Erica Rivera

Parables

January 24, 2023

length: 7,849 words

content/trigger warnings: discussions of mass shootings, mental illness, transphobia, sexual fetishes (bondage, feces, and vomit), addiction (pornography), violence, and abuse, written by someone with a history of being violent and abusive

note: there is a glitch with the footnotes. if you click the return arrows that follow each footnote (they look like this: ↩︎), or if you click the numbers in brackets that indicate a footnote, it will take you to the very first set of footnotes instead of where you're trying to go. i apologize, i will fix this asap. in the meantime, please avoid clicking the return arrows (↩︎) that follow each footnote, as well as the numbers in brackets that indicate footnotes.

final note: this essay is a living document that will change and grow over the course of my lifetime as i change and grow over the course of my lifetime, because accountability work for people with histories of being violent and abusive is a lifelong, ongoing process. the essay as it is presented here was written in january 2023; anytime i add anything longer than a few words, i will update this sentence accordingly.

i am unsure whether this is the right thing to do or say here, but if it turns out not to be, i will change this note accordingly as well: if you have any questions about my ongoing accountability work, especially if you have a history of being violent and abusive and are unsure how to begin your own accountability work, please feel free to contact me at work AT RiveraErica DOT com. i am not a professional, but i am willing to share what i have learned, or at least point you towards other kinds of resources.

one resource is “learning good consent,” which is available as a free PDF online, but which is also available for purchase from multiple presses and distros. if you want help finding it, or would like to me to assist you with purchasing it, please let me know and i will help as best i can.

“learning good consent” is only one resource of many, but it is a start, and although not all abuse or violence is inherently sexual in nature, much of it is, and the text offers important information to anyone who has harmed others in any way.

this final note is repeated at the end of the essay, in the final footnote.

I fear writing this essay. I drive away from home after writing some of it and all I can think is that if someone were to break into my apartment, crack the password to my computer, and read my most recently opened file, it would be this document and they would realize they had broken into the apartment of a trans person, and then maybe they would decide, transphobically (paradoxically), to stick around until I got back so they could hurt and/or kill someone who their world has deemed okay to hurt and/or kill.

But this isn’t exactly true. I fear this because I fear that whoever would be breaking into my home would be someone I have wronged, and I have wronged many people, and that they would see this—this essay, my transition—as an attempt to escape accountability (like Junot Díaz in the essay that I read years back[1] and think, “Damn, Jesus,” and then the articles about his history of being violent and abusive come out[2][3] and I think, in a very different way, “Damn, Jesus,” and then put sticky notes over his cover blurbs on my books because I never want to think about him again, except that thinking about what he did is one of the reasons I choose to try to write this essay in the first place), and that, if they weren’t ready to hurt and/or kill me when they broke in, this would push them over the edge.

But this isn’t exactly true, either. I fear the above because I fear that I am still the kind of person who would break into the home of someone who once wronged me and then decide to hurt and/or kill them because they, in their most recently opened file, wrote about hurting me and also about being trans, as an attempt to escape accountability (like Junot Díaz), and that, if I hadn’t been ready to hurt and/or kill them when I broke in, this would push me over the edge.

I am not going to write about the people I’ve hurt and how I hurt them in this piece of writing or any other, unless that piece of writing is addressed to them and for them, and not for an audience. I have already done some of this accountability work, most of it verbal—conversation, dialogue—and though there is still much of this to do, it will not be done here. Writing meant for an audience—for a public—is not where you confess your sins because it would be another, second violation, and one perhaps crueler than the first. You may have wronged people in ways you regret, or been wronged by people in ways you wish they would regret (more); feel free to use your imagination. This essay is not about me, and actually, the first thing I think about this essay after I drive away from home, after writing some of it, is that I need to take myself out of it. I struggle against this; I want to be in it, I think I’m supposed to be part of it.

