Back to Breath Again

I have been pondering how to find aspirations - a word which, again, is rooted in the concept of breath.

A friend who I was talking to when I was having my health breakdown this weekend referred to Feldenkrais phrasings of "able to fufill one's avowed dreams", and that's the place it all falls down for me, back at the beginning of everything: figuring out how to get there from here means having to find a 'there' to get to.

It was a couple months ago that I figured out that I want to be when I grow up.  I am nearly old enough to legally qualify to be President of the United States, and I only just started getting the inklings of aspirations.

Part of that is a social problem: I got a lot of "you're good at this thing" feedback and not a whole lot of help figuring out what I wanted, what mattered to me, how to pursue what I might want to do with my life.  (And while there's no way anyone could have meaningfully guided me to what I actually am doing with my life when I was a teenager, because my life is too damn weird, I could have gotten here with more productive back end stuff.)  This is a systemic problem; I wrote about it before in the very limited and specific field of sex ed, but I do think it comes down to things like critical thinking, internal development, and paying attention to the inner narratives of kids, all of which the culture I grew up in stink on ice at.

A lot of people muddle through that to finding what they want to do with their lives okay, though that doesn't seem to be the goal; as far as I can tell the actual goal is to get people who are dulled into shapes that are adequately bland so as to not argue with the demands of corporatist reality.  (People having dreams would be inconvenient when trying to coerce them into tedious jobs, after all.)  People with goals for themselves, aspirations, desires, they're hard to keep in little boxes.  They go looking for something better, more suited to them, or something eventually, if they haven't been broken.

But the social stuff is, at least from where I sit at the moment, comparatively minor.

When I was thrown out of college ("given the option to take medical leave", sorry), it was fundamentally because of the consequences of severe chronic depression at minimum.  And that's the culmination of a long stream of "does not fulfill potential" type things, wondering why I did not continue to be the eager-beaver overachiever of my childhood - a childhood where I was so overwhelmingly something that people went and built me curricula to give me something to do, which on the one hand let me learn a lot, and on the other hand left me woefully unprepared for realities where people didn't try to keep and hold my interest with shiny opportunities all the time.  And I knew damn well that the authorities of the school (or at least my godsawful dean) were mostly concerned with getting me shuffled off-campus so that if I killed myself it wouldn't reflect badly on them, because they weren't into looking after the Lesser Beings, you know, the people with mental health problems.  That was a school for the High Achievers, you know.  Not the disappointments.

Not living up to expectations means not having a college diploma, and that means having the devil of a time getting a job, by the way.  Because everyone wants a damn diploma.  I think the secretarial gig I picked up wanted a diploma but accepted me anyway.  And not having any goals, any aspirations, any clue about what I wanted to do - especially when I had Failed At Science - made it hard to figure out what jobs I might even begin to enjoy, anyway, or do well at.  (I discovered I was a pretty good secretary.)

I also discovered that I had a circadian rhythm disorder that falls brilliantly into the social model of disability.  By which I mean that when I could set my own schedule - as I did before they threw me out of school, trying to minimise my early morning classes and so on - I did fine, but being expected to keep a nine-to-five basically destroyed me.  I managed to muddle through well enough to pay the rent, but I lost any ability to do much of anything other than work, eat, and sleep, though I maintained a social life on the internet with my remaining few bits of competence, trying to hold on to some sense of self.

A major depressive episode later, and some re-aggravation of my PTSD that I didn't recognise was happening in that form at the time (I mean, I only recognised it as a thing that was relevant a few months ago and that's something like a thirteen year gap), and I was wound up in a ball of neuroses and inadequacies that was hard to comb through.  I didn't have at the time any clear sense of why I had sunk into the depths that time, which meant I had no idea how to prevent it happening again.

My understanding of myself had become that I could fail, and fail catastrophically: that I could shut down for reasons I did not understand and cease to be able to respond in a clear or meaningful way to the outside world, that I could neither maintain my commitments to others nor protect my own boundaries.  That my mental state was at best delicate, capable of collapsing, unreliable, that I was fundamentally untrustworthy because my mental health - or perhaps my moral rectitude - was not sufficient to overcome my circumstances.

