The Point of it All
People like to say things like, "omg Joe Piccoli is so me! I am Joe and Joe is me!" What I hope they understand is, Joe Piccoli was "me" before he was ever you, and to some extent he has always embodied some very personal anxieties I have around my relationship with my own creativity.
For ages now I've been struggling with the point of it all. From a very young age I was introduced very personally to how vile other people can be. It's something I've carried with me well into my adult years, and to date nothing and no one has alleviated it. If anything, the older I get the more disappointed I become with other people. Years go on and my mistrust only deepens.
What is the point of doing creative and emotional labour for people who don't fully appreciate you as a person? What is the point of spilling your soul out onto a page to entertain folks who, if they knew the whole of what you were, would only understand the richness of your subjectivity as a parlour trick, or perhaps conceive of it as some grand bid for attention? There is a reason Joe has the exchange that he does with Richard in the cage - it takes the core of the struggle Joe faces against the rest of the world and grinds it down to the finest sand, then sieves it through the finest sieve:
You do not have the privilege of being a (real) person.
I challenge that, of course, as the author. I myself would not be "real" to other people along multiple axes: my gender identity, my neurotype, my trauma, not to mention other aspects that are too personal to list - I don't trust anyone to take these things about me seriously. At best they'll get laughed off or smiled-and-nodded through; never contextualized or appreciated as something holding real weight and value. At worst they'll get actively derided or thought of as something dangerous, something scary, something that needs to be controlled and eradicated for the good of others... dare I say, something petlike.
To what degree is it worth it to make art for those people?
Am I making art for those people? Some days it feels like I am. Like doing so is an inevitability as a direct result of living in a world I do not fit into, and for that reason I must explain, explain, explain, and try over and over again to prove myself to you, just as Joe must constantly prove himself to Harry.
I personally believe that epistemic injustice lies at the seat of all injustice (or at the very least it has been the thorny heart beating at the core of all other injustices I have directly faced), and if epistemic injustice could speak, all would say would be "prove it" over and over again. And no matter what evidence you provided to those holding the power, no matter how viciously you poured out your heart to whatever distant judge on the podium was weighing your soul, it would never be enough. Never rational enough, never genuine enough, never real enough to prove itself worthy of the same respect everyone else receives implicitly.
Anyways, it's pride season where I live, and I love pride because it flies in the face of all that - or at least it's supposed to. I can go somewhere for a few hours and be sparkly and nonsensical and not fit in without punishment, because fitting in isn't the point. Difference, something once feared and vilified, becomes celebrated - not for the sake of being "special" as so many seem to believe, but for the sake of being comfortable.
I deserve that comfort. I have to remind myself of that constantly whenever I backspace the they/them pronouns out of my signature at work, or mask so hard around other people that the mask burns into my skin. I deserve to exist freely and naturally. I deserve to stretch out and Be, no matter how poorly other people might handle it - because it's not about them at the end of the day. It's about me.
So maybe if there's one good thing that can come out of my writing, it is the reminder that, no matter who you are, and no matter how strange you may be, and regardless of whether you may be accepted by others or not, or how superficially absurd showing you dignity may seem at the end of the day, you are a person worthy of that dignity. And if nobody else will give it to you, you will just have to reclaim it for yourself. Maybe that is the point I've been searching for all along.