Break Up? Get Down.

A story of queer heartache peppered with advice on how to get back your goddamn mind. Structured like a zine, fragmented by the internet.

[xicanajewel-blog]

“… the loneliness that may come with full self-love and self-actualization is far preferable to the loneliness of being in a relationship where love is not present.”

bell hooks (via xicanajewel)

[queerbreakup-blog]

In some sense, I envisioned sex work as the ultimate break-up revenge. Even better than sleeping with other people, I would sleep with everybody.  Your body has a memory and what better way to recalculate a map than to change the lands’ topography? I was going to plow over you. Not just with different people but with different sex as well. All kinds of sex and partners and transactions were gonna wring this body into something brand fucking new.  I would have sex with gay men, and ugly people, and old people, and at play parties, and in public, and on stage, and for money. I would have sex in all sorts of ways and all sorts of positions with all sorts of partners. And I did.

  Sex work was not sexually liberating. I did not learn to locate my feminist hammer in my emancipated and commodified libido. However, it was economically empowering though. Like many informal economies, sex work was minimal effort for maximum money. It was work without references so in some sense it was work without past. I was making a choice to professionally abject from meritocracy. Suddenly I was, in some ways, self-employed with a transferable skill that I could use around the world. I could work in New York, and Berlin, and London, and Sydney (and I did). It was my ultimate stake in independence, which is exactly what I had been hoping to carve out post break-up.  As a testament to this, I posted this on my tumblr:

YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW HARD I HAVE FOUGHT FOR THIS FREEDOM

because suddenly myself, and not my partner, was forefront in my mind.

[queerbreakup-blog]

"You'll feel a lot better when you stop being a doormat."

"But how do I know when that is?"

It's never easy to break a habit.

[queerbreakup-blog]

Anatomy Lesson

What’s a break-up? It’s a question that seems silly when you’re not in the throes of heartbreak, but all too relevant when you are. After my break-up, my first break-up and so far the only, I devoted myself to reading about love, loss, and grief. I read bell hooks’ On Love, I read Laura Kipnis’ Against Love, I scoured Barthes’ Fragments: A Lovers’ Discourse, and Berlant’s Love: A Queer Feeling over and over again searching for a place to put my anger but also a way to articulate how I was so quickly unraveling. In those first few months, when we still lay together some nights it would feel like I was wading through ruins, I would sometimes be riding my bike through the streets of Montreal with my legs pedaling quick and my mind falling off the grid to somewhere else. I crashed into a car door that way, I crashed into another bike that way, I crashed in to a bush. It was like that moment in Super Mario where your avatar falls down a hole and you’re stilling frantically pressing the jump button trying to get out. You can hear Mario jumping but he’s off screen and you know it’s a lost cause, but the game lets you pray for just a couple seconds longer. That moment where you’re neither present nor absent.

[queerbreakup-blog]

…love is queered not when we discover it to be resistant to or more than its known forms, but when we see that there is no world that admits how it actually works as a principle of living. Lauren Berlant – “Love, A Queer Feeling”

[heavenearthandhoratio]

Imagine you’re at a party. A guy offers you a drink. You say no. He says “Come on, one drink!” You say “no thanks.” Later, he brings you a soda. “I know you said you didn’t want a drink, but I was getting one for myself and you looked thirsty.” For you to refuse at this point makes you the asshole. He’s just being nice, right? Predators use the social contract and our own good hearts and fear of being rude against us. If you drink the drink, you’re teaching him that it just takes a little persistence on his part to overcome your “no.” If you say “Really, I appreciate it, but no thanks” and put the drink down and walk away from it, you’re the one who looks rude in that moment. But the fact is, you didn’t ask for the drink and you don’t want the drink and you don’t have to drink it just to make some guy feel validated.

The art of “no,” continued: Saying no when you’ve already said yes. « CaptainAwkward.com

Predators use the social contract and our own good hearts and fear of being rude against us.  !!!This. This is why I don’t trip off of making a scene. It might just save my life.

(via newmodelminority)

And remember, kids. If someone offers something to you and you refuse it and they do it anyway, THAT IS NOT NICE. THAT IS BOUNDARY CROSSING. HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH PEOPLE WHO DO THIS. Because if they can ignore your wishes with something small, they’ll try it with something big, so just quit now.

(via ceepolk)

A good rule to remember for ex-manipulation.

[queerbreakup-blog]

Found Object: Love

When we fall in love, what do we fall in love with? Our self or the other (the lover)?  Sometimes love becomes the narcissistic gaze of our inability to know ourselves and because our formation of self is contingent on knowing the other, love sometimes becomes a game of consumption – of who can consume the other faster – like a PacMan running through a maze – love is a moment of transformation – a willing jump into the unknown – a process of world building and future holding – of building attachments that bridge out towards a cluster of promises that may never fully gain muster – our best lovers are the ones who hold up our most perfect images of what we wish ourselves to be – the loss of a loved one is the process of losing ourselves – love is a point of contact, and contact leaves traces – when we loss a loved one we grieve not only the loss of love but the loss of the self we were with that loved one – love is a force that disorganizes the frames that seek to contain it – love is an affect, an emotion, an action, and is constantly unfolding in a moment just like any other utterance – love has very long limbs and a very long reach – past loves motivate present desires