Jotunwork
Iām bad and thatās good. I will never be good, and thatās not bad. Thereās no one Iād rather be, than me. -Bad Guy Affirmation, Wreck-It Ralph
Iām wild and thatās good.
When I talk about working with Loki, or really with any jotnar, the questions seem inevitable. How do I stand that energy? That intensity? That destructiveness? How do I live with so much chaos around me?
The real question, if you know me, is how could I not live with that energy in my life. Thereās a reason I talk about monsterwork and destruction and deconstruction. Thatās who I am, and thatās how I work. Jotunheim is a much better fit for me than Asgard. I aināt no country club boy. When I see Loki, heās free. When I work with the other jotnar, thereās no pretense of it being safe, or of them being tame. Ran is the ravenous ocean, Hraesvelgr is the churning storm, Logi is the wildfire and Surt is the fire at the heart of creation.
Why do I work with them? Because thatās the energy that I need in my life. Stagnation drives me up a wall, and more than that, it can actually make my OCD worse. There is a fear that, if things are calm, I must be simply waiting for the next chaotic thing. Iām happier when things are happening and changing, whether internally or externally. I may not have complete control over them, but choosing to give up control is still a choice.
People seem to worry that Loki is going to wander uninvited into lives that are happy and settled and completely fulfilled and tear them down for no good reason, or maybe because itās funny. Loki is not actually the God of Fishmalk. He brings necessary change when things are stagnant. He changes that which needs to be changed. If youāre actually, honestly, in your bones happy with your life- well, heās probably got better things to do.
Civilization is wonderful in many ways (medical technology and the internet are great), but wildness is also necessary, both within and without. To ask the jotnar to be safe, to be peaceful, to stand down from battling the Aesir... that is to ask them to be something theyāre not. Asking āwhy do you work with chaosā is a meaningless question. We all work with chaos, every day of our lives. We are at the mercy of traffic, weather, cell mutation and the stock market.
The only question is how we acknowledge it.
Everything Louder Than Everything Else
I always feel like Iām living with the volume turned up to 11. For me, being a monster is like speaking capslock as my native language. Everything is experienced immediately and intensely, in a way society tells me is āoverboard.ā The details vary, as details pretty much always do, but the aspect of Buddhism that draws me in is the philosophy of experiencing each moment fully for what it is.
Whatever I am doing at any given moment, that is the thing I have fully committed myself to. If Iām on a mountain, Iām enjoying the hell out of that mountain right then, not worried about the next part of the trail or whatever pissed me off that morning. If Iām fucking, my partner knows exactly where my attention is at any given moment. If Iām working, the work is what matters and doing it right becomes important no matter how dull the job is. Telling me not to care is meaningless, and this can cause me a lot of stress at work. If Iām watching a movie, my emotions are fully consumed by the movie, regardless of how stupid I might look crying in *Wreck It Ralph*.
Being a wild thing means being in the moment, not in the past or the future. What matters is what Iām doing now, and whether I could be doing it even better than I already am. Whatever Iām feeling, Iām feeling it one hundred percent. (Even if that feeling is confusion, or even if Iām feeling two different things and Iām at 200%.) Every feeling is valid and important, itās just what you do with them that matters. Anger and joy are easy ones to picture, and while Americans are acculturated to cringe at expressions of both, we at least know what they look like. Thatās not the case with many emotions. Grief, for example, is felt keenly by monsters and most other creatures; I mourn loudly and messily, and Iām a sobbing mess when I get started. (Traditional Irish wakes as well as funerals with wailing and screaming mourners are both closer to honesty than the stoic, silent funeral thatās so common.)
Fear is a feeling like any other, to be felt completely in the moment when it overwhelms you. The beautiful thing about really feeling all of your emotions is that you become aware of the fact that every mood changes and every feeling passes. That fear will pass, and be replaced by anger or relief or bravery; in the mean time, you can appreciate it for the survival instinct it is.
Because every feeling is valid, there are no guilty pleasures, just pleasures. If I like 80s power ballads, then I am going to turn that Journey album up to eleven and I donāt care who hears me sing along. If Iām running, Iām doing it for the sheer joy of running, even if thereās someplace I have to end up as well.
I can tell you without shame that I love bad movies, 80s rock, and cartoons as much as I love deconstructing mid-20th-century American poetry and traditional blacksmithing and opera. None of those is more valid than the other, and I sing along with La Donna Il Mobile and Donāt Stop Believinā with equal passion. Shame makes no sense. If I like it, itās clearly worth liking. If you disagree, we can have a lively debate about it, or we can ignore ignore it in favor of things we agree on.
