Cruel Optimism

Cruel Optimism…
This concept by Lauren Berlant continues to rattle in my brain like a haunting.
It names the condition in which something we desire—love, success, stability, power—is the very thing that keeps us stuck. It promises fulfillment but delivers maintenance. It feeds the fantasy of thriving while keeping us in survival.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I didn’t name my performance Cruel Optimism while onstage in Rovinj.
But I should have.
That’s what it was. That’s what it still is.

The week I returned from FCVC, I promised my therapist I would avoid perfectionism.
Instead, I renamed the performance.
And possibly my entire body of work.

The phrase—Berlant’s phrase—landed with a clang in my chest, like a bell I’d been circling for years. Her writing had always felt too expansive to hold in one moment. But now, post-slide deck, post-undressing, post-Rovinj-hotel-silence, it feels like the only container that fits: power, fantasy, embodiment, erotic labor, survivorship. Not resolved—held.

What Everybody Knows

That same week, I listened to QAnon Anonymous, episode 334. My brain was racked.

Media theory, fascist seduction, symbolic distortion, Berlant, Adorno, dopamine loops. I wanted to pause every three minutes and take notes. I wanted to master it. To metabolize the entire cultural machine. I couldn’t. Not to mention it was full of loop holes and contradictions. Is this the key to audience capture? Confuse them enough that they cannot stop listening?

And in the middle of that spiral: Leonard Cohen, who’s voice had pulled me through so many sessions in the dungeon, who’s concert I was able to attend before his passing, who haunts me and disorients me until this day.
The voice I return to when I need to feel contradiction without flinching.
Not healed. Not resolved. Just named.

“A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”
— Lauren Berlant

“There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”
— Leonard Cohen

Berlant builds the structure. Cohen scores it.

And then there’s Everybody Knows—the track that threaded through my body that week like a warning and a lullaby:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.

Everybody knows the deal is rotten / Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton / For your ribbons and bows.

Everybody knows that the naked man and woman / Are just a shining artifact of the past.

That’s the terrain of Bound and Free:
Erotic labor dressed as power.
The spectacle of sex work mistaken for control.
Costume mistaken for freedom.
A meter on the bed where meaning used to be.

Everybody knows that it's coming apart / Take one last look at this Sacred Heart / Before it blows.

Cohen doesn’t fix it. Neither does Berlant.
They just name what everybody knows.

And maybe that’s what I’m doing too.

I haven’t posted here because I’ve been metabolizing.
I haven’t stopped. I’ve just been underneath.
The slideshow sat closed. The kimono stayed folded.
My body didn’t want to produce; it wanted to sweat.

But something is returning.

The book proposal is waking up.
The Ghost project is still alive.
The performance isn’t over—it’s just taken off its heels.

I’ve been told it’s vain to name the moment before it arrives.
But I’ve lived long enough to know now:

I wasn’t premature.
I was pre-languaged.

And I’m not here to be perfect.
I’m here to be precise.