the annihilation quest.
the annihilation quest.
A visit to some early writing.
Preface.
I want to note that this piece is one of the first things I ever wrote that I could consider to say something worth saying. It was written around late February of 2021, it is a story, a poem, it is trying to understand something. It is something I would not be able to write now, it lacks a major influence from philosophy, instead it yells at the world. Thought myself too clever at this time, it is not a K-SICARII piece, nor is it a tetra piece, it is something else. It is written in an informal manner, only names are capitalized, I have chosen to not change this, I do not correct any mistakes because it is not my piece.
the annihilation quest.
you wish to not see yourself, you wish to escape, you wish for annihilation, dont you?
you wake in the morning, you had gone to bed last night and in some corner of your mind as always you wished to wake up finding yourself changed, not the current form. how do you distract yourself today, how do you escape? there is something inside you that wishes for annihilation, you see yourself in the mirror, horrid foul beast stares back, lattice form, reflection. you go about your day, seeing ways to annihilate the view of you, things to distract yourself with. you suffer dysphoria midday, you dont think much of it, it is after all a constant, 6 pm, you see your razor, you know shaving would make you feel better but you see in your mind blood, the ultimate annihilation. you shower, someone asked you a question today about understanding, this question is a wild horse, it bucks against the brain, it stresses you out, the water runs across this flesh, you cannot understand because ghosts are haunting you, and so you engage in the annihilation quest.
if i had access to a great amount of alcohol when i was 17 i would drink myself to sleep, wake up and wander into the bathroom connected to my room where i covered the mirror with paper, the mirror was my enemy, i told myself it was because i feared the passage of time. i had no access to a great amount of alcohol when i was 17 but i wished for
escape.
Anticlea: do you think that pre hrt you had a quest to basically limit your perception of yourself and escape reality? a lack of caring about yourself?
Pavla
: yes. end of sentence.Anticlea: what did you use to escape?
Pavla: anything
for Pavla that anything was hyper fixations, pot, and self harm (“self harm via hair and skin picking and procrastination”), for Hemithea escape was “Self harm, emotion suppression, emotional separation, stuff like that” for Venus it is “it's kinda like a rush you get when getting drunk or getting off” along with self harm however Venus did not term these as ways to escape. Palva at the time seeked this escape and did not realize it was caused by transness, her realization of this came “just before it [hrt]”. hyper fixations fit within the distraction label of escape, pot within the drugs, both drugs and distraction are interlinked, blending together. hyper fixations allow one to become engrossed with something, i have spent many hours in the forests of my hyper fixations, when you get to this state you are not haunted by thoughts. drugs are a change in perception and this perception change aids in fleeing the ghosts of dys, euphoria is a powerful thing, however the reasoning is not usually one of escape but rather fun.
Anticlea: what was your reasoning pre hrt for doing weed?
Pavla: was better than being sober[,] it was fun[.] I got into it for a girl
Anticlea: ah the classic reason for doing anything, but it was to escape dysphoria but also fun?
Pavla: ye
this is an escape that we are not aware of, we seek to not perceive this monster we inhabit, to us it is at least a monster, to be an entity in the world is to know gender, you cannot escape the two poles of gender, upon your first moments a hot red spike is hammered into your flesh, male or female, intersex people are unable to escape this, they too have the spike of male or female driven into them. binary gender poles are sunk deep into the worlds flesh, spanish and french words cannot escape gender, every object is labeled as male or female, to speak french is to speak with the ghost of gender always haunting you, english is gendered less so but still the world is violently gendered, recently there has been a third pole, a pole that is labeled non-binary, this pole does not understand its own name, it is a pole made by marketers, a pole that says nonbinary is brown sacks and thin white people with short hair, this pole too is a violence, in this world of three poles it makes sense to escape for awhile to a cabin made by drugs.
it makes sense to busy oneself with tasks, reading books, playing games, being lost in the hyper fixation forest, you do not think of yourself as a person you are pure action. dysphoria is a bog, one is surrounded in it, wisps all around, one who has only known the bog does not see how much their legs sink in the muck, how much the bugs bite their flesh, how the wisps haunt them, to be in the bog is to rot, to decay, it is to know
pydru.
