honesty

Infuriating

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

In preparation for a short mission to cheer up a niece who needs her auntie, I was crossing tasks off my to do list this morning.  One of the most daunting of the tasks was to retrieve my suitcase from the guest room/office closet. It is daunting because my second bedroom serves as both guest room and office, but also because it serves as art studio, storage, and a dedicated room for my medical supply when I am not actually using crutches or in need of my walker or the air conditioner.  So, the closet–well let’s just say that opening the door can be a harrowing experience.

 

Long ago I learned the concept of “eating the frog” from a friend–doing the hard thing first, so the rest of the tasks seem less challenging and the thing you dread most is done, eliminating the dread.  It’s based on the idea that if you had a bunch of things before you to consume, and one of them was a live frog, while the others were less disgusting choices, you should first eat the frog, and then allow the palate to rejoice in the other, less gross, items consumed after.  So, a little before 9:00 am, I opened the closet door.

 

Thankfully, nothing fell on my head upon opening the door.  And I rather quickly remembered the location of the suitcase and confirmed that it was, indeed, under all of the postal boxes.  I set out to rearrange the items and acquire the suitcase stashed below.

 

Now, it is important to mention at this point that all of the movement, noise, and shuffling happening was due to the shifting of cardboard and foam inside my closet on the second floor of a two-story building.  I will also remind you that it was nearly 9:00 am. And then, the thing happened that made me lose my shit. I heard banging on my floor–the ceiling of James, the downstairs tenant.

 

James has been told, repeatedly, that he is not, under any circumstances to bang on the ceiling.  After I had been living here for about 10 months, he suddenly decided that he would yell obscenities at me whenever seeing me outside, and bang on the ceiling at ANY noise he doesn’t like–including my family sitting down to eat lunch during the holidays. This morning he did not stop banging.  He just kept on doing it for about ten minutes, even after I had retrieved my suitcase and closed the closet door on the remaining mess.

 

I called my landlord.  She said she can’t be a therapist, she is a landlord.  But she did call James and tell him that ANY noise complaint goes to her and he is not allowed to bang on anything under any circumstances.  

 

However, he said that there is constantly yelling at 4 in the morning and 8 in the morning and all sorts of noise.  And that is complete bullshit.

 

This is the thing I am finding so infuriating today–and in the recent weeks, with all that has been going on in my life.  There isn’t a way to effectively tell tellers of truth from tellers of lies if you aren’t in the situation. If you aren’t there to see the events unfold, you can’t necessarily discern what the truth of the matter is, which puts the crazy, insecure, jealous, dishonest, selfish, and self-involved people in the world on the same level as the ones who are truthful and altruistic and compassionate and working to make a better world for all.  And that just doesn’t seem fair.

 

It isn’t enough to be a good person.  Suddenly, you feel like you need to constantly prove that you are a good person.  

 

That infuriates me.  Because we should be able to somehow tell the difference.  We should be able to know truth and see good and not be constantly deceived.  Good people shouldn’t be dragged through the mud by those who have selfish or nefarious motives.  But they are.

 

It didn’t take me long to realize that I don’t actually need to prove anything to anyone.  

 

Truth will out, as they say.  

 

Eventually, the good is recognized and the lies are exposed.  I do believe that, even though I also believe that it could take decades, or generations for that to happen.  It will happen. And a legacy of beauty and good and love and truth will be remembered as such, and the opposite will also be remembered as such.  

 

It isn’t easy to let things unfold, and to let my name be dragged through the mud.  It isn’t easy to live above the fray and to allow others to lie and misrepresent and harm without trying to fight back in some manner.  But attempts to argue with those who don’t tell the truth or use logic or care about the heart of matters always fail. It is futile. The only way to get justice in these matters is to wait for the truth to become known.  

 

It will become known.  

 

So, no matter how infuriating it is to have a guy who is full of crap banging on the ceiling while I try to pack for a mission of love and compassion to cheer up my lovely niece (and cheer up myself, of course, because being with her is such a joy), I will swallow my pride, hope all the things stay behind the closet door, and let things play out in whatever way they will.  Living in light and love will always be my best defense against any odds.

 

Now–to launder the clothing, pack things that don’t freak out the country folk (so basically nothing I own), and get ready for mission Return to NWIA.  (I just freaked out a little. It’s been almost 4 years. I must really love this niece!)

Instinct

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

My office is once again in (mostly) office form–instead of guest room form–so I decided I should use it this morning to do what I claim as my profession, and to write down some words.

 

The thing that has been most striking, and on my mind, in the past several hours remains the reactions that I have seen from people in particular contexts.  Some of the reactions I anticipated, and some of them I was taken aback by, but the thing that kept popping into my mind this morning was a vaguely remembered expression of C.S. Lewis that said something about the true nature of a person being shown when they were surprised or scared.  That idea stuck with me. If you sneak up on me and surprise me, I yell, potentially cry, and sometimes punch you. I have a lot of fear and unresolved pain on the inside, so that comes out. Cursing also comes out. I’m a woman who uses “vulgarity” with regularity, so it isn’t a hidden part of me suddenly exposing itself, but just my daily self being repeated before you.  

 

But last night I watched the Chicago Bears miss out on their big game hopes by one point with a field goal kick that should have sailed through between the posts, but for a timeout called at the most inopportune moment.  And when that loss, which was felt deeply by many, happened, there was one woman in particular whose inner self became an outer self. I’d love to know C.S. Lewis’s thoughts on what football exposes, because WOW.

 

Now, I’ve not had a good vibe from this woman from the start–for the record.  I think she is dishonest, manipulative, self-aggrandizing… But other people seem to like her just fine, so I generally keep my vibes to myself.  Last night, however, she started yelling at the television, and not just at the general disappointment toward a team but directly at a young man who did his absolute best under tremendous pressure, and didn’t meet the expectations of the whole world that was watching.  She called him a “fucking bastard” repeatedly, and demanded that he be traded by morning or … I don’t really think she is in a position to make threats against the franchise given that she is an unemployed, 50-something woman who lives in shared housing and drinks every night, so I’m not sure what she would do if they didn’t trade Parkey today.  She doesn’t seem to have much influence over the team.

 

Nevertheless, I made deescalating comments, like, “he’s just a boy”, and “you know he can make the kick, he just did it 10 seconds ago”, and “you’ve not kicked a field goal in your life, so it really isn’t fair to judge so harshly”.  She persisted, despite my objections, so I took a different approach and praised the Bears for the best season since 1985, and commented on how excited I was for next season, when they would come back even stronger. That positive outlook didn’t dissuade her either.  She just kept cussing out a boy on the screen for being a complete failure.

 

I kept thinking to myself, “This is the truth of who she is.  This is a variation on Lewis, and I am seeing the heart of this woman exposed.  No wonder she gives me the negative vibes! Her heart is hate-filled, fearful, bitter, and angry.”

 

Now, don’t get me wrong, please.  I’ve been in that space. I’m not judging her for being in that space.  I’m just ruminating on what is inside vs. outside, and what brings the inside out.  She probably has a reason that holds some validity for being as she is, currently. And I wish her all the best in working through that and coming out the other side with a better outlook and more love in her heart.  I suspect that her current situation, with the shared housing and the inability to hold down a job, are key factors in her unhappiness, and I hope that she finds a way to gain more stability. But the thing that I am so challenged by is the lying that is required to pretend that you feel one way when you so clearly feel another.

 

At some point in my history I was so good at feigning “okay” that my mind literally walled off years of abuse.  Complete repression of years of my life and experiences is the ultimate in lying, I suppose–even if it is subconscious and you have no idea that you are doing it.  But once that stuff started to come out and be remembered, the need to let it out was too great to ignore. Anger, pain, abandonment, neglect, betrayal, and more were all swirling around inside, and the ability to contain that was not an ability I possessed.  Of course, it came out at the wrong times and toward the wrong people, more often than not. I had trouble maintaining relationships or keeping jobs. I couldn’t keep my emotions in check and would have outbursts of rage or tears in the middle of situations where such things made no sense.  It was a crazy time, and it was made especially challenging because I didn’t have good mental health care during that stage and didn’t have anyone who could effectively help walk me through that chaos.

 

There were times when I worked to hold in all of that stuff and just “pretend’ life wasn’t plagued by these issues.  I could do it for a short time, but then the chaos would come out and things would spiral and I would find myself alone and broken once more.  It wasn’t until I started to let the chaos live on the outside that things started to balance out. It wasn’t until I started to accept that this was a part of who I am, and a way that I will always be, in some sense, that I could live without having a different person emerge when I was scared or surprised.  

 

Now I am the same person all of the time.  

