Coconut Tree
To make a better future for ourselves, we need to reckon with the past.
This is part four of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here, and part three here. Go forth and prosper or whatever!!!!
I remember peeing in a gender-neutral bathroom of the science building at my hippy-dippy college and seeing a poster on one of the stall’s walls that said something like you can be whatever gender you want to be, you can have whatever pronouns—he/him, she/her, xe/xir—you want. There was an illustration of a person with a beard wearing a dress on it.
At this point, I was a gay guy, and not very into my gayness. It all seemed antithetical to doing what I wanted to do in life, which was to find a career and settle down. I considered my sexuality superfluous. Which didn’t mean I didn’t want to have sex, but that I had no desire to participate in some kind of “community” or “culture.” What was the point of it all? What did any of that have to do with me becoming a journalist, or getting married, or buying a house. And I didn’t even know about gender. I’d heard the word trans before, but that was basically it.
I paid the poster little mind, filed it away to my subconscious. And then its message began expanding, seeping into every crevice of my mind until my entire brain felt occupied by it.
I’d be sitting in a sociology class and staring at the whiteboard and the poster would suddenly appear in my mind’s eye. I would shoo it away. It would come back with force. I would overhear a conversation in the dining hall and realize the people were talking about something similar—gender, queerness. Eventually, I could not ignore it.
A little stupid poster made me trans.
Which is to say that information that trans people existed and could exist made me trans.
Which is to say that there is no way to be anything without knowing that that thing can exist and has existed.
In the late 2000s, when I was in college, was not really in the wider cultural imaginary. I rarely heard it talked about, even in the ultra-liberal enclaves of New York and Western Massachusetts I spent my time in.
It was by whoever made that poster sharing the existence of trans people, of trans history, of trans memory, that I found my own future.
Which is to say that the transmission of information from person to person and generation to generation undergirds all humanity, all progress, your and our entire futures.
My survival and eventual happiness, of course, were not just a result of the poster. They were too the result of talking to older queer and trans people, about reading and seeing the history of the crises people like me had already faced and managed to overcome, and (perhaps more importantly) their joys too. Books like Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues changed my life not because they showed me how to live it, but because they showed me my life had already been lived. There was a path cut through the dense woods of ignorance and repression that I could now follow.
Being queer at one point felt paralyzingly daunting. It was only by connecting myself to a history purposefully hidden from me by dominant culture that I was able to more forward. And this is true of all of us, whether queer or not: we can only become what we know is possible. And as of now, with our histories devalued and purposefully suppressed, we have a very narrow understanding of what is possible.
As Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed write in If Memory Serves, their book about remembering and forgetting queer history and the AIDS crisis:
“Memories enable more than survival; they are imaginative ways to disrupt and transform conditions that make survival necessary. Like utopias, memories craft a world that stands as a counterreality to the lacking or painful present, creating narratives of “the past” so as to challenge the inevitability of dominant constructions of “reality.’”
History is not just history, and not just the present, but also every possible future. Without it, we become trapped.
***
Do you, like me, feel as if everything is stuck in an inescapable present these days?
Our culture is one of ever-increasing nowness. We see an endless slew of information, but the vast majority of that information is about our current moment—even if it is good or smart or true information, it is about what currently exists, what is currently being thought of, what is currently controversial or deemed worthy of discourse or of praise. News.
We are living in a dehistoricized society.
And this dehistoricization creates depression and desperation.
When everything feels unprecedented—wars and economic malaise and rising fascism—then it also feels inescapable. We cannot logically or methodically or successfully react to these things, whether emotionally or materially, because we cannot see their patterns, and thus cannot enact the counter-patterns generations before us did to escape or survive or solve them. The world was bad before too. But we are uniquely convinced it is now uniquely bad, and thus unresolvably so.
This is much like a depressed person thinks. One of the main features of depression is a seeming never-endingness. When you are in a mental health crisis, you often cannot see forward or backward into the future or past. You feel the now is how it has always been and how it always was. If you do think about the future, all you can do is project the present onto it, foreclosing on the possibility of something better by painting over it with the crushingness of your current mental state. And thus depression becomes a self-perpetuating system of stasis. You make your own future worse by assuming it will be as it is now.
Our society works similarly: we are paralyzed into inaction because we can only see what is directly in front of us, and thus cannot understand what action means, because action requires temporality—it requires a movement of and change over time. And if we do not understand a time beyond the now, there is now way to have hope. All we can do is project the present onto the future, creating that self-perpetuating system of stasis. The genocides will get worse. Global warming will kill us all. What’s the point of working when the world outside is burning, as the pandemic-era meme went.
Well, because, it’s not necessarily true that the world outside is burning. Or, though it may be partially burning, that doesn’t mean our current lives are pointless; that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about the fires. We simply must figure out what we can do.
You are what you repeat. And you repeat what you know. If you do not know something, you cannot repeat it.
Freud proposed that we were all guided by a “repetition compulsion“—repeating stressful or traumatic events of our pasts in order to better understand them, or complete them or master them. This is the reason we all become our parents (or work very hard not to), and/or our surroundings and/or our culture—because we are encoded by our histories. This is why people with PTSD have flashbacks and feel as if they’re reliving their traumas. This is why people develop compulsions around drug use or gambling—it is not (just) that these things are enjoyable or self-soothing, but that they are known.
But while the repetition compulsion may be inevitable, it doesn’t always have to be negative. If we are destined to carry forward our history whether we like it or not, then the very least we can do is know what that history is.
Perhaps if you are feeling stuck, the solution is not to try to stop repeating your history (impossible), but to find new information to encode into yourself that a future you can then repeat.