While driving, I think about how to write it without referencing myself; I don’t have the writing in front of me so I can’t come up with an answer, and also I am trying to be more present, and also I do not want to die in a car accident on the fucking 210 (101? Iconic. 10? Trash. 405? Cute, ish. But the 210? Who even are you?) because I was thinking too hard about a fucking essay. I don’t want to think about artists anymore, I don’t want to think about Antonin Artaud or Nella Larsen or Gertrude Stein or Junot Díaz or Wilhelm Richard Wagner or Vincent Van Gogh or Samuel R. Delany or Octavia E. Butler, or Royal Robertson or Ralph Ellison or Ursula LeGuin or Joan Didion or adrienne maree brown or Kathy Acker or John Fante or Mike Davis or Pedro Iniguez or David Sedaris or Joshua Whitehead or Jackie Ess or Sarah Waters or Park Chan-wook or Bret Easton Ellis or Michael Chabon or Judy Juanita or Seth Rosenfeld or Cory Doctorow or fucking [REDACTED]. I am so tired of thinking about artists, I know exactly how much space they have taken up in my head for so many years and I regret every moment I spent thinking about them instead of the real human beings around me whom I actually care about. I don’t care about artists, frauds, farcical lives lived out trying to paper over one’s flaws with whatever passes for genius at that current moment. Caring about artists and frauds and farces is what, among other things, caused, among other things, me to ignore my so-obvious transness for so fucking long. I don’t want to read any more of their works than I already have in order to write this essay, I don’t want to immerse myself in their archives, I don’t want to trace their histories or read their biographies or critically fabulate about them or anyone else. I don’t want to do any more research. Isn’t this enough? Isn’t what I’m writing enough?Is the work that research reflects really so much more valuable than the work I am doing to write these sentences? Will a few footnotes make the difference between you taking this seriously or not?

But now I am trying to be different again. Genius. Above research. Exempted, because greatness. Not needing to follow the rules because I transcend them.

Fucking gross.

I will do the research because it is asked of me. I will cite because it is a posted requisite. I am special the way Barney the Dinosaur tells you you are special. I am not special the way artists think they are special. I am learning to reach out to all the ones who came before me[1], without trying, with all my might, to be them.

Side note: did you know you can buy a drawing of Royal Robertson’s on eBay for $450 for which the description reads, without a trace of irony, “Very good/perfect, considering the artist's outsider life and environment” (“REDUCED!!! PROPHET ROYAL ROBERTSON Black Outsider Drawing/Last Day Baby-Lon,” posted by user “artistvoodoo” on eBay, 2021)? I learned that today, and, now, so have you, and maybe some other time we’ll discuss the white man who co-opted Royal Robertson’s story. ↩︎

They did not, I think, particularly want to be who they were, either.

*

I already hate this essay. It is already too much: tired, played out. You hurt people and you still want to make art and you have complicated feelings about this. Boo fucking hoo. So let’s talk about something I don’t hate: Parable of the Sower.

[Side note: If this writing seems good or different, I think I should make clear that this writing doesn’t seem good or different to the people I know and care about. The people I know and care about are not enmeshed in the literary world; they read pop fiction when they read, or else get their literature from TV in the form of adaptations. I think this is fucking wonderful. I have to tell someone I know and care about time and time again how fucking lucky they are to not have the entirety of the Western canon kicking around in their head, that their memories aren’t packed with centuries (millennia?) of colonial art. I still make the mistake, anyways, when they ask me for a reading list because they want to get inspiration for their own writing, of not putting the cool, fun writers first. I think, “Well, to appreciate the cool, fun writers, you need a little context,” so I start them off with Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, and The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals by Samuel R. Delany. This is a mistake, one I don’t realize until much later after their reading list has been reshuffled so many times that they’re bouncing back and forth between a dozen novels and a dozen more anthologies. I have them read Joan Didion’s The White Album and adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism and Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (it should be noted that I hand them each book alongside a thorough and comprehensive trigger/content warning) and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and John Fante’s Ask the Dust and Samuel R. Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast and Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis (a writer they already know and love) and they want to write funny queer shit so I give them When You Are Engulfed in Flamesby David Sedaris (other funny queer shit on the reading list that I should’ve started them off with instead includes: Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed because the possibilities seem infinite for them when I tell them autofiction is, like, its whole own genre, kind of, and super super hot right now, kind of; Jackie Ess’s Darryl because who wouldn’t want to read a novel about a white—genderqueer?—cuck; and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith which I don’t imagine is particularly funny but we both laugh out loud at Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden—in part because it is a patriarchally cheesy take on violence and abuse, in part because it is horrifying yet fun, and this may be two different ways of saying the same thing—and The Handmaiden is adapted from Fingersmith, which also, I think, is a fucking hilarious title, in part because it sounds like the job title of a locksmith but for fingers—???—or maybe a nice, neat way of describing critical fabulation: it fingers myth) and they want to write dark academia so I give them Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (there is an entire section on the reading list relating to dark academia that includes: Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue because his block is one of my old haunts; Judy Juanita’s Virgin Soul because her school is another one of my old haunts; Seth Rosenfeld’s Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power because that school is yet another old haunt; and Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface because, I don’t know, I’m trying to break up the heavy shit with some YA even though often I feel like YA shit is, like, the heaviest, and also not enough of us confront the reality that the City of Oakland almost built a Domain Awareness Center that would’ve made Keith B. Alexander cream his fucking pants[1][2]] and they get as hooked on Ellis’s nasty bullshit as I did at 18 and that is when I realize my mistake. Whenever they read any of the books I recommend, after they read, they come to me and ask me if writing nasty bullshit is really all it takes to be an acclaimed author, and I tell them, yes: “Yes! That is why I am introducing you to these writers and their work, so you can see how impotent and boring all their silly little books are, so you never again feel intimidated by the idea of writing or publishing or being a working author.”

