Book Club - Existential Kink
Monthly, Queer Umbrella (Instagram here) hosts a very lovely bookclub. We’re a small to medium sized group, and some regulars come and go month to month. It’s been a really great time so far, seeing some familiar faces, trying to connect with other aligned individuals, and really just meet new people and take in more literary content. All things I like and want need to do.
For the Month of March happy birthday to me btw we were reading Existential Kink. Yes, that is quite the name! No, it's not a book about kink culture and that world.
Yes, some of the club was expecting it to be. What it is though, is a fairly interesting self-help book focusing on digging into your psyche and understanding the negative, taboo, or 'dark' things that give you big thrill. The intent is to understand those parts of yourself, embrace them as part of your identity, unify your subconscious and unconscious, and break cycles and patterns of negative situations. Those can be relationships, financial woes, destructive tendencies and habits, and pretty much anything that is emotionally stimulating.
Trigger warning here: birth, myth about persephone, the intro / first part of the book is a bit fucked. very controversial. Book Club tore into it for awhile
Anyway, the beginning of the book was quite rough. I have a trigger point about birth and talk about that biological function and she really leaned into that heavily in the start. Like, birthing our situations and the divine whole of our consciousness. Not quite the choicest of words but whatever.
I've spent quite a long time working through dialogue and narratives that are laden with religious ideals and language to find their value, so looking through some of the birth, magic, and self-help tones of this book was rather straight forward.
That said, I really liked it. I'm deeply fascinated by the concept of our 'shadow self'; the parts of our subconscious that get mad thrills out of rejection, devaluing, fighting, criticism, antagonising people, or whatever 'taboo' sort of thing you can think of. and goodness do I have some deep interest in being devalued, diminished, controlled, and otherwise absolutely submissive + subservient And I'm also interested in ways to approach the immensely neurodivergent brain in order to foster self-growth, betterment, change, and overall building the identity and life we want to have. That's all really cool.
What I really appreciated about this book was it wasn't full of positivity thinking and pushing you to foster and manifest good situations out of thin air. It really pushes you to look into the ugly side of yourself, your behaviour, habits, interests, and even likes / wants to work through those things and get away from negative things and into more positive spaces. It isn't gold coating the shit you're standing in while you look up at the sun.
It was interesting to see how the participants felt about the book. There was some outright disdain for it and some in between opinions. It really made a handful of them uncomfortable, both the topics introduced and the kind of brutal introspection the book demanded of the reader. I think it's absolutely fascinating to watch people squirm over things that make their mind uncomfortable, challenge their frames, state of mind, positions, stances. All that concrete knowledge we supposedly know. I live for that. When something makes us uncomfortable, I've found that it usually means we are being challenged to change and grow. The mind likes it easy and comfy, and safe, and that's why we stay in our routines, our bad habits, our shitty situations, our comfort zones
I kinda wish Book Club talked more about some of the details and exercises in the book. I think we harped a bit too hard on the intro and the self help tone of it. Which, are valid criticism points but we can only hang on that for so long lol but anyway! It was great dialogue regardless. I'm excited for our next book and connecting more with the community. They're all really lovely so far. We meet at this awesome queer bar with bohemian vibes. Our spot in the back has a disco ball and some fluffy cloud lights, it's neat. I love to find and experience cute places like this
