Maybe a lot of you are too young or too straight to remember the AIDS crisis. I’m not.
It took my cousin, whom I loved deeply.
He was one of the few people in my life that I felt really understood me. It wasn’t until after he was dead from a horrible disease that I knew why. I named my daughter after him. He meant that much to me. And it took a long time for her to come to terms with being named after a gay man who died from the HIV virus in the 90’s, since we lived for many of her formative years in a small, conservative town in rural Iowa.
You see, a lot of people there didn’t much care that my cousin was dead. Many of them thought that he deserved that horrific end—it wasn’t a pretty one. He didn’t even want us to visit. He didn’t want us to remember him in that state, but to remember him full of life and color and joy. And people thought he deserved to die in such a violent way because he was gay.
Tonight I heard a neighbor outside my window saying some bullshit about more people dying in chihuahua attacks than will from the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. I’m certain that isn’t a true statistic. First, because those are some tiny dogs you could just kick into oblivion. Second, because we have no idea what the ramifications of this illness will be in the end. That is why it is called “novel”. It’s new. We don’t have data that is reliable at this point. We do not understand this virus fully, and we don’t know how many people will lose their lives because of it.
But one thing that I have noticed about the response to this virus, much like the one that took my cousin’s life, is that there are many who don’t seem to care what life is lost, as long as the right people die.
Those that are most susceptible to dying, as far as we can tell, are the old and infirm. Those that are most susceptible to dying, as far as we can tell, are the ones with preexisting conditions. Those that are most susceptible to dying, as far as we can tell, are the ones who are already in the categories that our current society—this consumerist machine we pretend is a democracy—does not value. The right people are dying, for the most part. And as long as that is the case, those that do not value them will not make the changes necessary to safeguard the society as a whole.
It is history repeated, but a different set of people are now waiting for the spin of the barrel, and the fated shot, and the moment to reveal itself. Will they live or will they die?
The lesson, if there is one to be learned, would be that all that death didn’t stop the LGBTQ+ community from thriving. In fact, in some ways, it helped inspire us to rally and organize and become stronger. And that illness didn’t just take gay men. It spread far and wide, becoming a leading cause of death for some time. It is still considered pandemic in some countries, where medications that are easily obtained here are not available. I
t still takes lives, even with all the advances we have made and our current ability to make it undetectable in some. It still frightens us. It is still a threat and a life-altering diagnosis and an automatic disability.
It stopped killing the right people. It started killing everyone.
You might not be a high risk individual. You might not know a high risk individual. You might not care about a high risk individual. But know this: you cannot control this novel thing. It might decide that it kills Tom Hanks as quickly as it kills a homeless diabetic. It might decide that getting it once doesn’t make you immune, but makes you more susceptible to reinfection. It might decide that it gives no care to malaria drugs that Trump likes, or to the economy, or to race, or gender, or age, or preexisting anything. It might mutate again and again, creating countless cycles of death on a yearly basis. It might never leave. We may never find a treatment or a cure or develop a vaccine. We may be at its mercy forever. We simply don’t know.
And if you are counting on this being fine because the right people are dying, then you are a monster who deserves not one death, but a thousand. To decide that you are more valuable than another human—that your pleasure or freedom or agency is more important than their life—is the worst possible thing I can imagine. The most heinous of crimes is to imagine yourself a person of greater importance than another, and to sacrifice them in your service.
I remember when I found out that my cousin was dying. I was grieving and distraught. The few people I told about his contracting the virus all asked the same question first thing, “Is he gay?”
Why did that matter? What was their fascination with his sexuality?
I didn’t really understand the question until today.
I saw the man who lives out behind my apartment complex and he asked if I had anything to eat. I told him to wait while I went inside and bagged up some breakfast bars and crackers and bottles of water—whatever I had around that he could easily transport and keep relatively fresh for a bit. I brought it out and handed it to him. I didn’t hug him like I usually do, because of social distancing, but after I went back inside I cried for the first time since this pandemic began. He is the type of person that so many others are unconcerned with. He is the expendable extraneous drain on society that we can let go.
And so am I.
So was Terry.
So were millions of men and women just a couple decades ago.
And yet, somehow, we have already forgotten that our callous hatred then is a blight on our history that we should not be repeating. We are going out to Spring Break or to see cherry blossoms while we let the right people die.
People asked if my cousin was gay because it justified his death, in their minds. It made it reasonable and righteous that an out of control, unknown virus was ravaging his body. They didn’t need to be afraid of AIDS if it was still letting the right people die.
I was taught to believe in a god by people who don’t care if he lets me live or die, so I’m not sure I am a believer in that, exactly, anymore. But I do have a system of belief that includes a Divine. These days I pray often. But I don’t request what you might imagine—health and for my loved ones to make it through this unscathed. Obviously, I want those things. But I find that I am begging that the Divine have mercy upon us, for allowing this lack of empathy and this sociopathy and selfishness and self-aggrandizement to go on, unchecked, for so many generations. I beg forgiveness that we continue to choose races and classes and groups that we deem expendable, as long as our own needs are met.
There is no person that should be sacrificed for our comfort. We should never be comfortable while others around us are losing their lives or freedom or resources. We should be fighting for their lives as if they were our own.
We are all human and we are all equal.
It is time to start treating one another as such, before there are none of us left to watch the others perish, because our greed has swallowed us all.
humanity
Payday
I’m busy printing out proofs to attain a payday loan. It is a long shot, last resort sort of move on my part. There aren’t any options left beyond a ridiculous interest rate over 50% and steep penalties should I not meet the strict requirements of repayment of that criminal amount of interest. It should be a crime for such life crushing loans to exist. And yet I am working to get one, and desperate to hear them approve me for this loan that I believe to be criminal.
It is nonsense, really. But it makes all the sense when you live in the margins, where there is never enough, and you are treated with contempt and barely considered human, much less treated with the grace and kindness and compassion that humanity should garner.
These days, I don’t know what “humane” means. I don’t know that “humanity” exists in the way it once did. Or, more correctly, I don’t know that it exists in the way that I had imagined.
I was running very late for a doctor appointment the other day and needed to take a Lyft instead of a bus. My driver, a Somali native, said something along the lines of “selfishness is human nature”. I wanted to argue that was not true. I wanted to express the compassion and love that humans were capable of offering one another. And then I thought better of it, knowing that I was suffering needlessly an economic situation that could be eliminated with just a few dollars from the people who call me “friend”, and knowing that this man, having emigrated from Somalia, knew selfishness and pain and racism and judgment and xenophobia and messed up fucking shit that I, an already despairing woman, cannot even imagine. Who was I to tell him that humanity has something better to offer??
Instead, I made a statement about perspective and how much we are shaped by what we experience in our lives—hoping to avoid agreement that hurting those whom we can place beneath us so that we might rise is human nature, but also not arguing that we are better than that, because I don’t feel like we are better than that very often of late.
I sit at a desk covered in images of Wonder Woman. I built it. I covered it in these images deliberately, because I found it inspiring. Not only do I sit and work atop a work of art when I am well enough to do work, but I also have a deep sense of justice and love and giving of myself to improve the state of the world, and she embodies that for me, and reminds me that my end goal is a world filled with love and justice. What I do at this desk should be focused on that goal. And to a great extent my work is focused on that goal.
But more and more my focus is fear. There is worry over finances. There is stress over what I read in the news. There is the sadness and the horror that comes from seeing the world become more broken, fractured, confused, and afraid as a particular world leader creates xenophobia, insecurity, unrest, racism, and general hatred and chaos. There is pain and struggle and the fear that the future will become even more difficult than the present. And that isn’t just my personal fear, but the fear of millions, which is even more heartbreaking, because of my deep empathy. Wonder Woman and her ideals seem worlds away while I work atop images of her from generations of comics.
I wonder if Donald Trump ever watches super hero films or reads comics. Do you suppose he sees himself as the hero or the villain? He certainly doesn’t have the ideals of the hero, so he must be delusional if he identifies as one.
I know that I am not the hero in any story. I sometimes get painted as one. Ask my brother-in-law about Christmas Day in Seattle and he will tell you a tale that makes me the hero of the story. But I am not the hero, because I only did what any human should do—I helped a woman in need. I felt her pain, I met her in it, and I made certain that she was safe in the hands of professional medical personnel before I left to attend to my own needs. That is the least that we should be doing for one another. The absolute least.
There is so much more.
So. Much. More.
Recently, I had dinner with my “brother”, Adam. We were talking about need and giving and enough and excess. He talked about aid that he had offered our nephew, and the way that he had added a component of “paying forward” part of the funding that had been offered to him. Give to another, the way Adam gave unto you.
It sounds a bit biblical, right?
It is a bit biblical. Because there is a verse in the bible that is pretty much the same. It is found in the Gospel of John, Chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. It says, “I give you a new commandment: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
I suppose that means if my nephew pays forward a third of his college aid, he is a disciple of my “brother”. Haha. There are definitely worse men to be disciples of, so this is probably a good thing.
The point I am working toward here is that the goal that we as humans are meant to be working toward—according to Jesus, and according to Adam, and according to Wonder Woman, and according to the feeling in my gut—is offering love and compassion and physical needs and grace and equality and honesty and kindness and more than enough. And I don’t know when or where we lost sight of that, or whether we ever truly had that in our sights as a society at large. But our heroes—the embodiments of the best of us—have always had that in view. We need to cling to that view.
I should be focused on what I can do to continue living out the ideals of Wonder Woman, not on what I need to desperately print out to prove that I am worthy of a criminal payday loan! No human being should be forced to sell their soul so Speedy Cash out of fear that they won’t live from the 28th to the 1st, and will lose their home, contact with their family and friends, and the ability to obtain sufficient calories to sustain their body. And when some of the people are in this state while others are jumping off of fancy boats in the waves on a weekday morning, we are not loving one another as we have been loved. We are not giving to one another as Uncle Adam gave to us. We are being selfish. And we are letting Somali men believe that this is just the way we are as humans—that this is just who we are and will always be: selfish bastards who trample one another to elevate ourselves.