But as I watch them get sucked into Less Than Zero harder and faster than they have been by any book so far, and even harder and faster than the first (Invisible Man), I realize that they should have felt intimidated by the idea of writing or publishing or being a working author. They need to feel intimidated by the idea of writing or publishing or being a working author. We all need to feel intimidated by this. Whether we articulate it in so many words or not, fear—I think—is one of the emotions we must pay attention to most when we feel it, even if our instinct or training tells us to brush it away. I think fear—heart racing, palms sweating, gut churning, anxiety peaking—is our body’s way of telling us we are (at least internally) as far from homeostasis as possible. It is, quite often, in my experience, the best idea to move away from what is causing that fear, not towards it. (I am unsure whether the 26-year-old man who prevents the violence in Alhambra, which I will describe below, would agree; he says, in an interview on Good Morning America, “Courage is not the absence of fear,”[1] and I know I sure as hell fucking agree with him.)

“Man who disarmed Monterey Park shooter speaks out: 'Something came over me,'” interview between ABC News's Robin Roberts and Brandon Tsay, 2023. ↩︎

The expression is “face your fear,” but I believe you can face something without needing to move towards it. You can confront it without needing to be inside it. You can untangle it without needing to be all tangled up with it first. (Anyone who’s ever unpacked Christmas lights will tell you: if, in addition to untangling the lights, you were also at its center—the wires wrapped around your limbs and appendages as though you were the goddamn Christmas tree—this would not make untangling the lights any easier. Anyone who’s had good therapy will tell you what I’m talking about, too.)

The publishing industry is irreparably broken (which is true of every industry, of course). There is no amount of money or labor or innovation that will fix its problems. I have to write this essay before I can get paid for it, and there is no guarantee that I will ever be paid for it. What the fuck kind of deal is that?! What the fuck kind of a deal. Is. That. So fear it, please. Fear this industry. Flee, if you are so inclined. It is not a bad idea. The person aforementioned went out of town before I could tell them this in person, but I will tell them when they return:

Fuck writing.

Fuck art.

If this writing seems good or different, it is because I am operating from these positions. I hate almost all writing I read, almost all art I see; I have never read a book I can claim to have truly enjoyed; the writing I do like is almost always written on walls with graffiti, or scrawled in pen inside zines of which only five copies were published, or in lyrics to songs by anonymous musicians. The writing I like reading is libelous, about people I hate, and so literally illegal. The book I like most is the most boring book you’ve ever read, with the shittiest, most Microsoft WordArt book cover in history—riddled with typos, the only copy hidden behind a stack of cookbooks in a used bookstore that’s about to shut down.

I wish more published writers were willing to say this out loud. I wish more working artists were willing to say that we as a species have never produced more art than in this very moment, and that all of it is so, so, so, so fucking bad.

Except for, maybe, Parable of the Sower.]

There is pretty much only one novel that can be written and be, like, actually good, and Octavia E. Butler wrote it. I mean, she wrote over and over in her notebooks like a madwoman that she was going to write The First and Last and Only Novel[1] (I’m paraphrasing) and she absolutely did.

