when I was a very very young, through absolutely no fault of my own (really before anything could have been considered my fault), tossed into a bunch of bullshit systems. everybody else had control of my life, and they used it with no regard to my well being.

some of those systems were out to punish me when they were supposed to be educating me, and ended up holding me back in the places I excelled-I was once expelled for writing poetry as part of a writing assignment I'd misunderstood and gone WAY above and beyond on. after this happened twice, I didn't write any poetry again for twenty years, and I'm pretty fucking good at it. I was told not to read novels in class because it made the other students insecure. I was told I had to go out at recess, even though I'd have much rather enjoyed a book in peace and avoid the possibility of fights with other kids. it wasn't malevolent, at least not at first. they couldn't have hated me from moment one (though it definitely got to that point because I was a pain in the ass who insisted things make sense), it was just... the way the system was designed. and they couldn't bring themselves to deviate, even when it went exactly against the stated goals of that system.

a system designed, supposedly, to give me a stable home, was being used to destroy any sense of home space or stability I had in ways that should be a crime against humanity when done against people in that developmental phase. I was treated like a criminal and ferried arbitrarily from place to place, by state thugs when I objected. I'd come home from school to find home was different and all the pets had died, kept from leaving the state, banned, week to week, from totally arbitrary activities (video games? reading? the park?) by literal court orders-not because I was 'criminal' or 'bad', but because some delusional asshole who had never met me decided it was 'for [my] own good'. some of them were corrupt as fuck, some of them meant well, but all of them hurt me. they didn't know how to do anything else, and no matter how loud I screamed or how hard I kicked or clawed at the doors of the police car or bit the thugs who dragged me away from home twice or more a week, I didn't seem to have a voice in my own life. that shit fucked me up for a long time. I had to do a lot of crimes to heal from that. an immoderate amount of violence and destruction too.

I also had some pretty early experiences with monsters. the bad kinds. the kinds that we think of as the boogeyman around here. pedophiles, CIA fuckers, the military industrial complex. and they always had reasons for the shit they did. no matter how horrible the shit they did, they did it for reasons. real material reasons. sometimes delusional, sometimes bullshit, but there was always a reason, always a cause to the effect, and a reason they believed it, if you dug deep enough. and I figured, if you can change the reason, fix the cause, pull the problem out by the root, maybe you don't have any more monsters in the first place?

I saw class disparity between the sides of my family. saw how some people had SO MUCH and others had nothing, and I couldn't find anything to justify it. there was no reason. they both worked s hard, they both cared about others the same amount. being a more or less morally upstanding person didn't seem to make a difference. but one side were kept from having nice things and cool toys and stable well kept homes, and the other had servants, and WTF? and there were armed thugs to enforce these distinctions? so I asked myself, "why thugs?", and came to the conclusion that if we all stopped being so stratified and unfair, there wouldn't be any point in thugs.

and then I actually talked with people who had been suffering from addiction, who I'd been told were the cause of everything bad. and every single one of them had some deep pain they were trying to soothe with drugs, some old wound they couldn't find a way to heal. often that this shit society wouldn't let them heal.

I saw people with money get away with things nobody should ever be able to do. because it was in line with the toxic culture. because it was in line with the 'social order'. im not even talking about bribes, they werejust 'the right sort', so they got off. I realized laws aren't shit. they don't protect shit. they don't fix shit. they don't stop shit. they have only ever been a tool of oppression, a way to make the weak oppress themselves.

I was homeless and saw the difference between how I was treated when it was known I was connected to the moneyed side of my family. the difference in what I could get away with when I dressed certain ways vs others, and what I could do as opposed to darker skinned comrades. it was like fucking magic, and it was absolutely disgusting.

and of course all manner of philosophy and theory and lived queernesses and meditations on identity and self and experiences in activism, some revelations while being actively suicidal that the more you give, the less possible it is to exploit you, and some other stuff at other times about how anyone in a cage is everyone in a cage, but I was mostly there before all that.

so I can't respect authority, and I can't respect toxic systems, and I know laws and authority cause more problems (most of them) than they fix (none of them), and obviously capitalism is evil. and I can't stop thinking/seeing in terms of systems. you can't legislate away human error, you can't create a system that makes bad DM's or problem players not a thing, and trying just ruins the game for the rest of us. it's all made of people, and if you want to change it, you need to change people.

I spent time making myself into who I wanted to be, and deciding where I wanted to go and who i wanted to be and what I would need if I wanted to do that, and I realized I would need a better world, or at last to be someone in the process of making a better world.

I saw in various lefty spaces and histories (some of them ML, credit where due), how giving people agency and purpose made them so much more. I felt like that was a thing that the world should optimize for. and I saw how horrible it was when that was crushed out of people, reduced to bland delusional lib survival.

so I'm an anarchist, because everything else leads eventually to something unpleasant and shitty. because any unfairness or coercion requires whole ecosystems of unfairness and coercion, like maintaining one lie requires telling other lies. its a cancer, and there's no room for that in any kind of world I want to live in. you can't half-ass doing the right thing, and you can't count on ridgid inhuman systems to act humanely without human influence and agency.

and also black and red is just really aesthetically nice and something I naturally gravitate towards anyway, and it works with my complexion.

though recently, while still believing all of this, I've become much more skeptical about the possibility of improving people at scale. i still don't think any other way can work long term, that ends to not exist independently from the means used to achieve them, and that everything we do shapes us. im just less optimistic about people and whether THIS will work these days. its still the most rewarding thing to attempt, until we can openly murder nazis.