LOVE & BLUE

^{Otherwise known as Papier's Manifesto}
 

Now before I fall into pretentious prose, let's understand what the point of this is!! This manifesto is an opportunity for me to write down the heart of my beliefs and truth- things that I find too personal to just post without prompting, and too ostentatious to discuss casually in a forum or something. So where better to host than MY webpage that I made for ME !!!!!!!!!!
^{Will likely update every now and then- not nearly as frequently as a blog, but whenever I feel the need to shout from a rooftop to an empty city.}

Love is an interesting and complicated discussion to me, namely because most people in a standard discussion will default to romantic love. Romantic love can be and is important to so many people, and for good reason, but it is only one way to love in the simplest way. I believe love, love as a whole, is the most important thing in the world. The necessity of community and empathy and kindness is a fairly standard, almost preach-y topic nowadays but I don't think people fully understand how love intertwines itself with every facet of life. Similarly, I believe creation is the most crucial part of the human experience. To create is to love, to love is to create. Everything that we choose to do is to create and/or love. Creating art is the simplest example that I can propose- the act of taking time, etching out even the smallest piece of our lives to create something (even if amateurish in the eyes of others or ourselves) is in of itself an act of love. To care for something enough to commit to it, or to have the briefest moment of admiration in which you try is, I believe, love.
From the moment we are born we create, and we rely on the creations of others. Be they crayon drawings, or a meal, or a scarf, or shelter, whatever. People are meant to create, meant to love, meant to love their creations, and meant to be loved. And don't misunderstand my nothing-esque rambling- I am not solely referring to manmade creations when I speak about love and the act itself. There is creation with and without humans, and love regardless. I believe that creation is not our own but rather one of few concepts that connect us as people to everything. Similarly, love intersects everything in a similar way. Taking a walk, enjoying the weather created by any array of non-personifiable forces. Enjoying the warmth of the sun that is in no way created intentionally, but a product created by its mere existence all the same.

I am in love with creating. Not merely the act of creating in my own right, but creation as a whole. To see people make art, or learn a new skill, re-find an interest thought lost, that's love to me. I've had more than a few years to go on whatever religious journey I've needed to and at the end it all brings me to one concept: Love and Creation. I guess you could read my above statements as gospel or some kind of religious prose, maybe, that's how it feels sometimes. A devotion, unwavering love to creation. A desperate, addictive need to be apart of it all- to create, to love, to appreciate. I think a lot of creatives are like me, just more normal about it or at least normal enought to not write a page around the concept. People are always in love with their work, consciously or not- there's love in far too many things for this to not be fact. Consciously or not.
 

More than an explanation, this is a proclamation. Why it is so important to me that we continue to create. To create art in all of its forms, to put love out into the world in every way of the word.
 

Identity is another topic that is very, very interesting and equally as complex to me. Identity is something that people take years upon years to understand, and can die never even fully grasping it- I think that's why I spend so much time contemplating my own. Somewhat recently (within the past year or two counts as that, I think,) I became more comfortable with my own dehumanization. To a stranger reading this I feel it important to note that I am a queer (visibly queer?) black man who has had his fair share of less-than-kind interactions both in the Real World and assorted netspaces. Dehumanization, being made to feel lesser than, things of that sort absolutely wrecked me for years. I struggled to balance so much stimuli and almost died trying- but I didn't! Thank God. In any case, somewhere along the way I made a conscious choice to pull back and live in my head for awhile. While this also nearly killed me, it gave me a different sort of understanding of myself and what it meant to find everything around me- from my own identity to that of those around me to the general state of things in the world at the time- so alienating. Reclamation can mean a lot to different people, to me in this particular context it meant allowing myself to simply be. To be thought of as something less than a person is distressing, absolutely, but there is a sort of comfort in considering yourself as just something.

My favorite color is blue! Light blue, something like #5DD9FF. My record player is, roughly, that color. So is my favorite stand mixer, and the cans of my favorite soft drink. Sometime roughly two years ago, I found out about objectum attraction and figured that I was something of the variety. I love blue, light blues, descriptions of the color. I also figured that I was somewhat on the aromantic spectrum. It was a difficult stew of an identity: A thing that loves ideas but can hardly actually love in the first place. Shockingly, this is some of the happiest I've ever been.
 

Simply being is probably the most peace you can lend yourself. Identity is important, it's comforting, it's complex. Maybe one day I'll become a real man and I'll consider myself more someone than something and look back on this as the biggest cope of the century but I don't think so. I believe that there's far too much value in self-exploration and expression to keep yourself from becoming a hodgepodge of contradictory arbitrary "labels" as frequently as possible. To be someone or something, to love things freely. I don't think validity matters, and it's a term far overused, but I believe there's value to every strange way you could consider yourself.