“Behold Octavia Butler’s Motivational Notes to Self,” by Ayun Halliday, published in Open Culture, 2020. ↩︎

I live in Robledo, which is to say a fictional town that most people would call Pasadena. (There is an idea of a Pasadena, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real Pasadena, only Robledo, a walled city thinking itself immune from what surrounds it, and though you can walk its cold streets and you can shake its mayor’s hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense that life in Pasadena is comparable to life in any other awful little segregated town choked by its proximate metropolis: Pasadena simply is not there.)

Octavia fucking nails Robledo (to the fucking ground, then dances and pisses all over it; I love it). Come visit. It’s exactly the same as it was then and as it is in the book. Unspeakable violence happens here (mostly at its margins) literally every day. Hours before I write this in my cute Robledo apartment, twelve miles south of me (in Monterey Park) is the location of the deadliest mass shooting since Uvalde, which (for reference, in case you’ve lost track) is the deadliest mass shooting since Buffalo, which (for reference, in case you’ve lost track) is the deadliest mass shooting since El Paso, which (for reference, in case you’ve lost track) is the deadliest mass shooting since Parkland, which (for reference, in case you’ve lost track) is the deadliest mass shooting since Paradise, which (for reference, in case you’ve lost track) is the deadliest mass shooting since Pulse, which (for reference, in case you’ve lost track) is the deadliest mass shooting since San Bernardino, which is a straight shot (ugh) down the 210 (ugh).

The news says he (the Monterey Park shooter) tried to pull off a second mass shooting three miles north of the first, in Alhambra, but was disarmed by the aforementioned 26-year-old man[1], and I wonder whether, if this hadn’t happened, the shooter would have headed another three miles north and shot up a place near where CalTech meets the Huntington Library, which is where Octavia E. Butler’s archives live and are accessible to the public (I drive past it all the time but have only gone once since moving here; it is, like all museums/archives/estates, a very chilling place); and if he’d gone four for four and travelled yet another three miles north, he might have killed me in my home.

“Man seen as hero grabbed gun from Monterey Park shooter: ‘I needed to take this weapon,’” by Richard Winton and Julia Wick, published in the Los Angeles Times, 2023. ↩︎

But then to lump all of the aforementioned acts of unspeakable violence together threatens to elide their very important differences—this shooter was an Asian (American?) man, his victims were Asian American people, the locations he targeted were predominantly patronized by Asian American customers, in a predominantly Asian American city, during the city’s Lunar New Year festival (also, he was fucking 72???)—but then the truth is that all unspeakable violence is more or less the same, handcrafted from hatred and pain and entitlement and a vicious desire for vengeance (I’m not really sure human beings are capable of killing without this last one). We hurt the people we know. We hurt the people we know how to hurt hardest because it is an opportunity to inflict maximum pain. We hurt the people we know in order to hurt ourselves, although I always wish we would cut out the middlemen and just hurt ourselves to begin (and end) with. But we have a name for this—the “suicide epidemic”—and the fact that we separate it from other acts of unspeakable violence (and then lump them together to elide their very important differences) is also part of the problem, of course. I was not, in all likelihood—even if I ran directly into the shooter and called him all sorts of ugly, cruel names—going to be murdered (by him). And I cannot, of course, say that I ever hurt others in order to hurt myself. I hurt others in order to hurt others, and in order to hurt myself. The first part is the most important one (the only important one?), but the (small, very small) second part is revealing, too. I think if guns were designed only to shoot backwards, at the gun holder, we wouldn’t have mass shootings, just more suicides. I think if you plucked every mass shooter in history out of their timeline right before they committed unspeakable violence and locked them up in tiny rooms, they wouldn’t try to escape; they’d bang their heads against the walls until they bled, and died. Most people in solitary confinement only do this when they feel they have no other choice. I think violent, abusive people are violent and abusive towards whatever is front of them, or whomever they know best, and that, if they’re the only target available, they’ll cut their own damn (dick/head)s off. Guns (knives, fists, weapons, words) make it possible to skip the part where you realize you are the one who deserves to suffer most, for being willing to inflict violence on others; violence is the BetterHelp of suffering. A shortcut; a displacer. And you cannot pluck a mass shooter out of their timeline, even hypothetically, because we cannot know—we cannot know—whether they will be a mass shooter until they (mass) shoot. We cannot know—we cannot know—until someone is violent whether they will be violent. A history of violence is an excellent predictor. Being white and/or a man are excellent predictors. Being skinny and/or cis and/or able-bodied and/or “neurotypical” are excellent predictors, too. Plotting violence and executing every part of that plot right up to the actual violence is also an excellent predictor that, yes, this person (or people) will follow through with that violence.