Are you a selfish bastard who tramples others to elevate yourself? Is that who you want to be? Is that what you want to be known for and what you want others to believe defines the human condition?
I cannot abide that. I cannot tolerate that. I cannot accept that.
I won’t let humanity be a giant game of “king of the mountain” where the ruthless climber is the winner. Not if I can do anything to help it.
And I can do something to help it. You can also do something to help!
We can all stop accepting the idea that selfishness is a part of our DNA and refuse to let humanity be defined by anything but the heroic ideals of love and generosity and compassion and care and grace and good. We get to define who we are, as individuals, as a society, and as representatives of the human condition. We decide.
So, decide now. Are you the kind of person who lets payday loans take the souls of disabled, poor women struggling to make ends meet, or are you the kind of person who changes the narrative and refuses to let this be the way that we treat the people in the margins? Are you the kind of person who is ready to stand up and work hard to eliminate the margins?
It will be difficult work. Change always is difficult. You need to learn, you need to change the voices in your head, you need to assess the things that you believe and challenge the beliefs that you have held for many years. So much of our bias is unconscious, and it takes a lot of self-reflection to work out what we think, and then to consider the ways that thinking might be incomplete, inconsiderate, or just plain wrong. But if the choice is between doing hard work or letting down humanity, I choose hard work every single time.
Today, I still need the payday loan. And it breaks my heart to know that I need to sacrifice in this way. It is a terrible choice. But there aren’t good choices in the margins very often, unfortunately. Maybe at some point I will have better options, or there won’t be margins, and humanity will not be seen as selfish, but as loving and generous and compassionate. Maybe on that day payday loans won’t exist—they actually will be criminal, as in illegal—and disabled women will not be afraid of starving or living under bridges because of financial challenges. If enough of us choose care over selfishness, this will be reality.
So, choose heroic ideals instead of payday loans. Don’t let Somalian Lyft drivers believe that this is who we are as humans. Don’t be this as humans.
We can do better.
I know that we can do better.
Follow Jesus, or Wonder Woman, or Adam. Choose heroism over selfishness and do better.
As I have loved you, so you should love one another.
Five Common Arguments Against Watching 13 Reasons Why, and Why, as a Survivor, I Reject Them
Recently, the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why has created what I wish were helpful conversations on my Facebook feed. But, more often than not, the people who are posting are educators of middle and high school students in small towns. The reasons why I have those sorts of educators on my feed are simple—I used to live in those small towns. But when I am looking at these posts, and reading the arguments against the series, I can’t help but become angry and frustrated with the content and the comments.
I am a survivor of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder, and suffer from anxiety and depression. I have a daughter who suffers from depression and anxiety, shows signs of post-traumatic stress (we don’t yet know for certain if she adopted those symptoms from being raised by me, or if she suffered some violence as a child that we have not uncovered). Both of us have been suicidal.
Given my experience with these events and situations, I have a perspective that, I believe, needs to be expressed and heard by those small-town educators. Because their reasons for not allowing students access to this series or the book that inspired the series are not, necessarily, informed reasons.
So, here are five common arguments against the show, and why I reject those arguments:
- Students are too young to see depictions of violence, assault, and suicide.
I can’t be certain when I started to be sexually abused, because I was a child, and I dissociated from those events. What I can say with certainty is that I started exhibiting signs of acute trauma by age nine or ten, and I was suicidal by about the age of eleven. My daughter first needed psychiatric care at age 9. She was hospitalized by age 16, having struggled with major depression for over a year, and finally admitting her intention regarding suicide.
Students are not too young to see depictions of such violence, assault, and suicide. Students as young as eight or nine years old are experiencing such violence, assault, and thoughts of suicide!
There is some sort of desire to ignore that our children are exposed to and experiencing things that we wish they were not exposed to or experiencing. Even I, being fully aware of all the warning signs of mental illness, didn’t know that my daughter was experiencing certain symptoms until it was almost too late.
We don’t want our children to be suffering in this way, so we ignore the signs of that suffering—pretending that the bad things can’t be happening.
This does no good for our students. This does no good for the whole of humanity. Pretending problems don’t exist has never solved a single problem. Wishing that our kids are too young to be harmed in this way—battered physically and psychologically, being taken advantage of, being pushed to a place where life is too hard to continue living, being abused, bullied, assaulted, raped—will not make it a reality. It is ignorant to keep insisting that middle and high school students don’t see this violence every day. They do. They aren’t too young to watch a show that addresses issues that they are experiencing. They certainly are not too young to watch a show that brings the possibility of identifying with characters that are suffering, when nobody else in their life or experience seems to understand or care about what they are going through.
As a child, I didn’t know where to turn with my pain. As a teenager, I didn’t feel connected enough to anyone to admit how dark and dangerous my internal dialogue was becoming. I pretended to be innocent and outgoing and “normal”, because nobody was talking about things like mental illness or suicide. I felt completely divided and set apart from everyone around me. I had nowhere to turn.
13 Reasons Why addresses these issues in what seems like a violent and shocking way. But our children, our students, and the youth in our society are not protected from such violent and shocking events. They are already experiencing this. And the series gives them someone to identify with, and offers resources where they can receive help, should they identify with those who are being bullied, assaulted, or raped, and those who are considering death by suicide.
The honest address of common experience is not too dark and damaging for the young people around you. It is an opportunity to feel heard and understood. It is an opportunity to feel normal, in a society that wants to insist that this violence isn’t normal.
- “Counselors” are against youth watching the show.
This is an annoying argument, because there might be some truth to it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it good advice. There have been several people who are school counselors or mental illness “experts” or social workers who have come out with statements or articles that offer their opinion of 13 Reasons Why. Some of them say that watching these events can trigger or encourage negative behaviors.
This is partially true. Watching events that you have experienced can trigger symptoms. This doesn’t always happen, however, and it isn’t always a terrible thing. Being in a controlled environment, knowing your own triggers, and being aware of the content ahead of time can all limit the triggering effects of viewing such events.
13 Reasons Why has very clear trigger warnings before each episode that will portray events that have the potential to harm those who identify closely with such events. When we were watching the show, one such warning prompted my daughter to ask me if I wanted to watch. She knew that it might be a difficult thing for me to see. But I watched. And I was very glad that I watched, even though it was a very challenging scene.
I later commented on a Facebook post that was basically a “counselor response” to the show. I said that it was the most real and honest depiction of the event that I had ever witnessed. I found watching the characters go through such events healing and validating, not triggering.
Some people will find these episodes and these images difficult. Some people shouldn’t watch, if they are concerned about triggers. But, for many who are survivors of such events, this is a show that offers an extremely honest view and allows you to connect to your own pain, your own struggle, and your own healing. Will all teens be ready to address these issues with such realistic and graphic images? No. But will many of us, as survivors, finally feel heard and understood and supported by seeing such clear and unrestrained images? Yes.
“Counselors”, as a blanket statement, could include school officials who haven’t had psychological training, really bad advisors (like the first “counselor” I had as an adult, who told me it wasn’t the fault of my abuser that he abused me, but that “curiosity” is normal), or excellent mental health care providers. And these people are not knowledgeable regarding every case that might crop up. There are numerous ways to connect with the material, and while one person might have a bad reaction to things, another might find it healing—as I did. The point here is that there is no one appropriate or “correct” approach to content like that in 13 Reasons Why. The best way to consider viewing is on a case by case basis, with the survivor being the one whose voice is heard and the survivor being the one who chooses to watch or not watch.
The most triggering movie that I ever watched was Captain Phillips. It didn’t have any trigger warnings. And it wasn’t about abuse or rape. I saw (spoiler alert) Tom Hanks step onto a vessel that was rescuing him. As he did, he—in an amazing performance—exhibited signs of trauma, because he had just suffered a significant trauma. I began to weep and shake and shudder. Seeing him show the shock and dissociation that PTSD sufferers go through, I was feeling all that the character was feeling. It was awful. And I may never watch it again, but even with the triggering and the awful feelings, that scene was an opportunity for me to acknowledge and make some sort of peace with my own suffering.
There is no way to know for certain what will and what will not trigger or affect a person. But since bullying, sexual and physical assaults, and rape all have a common thread of taking away the autonomy of the victim, allowing each person to decide and be in control of what they choose to view and not view is important.
I’m not a “counselor”. I’m a survivor. So, I haven’t gotten a degree in psychology. But what I do know is that autonomy and identification and validation are essential to healing and coping and overcoming events like those depicted in 13 Reasons Why. A stranger who claims to have superior knowledge because of a few classes is not necessarily a help, because telling survivors what they can and cannot do, or see, or hear, or cope with can be a retraumatizing event. We need autonomy. We need to decide on our own. And we need to cope with the support of others, not the demands of others.
- The show glorifies suicide.
I honestly can’t understand this argument against 13 Reasons Why. I can’t understand how someone could watch such terrible events unfolding and think to themselves, “Wow, I think I should do that. That is awesome!”
If you are suicidal, please seek help. If you are not currently experiencing suicidal ideation, but have in the past, consider the trigger warnings and make an informed decision regarding whether or not you wish to view the show. (Again, you deserve autonomy and get to choose the media to which you are exposed.)
That being said, the depiction of suicide in this show is horrible, violent, sickening, and shocking. It is intentionally so. The producers worked very closely with several medical professionals in their decision-making about how to best portray this event. And it was intentionally depicted, and intentionally made very difficult to view, because it is a horrible thing.
I’ve heard some people say that the show could make kids think that suicide is a good way to get revenge on the people who hurt you. I cannot comprehend how they come to that conclusion.
It is obvious that the main character is suffering from major depression, dissociation, flat affect, and more. And the “suicide note” she leaves behind is deliberately affecting for those who harmed her. However, every suicide note offers reasons why the one who died by suicide did so. Often, those who are left behind to read that note feel guilt, remorse, and a sense that they failed the one who died. It makes sense to feel that they failed the one who died, because after the life has been taken, you see the signs that you passed over when the person was alive. You find the truth later. You can’t always see the pain until the pain has become too much for the bearer of that pain to carry.
