Goyavoyage's den

Notes on I want to care

(It is recommended you read I want to care here before or after reading this.)

I wrote I want to care in mid-September 2024. At the time of writing this, it is among the most recent writings in my backlog (of which others may or may not end up here someday).

I have been wanting to write this text for something like a year. I wanted it to be a reflection on how I try to function in relationships close and far, and on the impossibility of doing so without hurting people, and on the tremendous importance of trying still.
Yet even with this title decided for a long time, and this immense emotion welling up inside me more and more, I couldn't write it. Many months passed, and I simply kept the idea that someday, I would do so. Someday, I would write something called I want to care that would try and crystallize all the things I had been feeling.

That text would have been fed with glimpses of so many relationships, first and foremost. But it also had, very early on, a clear mood board in my mind, that included the following four elements.

The first one is this page and the following few of the webcomic Goodbye to Halos by Valerie Halla. Some of its pages left a strong impression on me (other example here), early on in my transition. It is in indefinite hiatus and not always easy to follow, but there is a clear something to it that made it lodge itself into my brain, and it never really left.
Funnily enough, I didn't reread said pages when finally writing I want to care - I wanted to capture some of their spirit, not their words, as can probably be felt around the last full paragraph, I think. I see only now as I write this extra that "I don't want to hurt you" is written explicitly in this comic, as it is in what I wrote. This is fascinating.

The second inspiration is the beginning of this text by ridinskinned. A lot of their poetry and writings inspired me more or less directly during these past two-something years. They have filled me with a lot of intense emotions, influenced some of my writing style (though that is more apparent in other texts I may or may not post here), and are among the reasons that made me want to write more. Sometimes, I go back to some of their words that make me want to keep going.
The beginning of this one poem directly informed the way I started here.

The third inspiration is Heaven Will Be Mine, a queer mecha visual novel by Worst Girls Games that I played in 2020 (and replayed several times since) and that changed me somehow. Here, a specific quote was in my brain for this:

When I say I don't want to be human, what I really mean is... 'I can't stand being human like this'. Emphasis on the LIKE THIS. 'What I want instead, is to be human like THAT'.

It didn't necessarily make it into the text that much in spirit, but it somehow merged with the previous inspiration to help me start it.

The last inspiration somehow is this desperate, intense quote from the video game Night in the Woods - a story about going back to your dying small town to run away from your problems, by reconnecting with your friends and sometimes failing to do so. I may replay it soon, as it definitely is the season, and write a recommendation about it someday. Anyway:

I'm so scared. All the time. And the fear hurts. Feeling like everything is over, was over long before I got here, so long, hiding, or trying to outrun this.
I get it.
This won't stop until I die, but when I die I want it to hurt, when my friends leave, when I have to let go, when this entire town is wiped off the map, I want it to hurt. Bad. I want to lose, I want to get beaten up, I want to hold on until I'm throwing off and everything ends. And you know what?
Until that happens,
I want to hope again
and I want it to hurt.
Because that means it meant something, it means I am... something, at least.

This, too, didn't make it as is in the text. But something of its despair, repurposed here about trying to function and to communicate and to hope, remained seared into my brain.

Still, even with all this planned out, I couldn't write what I wanted to. It felt too enormous to put it into words, so that simply didn't happen.

2024 went on, and with it its share of small and bigger relationship problems and mendings - of talking, listening, caring, and mutual support.
It was hard, sometimes. It was rewarding, often. It is clear I love communicating and meta-communicating about relationships. I suppose it helps me feel like no misunderstanding is going on, either within me, or with the people I am interacting with; I suspect some of it is about being neurodivergent and often struggling to be sure how what I do can affect other people, or even whether a given dynamic may fit me at a given time. Processing it all step by step together within a kind frame, with people who are willing to do so, is the best tool I have still.

2024 is also a time I spent on cohost, a closing social media website, which was my first true experience on social media. It was, I believe, far less toxic than most people's relationship with social media, notably as it didn't have most kinds of metrics and no algorithm.
Still, it was something public. I was left perpetually bearing the fear of somehow writing things that would unexpectedly hurt other people, perpetually amazed by how some of the things I wrote or thought could resonate with others; impressed and joyful and anxious in turn; seen, to some extent, and feeling enthusiastic and scared of it all at the same time. Functioning in a relationship, however distant, with so many people, and trying to formulate opinions and thoughts and ideas, while leaving room for discussion, but also while feeling that standing by them mattered, too - and this, about everything, even the things that felt the most trite... Well, it could be exhausting as much as genuinely exhilarating, at times.

With all this, this idea - I want to care - felt more and more like something that mattered to some absurd level to me. I wanted to capture something that would sound probably naive to some extent, but also true, hopeful, important. I wanted it to be a statement. A promise. An attempt.

It finally burst out of me in the middle of September, notably as two things were unexpectedly added to the mix of my thoughts at the beginning of that month.
The first was the nearing, recently announced end of cohost. The website would become read-only on the first of October, and the strange atmosphere of end of the world that shrouded it throughout September, along with all of the complicated feelings I had had about it during the year, did something to me that made me want to crystallize that feeling within me - of moments shared one way or another with other users, and of who I had been wanting to be on it.
The second thing was me reading the eighth volume of the yuri novel series Otherside Picnic. My blog is mostly about that right now, actually, which does not reflect me accurately in general - it should be more yuri reviews and more Touhou, and it probably will be, with some more time - but may very well be a reflection of my mind for this last month. That series was a favorite of mine for various reasons already, but the added element of having an entire volume dedicated to reflections on relationships and communication felt incredible. Like something that mattered so much to me, reflected back at me in a text - in a fiction I already loved. And so a new layer added itself on top of the existing inspirations I wanted to borrow from: something about interfaces, about common channels, about peeling back layers to a vulnerable core, an unspeakable emotion.

One day, I just went back home, my head buzzing with all of these things above to a level I couldn't ignore, and I knew it was the moment to write this.
So I did. Moved. On the verge of tears. I tried to carve the right words, and by the end was in a trance that I felt like I needed to reach to tell this.
I read these words to myself afterwards, and cried, and I felt like this was it. This was somehow what I had been wanting to write.

There are a few easter eggs and more or less intended references that came to me as I was writing to add to this, to conclude. Here is a small list:

Finally, a decent amount of the feelings and words of the ending echo the transfigurative feelings of both of Worst Girls Games' games (Heaven Will Be Mine and We Know the Devil), and Otherside Picnic as mentioned above. Somehow, the altered state of mind I was in when I wrote part of the end of I want to care taps into something similar to states I found when ending these fictions. It makes me happy to realize I can access it at times. I may write about that more, one of these days.

... That was quite an amount of notes. Most of my texts should have much less; they are mostly spur-of-the-moment things written from events much closer to my simple real-life experience, though some of their inspirations can be traced back to this or that I may have read before, which may still bear mention. This one, however, felt important to write about in details, considering how much time it spent in my mind. It may feel, even to me, too cheesy, or overly optimistic, or naive with time; but right now, it matters immensely.

So thank you for reading. It is difficult and fascinating an experience, still. Being read.
Thank you for this, and for caring.

#notes on... #writing