But prediction is not predestination. To assume that nothing can be done between the moment of deciding and the moment of doing is to throw one’s hands up in the air and say, “Well, thoughts and fucking prayers.” There is a study (that we needed a fucking study to prove this is one of the many good arguments, I think, for abolishing academia) that shows that, like, giving a stranger a muffin for no reason is, like, more valuable to them, emotionally, than, like, money, or whatever. I don’t know, you can read the footnote, something about how kindness, in small moments, like, matters.[1](More like money, at every moment, matters; I don’t know why they couldn’t have given people cash instead of muffins.) I know that this sounds like the worst possible fucking solution to gun violence ever—be nice!!!!—but it may be the one of the few solutions most of us have access to, as individuals, short of truly radical revolution. [Side note: As I edit this document a day after beginning to write it, I bounce back and forth between it and the news which is saying someone—another Asian (American?) man, another old man, 67 years old—has killed 7 people in Half Moon Bay, the first four victims being killed (for reference, in case you’ve lost track) about 11 miles southwest of the offices I worked out of the last time I had a full-time job, not too far south of San Francisco; the shooter and victims are, as far as I can tell, all farmworkers and this makes me want to print as many copies of this essay as I can and paper myself over with them and then light them on fire because I don’t know how else I am meant to respond to this, except that this oversaturation of violence is the oversaturation of violence everyone with even a little less power than I has known every moment of their entire lives, so maybe I should shut the fucking fuck up. I don’t even really know where to place this side note but I feel it is important to (side) note, and here is as good a place as any (that’s how shooters seem to see the world, anyways, I guess).] Truly radical revolution is absolutely necessary (like, literally, right now) so please don’t misunderstand me; but so/too many of us are so disconnected from a path towards that truly radical revolution that, sometimes, all we can do that is truly/radically revolutionary, on a day-to-day basis, is—if we have any kind of power whatsoever, or even if we think we do not—to be kind when it feels absolutely impossible to do so. It is rich, of course, for a person with a history of violence to be telling people to be kind to people on the verge of committing violence. Really, I am talking to myself. Really, it is that I understood too late that it is easier to be kind to others when you are kind to yourself. That being kind to yourself is not a prerequisite for being kind to others—in fact, being kind to others is literally kind of the onlyrequisite for, like, being worthy of being alive, generally—but that being kind to yourself makes being kind to others easier, especially during the moments when it feels impossible. God, now I sound like “This is Water,” and that shit makes me want to fucking puke (and not in the hot, fetish-y way; just kidding, I have a scat fetish but I’m not a total freak; just kidding, I know people with puke fetishes and I get it, it’s, like, intense, and real, and intense, and, like, that’s real, so, like, I promise wholeheartedly, no ill will towards puke fetishists from my end) so let me just wrap this part up already. My point is that in The OA, which is a hell of a mixed bag (largely because it is a white woman’s co-optation of Octavia E. Butler’s story—or Lauren Olamina’s?), a group of students prevent a mass shooting by distracting the shooter, for just a few minutes, with a synchronized dance[2]. The dance is so bizarre and surreal that the shooter is literally stunned, and though the show and that episode and its climax are all, like, so fucking cringe—because, one would hope, the beauty that is human life would be stunning enough to prevent violence, though it rarely ever (or never) is—the idea is that something as bizarre and surreal as a group of high-schoolers from disparate social and economic networks, plus one of their teachers, dancing in perfect sync (for, like, 90 seconds, tops) can counter, perhaps, something as bizarre and surreal as a mass shooting. (That someone might try to learn this dance and dance it at a mass shooter during a mass shooting is one of the many good arguments, I think, for abolishing television.) The idea, in the show, is that to be kind when it is impossible to be kind is just as bizarre and surreal as violence itself. That when the main character in Everything Everywhere All at Once (also mixed bag; also so cringe, but only because it should have been a short story or novel—as a televisualized narrative, the execution is too cute, too shiny, too polished, and inter/generational trauma/abuse should not be made cute or shiny or polished—although if Stephanie Hsu doesn’t win an Oscar for playing the person who should have been the main character of the film—and I fucking dare you to tell me that’s youth talking [Side note: Oof, I scared myselfthere, italics can be quite violent]—I will never watch any movie, ever, again) tells the white tax-lady Karen (whom she hates) that she loves her, and means it[3], it makes possible some of the most fun and intimate and interesting parts of the movie (which, spoiler alert, involve lesbians with hot-dog fingers[4], or whatever).

