“That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”

Trigger and Content Warning: racism, childhood trauma, childhood physical and sexual abuse. Because unlike other people, I actually care about survivors and put warnings on my shit. Anyway, here's Wonderwall.

I get a lot of flack for my distrust. I get a lot of flack for my hypervigilance. I get a lot of flack for my immovable morals, for my justified anger, for my unwillingness to compromise, for my over self-reliance, for.... basically just existing.

It would be easier to be less self-reliant (which is, uu huu huu, a ~trama response~, don't you know?) had I not spent an entire lifetime of being shown I cannot rely on others for literally anything. There is something to being let down over and over and over and being made to fend for oneself that just makes you overly self-reliant. Is it 'overly,' even, or merely an entirely appropriate response to being let down one's entire life?

I've been thinking a lot about the conversations surrounding "representation matters"--most of which have been hijacked by the people whom this doesn't even effect, and their targeted fixated obsessions with certain things, as if them simply liking a marginalized-depicted character is shorthand for social justice (which I just find fucking creepy and weird, I am sorry, not sorry). I've been thinking about the times before they discovered they could make money off of us, too, and how we all had to search for ourselves in other places. How many years did so many of us spend seeing ourselves in places where we knew we actually weren't in hopes of finding pieces of ourselves? We know that ~certain~ experiences are seen as universal (I'll let you do the math on that), when we know that they're not. Or, maybe, in some cases, they are.

I know there is always a good deal amount of projecting going on at any given point in time.

In fact, a great deal of projecting, if we are being honest.

When I was a child, the characters I identified with were mostly feral children, because I was, unfortunately,  a feral child. Figures like The Artful Dodger,  Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Pete from Pete's Dragon, Gavroche,--- you get the idea. Mostly boys, because there were so very few female characters in books, and none that were feral in the way that I was. This has nothing to do with me having any internalized misogyny, and absolutely everything to do with the way that books were written until like yesterday, so if you think you're coming in for ~the clutch~ on that one, I advise you that you can just shut the fuck up. WE ALL KNOW that GIRLS cannot be feral (because you KNOW WHAT HAPPENS when GIRLS are feral).

I read very early on. This was because I could not sleep. I had to spend most of my early life dealing with break ins, and my biofather trying to break in and kill us. Every night I worried about break ins, and every day I had to deal with being stalked by this person. So, I guess my hypervigilance is "annoying" or something to "prank"--or maybe you are just an asshole, who knows! By the time I was in first and second grade, I had read all of the classics. ("The Classics"). I read and re-read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the most. I saw myself in Huck Finn the most.

Tom Sawyer is an asshole. This is prevalent in his title novel, but you really, truly do not get a sense of this until The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when human lives are at stake and he treats everything like a droll game. What may have been `charming` in his titled novel now comes back full circle to see it for what it really is: him being an asshole. Of course,  all of the boys really want to be Huck Finn. Huckleberry Finn is a societal outcast because of circumstances beyond his control. Huckleberry Finn was badly and under-raised and therefore only knows how to be himself. Tom Sawyer wishes that he were Huck Finn. But Huck Finn is Huck Finn not because he is trying to be Huck Finn. He IS Huckleberry because he is shaped by his organic and authentic life experiences and he's incapable of being anything that he's not. Unlike Tom Sawyer, he does not get to retreat to the safety of his home and food stability and proximity to status when the adventure is over.

