Good sister, bad sister

There are two ways of going crazy: one is by being good, the other is by being bad.

The one who goes crazy by being good learns to restrain herself. She learns to control herself. She takes care of the adults whose job it was to take care of her. She internalizes the lessons, she practices, she earns. The good sister takes the pain and buries it. She knows it only as a crushing shame. She just can’t seem to get it right, she can’t quite figure it out. If only she were better then she would be loved. If only she were better then she would be safe. If only she were better then these unthinkable thoughts would stop clawing at the edges of her perception. Sometimes she hides this shame under righteousness, sometimes under humour, sometimes under grandiosity, sometimes under perfectionism. Sometimes it’s just shame. And what is this selfishness? This ingratitude that lurks within her? The good sister will purify herself of any trace that she does not know how good she has it. And if the lurking shame that never quite goes away becomes too much to carry, there are many behaviours and addictions which can serve to numb the pain, and these can be more or less socially acceptable. She can be good and still find ways to keep the constant hurt from the betrayal she will not name just outside of her awareness. If this becomes hard to manage sometimes, she is offered up an outlet. There is one place where she is permitted to express her rage, transformed now into contempt. Not toward her parents on any other author of the crime, but toward the scapegoat, the ungrateful one, the one we all know it is acceptable to punish and despise — the bad sister.

The bad sister goes crazy in the way we collectively agree is really crazy. Usually this involves spectacle and her body. Usually she enacts the unspeakable thing in some impossible to ignore performance of suffering. She drinks. She screams. She cuts herself. She runs out of the house into the snow without her shoes on. She rocks back and forth on the floor pulling at her hair. The bad sister goes to lock up and everyone feels relief. The bad sister is institutionalized and everyone feels relief. The bad sister is blamed, scorned, judged, mocked, and ridiculed. She is made responsible. She is a receptacle for everyone’s misplaced hatred and unexpressed pain. And through some sleight of hand, some blessing of doublethink, she is relinquished from this burden of responsibility by being made unfit — unable to be responsible even for herself. She is stripped of that dangerous autonomy, that reckless terrifying agency. And we remind each other in hushed voices dripping with superiority masked as mercy that it’s chemical, it’s genetic, it’s not really her fault because it’s not really her. She had an aunt that was like that too. And certainly this is not about the fucked up behaviour of the adults that raised her, the subtle and pervasive boundary violations, the lack of fundamental needs being met. The cycle of intergenerational trauma grinding on and on. Instead it’s her genes thank god and everyone is relieved that this lets us all off the hook. Think about it — it can’t be trauma. Her sister isn’t traumatized. Her sister has the good sense to be grateful.

Lobotomized, burned at the stake, the body of the bad sister is sacrificed in a cleansing ritual that sets us all free. We’re free, we’re free. We’re free we tell ourselves because she’s the one who’s crazy. We’re free because she’s the one who’s locked up. She’s the one who can’t be believed. We’re free.

The good sister and the bad sister are both solutions to the same impossible dilemma. They are both deserving of our curiosity, our compassion and our respect. They are both surviving however they found they could survive. Sometimes they exist inside one person. They both suffer. But, the bad sister, despite being locked up, is on her way out of the cage. Her rejection of the narrative, her insistence that something really is wrong — out there — not in her, is the key. Her drama while dangerous and chaotic might just save her yet.

The good sister has to learn to face the bad sister inside herself or else she will never be free. The good sister has to break her own heart by finally admitting that there was nothing she could have done, nothing that would have been enough. It wasn’t her fault and neither was it the fault of the bad sister. Neither of them had the power to stop it or change it. Neither of them can make what happened not have happened. If she wants to be free, the good sister must relinquish her desire to be good.

As a society, if we want to be done with intergenerational trauma, child abuse, sexual violence, then we have to stop scapegoating, silencing, punishing, medicating, incarcerating, lying about the bad sister. We need to fucking listen to her.

Good sister, bad sister is the title of a Hole song. Courtney Love knows all about the bad sister.