I have rehearsed what I would say to a mass shooter if confronted with one a million times; I rehearse it every time I am in a public place; it is, briefly, just a summary of Heroes by Franco Berardi:

“Your pain is valid.

But you cannot—you must not—express it this way.

I hate you.

I love you.

Let’s do something else.”

I want to tell you to kill the shooter. I want to tell you to carry a gun to kill the shooter with, or to arm yourself with self-defense training and learn how to spot and disarm or take down a potential shooter with hands and fists, like the 26-year-old in Alhambra, or improvised weaponry if nothing else, or to travel in groups or with security anywhere you might feel threatened (which is, like, everywhere, probably). None of these are bad ideas. I think they might also be good ones. I also want to tell you to lock/round up—in some ethical (?) way; abolish prisons, 1312, etc., etc.—everyone with a history of violence (which includes me), before they(/we) can be violent again, or maybe even just kill them(/us), neither of which are bad ideas, either, I think. But then this might give you a history of violence, and then people might decide to kill you, too, and I think they would be wrong to do that, but maybe you might feel that they would be right, so before it even gets that far, I think it would be good to tell people something else, too.

No one should ever have to beg for humanity or autonomy or respect. Let us be done with begging for mercy from abusers, from people with histories of violence, from crazed (American?) gunmen.

There are far better ways to die.

I only know what I will say the day the gun is pointed at me. I can only pray there will be time, between the moment I start talking and the moment he shoots me, for someone to do something else.

Consider me a distraction. Consider me bait. Consider me a bizarre, surreal, synchronized dance than can stun, only temporarily, but that maybe that will be all the time you will need to get away, or call for help, or take him down. I am not a physically strong person but I do know how to just keep talking, and if one’s ability to communicate cannot, at the very least, avert a mass shooting, then maybe one should just shut up and stay silent.

*

[Side note: The news re-runs an article on what to do during a mass shooting[1] and it is the same three things I have learned in so many violence readiness seminars, at so many schools and workplaces.

“How do you survive a mass shooting? We asked experts for advice,” by Madalyn Amato, published in the Los Angeles Times, 2022. ↩︎

1. Run

It is, quite often, in my experience, the best idea to move away from what is causing that fear, not towards it.

2. Hide

You can face something without needing to move towards it. You can confront it without needing to be inside it. You can untangle it without needing to be all tangled up with it first.

3. Fight

From the article:

We’re talking about literally fighting for your life right here, so anything can become a defensible weapon, doesn’t matter if it’s a book, a chair… When people think ‘fight’ and ‘a weapon,’ it doesn’t necessarily have to be a knife or a firearm. It can just be something, anything that you can turn into a weapon and can be used to help defend your life.

From this article:

Consider me a bizarre, surreal, synchronized dance than can stun, only temporarily, but that maybe that will be all the time you will need to get away, or call for help, or take him down. I am not a physically strong person but I do know how to just keep talking.

The news article adds, for good measure:

Once you’ve decided to fight… it’s much more effective to coordinate an attack with other people. The main goal of an attack should be to disarm and “destroy” the target.

Coordinated destruction. A discussion for another essay.]

*

It requires, I think, almost hyperempathy to speak this coldly and unfeelingly about violence, or maybe just a history of being violent and abusive, which may be two different ways of saying the same thing.

