Jenna has been my anchor. She approaches the world with hope despite how impossibly confusing it is. I have never been sure of my place in the world, or what it’s like to feel like I have a purpose, before seeing her model these things in front of me. Watching her meet a tipping point has ultimately caused me to have a paradigm shift.

Since early in our relationship, Jenna and I have been absolutely open about our struggles. Having access to viewing things in my life through her lens has been invaluable and has pulled me through several of the most difficult life situations I’ve been in. When I had to manage a divorce from my wholly abusive ex entirely on my own, she was there with encouragement and support. The stumbling blocks that felt like the end of everything could be easily put into perspective with her help. The space for healing and growth that she has given me has been vital to my finding myself in a place where I can breathe today.

Jenna is not special. She is special to me, of course, because of our relationship. But the things that make us capable of forming the bond we’ve formed are not exclusive to either of us. She is not a magical creature created specifically to fit with me. She is a person who has accepted that she must survive, and to do so requires showing care, kindness, and grace. She also understands that - as a participant in our decomposing society - she must do what she can within her capacity to make sure those around her survive.

Shared survival is not a new concept, but the ways in which we view survival must evolve as the society around us evolves and - inevitably - reaches decomposition. The idea of shared survival being a macro-level task can no longer be humored as we are beyond the point under capitalism where we can manage society at that scale. We must refocus our efforts more locally. It is necessary that we build local communities that not only subvert the decomposing of society, or assist in it, but also have at their core the safety and survival of their most immediate members as a first priority. A focus on community at a personal level is the only method by which a person may survive in capitalism.

The dynamics of shared survival within a loose community are not new to me. My parents, despite the flaws in their methodologies during my upbringings, modelled this radical leftist concept to me even while they were deep in pre-New Millennium Conservative Christian subcultures. The dialectical view of this is that while they had been nurtured to be susceptible to those types of subcultures, their core human desire was nevertheless to have their people, and to take care of them. But the understanding of these dynamics was always abstract. I spent many years building communities online, and focusing on how to make them amazing. I wallowed in failure as I watched them eventually reach the point of decomposition, and then died. But I realize now that this is not a failure. Seeing a subculture through from birth to growth to decomposition is a privilege, and I realize that all communities decompose.

Decomposition, in the context of my writing, is the concept of a societal object reaching a natural point at which the lines between it and another neighbouring societal object reach a point of dissolution. In our current moment in society, everybody listens to Jazz, but very few people still Listen To Jazz. The subculture of jazz has decomposed. Decomposition is a positive. It is very easy in our current culture to see death as an absolute negative, but throughout all time some subcultures have understood the necessity of birth, growth, and death to be beautiful and necessary. I feel that this well-known lifecycle has been well reterritorialized by capitalism, and so our view of death is that it is an inevitability rather than a necessity. Death is a moment, and has a small place of note in the lifecycle of accelerationism, but the true lifecycle is birth, growth, and decomposition. When an apple falls from a tree and is left to rot unpicked, the point at which it has died is difficult to impossible to state. The same is not true of decomposition. We know the point at which it begins: the moment it loses access to the resources and support necessary to keep it alive and growing. From that moment on, it decomposes. At what point during that process does death begin? When does it end? Death is a concept with much societal focus, and very little benefit. I believe this is intentional, as capitalism has been able to reterritorialize the societal lifecycle and death itself to its own means as a tool of fear.

I died. I have died many times, as most people have. Death is simply the process of burying parts of you. An apple dies when it is no longer connected to its tree. At that point, growth is no longer possible, and it dies. At the same time, decomposition begins. When I died, the decomposition began. At the beginning of my period of psychosis, I noticed within myself a strong desire to write. I’ve never considered myself a writer, and have rarely considered what I have to say or write to be of any real note, but the desire was there nonetheless. I believe that the focus on that desire correlating with the early stages of psychosis was mechanical. Some part of me knew that I had thoughts in my head that I needed to get out, and some other part of me knew that I would need that skill very soon. When I died, the parts of me that began decomposing would fertilize the soil from which these thoughts were born. I am proud of the knowledge of my ability to allow that lifecycle within me.

We must not choose to stop believing in magic simply because we grow. Even if the social object of magic has reached deep decomposition, the value of it is well known. Allowing ourselves to believe in the unreal*, to engage with faith, and to imagine and dream has been shown to encourage and even accelerate growth. While the societal subsystem of magic will always exist, it has died and we must tend to its decomposition. This is our task. We must tend to the corpse of the societal subsystem of magic and use the resources naturally present during decomposition to enrich another area of life that needs accelerated growth. We play, we imagine, we dream, all so that we can drive our natural instinct to grow and learn.

I died. My death came at the end of many things. In a truly astonishing show of cosmic humour, I saw many threads of my life all end at once. And to add to this, I was experiencing a particularly harrowing alienation. My anchor slipped. I am particularly fond of the metaphor of the anchor. I feel that it is important to allow humans to place special value on particularly important people in their lives. This can be a very slippery slope, which is why largely we have chosen to take a hard line and say that finding safety, security, comfort, and stability in others is toxic. This is often true, but like all things that have yet to be deterritorialized there is missing nuance. I feel that “anchor” is sufficient here because it describes the role of an object to which we make a strong connection that we can rely on to keep us moored, but the anchor is passive. There are no active processes by which the anchor holds. The anchor’s nature is to grasp. And not to grasp intentionally, but to - by passive, natural design - have the environment cling to it. There are so many essential understandings necessary to design an anchor. Its shape must passively conform to the immense variability of the floor of the lake. It exists as an object with a firm grasp on its environment, and that is the root of the value we derive from it. In those moments, the anchor exists, but the ship is the active participant. Even the rope - the bond we build with our anchor person - is passive in the moments that it most matters. There is no way to reinforce the rope once the waves get rough.

Co-dependency is difficult. As humans we rely on others, and untangling the ways in which you are independent, dependent, or co-dependent on another person is daunting and scary. The taboo surrounding co-dependency makes it sneaky. It lives in the shadows and while we allow it to do so, it affects us in ways we have difficulty seeing. I have been co-dependent on Jenna, and likely will again in the future. I am beyond accepting guilt for this. While I regret it, I understand the forces at play that caused me to believe that my value could be derived from someone who thought I was special. It also cheapened the unique light under which she sees me. I am not special because she needs me. I am special because I happen to share similar goals and passions, and I share them in a way that lets us engage with them together. Understanding this is the most important tool in burying the response entirely.

A very large piece of the philosophy I am building is burying the things that should be dead. I believe that our role as participants is to bury the decomposing corpses so that we can tend the growth of the things that are important to our survival. Burying the taboos surrounding the various traumatic responses will allow us to deterritorialize them, bring them to a point of dissolution, and make their decomposing corpses available to us to build new trauma responses, and to attempt to then bury the root causes of trauma wherever possible. And that is what I am doing with this document. Part post-mortem, part vain self-reflection, but entirely allowing the decomposing corpses of the parts of my past that no longer have talons in me to be buried, allowing new growth.

*things that are not objectively real should not be considered less valuable to society