Writing on politics a little while I'm lower inhib late at night

I think a big thing that seperated me from my generation politically (specifically my demographic of teenage boys) was my grandma at first. My grandma is a very liberal woman, always has been. I can't blame her. While my beliefs have changed since then and I view her differently, I still admire her tenacity, at least when she was younger.

She had a hard life, growing up in poverty with a neglectful at best mother and sisters and a horrifically abusive father and brothers. She was forced out of school at fourteen to work in a shoe factory and married young to a man who forced her to have a child. She eventually got out by some miracle and married my current granddad. He's not a saint either, and was also quite horrible to her and her kids at times, but it was an improvement (mostly because he worked longer, focused on his work even at home, and made a lot more). She's been an ardent believer in women's rights her entire life, and given her lived experience, yeah, anyone can see this and say something is deeply wrong with the society that let this happen. It sort of ends there though. 

I kind of began to gain consciousness around the time Trump started to dominate the news cycle. For years, this guy ruled my perception of politics. He was the body all other politics, past, present and hypothetical future orbited around. I don't even live in America, but Trump really did dominate global politics and the anglosphere in particular so strongly that even as a kid outside of America I heard so much about him.

For a long time I remained apolitical with vague "yeah Trump and Putin and Kim Jong Un all suck" if prodded. Obviously. I was just barely double digits. It'd be a while before anything really happened. I had an extremely brief "anti-sjw" phase with Isaac Butterfield when I was in grade five (so ten or eleven years old) but moved on pretty quick and forgot about it.

I always loved science (as much as a child can) and grew up as a dinosaur kid till I was maybe 8 or 9. This sort of informed my very underdeveloped dislike of the former three because they "censored truth" or whatever vague belief I held. It doesn't matter much. Ironically this is more important because I discovered ARK survival evolved in my first year of high school (yr7 where I am). Played it with my friends, obsessed with it over lockdown. In lockdown I got properly into social media beyond YouTube, Instagram, discord, mostly just stuff close friends had. Tiktok, Reddit, twitter all entered my life.

A big moment for me, funnily, was this absolute dumbass on r/ark losing his SHIT over seeing a dinosaur drawn with various pride flag colours on it. At this time I supported the community but wasn't really aware of anything beyond LGBT but still found it kinda funny watching someone get so riled up over it. This sort of started me out into online politics oddly enough.

I've always loved the movie Scott Pilgrim vs the world, I honestly don't even remember when I first saw it or how but I've seen it dozens of times now. I used to watch random movies I saw on YouTube for free back in like 2016 by just looking up playlists uploaded by guys in southeast Asia with shitty English subtitles but I doubt I saw it there for some reason.

Anyway, one day I was getting curious about reading the comics finally and was looking up about the franchise obsessively everywhere I could. Looked it up on youtube and the top result autofilled Scott Pilgrim vs the world with 'ruined a whole generation of women'. Obviously I was really confused and so clicked it, clicked the first most highly viewed video and heard that song.

I was really confused honestly, but at 14 and just getting into different music beyond the first layer of radio music (i.e. bands that were popular like 10-40 years back) I was taken aback. I read that comment section for nearly two hours instead of doing whatever online assignment I was meant to do.

I started to look up about the song, who wrote it, why, what people thought of it, etc. I saw people on Reddit and tiktok calling it an "incel" song but had no clue what that meant. Next rabbit hole. I had no idea what I was looking at until I saw something about race mixing. It was an article about Elliot Rodger. I felt my stomach churning reading it. A little fact about me is that I am kind of mixed race. It depends on how much you consider mixed (1/4 Chinese), but I'm mixed enough that apparently it's noticeable to this day (the last time it's been mentioned was a coworker saying he's confused why I have a very white name but look Asian apparently).

The only other mixed people I knew at this point were my mother, siblings, and cousins at this point. All family. I knew vaguely of another mixed Chinese family in town but only their surname, didn't even know what they looked like. Seeing this detailed an article about a mixed race (and wasian too!) person really, really affected me. Mind you I was alone in my room on my laptop looking at this. To this day I've never said this out loud or written it till now.

The only other mixed race person I'd seen outside of my family was hated. He was a killer, a psychotic, hate filled person who died because of his obsession with his own identity. Worst of all, the comparison was beyond race. I was growing up and some of my classmates had very developed bodies at this point. My best friend who I was pretty close with at this point already had his voice drop over the holidays, which hurt me more than I ever said. I was still a tiny, skinny, wiry kid, barely 5'2.

I had no idea what to do with myself. Id never really considered a lot of the things I'd been introduced to on a random afternoon. I went to bed wondering if I'd ever be loved by anyone really, if I was doomed to hurt myself or others based on the fact I was a mixed race male. I began to really, really despise myself for my own identity. I began to tell myself I didn't count. I wasn't mixed, and all my features would become white after I finished puberty. That's what I kept telling myself for a while.

I became identity obsessed. Theories on race and gender and sexuality online totally consumed my life whilst I tried to work out these problems. After months of bouncing around progressive circles and sort of feeling better about myself, I became a little fixated on trans issues for a while. It's pretty embarassing but I was quite militantly browsing tgcj at the time. I eventually found my footing and moved on. Id successfully maintained my friendships, and came out happy and healthier than ever. I've always struggled mentally, ever since I was only 9 I'd run away from classes to hide, I'd cry almost every day, had a therapist on and off.

After this, Trump and his ilk leaked back into my life gradually through politics. Of course, as an important figure, he came back up to the top eventually. I began to fixate a lot on him and historical analogies about him and various 20th century figures. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc. This lead to me thinking I was really getting into intelligent stuff by learning about the definitions of fascism that people like Umberto Eco offered. Frankly, today I think these definitions are a bit silly and focus on the secondary aspects of fascism rather than its actual character, but nonetheless. It's still interesting, and ur-fascism is probably the first actual political essay I read. It's a short one yeah, but I was doing more than reading more than posts and watching videos now, is what I told myself.

I guess I gradually started to notice rhetorical similarities between social democrats and fascists online, and that was the beginning of the end. In short, I found the leftcommunists through leftypol users complaining about them (which I found through rdrama.net which I found alongside soyjak party which I found after seeing boards on 4chan raided by them yada yada yada).

I think only now, after regrowing my sympathy for liberal/typical leftists causes such as the no kings thing (which I guess while blatantly classical bourgeois is genuinely good for wide scale prole organisation in future) has made me feel I'm becoming more mature, politically. Which is awesome and all but I should probably go back to therapy and finish moving on from the friendships that I broke after I got way too invested i last year.

Idk, it's way past midnight now so it's probably incoherent, but I'm gonna do my best to not press the delete button sometime in the future. Writing is great for clarification of the past, feels great to be honest