 

Granted, we all have moments when we don’t speak honestly.  I might have a bad headache, but still go to your party–pretending it isn’t a big deal because I want to participate in your event. But that isn’t what I mean.  I mean that the fundamentals of who I am are on display all of the time.

 

I am boisterous, stubborn, intelligent, brutally honest, compassionate, a great listener, an over-sharer, and I will cry, yell, curse, or whatever else I feel moved to do in the course of everyday conversation without reservation.  I’m not afraid to speak my mind. I’m not one to back down from a fight. And I will talk to anyone and everyone present to try to make connections, because I am in love with community as and ideal. Oh yes–and I am extremely idealistic.

 

But if you have met me, you probably know all of that, because I wear it on my sleeve.  I don’t hide any of that. You don’t need to root it out or search for it. It is standing right in front of you.

 

I had a conversation last night with a woman I just met.  It became very in depth very quickly, and we were arguing a bit about hunger.  She didn’t believe my statistics about hunger related deaths in the U.S., and she felt that homeless/hungry people here are being too picky.  “If you are hungry you would eat anything”, she said. And I disagreed.

 

Obviously, my disagreement didn’t make sense to her, and this caused a mini argument.  I hold to the idea that no person should be put in a position where they are hungry enough that they would eat anything, and that it dehumanizes people to say that they should take whatever they can get, when the rest of us clearly choose only our favorites from a fancy menu of curated items.  Why shouldn’t the homeless and the working poor have options like the rest of us? Are they less human because they have less resources? Why not make certain they have resources, instead of demanding they suck it up and take what they clearly do not want?

 

At one point in the conversation, she said to me, “I’ve never been that hungry and you have never been that hungry, so we can’t understand.”

 

“I have been that hungry.  I’ve eaten my meals out of dumpsters.”

 

And there it was … I put my inside firmly on my outside.  

 

She looked at me wide-eyed for a moment and then said that she was sorry that I had been put in that position.  The conversation turned and we discussed something else. There was little else that she could say because the experience of taking whatever I could get trumped her thought experiments about what might be.  

 

But again I was thinking about the instincts.  I was thinking about the way that she made assumptions about who I am and what I have experienced because here we both were watching the Bears lose in a bar in Edgewater.  Very different lives have brought us to this moment. Very different experiences have shaped us. But she instinctively believed, by my dress and my speech and my position in the world, that we shared so much more than we actually do.

 

I didn’t disclose that I eat because of Meals on Wheels and foodstamps programs.  I didn’t disclose that I don’t care that the IRS is closed because I don’t need to file a return due to a lack of income.  But I did disclose that I am writing about racism, childhood trauma and abuse, and a history filled with challenges. I did disclose that I had surgery in November and that I manage a number of illnesses, including fibromyalgia.  I did disclose where I live, and what I do, and the birth order that puts me into middle child territory. I didn’t hide who I am or how I am. So I don’t need to be scared or surprised for the real Christy to pop out. She is always here.

 

I wonder, at times, why we all feel so much need to hide our true selves.  Are we so terrible, at our core, that we won’t find love and life and friendship and care if we are honest?  Are our issues so complex that they cannot be dealt with or resolved?

 

I don’t believe that is true.

 

In fact, I think that being genuine and true affords us more room and more time and more energy for developing strong bonds and working out what challenges us.  I believe that my life became less complicated and more positive once I started seeking to live without hiding and holding up a facade for others to view.

 

Granted, the woman at the bar who was tearing the proverbial flesh from a young boy whose best wasn’t good enough to win a game doesn’t seem like the kind of person whom you want to have “out and proud”.  But at least if her true nature was out there, something could be done to guide her into a healthier and happier space. Right now, everyone around her just feeds into the lie that she is doing fine–when she clearly isn’t feeling balanced and happy and good at all.

 

Those gut reactions are telling you something about yourself and where you are and what you need.  But if you keep your instincts hidden and locked behind doors, only letting them out when you are shocked, scared, or mad at football, you cannot hear what they are saying.  You cannot listen to what they are saying about you and your position and your needs if you keep them bottled or boxed.

 

In order to hear and see and cope, you need to start wearing those inner things on the outside.  You need to start letting the instincts flow out.

 

It isn’t an easy process, assessing the inner workings and letting them become a part of your persona, out there for everyone to see.  It is actually a very challenging process, that leaves you feeling vulnerable, exposed, and, often, wounded. But I believe that the work is worth it.  

 

I believe that having the deep things become visible in the shallows makes you better, stronger, and more beautiful.  Because working on those inner things is what offers your the opportunity for transformation. Doing that is what can make what was instinctual become obsolete, and change the way that you interact with the world.  

 

I still have moments of rage on occasion, but for the most part, that is gone.  That instinct isn’t strong anymore, because I have spent years working through why I felt that way–what brought it on, what left me out of control, and how I could change that.  I don’t need to rage at football players, because I don’t need to rage at all. Or if I do feel enraged, I know that something needs to be changed in my life, immediately, because I am being triggered in extremely negative ways–which is why after a particularly angry night a couple months ago, I broke off a relationship that was not healthy.  

 

Had I not embraced this instinct, however, and gotten down to the root of it, I wouldn’t have the insight to know that I was being triggered and that relationship needed to end.  Had I not let my rage become a part of me, and accept it and understand it and cope with it, I would not have been able to make such an informed, wise decision.

 

So, let your inner stuff come out.  Work your way through it. (Preferably with a qualified professional.) And live as a whole person, without hiding parts of you somewhere inside.  Let your instincts out, and be who you truly are–even if that is a vulgar, stubborn woman with a huge heart and too many tears.

Can’t Find a Better Man

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

The half growl/half crow of Eddie Vedder has long been a part of my own, personal war cry.  It both fed and poured out my teenage angst—my frustration with the things that were senseless, wrong, and unjust in the world, and my desire to be free from all of the pain and confusion and devastation that those things caused me.  I felt deeply.  Eddie did too.  You could sense it.  And you could echo it as you sang along.

Better Man was one of the songs that I connected with on a spiritual sort of level.  There were others.  And some even more deeply felt than this one.  But this one came to mind today, because I still feel the same angst at times.  I still know the challenges of being that one in the song—that one who can’t find a better man.

If you don’t know it … well, if you don’t know it you are either too young or too old or just plain Amish, I suppose, because Pearl Jam has been around for longer than my child has been alive (21+ years), and they keep putting out new music and touring the world with old favorites in their sets as well.  But, in case you have decided to go the way of Patrick Star and you live under a rock, I will let you know a bit about the lyrics, and the basics of the song.

She lies and says she’s in love with him; can’t find a better man.

It’s a woman, waiting alone in bed for some man who clearly sucks at being a partner.  She practices what she will say—what boundaries she will set, and what angry rant she will set forth when he finally dares to come home in the wee hours of the morning—but when he actually arrives, she pretends she is sleeping.  She keeps his failure and her misery to herself.  It feels like her fault that she chose him, and she does love him.  And somehow, they have this symbiotic, albeit unhealthy and unfulfilling, relationship that they both continue to choose.  And she echoes over and over:  Can’t find a better man.  Can’t find a better man.  Can’t find a better man.

If you’re like me, you can’t help but sing those words instead of simply read them.  They come to life in your head, in Eddie’s voice. And if you are even more like me, you remember singing those words and meaning them with so much truth that it pained you, and you weren’t entirely certain how to feel when the song came on, because the pain of the truth and the release of the singing it were also tied together in this strange way that worked so well.  Turmoil and beauty connected in a way that only the most broken of us can see, acknowledge, appreciate, and even love.

I felt Better Man so deeply not because I was in a relationship with someone at the time who mimicked the song’s poor partner, but because I was somehow already identifiable, before the terrible partners started lining up in my life and experience, with that woman.  Can’t find a better man.  Can’t find a better man.

Like a fish knows swimming is his mode of transportation, I knew that I deserved to struggle through bad partners—I would live this out, and this would be my pain.

How did I know that?

Pearl Jam, Ten, was released on August 27, 1991.  Twenty-eight years ago, I was still in high school, and I hadn’t had a “real” partner at all. I would start a relationship with my first “boyfriend” not long after this album’s release and have sex for the first time about six months later—if you could call it that … it was more like awkward penetration with mutual dissatisfaction.  And throughout that year, even though I was coming of age and starting to figure out that sexuality was even a thing, sheltered in extreme ways from all its forms and expressions, I had no concept of bad partners the way I would just a handful of years later.  Yet, before it happened I knew.  Eddie sang it the way I felt it, and I still understand it as deeply and with as much truth today.  Can’t find a better man.

