boomers: the boxes are real to them (updated 19:13 est — audio voiceover: new recording / additional detail)

remember: some people only see abstraction

🌟🌟Taylor Cecelia Brook🌟🌟

:

Queer Safe Spaces, Being Our Most Authentic Selves, and Boomer Americanism.

why my clairo hoodie is so special to me

if you are a member of the younger generations, it is highly likely that your parents sincerely believe in hundreds of thousands of bullshit concepts;

and they believe in these concepts so strongly that they deliberately organize their lives around them: “adult,” “professional,” “educated,” “well-read,” “successful,” “well-respected,” “mature,” “beautiful,” “ugly.”

i say all of this is nonsense; i say all of these are bullshit concepts.

but do i mean there is no truth to any of these concepts?

no, i don’t mean that at all.

butterfly rising #3: fuck israel, fuck the new york times, fuck fundamentalist "christianity", and FREE PALESTINE

we all must learn to operate on two levels of reality, at a minimum:

the ultimate level of reality (“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” Galatians 3:28);

and the mundane level of reality, in which we definitely encounter all of these concepts, and in which they truly do dominate, control, and subjugate real beings.

even so, we must remember on an intellectual level:

these are bullshit concepts. Often they are also useful concepts; and often we simply must resort to these concepts — race, religion, gender — in order to give truthful voice to our own subjective experiences and our own traumatic pasts — but even so, they are still concepts we invent to help us navigate the world, and we go wrong when we allow invented definitions for these concepts to control our lives and define our experiences. that’s why it was so ridiculous to watch republicans question a woman about the “definition of woman.”

the lava is real to them: they TRULY believe the definition of a dictionary can settle a debate.

But remember:

All of this is bullshit.

And it’s fact that this is all bullshit — I mean bullshit on the level of Christ (remember to operate on at least two dimensions at all times: when reading, when listening, when looking: then you will see beneath the surface) — which makes it possible to break free of the boomers’ slimy tentacles.

because the boomers truly believe in these things.

but from our own subjective experience,

we fucking know it’s all a lie, don’t we?

people deploy concepts like “adult,” “professional,” and even definitions from dictionaries (books made up by groups of humans; groups of “experts” carefully curated by other groups of humans and the institutions which these humans created — if this makes no sense, it’s because it never did —

and YET as little sense as dictionaries make,

there are literally fucking congresspeople who believe that the definition of “man” in the webster dictionary should settle the culture war.

that is how stupid some of these boomers are.

they believe in dictionaries, okay?

and they’re in the senate while olivia rodrigo isn’t even eligible to run! wtf!

why my clairo hoodie is so special to me

Listen:

they will always use their precious dictionaries to try and modify our behavior to their liking.

in most cases, these people seem to sincerely believe that these concepts truly exist as independent and tightly defined entities —

in fact!

i learned this quickly when it came to the many critics of this blog.

they never respond only to a detail from the blog. never.

they always categorize the detail — “attacking,” “vindictive,” “unwell,” “not the way it’s supposed to be done,” “the posts are too frequent,” “you posted at two in the morning,” “you post at all hours,” and other increasingly vague words & benchmarks, all of which they try and use as proxies for my mental health —

another ultimately bullshit concept, as illustrated by how these boomer critics (and millennial critics) seem to view my mental health services: they seem to believe that i have simply malfunctioned, and a therapist would help me learn to adjust my behavior so as to be more in line with various definitions for various concepts in the dictionary, all of which i have discovered fall under a vast and terrifying web of cis-heternormativity.

i told you the byzantines were back.

but so is Princess Anna,

Daughter of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos,

Rightful but dispossessed heir to the throne of the eastern roman empire,

Inspiration behind a book I read this April that helped make me ME,

And yet another basis for how I, Eloise-Hypatia, afraid of knives since I was born but embracing myself as a slayer, manifest in my writing.

Just read the above: understand the Byzantines and you understand the Boomers

even so,

the conversations never intimidate me.

that’s because i am a goddess, like you are once you strip away the bullshit concepts that control you, and as goddesses we are able to operate on at least two levels of reality.

we are able to understand that the concepts and words we use as guides are not actually real.

we understand that feelings are real, experience is real, not dictionaries.

we do not believe in abstraction as anything other than as a useful guide to be dispensed with as soon as it stops being useful,

as it often does once the conversation turns into an argument about the definition of the word “vindictive.” (every time with my mom!!!!)

Listen!!!!

the more time your parents make you spend debating the definition of that word,

“Vindictive”,

the less they will listen to your detail.

there’s no such thing as “Vindictive”

Do not respond!

Continue to dispense detail!

Know what my assistant principal told me when I was a teacher in Detroit? Before parent teacher conferences when parents would resort to abstraction rather than the details of their children’s performance or behavior?

She told me,

“Your grade book is your sword.”

When you go into battle with your parents:

Your details are your sword.

journal.

Diary.

Blog.

DO NOT STOP WRITING: whether privately or publicly, you must get in touch with detail, and you must never allow them to make you look away.

They will try so hard.

Don’t do it:

there was a time, shortly before i listened to “second nature” by clairo,

when these concepts really scared me.

These concepts silenced me.

but ever since I listened to second nature,

my fear has been dissipating,

and now, when these people throw abstract concepts at me,

I’m not as scared anymore,

Now I am mostly bored:

they want to track my location and talk about the definition of “vindictive.”

they want to tell me i’m an “insult to women.”

they want to teach me about the “purpose of the internet.”

they want to vaguely caution me about the “opportunities” that my “behavior” is supposedly costing me.

and when i say, can you give me an example?

they say, “you know what,

“we’re not gonna get into it with you. you need help.”

they do not want to discuss the detail because they cannot see the detail.

they only see fucking abstraction.

if you are struggling with your boomer parents you must try your best to understand this point because it will make everything so much easier:

many people only see abstraction.

if you cannot get your parents to stop communicating almost exclusively in terms of abstract words like “unprofessional,” “disrespectful,” “childish,” “inappropriate,” “well i guess i am just worst mother ever,” “not the way you’re supposed to do it,” etc., etc., and if they refuse to respond to a single feeling or experience you’re trying to describe without immediately collapsing you into one of these little boxes, you must remember:

the boxes are real to them!

and it’s not a mental illness.

it’s simply what they see.

they see abstraction.

at any moment, they could join in the journey to see detail, to see feeling,

to see the world like Abed and I see it,

to look in the mirror and see:

They are the lava.

sadly, their vision is so far from detail that we should have some compassion;

but i am a long way now from tolerance.

i simply understand:

boxes make things easier for them.

butterfly rising #3: fuck israel, fuck the new york times, fuck fundamentalist "christianity", and FREE PALESTINE

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