Hannah, the one who dies in the show, is hiding her pain as often as possible. And there are good reasons for her to do so. Earlier, I said that I pretended to be all sorts of things, because the admission that I was suffering from dark and dangerous suicidal thoughts was not something that I felt anyone would understand or accept. I hid my pain. I still do.
This combination of glossing over slights and hiding pain and suffering creates a perfect storm of struggle. And the one who is struggling often feels alone in that struggle.
The depiction of suicide in this show is precipitated by all sorts of expressions and depictions of the pain that is being hidden and the opportunities missed for others to see that pain. And it is the “note” recorded on 13 tapes that shows us all of that. Suicide is an escape from pain. Suicide is not an act of revenge. Sometimes there may be an element of “I’ll show them” thought in the planning stages of suicidal ideation. But that occurs largely because the one who dies by suicide has sought to express their pain on multiple occasions and has not been heard, not because there is a deliberate desire to harm those left behind. Those left behind are completely cut off in the mind of the one who is considering suicide. They don’t seem to be able to feel at all, because they can’t see your pain.
Suicide isn’t logical. Suicide isn’t vengeful. Suicide is the thing that you turn to when there is no other place to turn. Hannah had at least 13 reasons to feel cut off from and ignored by her community. She had at least 13 burdens to carry. And that weight became too much to bear.
Watching her bear that pain, and watching her end her life because she could no longer carry the weight doesn’t glorify the act. It makes the act sad and avoidable and gut-wrenchingly difficult to watch. There is no glory in this show. None. There is no glory in that escape. None. There is no glory in her pain, or in the way she slowly but certainly breaks down completely, and loses the will to live. None.
If you imagine that young people will watch this show and want to follow in the footsteps of Hannah, you should probably do a bit more research on suicide and suicide prevention. Because it isn’t the act of death by suicide that you should be most concerned with. You should be most concerned with the 13 reasons that brought Hannah to that point of desperation. You should be most concerned with changing the behaviors and eliminating the threats that caused her to reach that point. Suicide is terrible, but it isn’t really the point of the show. The point is the reasons. The point is that there were numerous events that should never have happened. The point is the ways that her pain was caused and compounded and collected. The point is not the suicide. The point is the many opportunities to care about others, instead of inflicting pain and violence, that were missed. And focusing on those things can actually create change and reduce the incidence of suicide—not inspire more people to die by suicide.
- 13 Reasons Why is not for the vulnerable.
Another argument that I am confused by, as a survivor of abuses, is the idea that those who are “vulnerable” shouldn’t be exposed to the series.
I’m not certain what the definition of vulnerable, in the minds of others, might be. It is defined as “susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm”. And in my opinion, those who are most susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm are the ones who will most identify with, and find validation and acceptance in, 13 Reasons Why.
Hannah is susceptible. But so is almost every other character in the book/show! There are so many instances of bullying, abuse, rape, denial of harmful actions, misrepresentation, image ruining, slut-shaming, and more that it is amazing that they are all able to fit into one story. There are numerous people who are suffering harm at the hands of others within the storyline. There are numerous vulnerable people.
I identify with Hannah. But I also identify with Clay, with Tony, Jessica, Alex, and Olivia. They all have particular vulnerabilities, and they all experience suffering of some sort throughout the series.
I’ve already expressed how the choices about viewing triggering events should be left in the hands of the victims of abuse. This includes those who are vulnerable. Because if you are vulnerable, you have likely already experienced the things that are expressed in the episodes of this show. If you are at risk, you are likely already suffering in some way. And identifying with the characters in this show can offer much-needed validation of those sufferings and those vulnerabilities. Connecting with a character can bring comfort and can offer perspective that isn’t always available to us as individuals within these situations.
One of the immense strengths of the show is that we see it unfold from the perspective of Clay, as well as from the perspective of Hannah. And because we see it unfold from multiple perspectives, we can also gain multiple insights, alongside the characters in the tale. When you are living in a state of vulnerability, or suffering, or abuse, it can be very difficult to see things from varying perspectives. One perspective begins to shove out all other ways of thinking about the events. We get tunnel vision. This show lets those who are vulnerable, who are suffering, who are suicidal, who are being bullied, who have been assaulted or raped, look at the events unfolding from the outside, and allows us to gain perspective. This is a good thing!
For those who have never experienced these events, I can see why you would want to seek to protect the vulnerable from difficult images and serious events. But because we are vulnerable, we are likely already experiencing these things, and already feeling unprotected. Allowing us to connect with these characters, and watch them navigate these horrors can be healing, and can offer us support. Fictions of this type, which are so close to our own experience, can be healing and helpful, and not just damaging or dangerous. You may not know how much the vulnerable need this connection. You may be unaware that they need these characters to connect with and find validation.
- The show is so hopeless.
I’ve heard many say that this show isn’t good because it is hopeless. It doesn’t have a happy ending. The pain doesn’t go away, and there isn’t any resolution.
Exactly!!
If you are a person who thinks this show can’t be helpful because it doesn’t resolve the pain of the characters, then I encourage you to consider the life of a survivor of these events.
There is no resolution.
I was sexually assaulted in childhood. I’m almost 43 years old. Nothing has changed. I’m still suffering from anxiety, depression, and PTSD. I’m still in therapy. I’m still on medication. My abuser still sits across from me at the dinner table, on occasion. I haven’t spoken to my ex-husband or ex-boyfriend who were violently abusive in many years, but their words still harm me at times. I’m still aware of the ways that the neighbors and classmates and people in my community harmed me, and then blamed me for that harm. I’m still an addict. I’m still incapable of positive romantic relationships. I’m still a loner, in many ways. And I’m chronically ill in ways that will affect me for the rest of my life.
There is no resolution.
Life isn’t a story. And if it were, it wouldn’t be a fairytale. Fictions can resolve into nice little packages with happy endings, but life, and especially a life of vulnerability and suffering and abuse, doesn’t resolve in those ways.
The story is hopeless, except for Clay’s assertion near the end of the series that “this needs to change”. The only hope is the fact that we need to begin to treat one another better, and to stop patterns of behavior that harm and break people. The only hope is that those watching from the outside of this story, the viewers at home with their eyes glued to this drama, would understand the purpose of telling this tale—that we, the audience, need to take up that gauntlet and fight to change the way we treat one another. We, the audience, are responsible for creating hope and affecting change and stopping these horrors from being acted out in real life.
My life is not filled with hope. My life has not resolved into a neat little box of rainbow’s-end happiness. My life is still filled with burdens that are difficult to bear.
A happy ending wouldn’t make 13 Reasons Why a better story. A happy ending, filled with hope, wouldn’t inspire us toward change. It would reinforce the idea that the pain goes away, and the effects aren’t all that bad, and we can ignore these injustices and let them resolve.
These injustices won’t resolve. And the victims of this violence won’t have fairytale transformations. The only way we get a happy ending is if we stop avoiding this pain, and stop insisting that we aren’t responsible to and for one another in our communities and in our world, and stop ignoring the ways that others are being harmed in every moment, and make the way we act and think and live better. The only way we get a happy ending is by our own actions.
Because 13 Reasons Why is a critique of what we currently do and what we currently allow. It is meant to give power to the young and vulnerable, and to affirm their circumstances are an injustice, and to demand that we do better at protecting one another. This show is designed to teach us to stop physical and emotional attack or harm. This show is pointing out our failures, and begging us to fix what is wrong in the way we treat one another. This show is the truth we don’t want to see and acknowledge.
But refusing to see and acknowledge the truth helps none of us, so I encourage you to watch 13 Reasons Why, to cope with the horrific, graphic truth, and to acknowledge that up to this point, many of us have been a part of the problem. Then, and only then, can we move forward and find and support effective solutions.
As long as some can abuse others without repercussions, we are not yet finding those solutions. As long as some can abuse others, we are not allowed a happy ending.
Face the truth. Watch Hannah Baker die. Watch her community reel and spin out of control as they deal with the truths that her 13 reasons expose. And then make certain that you aren’t letting this happen in your own community.
Stop injustice. Validate suffering. Heal wounds. Listen to the victims. Punish the perpetrators of violence. And work toward a better world for all of us.
On Being
I made a plea for funds on my fundraising page recently. This happens a lot, because I have a lot of financial need at present.
I wrote something within that plea about being a human being, and therefore deserving basic human rights. And not long after, I felt this unsettling feeling in my gut. I felt that feeling because I realized that making this statement means that I believe that some of the people who know me do not understand basic human rights. I realized that some of the people I know do not think all people deserve life and health and safety.
That is the worst feeling!
I am making an argument for my dessert of life to people who know me.
Seriously, let that sink in for a moment. People I know need to be told that I deserve life.
It is hard for me to imagine that others think existing on the most basic level is not a right. It is even more difficult for me to conceive of, because many of those same people are insistent on the rights of a fetus. Before your life is viable, you have rights. After being born, you cease to have those same rights? I find that concept difficult, if not impossible to argue.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights lays out a number of rights that all human beings deserve, simply because they are human beings. One of those is the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of a person and his or her family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his or her control.
This right, that is offered for all who are human, is denied me on an ongoing and regular basis. I’ve been living without that standard of living, and without that security for the last two years while I wait for my disability hearing to occur. And I have been living without that standard and that security for pretty much my whole life.
Obviously, I don’t count childhood in the financial failings of the system of social services, so my adult life has been plagued with poverty and lack of security. But I have been without life, liberty, and security of person since childhood, since I was not free and not safe during that time. Life, liberty, and security of person is one of the rights expressed by the declaration as well. And I didn’t have that. I still don’t.
And I am not alone in my lack of life, liberty, and security of person. Millions of people share this state alongside me.
We make all manner of excuse for why this life and liberty and security and standard of living and equal pay and recognition and participation in government and freedom of thought, expression, religion, and peaceful assembly are not offered to all humans. And all of them are inexcusable responses to the failures of our society to meet these standards.