Part of the challenge in my own situation, I think, is that Calvinism and the last bits of Dutch puritanism were so pervasive in my little sub-culture.  I knew, even when my conscious mind had repressed every single synapse of sexual abuse, that I was “damaged goods”, impure, unclean, sinful, tainted … you could say it a hundred different ways and it all hurt the same way.  Something in me knew that there was this stain on my reputation, according to the religious and cultural views that were held by those around me.  Of course I would not be worthy of a better man.  I was sullied by debaucherous sins.  “Good” men want “pure” women.  Obviously!

The other part of the challenge was the terrible partners that did start to line up in my life.  They only reinforced the idea that I deserved crap partners who treated me with disrespect, put hands on me in violence, didn’t give me the option of consent—either by force or by coercion and manipulation—and generally just acted like assholes.

How did I end up with this line of losers?  It’s a chicken/egg conundrum that we may never solve.  Either my low esteem attracted the sharks, or the sharks lowered my esteem until I was weak enough to pull under and drown.  But the how and why don’t matter a whole lot, unless you are an anthropologist of some sort.  What matters more is the effect, which was proving to me the stain on my reputation must be evident to all, and I am being punished for it, and given what I deserve.

I can’t find a better man.  I don’t deserve a better man.

And eventually, having remembered the abuse and having been flooded with images, feelings, flashbacks, nightmares, and all of the confusion, rage, and fear of childhood trauma returning to my memory from the deep recesses of my mind, I didn’t want better men.  I wanted dirty, dangerous men who would offer me the opportunity to use sex as a tool for inappropriate coping—reliving traumas through promiscuity and increasingly risky sex.  Better men didn’t pull your hair and pound their pelvis against your ass and call you names and do all of it while another couple had sex in the same room—the other man getting off on watching your face as you were being ridden like a bronco and his own partner looking on, infuriated that everyone in the room was focused on your pleasure and pain.  Better men didn’t pass you on to their friends after they had finished so that another could take advantage of a woman still in the throes of passion when the first man was already spent.  And I happily climbed atop another penis, grinding my pain into men as if my hips were a confessional and thrusting organs were penance I needed to endure until I felt clean again.

But no amount of sex brought me to a place where I felt clean.  I still felt undeserving of the love of a better partner. So, I settled for partners who claimed love but offered insecurities, control, abuse, lust, addiction, avoidant behaviors, and a plethora of negative and damaging behaviors that reinforced the idea that I didn’t deserve love, and a soulmate was somehow outside of my reach, while everyone else around me was allowed to find that “perfect” lover.

Can’t find a better man.  Don’t deserve a better man.  Unworthy of a better man.  Incapable of a better man.  The list of disordered thoughts goes on and on.  And the disordered thinking continues to this day.

I’m still settling for a man that needs “fixing” and babysitting and diagnosing and repeated forgiving for the same error.  I’m still not taking my own good advice, and I’m dating “potential” instead of finding a fully actualized man who exhibits the fullness of his potential in his current circumstance—he doesn’t have the potential to get his shit together; his shit IS together.  I still date men who aren’t the men I want to have and hold as lifelong partners.  And in some way, this must be tied to the idea that I don’t deserve that partner.  I cannot achieve that relationship.  I don’t get to have the better man.

Can’t find a better man.

Some part of me longs for the better man.  Some part of me has all sorts of desire for being in relationship with a loving partner who treats me with respect and equity—a person who offers me compassion and kindness and honesty and love.  And then there is this other part that cannot shake the Dutch Reformed purity bullshit that says I am not white like snow with an untouched vagina and therefore cannot find happiness with a partner who offers me those things.  The dirty of Calvinism doesn’t wash off, and the damage of childhood sexual trauma isn’t something that I can recover from with my PTSD diagnosis, so I sit in the muck of disordered thinking nonstop.  I sit in that muck and I get sucked into unhealthy relationship after unhealthy relationship, because my conscience is a liar and my good advice extends outside of myself and not inward.

The fact is, I won’t find a better man until I find the better in me.

It is here—the better in me.

In fact, good and better and best should define me.  They probably do to most others—the non-Dutch Reformed ones—who encounter me.  I’m not covered in stains, as Calvinism would have me believe, but am a woman who does now, and has always, fought for equality, love, goodness, kindness, rights for all, life, grace, freedom, justice, and all sorts of positive qualities.  I’m overflowing with love and compassion and care for others—all sorts of others, and not just those who look like, act like, and believe like I do.  There is so much better in me.  And such better deserves to be met with better.  This amazing woman definitely deserves a better man … or a better woman, as the case may be, because letting go of my early religion also let me grab hold of the truth that my sexuality is extremely fluid and not fixed.  Regardless, a better man or woman belongs in this picture.  The previous pain that Pearl Jam helped me express is not a pain that I should have ever felt, and I should always have believed that a better man or woman was waiting just around the corner for me, and we would share a beautiful life.

But I didn’t believe that.  I wasn’t taught that.  Eddie Vedder saw or knew or related with women like me, who didn’t believe that and were not taught that, and he sang our pain.  If only he could have offered a correction instead of a correlation and showed me that this wasn’t my anthem but a lie to which I was listening.  Maybe he did mean to show me that, but I didn’t see.  Instead I held the belief that this was my plight and my burden to bear.  I didn’t have people who were correcting my error or replacing that lie with the truth.  I had more and more affirmation that I was a stain and stains deserved to be tossed to the trash bin and left there with the rest of the unclean things.

Can’t find better.  Can’t be better.  Am not better—ever.  No amount of goodness can transcend the one bad thing, even when the bad thing was your victimization and far beyond your control.  Give up now, Christy, because there is no redemption here.  There is only purity and not purity here, and you are not pure.

I recently had the amazing opportunity to visit with a young woman who is living in a situation near to the one that I grew up within.  She mentioned to me an abuse that she suffered, and then said something along the lines of not letting it ruin her.  “Some people let it mess up their life.”  She said she wasn’t one of those people.  But later in our conversation tears welled up in her eyes and she told me of challenges with feeling unheard, and like her parents were not dealing with issues affecting the family, and a number of other things that I felt after suffering abuses as a child.  It is messing up her life, whether she intends to let it or not.  And part of why it is messing up her life is the same reason it messed up mine—the inability of others to find empathy, compassion, and understanding, and their insistence upon seeing the world in black and white, instead of recognizing and honoring the fact that we all live in complex circumstances and hard and fast “rules” or dichotomies of good/evil, or virgin/whore, or right/wrong don’t make sense.  Beyond not working, those strict dichotomies harm innocent people, and reinjure those who are already victimized.  They mess up lives.  They destroy lives.  They convince young girls (or boys) that they will never find a better man (or woman), because they are not deserving … because being a victim has left them stained for life—dirty, bad, and impure.

Not only do I deserve a better man than the ones that have been in my life in my history, but I deserve an amazing man or woman as a life partner.  I deserve that because I am not stained and dirty and impure.  I am an amazing woman, with talent, grace, empathy, passion, perseverance, love, and beauty that are unmatched by most.  I don’t say that to brag or because I am egotistical and narcissistic.  I say that because it is a truth that was hard to learn and needs to be remembered.  I also say it because it is something that many others need to hear and accept.

I am not impure, dirty, damaged, and stained.  I am a victim of horrific and terrifying crimes against my person.  My brain was literally malformed as a result of childhood sexual trauma that was ongoing and created captivity-like conditions, making my brain nearly identical to that of a holocaust survivor.  My hormones, my stress responses, my gut health, my brain chemistry, my bladder and bowel control, and more were harmed by this trauma, and more trauma happened as I was retraumatized when people didn’t believe my claims of harm, doctors broke confidentiality, I was forced to interact with my abuser, my family refused to allow me to speak about or address the abuse, gaslighting and victim-blaming became commonplace, violent abusive relationships resulted from my deep need for connection tied with my inability to form healthy connection due to my complex post-traumatic stress symptoms, and more.

All of this was me being victimized.  None of this was me being impure.  If there were lines that were crossed and bad things that were done they were done by my abusers, the people who didn’t listen when I cried out for help, the doctors who didn’t know how to help and didn’t refer me to someone who could, the family who refused (and still refuse) to address the issues afflicting me and us, the church that pounded the drum of purity so loudly that a young girl was shamed into silence about sexual assault and rape, the “friends” who chose to support the denial of the perpetrator and not support my claim of abuse, the people that told me to “give it to Jesus” and it would be gone who made matters worse by not getting me the help that I needed from medical professionals, and the many people who refused to give up their dichotomous thinking in the face of my pain and struggle and confusion and help ease my suffering.

But if you are one of those people, I don’t judge you, and I don’t blame you.  You were likely (and perhaps still are) stuck in a space where that black and white thinking was affecting your judgment.  You didn’t mean to wrong me, I am sure.  You didn’t know better.  And when you know better you will do better.

I hope that what I write here today will help you know better.  I hope that it will help you move toward doing better.