Taylor Bankole says he thinks it wouldn’t be so bad if everyone was hyperempathic (hyperempathetic?); Lauren Olamina, obviously, disagrees. Sometimes things go over my head and it goes over my head, until I read the questions in the Reading Group Guide in the back of my paperback Parable of the Sower, that Lauren Olamina does not “have” hyperempathy. Her mirror neurons aren’t hypersensitive, as I (with my one undergraduate semester’s worth of neuroscience) had imagined. She is psychotic (or whatever): she suffers from a delusion that manifests psychosomatically as pain.

Lauren Olamina says[1]:

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler, 1993; page 278 in the 2019 paperback edition. ↩︎

“The worst of it is, if you got hurt, I might not be able to help you. I might be as crippled by your injury—by your pain, I mean—as you are.”

Taylor Bankole replies[1]:

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler, 1993; page 278 in the 2019 paperback edition. ↩︎

“I suspect you’d find a way.”

Octavia Butler adds[1]:

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler, 1993; page 278 in the 2019 paperback edition. ↩︎

He smiled a little.

Lauren Olamina can turn off her condition whenever she wants (as much as someone who is psychotic can turn off their delusions whenever they want). I have experienced psychosis so I know what delusions feel like: I have experienced the delusion of believing I am God; I have experienced the delusion of believing I am Jesus Christ, reincarnated; I have experienced the delusion of believing I know more than anyone else in the history of the universe; I have experienced the delusion of believing I am the only living being with consciousness in the universe. (These delusions don’t ever really “go away,” you just learn to paper over them with better, healthier delusions: I’m normal, I’m just a person, I don’t really know much at all, everyone around me is alive and conscious and real as fuck.)

I have also experienced the delusion of hyperempathy.

When I was a child, I would say “ow” when someone else would get hurt. Often I would say “ow” when I would almost hurt myself, from the vivid, visceral experience of imagining the pain I almost endured. I watched movies and saw people get hurt and winced not the wince of sympathy but the wince of literal pain.

Then I started to fuck and I experienced the orgasms of other people just by watching them. Later I learn this has a word—compersion—and I revel in it. I watch two people who genuinely care about each other kissing and I feel I am being kissed, too. I watch a man tie up another man at a gay bar and I can feel the ropes around my limbs and crotch, tugging and pulling and turning me on. I develop, on and off again, an addiction to pornography because the Internet is a catalog of sexual experiences to watch and replicate like clones, in my brain. I watch two people fall in love and I feel I am a part of that love, too.

This is a delusion.

There is another word for it, less optimistic than compersion.

Co-optation.

Lauren Olamina is—like all messiahs (geniuses, visionaries)—selfish and self-involved. My pain is suddenly your pain? I’m hurt and suddenly you’re hurt too? What the fuck kind of a deal is that?!?

What the fuck kind of a deal. Is. That.

There is another word for it, less optimistic than co-optation.

Abuse.

*

Octavia E. Butler wanted everything.

Octavia E. Butler deserved everything: the world, the universe, justice, life.

At every turn, in ugly fucking Robledo, she was denied even a taste. There is so much rage and a vicious desire for vengeance, in (all of) her writing. I can feel it when I read her, coursing through my veins as though it is hers, like drugs from a needle. I am not a Black woman but I am a transgender woman and I do not live in her Robledo but I live in my Robledo and I know exactly how much there is to hate and despise and want to destroy here. I can run my fingers over the walls of Robledo even though they aren’t real. I see Lauren Olamina somewhere between CalTech and the Huntington Library and I know she is a year and a half away from her fifteenth birthday. And I worry. I worry because sometimes I wonder if someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew our 45th president read Parable of the Talents (as a joke? as a gag? to see from the other side? because they thought themselves her?) and somewhere along that trail of people “Make America Great Again” became MAGA. An identity was forged, the way red-pilling was co-opted and abused by people for whom The Matrix was “not meant.” But when we publish, we cannot choose who engages with our work, except that we absolutely can, we absolutely can. We can. You can. Just don’t publish with a (traditional) publisher! Publish it yourself; bind the book with your own two hands, or better yet, have a friend help you. A lover. A partner. A family member. Have them be the only other person allowed to read it. Or have them get to choose who else gets to read it. Distribute it at, like, your local library, or your church, or, like, your PTA meeting? I don’t know where people go or what they do these days. A bar? (A bar would be an excellent place to distribute literature that you can pretty much guarantee almost no one will ever read.)

