hypomania: “a mood state characterized by persistent disinhibition and elevation (euphoria). […] According to DSM-5 criteria, hypomania is distinct from mania in that there is no significant functional impairment; mania, by DSM-5 definition, does include significant functional impairment and may have psychotic features.”

this is kinda a thing that keeps occurring to me on and off, as you’re aware. i wanted to try to describe the subjective experience. because it’s a mood state defined by a set of symptoms, i’ll do so according to the list of criteria.

pressured speech: i’m fucking talkative lately. i can’t stop expressing myself. i tweet a lot and i talk a lot, but inside my head when i’m alone it’s like a freight train. the thing is, it feels good. it feels like i’m putting together some unified theory of the world and psyche and essentially every damn thing i’m talking about, like it All Makes Sense™. the desire to keep talking and theorising is fuelled by this sense that i’m making sense of things, and that if i keep doing so, i’ll have made sense of everything.

inflated self-esteem or grandiosity: my self-image is really good lately. this isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it contrasts to my baseline of “this is fine”. i feel much more associated with my body, much more accepting of it, and i’m much more willing to express the idea that i’m good or even excellent at certain tasks. similarly, i have less qualms with putting myself out there.

decreased need for sleep: this is pretty simple. lately i’ve not been tired, have had trouble falling asleep if i’ve gone to bed early (e.g. with you), and still not been tired in the morning when i wake up.

flight of ideas or the subjective experience that thoughts are racing: see ‘pressured speech’. it feels like everything is related.

easily distracted and attention-deficit: this one hasn’t hit me as much, subjectively, though i have struggled to accomplish much work-wise lately.

increase in psychomotor agitation, or occasionally in some, increased irritability: maybe.

hypersexuality: from ace to 8 hours of fucking in 48 hours. yeah.

involvement in pleasurable activities that may have a high potential for negative psycho-social or physical consequences: yes. there’s the whole 8 hours of sex with someone you just met thing, but i’m willing to excuse that as simply queer life sometimes. but we didn’t use any protection! hello disinhibition. :/

i need “elevated mood” plus three of those for the DSM-IV-TR definition. i have elevated mood plus six, so …

today i’m looking at my laptop. it’s covered in a variety of stickers and there’s a lot of history recorded in them.

honestly, i’m not a fan of keeping history around; i don’t mean “delete or trash everything a day after it’s gone” — i like to hold onto things for as long as they’ve held their relevance. but in a habit i picked up from marie kondo, once something has served me in life, i appreciate it one last time and then move on.

i used to hang onto everything. starting from when i was 12, i’d hang onto every text document i wrote or acquired, every picture i downloaded, every project i worked on, every piece of music, everything. when i’d get a new computer or reinstall an OS, i’d collect them all into a folder (usually called “old” or “archive”), and stick in my new, empty documents folder. next time, i’d do the same. up until last year you could go through the onion layers of “old” folders, reaching further and further into my history, right back to when i was 12.

preserving this was an effort, because i’ve had how many new computers, how many reinstalls in the last 15 years? but it felt like something had to do to, like throwing that away would violate a sacred principle i lived my life by. turns out that principle was OCD.

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so, this laptop. the cats in the top-left corner were sent to me by my coworker aaron. he’s kind of a Big Deal in the ruby and rails communities, so when he tweeted about sending these to anyone, i DM’d him on slack and was like “omg would you??” and he just mailed me out an envelope full of them. i was ecstatic, so they went straight on my laptop. (there’s one in the front cover of my diary too.) now it’s kind of surreal that we’re “friends” who video call every week.

there’s a variety of work related stickers without much backstory: the four big octocats along the middle line, the vinyl octocat covering the apple logo, the pride octocat. they are what they are. this is a work laptop and it seemed appropriate. same with the git and the datadog (purple woofer up top) stickers.

there’s a bunny sticker on opposite corners. they were from a sticker set i got to give to kairi. there were others but i removed them because of all the negativity they were associated with. but i couldn’t bare to drop the bunnies.

the bottom-right corner is the logo of my favourite band, school food punishment, now disbanded. it came with a limited-edition cd release.