I don’t want a young woman to come to me and tell me her secrets because she can’t be heard in the space where she lives, just as I couldn’t be heard in the space where I grew up, and where the worst possible things happened to me.  I don’t want that beautiful woman to be holding on to those secrets until she is 40 years old, because she feels impure and shamed by a community that sees things in such black and white terms that it cannot give love to the wounded and the wronged.

I share my story, in part, to heal my own wounds.  It helps me to get it out on “paper” and to release it from the places where it has been hidden for all of these years.  But I also tell it for all of you.  I tell it so that if you are the young men and women who have also been harmed in this way, you can know that you deserve a better man, or a better woman.  You are not impure.  You have no stain.  You are perfect and pure and good.  Someone did something terrible to you.  You deserve justice for that wrong, not shame.  And if you are one who hears of a person or from a person who has been harmed in this way, listen and support that person.  Fight for justice on their behalf and be certain that they receive the aid that they need.  Never support the perpetrator because it is easier than supporting the victim.  Never place blame on the victim.  Never treat a victim as though they should carry some shame.  They do not.  They have been wronged, and they deserve better from you than what I received.

I’m dating someone now.  I’m not always certain that he is my better man.  He has a lot of challenges.  I have a lot of challenges.  It makes things volatile at moments.  But I don’t see things in black and white, and I know that he was a victim of lots of wrongs, just as I was.  So, we work at loving one another, the best way we know how.  He cares for me and he tries very hard to be the best he can for me.  And he is open, honest, and working very hard to be the man that I deserve in my life, because he knows that I am an amazing woman.  That is much more than any man has done for me in the past, so I am happy in this relationship now.  If that changes, I no longer feel tied to shame and insecurity and the idea that I am not enough, so I can walk away without reservation and seek out a better man or woman.  And that is miraculous, given all that I have been through.

I still love to listen to Vedder croon out the words to Better Man.  I still sing along with my teenage angst somewhat intact, but it is more a memory of what was than a feeling of the moment.  I know that I have a better man.  I know that I can find and that I deserve better.  I am not the unclean and impure that should be shamed.  I am the overcomer—the strong, the determined, the loving, the understanding, the one who learns and shifts and grows and fights and finds life, no matter the circumstances she is offered.  And no matter the circumstances you have been given, you can fight to overcome in numerous, amazing ways as well.

We don’t win every fight, of course.  I’m still disabled and suffer from PTSD.  I still have several family members who refuse to discuss the events of the past.  There are many who would still shame me for my actions—like having sex outside of marriage, or smoking weed to manage my fibromyalgia pain.  But what other people want to consider shameful doesn’t matter much to me anymore, because I know my heart and my intentions.  I know that I am a good person who does all that I can to promote equality and justice.  I love deeply, I seek to respect all, I honor the beliefs of others as long as they do no harm, and I work toward creating a better world in any way I am able.  That is what matters.  Lines in the sand, black and white thinking, and rules that shame and harm the innocent do not matter.  Your heart matters.  Your intent matters.

So, let go of shame, call out victim blaming, call out gaslighting, and speak your truth.  Bring evils to light and bring justice to every situation you are able.  Don’t hide.  Tell your story.  And, of course, find a better man—with or without the Pearl Jam album in the background.  (Just kidding—definitely with the Pearl Jam album in the background!!)

Thanks, Pearl Jam.  Thanks, Eddie.  And thanks to everyone who helped and still helps me to step outside of Calvinist shame and to step into the love and light of who I am over and above the victimization that I have experienced.  I am a better woman every time I take that step.

 

 

And the Storm Rages On

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

It isn’t easy for me to be vulnerable.

I remember a friend from cohort saying to me once that I was very open by not very vulnerable, and I was upset by that statement, because I didn’t think it fair to separate the two out in that manner.  Being honest was, in my mind at that point, being vulnerable.  Now I understand more fully that there is a difference, and that Chris was correct in his assessment.  It is easy for me to tell the truth, and it is hard for me to be open about how that truth can harm me—how exposing the heart of me is different from exposing the facts of my situation.

I was recently quite vulnerable about the financial situation that I find myself in, and the subsequent challenges that my daughter is experiencing.  I let people know how hurt and frustrated and damaged and judged and punished I was feeling as a result of all sorts of things that are far beyond my control.  And I didn’t shy away and rewrite and edit and try to add decorum or lessen the blow of my emotions.

Overall, the response was positive.  I had a few people who commended my authenticity and vulnerability in stating not just the true facts, but the challenge of my own feelings about those facts.

But there was one response that has been eating away at me for days now, and I can’t help but craft some sort of retort.  I won’t start some strange, heated Facebook argument about it, however.  So, instead I want to address it here, and, hopefully, give it a worthy apologetic.

After lamenting that my daughter was forced to drop out of her educational program just 6 weeks prior to graduation due to financial constraints, and noting that my own challenge of being trapped in cycles and systems that keep me in an impoverished state, rather than offer me the chance to thrive—both of which I consider to be rather unique to me in my particular circles of acquaintance and/or influence—I received this comment in reply:

It’s not just you, Christy.  Nor is or (sic) just single income households. The economy is tough and there are a lot of people that I know right now that are struggling to keep the lights on. 

                I’m so sorry. I know what you’re going through when the stress, the anxiety, disability, and desire all meet in the perfect storm.

                I’m praying for you guys…

And under that was a meme that said:

Sometimes God calms the storm.  Sometimes He lets the storm rage and calms His child.

I later texted another friend that I was “Zen as fuck” until I read that comment.

I can’t fully express how upsetting comments like this are for someone in my situation.  The idea that my situation is just like a whole lot of other people’s situations is laughable.  To normalize what is incomprehensibly abnormal as a strategy to deny me aid is not one that is foreign, unfortunately.  People love to rationalize their refusal to help their fellow humans as “reasonable” instead of cruel or evil in all sorts of ways.  And the easiest way to do that is to dehumanize the person in need—using racism, classism, moral relativism, or some other ism to blame the needy for their own struggle.  That dehumanization is much more difficult when you sat beside said person in seminary classes and your child was babysitter to mine, so you resort to the second easiest rationalization—the “lots of people” argument.

“Lots of people” have disabilities and they…

“Lots of people” are divorced and they…

“Lots of people” are having financial challenges.  “Lots of people” have anxiety.  “Lots of people” want life to be different than it is.  “Lots of people” struggle.

All of this is true.  So, in the mind of the one arguing for the many, the one is simply an exaggeration of or a dramatic expression of what all sorts of people are dealing with.  They “understand”.  They “sympathize”.

Bullshit.

I call bullshit.

And I get to call it because of this ugly feeling in the core of my being whenever I get to read these sorts of comments under my vulnerable posts.

Ironically, just above this comment was a series of comments and replies that talked about how I hate to open up because of the times that I opened wide my arms for a hug and got a gut punch instead.  This “lots of people” comment is a gut punch where there should be an embrace.  And I will tell you why this feels like a gut punch.

My vulnerability is not something that is shared by lots of people.  It is an intimate thing, to share my heart and my deepest wounds and fears.  To say that lots of people are touched in the same way—even if it were true—is a betrayal of my trust.  This comment is akin to a friend confiding in you that they were raped, and you saying, “Lots of people get raped.  I know what you’re going through.  Sometimes you need to let go of shit and let God change your perspective.”

Gut fucking punched.

I’m deeply involved in all sorts of methods for changing my perspective, by the way.  I meditate almost every day.  I practice yoga.  I practice gratitude daily.  I use several mindfulness practices, and I have all sorts of routines in place to keep my heart open, my outlook positive, and my disordered thinking in check.  When I said that I was Zen, I meant it.  I could not have been calmer when I received that offending comment.  And I addressed it in the calmest manner possible:  I ignored it.  I talked to a close friend about how it made me feel, and she supported me through the event and helped me to keep a positive perspective throughout the situation.

So, even after being gut punched by the insensitive rationalizing comment, I kept my cool demeanor.  I didn’t need “God to calm his child”.

But the storm is another story.

The storm should NEVER have been here in the first place, and yet it rages on.

This common little meme, and the saying upon it, are very upsetting for me.  They assume that the things in life that harm us are somehow meant to be hanging around our heads so that God can teach us some sort of lesson in how to keep our cool under pressure.  And I don’t understand where that idea comes from, but it is a terrible sentiment, and we need to put an end to it.

My challenges stem from disabling conditions, yes.  And those disabling conditions might never go away or be cured.  I understand that a certain amount of coping is required for me to navigate life with those conditions.  In that sense, there with always be challenges.

But “the storm” for so many of us can simply go away if people stop using the rationale to avoid helping one another and affect change.

