This story captures a lot of bundled feelings I have which I want to try to put into words, though words are imperfect. This is the part of the story which I feel mirrored in my own:
My mom was fighting something, and she was fighting (and teaching me to fight) harder and earlier than I knew at the time, giving me tools and perspectives that most people don’t get until they are adults (if they get them at all). Now I also see that a very few people even saw that she was fighting anything, much less what it was, and few see it now, and we just can’t seem to teach all our children fast enough.
But I see a lot of it too, or at least I vaguely “see” it in the way she vaguely “saw” it. I know (and she knew; we had many drunken debates) I see different parts of it than she did. Not in a magical way, we simply visited different parts of the world and had different experiences.
But it’s weird that so few people see what she was fighting, because I’ve also seen it endlessly unpacked and discussed and torn apart and prepared for in… I don’t know how to say this without sounding weird, but in literally everything I’ve ever read? That sounds like I mean hidden codes or something, but I just mean fighting “IT” is what a lot of work (whether sci-fi, fantasy, myth, science, or gospel) is about.
The tools I use to be able to function and care for anyone around me at all come from her and her favorite stories. Though, here’s where my story differs; I didn’t lose access to my mom young, and I get a lot of the same things I’m talking about from my dad and his stories and his fight too, and feel they were fighting the same and seeing the same and teaching us differently but together, which I think is one the greatest privileges of my life.
But that thing was what killed her, first slowly and then all at once. And now I see it systematically going along and killing… everyone. One at a time, and then all at once. And it’s tempting to think “IT” is a metaphor for… whatever and whoever you want. The Patriarchy, Big Oil, Satan, “the cruel uncaring universe”, Nazis, The Lizard People, Disease, so on and so forth.
But the worst part is “IT” is either none of those, or is in some sense all of them, and both of those have the same feeling attached which I would word as:
This story captures a lot of bundled feelings I have which I want to try to put into words, though words are imperfect. This is the part of the story which I feel mirrored in my own:
My mom was fighting something, and she was fighting (and teaching me to fight) harder and earlier than I knew at the time, giving me tools and perspectives that most people don’t get until they are adults (if they get them at all). Now I also see that a very few people even saw that she was fighting anything, much less what it was, and few see it now, and we just can’t seem to teach all our children fast enough.
But I see a lot of it too, or at least I vaguely “see” it in the way she vaguely “saw” it. I know (and she knew; we had many drunken debates) I see different parts of it than she did. Not in a magical way, we simply visited different parts of the world and had different experiences.
But it’s weird that so few people see what she was fighting, because I’ve also seen it endlessly unpacked and discussed and torn apart and prepared for in… I don’t know how to say this without sounding weird, but in literally everything I’ve ever read? That sounds like I mean hidden codes or something, but I just mean fighting “IT” is what a lot of work (whether sci-fi, fantasy, myth, science, or gospel) is about.
The tools I use to be able to function and care for anyone around me at all come from her and her favorite stories. Though, here’s where my story differs; I didn’t lose access to my mom young, and I get a lot of the same things I’m talking about from my dad and his stories and his fight too, and feel they were fighting the same and seeing the same and teaching us differently but together, which I think is one the greatest privileges of my life.
But that thing was what killed her, first slowly and then all at once. And now I see it systematically going along and killing… everyone. One at a time, and then all at once. And it’s tempting to think “IT” is a metaphor for… whatever and whoever you want. The Patriarchy, Big Oil, Satan, “the cruel uncaring universe”, Nazis, The Lizard People, Disease, so on and so forth.
But the worst part is “IT” is either none of those, or is in some sense all of them, and both of those have the same feeling attached which I would word as:
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