She has a voice that cradles my brain and crushes my heart.
I’ve always been drawn to people with peculiar or excellent voices. Growing up, the radio was my constant companion. I listened to it in the car, driving all over the backwoods with my dad. At night, I’d turn the dial to 95.7 (the “dad rock” station) and listen to Ozzy talk about satan and war. Times changed, and I abandoned my beloved dials and hosts for podcasts. Narrations on youtube. I preferred it actually-content could be more catered to what I wanted. Commercials were non-existent with a decent ad-blocker. But moreso, I had a much, much wider array of talented people to listen to.
Finding her was totally happenstance. Looking back, I think it might have been the universe doing that funky thing it seems to do in my life. Total coincidences that seemingly push me towards life altering events. I don’t know, and I’m still not brave enough to question it. But find TheLittleFears I did.
Her stories, while sometimes variations on things I’d heard, weren’t like anything else. From Sudden Onset to One In The Oven, each video unsettled me to the point of literal goosebumps. I eagerly awaited every single entry-and noticed a common theme.
A lot of the works preyed on common themes. Loss of identity and personal autonomy. Losing ourselves, or questioning who we are in the first place. It wasn’t a detail I missed, but I couldn’t place why it stuck out so much to me. So I tucked it away in the back of my head. I didn’t question it, especially when it was so much easier to just totally ignore it.
Then one day the uploads stopped. First a month, then three. I’d go back and relisten to the older works, cautiously eyeing that video library. After a year, I finally hit unsubscribe. I figured, if she uploaded something new, I’d find out. Somehow. Some way. The universe works it’s magick, just as it had the rest of my life. I didn’t think about TheLittleFears for a long time after that.
But those questions.
Those very uncomfortable questions.
They wormed their way to the front of my head every so often. They would course through my brain in the dark of night, chittering in a chorus that kept me awake into the morning. Their voices didn’t lessen either. I just got better at ignoring them. At least, I did. For a while.
Today, I’d like to talk about how media affects us and shapes realizations we find about ourselves. Let’s begin.
A Mind Is…
Every time a new Mortal Kombat or Doom gets a trailer, a soccer mom in middle america simultaneously shits her pants and screams.
What an absolutely amazing reaction. Seriously. Twenty-four hour news cycles with graphic footage being played on every available screen globally, and some still give such a visceral response. In my wettest and wildest dreams I couldn’t conjure something that elicited such an emotional investment. But if we put aside our laughs and look critically at why this response occurs in the first place, we find some commonalities.
Media is everything and anything. It can be something that begets introspection, scorn, or even laughter. Yet how we respond to it is a culmination of both what we have within our lives and what we don’t. The things we gloam to the most are often such because of a perceived deficiency somewhere in our existence. This year, people flocked to Animal Crossing: New Horizons in the wake of COVID for a literal island of calm. There’s plenty of people that look up to Superman because they wish for someone like him-or to be him.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my pseudonym/nickname came from a character I have admired my entire life. Plus, it’s what my dad called me. The things we enjoy and consume shape us either overtly or subtly. We still walk away changed regardless, even if they’re terrible.
That soccer mom in middle america? The one with the smelly pants? She’s screaming because Doom and Mortal Kombat so shake the frame of her perception that she’s terrified. She’s afraid of the hows and whys of what could prompt creation of such media. She’s even more terrified of understanding though. Because if she did, it might awaken something in her she’s afraid to accept.
None of us, nor our response to the media we consume, are any different.
…A Terrible Thing To Waste
I want you to take a breath, and think of your favorite movie. Your favorite song. Favorite book, favorite fictional character. Take your time. This web page isn’t going anywhere, unless my host decides to boot me suddenly.
There’s likely all the surface reasons. “It/they are super cool”, “I like the design,” are both totally valid reasons to enjoy anything. But if we push past that and think critically about why our media consumption speaks to us, it’s often because we empathize with it in such a way that seems difficult to describe. Often, it can take years to find the words, hours of thinking and talking with other people. For all the decrying of fandoms I do on twitter, they do provide a space (often through the anonymity of the internet) to openly express our empathy for the arts.
It’s a shame that such freedoms are often suffocated into non-existence elsewhere. What empathy for the arts and media actually is, in practice, is empathy for the human experience.