The American cultural ideal of the āpolite fictionā is ridiculous. Most monsters will take you at your word; this is why honesty is so important in fairy tales. If youāre going to lie, lie big. Make it worth your while. But when in doubt, donāt lie at all, especially not to yourself or the people you care about.
Yes, this ends badly sometimes. Freaking out when someone āmoves your cheeseā is frowned on in the workplace. Weāre expected to act like weāre simply okay no matter how we really feel. Maybe some people can learn to tamp down their feelings like that, but I never really have. If Iām angry, or if Iām happy, youāre going to know. (Iāve had bosses complain about my āoversharingā before, and Iāve worked on it, but itās still hard.)
There is also a tendency toward violent reactions thatās not easy to understand if youāre not from a culture that allows honest feelings to flourish. I donāt punch people any more, but I am going to let you know what I think and I am going to call you on your bullshit if I think itās deserved. Otherwise it not only builds up inside you, but it can turn poisonous, leading you to undermine whatever compromise you reached.
Even my anxiety is something I live at full volume. I donāt have any small, creeping fears. I have terrors, and I learn to live with them. I have my obsessive thoughts, and I think them *loudly,* and eventually Iām able to release them.
And thatās the amazing thing about living a life where you arenāt afraid to feel everything. Yes, it will hurt, and you will feel every inch of the pain. But the joy and the excitement and all the pleasures are that much sharper as well. When you know every feeling will pass, you learn to treasure all of them, even the anger and the pain and the grief, because you know youāll never feel precisely this same way again.
This is all I have. I intend to enjoy it.
Gender in the Woods
A friend of mine came out as genderqueer and Iāve been thinking about my own relationship with gender. As a trans man, Iāve put a lot of thought into how I view myself and how I want the world to see me. At the same time, Iām still largely in the closet at work and donāt plan to publicly transition at this job. I spend half my day cross-dressing, essentially.
With as much as I write about opposing forces, you might wonder if this back-and-forth is difficult for me. Itās hard because Iām playing someone Iām not, itās hard because Iām faced with daily microaggressions from people who donāt know thereās a trans man in the room, but on a metaphysical level, no, itās not hard. Itās much harder to remember to answer to the right name, actually. I can put on the mask of Who I Am At Work and take on that female self when itās necessary.
And it is necessary. There are different expectations for the way men and women handle themselves, even here in Greater Portlandia. Actions that would be praiseworthy go-getting from a man are aggressive when they come from me. Iāve made my peace with that, and learned to work with it, but Iāve never really gotten over it. Some days I honestly feel like a woman. Some days, femininity is a role I put on, somewhere between the bus stop and the office. Iām naturally receptive; people tell me things without meaning to. Itās not as useful as it sounds: Iām not good at building rapport, so oftentimes people get freaked out about it after they say it.
This is a kind of liminality, this shapeshifting. I know both sides; I choose how people see me and project what I want to be seen as. Despite the way Western philosophies tend to paint opposing forces as, well, in opposition, they are not inherently at war with each other. The struggle between the two takes place inside my head, and inside the heads of those who donāt understand that gender is not the sum of your parts. Being able to shift is a skill that has benefits. I feel better when I can shift freely, when I am choosing the role I play at work. There are skills that you learn when society treats you as a woman that are different than the skills you gain as a man. On good days I can shift back and forth, taking the skills and mindset that will help the most with whatever Iām working on.
People use 太ęå¾, the yin-yang symbol, all the time without thinking about it, but if you look at it, you can see that itās clearly meant to be *in motion*. One energy is rising, the other descending. Often you see the core of one energy inside the opposing energy. Getting stuck in one side or the other is stagnation. This is where stereotypes come in, from the 50s housewife to the dudebro ā stereotypes that harm, by encouraging us to view the opposite force as *the other*.
It isnāt, though. Especially in the case of gender, where āmasculineā and āfeminineā are almost meaningless as personality descriptions anyway ā pushing away parts of yourself because theyāre not correct for your gender stereotype is not going to make you a better Barbie doll or GI Joe. Jungian psychology talks about the anima or animus, the part of yourself that is the opposite gender. I donāt think itās quite that simple, but I do think we each have an other-self that we have to learn to understand.
Itās a misnomer to call it an other-self, isnāt it? Itās still the self.
I think about Surt-Sinmora, about Loki, about the Serpent, about the other jotnar Iāve met who either switch gender at will or have none to speak of unless they need one. The further away you go, the less gender means anything at all. Learning to understand that, and to embrace the shapeshifting I do on a daily basis, has helped me to keep my sanity.
Gender is real, but itās also not the be-all and end-all society treats it as. Itās a part of who you are right now, and a part of whatever work youāre doing, but it shouldnāt be a prison any more than light or dark, or ice or fire, or any other dichotomy.
Further Thoughts On Gender and Bodies and Loki