At this moment, in the United States of America, there are children being gunned down in the streets, and unarmed people of color being murdered in the name of “feeling threatened” by the police. There is a violent response from law enforcement to the peaceful protest of indigenous peoples on their own land. There is humiliating punishment, torture, cruel punishment, and slavery within our prison systems (that are privately owned and income generating). People are not protected from arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile. Political refugees are being refused access and protection. There are millions assumed guilty until proved innocent, instead of the other way around. There is arbitrary interference with privacy, family, and home with the NSA listening in on the American people.
All of the above are in direct conflict with the declaration of human rights that the UN puts forth. All of the above are not acceptable. And all of the above are excused by claiming moral failure or some form of action that pretends to nullify the humanity of those without adequate human rights.
So, at this point, I am offering the whole of society a command: STOP.
Stop treating me and others as though we are not human. We are human.
Dehumanizing happens in many ways, but at its core is the idea that we make someone seem like less of a person in order to ignore the responsibility we have toward other humans. We take an individualist stance, and we find reasons to say that people deserve what they have received on an individual level, so that we can ignore systems of injustice and refuse to change, share, care, or relate to others.
I sometimes feel like I live in a society of toddlers. When you are a toddler, you don’t yet understand that the world is not revolving around you. As an infant, you cried and someone responded. All the things were about you. And then, suddenly, you are thrust into social interaction, and all the things are not about you. “Mine!”, becomes your war cry. And all the adults are telling you to share, to respect boundaries, to not harm others, and to see your life in community instead of seeing it as a place where your voice is met with immediate action and all the things are meant for you.
The society I live in is struggling with the concept of sharing. Adults are still using “Mine!” as the war cry. My woman. My home. My paycheck. My desserts. My right to take and never give. My parenting style. My business. My tax breaks. My neighborhood. My border. My ego. My viewpoint. My voice.
But that isn’t how a society works.
We cannot be a group of individuals all working toward our own interest and ignoring the interests of others and believe that this manner of being will lead to justice and equity. It won’t.
It cannot. Because society is not just a bunch of people doing their own thing.
The word society originates from the Latin word “socius”, which translates into the concept of “companion”. A companion is one with whom you are a friend, a partner, a complement. Companionship requires the consideration of others, and the partnership between parties. Somehow, we have forgotten that those within our communities are companions, partners, and friends. Somehow, we have supplanted the idea of “individuals in a space” with the original meaning of “society” that includes companionship.
Our concern ends at those we consider “close”, both in relationship and in common interest, and we no longer extend our concern to those we see as outliers or strangers or “threats”. The comaraderie of society ended as the shift from the 16th century meaning was made and we began to look at life in the way of the toddler, by fighting to keep our individual self at the center of the universe. Society became a group of individuals sharing the same space, and lost sight of our responsibility to one another.
I’ve studied social justice for some time now. I’ve lived a life that denied me basic human rights for even longer than I studied. And I can tell you, both from an academic research standpoint and as a person affected by the way we view rights, that being a bunch of self-interested individuals who pursue our own agendas in the same space is not working. The increases in crime, in protest, in outrage, in violence, in refusal to help and share and identify with others, are all symptoms of the problem of that individualist thinking.
We need to find that understanding of society and companionship once more. We need to see all human beings as deserving of the basic rights that the United Nations has put forth. We need to look at all other humans as equal to us in their humanity, regardless of race or religion or poverty or moral failures or any other standard we might assign to others in order to dehumanize them, and to justify our lack of companionship with other human beings.
We need to treat humans as human. We need to care for each as we might care for the one we consider our closest companion. If you wouldn’t treat your friend or partner in a particular manner, then you ought not treat any human being in that same manner. Would you leave your partner homeless? Would you submit your partner to torture? Would you deny help to your best friend when they lost their job suddenly, or became ill? Would you tell your child to “deal with it” when they are profiled, policed under different standards, and denied education? Would you find excuses to allow the harm of those closest to you?
If the answer to those questions is “no”, and I hope the answer is no, then the answer should remain “no” when that person in the scenario or circumstance is not your partner or best friend. We should refuse to allow that treatment to any one of our companions—any person in our society. We need to begin thinking of our society as our companions, our partners, and our complements. When we work together, we create good things for all. Symbiotic relationship doesn’t apply only to the nature channel’s programming. Society is a symbiotic relationship, and each individual within it should benefit from the others.
I once had a conversation with a man on the bus who was in tattered clothing and appeared to be transient. We talked about his kids, and about his previous experiences, and about his life now. He lives in a tiny room above a bar, and he has a sign in his window that says, “Piano lessons, classical” and has his phone number below. He has that sign because he was a concert pianist. A talented and well-traveled, educated man was sharing this conversation with me. He told me of the places he had been, and the people for which he performed. He was famous in cultural, musical circles. And now he was without resources, because playing the piano doesn’t necessarily pay well anymore. When people pass him on the street, they think of him as a bum, a drain on society, a dirty or bad or frightening threat to the wellbeing of “good, clean, responsible” citizens. But he isn’t what they imagine. And if they could see him as a comrade, as a companion, or as a friend, as I saw him, they would enjoy beautiful tales of extraordinary fame and fortune. They would know, if they could see him as their equal, that he was more accomplished than anyone else on that bus.
But they don’t see him as an equal. They don’t offer him the human rights to housing, clothing, food, medical care, and social services. They don’t offer him more than a look of disgust, or the ever-present tactic of pretending that he doesn’t exist.
I’m not offered the human rights to housing, clothing, food, medical care, and social services either. I’ve been disabled for a few years, and I still haven’t been given resources to survive and remain safe. I don’t have what I need to live—to stay a human being and not become a pile of ash—unless I plead with people to meet my needs on an almost daily basis. The pleas are met with resources, thank the Divine. But those resources often come from the same six or seven individuals. The rest of my acquaintances ignore the pleas, or offer reasons that I do not deserve resources or should “get a job” to gain resources. They don’t seem to care about my rights as a human being. They don’t seem to believe that I deserve the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his or her control. They don’t seem to believe that I have the right to live.
I do have that right. And if you would treat me as your companion, your comrade, your complement, you would see how much I, as a human being, have to offer, and the importance of offering me life.
You hear much about “the system” or “systems” of late. People whom I stand in solidarity with are being oppressed and denied their basic human rights. We have created ways of acting within society that cause systemic damage, meaning that the whole of the society is affected. We have created a society where individualism, racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and all sorts of other “isms” are infecting every part of the whole. And many think that the answer to this problem of an unjust system is to spew forth more hatred and division and insistence upon individualist approaches to finding solutions.
But when the whole is affected, you cannot simply treat one part of the disease, leaving the sickness to spread in other areas. The whole is affected. And the treatment plan needs to begin with addressing the whole, not a part. The cure for our society’s ailments begins with adherence to the declaration of human rights. We need to stop being toddlers and grow into compassionate adults, who share and work together and have concern for others. The way to justice and equity is clearly spelled out for us—life, liberty, and security of person. The way to justice and equity is seeing people as human beings, and treating them as such.
I am.
Descartes stated that thinking was the basis for being—I think, therefore I am. But I believe that he was off by just a bit. I am, therefore I am.
Being is what makes us worthy of being. Living is what makes us deserving of life. Existence is what demands I receive resources to maintain my existence.
I am.
That is the whole argument.
And none of us should need to plead for our lives, no matter who we are, what we look like, where we come from, or what we do or do not accomplish. We should be offered a basic standard of living because we exist.
We are human beings.
We are.
But Some Lives Don’t
I removed a comment from my Facebook post this morning. Its basic message was “ALL LIVES MATTER”. I was as kind and respectful with the one who commented as I was able, but I could not leave that comment on my page.
It isn’t that I think all lives mattering is a bad thing. I’m all for that. I would love to see that.
The problem is I see very clearly and close-up that some lives don’t matter. And that isn’t right, and it isn’t good, and it needs to be rectified.
I think that a lot of people miss the point of the Black Lives Matter movement, and other similar movements that are pressing for equity and safety and opportunity for those who are marginalized in our society. The point is not that these lives matter more than the “all lives” that some use to counter these movements. The point is that these lives already live under the oppressive and marginalizing weight of being treated like they don’t matter.
Last night I posted because I watched a young man be shot across the street. He was a black man, living in an underserved neighborhood—my neighborhood—and he was just walking down the sidewalk when he was struck with bullets and fell to the ground. There were lots of people out last night, on that same sidewalk on this block. Women, children, elderly people, and young men all shared the moment. We sprang into action. I called for the police and an ambulance. Several others ran to where the victim had dropped, peeling off their shirts and pressing against wounds, administering what first aid they could and keeping him conscious until help arrived. And after the event, I posted a plea for an end to this injustice, racism, classism, and access to firearms that transforms quiet blocks on the Westside into blue-lit, yellow-tape-covered, crime scenes.
Many responded with sadness, some with shock. One left the “ALL LIVES MATTER”.
They don’t. They matter in the sense that I believe in equity and that humans deserve love and respect and opportunity and safety and security as humans. They don’t in the way our society currently treats the brown and the black and the poor and the sick and the suffering. We are treated like shit. We are treated like our lives are not worth the air we breathe. We are treated as though our lives mean less to others than “rights” to have entitled and privileged and unfettered space for the most white and most rich and most cis and most male and most heterosexual. We are treated as though our lives don’t matter.
Here I will interrupt myself for a moment and clarify something. I’m not black or brown. I am poor and sick and queer, so I understand much of the marginalization that my neighbors experience, because I experience that too. But my plight is not their plight, exactly. I can pass for a normative, respected, acceptable person when I am not asking for money or ranting about the problems that disability creates. I can simply not share with others that I am unable to work and struggling to survive. But my neighbors can’t pass as white-bodied individuals. And no matter what other status or wealth or purpose or good works they may have associated with them on an individual level, they are judged first and foremost by the color of their bodies. And that judgement leaves them unsafe, disrespected, gunned down, impoverished, and more.