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Announcements

I have decided to reprint limited runs of some of my old zines, as an homage to my various selves that brought me here. Licking Stars Off Ceilings is a zine I used to write in my late teens and early 20s, in another lifetime. I was 24 when I wrote this issue and it has been out of print for 13 years. It is gorgeous poetic writing about sexuality, spirituality, violence, trauma, power, and madness. It pulsates with life. If you guys think I'm a lot now -- wait till you meet 24 year old Clementine, she's fucking crazy. I love her so much. You can get the zine here.

There’s a new episode of Fucking Cancelled: The Theology of Exile with Juno Zavitz. If God’s law is to love one another radically, then the various forms of exile and dehumanization practised by human beings through the ages may constitute a kind of ‘cultural sin’, a deviation we keep coming back to over and over as a species because it feels good. Not only might this practice lead us further from love, and not only might it not even work to give us justice, but it might also inflict a moral injury upon all of us. In Episode 75 we’re joined by Juno Zavitz, student of divinity, former social worker, and owner of Aporrai Counselling, to discuss the theology of exile — as well as the epidemic of wreckerism sweeping through the nonprofit world.

I updated the Body of Work section of this website. It’s for paying subscribers and includes access to digital versions of all my zines, including many out of print zines you can’t get anywhere else, several recorded workshops and three recorded live events, as well as a bunch of translations of my work. It’s a huge archive and you can access it here. I also updated my giant and ever-expanding bibliography.

I am doing another event at Breitenbush Hot Springs in March 2025 called Writing is a Lightning Strike. Last year’s workshop was incredible and I am even more excited for this one because it is about writing. You can register here. There are only a few spots left!

This workshop is an invitation to take yourself seriously as a writer, regardless of how much experience you have with writing or publishing. If you feel the call to write, this workshop will help you answer that call. If you already have a writing practice, this workshop will help you deepen it. Hosted at Breitenbush Hot Springs, you will have the opportunity to soak, relax, and recharge between sessions. As we will discuss in the workshop, your writing practice continues to happen underground in uninterrupted moments such as these.

The energy of forcing, proving, and seeking legitimacy is not the energy that will help you crack open your writing practice. This workshop will go against a lot of conventional advice to simply and consistently show up to the page and will instead highlight how much of the writing happens when we are not at the page. Rigorously anti-shame and rooted in the wisdom of the body and the depths of the unconscious, this workshop will create the conditions you need to approach your writing with curiosity rather than with demands.

Drawing on the work of various underground and outsider writers, as well as our own wild intuition, we will read, write, move, breathe, share, and talk about our writing. Clementine, a longtime independent writer, will share her knowledge and wisdom on how to trust your process and your voice.

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I am a writer, zinester, and literary punk based in Montreal, Canada. I have been making zines since the year 2000 and have probably made more than 100,000 hand stapled zines over the course of my career. My best selling zine, Love Without Emergency, has sold more than 11,000 copies, and I have many other zines besides that. I write essays, literary nonfiction, and philosophy, and am known for my unflinching approach to deep and difficult topics, as well as my accessible, down to earth use of language. I am known for my work on many topics including surviving incest and other forms of trauma, trauma informed polyamory, bisexual women’s sexuality, opposing cancel culture on the left, and finding compassionate, non-punitive approaches to ending the cycle of violence. I have a podcast with my partner Jay Lesoleil called Fucking Cancelled where we develop our thinking on how to build a robust, effective left that doesn’t eat itself alive, and where we’ve had the pleasure of interviewing many important thinkers and writers. I have published six books over the course of my career, Rupture, The Size of a Bird, You Can’t Own the Fucking Stars, Trauma Magic, Fucking Magic, and Sexting. I sometimes teach workshops on various topics. This substack is a huge archive of my writing, a place where I am regularly and consistently producing new writing, and one of the main ways I support myself as an independent, underground writer. Thank you for being here. As well as the archive, make sure you explore my bibliography, my body of work, and the list of interviews I’ve done. Thank you for your support of my work.

I am looking for a literary agent and publishers who are excited about unconventional, underground writing. If this is you, or you have any leads, please get in touch.

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