I think Octavia E. Butler wouldn’t have died tragically if she had just distributed a few hand-bound copies of Parable of the Sower at a bar. If she had handed them out like a street preacher, which she pretty much was—the first street preacher to get a MacArthur grant, which is to say, like all street preachers, a genius (a visionary, a messiah, selfish and self-involved). And I don’t mean “died tragically,” as in “died from a fall in front of her home,” but “died tragically” as in “died trying to finish a series of six books she had planned in which she could, she imagined, accurately tell the story she set out to tell[1], which is that if you write Parable of the Sower—if you sic Parable of the Sower (i.e., Earthseed) on the world—you must atone for it, by writing Parable of the Talents, which clarifies your intention, and Parable of the Whatever, which papers over your mistakes in the first two, and Parable of the Fucking Suck My Dick, which sets the record straight about the first three, and so on, and so forth, because otherwise you will get midway through the third book and realize that the only way to tell the story justly is to obliterate everything you have written in the preceding books because the preceding books were a means to an end but the story that follows from that means to an end is the most horrible future for humanity you can possibly imagine, which means that if you thought that writing the first book was going to help anyone or yourself, you were absolutely wrong, because what you ended up doing was inaugurating the future you wanted to prevent because to imagine a future—especially out of so much rage and vicious desire for vengeance—is to, more or less, make it real and this means that you are Lauren Olamina and Lauren Olamina was wrong, so, so very, very wrong, and this is too much to bear so you read a vampire novel by Anne Rice to distract yourself and think, well, I could do this, so you do it, and you kind of hate it, and it feels like pulling teeth—the exact quote is, I think, something like ‘I had to relearn how to write,’[2] or whatever—and you publish it and people like it, but not you, because you’re not even sure you like yourself anymore, and you think that you could have made the same amount of money you got from the MacArthur grant by working for, like, a decade or so as, like, a real estate agent or something, selling homes to incoming Robledo residents with your niche being maybe, like, wealthier people of color because, well, you’re a Black woman who grew up in the city, so why wouldn’t people trust you, and that doing this—enabling the kind of family Lauren Olamina grew up in to move into and feel comfortable in Robledo—would have been at least as ethically fraught as being a writer but at least, on a day to day basis, would probably not have been as painful or arduous; realizing all this and then dying from a fall in front of your home before you can explain yourself, and repent.”

That kind of “died tragically.”

The data says the best-selling book of all time is the Bible.

I imagine that, by the end of the next century (or the one after that), if books (or humans) still exist, Parable of the Sower will take its place.

Parable of the Sower is a bible; it is, quite literally, the Bible.

Octavia E. Butler set one task before herself: write the first and last and only novel, because it was the best and most violent way to exact vengeance upon everyone who ever believed she would be nothing, be forgotten, be anything but genius.

She succeeded.

And now we live in her world.

*

(Octavia E. Butler, your pain is valid.

But you cannot—you must not—express it this way.

Octavia E. Butler, I hate you.

Octavia E. Butler, I love you.)

Let’s talk about something else.[1]

final note: this essay is a living document that will change and grow over the course of my lifetime as i change and grow over the course of my lifetime, because accountability work for people with histories of being violent and abusive is a lifelong, ongoing process. the essay as it is presented here was written in january 2023; anytime i add anything longer than a few words, i will update this sentence accordingly. i am unsure whether this is the right thing to do or say here, but if it turns out not to be, i will change this note accordingly as well: if you have any questions about my ongoing accountability work, especially if you have a history of being violent and abusive and are unsure how to begin your own accountability work, please feel free to contact me at Work AT RiveraErica DOT com. i am not a professional, but i am willing to share some of what i have learned, or at least point you towards professionals or other kinds of resources. one resource is “learning good consent,” which is available as a free PDF online, but which is also available for purchase from multiple presses and distros. if you want help finding it, or would like to me to assist you with purchasing it, please let me know and i will help as best i can. “learning good consent” is only one resource of many, but it is a start, and although not all abuse or violence is inherently sexual in nature, much of it is, and the text offers important information to anyone who feels they may have harmed others in any way. ↩︎