So – it’s been a while. I’m afraid to make any promises about whether or not I’m going to return to regular blogging, but I have missed my little spot on the interwebs, so I’ll just see how it goes.
I’ve had some major internal shifts in the past six months, and I think I haven’t been writing because I needed some time to adjust to my new normal. It’s finally sunk in that I don’t need to brace myself for my upcoming emotional meltdown, the PTSD is 90% gone for good, and holes I did not think could be filled just aren’t there anymore. I’ve stopped interpreting every negative emotion as a sign of deep-rooted damage & insanity, and for the first time in my life, I don’t feel like a fundamentally defective human being.
Every so often this still astonishes me. Even on my best days, I just assumed that I would battle a certain amount of self-loathing for the rest of my life. I didn’t know that feeling equal to everyone else in the room was even a possibility.
A few weeks ago, my therapist said to me, “You do realize that you have achieved all the goals you set for yourself, and that we’re basically just hanging out during your sessions, and that the only reason for us to keep doing this is to augment my income? I don’t think that’s a very good reason to stay in therapy, so I think we should talk about terminating. ”
I sat with that for a week or two, and realized, “Huh. I think she’s right. How’d that happen?”
I mean, I know how it happened. I was, after all, there for all of the excruciating work and the yoga and the meditation and the painful decisions - and I have the debt wrought by $12,000 of therapy to prove it. Still, even after years on this journey, there’s a big part of this healing that feels supremely mysterious. I plod along and do this little bit of work, then that little bit, and it is a slow, steep hike through sharp and prickly things. Then at unpredictable intervals, I hit critical mass, and something clicks. All of a sudden, I’m in a new spot, and the view is completely different. Every time, it feels surprising, so I will credit the Mysterious Divine and be grateful.
So, my life is good right now, even though from the outside looking in, it is supremely unspectacular. For me, though, there are worse things than a little boredom here and there. Just sitting on my couch and being okay or waking up feeling pretty good still feels pretty miraculous, so while I want to expand my life in the next few months, I’m trying to soak up the wonder of being ordinary.
So, three cheers for the mundane, and I’ll try to be back soon.
I learned how to break a man’s arm this week. I’m taking a rather intense self-defense class right now. Here is the blurb about the class:
Our Vision is for women to have the skills and capability to be destructive to anyone attempting to violate them. SHIELD is a close-range fighting system created specifically to empower women against sexual assault.... It emphasizes on close-range fighting to be efficient to fight in tight quarters using lower body strength to generate power. This is a safe space for women to learn practical and effective full-contact self defense.
You can’t say it clearer than that: This is a class designed to teach me how to use violence to injure another person. It’s a public statement of my willingness to do some serious, and possibly permanent, damage to another human being, of saying that yes, my life and my body is more important than some ideal of peace and non-violence, that if it comes down to him or me – I choose me.
Continue reading "All the martyrdom I can stand" »
So, I’ve been mulling over this pacifist thing some more, and I think my shifting relationship to nonviolence as an ideology is part of a larger process in my life of unwrapping myself from various identities to find out what’s underneath. Jung would talk about our shadows, Thomas Keating our true self and false selves, and Buddhists would talk about ego and detachment, but whatever you call it, we all have an image of who we think we are – and who we aren’t. Some labels we choose, and some we are given. There nothing wrong with that, since we all need to have some idea of what we’re about.
But something does go wrong when we get wrapped up so tightly in these identities and labels that there is no room left for anything else. We start rejecting anything within ourselves that contradicts who we think we are or that supports anything that might connect us to who we DON’T want to be. “I can’t possibly be doing emotional violence to someone else because I am a pacifist activist! Therefore, you cannot call me out on my emotional manipulation and general ass-holery.” “I’m not like those moron fundamentalists over there, so I cannot possibly be demanding utter, unquestioning obedience to my personal ideology and labeling everyone who disagrees with me as immoral and/or stupid. I’m a progressive, dammit!”
Continue reading "Ego and shadows and other good stuff" »
So, much for wanting to blog regularly again. Maybe eventually I’ll figure out how to live my life and blog too. For now, I will re-visit the month-old topic of whether or not I still believe in non-violence.
I’ll start with an example. I was recently in the know about a situation that involved a woman getting choked and beaten by her fiancé. With some assistance from friends and family, she moved out of their apartment, broke off their engagement, pressed charges, and got a restraining order. I am strongly in favor of her doing all of those things, but that means that I support sending police officers to his house with weapons to handcuff him, put him in the back of a police car, and throw him in a holding cell until he can make bail. Whatever happens to him next will be decided by a coercive system that runs on punishment – particularly for those without the cash for a good lawyer. It’s foolish to pretend otherwise.
While I am categorically opposed to the death penalty and support notions of restorative justice, I do believe that people who commit violent offenses should go to jail – even though I am fully aware that our prisons are dangerous and violent places and I am supporting an incarceration that will most likely involve beatings, rape, and various other forms of torture, dominance, and control. Even if all those things didn’t happen, locking someone up in a cage surrounded by guards with guns is most certainly a violent act. I know all this, and I still think violent criminals should go to jail. I don’t think I can trumpet my commitment to non-violence just because I am not personally walking uniformed and armed through the halls of Pelican Bay.
Continue reading "Peace, Love & Ass-kicking" »
This Be The Verse
Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
I secretly love this poem. It speaks to my inner misanthrope. Whether we’re aware of it or not, all of us have some overarching lens by we make sense of the world. Whether it’s “he who dies with the most toys wins” or “Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”, our culture, society, families, and life experiences work together to create these glasses that affect how we see and what we see - and what we don’t. The lens through which I see the world is that I’m on my own in a dangerous universe, that if I don’t protect myself, no one will – not family, not friends, and certainly not Big Daddy in the Sky. On my worst days, I can make French existentialists look like Kathie Lee Gifford.
Continue reading "Snakes, doves, and Philip Larkin" »
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