MANIFEST… Because i am grey. The different parts of me crash into and complicate each other constantly. And i know i'm not the only one trying to figure it all out. Because we all have something to say. Because one important way to break down all that oppresses is to speak our truths without reservation or apology, and find solidarity and inspiration in each other’s honesty. Because sometimes i get angry. Because sometimes i get happy. And oftentimes i want to share. Because if you don’t feel like you have a place to go, you need a place to go. Because i am a Young-Girl. The jumble of fragments that follow in no way comprises an offering of any definitive theory on the Young-Girl. They are materials accumulated from encounters with, observations of, and most importantly, personal experiences of Young-Girls. Minds looking for moral comfort or for vice to condemn will find in these scattered pages but roads that will lead them nowhere. In fact we're not so much trying to convert Young-Girls as we are trying to trace out all the corners of a fractured battlefront of Young-Girlization. And to supply the weapons for a hand to hand, blow by blow fight, wherever you may find yourself. This text is a pact. This text is a labor of love. This text is a gift to you. -To all those who relate and create, connect yourself and keep creating. (inspired by TIQQUN) GENESIS GREY & FEMMEDYMION

HOW TO LOVE YOURSELF !STOP ALL CRITICISM. Criticism never changes a thing. Accept yourself as you are. Everybody changes, and when you criticize yourself, your changes are negative. When you approve of yourself, your changes are positive. !DON’T SCARE YOURSELF. Stop terrorizing yourself with your thoughts. Find a mental image that gives you pleasure and immediately switch your scary thought to a pleasure thought. !BE GENTLE, KIND, AND PATIENT. Be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself. Be patient with yourself as you learn the new way of thinking. If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. !BE KIND TO YOUR MIND. Self hatred is only hating your own thoughts. Don’t hate yourself for having the thoughts, but gently change your thoughts. !PRAISE YOURSELF. Criticism breaks down the inner spirit. Praise builds it up. Tell yourself how well you’re doing with every little thing. !SUPPORT YOURSELF. Find ways to support yourself. Reach out to friends and allow them to help you. It shows strength to ask for help. !BE LOVING TO YOUR NEGATIVES. Acknowledge that you created them to fulfill a need. As you find new, positive ways to fulfill those needs, you can release the old negative patterns. !TAKE CARE OF YOUR BODY. Learn about nutrition. What kind of fuel does your body need to have optimum energy and vitality? Learn about exercise. What kind of exercise can you enjoy? Cherish and revere the person you are. !MIRROR WORK. Look into your eyes often. Express this growing sense of love you have for yourself. Forgive yourself while looking into the mirror. Talk to your parents looking into the mirror. Forgive them, too. At least once a day say “I love you.” !DO IT NOW. Don’t wait until you get well, lose the weight, get the job, or the new relationship. Begin now--do the best you can.

genesis&g'ey

DESCENT INTO LIGHT ! Pundits of all platforms are fond of pointing out the omnipresent threat of the slippery slope. If, to take a ready example, “we” are to “allow” same-sex marriage, soon this will lead to marriage between multiple spouses, marriage between humans and animals, marriage between adults and children or family members or between humans and objects—this slope is rendered along a continuum of both ridiculousness and impropriety, so that by the time its foot is reached, hopefully “we” will have slid over a prospect offensive to every folks of stripe—even if, for example, plural marriage doesn’t bother you, conjugal zoophilia might. And, on this basis, it can be collectively agreed—across difference!—that this slope is best not neared, period. So the story goes. But perhaps this slope has been horrendously mischaracterized as something evil, when in reality it is something crucial, slippery not to trick and fell us, but to ease our passage to some humbler, more common ground. After all, what is progress but a continuum, and what is a better continuum that a slick slope? Yet, where does it end? I think of Hell, of Dante methodically penetrating the Inferno, following a steady grade straight to the sinner-stuffed, stationary Satan. This is what i’ve been taught to think of descent, and this ominousness is intentionally evoked by slippery slope rhetoric. Descent is presented as inherently evil, the very opposite of what is desired. But if i shake off these culturally induced associations for just a moment, i can see how descent can mean something very different: psychic investigation: sinking into the self and the mind and the heart and interrogating what is to be found there, as Dante interrogated the sinners he found in seven flavors. Descent means the sea, the return to something primordial and inherently more genuine, more true. Subterranean: stripped of material concerns, more substantial and interesting than crust alone. I think of Leroux’s Erik, the phantom of the Opera, who himself lived stories beneath the ground in the cellars of the Palais Garnier, far from terrestrial concerns, embroiled in a reality of essence and impulse and despair and creation—that is, the primordial soup of his spirit. Less grandiosely, this descent looks like an honest examination of and conversation with the self, with one’s values and principals and motives for treating and thinking of other people the way that one does. In this sense, self-awareness is a slippery slope to the most powerful of destinations: collective (self-)awareness that can be shared and synthesized to create a culture that is truly kind to and respectful of All. The Slope isn’t so much about particular “points” of awareness reached in a particular order as it is about an accelerating & gathering consciousness of the oh so many ways of being human. This Difference is not to be feared as it so overwhelmingly is, but examined and embraced. This Difference is what renders life living—fluxing like the sea. The slippery slope, then, isn’t some downward spiral of societal debauchery, as is implied by the pundits who employ this phrase. Rather, this is the mask that is placed over the true “slippery slope”: an odyssey into one’s own consciousness, where i believe the

majority of people find an innate understanding of and yearning for respect that would, in turn, spark real world change. The practice of social justice—here standing for progressive identity politics and awareness of the multiplicity thereof—is also a slippery slope. It is necessarily a slippery slope. Its very slickness is what makes it a framework that encompasses various social movements and groups, the ideal dovetail for a continually expanding social consciousness. My social consciousness’ genesis found me at the summit of the slope. When i felt intrigued, and ready, enough to set foot past that slope’s brink, the descent birthed countless questions, and the lower i travelled, the more i had and the more quickly they came. How, i’ve come to wonder, can my politics be as inclusive, as considerate as possible? What experiences and voices am i (un)wittingly ignoring? What multiplicity of possibility and potential am i only just beginning to grasp? And how do i put it all into practice? Where does “it all” end? I am no mountain goat. I proceed cautiously, eyes ground-glued and plotting each step like an exercise in ephemeral cartography. It is always scarier to go down a hill than up. And try as i might to plant each foot firmly, i do slip sometimes—sometimes almost sliding off the slope itself and plunging into some foggy abyss. And sometimes, in my caution, i miss things: the sun hitting the mountains just so, the hawk soaring, the crow’s caw. I try to be careful but i miss or misinterpret cairns. The descent won’t be perfect. But, again, what is the destination? The journey, of course, the learning and unfolding of the world and its inhabitants, but there is also a fabled terminus. But the sea of possibility is never quite intelligible. We will never achieve perfect understanding. Descent (dissent?) is an object to be worked at indefinitely, a project whose progress is its own reward—but there is no sandbox at the foot of the slide, neither a hellish pit where “we” will be buried by our misguided permissiveness, nor a gentle valley in which all is well and All are well and understood and respected and the work is done. Life does not organize itself in these poles. The challenge to continue the work even without a concrete target—to cultivate our spelunking skills even in absence of a specific end-point. Because i think if we learn to let go of fear of difference, of descent—of a slide down the slope of consciousness—the world and understanding of it will unfurl more swiftly, more beautifully, and more deeply than i can guess at. !!!

— Chelsey K. Shannon