I Regret the Zine I Was Writing

[bodyetal]

Sorry, access list, I’m not done with you. (To everyone else, hello.)

I’ve been working on a zine, on and off, for years now. It’s titled “Psycho!” (or “PSYCHO,” or “Psycho”—it doesn’t really matter yet), and it’s about [my] sociopathy/antisocial personality disorder. No draft of it has stuck yet. I write for a while, a few pages at a time, and then I stop. It never feels right. It barely feels like I have something to say. It’s far from my aspirations of a seminal work on sociopathy. And I can never figure out why.

Well, I figured out why.

It’s because it’s written as if for empaths, to convince them that sociopaths/psychopaths are not frightening and inferior. Every draft explains my capacity for care, my lack of abusive tendencies, or exactly how I’m not worse than empaths. It’s not revolutionary, it’s defensive. It’s begging for scraps. It’s arguing my humanity to people I don’t fucking care about.

It’s like I’m apologizing for my choice of title by relentlessly clarifying our worthiness. I co-wrote the fucking Dyke Manifesto, and I can’t write a zine about the fundamentals of myself without acting sorry for using a derogative? Give me a fucking break.

I don’t know if that zine’s ever getting done. I’ve been working through a lot of complicated thoughts on my own sociopathy that make the idea less appealing (though also less vapid, at least). But I have made the very firm decision that if I do finish it, it will not be a defense of sociopaths. I do not write anything in defense. I write offensive, in every sense of the word, and I will not let this project be the exception. If that means the project’s dead, that’s fine.

I will never publish anything from the back foot.

Comments

[lb_lee]

"It’s not revolutionary, it’s defensive. It’s begging for scraps. It’s arguing my humanity to people I don’t fucking care about."

Rogan: Ahhhh yes, we are familiar with this. If it helps, I also feel like this is just a natural stage of the whole business? If you look at our old comics, we did it too for multi! Sometimes you just gotta get the defensiveness out of your own system, even if it makes you mad that you have to, you know? You could always make it and then just not show it to anybody, as an exercise in blowing off the steam.

[bodyetal]

That is true--I struggle to accept it as an impulse I have because it feels so contradictory to who I am as a person, though since you& are on the access list you&'ve seen/probably know that I'm doing a lot of accepting ways I contradict my self-image. (I had been expecting not to be fundamentally messy, which is an impossible standard for anyone operating on electrocuted meatware.) I suppose part of the trouble with aiming to write seminal works is that you're generally the first person doing it, so you're starting from that deeply insecure (for lack of a better word) position.

I think I will make that zine without posting it, that sounds useful--besides, I don't think the defensiveness is useless, I just loathe the idea of publishing defensively. But no one has to see it, least of all people I don't think I owe a defense.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: nobody's self-image is completely consistent. I don't think that that's possible for anyone, no matter what their wetware. People are complicated.

And the zine may prove a useful record for later on down the line! You never know.