I think this is largely my problem with the way people (and corporations) have latched onto "representation matters" because they do not fully comprehend what it actually means, and have no way of understanding the depth in which its impact has. It's something they can put down, put away, and be done with when, well, they're done with it. You being obsessed with Encanto or Tiana being your favourite Disney Princess doesn't actually have any larger impact on the people whom these stories are supposed to impact, but you've made it a point to take up space in this conversation (which, thanks to it now almost exclusively becoming about marketing, is almost entirely superficial.) Why be quiet and let people process what they need to when you can tell it on the mountain that you are One Of The Good Ones, I guess. The weird, consumeristic shorthand for social justice.(I also don't understand why, as you, an adult, need to  tell me that Tiana or Moana--who are lovely, make no mistake-- being your favourite princesses makes you One Of The Good Ones or Not Racist, yet, here we are. People want nonstop accolades for just the most inane shit.) Having generational trauma repackaged and sold back to me is not representation. It's not the representation that I want, at least. I especially do not appreciate that way that our intergeneration trauma is now opened up to "~analysis~" and "~discussion~" by people who have no business talking about it--and then telling us we are wrong. (Just as a side note, I sure as shit to not miss Tumblr for this very reason.)

Speaking of Tom Sawyer and intergenerational trauma and representation, let's also talk about that for a second. During the 1990's, there was a plethora of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn-related media. I am not sure why the 90's were ripe with a Tom Sawyer cultural revival, but yet, here the fuck we were. Amongst Lilith Fair, a blossoming baby Internet, The Spice Girls, and Good Nickelodeon, the cultural landscape decided that we needed  Tom Sawyer. I mean, sure, why not. The 80's had a weird obsession with shit that looked like Little House on the Racist Ass Prairie and faeries and shit, so why not! There was  Tom and Huck (1995), The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993), the kinda weird (if I remember correctly)  Back to Hannibal: The Return of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fanfic movie from 2000, all three of which were from Disney. There were a few more animated movies that came out around 2000,  some anime and another animated movie thrown in there, too.  Illustrated Classics had a revival (both the abridged novels and  comic book adaptations), which also meant new editions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  Tom Sawyer, for perhaps the first time since its initial publication, was living his best {self-obsessed} life.

Of course, for me, this cultural revival was very different. By the time the Disney film came out, I had already read the books, so I was very familiar with these stories. I had an edition of  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that had been printed in the 1960s.  Even though I was familiar with both the Tom and Huck respective novels, nothing really prepared me for the racism that I would experience. Most of my childhood, my classmates taunted me with question as to whether or not my biofather was "Injun Joe." "Is your mother a MAID?" "Is your dad OJ SIMPSON? Is your dad INJUN JOE?" You know, totally casual, normal kid stuff. uwu.

All of my father's badness was attributed his Indianness. The Indian blood as the source of his evil, malevolent for the sake of malevolence. Of COURSE your father is a worthless child rapist, wife beating thief and a drunk, "he's a drunk Indian, that's just how they are."

My biological father was an amalgamation of Injun Joe (in the mind of my classmates) and Pap Finn (in the mind of myself), Pap Finn being the drunken, abusive terror of a 'father' of Huck Finn. My father, much like Pap Finn, was the town's vagrant drunkard (famously known as 'Mister Forty,' because he bought alcohol for teenagers), and I, much like Huck Finn, was "the juvenile pariah" because of my father's badness, badness attributed to his Indianness. Some people are born into badness, and others have badness thrust upon them, nyuk nyuk.

So, you have I, as a very isolated, abandoned, ostracized child (and, mind you, much of this horror already happened to me by the time I was six years old) looking to find themselves in fictional characters--in order to be anyone else, anywhere else. And, you know, the world of Oliver Twist doesn't appeal to me that much because the Brits were keen on executing children, Gavroche DIES, and in general, both are just more seedy and perilous than the pirate adventures of Jackson Island. Huck Finn out-witting his foes and living his best carefree life, free from the burdens of societal norms or the burdens of the opinions of others on things he cannot help just hits different. To flea from an abusive father and an oppressive and unjust society, and float freely down a mighty river on my raft of immunity and opportunity. To do just what I like because I suit me. Huck fakes his own death  to escape and run away from a "civilized" society he sees as immoral and uncivilized, and I cannot tell you how many times as a small child that legitimately crossed my mind. Huck was a boy with no future, as I, as a child of merely six years old, was also deemed a child with no future.

