fleeting moments of luminosity and love
in a world churning with fragility and rage

resentment is an unreality machine
a repetition-compulsion that reproduces the agony of the past
forevermore in the present

be free
and set those free around you
for as long as you can

x

c.w. this book is about trauma — unrelenting, all pervasive trauma — and the ways we cope with it through withdrawal, blame, resignation, domination, and addiction, but also gentleness, pity, acceptance, compassion, and love.

if any of you feel like a character from stoner, please see a therapist or community organiser. recurring feelings of detachment, dissociation, and derealisation are not permanent nor essential to your being, nor are violent outbursts or hopeless withdrawals. these feelings and behaviours are a result of persistent neglect and/or trauma, something that stoner portrays well (but normalises by depicting few alternatives to such conditions). alienation is a social condition and it can be undone through the cultivation of new social relations. it's not you that's at fault, even if that fault is all you feel is there.

if there's anything i've learnt from my own struggles it's that there is a beyond indifference, shame, and resentment, but it requires persistence and love, from yourself and from those around you. this is hard because trauma transforms you into your traumatiser. you reproduce their terror on yourself and on others. for example, if you've been brought up by critical or controlling caretakers, you won't have learnt other ways of influencing others, except through critique and control, so despite your best efforts to connect with the other you may end up bitter and alone through the same mistakes over and again. such experiences can become a source of self-hatred and hopelessness, reinforcing the cycle of abuse.

the way i've slowly undone this is by seeing that a lot of the actions of others who have hurt me, as well as my own actions that have hurt others, were done out of pain or ignorance. this doesn't excuse our actions, but it changes my relation to them from one of rage to compassion. instead of ruminating in resentment or guilt, i try to understand what needs and fears drove us towards our mutual suffering — and if i have the energy i reach out, even if it doesn't feel fair for me to be the one to make things right.

in stoner, edith and lomax are grotesque characters, but they're also fragile, sad, and confused, lashing out because they don't know any better (or, conversely, because they think they know better than the other knows themselves). there's a deep pain in them, a vulnerability they can't stand, so they isolate from the world. they live in the unreality of noncontact, of presumptions and projections that grant them control and bitter gratification, even as it distances them from their lived reality with others.

there are ways of attaining control and gratification that aren't dominating or indifferent, though. you can generate new forms of autonomy through care and vulnerability, rather than violence and fragility. it's scary and messy and uncomfortable, but it's pain that heals rather than numbs.

don't become a stone(r), baka~