like that. i know that the things that these powerful people who call themselves christians do, i know that they're opposed to the teachings of jesus as i learned them. and i know that the people who call themselves christians and don't agree with these powerful people... they're not empowered. they're not empowered to oppose the people who preach hate in christ's name. what can they do? fight a holy war against these people who are blaspheming the name of christ? lol. nah, these people, these people of good intent and strong faith, they don't, in reality, have any way to oppose the powerful people who say christianity is bigotry, christianity is hatred, christianity is malice. that's the conclusion i came to, at least, when i called myself a christian. i thought about it, i prayed about it, and in the end, i decided that the purpose of a system is what it does. i decided that regardless of my personal faith, my personal values, i couldn't in good conscience call myself a christian.

i do want being an american to mean _something_. just like i'd like being a christian to mean _something_. i want to believe, you know? i do. i just wish it wasn't so hard.

I find it helps me immensely to feel an attachment to the land that has been my home since birth. The land is innocent of the grosser parts of our history and current society. It even bears the brunt of a lot of abuse, just as certain parts of our human society have been abused. Those parts of our traditions and social structures which seem to have been the most beneficial and benign seem clearly worth celebrating as a contribution to the welfare of humankind in general. They can and should be held as separate from the more shameful and harmful parts of our history and culture. By sorting among these good and bad aspects of my American heritage I find it possible to maintain a fund of goodwill toward my nation, within that mixed set of perspectives. I try to strengthen the good and mitigate or atone for the bad to the best of my ability, but underneath it all I cannot disclaim my home and all its present and latent good. Especially the land itself. I truly love the place where I was born, my family mostly resides, my neighbors are, and where I continue to live by choice: Oregon.

it's funny, the reason i've been thinking about this lately after someone on my timeline posted a question to other trans people: why haven't you left america? because it's not safe for us here. all the trans people i know, we all know it's not safe for us here. and there are a lot of reasons i haven't left, the chief one being that it's not really practical or feasible. another one of the big important reasons for me, though, is that it's my home. the friends i know who've left are very sad about it, having to leave the land that's been their home since birth.

it's different for me because i wasn't born in oregon. the places i've lived... i don't feel like i've only lived in one land. i've lived in new jersey and florida and indiana and oregon and all of these places don't all strike me as being _one country_. i grew up being told that america was a "melting pot" - i don't think they say that nowadays - and i don't think it was ever true. i've never really been able to see the american people as one people. if america was anything it was a suspension, a chemical suspension. if i'm, you know... i don't know, the salt of the earth, or whatever. maybe. america isn't _the earth_. america isn't _the land_. america right now... it feels to me like this dank and fetid liquid. that's what i feel like i'm suspended in.

i do love this land. back when people did land acknowledgements... i listened. when people would say that we were on the ancestral lands of, i don't remember all of the names of the tribes, the multnomah, the willamette, the molalla, the salish, were those some of the names? of course it was performative, because at the end of the day i _am_ white, because when i got paid i got paid in american dollars. this land isn't america, though. america is just a name some people have given to this land. places around here fly the american flag, fly the portland flag, fly the progress flag, fly the cascadian flag...

and "cascadia" isn't a country, of course. i don't find it likely that cascadia will ever _be_ a country. the people who fly the cascadian flag, though, they're closer to my people than the people who fly the all-black american flag. both of those flags mean something to me.

I think it's perfectly natural to hold emotional ties to the people and landscapes that you exist alongside. Whether that needs to be fit into some nation state mythos is another question.

I think "needs" is prescriptive here, when this is a case of the descriptive not the prescriptive. I also think mythos is slightly grandiose for this

Language is a big factor, and it's not coincidental that there's a big overlap between nation state and language. But even when language is same you don't see meetup groups for Mancunians in New York, its Brits in New York. When an Oregonian meets a fellow Oregonian in Buenos Aires or Frankfurt is it really Oregon thats the common connection and it wouldn't be the same it they were from Minnesota instead?