My storm includes a system that doesn’t fully support those in our society who have disability, and only offers me $750 in cash and $15 in food benefits, plus a housing stipend.  Adding those together doesn’t make a livable situation, and I am constantly in need and constantly in danger of losing my home, starving, not having my medications, or some other disastrous challenge.

My storm also includes the challenge of mental illness that has been present since early childhood, and which left untreated for so long has influenced my life in countless ways, making it impossible to consider any decision I’ve ever made one that wasn’t made under duress, and challenging me to figure out who the hell I am, and why.  I don’t need a midlife crisis, because I’ve never had an independent identity—my crisis is ongoing.

My storm includes a divorce from a horrible man, whose damage to my person and my psyche cannot and should not be downplayed, for any reason.  And that also means an absent father is a part of my daughter’s storm—and the storms of our children influence our own storms.  The weight of being a single parent goes far beyond “single income” households—and I’ve generally had a no income household, because of my difficulty with employment due to PTSD.  Having a completely absent parent, who contributes in NO way, is not anything that a person who lives in a two-parent home can ever imagine.  It still infuriates me when married people say things like, “I’m a single parent for the week”, when their partner is away on a trip or something.  Having a partner who is physically absent for a matter of days is nothing like having no partner at all.  You still have all sorts of support, financial and emotional just being the tip of the iceberg.  You can’t imagine none of that being present, ever.

My storm includes debt totaling over $250,000.  Most of that is from student loans, and much of the rest is due to the three years’ time that I spent waiting for my disability claim to be approved.  I was unable to work and waiting for the Social Security Administration to look at the body of proof that I was unable to work and sign off on my meager $750 a month payment.  In the meantime, I had nowhere to turn but credit cards, my dad, and charity.  So, I owe far more than I could ever pay back on my own, but I am not eligible for programs that would forgive these debts.  So, I sit and owe, and the interest just increases the amounts and increases the amounts.

My storm includes the complicated situation where my adult daughter cannot be considered an independent student, according to the rules of the government, but I cannot claim her as a dependent, according to the rules of the government.  This leaves her with a shortfall that other students don’t need to deal with regarding their own financial aid.  She can’t take out more money, but I can’t take out money on her behalf.  Because she is in this weird limbo state, because I am a disabled individual.  This isn’t her fault.  This should not be a storm she needs to weather, because I should be able to provide for her.  But I can’t.

So, my storm also includes the constant feeling of guilt because I cannot offer my daughter enough to put her in a position where she is on equal footing with her peers.  She isn’t set up for success.  She doesn’t have the advantages that her cousins and her friends and the children of the commenter on my post have.  I can’t offer her a chance at starting out at zero sum and working her way up from there.  She starts with my handicap.  She starts at the back of the pack, because I can’t give her an education and rent money and clothing and food and care packages and enough love to make up for the losses that she has suffered and the abandonment that she has felt.  I have loved her fiercely.  I have done and continue to do all that I can.  But it will never feel like enough.

My storm includes shame.  So much shame.  Not being a pure virgin girl, and not knowing how to stop being abused, and not understanding what that abuse even was or meant.  The shame of hiding and the shame of secrets and the shame of difference.  My storm later became one that was volatile and violent and full of rage—so much rage.  I felt like I was the storm, or like the storm lived somewhere deep within me and it was trying to get out and I was desperate to hold it in—failing to hold it in.  And then the storm became the shame of promiscuity and feeling like all of those words that are used to keep women captive—whore, slut, bitch—were the only thing that I could be, tainted that I was.  And it felt good to be used in a sense, until it was over, and then the dissociative state wore away and the wave of shame washed over again and I started holding in the storm again, as long as I could … until the next time.

My storm includes being all the people that you could rationalize away as not quite human.  Homeless.  Addicted.  Divorced.  Unemployed.  Mentally ill.  Using my body as currency.  Shielding my body from blows and then crawling into bed next to the one who wielded them.  Perpetually single.  Having sex with partners that were not my husband.  Having sex with partners who were not men.  The girl who stays out too late.  The girl who mows her lawn on Sunday.  (Oh, yes.  Some people consider that a grievous offense!)  I received anonymous notes about my bad behavior.  I was told I could lose my scholarship for having sex.  I got dirty, side-eyed looks from others.  When I talked to your husbands after church, you would suddenly appear at their sides and pull them in a different direction—like talking to me would lead to me stealing them away to mow lawns and suck on body parts by sundown.  In truth, I was just interesting and unconstrained by convention.  It’s an attractive thing to be interesting and unconventional.  (Translation:  read some books not written by female bible study developers and then discuss the contents with your husband … he’ll be mowing your lawn in no time.)

So, my storm also included years and years and years of not having my needs met. Hence the comments about opening my arms for a hug and getting a gut punch.

I’m still not surprised when I open myself up and somebody hits me hard, instead of offering me love and support.  Unfortunately, it is what I have come to expect.

The dumb thing about that meme is that you don’t have to tell me that the storm might not go away.  I fully expect that storm to fucking tear me to pieces and kill me.  It takes weekly therapy, twenty drugs, a host of friends, and all sorts of self-care strategies to convince me that the storm can be survived.  It takes every ounce of energy I can muster to get up in the morning and face the storm again.  It takes all manner of strategies to be my Zen self in the midst of all this chaos and terror and shame and unmet need.  But I do it.  I do it day after day after day.

I keep on facing it.

And some days the storm wins a little, and I freak out on a new potential partner with a host of doubt and shame and fear.  Other days I wake up and counter that with a bit more of the Zen and apologize and open up and tell him why I reacted that way, hoping that he will meet my need and connect with what I am saying … and not gut punch me while my arms are open.

But I face it.

And your job, as the people who would support me, is not to remind me that there is this big, ugly, terrifying storm that I am working so hard to live in the midst of without losing my shit.  Your job is to do everything that you are able to make that storm disappear.  Your job is to offer support where there wasn’t any.  Your job is to accept me and not shame me.  Your job is to love and not harm me.  Your job is to prove that the storm isn’t going to win, and that we can make all of that crap go away by being better than the crap.  We can change and grow and not hurt one another anymore and counter the falsehood with truth and slay the dragon of cruelty with a sword of kindness and acceptance and love.

That is the only way I know how to continue to face the storm—by trusting that we can eventually find calm skies for everyone.  Without that assurance, facing it is a worthless effort, and I may as well off myself now.  (That isn’t a suicidal statement, fyi.  That is me drawing on the extreme to make a point.)  Because if there isn’t an end to the need and the shame there isn’t really a point in moving forward.  And I don’t mean just the money—I mean the need for understanding and connection and love.  But I define love as “meeting needs”, so the money is a part of the equation.

If you are to assist another, you need to do more than tell them that there is struggle all around them and to work on their perspective.  You need to work to end the struggle.  Because no matter what your perspective is, if the struggle persists, you aren’t doing what you should be doing.  You aren’t helping.

I know that standing up against the storm isn’t an easy thing.  It is much easier to say, “Check your perspective” or to hide in some shelter and hope that the storm passes.  But for many of us—and for me—the storm rages on, indefinitely.  And that storm can’t stop.  It won’t stop without the change of perspective from many other people who are not me.

It is often not the people suffering, but those who are unaware of or those who are causing the suffering who need to change the way that they are operating in the day to day.  I’m usually not the one doing things “wrong”.  I’m generally suffering because of the things that are unjust, not the things that I cannot accept but that are perfectly fine.  And the ones suffering an injustice generally don’t have any power to make the change required to stop that suffering.  If they did, the change would happen hastily and without resistance.  Because, despite the lies that many in power like to feed you, people don’t wallow in poverty and addiction and illness and homelessness and sex work because they want to.  Just like Kanye West is an idiot for presuming that slavery was/is a choice, anyone who thinks that people live in the middle of storms because they like how lightning feels is an idiot.  Those people don’t have the shelter they need.  You must find ways to provide it for them—preferably by asking them how you can best provide them shelter.

Robert F Kennedy once said:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

This is the type of shelter-building act that we need in response to those who are in the middle of storms opening their hearts and asking for assistance.  Building currents that sweep down walls—sweeping away the clouds of the storm and bringing, perhaps for the first time, calm, blue skies, should be the goal that we aspire to reach.  Asking people to be quiet and calm in the middle of injustice is not the answer.  Fighting against injustice is the answer, on the grand scale.

And meeting me in my storm, with open arms and an embrace—not a gut-punching meme that seeks to discredit my need, devalue my expression, and normalize an injustice.

When you are met with someone who opens up and seeks to be authentic and disclose their struggle, don’t tell them to sit quietly in chaos, please.  Don’t ask them to be happier with the injustice that swirls around them.  Act to improve their lot.  Strike out against injustice.  Send forth that ripple of hope.

And if you won’t do all those good things, at least stop sending gut punches.