I live in an area where I am one of very few white people. It took me living here for over a year to even meet some of my neighbors. There was a suspicion that floated about me. Why was I here? What did I want? Why would I not live in a “better” or “safer” area? After all, I am white, so I should be able to easily find a place to be among the other white people. But I am poor and disabled, so I cannot afford to live among the other white people. And, as my neighbor so poignantly expressed last night, “None of them are buying you a house in the suburbs, are they?”
Nope.
Nobody has offered me a place to live in the relative safety that they live in. Some will help with finances so that I can continue to eat and heat or cool my home and stay alive in my marginalized state. Many will judge me and treat me poorly and say bad things about me to others in order to discredit my claims that the system is rigged against people like me and my black and brown neighbors. “Lazy, free-loading, welfare queens” is how they see us—not as hard-working people of integrity who just happen to have arbitrary traits that prevent us from being valued in our society.
I stood outside and talked with my neighbors for some time last night after the shooting had happened. We talked about how nobody wants this for themselves or the ones they love. We talked about how a teaching career and a host of graduate degrees and the love of god and fellow humans means nothing, because we have that arbitrary trait of ours that negates all of the good, purposeful traits.
We are good people, by and large. We are families. We hold down two or three jobs. We learn from a young age to appease the system at all costs, to prevent increased suffering. We learn that even appeasing that system all the time will not necessarily prevent suffering—it might still end in us shot on the sidewalk. It may even cause us to be shot by the people who are sworn to protect and serve us.
I’m not black or brown-skinned. But I count myself as “we”. I count myself that way because I have been immersed in this culture, in this neighborhood, and in this experience for over five years. That is but a fraction of the years that these others have and will be marginalized due to arbitrary standards, but it is enough time for me to know and to feel the pain that is endured here. Not fully, of course, but in part, I feel what those around me feel. I hear their cries. I listen to their stories. I relate to their pain and fear and frustration.
I had PTSD long before I began living in a ghetto-like environment where people of color are trapped for lifetimes, and living to age 50 is a landmark worthy of parties bigger than the reception after most weddings. But being here triggers much, because the traumas of being black surround me, even though I am white. I’m not afraid of or in my neighborhood. I am afraid for my neighborhood, and the people within.
Our lives do not matter to politicians or manufacturing companies or many of the police or “decent” white people living in large houses in nice areas where you don’t even lock your doors at night. Our lives don’t come with the assurances offered to others. Our lives are lived moment by moment, challenge by challenge, and triumph by triumph. And we value life more than most, because we see the fragility, and we understand how quickly and without comment we can be removed from this world.
There were no news vans or helicopters last night on my block. There were only those who live here and those paid to come here and help. This young man was gunned down in the street, and only those who live and work here even know about it.
Sure, there might be an article on Monday about how many shootings and homicides happened in Chicago over the weekend. But this young man may not even be mentioned specifically, and all the people with power to change the situation will pass over that article and give it over to statements including drugs, gangs, “black on black” crime, or “ALL LIVES MATTER”. They will give it over to excuses, and not to the truth of the matter.
The truth of the matter is that we do not matter. The sick, the aging, the black or brown, the woman in hijab, the man with prison tattoos, the person with the name you don’t know how to pronounce, the mother who has three jobs to provide for her children, the veteran on the corner with a sign and a paper cup asking for care and respect and the ability to live—we don’t matter. And we feel the weight of that every day. We know you don’t believe we matter. If you did, you would change your actions and fight for our rights and stop saying that “ALL LIVES MATTER” to justify your ignorance and lack of care for the most vulnerable in our society.
If all lives really mattered to you, you would stop purchasing fast fashion to save the lives of Bangladeshi men and women. If all lives really mattered to you, you would demand that social security support those who are disabled without years of suffering and waiting to be heard and offered care. If all lives really mattered to you, you would be screaming at your representatives to put an end to the sale of handguns and assault weapons in our country. If all lives really mattered to you, I wouldn’t be trying to crowdfund my existence because you would be generously donating funds or making certain that there were safety nets for those who need them in this country. If all lives really mattered to you, you would reassess your views regarding women and birth control and safe access to abortion to make certain that you were not looking at the issue from a privileged viewpoint. If all lives really mattered to you, you would fight for the rights of the formerly incarcerated, sex workers, and juvenile offenders. If all lives really mattered to you, you would call for an end to the “war on drugs” and private prisons and mass incarceration. If all lives really mattered to you, you would celebrate love between people, regardless of their gender, and use the pronouns and names that transgender or queer individuals have chosen for themselves, and stop looking sideways at men in dresses, or women with shaved heads, assuming that they are “wrong” somehow, for being who they are. If all lives really mattered to you, you would be outraged by the oppression of, marginalization of, or limited rights of any and all people or groups. If all lives really mattered to you, they would matter equally.
I can hug a homeless, mentally ill, prostitute on the corner and wish him a good day and ask how he is doing. His life matters to me, regardless of anything he does or does not do. And if all lives matter, then he should have healthcare and medication and safe housing and opportunities to make money in other ways than selling the only “capital” he has—his body. If you wouldn’t go near such a man, then all lives do not matter to you.
If you would not sacrifice a portion of your own comforts and securities to make certain that all others had equal, or at least basic, comforts and securities, then all lives do not matter to you.
And if you cannot admit that you treat lives in a hierarchical manner, placing some lives higher than others, then you are in no position to say “ALL LIVES MATTER”.
This post is harsh. But I won’t apologize for that, because it is necessary.
People with extreme privilege need to stop pretending at care for all lives. Instead, all people need to care for one another in a manner that demonstrates we want a world without privileged status—we want a world where each life matters as much as our own.
I don’t see that from most of the people who say things like “ALL LIVES MATTER”. I don’t see that from many of my acquaintances or my Facebook “friends”. I don’t see that from most of my family members. I don’t see that in my neighborhood or in my city or in the way that the problems we are facing are addressed. I don’t see equity. I don’t see lives that matter. I look out my window and I see a sweet young man, who passes my home almost every day, bleeding on the sidewalk—shot, wounded, and not mattering much at all.
So, please, for the love of all that is good, stop pretending and making excuses and going forward without challenging the systems that are oppressing others. Grow. Think. Listen. Consider. And then change, so that you are participating in a society that offers equal rights and equal benefit and equal status to all.
Don’t say all lives matter until you are doing everything you can to honor every single person living on this planet, and have your actions be intimately tied to the care and concern for every single one of those lives. My guess is that following this suggestion will create a situation where only a handful of people I know—maybe less—will be able to say that all lives matter. The rest need to sit and study and wrestle with the concepts of privilege and oppression and injustice and equity for a longer time and with more intent.
Yes, all lives matter. But no, we aren’t treating people in that manner. So start treating people as though they matter, or stop fucking saying that they do.
This morning the blood is washed away and people are out doing work. The men across the street are working on fixing a car. Next door to them is a man working diligently to rehab a house that has been boarded up for about four years. I’m sitting in my office, overlooking the children and the young people and the men and women moving about. We just go on. We just keep on doing life in the best way we know how, in the midst of trauma and terror and task forces and terrible social support systems. We are resilient and we are strong and we are good. We keep fighting for change and working toward peace and summoning hope and praying for better situations.
Even if you don’t show us our lives matter, we know that they do. So we live our lives, in the best possible ways we can. Our lives matter to us. We hang on to one another, and we work together, and we keep telling our stories, hoping the world will one day hear and respond. Hoping one day we will see that our lives matter, that all lives matter equally, on a global scale.
May that day come soon.
Dances with Dragons
It is no secret that I love the HBO hit series Game of Thrones. George R.R. Martin is genius in so many ways, and the show follows suit. And for many reasons, I wonder how Martin connects in the ways that he does to the plight of the marginalized in his medieval and magical imagined society.
One of the ways that I identify with the characters in this series has to do with the plight of the woman. Not one woman in particular, but a great variety of women in a great variety of situations. Raped, owned, captive, forced to do and be what another bids you to be—all are ways that women in the stories suffer due to their perceived weakness and their lack of agency. But we don’t stop there. We go on to tales of power and strength and cunning and a capacity for greatness in the lives of these fictional women.
I sometimes feel like a fictional woman.
That might sound strange. I’m not bipolar or schizophrenic and manifesting with delusions that I am a character. I simply bear burdens that I rarely hear about in true tales. My life is an epic tale already, and I assume that I am still only about half way through my life, barring the development of fatal disease or the collision with a truck that might end it a bit early.
I’ve gone through so many things in my life that it is difficult to believe that they all truly happened. I wonder how I survived. I wonder if I have some cosmic draw upon the evils of our society. I wonder whether the story has a glorious end, or whether the bad things will keep coming indefinitely for the rest of my life.
I sometimes feel like a fictional woman, because I have never met another who can relate to all of the things with which I relate. I feel like this life is impossible, not plausible, and maybe a bit crazy—this life of struggle after struggle and story after story.
The marginalization, lack of agency, and captivity that the women of Westeros experience feel like real things for me. There are moments it is too real for me—when I have my hand clamped over my mouth in shock and my stomach feels as though it has dropped out of my body, leaving an empty, sickly cavern in its place. Being owned, being abused, being captive: these are things that I know intimately. And most women don’t have that intimacy of knowledge and connection with all of the bad things you might imagine. Most women have experienced some marginalization or lack of agency, but not with all the forms of marginalization and lack of agency you can imagine wrapped up into one package.
So, who imagined my story? How did it become this epic tale that recounts the plight of each and every woman who crosses the pages of Martin’s imagination? When did I become the poster-child for trauma and trial?
I think the answer is staring me in the face. And I don’t want to name it—I don’t want to name him, because that will make me feel the unwarranted guilt of calling out the wrongs of those who made my story go so “wrong”. Because somewhere, deep in my psyche, I still feel responsible, and I still feel shame, and I still feel confused, and I still feel like I need to protect those who harmed me. That is crazy, and more than just a bit so. That is a lot crazy.
The startling thing here is not my responses to trauma and trials, but that my responses are considered less acceptable than the actions that brought about those responses. Molesting your family member, or sex without consent, or smacking around a non-compliant partner, or treating a woman like property are all less offensive to many than my psyche and my ways of coping with the traumas of my life thus far. Even more startling is the fact that my depression and disability, which are directly related to those traumas, are seen as the marks of a dirty, lazy, crazy, messed up, burdensome, whining, free-loading, fuck-up. My disabled status is more criticized than the ones whose actions caused my disabled status. I am attacked for having been attacked, and not just being fine with that. I am attacked for having been wounded and not just putting a Band-Aid on that shit and going ahead with life unaffected.
The ways I relate to the women in the imagination of Martin, and their portrayal by the producers of Game of Thrones, are ways that express the greatest possible struggles in life. But I also relate to the women becoming something stronger and more powerful and more able with each passing event. Hard things make strong people. And I hate sentiments similar to that statement, in some sense. I don’t believe that the divine offers us challenges to strengthen us or prepare us or make us useful in the lives of others. I don’t believe that triumph follows trials, necessarily. I don’t believe that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. There are plenty of things that didn’t kill me that made me broken and weak and wishing that death had been offered instead. But, I cannot deny that some of my strength was forged in the fire of evil attacks upon my person and my psyche.
I don’t want to say that I am better because I was treated worse than most. That simply is not true. I am far worse off because of the poor treatment I was subjected to in the past. But I have also developed some great skill in coping and in fighting for justice and in being a beacon for those still caught in a cycle of dark, dangerous mistreatment and marginalization.
One doesn’t negate the other.
I’m a fucking mess who learned lessons in being amazing. They exist in tandem—the broken and the brave.
And you don’t want to process that last statement. It fights against the dichotomous thinking that we have been programmed toward for centuries. Either/or thinking is rarely the best line of thought. Both/and is the way that the world actually offers itself. I am both broken and brave, at once.
The women of Westeros are broken and brave. They are overcomers. They fight to gain their freedom, their justice, their right to be whom they choose and not the ones they are told to be by others. But the knowledge of trauma and its effects upon its victims lets me know, with certainty, that these women are also irreparably broken. There are some things that you never forget. There are some things that never stop having a hold. And that hold doesn’t need to propel us toward evil and revenge and perpetual suffering. Sometimes those things that have a hold are the inciting motivation for our desire to find justice and agency and bravery. But they still have a hold—they still take a toll.
The thing that I need to keep remembering and reinforcing in my own life is that it is alright for those things to have a hold and take a toll. It is okay to suffer the effects, and it is okay to fight for freedom from those effects. And those two things can happen simultaneously. I can allow both the bravery and the brokenness to exist and to be honored and to be experienced and to be felt deeply.
I am allowed to be both/and.
Sometimes my ability to press forward toward a goal of peace and justice and healing is inspirational. Sometimes my inability to cope and overcome and heal is just as inspiring. And it is so and should be so because I am both/and. I am both a woman of strength and a woman who copes with weakness. I am both a victim and a victor. I am both broken and brave.
Learning to celebrate the difficult parts of your life and your person is not easy. I’m certainly not to the point where I do so with consistency. But I am closer to celebration today than I have been in a long time.
The challenges are difficult for the women of Westeros. The moments of champion are many for these same women. One doesn’t negate the other. One informs the other.
In the same way, my challenges inform who I become and how I live in this world. The bad things are not negated by the good. The lessons don’t erase the loss. The struggle remains real, even when it seems like I am overcoming, because there are those things that hold on—the things I can’t forget. And those things are a part of who I am, not just a part of who I once was.
Allowing yourself to be both/and, and accepting the brave and the broken equally, is not simple in its execution. It is ridiculously hard. It is something that I want to do, but that I am constantly told by my society that I should not do.
“Get over it.”. “Let it go.” “Just forgive and forget.” “Look at the bright side.” “At least you haven’t experienced [thing that one deems more crappy than your experiences].” “There are children starving in Africa.” “Focus on the future.” All are well-meaning sentiments, and all are telling me to stop being the person that I was shaped and developed into, and to ignore and subordinate the majority of the things I have experienced. And I think that desire to ignore and subordinate the broken and the bad things is a conditioned response. I think that our society tells us that value is tied to good things, and those who experience bad things are people of little worth, or of poor character.
That is a terrible, incorrect, and damaging view—that struggles are the result of poor choices by lesser beings. That is the root of every “ism” that we experience in our society—racism, classism, sexism, ableism, ageism, and more and more.
Instead of feeding the fallacy that my challenges are evidence of my personal failures, I would love to see a society that can live in the both/and. I would love to feel that my challenges are just as valued as my moments of champion. I would love to be treated as a whole—a woman who has trauma and trials and triumphs. I would love to be accepted as I am, without judgments that minimize the effects of my past experience or tell me to cover up wounds for the comfort of others.
The thing is, I cannot cover up those wounds. I am covered in wounds and scars, and those don’t disappear. They might heal a bit, or stop openly bleeding, or be less pronounced over time. But they never disappear altogether.
I have a scar across my lower abdomen from a childhood surgery. It used to be a big, hip to hip, thick, red scar. Now it is lower and thinner and just a touch lighter than the skin around it. It seems to have shrunk quite a bit, as my body grew, I aged, and time passed; but that scar is still present and always will be. And that is a part of my whole. That scar is a moment in time etched on my body for life. That scar is tied to psychological effects and physical limits and family dynamics and the response of my community. That scar says all sorts of things about who I am and where I have been and where I am traveling now. Because it says all of those things, it is important. It is as important as this moment or any moment to come. It shaped me and created a way of being and a way of reacting and a way of living that I would not have without it. So, it needs to be honored and held and accepted and loved as an important part of me.
Identifying with women who overcome the worst challenges and become champions is something that most of us can do on some level. But it takes a lot of deep consideration to understand the ways that the trial and trauma shaped the triumph. It takes a lot of understanding to see that the victories are often bittersweet, because of the place where the moment happened, the change came, and the suffering informed the future actions that brought us to the victory. That understanding is so needed.
Accepting my past is imperative to being in my life today. Honoring my struggle and refusing to hide or ignore what is difficult to cope with is necessary for me to survive, to thrive, and to continue working toward moments of victory. Being a champion doesn’t mean you are not still the oppressed and challenged and broken woman in some ways. And acknowledging both the brave and the broken in me is so important.
Because none of us are only our triumphs. All of us are both/and. We are all light and dark, commingling in a storied history. And it is time to begin celebrating that storied history. It is time to sing and dance and toast to the storied history that includes both trials and triumph. It is time to see the characters before us—both fictional and not—as both/and. It is time to honor the whole person, and end the practice of trying to bleach the dark bits in our histories and our hearts.
I am working hard to love all of the parts of my life and myself. That work is made harder by those who insist that the hard times and bad times and horrors that have been and are being endured should be hidden behind false smiles and kept behind closed doors. I need for those around me to be willing and able to accept all of me, and to look at the hard times and bad times and horrors without recoiling in shock and disgust.
There is a moment when a character in Game of Thrones, Sansa Stark, is named by her challenges. Her name—her title—is questioned because she was forced into marriages against her will. The power and influence she might have is called into question because she is no longer a woman who holds her family name. She replies by claiming that she is and always has been a Stark. She did what she needed to do to survive, but that didn’t make her into someone other. She has changed, but she is also the same. Her history and her present are both tied into one. She is twice married, but she is still a Stark in her heart. She is both/and.
I think that it would serve each of us (and likely the whole of the universe) well to respond to and respect the both/and in the lives and personas and stories around us. I believe that the acceptance of the light and the dark, the trial and the triumph, the challenge and the champion, allows us to celebrate who we are without the question of worth, value, purity, influence, or power. Being who we are, wholly and completely and without shame, is only possible if we accept both/and. I cannot celebrate and dance and play and love and live in the ways I want and hope to while others force me to question whether my value has been reduced as a result of the history I carry with me into today. None of us can truly accept ourselves or others until we acknowledge that the dark and the light commingling is a part of our humanity, and that, regardless of what we are currently experiencing, we are still valued and loved.
We need to become a society that does not place value on one and not on another. We need to be able to face what seems like it must be fiction due to the enormity of the challenge, and still smile and offer kindness and show love. We need to be people who celebrate the whole. We need to accept that the same character who is sold/married to solidify an alliance is also the Mother of Dragons. And we need to celebrate her in both of those moments—the terrifying and terrible wedding night, and climbing atop a great beast and flying to the rescue—in a way that does not deny part of the story. We need to find a way to accept that all have value, in each and every moment.
I identify with these characters, because I am forged in burning flames. I have a storied past, and those moments shape this moment and the moments to come. And I am determined to figure out the way to both dance in the darkness and dance with dragons. They are equal parts of me. They do not disappear, and they cannot be hidden. They are parts of a whole, and should be honored as such.
Join me on this journey. Let us learn to dance in darkness. Let us dance with dragons. Let us be both/and.
Same
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.”
Making Enemies and Infuriating People
I have a friend who often uses the hashtag #makingfriendsandinfluencingpeople, which I believe is based on a book about doing just that—using specific strategies to create connection and influence others. I also believe that it was a book popular within business circles some years ago, so I have suspicions that the influence part was what was stressed, and the getting what you want from others is the point of using the strategies. I don’t know how much we can then call that “friendship”. (But I haven’t read the book, so I can’t speak to its tone or effectiveness with certainty.)
My friends—the true and real and lasting ones—are people whom I suffer with and rejoice with through all sorts of circumstances. And I don’t think that a book of strategy for connections would have been useful in the development of those relationships, because they were forged in fire, in many ways, and that forging was often horribly uncomfortable. Really, the way that we became friends was by not appeasing one another, and by venturing into dark waters together … some of which I thought would drown us both and destroy our connection. But the thing about being willing to sacrifice your friendship for the good of your friend is that it strengthens the bond with the people who are best for you, and offers those who would not be your friend through both thick and thin the opportunity to walk away.