On this board, no different than most places, its nationalities that are referred to far more so than regionalities. The unit of identification referred to, whether positive or negative, is almost always national

I think "needs" is prescriptive here, when this is a case of the descriptive not the prescriptive. I also think mythos is slightly grandiose for this

Language is a big factor, and it's not coincidental that there's a big overlap between nation state and language. But even when language is same you don't see meetup groups for Mancunians in New York, its Brits in New York. When an Oregonian meets a fellow Oregonian in Buenos Aires or Frankfurt is it really Oregon thats the common connection and it wouldn't be the same it they were from Minnesota instead?

On this board, no different than most places, its nationalities that are referred to far more so than regionalities. The unit of identification referred to, whether positive or negative, is almost always national

― anvil, Monday, October 6, 2025 10:15 AM (one hour ago)

absolutely "american" is descriptive... the question for me is _what's being described_.

if i'm meeting an american in buenos aires, the chief factor is that i'm _not in america_. personally, i do think i'd be feeling a great sense of relief at not being in america. if i met someone else from america, pretty early on in the conversation there would be some commiseration - "god, america sure is fucked up, isn't it?" to me, our shared experience would be the grief of seeing what's happened to america. if the person i'm talking to doesn't share that perspective, there's not much we can really talk about, even if we do have a shared love of, i don't know, root beer.

last thursday i went to the art museum with a friend, and she talked about working at the indianapolis art museum. "oh yeah! i'm from indianapolis too!" if we happened to meet in buenos aires, i think that would still be a meaningful similarity we could talk about.

on this board nationalities are referred to more than regionalities, absolutely. there's more to this board than just this board though, yeah? last week eazy and i hung out and watched a movie. i'd love to hang out and watch a movie with you, anvil, but i'm not sure that would be entirely practical! increasingly i am starting to view our interfaces with the internet as glorified pachislot machines. every time i get out of my apartment i'm _so_ happy to have done so. i love y'all, and i also love the city i live in. there are a lot of things that suck about it, and it feels like home. i feel safe here, welcome, appreciated. i wish to god i felt that way about america. i don't.

A couple of weeks ago my wife expressed some worry about being rounded up and deported (she was born in Colombia but became a naturalized US citizen in 2004 or so, I forget the exact date) but I said that she had nothing to worry about because we live in a state that is perceived as loyal to the regime, so there aren't many ICE agents roaming around. (There have been some in Whitefish, a small town about an hour from here. The people they've picked up have all had prior criminal records.) Anyway, that's how I think about "America" these days. That there are regions understood to be loyal to the ruling junta, and regions seen as disloyal. Although I am not myself loyal to the regime, I feel safe from harassment because of where I live.

i think that makes sense. i'd say i'm "safe" in the way that i'm not in any physical threat, except that i don't have a job and hardly anybody i know has a job and nothing works and i don't see how i can get hired anywhere. that's the issue for me, i'm technically a member of one of the groups the administration is targeting, and at the same time i don't feel like i'm under direct physical threat. my issue is more that nothing works, and everybody with brains knows that nothing works and it's beyond their power to fix it, so the people in charge are the ones without brains. as best i can tell, the american economy at this point runs on pure bullshit and delusion. not only are people not empowered to do valuable and worthwhile things, but the system is actually engineered so that people who _try_ to do valuable and worthwhile things can't. i keep saying this and i mean it - my "radical leftist ideology" is that i want a stable, secure job doing meaningful work with tolerable working conditions. that's so utterly pathetic. i think probably america was always that way for a lot of people, and since 2016 i've seen more and more people have the same kind of experience. and i mean i am a "the purpose of a system is what it does" kind of girl, so to me, i look at this and i say "well this must be america". all the things i was taught, if they were ever true, they certainly don't seem to be now, and i don't really see any realistic prospect that those things will be "america" in the future.

other than that, though, life is good. i live in a beautiful town, i have some amazing friends... i hardly ever get to see my girlfriend because she doesn't have a job either, and she also doesn't have any money, so she's stuck living off money that, ultimately, goes back to someone who got rich a couple decades ago for doing basically nothing and dangles that money in front of everyone around them to control everyone in their life. and that, too, is america.

i don't have a job and hardly anybody i know has a job and nothing works...as best i can tell, the american economy at this point runs on pure bullshit and delusion.