 

Contribute to Christy’s fundraiser here if you wish to help lessen her storm’s raging.  Thank you!

Up Again

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

It’s been difficult to write.

That’s not entirely true.

It’s been difficult to write something that doesn’t sound like suicidal ideation blended with complaint and condemnation and a little bit of protein powder to make an “I fucking hate everything and everyone and can’t remember why I keep trying at life smoothie”.

And I am relatively certain that nobody wants to read that.  Or taste that.  Or whatever.

On the bright side, I’m not literally suicidal.  And all sorts of pop songs are cycling through my brain—not death metal—so, all is not lost.  Though I did tell my dad yesterday that things were going to get very Dantesque around here if I don’t get a ruling in my case soon.  “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”.

But for the moment, I am only a depressing mess in written word, not in other facets of my life.

Today I have been wondering about that a bit.  And I am wondering if there is an element of true self and false self, or of seen and hidden, or of private and public, that is expressed through the writing and being.  Is there a tie that binds my writing with my deepest feelings, and keeps it honest?  Or is the best of me brought out in person, leaving the struggle for the page?  Is there some way that my craft expresses only one bit of me and not another?

I don’t know how to answer that.

And now I am tired.  Tired beyond all telling or explaining.

Just considering one or two questions exhausted me.  And my splint just hit buttons without my consent and tried to send my document over the internet for translation?  What the fuck, splint? Why are you acting out?  I know why the dog and cat and offspring are cranky—not enough play time, no fresh litter liner, and no access to cigarettes or boyfriend, respectively.

And I am cranky because everything and everyone else needs and wants my attention and affection and compassion and concern.  But I don’t even have enough of that for me.  I can’t give what I don’t have.  But I keep on trying.  I’m a fucking bleeding turnip.  I’m a fucking bleeding stone.

So, while the dog is fed and the cat is sleeping in the window and the temperature is below 80 degrees and the daughter is out, I’m going to stop trying to express my thoughts and start taking a nap.

Because the one thing I know for certain is that no matter how many times I fall, I’ve always gotten up again, and I think that is the truth for all of us in this household—whether I hold us up, or whether the others lift me up, or whether we all take turns dragging one another from the depths.  And lying down this afternoon gives me an opportunity to wake in an hour or two, and get back up again.  Rested a bit, I hope.  Ready to fight—in the good and righteous way where we make it through life no matter what challenges are thrown our way.  And the longer I have fought, the more I have learned that you stop the monsters by throwing back love and kindness and good.  So, I need to regroup and give myself the attention, affection, compassion, and concern—the care and love and kindness—so I can keep putting it out into the world and overcoming the challenges.  That’s right: We fight with care and love and kindness.  It’s the only way to win.  It’s the only way to get back up again.

 

Too Much

/ christyterese / 1 Comment

There has been so much to say that I haven’t been able to say anything.

It’s one of those things that seems inevitable for me.  The more there is, the less I do.  I have heard others speak of this phenomenon.  I’m, apparently, not the only one who suffers this problem.  And I have read a bit about how decision-making gets more difficult with each decision, so having too many things to decide leads to a sort of fatigue or paralysis for your will.

I think I currently have some fatigue or paralysis of productivity, because there is just too much I feel like I must produce—or do, in other terms.

I have this long list of things that I am working on completing … so I spend no time completing tasks and all the time bingeing on The Mysteries of Laura and The Killing on Netflix.  The sheer volume of tasks makes me unable to choose a task.  I am overwhelmed before I even start.

There is this thing that they call “uniform dressing”.  It is basically taking the school uniform into adulthood, and removing wardrobe decisions from taking up your precious decision-making energy.  Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, and Vera Wang all practice(d) this way of dressing.  When you think about it, they wear the same thing all the time—not the actual same clothing, but the same basic type of outfit.  Vera Wang wears a legging for her everyday, and Steve Jobs used to be in a black turtleneck at almost all times.  Obama has a white button down and a grey pant for every occasion—dress it up or dress it down, he is always wearing the same thing.

I’ve been thinking about trying the uniform dressing out with my own closet.  I don’t know about everyone else, but I stand in front of that damned closet for way too long.  And it doesn’t matter where I am headed or what I need to do that day.  I spend twelve minutes in front of the closet even when I am choosing joggers and a tee for a reclusive day in my apartment.  And that time staring at my clothes or trying on and taking off items increases in direct relation to the amount of “fancy” associated with the event.

The concept of uniform dressing seems like a good one, in terms of reducing time spent considering clothes.  What I wish for is a similar concept for the rest of the tasks in my life.  How does one “uniform clean” or “uniform pay bills” or “uniform consider the state of the union and freak the fuck out”?  How do all those decisions and determinations and actions become rote and leave my brain less fatigued and less paralyzed?

I’m not sure there is an answer to those questions.  They are mostly rhetorical—unless someone reading this has a solution, in which case, please share your wisdom!

So, yes, there has just been so much to write and so much to think about and so much to plan for and so much to accomplish that I have been stuck not writing and not thinking and not planning and not accomplishing.  I’ve been in this sort of non-being—walking around and appearing to be handling life, but being completely stymied by all the things inside my head.

And being overwhelmed is not new to me, sadly.  But this is different, because every aspect of life seems overwhelming, not just one or two.

I have worries about all the parts of my existence, because the world has changed in significant ways over the past few months, and my view of the world has changed in significant ways over the past few months.  I’ve had all sorts of experiences where what I thought was true, turned out to be false.  I thought that people were reasonable.  I thought that Spring brought security.  I thought that my worst fears were never to be realized.  I thought that life had a certain level of sense attached to it, and that nonsense couldn’t become normative.

I was wrong.

And the world that I have been cast into, by my realizations, isn’t the whimsical Wonderland that Alice gets to explore, but the opposite.  There is no whimsy here.  There isn’t joy here.  There isn’t hope here.  The only thing that my world shares with Alice’s world is the irrationality—the senseless replacing the reasonable.

And the chaos is too much.

I have degrees in philosophy, religion, and social justice.  I understand well the ways that thought and belief and social problems shift and form and reform throughout history.  But I have never experienced a time when that shift happened with such force and velocity that I could see the change happening—feel the pendulum swing.

That force and velocity made the pendulum swing right into my gut, and throw me flailing across the room, proverbially speaking.

The worst of that flailing was in response to the emotional connection I made with the change in thought that I was experiencing.  The knowledge that people whom I have connected with, stood with, and related with believed in and supported this swing of the pendulum was painful.  It still is.  Those who would claim to love me, on one hand, promote ideals that would kill me, on the other.  And the cognitive dissonance isn’t the thing that bothers me most.  The thing that bothers me most is the knowledge that I am the Other.  When it comes down to the nitty-gritty truths of the matter, I am not the person who “deserves” care and kindness and assistance and love and life.  I am the expendable “drain” on society.  I am the margin.  I am the fringe.  I am the problem, and the solution to fixing me is denying me basic rights and basic needs—effectively exterminating me.  Let’s all hope and pray that the literal extermination of people doesn’t become normative.  But we also need to be honest about the fact that denying anyone basic rights and basic needs casts a death sentence upon them.  And I feel like many in my nation are not being honest about that.

Paint the world with your fascism, if you must.  But don’t pretend that you have painted it with hope and love.  Admit that you have painted fascism.  Admit that you are making my life a challenge.  Admit that your actions are placing so much undue stress upon my brain that it cannot function normally—being paralyzed and fatigued by the hopelessness and fear that weights the synapses, slowing them to a crawl.  Admit that you have painted a picture that doesn’t include me, or at least puts me in the dirty, decrepit corner where the others cast out the “problems” they don’t wish to acknowledge or deal with.

And now all the Trump voters are freaking the fuck out because they believe this is a political post.  It is only partly such, because making the presidency a reality show cannot be ignored as a part of the dilemma.  But, it is mostly just me looking at what is happening in the world right now, and acknowledging that I no longer have a place in it, in the view of many.  I don’t deserve a space on the board when we are playing this game.  I’m continually told to not pass go and not collect $200.  I’m stuck in a world where nonsense is sense and reason is replaced with weird tweets and executive orders that can only serve a handful of people.

(Wait.  Are we literally in a game of Monopoly right now?  That would explain so much.  I fucking hate that game.)

So, here it is:  a post with no wise expressions and no neatly packaged solutions, but just the admission that I am overwhelmed and that I don’t know how to fix that.  I don’t even know how to begin to fix that.  This post ends in the same place it begins.  It ends with me paralyzed and fatigued in ways that make me completely ineffective and incompetent.  It ends with the pain of betrayal, and the questions about how and why my experience is invalidated and ignored.  It ends with me having too much to say and too much to do and too much to fix and too much to think about.  It ends with a plea to be heard falling on deaf ears.

