Micro Monday #9: “personal growth for anarchist gremlins” by mk zariel

This work originally appeared in Backstory Magazine.

since middle school, when i’ve had an interpersonal conflict, i’ve handled it the normal way—talking to friends, to a therapist, to the blank stare of a notes app at 4am when everything feels realer than real and shadows flicker against walls like worn-out identities—and it’s served me really well.

actually, that’s a lie. whenever i have an intepersonal conflict, i find something that
mirrors it in classical anarchist history.

i still recall the first time i went on a bad date—eighth grade, with a girl who kept insisting i do her homework for her—and rather than a crying fit or a desperate advice post made to r/Relationships or extended meta-analysis with my found family, i pulled out a PDF of Emma Goldman’s Living My Life and flipped to her depiction of her first husband. Kershner had come to America in 1881 from Odessa, where he had finished the Gymnasium. Having no trade, he became an “operator” on cloaks. He used to spend most of his leisure, he told me, reading or going to dances. He had no friends, because he found his coworkers in Rochester interested only in money-making, their ideal being to start a shop of their own, she wrote, subtly mocking his lack of social skills. of course, at the age of thirteen, i immediately felt deeply seen. the girl i’d gone out with had also fancied herself better than others, had also never found a passion besides the superficial—and of course, over a hundred years later, i felt an awkward sense of kinship.

getting radicalized isn’t a debate bro thing, and it’s certainly not a one-time event. it’s more like slowly realizing where you belong. for me it was stumbling into small-town infoshops and coming out with lifelong friends, starting affinity groups that shut down two weeks later (and repeating the same process for eternities), soft-spoken arguments at convergences and new pronouns and (in)direct action and care. and of course, a lot of reading. Lee Edelman and Voltaire De Cleyre, Baedan and Queer Ultraviolence, an erasure poem of the Xenofeminist Manifesto, an ad-hoc discussion group with friends about everything Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
ever wrote—and of course, our beloved Emma Goldman. who could forget the depressed lesbian who basically invented anarchist feminism. who wouldn’t feel called out by that?

feeling desired is short-lived, but being a middle schooler who just transitioned and feels weird about that? apparently that lasts forever. just a week ago, fresh off a friend breakup, i was absent-mindedly flipping through Goldman’s memoirs, looking for something utterly validing. the friend who I’d lost had always brought up political philosophy in arguments, a habit that had driven me crazy. and of course Goldman had needed to have this exact discussion with a partner: “It isn’t Nietzsche, it is you — you,” I cried excitedly. “Under the pretext of a great love you have done your utmost to chain me to you, to rob me of all that is more precious to me than life. You are not content with binding my body, you want also to bind my spirit! First the movement and my friends — now it’s the books I love. You want to tear me away from them. You’re rooted in the old. Very well, remain there! But don’t imagine you will hold me to it. You are not going to
clip my wings, you shan’t stop my flight. I’ll free myself even if it means tearing you out of my heart.”” and of course, this shouldn’t have been relatable, but it was. Nietzschean exes may have been a problem since the 1800s, but, hey, at least i was in good company.

mk zariel {it/its} is a transmasculine neuroqueer poet, theater artist, movement journalist, and insurrectionary anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. it can be found online at https://mkzariel.carrd.co/, creating conflictually queer-anarchic spaces, writing columns for Asymptote and the Anarchist Review of Books, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay.