Well, so, here’s a thing.
Two things, actually.
I gave up that second “A” in either AA or NA a long time ago while working on CASANOVA. As part of the, uh, confessional pieces I’d decided would be a part of the book, I got to a point where not disclosing was fraudulent, and my sponsor was in the process of writing a recovery memoir so… so it seemed time. Although, as Warren Ellis pointed out, the way I write CASANOVA is as if I had once fell onto a nail and drove it into a board with my shin, so now, that’s how I think you’re supposed to drive nails in all the time…
Anyway so to talk about my work in the way I’d chosen i had to talk about that.
And the other thing about putting yourself out there…
I’m gonna frame this very vaguely to protect those involved; just… like, okay, the first time I blogged about Malala http://mattfraction.com/post/45767440517/motherjones-nbcnightlynews-malala-yousafzai someone popped up and tried to get me to take the post down, saying she doesn’t want to be a symbol and… and just trying to get me (and one would suspect anyone) to stop talking about her. flagrant disinformation.
now, this person was either real or wasn’t and was either misinformed or wasn’t, and, either way, was spreading straight-up propaganda. I’m not saying talibs scour the tumbls at night looking for mentions of everyone and/or thing they hate but someone somewhere lied about Malala to try and shut people up about her and it rolled downhill to my doorstep. Which is insidious, yeah? Best case, someone heard a wrong thing and repeated it as received wisdom — but that alleged wisdom was ultimately transmitted by people sympathetic to the men that shot that girl in the face to stop her from educating women.
It’s like the paranoiac’s butterfly effect, right?
Anyway, rather than… rather than say anything anyone could precisely verify, let me be vague, in hopes that they sympathetic to everything awful in the world can find no sweater-thread to trace to my friends. This might be ridiculous and paranoid if not downright egomaniacal on my part but… well, look, someone somewhere had to start trying to get people on social media to stop talking about Malala, right?
Okay so: it’s Arab Spring and like millions — billions — of people around the world, my breath has been taken away by it all. And I made my twitter icon green and would tweet relevant information when and where I could — trying to help anybody that might be reading my twitter account (which is, y’know, not Lady Gaga or anything but it’s not insignificant) stay safe, stay alive, stay online. It was moving, it was important, it was astonishing to see — what IF i could help the side of the great and good, just for a second, just a little bit? If nothing else, there was something exciting and dramatic about watching it all unfold. Like Tiananmen Square, but breaking in the right direction (or so it seemed, at the time).
And of course people started to mock, because that’s what people do when you put yourself out there and dare to admit there’s something you care about. God forbid you not be cynical and bitter and jaded about absolutely everything all the time because, god, why bother caring about anything. *light cigarette* *exhale* *stare off into distance*. Because it’s all just bullshit, maaaan.
Gah. Just that fucking… entitled posturing thing. Still — it’s easy to get embarrassed, yeah?
Anyway slowly icons stopped being green. Slowly locations turned back to normal. And the tweets stopped as internet was cut and the demonstrations faded.
Cut to a few months later at … at a con. And I met people who were there. And they told me that stuff — tweets and blog posts from the Western world — let them know they weren’t alone, let them know they were being heard around the world.
And then someone said “And when I found out the person writing the X-Men knew what we were doing…”
So fuck cynical hipster entitlement, basically, is what I’m saying. Because you never know when YOU’RE the butterfly, right?
It was what I was trying to say about cosplay, way back, that got misinterpreted — albeit sweetly — as being about body-shaming. My greater point was ANYBODY that wants to put themselves out there in a costume of some character I wrote — you have my loyalty and awe. You are, as the man said, a braver man than I, Gunga Din.
So I put myself out there because you never know. Hey, I am a drunk and an addict in recovery. Flap flap flap. Hey, I’ve fought depression my whole life. Flap flap flap. If I can manage to not-kill myself then surely YOU can too. Because goddammit you never know.
Hey, you, reading this tonight — wondering and waiting for that sign not to fucking kill yourself. This is that sign.
Flap flap flap.