Because that is exactly how it started.

And it is too much.

 

Same

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

There is this way of speaking that has taken over much of the communication between me and my daughter, and some of my friends as well, I suppose.  We shorten things.   It just seems like a whole lot of flourish and extra syllables isn’t necessary or important.  And while, as a writer, I am a huge fan of the flourish and the big words, in life they aren’t always helpful.

So, when we are thinking, “I completely agree and have a very similar perspective on this issue”, we instead say, “Same”.

I’m in the mood for pizza.

Same.

I can’t believe the state of the world and am grieving deeply over the pain and wounding that is overwhelming millions.

Same.

I wish that I could be in La Jolla right now.

Same.

I’m overcome with grief and don’t know how to express anything clearly, but everything hurts.

Same.

Yesterday I received news of the death of a good friend of my parents.  And all day I was feeling the weight of grief.  I was feeling it not just over the loss of her life, which is definitely significant and important, but also I was mourning the loss of my own mom.  And I was drawing all sorts of parallels between the lives of these two couples and feeling for those going through what I and my family went through a year ago.

All day I wanted to reach out to the daughter of the deceased wife and mother.  But there were not words.  There weren’t words when my own mother died either.  And the platitudes and “she is with Jesus now” assurances helped not one bit.  In some cases, they did more harm than good.

So, in the evening, I finally realized that what to say was that there was nothing to say—that nothing makes that pain lessened and nothing changes the complex feelings and nothing brings back the mother that you long for now more than you ever did when she was alive.  And I reached out with exactly that: an assertion that nothing would help and that I wouldn’t pretend it might.  I offered my love.  I offered my listening ear.  And I offered my sympathies.

And she shared a huge piece of her heart in reply.

As she expressed her feelings and her struggles and her joys and her surprise and her pain, I realized that all of these long years, we have been living a parallel life.  As she spoke of her many-faceted emotional state and the journey that she had been on as her mother became sick, her father became a care-taker of sorts, and her mother passed, I could have replied with that often used, “Same”.

We were sharing a history, but doing so apart from one another.

When we were kids we played together when our parents got together.  And it wasn’t as though we didn’t enjoy hanging out, but over time, as we became old enough to not be dragged along to our parents’ social events, we stopped spending time together.  And there were times when we connected over the years—running into one another at Christmas or a special event when we were all present once more.  But those little interactions became cordial and socially acceptable, instead of times when we played with abandon or shared secrets or did all those things that come easy when you are young, but cease to be so as you grow up.

Peter Pan had the right of things, in many ways.  Growing up steals much of the honesty and joy and many of the dreams which childhood allows, and even encourages.

What was stolen from this woman and myself was the opportunity to share our similar journeys.  Until last night, we had not had the opportunity to bond over shared experience, or to support one another.  It took the death of both of our mothers to recognize one another on a path we had been walking together for years.

I’ve been thinking much today about this sameness, and this similarity, and this shared experience.  I’ve been thinking that we all felt the weight of struggles alone, and all of this time we could have been bearing them together.  I have had other childhood friends express feelings that I have struggled with: I’m not enough, I’m not good enough, I cannot compare with person X, I don’t fit in, I can’t do anything “right”, I didn’t want to treat person Y like that but wasn’t brave enough to put an end to it and went along with the crowd.   All of this time, we were all young women (and a few men) who felt alone in our struggle.  We were not alone.

We are not alone.  We are united in this struggle.

The organizer in me wants to shout from the rooftops that we need to come together and fight against our common enemy.  But the pastor in me knows that such a strategy isn’t necessarily the right approach here.  What might be helpful is for me to express continually my struggle, and to allow others the safe space to express their struggle.  Because SO MANY TIMES I find that we are coping with the same feelings, and have so much in common, and could be bearing burdens together.

I’ve said before, and will say again, that I label myself as “spiritual but not religious” because organized religion has left bad tastes in my mouth time and again.  I believe in the Divine.  I don’t name it in terms of a triune god, but I believe.  But one of the things that many religions teach, and that I think is a divine directive, is that we share in one another’s burdens—we carry the heavy shit together to make it lighter.  And for some reason the place where I grew up chants the religion like a name at a boxing match, but also chastises individuals and tosses burdens onto their backs while they whisper behind their hands at the failures of those individuals to carry the load.

It is a sick practice, really.  It is wholly other than the divine imperatives to care for and love and welcome and heal and help everyone—like literally everyone.  All of those imperatives tell us to help carry the load, not toss it on the back of another.

I broke under the weight.

So many people I know broke under the weight.

And still the weight is piled.  My daughter experienced that weight when we moved back to that area.  And I left, rather than have her live in that place and in that way where you never feel like enough and people are constantly trying to hide their brokenness by breaking the person next to them.

Today I see that we can fix this.  Today I see that we were fighting the same war, but we were all at different battle sites.  If we could have been honest then, in our adolescence, and shared how we were struggling, we could have become a powerful force for change.  We could have swept that town of gossip and lies and shaming that keep the focus off of the problems of one, only to shatter the life of another.  We could have united to bear one another’s burdens.  We could have lifted the weight and held one another up and shared a journey.

We didn’t.

But I am committed to doing so now.

The past doesn’t change when we change in the future, but it can transform in some ways.  It has the benefit of perspective, and new perspective can shed light on events, even though the events themselves do not change.  And I am ready to look at this childhood in this place with these people in a new light, and with new honesty and connection and trust.  I believe that looking at it in this way will transform not just the past, but will transform us as women and men who thought for all these years that we were alone in our struggles.  Knowing we were in it together and talking about it together in this later stage of life empowers us.  It lets us acknowledge and release the bad and lets us acknowledge and embrace the good.

And that doesn’t happen overnight.  And some events you don’t get over completely—or at least there are some I don’t think I will recover from completely.  But knowing that the burden is shared, and that I am not the only one carrying the weight of those events puts me well on the way to recovery.

So, here I am, people of my youth (and any other time period, really).  I’m standing open to receive and to offer with honesty, with trust, with grace, and with understanding the journeys—mine and yours and ours—and the events and the feelings and the burdens.  I’m here, committed to change, committed to new life, committed to carrying the weight together.

Let’s all try to open up.  Let’s try to do it before any more of our parents die.  Let’s know that the circumstances of our childhood don’t define us.  Let’s know that molds were made to be shattered in order to exhume the beauty within.  Let’s know that we don’t need “thicker skin” or to keep our business private or to hide or to hurt.  We are allowed to be—in all of our ways of being we should feel comfortable and free and alive.  Let’s stoop under the weights of our friends and neighbors and partners and brace ourselves underneath, helping to lighten the load a bit.  And when enough of us are willing to stoop down and take some of that weight, we all find relief.

Community.  I’ve studied it for a long time.  And I keep coming back to this idea, that burdens are borne together, or we are crushed.  So, in order to survive, we need to start looking at the plights of those around us and responding with the short and effective communication that my daughter and I have come to use so frequently.  Same.

There is a quote I use often, and love from Lilla Watson.  “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time; but if you are here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

It is time for us to work together.  In my childhood community, in my current community, in my social circles, in my city, in my country, in my world, and in my universe it is time for us to work together.

It is time for us to understand that the liberation of one is bound to the liberation of all.

We can only be free when we are free together.  We can only bear burdens with all of us carrying the weight.  We overcome only because we do so together.  And we do so together because in many ways we are all on the same journey—not just in the specifics of events or feelings, but in the sense that we are all evolving and developing into a better version of humanity (or we should be, at least).

We are meant to look to the person next to us, to see their experience and their perspective and the events that shape them and to declare, “Same”.  And if we cannot do that, we will be crushed under weights we didn’t imagine would ever be placed upon our shoulders.

I think we see that in the news every day of late.

We join in sorrow over things that were caused by a refusal to bear burdens of another.  Discrimination doesn’t hurt us personally—that is the burden of the gay or the black or the Muslim—so we don’t enter the fray.  And we are seeing the results of that failure to stoop and lift with our fellow human beings.  When we don’t bear the weight together, people break.  But there are consequences felt throughout the entire community when those individuals break.  You can’t escape the aftershock of the seismic events.  So, why refuse to help hold the weight that might prevent those events?  Ignoring the problems of others doesn’t work.

We lift together, or we are crushed.  All of us.  The whole of humanity.  The entire planet.

And saying it that way makes it seem an enormous task.  But it really just starts with us listening and bearing the weight of the feelings and experience of another.  A world full of people caring about the person next to them is a world that resembles what most would see as a heaven or a paradise.

That heaven, that paradise, is achievable in the here and now.

It can happen if you open up and share your journey, and listen well to join in the journey of another.  It will happen if we simply love one another, care for one another, and bear one another’s burdens.  It will happen when we hear the struggle or joy of another and can respond with a genuine agreement.