This is the thing that's at the forefront of my mind right now, is the question of how long can this system last when it's run by people who are manifestly incompetent and doing everything wrong? The tariffs. Dismantling the visa system that keeps our white-collar economy afloat. Allowing the health care system — encouraging the health care system — to collapse. Insisting on and subsidizing fossil fuels when solar and wind energy are clearly the future. And that's not even getting into crypto and AI. It's all spinning up into a whirlwind that's totally unsustainable and destined to explode/collapse.

(I will be unemployed at the end of this month. My contract with the evil red-state health insurance company is not being renewed.)

(I will be unemployed at the end of this month. My contract with the evil red-state health insurance company is not being renewed.)

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson)

RIGHT!?!?!? I mean I'm a LITTLE BIT CONCERNED that America does not actually have a functioning healthcare system. People are sometimes like, oh, we have a bad healthcare system, we have a healthcare system in crisis, we have a failing healthcare system. No. No, we have a healthcare system that does not work. A healthcare system where everybody employed in it spends all our time actively fighting against the system until we either get fired or get burned out and quit. I used to work for a health insurance company too, and, uh, it's _not actually better_ in blue states. I mean yeah it sucks that I don't have a job and am not getting paid, but the truth has always been that they're worse off without me than I am without them. It doesn't function. People aren't getting paid. The President has destroyed the CDC, there's this ad-hoc West Coast group because, uh, the CDC is something that people kind of _need_. And OK, I'm in Oregon, that's there for us. That's not there for you. Whatever the fuck happens with Medicaid, again, this huge, disproportionate chunk of the federal government, of federal taxes, goes to _healthcare_. There's a real, real serious crisis that's being faced by the states here. States are struggling to make up for the things that the federal government _should_ be doing and isn't. We're all paying federal taxes that basically go into a black hole. The government is shut down for longer and longer periods of time. More and more people are leaving, and they _aren't_ being replaced. The problem with running a government that's run on delusions is that it requires the people who implement policy to do the impossible.

Am I worried that the President is sending American troops to occupy American cities? Well, yes, but mostly because he, uh, _doesn't need to_. The people of Portland simply are not engaged in open insurrection against the federal government. And in any case, the federal government is, uh, shut down right now, right? HE shut it down. Although I think he's blaming it on, uh, Satanists? Am I correct in that? Well, whatever the reason, people who work for the federal government aren't working. Maybe they'll get paid if and when the government stops being shut down. Which is good, because, I mean, they deserve to get paid, it's not their fault that they couldn't do their jobs, but it's bad because they COULDN'T DO THEIR JOBS.

I have nothing against America but nation-states are, like, supposed to do things. And America kind of isn't doing some of the essential things nation-states are supposed to do. I honestly don't think it's _capable_ of doing all the things a nation-state is supposed to do, at this point. I'm pretty strongly opposed to sedition or revolt. I mean I absolutely am going to continue paying federal taxes in American dollars backed by the "full faith and credit" of the United States government. Well. I mean. In theory. In practice, I don't have a job and am not making any money. So I guess I'm not going to be paying them any taxes for 2025.

I remember back in 2009 when Obama got elected and people were talking about his "political capital". Looked at in those term, the President is completely bankrupt, and I'm not entirely sure that America, at this point, isn't a toxic asset. I love this country, love it like I love my mother. Well, let me put it this way. My mother is 76 years old, she's in assisted living, she's diabetic, she had both her hips replaced last year, and she's also in a _lot_ better health than America.