I was recently speaking with a dear friend via Skype, and we questioned how we became friends at all, since we were both very closed to connection and guarded and mistrusting and walled off at the time. But, as we discussed it, I realized that sharing mutual distrust for humanity was what bonded us. And that sounds a bit weird, but we created a connection out of not connecting. We shared uncomfortable space. We were both different. We were both damaged. We were both in need. We both knew frightening dangers and horrible pain and devastating events in life. And because we shared all of this, we were able to quickly dive into the dark waters together.
Other friends have been less quick to dive in. Some friendships were not cemented until years without communication had passed, and the realization that the challenges the other had placed upon us were meant to love us, and not to harm us, and the remorse and the forgiveness and the forgetting of the division and distance made the bonds strong.
Suffering plays a big part in friendship, because the best way to connect is to break together and to heal together.
Religious texts mention this frequently. Warnings against fair-weather friends, and commands to support one another, and models of rising and falling together abound, not just in one religion, but in many. Life together means a life of ups and downs together.
I think that one of the reasons we fail, and make enemies instead of friends, is that we react harshly when we are incapable of rising and falling together. When we think that individualism is of high importance, and we refuse to imagine that those falling are doing so because that is half of life, but believe that falling is a moral failure, we speak in ways that harm others. When we are falling, and nobody will hold us as we do so, we sometimes lash out in what looks like anger, but is truly fear at its core. When we are afraid of falling, we pretend to be rising, and we become disingenuous and dishonest and untrustworthy, which breaks apart bonds and ruins relationship.
We make enemies and infuriate people when we don’t allow ourselves to enter the dark waters together. When we avoid the falling half of life, and try to wish away the times of struggle and the dangers and horrors that accompany life together, we cannot treat one another in positive ways. We make up excuses and judge individuals harshly and create scales of worth and value or hierarchies of wrongs and sins and evils in order to justify our refusal to join one another in the sorrows, and be half-friends who only stand in the moments of joy or praise or pride with others.
I am in a season that lacks joy or praise or pride, and others use the scales and hierarchies in attempts to discredit me, so they don’t have to accept that this season—this falling—can happen to any of us at any time. They hurt me with accusations and define me with degradations, in the name of fairness and righteousness and, at times, even in the name of god. And I don’t quite understand the instinct to distance one’s self from the one falling. It seems like far more work to uphold the excuses and the judgments and the scales and the hierarchies than to simply hold onto one another as we fall and as we rise.
I understand that the dark waters are a bit frightening, and that it takes work to swim through to the other side. But many of us aren’t offered the chance to ignore those waters. Some of us have been drowning in those dark waters since we were small children. Others of us wade in the dark waters daily due to lack of resources or abusive acts against us or illnesses or addictions or living in the midst of violence or deep loss. But those who have a choice, and those who choose not to venture into that space are failing the ones who are falling, and pretending at goodness by attaching themselves to those that are rising. Being that fair-weather half-friend makes a liar of you, because your joy and praise and pride is not your own, but it is stolen from another.
As one who has been in the dark waters for a lifetime, I want to share something with you. It is terrible and desperate and contains horrors … and you should long to dive in. Making friends and influencing people is meaningless if it is this false, half-friend sense of friendship, and the only influence is yours upon others, and not theirs upon you. Diving into dark waters builds relationships that last and that stand firm in the face of overwhelming circumstances. Diving into dark waters, and holding one another while we are falling and while we are rising, offers us the fullness of relationship that superficial connections cannot achieve. Trust, boundaries, vulnerabilities, honesty, and deep love can only accompany these dark-water friendships. Everything else is insufficient, and you are missing out on love and life if you don’t have people in your life who are holding you while you rise and while you fall—who don’t attend your struggles the way they attend your happiness, who come to the parties and not the funerals.
This is the fullness of love—the “unconditional” that we hear about, but rarely experience. Rising and falling together. Suffering and celebrating together. And refusing to hold on to any judgments or scales or hierarchies. Wading in the dark waters, and connecting in the midst of that murky river, with walls stripped down and conditions removed and humility and trust and the knowledge that brokenness is not all-defining, but that we can build a beautiful love from the bits and pieces, is a most fabulous use of time and energy.
I don’t often make friends and influence people. I live a relatively humble life, and I don’t get out into the world to make connections very often. And sometimes I make enemies and infuriate people, but not for the reasons listed earlier in this post, but because I push back at people’s refusal to accept the existence and the pervasiveness and the importance of the dark waters, and I try to break down the judgments and scales and hierarchies that some hold more dear than love. But I seek, every moment, to be the type of person who holds humanity in high regard, and who seeks to hold every human I meet as they rise and fall as a result.
I don’t always succeed. Because even as I seek to break down judgments, scales, and hierarchies, I was conditioned to hold them in higher esteem than humanity and love. So I know that it is a fight to continue to hold everyone as they rise and fall. I know that it isn’t easy. I know it doesn’t always come naturally at first, and there are days when you will revert back to the scales or judgments by default (and you are usually overcome with shame when you realize you have done so). However, every moment of that fight and every discomfort that results from diving into the dark waters is worth it.
Love—in the most deep and pure and deconstructed form—is worth it.
Rising and falling together is love. Meeting needs is love. Standing together in the darkest of moments is love. And if you don’t brave being in the deep, you won’t find love. You will find the half-friends who let you remain unchallenged in the good times, but abandon you in the difficult times.
When the deep rises up and you find yourself wading the dark waters, you want to be held by true love, and friends who are there for the whole of your experience. And you want to hold onto others as they rise and fall. Because a deeper, richer, more full life is the reward for holding on.
I want that life. I want those friends. I want that love.
Do you?
Dare to dive in.
Diet
I think that this title is somewhat of a “dirty” word. Most of us think of it in terms of restrictions and frustrations and defeats. I know that is how I often view dieting.
This is also a somewhat new concern for me. I am one of those people who was born fit and stayed fit for most of my life. I ate all the carbs and all the candy and still kept my 120 pound perfect figure. When you look at pictures of me in my youth, I am bronzed and buff and looking like a tiny body builder. And then, in my teens, I had that great T and A with a tiny waist that was apparently super desirable. And that figure stayed well into my 20’s, though a couple of pounds more T and A were added.
But then, I got sick.
I didn’t even know that I was sick. I just knew that I was tired, and I was gaining weight. I decided to take up running. I would make it about a half mile and then be in pain and walk back. Then it would be four to six days before I could summon the energy to run again, with similar results. I started spending more and more time on the sofa and less and less out trying to run. And I kept gaining, slow but sure. 140. 145. And then I had three or four rounds of steroids. 160. Trying to run again. 158. 162. And then the dreaded diagnosis happened. The reason I had been so tired all those years, and complaining of fatigue came to light—fibromyalgia. I started on Neurontin and kept on gaining. I went through a really bad year, where almost all of my time was spent sleeping or lying on the sofa depressed and in pain, and I gained even more. 170. 180. 198. And then the horrible moment when I hit that mark I was struggling against: 200.
I’m currently 208. And my BMI is 35, which puts me in the category of the “obese”.
And I found the bright side in that by saying, “at least I am not morbidly obese!” But inside something was cracking and a fissure that could swallow my obese butt was opening.
For the past several years we have been trying all sorts of things to keep my weight from climbing. Switching up medications, sending me to physical therapy regularly, getting me into the pool to swim, increasing my calories, then decreasing them after new studies showed my low calorie diet actually made sense given the way that fibro bodies metabolize in comparison with “normal” bodies. And nothing has been helping. And it is ridiculously difficult to cope with this, after a life of great bodiness.
I know that I shouldn’t be saying some of these things in this manner. I know that there are men and women who have struggled for an entire lifetime to manage their weight—kids who were “husky” from childhood and who were constantly challenged by body image and weight control. And I don’t mean to deny their experience or trivialize that struggle. But I didn’t know that early struggle, so becoming acclimated to a big body has been really difficult for me.
I used to be able to put my foot behind my head, or do the splits, and now I can’t touch my toes without a blob of belly fat getting in the way. It is quite the transition, and not in a “good” way, according to most.
But in some ways I have learned good lessons from this experience. I have learned that I only judge myself by societal standards of beauty and size, and not my friends. I have learned that I don’t accept or love myself well at any size. I have learned that bodies aren’t all made to appear the same, but we are very diverse. I have learned that health and size are not necessarily linked in the ways society teaches us they are. I have learned that bodies are still amazing, complex, beautiful, and fantastic at any and every size. And I have learned that all of the things that I was taught about “calories in/calories out” can be thrown out the fucking window, because it just isn’t always true.
One lesson that I haven’t quite learned is to love my own body in this state, and not to shame myself for being larger than I once was, or being larger than society and the media and whatever other influences dictate as appropriate or beautiful or “healthy”. I’m working on that. I have this fabulous yoga sequence I do from yogaglo where I get naked and jiggle my parts and offer love and thanks to all the parts of myself that I struggle to accept. I have a list of things I love and am grateful for about my body. I work on dissecting my illness from my personhood, and instead of saying things like “I’m so dumb today” I correct and say “my fibromyalgia and PTSD are really affecting my cognition today”. And I am far from perfecting these strategies and loving my jiggling parts wholeheartedly, but I am on the road to accepting who I am as I am.
And I think that is the space we all need to start from before we seek to make any changes, ever.
I spend a lot of time using mindfulness exercises to stay in the present moment, and to accept that moment as it is. This is a coping strategy that is basically saving my life. Chronic pain and chronic mental illness are really difficult to manage, and learning to accept the present moment, and to sit in it without reacting to it in any way helps. Separating pain from suffering, letting go of thoughts, noticing my environment, and being more aware have all helped me in myriad ways.
And this way of being aware and of accepting are transformative. So, when I think about transforming my body, I can’t begin without finding an awareness and acceptance of my body now.
Getting naked and letting all the parts wiggle and flop and whatever else they may do is part of that, but so is looking at the ways that food and I interact, and noticing the ways that I am influenced by outside media and standards, and looking honestly at how healthy or unhealthy parts of me are, and being able to recognize and embrace all of the amazing things my body can and does do. I mean, have you ever stopped for a moment and considered the process that happened in order for you to pee? It is kind of amazing.