Of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention that the core of the Huck Finn story, beyond the thrilling spirit of adventure and the impetuous  leaps into the unknown, the call of the River, etc. etc. etc., without talking about the role that slavery plays in the novel. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, of course, the classic Campbellian Hero's Journey, but, unfortunately, the journey of our hero, Huck Finn, comes with the spiritual and moral awakening of recognizing Jim as a human being.  Well, that puts a damper on things, now doesn't it! Especially since the last chapters of the Huck Finn novel are so dreadful and undo much of the goodness the first part of the novel did. I also for some reason always thought that Jim was closer in age to both Tom and Huck, not realizing that he was an adult with an entire family and everything.

You also have to remember that I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the abridged and Illustrated Classics version, which largely glossed over the novel's worst aspects (including the language). I glossed over much of the novel because I was only interested in the adventure and the stuff with the Duke and Dauphin I neither understood and it bored me to tears. I realize upon rereads that I liked the idea of Huck Finn, the essence of Huck Finn, more than I liked the novel itself.

I don't feel qualified to talk about the aspects of slavery in the novel, but there are way smarter people than me that you can read from. I do want to make it clear that I am glad that this novel is no longer taught to children.

It doesn't matter than I just turned 35 a couple of weeks ago, in my mind, I am still that child that saw themselves as Huckleberry Finn. I am still the child societal outcast. There is a part of me that is frozen in the microfilm of the Super 8 reel of time that is the age in which I was first traumatized. My only trajectory and touchstones are trauma. My earliest memories are trauma. They say for a lot of trauma survivors, they are partially stuck at the age they were traumatized, and, well, that was my whole life! That was, until very recently, my only life. My hyper-vigilance. My distrust. My anger. 

Like Huck Finn, I feel different from others. Not in a narcissistic way where I think I am more special than everyone else, nor in a Not Like Other Girls way. We aren't trying to be different, we are just different from other folks, because we have experiences that separate us, maybe forever, from our peers. People legitimately cannot understand you, because you have lived through the unthinkable. Sometimes because they don't want to, but most times because they can't. They have nothing to genuinely lengthen experiences to, and that's fine, everyone is different. But there's always going to be a pang in my heart because of it. We also, unlike narcissists and Not Like Other Girls, don't want to be different. To be different, truly different, is to be othered. Being othered is not special. Being othered is not uniqueness, it is not an actual embrace of your idiosyncrasies. Instead of some unattainable specialness, you just have an invisible wall between you and everyone around you.

Like the whole thing with Biden-Harris in 2020. You could not communicate with people who were not effected by their policies during their lives. They were absolutely incapable of understanding. There was nothing that you could say to these people that would bridge the understanding. They met you with a "now listen," like you were a child and you didn't understand. No, YOU listen. YOU'RE the one who doesn't understand. I could try to convey the pain and humiliation and the anxiety around the experience, and was met with a high handed lecture about a "greater good" that has never once included me or people like me. Hey now, hey now, don't dream, it's over, there's a wall between us. And it hurts.

So, to circle back to #representationmatters. How long, for so many decades, did marginalized and under-represented and isolated people have to see themselves in places that they had to squint and shoehorn themselves into? Some of us identify as Huckleberry Finn. Others see ourselves as monsters. I am so grateful and so happy that people are finally seeing themselves on screen for the first time in their entire lives, but I wish that it weren't immediately attached to some new form of marketing. I wish that it didn't feel like they just newly discovered they could make money off of us, too. I wish that people who don't really, truly, fully understand what #representationmatters means allow the people whom it actually effects to have the SPACE to breathe and to process something that is supposed to be meant for them. And someone of us have complicated relationships with the things we identify with and love, and we should also be given the space to do that.

Man, I am just sick of everybody.

Ironically enough (or perhaps fittingly enough), Huck decides at the end of the novel that he's done with the fake morals of society, and that he shall flee west to Indian Territory, of all places.