apocalypse

a diary entry about being Russian and trans and closeted and traumatized and there is a war waged by your government that you have no way of stopping

I wrote the following diary entry on 23rd of March, 2022. After a month of hopelessness and powerlessness and the most contact I’ve had with my family since moving out (nothing to bring you closer to your emotionally distant parent like the constant shared sense of doom and heartbreak you will end up talking about five minutes into any conversation), I got out of the city with my mother in a feeble attempt at a day of respite. It didn’t quite work out.

That was when I first conceptualized this blog - initially, to catalogue my experience as a CSA survivor, seeing how I was running on hypervigilance as much as acute grief. I believe I will use it just that way, someday.

For now, though, it is September 22nd, day two of conscription of Russian population to die and kill on invaded land. I am bearing witness to fear and fight and defeat and confusion and trying my darnest to do anything at all. Nothing to bring you closer to your alien nation (oh, fun! alie-nation) like the suddenly re-discovered awareness of the senseless horrors of unjust, occupationary war.

I guess there is a thread here. Since the start of the war and the anti-war movement, I’ve been seeing calls to unite, to reach out to friends and comrades and find support in that.

I do not have friends in Russia. I barely have friends at all. The calls for unity left me feeling lonelier and more confused than ever. I’m discovering a belonging, though, and that’s something.

…So, the thread. Something about being Russian, and genderqueer, and isolated, and traumatized, and distance from family, and distance from the nation, and hope that desperately does not want to feel hollow.

I should try to post the entry with minimal edits, just to do myself justice, I guess.

(Oh, and I do address speciesism here, too, apparently. Hell yeah.)

Anyway, consider this… a mission statement, of sorts. This is what this blog will (probably) be about. At the very least, this is where it gets its title from.

(TRIGGER WARNINGS: sexual abuse, CSA, parental sexual abuse)

“The world feels personally apocalyptic.

It is still here and there are still places of physical safety. I can sit under a tree by a running river and not fear for my life.

I want to preserve it; I know there are things threatening it. Ultimately, though, the natural world is still there and not hostile. There is air I can breathe that will not seek to kill me. There is life to observe that endures, some easily, some spitefully. Either way, it's present.

I wish I could move through this still-safe world with a sense of safety. On a personal level, on a social level, I am already surviving. That's what apocalyptic media faces us with, time after time, right? This constant feeling of distrust. There is a group, a found family (though not always without a traitor in their midst), banded together by survival, and having to be so, so careful with who they chose to let near them. Every person is driven to the edge with the constant fear, constant deficit. How far will we go to benefit our survival at the cost of others? Who can we trust to extend seflless love and compassion to ours, when every act of kindness over self-preservation costs so, so much?

Some people lean into cruelty with blissful self-abandon, sever themselves from their softness, compassion, care, revel in the pain they can inflict on others because it ensures their power, their freedom, their security in knowing that they are stronger, so they will live another day.

I want to move through the world of beauty and peace and nature and hope with a feeling of trust in others. I don't want to be holed up in a bunker with a gradually depleting number of people I can rest around, only braving to go outside once in a while.

How many people can I trust?

There are people that are directly dangerous. I have been fortunate enough to avoid them. Not once, have I been a victim of a hate crime, police brutality or legally punishable sexual violence. What luck!

There are people mindlessly welcoming pain, violence, oppression, ostracism, isolation, trauma, ruthlessness.

There are people that I wonder about. My mother, sharing a post she saw around, about people disowning their own children over said children's unacceptance of the war our country is waging on Ukraine. "If this mental fortitude, this support of violence, is strong enough for that, don't try to reason with them".

Will her homo- and transphobia be enough to overpower her love for me?

Should I hold onto any hope of her coming around?

There are people I trust, fundamentally, to be good. To be kind. To listen when they hurt someone. To care about the experiences of those whose voices don't get heard.

There are still layers upon layers of conditioning, cognitive dissonance, making them accept things that seem so plainly unacceptable to me. Some of them, I can still have patience towards: we've adopted those notions so strongly, they are normalized so deeply, it's truly hard to stumble upon something heart-opening enough. That's what it's like, seeing people reference slaughter as a natural end of an animal's life; as if we are not Deciding for it to be. As if there is a good reason to kill a young creature after a lifetime of being robbed of any bodily autonomy, down to how this body is actually bred, how its very genes are made to benefit our gain, not its actual natural well-being - when there are other ways for most of us to sustain ourselves.

Sometimes, it's something so personal that I cannot hold onto my faith into people's hearts, my understanding to their conditioning; so personal that all I feel is fear. That's what it's like, when people are careless about age and sexual safety in a deeply pedophilic society, after you've fallen prey to its grooming, happily welcoming your parent's sexual abuse. (Not legally punishable, at least! What luck.)

When someone I trust to be a good, compassionate person does not display the level of care I desperately need people to have, it feels like the bunker is getting smaller, almost claustrophobic. It feels like the world is getting emptier. Like I can only extend my hand to a couple of people in full trust. Like everyone else is driven too far away from me, either consumed by something that makes them unreachable, or too different and distant from me for us to put our lives on the line in an attempt to cooperate.

I want to share the beautiful world that is still there with the rest of the humanity. But every layer of awareness to the pain of the world I acquire in an attempt to understand it, to be kind to myself and to be kind to people like me and to be kind to people with traumas I cannot even hope to comprehend, whose pain I never want to tread over carelessly - with every layer of nuance, I fall further away from others.

I must admit, trauma is playing the main role here. The more I tried to extend my compassion to people harmed by discriminatory social systems and ideologies, the deeper grew the divide between me and my peers - but the stronger was my bond with everyone who cared the same way as me. I found a community that made me feel safe, reassured.

I've been losing that feeling of safety over and over, the more my awareness of my own trauma grew.

I am hypervigilant. I am isolated. This is definition of trauma. I don't have to trust the most scared and hurting parts of my psyche.

And still, I have to be afraid, because, among the people I would want to call my family, there are those who are careless about age gaps or underage sexuality, not viscerally uncomfortable with bringing either up casually, without much serious nuance. I know they are well-meaning. And I'm still afraid of the narratives they are perpetrating, without any vicious intent whatsoever.

My apocalypse is my trauma, I guess.

I want to live in a world that is post-apocalyptic. I want the renewed awareness and connectedness and care and defiant hope for the future, and rebuilding, rebuilding, rebuilding.

I hope the way there lies through therapy. But I don't want that to mean that the awareness my trauma brought me, of the dangers we are groomed into ignoring, will be rendered meaningless, irrational, not something anyone else needs to ever consider when we choose what world we want to build together.

I hope I'll find a way to trust. I don't want that trust to be mindless, reliant on only the absolute majority of others' voices.

I hope I can trust people. For us to hear each other. I never want to have to trust society at large; society has let enough of us down.”