Facebook Update: I Caught A Sad
Autor’s note: frankly I hate posting reader updates here, but given Facebook’s hostile attitude towards anarchists and left wing radicals, I’ve come to accept that any personal updates or journals I post there, have to also be published on a site I control; like this one.
The tl;dr here is that I’ve been away for two weeks because life kicked my ass. I’m back now however, and even though I’m not totally over being angry, folks shouldn’t worry about me.
Eating Garden Worms Update
Hello my friends. As I mentioned a few weeks back, it is my intention going forward to post a brief update to my readers whenever life’s slings and arrows keep me from writing regular content. Given that it’s been more than ten days since I’ve done anything besides stare at a blank page of digital paper with tears of frustration welling in my eyes – the piper is clearly due.
As such, I sat down yesterday to pour my feelings onto the page and ended up with fourteen hundred words of emo rambling that really only covered my life until the end of January. Eventually I realized that if I could write six pages about why the world appears to be picking on me but in an extremely not personal way, I could probably just go back to writing now that the period of writer’s block was clearly over. Thus, today I’m just going to post the short-short version so folks know where I’ve been, and then I’m going to try to just go back to writing like nothing ever happened.
Ready?
The last three months of my life have kind of sucked. First my livelihood was attacked by a permanent Twitter suspension, then my antifascist scholarship itself was attacked (albeit indirectly,) even while the fallout from a literal fascist coup attempt was playing out on my TV. Along the way I walked into a brewing shadow war in the online “left” between crypto-reactionaries pretending to be leftists, and liberal interventionists calling themselves antifascists; a fight best described in brief as “Jimmy Dore Stans against Alex Reid Ross Stans.” To be clear, I don’t think either of these people are leftists, and I’m beginning to question the same about many of their followers.
I followed that up by catching the flu and then being watched, tailed, and ultimately harassed by police because I know someone, who knows someone, who was at a protest action. Have you ever been spied on by cops before? Well let me tell you, the really scary thing about it is that they don’t actually come up and tell you “hi, we’re the police” – I spent quite a while thinking I’d either lost my mind, or fascist gangsters were after me; which in a way, you could say is true.
Finally, I managed to top all that off by coming back to my (now) tiny corner of the online discourse and walking right into a mentally exhausting discussion about the agency of trans teens, and whether or not Jesse Singal’s transphobic pseudo-scientific ravings were being censored by the man. Here’s a hint guys, given the fact that I managed to hear all about it despite trying to actively avoid the issue because I’m tired of refuting re-purposed anti-gay propaganda from the 90’s coming out of “leftist and libertarian” mouths, it’s safe to say Jesse is not really being silenced. All of which of course neatly ties into the whole fake leftists manipulating online discourse in our community issue because naturally, Glenn Greenwald has inserted himself and his objectively transphobic opinions into the discussion – gotta pay them bills somehow, I guess.
To really sum the situation up; I’m feeling isolated, targeted, and attacked, but simultaneously unable to confront the people responsible because in every single case except maybe Twitter, they either aren’t targeting me personally, or if they are (such as the police) it’s because they’re really after someone else. The feeling of being a spectator at your own sentencing is pretty damn surreal let me tell you, and given that I’ve struggled to rebuild my social media presence thus far, that feeling does not appear to be going away any time soon. As I’m sure you can imagine, all of these “feel bads” are themselves rather depressing; and for a couple weeks this has thwarted my numerous attempts to work on any articles about other, objectively more important subjects.
Despite this however, I do in fact seem to be capable of writing again; my birthday is coming up in a couple of days (2nd stay inside and do nothing covid birthday, yay) so it might take me a half minute to start churning out content, but I expect to be publishing again very soon. On some level, I want to apologize for the delay, but I’m also forced to concede that I’m only human and try as I might to separate the political, from the personal, being a (somewhat) marginalized person and a political dissident in a reactionary society, sometimes makes that impossible.
Thanks for your patience.
– Nina Illingworth
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog
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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”