why care for something that you hate? why would someone leave rotting meat out if they knew it brought maggots and foul smells, you cannot care for something you hate. 17 year old me hated his form, flesh that may as well been filled with maggots, i did not brush my teeth for that required looking, i wore whatever, all that mattered was that the maggot flesh be covered, so i wore thick coats, long pants, i didnt know this was because i hated my maggot flesh it just made sense to me. pydru is welsh for to rot, rot i did, relationships i had rotted away, teeth rotted, my room filled up, again why care for something you hate. i at points said that if i was stabbed i wouldnt do anything about it in a joking manner, i had been stabbed, each and everyday i was stabbed, open wounds get infected and leave them open long enough you get maggots, i had no value to myself, i did and still do not understand why others liked me, pydru lasts a long while, i have to remove the maggots one by one. i wanted death i think, for someone to tackle me and tear my flesh appart, i think, i think, i do not remember. had i not take my first dose of hrt on the 13th day of the third month of 2020 the maggots would stop being metaphors and by december 31st 2020 i wouldnt have getting tipsy and posting photos of myself looking pretty i would have real maggots inside me.
17 me, the mirror, covered by paper, i cant look at myself, i cant, i cannot know, i am unable to dig deep, to cover the mirror is to embrace
unknowing.
Anticlea: but did you understand yourself in that way pre hrt?
Hemithea: I don't think so because I was in denial and pushing away who I was so there was a mismatch between my innate self and who I was
Anticlea: hmm, interesting, in my personal experience and experience with some pre hrt heavily dysphoric trans people is that they cannot know themselves, like it stresses them out.
Hemithea: It did stress me out
Anticlea: yeah.... do you think that you understand yourself?
Venus: no clue[,] im fine being ignorant about myself atleast right now
Anticlea: why?
Venus: because it stresses me out and makes me sad
Achlys: i just dont want to talk about this because it causes me stress
and so upon these shores i sit
i stare out into the blue and white landscape
this is a cold sea, it eats at you
i do not wish to know what lays under
perhaps when it is warmer i shall slip into the sea
to know that who is me.
i am asked what i want to do, i joke “dead in a ditch at age 23” it isnt really a joke, a way to get off the topic, what happens next causes me stress, i am 17, i cant see, theres just black fog ahead, i cannot see a future with me in it. i make no attempt to understand who i am.
i do not know what causes the unknowing, i do understand myself to some extent now, why i say the things i do, my gender is a reflection of myself, it is a gender created by abuse, autism, and outsiderness, I Am Android, the self is reflected in name, i could not understand myself at all when all there was in my brain was roaring waves of rot and fury. fury caused by my own monster form, as hrt began its course of actions the waves stilled a bit, i began to deconstruct my own personal strata, you cannot understand yourself if you wish to escape perceiving yourself, you cannot understand yourself if you are pydru, to bring the transgender form, the hypothical beast into being is to start this grand act of understanding. the door is there you just have to open it and you can have an understanding of yourself that is deeper than those who have not traveled the liminal space.
many people i fear do not open this door, for on the other side there can be great pain, ethereal razor blades, but it can be joy and sharpen ones sword.
i wrote this for i am an anxious person, and i have many
worries.
and so they shall drive themselves into the sea
so i worry,
so i worry,
waves doing battle with blacken rocks
they look like daggers staring at the face of G-d
crashing people, warring with themselves,
warring with no one,
to annihilate, to escape, to rot,
i worry myself with rot,
draw blood and salvation,
draw blood and damnation,
to reprieve the knife is a holy act,
and so they fall in the waves and water
escape for a moment now
rot the strata, rot the self,
vines grow, whipping the mind,
these waters i stand in are swallow, cool and calm
and to step four steps is to plunge under the surface
face that hypothetical beast
to know who she, it is,
tear the knife from the hands that wish to destroy,
i cannot cry,
i cry for they shall drive themselves into the sea.
i have had too many times in my life where i fear a friend dead. i worry that my friends shall succeed in the annihilation quest so well that it ends them. i worry that i will send messages and that there will be no one on the other side to respond. i worry that one of my friends will have gone too far in their attempt at escape and find themselves in a place they do not want to be. i worry that i will never met some of my friends. to be trans is to be transgressive, and the transgressive suffer. gender hexes, gender worries, gender warriors.
i wish for someone to read this and see themselves, it is all too common a story, the escape is many things, drugs, sex is a drug, jerking off is a drug, an escape can be a community that wishes to kill the outsider, an escape is throwing yourself into the hyper fixation forest, an escape is many things.
the escape is not a bad thing, it is something that is needed but it is like magic you have to be careful with it.
pydru is not your fault, it is a byproduct but you cannot let the pydru completely claim you.
i cite very little for this part for it is something that i feel you cannot talk in abstraction about this, it is something that has to be down with a poets touch.
conversations with Palva.