Do I love America? Absolutely. Am I patriotic? Absolutely. With apologies to Robert Jackson, patriotism is not a suicide pact.

every time i drive down to the utah desert we pass through carbon county, named after the coal mines there. the first town is helper, named after helper train cars that were once attached to coal transports there to get them up the canyon. it is still pretty bombed out as a town but it's been trying to have a funky little artistic renaissance. there are enough people who live there now who care about the arts to make that happen. i once got hit up by a trans man on scruff who lives in helper. i chatted with him for a while, fascinated - because i'm small rural town-curious.

next up is the largest town and county seat, price, named for where banks exchanged money for the coal. we often stop at the grocery store in price and get a glimpse of the locals. overall they are in sad ass shape. physically and economically. old timers with absolutely broken bodies. feral youngs with a glazed look. everyone dresses in a way that seems somehow obstinate in its ugliness. carbon county has the biggest opioid problem in utah. you get the sense that everyone there is sort of bonded together in their misery and proud of it.

after price comes wellington, named after a county court justice apparently, not oil wells or anything. wellington is always the little town that gets me. it is so grim. there are always a few reliable maga properties with trump shit everywhere. this time i also noticed at least two signs advertising a crisis hotline. that was basically what i wanted to say, in response to kate's post - increasingly patriotism is a suicide pact. all they have left is image and they've been groomed to die for it.

as best i can tell, the american economy at this point runs on pure bullshit and delusion

there's a lot of genuine work happening out there or nobody could eat, but the really big money is being made on bullshit, armaments, stock and bond jobbing, and predatory quasi-monopolistic practices.

everyone dresses in a way that seems somehow obstinate in its ugliness.

This is something we've noticed in northwest Montana, too. The first thing that struck me was that I never saw anyone wearing band T-shirts, which was weird. But then I started picking up on what they do wear, which is a combination of shit you'd wear to go tramping through the woods or cleaning out a barn, and shit you might find while tramping through the woods or cleaning out a barn. My wife comments that the women often look un-showered. It's baffling because it seems like the most low-effort way of dressing, but it's such a perversely ragged "style" that it has to be deliberate.

i wonder what goes on in their lives

after price comes wellington, named after a county court justice apparently, not oil wells or anything. wellington is always the little town that gets me. it is so grim. there are always a few reliable maga properties with trump shit everywhere. this time i also noticed at least two signs advertising a crisis hotline. that was basically what i wanted to say, in response to kate's post - increasingly patriotism is a suicide pact. all they have left is image and they've been groomed to die for it.

― she freaks, she speaks (map)

that's it exactly, and that's so fascinating to me because around here, there are also signs advertising crisis hotlines. one of them said it was for LGBTQ+ people in crisis on election day, and just had "on election day" crossed off in marker. it's easy these days to get isolated and walled off, easy for anyone, and the hardest thing, when a person is hurting, is for me to say "wait a second, this isn't just about me. there are a whole lot of people being screwed over, and a lot of them have been screwed over for a lot longer and a lot worse than me."

and you can look at it from any number of ways. economic precarity is one. the thing that strikes me more than anything else, though, is the loneliness. the way the internet reinforces that loneliness. touch starvation. no hugs, just hug emoji. it is so hard for me to get my friends out of the house. it is so hard for me to get myself out of the house. the world is beautiful! the world outside is just so much more beautiful than _anything_ on this screen! and this fucking machine is killing us. i mean, why dress nice, you know, why dress nice when nobody's going to see you? why love your body? why take pride in your body? this isn't me judging them. this is me spending all day lounging around in my pajamas and feeling terrible. this is me trying to break out of this slough of despair and succeeding, probably, more than most people.

the "america" i love is the land, the "america" i love is the people, and these screens, they are necessary but god, do i feel good whenever i step away from it, even though i'm talking to people i love, even though i'm learning about what i love and talking about what i love.

idk. i think we all got a future, if we can value ourselves enough to walk away from the bullshit. the bullshit isn't america, but america's just been so captured by the bullshit... it's so weird, me having imposter syndrome, when i'm just so much more fucking _real_ than i ever have been in my life. mighty real.

Just read map’s posts—incredibly vivid.