The reason I attached myself to Samurai Jack at such a young age was all the obvious reasons. He was strong, he was “cool”, he was smart. Jack had a morality that I agreed with-doing the right thing, even when it seemed hopeless. As an adult, watching the trailer for the final season also struck a nerve. This wasn’t the hero I’d grown up with-but then again, I wasn’t the same young boy either. I felt old, I felt broken by depression. Seeing Jack onscreen dealing with the same thing hit me very, very hard.
Because I’d been there. I’d been lost. I’d felt displaced by this world, this culture and my own flesh.
It made seeing him triumph over himself all the more powerful.
It gave me the thought that, even for a second, I could do the same with my own demons. I’m still fighting-but I haven’t given up yet. I won’t, either.
If media can evoke these kinds of moments, these emotions in us, it likewise can lead to awakenings we otherwise wouldn’t or may not have. Maybe we’re not strong enough. Maybe we’re not brave enough to talk about it. But maybe what we need is someone or something to give us the “okay” to proceed.
“I’m Paralyzed, I’m Burning Up”
I started this article with the intention of answering the question of queer awakenings through media. I asked that very thing on twitter, and got some excellent responses. You can read that thread here.
You’ll also notice that I didn’t give an answer to that question.
There’s a reason for that.
Realizing I’m queer has been a lifelong process. It wasn’t any one piece of media that caused it. Nor was it any one life-altering moment. It wasn’t trying to define my masculinity on my own, or long talks with a friend about gender identity. It was a slurry of all these things, tossed in a blender and set on high. Each seamlessly bleeding into the next until it was poured in a very tall glass of Very Uncomfortable Questions That Need Answered.
But when I think back over what exactly set that off, what started to fill that glass?
It was figuring out what happened to TheLittleFears.
It’s rare for creators to just disappear. J. D. Salinger famously ghosted off the face of the earth after The Catcher In The Rye, but off the top of my head? I can’t think of another that’s done the same. In the post social media world, it’s damn near impossible to just utterly disappear.
So, with an afternoon and a cup of coffee, I put on my best detective hat and set forth to see where my favorite horror creator went. What I found with a single google search connected everything like a freshly done puzzle.
Turns out, TheLittleFears is actually Dizzy, an indy trans artist. She’s a singer, composer and writer for Girls Rituals, Mom and way, way more. She’s still incredibly fantastic as well. I started listening to her music, feeling that I was too much of an outsider as a cis-gendered guy to really “get it”.
Then so very many of her songs hit on a lot of feelings I’d tried desperately to suppress. Thoughts, ideas and more that haunted me into the wee hours of the morning. Things hinted at that I had been too afraid to ponder long with her horror content. I binged most of the albums over a few months. At work, at home, on the road. After six years, I finally decided it was time to drink that tall glass of questions.
We’ve a saying on the Splathouse Discord: gender is a fuck. I firmly believe and support that, especially since I’ve come to realize many of the things that compose my masculine identity really aren’t gendered at all. There’s nothing inherently “masculine” about a lot of the things I enjoy and do. They’ve simply been labeled as such by marketing.
I’ve known I was pansexual since puberty hit, even before I really had a word for it.
What’s been far more difficult to accept is my gender identity. What’s caused me way more grief is working through the feelings of alienation I have in “male society”. I’ve never really felt at home with the dealings of men, or the way in which we’re told to “man up” and suppress ourselves at the expense of our mental and emotional health. It’s a behavior which stifles, cripples and kills us.
And at the end of the day…
I really don’t know what the fuck I am. Hah, sorry folks. I’m sure you were expecting more of a reveal there. But thanks to Dizzy and other queer creators, I’ve got more of a concrete answer. I am me, and that’s a good way to be. There’s nobody else like me, and thank fuck for that.
It’s a relief, after all this time, to be able to even say that much. I don’t know if that will change over the years. I don’t know if I’ll slap a label on it, or if I’ll just remain this amorphous blob of concepts. But for the time being-I’m comfortable. I’m happy. The glass is empty.
I had my signal it was okay to pursue. That I’m going to be loved and alright regardless.
I couldn’t have done that without representation and media giving me the green light.
I want to end this by saying thank you to all the people that have helped me get this far. All the creators, friends and media that put the work in. Thank you to everyone that chose to create queer content in a world that screams at us about how wrong it is. Likewise, if you’re sitting there right now and there’s a piece of media asking those same questions?
Breath.
Breath deep.
Take a moment alone-and approach those questions. Approach why you empathize with that thing.
Realize that it’s all really, truly going to be okay.
I love you.
Take care.
-J