“Same.”

 

 

 

 

Too Much

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

Yesterday was too much.

In fact, the too much started the day before, and I didn’t do a good job of mitigating it at the outset.  But who is great at mitigating, really?

On Thursday, when I took the bus to the doctor, there was so much chaos.  There was a woman who insisted her daughter, who looked to be about 10, was 6, so she didn’t need to pay fare for the girl.  And she kept arguing with the driver long after she go to her seat (not having paid, and seemingly having gotten what she wanted).  She would yell some angry assertion about his dumbness and him minding his business, which I am relatively certain he wanted to do, but she kept yelling out offending shit, and it is really hard to mind your business when someone is shouting theirs at you through the bus.

Not long after, a man got on the bus without paying.  We waited several minutes while the driver tried to get the man to leave or pay, to no avail.  So, finally, and with much frustration, the driver went on with the route.  I was running late by this point, and getting internally frustrated by that lateness.  And then the lady with the very-old-looking-probably-not-6-year-old started up again.  She was now angry that the driver let the other man get by without paying.  Even though she had gotten by with not paying fare for the child.  It became a mess of people yelling out random shit about the offenses against them, when the only person who could rightfully be upset, in my opinion, was the driver of the bus.

It got to be too much.  I quickly snagged a seat that let me curl up toward the window and cranked the volume on my headset.  But too late.  Tears started forming, for one reason or another in the corners of my eyes.  Was it fear? Frustration?  Stress?  Anxiety?

Whatever it was, it threatened to pour down my cheeks, which would not have been a great thing and would have added to my emotional upheaval.  So I pushed it back.

There is and has been a place to push things since my childhood.  I know it well.  So many things were too much for my small psyche, and I could not deal—not just would not, but literally was incapable—with that excess.  So, it got pushed into the place.

Obviously, the place isn’t a physical space, as far as we know.  There are multiple synapses that stop firing or misfire or disconnect in the dissociative brain.  It would be much easier if there was one spot that held all the excess. Maybe then we could zap that space into connection, or cut it out altogether, or some other frighteningly macabre way of coping.

As It happens, there isn’t an easy solution, macabre or no.

Once I got off that bus, onto another, and eventually to my appointment, the overwhelmed feeling should have dissipated.  But it didn’t.

That question.  The question.  “When did you first become aware that your speaking was different?”

I was meeting with a vocal specialist.  The troubles with my voice have kept me from living life in the way I would otherwise choose.  I long for my singing voice.   It is definitely time to address the situation.  But, maybe somewhere in the back of my mind, or shoved into the place, there was the fear of this question.

I didn’t notice.  Tony noticed.  Tony mocked me, mimicked me, publicly shamed me.  He told me, in the most hateful and terrible ways, that my voice was different—a strange way of clearing my throat, or making a guttural sound where there ought not be one for an English speaker, or the way that my words have a bit of a sing-song ending at times.  He used that vocal abnormality to hurt me.

And when she asked the question, and I tried to respond, I cried.

The thing is that the place sometimes overflows.  No amount of strength or determination can keep all the too much things from spilling over at times—usually at very inopportune times.  And the place overflowed onto my face and neck in the voice doctor’s exam room.

She was kind.  She was understanding.  And she let me get through that little moment when the place door creeped open a sliver and stuff spilled out, and then she got on with our work.  She showed me the inside of my throat while I was speaking and singing.  She referred me for voice therapy, changed up my meds, and referred me to neurology.  Seeing my throat and my tongue and my voice box in action made the moment when I cried seem miles away.  There are reasons.  They can be addressed.  And that brought all sorts of relief, and shoved Tony’s asinine behaviors back into the place.  Those behaviors might come out in next week’s therapy session, but for now they are not overwhelming anymore.

You might think that is the end of the story.  I faced the overwhelming events and got on with my life, yes?

No.

The feeling didn’t lift.  I watched Netflix.  I worked on crafts.  I took a shower.  I took a nap.  I went for a swim.  I got a haircut.  I took a walk.  I wrote.  I entertained the dog.  I texted with friends.  And through all of the really good coping strategies, the feeling still stuck.  It wouldn’t leave.

And it became more and more pronounced.  It became more anxious, more desperate, more affecting.  Until last night when the place sort of exploded into the forefront of my brain.

Here’s the thing.  The place scares some people, but some people take it in stride.  I’m forced to take it in stride, whether I want to or no.  And I know that the preference for others is to not take it in stride.  There are only a few people in my life who can and will and do stick around when the place shows its face.

Last night, it unleashed itself in full force upon the “bae of the day”.  (I call him that not because he is expendable or will be replaced tomorrow, but because I’m not going to use his actual name here—too early for that.  Plus, it rhymes, and who doesn’t love that?)

I think that I was a bit shocked when all the overwhelming feelings channeled into me having crazy anxiety over what and how and why we were connecting with one another.  I am experienced enough to know that it is best to let things play out in new relationship of any kind, and not to force it.  But the place doesn’t know that as well as I do.  The place might be in my head, but it doesn’t usually communicate with the other areas in the brain, so it doesn’t act with reason.  And this irrational fear that I was misreading all the signs and that I wasn’t important and that I was secretly being played came flying out of the place.  And bae of the day has NOTHING to do with all that shit that escaped the place.  He has in no way acted in a manner that would make the place’s emotional outburst reasonable.  But, again, the place doesn’t act with reason.

But here is the beautiful part of the story.  He met the place with unflinching care, kindness, and understanding.  He engaged the place with honesty and respect.  He accepted the place, and he honored it, and in doing so he accepted and honored me in ways that I don’t even fully understand.  Nobody has ever met the place with as much grace as bae of the day met it.  And because he did, he immediately shut it down.

He shut it down not in a way that made me force my feelings and overwhelmed state back into the place.  He shut it down in a way that let me leave it out.  He shut it down in a way that allowed me to let it be, let it show, and potentially let it go.

And this morning I was thinking about it, as I woke in peace and felt lighter than I have in many days, and I wondered what life might be like if all the people met my place in like manner.  I’ve spent about 35 years managing and monitoring the place.  I’ve been trying to stuff more and more into that place as more and more things turned out bad and wrong and painful.  And I can count on one hand the number of people I trust to meet the place with the grace, kindness, and understanding that is required to process, and to make the place a bit smaller.  But what if there were more than a handful of people who allowed the place and its secrets and its struggles to come out into the light?

That would be earth-shattering.  That would change everything.  That would be a total life-altering experience.  And that would heal so much that is broken.  The place is filled with brokenness.  That is its hallmark.  That is its purpose.  That is its truth.  It is filled with every shard that ever broke away from my heart and my spirit.  It is filled with every hurt I cannot bear.

But when someone else bore the hurt with me, everything changed.  That hurt couldn’t hurt me quite as much anymore.

I’ve learned over a lifetime of keeping the place stocked with secret pain that people don’t like to bear the hurt with me.  I’ve seen the little cracks that open up end relationships, create dangerous situations, and bring shame and judgment upon me.  And I cannot imagine EVER opening the door to let everything out at once.  That might be downright lethal.

But I have more hope today than I did yesterday.  I have more hope that there are people out there like bae of the day.  I have more hope that the place could potentially be emptied bit by bit, shard by shard.  I have more hope that there is healing, and that my whole life doesn’t need to be defined by this PTSD label (though some of it will always be there—my brain scans will attest to that).

And if you are a person who has quit me or threatened me or judged me over the place, I forgive you and I understand that.  I have days like yesterday, when I cannot even cope with what lives inside of that place, so I certainly have no hard feelings toward others who cannot cope with it.

If you are a person who understands this post, and feels the weight of the place in your own spirit, know that there is help out there, and you need not be ashamed or afraid—but you are also totally allowed to feel ashamed or afraid, you are entitled to those feelings.

And if you are a person who has faced the place and stayed in my life, you are fucking amazing.  And I will cling to your responses, continually holding on to the hope that the place might empty, and my heart might heal.  I love you like crazy.

There are these challenges to living with a dissociative disorder.  There are these struggles with managing the rage and the depression and the isolation that such disorders cause.  There are these outcomes of loss and further pain that accompany the misunderstandings about and the actions precipitated by such disorders.  But there are also these people who understand, and who love, and who respect, and who assist, and who offer chances and graces and changes.

I am so grateful for the people who support me in any and all ways.  But I am most grateful for those who let the place be a part of me, and don’t shy away, and let me work my way through it and toward an integrated brain and a more balanced life.  Too much suddenly becomes a tolerable amount when you find those who would bear the weight alongside you.

I’ve found another who will help me bear the weight of the place. I’m grateful I have the opportunity to know him.  I’m grateful for what he carries.

Today is a tolerable amount.