My body has lots of flaws—dissociated parts of the brain, pain where there should not be pain, benign tumors hanging out in a few places, a pelvic floor that can’t figure out when to hold tight and when to release, weak quadriceps, ruptured bursa sacs, a CMC joint that can’t seem to get its shit together, and the list goes on. But it also has lots of amazing power and strength and goodness and health. The fat bits are just one part of the whole. And the whole is actually pretty fabulous.
I am scheduled for a visit with a nutritionist the end of next week. And I suppose you were not expecting to hear that, after all of this loving the fat bits talk. But I want to choose my best self, so even though I have tried many ways of eating and exercising in the past, and even though I think that diet should refer to an abundance of good foods, and not refer to restrictive and uncomfortable programs that usually fail us, I want to make certain that I am actually doing what is most healthy for my body, and for my life.
Choosing my best self includes ensuring that I am eating well, and not allergic, and not suffering from some metabolic issue, and being certain that there isn’t a disconnect between what I think is healthy behavior and what science says is healthy behavior. And that doesn’t mean that I am going to “go on a diet”. It does mean that I am going to work toward my best body. If I don’t lose an ounce, but I find that I would be healthier with less sugar and more fat in my diet, I will still be pleased with the experience. Because awareness and acceptance create change. I don’t fully understand why or how they do, but they do create change. Being aware of myself and being accepting of my body as it is moves me toward changing myself and my body in positive ways.
People often use a saying that the Buddhist gains nothing from meditation, but then goes on to list all of the negative things that have been removed or lost. This is what I think needs to be kept close when I think about diet and body image and size and health. I gain nothing from accepting my body, but I lose the tendency to criticize or compare myself to others, I lose an unhealthy connection with food, I lose the need to prove my beauty or strength to myself or others, I lose the need to force my body into a mold made by unrealistic normative standards, and I lose the habit of speaking negatively about this amazing body that offers me life. And losing all of that is more important than losing pounds.
My body might always be this size. The nutritionist might say that all the medications I am taking and all the ways my diseases harm my cells are not things that I can overcome with dietary changes. The verdict may be that I remain above that 200 mark, that I am always hoping to get below, and that I need to set more realistic goals for my body and my life. Or, conversely, I might learn that I have terrible habits that are contributing to the ever-increasing waistline, and be taught ways to eliminate or manage such habits to reduce my weight.
Either way, I intend to remain committed to the jiggling of the naked parts and the offering love to my body. No matter my size, I still know that awareness and acceptance are the tools that bring me the most good, and the least struggle, in every part of my life. Skinny or fat, frail or fit, tall or short, dark or light, broad or petite, stout or lanky … none of that matters more than the awareness and acceptance of the self. And, really, none of that matters at all. I won’t love you any less because you are short and wide than I would were you tall and thin. And anyone who would offer love and compassion and kindness only to the thin or the tall or the light or the petite or the whatever is just an asshole. Because the point of this post may be that we are all human. And all humans are equal. And all humans deserve to be treated with respect and kindness and compassion and love. Just because.
So, I encourage each of you to go get naked (probably in private, given the laws against public nudity in some areas) and shake out all those parts, and offer them love, and thank them for being, and start being aware and accepting of your body and self. Bask in the glow of the beauty of being. Revel in humanity. Love existing in space and time. Love your body. Love yourself.
Production
Yesterday I deleted some people from my friends list on Facebook. This isn’t uncommon, as far as my activities in a normal week might go. It is uncommon that I have such a visceral reaction to the things people say that get them removed from the list.
These people clearly hit a nerve. So, I dug into that nerve. And my digging brought about the realization that they were saying things that I say to myself, and that is why it was so hurtful. I haven’t talked to these people in years. They know nothing of my situation, and never bothered to ask about it, but felt incredibly free to judge it, nonetheless. And they judged not just the situation, but me within the situation. They were making attacks—entirely unfounded attacks—on my character, and calling me a person who lies and steals.
Why, you might wonder, would I call myself a person who lies and steals? And I have an answer. Society.
When you are ill and cannot be “productive” in some hyper-capitalistic sense, you are called lazy and worthless on a pretty regular basis. And if not called it, then at least made to feel it. North American society oozes production. We over produce and we over consume and we are basically a big fat nation that hogs all the stuff and money. And when you don’t buy into the system of making too much and having too much you get all sorts of push-back. Has anybody been called “granola” or “hippie” for letting go of the idea that we need all the things all the time? Has anybody been chastised and berated for being too slow at making a latte or typing a document or responding to a text message? Has anybody been given the side-eye because they ordered a side salad for dinner at the steak house?
We are expected to fall in line and over produce and over consume and to always want more and always be more and never fail or slow or stop.
So, when you cannot play that game, and you sit the bench, you feel the disdain of the whole of your society. It pours over you. And you start to feel it inside of you. And it becomes not the mourning and coping that it ought be—the letting go of expectations and settling into your new truth—but a self-hatred that you never deserved.
Bodies and minds are complex and beautiful. And because they are such, we don’t always know what they are doing or why. My rheumatologist said today that I was pretty much stuck in the disabled column “unless they come up with a miracle pill”. And it would be a miracle pill because they don’t even know what causes my illness, much less how to treat it effectively. Barring an act of god, I stay this way. I stay broken and in pain and unproductive. And I hate that.
To hear someone else say to me the things that swim through my mind. To have relative strangers and former friends voice those things was hurtful because they were my fears realized. I am lazy. I am bad. I am not enough.
None of those things are true. Not one. But I feel like they are because of the way our society treats people who don’t produce in the ways that they deem fit.
I do produce.
I write when I am able, and I create works of art when I am able, and I am trying to learn to sew again, and I have a lovely little rosemary plant that I am growing in my front window. I also encourage and offer love to my friends and my daughter and my dad. Sometimes I talk with the neighbors, or send coloring pages to friends. I often spend time meditating and doing a few yoga poses and listening to or reading material that helps me cope with my illnesses. I listen to music. I play with my dog. I bake cookies once in a while. I compare theories on racism or feminism or Game of Thrones episodes with friends.
And that is more than enough. That might even be better than the Almighty Dollar or the shoddy product or the other service I might provide. If I could make a Big Mac, and not sit and braid a rug when I have the dexterity and energy, would you respect me and value me more? I hope not.
I mean, I’ve been a fast food worker, and spent much of my life working in the service industry, so I am in no way belittling the people who make your Big Mac. They deserve a thousand times more money and respect than they are currently receiving. But, what are the parameters for successful production? And who made them?
I’m choosing to reject them, no matter who made the parameters or what they are. I am enough as a disabled woman working her hardest to make ends meet and to jump through all the ridiculous hoops the state demands of me in order to get the benefits that are legally and rightfully mine through the Social Security Administration. And if that isn’t enough for you, then maybe you need to evaluate how you value people, and not evaluate what I do or don’t do with my time.
It isn’t like I break into your house and judge your parenting or cooking skill. And if you asked me to mail a letter on your behalf, I wouldn’t assume it was acceptable to judge all the areas of your life because you asked for one thing from me. And why would it be okay for you to put a spotlight on all the areas of my life because I ask you for one thing? Is it because that thing is money?
If that thing being money makes the difference, then you value money more than you value lives. If asking for a favor and asking for money are on two completely different planes, in your estimation, then you serve money, and not humanity. Because if you would pick up some milk for me, but not give me five dollars, you are placing undue value on the dollars. Of the two, five dollars is probably worth less than the favor, if you factor in the price of gas, the price of milk, and the value of your time.
I’m currently listening to a song that has lyrics that repeat, “Have you ever lost every part of yourself?” And this resonates with me, because becoming disabled felt like losing every part of myself. I can’t do what I once did. My mind isn’t the same. My body isn’t the same. My capabilities and skills and gifts and occupations and expectations all came to a grinding halt. I lost everything I was, in some sense.
Until I realized, and people reminded me, that I didn’t lose all. I still have my sense of humor and my fabulous snarky sarcasm and my beautiful eyes and that face that always shows what I am thinking (even when I want to conceal what I am thinking) and my love for humanity and my passion for justice and my artistic spirit and my love of music and the power of Wonder Woman as my guiding light. I am still me, but I produce at a slower rate than I once did. And this is only problematic if I keep buying into the idea that my value is directly correlated with my rate of production.
No person’s value should ever be directly correlated with their rate of production. Not ever.
So, these people who are no longer on my friend list did me a favor. They reminded me of who I am and what I am capable of, instead of keeping me stuck in a place where I was focused on my own lack of production and means of production. They shook me out of the place where I valued myself only as the hyper-capitalist society valued me, and brought me back to the peace of knowing who I am, and valuing myself as a human, and not as a mode of production.
Would it not be incredibly transformative for each of us to have someone push us into that knowing and that valuing of the self? What if the people working 65 hours knew that they would be just as cared for and valued if they worked 32 hours? They would likely all choose the 32. What if we all believed that our passions were worth living out, instead of things relegated to the spare room or the moments when we finally retire from the 9 to 5 production race? How many people would be writing a concerto instead of punching a time clock?
What would happen if we all looked at ourselves and one another through a lens that included valuation based on humanity and joy and kindness and love and passion and friendship and interest and curiosity and so on and so forth, instead of one that valued only production, and subsequent dollars? I would LOVE living in that world—and not just because it would mean I struggled less with seeing my disability as a failure of humanity, but because the whole world would be filled with good and love and joy, not stuff. I would much rather have the love and the joy and the good than the stuff.
So, I am not deficient. I am actually less so than those who would judge my inability to produce as a marker of deceit and theft. Because I value humanity above productivity. I look at people and see people, not burdens or benefits.
How do you see people? Do you see them at all, or are you too busy trying to prove your own productivity? Take a breath. Let it go. And look deeper.
You are not the sum of your production.
You are a person.
And you are valuable.
Learning To Be Whole 