“gender is not binary” is actually from a member of parliament in nsw (!). she sent them and a bunch of other stickers out. that was pretty cool.

idk why i have the slack pride one. whatever. more rainbows on a laptop is always good.

there’s two stickers from github constellation, an event held last november in melbourne where i attended as staff. they were handing those stickers out. one is the octocat “constellation” on the bottom of the laptop. the other was a grim reaper (!?), which i’ve covered with the “invasion day” sticker. i covered it because it was actually really grim: that night was the one i was raped. a bit too much to leave a literal grim reaper sticker from that night on there, y’know? whereas i support indigeneousx on patreon.

“be pawsitive”. cute furry artist put these together. my keys have a little charm of the same design on them.

finally, the bunny girl drinking a milkshake. it’s from a LINE sticker set i used with emma a lot.

there’s a lot i’m ready to move on from with this laptop. it kinda documents the last 2 years of my life, the 2 years i’ve had it. i’m giving it to a friend when my replacement laptop arrives, which is pretty soon.

There’s my diary on the desk. It didn’t start out that way; it was a bullet journal originally. It’s a Moleskine, since those are the fancy diaries with the dotted grids suitable for bullet journals. I think the covers are leather. Oh well. I bought this years ago. At a guess it has .. 180, 200 pages? I’m up to page 158 right now. I number them myself. I’ve only ever used two different types of pens in it, both made by the same Japanese pen company, Zebra. I can’t say I know for sure why I’ve chosen that pen company as “my” pen company, but I have.

It has a little tassel attached to it to use as a bookmark. I keep the current day marked.

The paper is slightly yellowed, with a grid of light dots, maybe 8mm apart in both directions. It’d probably be good for playing grid-based paper games, but that’s not what I use it for. At a guess I’d say it was 70~80gsm. Good, strong paper, without being bulky.

For a while I maintained an index on the first page, in true bullet journal fashion, with page references for months, and a yearly overview for each year as it happened, three months to a page. Turns out that wasn’t actually useful to me. Likewise, it was purely a daily todo list and short bullet points on things that happened in a given day, if I felt it was exceptional enough to mark it.

The beginning was November 2016. I wasn’t doing too well then. “Diazepam helped alot.” “Fucking chill.” “chill” “relax about life a little” “Feeling a bit underappreciated” (NB. this was almost certainly the understatement of the year.) The tone is rarely positive, and when it is, it feels fabricated. There’s a lot of self-reassurance that things will be okay, and reminders to try to provide reassurance to my partner that things will be okay. “Panic attack all morning.” “Didn’t get any work done.” Sometimes there’s an upturn. “Feel better as the day has gone on.” Then there’s a downturn. “Last night she was very suicidal.”

If I jump 60 pages ahead, the tone has changed significantly. “Sun feels so good!! aaaaaaaaaaa” “GOD I LOVE BUNNIES” “feeling pretty fine w/ new hair”. The style of the journal has changed, and it is much more a diary. Short dot points of a day’s events give way to entire pages of solid prose, feelings I can now express.

Further months pass and days wax and wane, grow thicker and thinner. Sometimes it’s thin because I’m too busy to write, other times because I’m too depressed to. Sometimes it’s thick because I have too many negative emotions, other times too many positive events to detail.

A lot happens in 158 pages.

It’s a new year, again.

2017 was a hell of a time.

Here’s hoping 2018 is better.

It’s a new year.

I’d meant to keep writing of the agonising days, then weeks, then months after the onset of the illness that struck, but I’m still not out of the woods (and perhaps never will be), and writing about it hurts — my mind is not ready to go back to the worst of it.

Despite how much “worse” my day-to-day life is for the sickness, there has been a prominent silver lining: priorities. This past year has shown me what’s important; what I can’t live without, and what brings me more pain than happiness. So I’m thankful for that.

What does the new year bring?

Global warming is promising truly catastrophic things for our planet.

Australia has created hell on earth in the form of refugee camps.

Beautiful Aleppo has been razed to the ground, Russia providing the necessary firepower to Assad.

Israel continues to destabilise Palestine while refusing to heed UN resolutions.

Trump. Ugh. Who knows if we’ll face a third world war in our lifetime, but the probability has risen significantly.

It’s hard to know how to be hopeful. It looks like the global right is growing in power and trying to cement their position. The steady rise of fascism becomes harder and harder to ignore, and the fascists themselves become ever more bold and accepted.

I don’t know how to fix this, but I do know caring is important. Caring takes energy — it hurts — but it’s the least we can do as humans. If we keep caring about the people around us, about our siblings in humanity wherever and whoever they are, at the very least we’ll have the necessary precursors to taking action.

I’m still a baby when it comes to politics; I’m quite convinced in anarchism, in class being the real political driver of society, in left materialism and the useless of identity politics (which comes up a lot, being trans, queer and such), but my ability to argue is still lacking. This doesn’t mean I just give up on being politically active — it means I need to better myself, to participate even more, to read more.

I hold hope, knowing that there are others out there who care, others who have thought (much) more than I have about the problems we face today, and others who (like me) want to learn more, knowing there are no easy answers.

Here are some of the most politically influential things I’ve read this year; things that have brought me around from being someone who thought radical left ideas were great, but never believed they were possible, to being someone who believes that there is no alternative; that we must make them possible if we want to avoid the collapse of society under capitalism.

• Get mad and get even — written by the superlative Eleanor Robertson, this was one of the strongest turn-offs to modern (neoliberal) feminism I’ve ever read. I cannot recommend this essay enough; it really started me off in earnest.

  A simple follow-the-money approach is enough to call this lazy embrace of commodity fetishism into serious question: who benefits when a television show is perfectly diverse and responds to the psychological needs of its audience, Tolentino’s ‘extremely woke 12-year-olds’? Ultimately it’s the industry itself, which has now gained the institutional knowledge necessary to extract more profit by appealing to the sensibilities of consumers. This is not just an absence of material politics, but its negation: twenty-first-century feminism’s primary medium, the diversity critique, has as its functional terminus the ‘freedom’ of consumers to purchase a picture of a utopia from a company whose interests lie in preventing any of those utopias from occurring.

• Suey Park and the Afterlife of Twitter — Yasmin Nair wrote about the online performance of Twitter celebrities. I somehow thought this wouldn’t necessarily be that interesting or relevant, because who cares about celebrities? looooool. I guess it makes sense that celebrities are pretty necessarily bound up with the function of capitalism, huh?

  The point here is is not to be critical of people like Suey Park and Arthur Chu for making money off Twitter but to consider their money-making as part of a neoliberal framework that fetishises their entrepreneurship, and to consider Twitter as part of that neoliberal framework.

  Twitter is mistaken as a form of political action, and the fact that tweeting has the appearance of unmediated immediacy gives it the legitimacy of authenticity, a hallmark of the neoliberal entrepreneurial self.

• The internet has made defensive writers of us all — I found this at the very start of the year. Talking online can be hard; your intention may not be well-understood by others, nuance is difficult to convey, yada yada. But I can really relate to this bit:

  The defensive writing style also encourages another sort of ugliness, which is that “avoiding saying something wrong” becomes a primary focus of the writing, rather than communicating or exploring ideas which the author might himself be unsure of. It encourages a tendency to be attached to ideas and defend them against attackers, rather than letting ideas exist separate from ourselves as they should.

  My brain automatically responds to a paragraph like this with “but what about the classists/racists/sexists/ableists/homophobes/transphobes/[…] who would exploit this”, but that seems to further reinforce the point: it’s extremely difficult to write about difficult or nuanced topics online in an exploratory fashion without either (i) hedging every statement made to make it absolutely clear you’ve thought of every possible misinterpretation or negative follow-on effect, or (ii) getting absolutely dunked on by the commentariat.

  The extent to which one ends up internalising the former really does end up becoming thought-limiting — especially when spending lots of time in circles where idpol is the defining common interest.

• There Is Such a Thing As Society and Talking Cure — by George Monbiot. As neoliberalism tears us apart, humanity itself begins to collapse. We don’t have to accept this — but it is necessary to accept what the source of the problem is in order to fix it. These essays helped further the notion for me that a modern capitalistic society wants to atomise the individuals within it, whatever the casualties.

  Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which, having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. Social media brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to quantify our social standing, and to see that other people have more friends and followers than we do.

• Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why — a lengthy and worthwhile essay by Adolph Reed, Jr. on the depictions of slavery in film. I’m severely underdeveloped politically in this area (being a white Australian, living in colonised Australia!), and there was a lot to get from this. Having not seen either film, I read the plot summaries on Wikipedia for context.

  Effacement of historicity and the social in favor of the timeless—that is, presentist—narrative of individual Overcoming is the deep politics and social commentary propounded in these products of the mass entertainment industry. They differ from other such products only because they ostensibly apply the standard formulae to socially important topics. They don’t, however. They do exactly the reverse; they revise historically and politically significant moments to fit within the formula. In doing so they are nodes in the constitution of neoliberalism’s ideological hegemony.

  And the extent of that hegemony is attested by claims from the likes of Lawrence Bobo, Jon Wiener and others who should know better than to think that a film like Django Unchained somehow captures the essential truth of American slavery. That truth is apparently, as Bobo condenses it, “brutality, inescapable violence and absolutely thorough moral degradation.” But those features were neither essential nor exclusive to slavery; they were behavioral artifacts enabled by the institution because it conferred, with support of law and custom, a property right—absolute control of life and livelihood—of some individuals over others. That property right was the essential evil and injustice that defined slavery, not the extremes of brutality and degradation it could encourage and abet.

  A part earlier on particularly spoke to me:

  The deeper message of these films, insofar as they deny the integrity of the past, is that there is no thinkable alternative to the ideological order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment industry; it shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as escapism.

  Half of the problem with modern neoliberalist schmucks is their insistence that their politics is actually no politics at all — their politics are actually the Natural and Correct way to be, they way things have always and should always be, and that any other political “idea” is therefore nothing more than an idea; a city-scale revolution here or there, perhaps, but never anything that could change the world.

  When I find myself subconsciously accepting some facet of neoliberalism as timeless or inevitable, Ursula K. Le Guin serves as a strong antidote:

  We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.

• Why I am a communist — Eleanor Robertson again, succinctly stating her own case for communism, focussing on the power dynamics inherent in oppression. As ever, the anti-liberal message really spoke to me, as no doubt the me of a few years ago would identify as a “liberal” today.

  One of the biggest problems with liberal or reformist approaches to oppression is that they ignore the arbitrariness of this process, and instead fixate on an imagined inherent quality of particular instances of target selection. This causes a perception that particular oppressions are discrete phenomena which can be ameliorated by breaking down the irrational prejudices that justify and sustain the persecution; the solution to anti-black racism must be focused on dispelling myths and stereotypes about black people, sexism can be ameliorated only by cultural changes in the treatment and depiction of women, etc.

  This puts the cart before the horse: these stereotypes, and the ways they find their material expression, are overdetermined by the necessity of persecution itself. Any hope we have of putting a stop to prejudice must address its underlying mechanisms as well as its specific expressions. Bigotry can only be halted by addressing oppression as a general social phenomenon produced by imbalances of power, without a pre-determined object.

• No country on Earth is taking the 2 degree climate target seriously — we’re all going to die. Really. That’s all there is to it. There’s no presently conceivable future where we don’t render the earth utterly uninhabitable in the short term future, on a human scale. I’m not a climate scientist, so I can’t speak to any particular numbers, but things look to get bad within decades. There’s no way we’re going to hit the 2 degree mark (do you see any large countries immediately stopping all new investment in fossil fuels?), so I think I have to apologise to my children already.

  This is included here not just because the right wing has a tendency to overlap with global warming denial, but also because it highlights the urgency of our cause: we probably don’t have that much more time to organise.

  The third option is to allow temperatures to rise 3 or even 4 degrees, which Anderson has called “incompatible with an organized global community.” Such temperatures would bring suffering to hundreds of millions of people and substantially raise the probability of runaway global warming that can’t be stopped no matter what humans do. Runaway warming would, over the course of a century or so, serve to render the planet uninhabitable. Quite a legacy.

I hope some of this reading proved interesting, but I hope more it might be motivational. We don’t have to accept the state of things (which is terrible). A better world is possible; the first thing is to believe that it is possible, and then find others who share that view, learn from them, and grow our collective effort.

Again, I’m very much a baby at all this, so I may have been way off the mark in more than one place. Comments and discussion are super-appreciated (@kivikakk).