I built a life around those assumptions.  The expectation that failure was implicit, inevitable, imminent: that circumstances could send my capacity for anything into a death spiral at any moment.  Futility was my watchword.  I would set myself small tasks and reward myself for them, but nothing in the sense of a long-term goal.  (The longest-term goal I accomplished was 'write a novel', which was assembled from a long sequence of goals the outer time limit of which was about three days.)

What's the point of having dreams, anyway?  When one isn't stable enough - or mature enough, or sane enough, or disciplined enough, or (some virtue or other depending on what seems appropriate for the beatings) enough - to achieve anything, why waste resources investing in an aspiration?  I marinated in my own perception of worthlessness, because I could not imagine a better world.

I would ask my doctor to check my thyroid levels regularly, and got grudging acquiescence and no help beyond that.  Eventually - and this was a long time coming - I built up the personal reserves to imagine that I might deserve a more compatible doctor, and swapped to one in the same practice who seemed plausible.

Who basically diagnosed a suspicion of my Hashimoto's in our first visit from our interview, ran the appropriate tests, and told me what it was the second visit, and got me on treatment.

And I take a little pill every night before I go to bed, and when I wake up I can do things.

All kinds of things.

I was on the little magic pill for like a week when my liege came home with a truck full of cobblestones and was unloading them in the driveway.  And I not only imagined that he would appreciate help, I managed to figure out a way of getting out there and helping him, and made the task go a whole hell of a lot more smoothly.  All of which would have been beyond my scope a week before.

I am prone to commenting now that I have four major diagnoses - chronic depression, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, delayed sleep phase syndrome, and also recently discovered a significant nutritional deficiency which we haven't tracked down an etiology for but are currently attempting to bludgeon to death with a ridiculous number of supplements - all of which boil down to, at some level, "You feel tired all the time and you can't get shit done."

And as I wrestle with starting to get all that stuff treated I find myself wondering ...

... now what?

Because I'm nearly old enough to be President.  And I have never felt able to have the luxury of dreams.  So now that I might not be a failure, now that I might be able to do something in the world... I'm at a total loss.

(While I was in the middle of writing this, I got email from the ACLU titled "You can't suppress a dream", and I just ... ... stared at it for a long time before I hit delete.  I don't even know, guys.)

R is for Railway Spine, Battle Fatigue, Shellshock, and Other Clever Ways of Saying PTSD

I have a problem.

I don't trust the world.

The theological upshots of this for a person dealing with a non-transcendental religious system are not minor.  (If I were looking to get out of my body and get to heaven, not trusting the world would probably be some kind of bloody bonus.  Of course it is a vale of tears and a source of trauma, right?  Pfeh.)

All those immanent, pan(en)theistic, naturally manifesting gods and spirits, they're part of the world, right?  And the world ...

The world has a lot of things in it.  And a lot of my experiences with those things have been unsettling.  (And I'm explicitly being personal here, not geopolitical.) I'm not just talking about sexual violence or harassment here, though that's the obvious thing that people leap to and something that's on the mind lately.  There's bullying, there's emotional abuse, there's lack of privacy, there's disrespect for boundaries of all kinds, there's a lack of awareness of the potential for differences among people leading to the erasure of some experiences, there's the full panoply of -isms and -phobias, there's ....

A long time ago I happened to look up the symptom-set for PTSD and I had all of them but one.  My liege, training to be an acupuncturist, says that the defensive layer of my energetic bodies is hair-trigger and twitchy, which he suggests may be part and parcel of the same sort of thing.  And, in all things, my response to the world's minor inconveniences and issues is to ... go away.

Dissociation is a skill, actually, and it's one that I'm pretty damn good at.  Reflexively good at.  It's not just the year or more of my teenage years where I have no memories written to disk, though that's a pretty primo example of not being in the world or of it.

And being reflexively good at absence is a bit of a problem when cultivating presence.  When the work has to do with being embodied, with engaging with the world, the fact that there's a soul-presence that responds to the concept of the world by whining like a tortured puppy and retreating into a corner to minimise potential avenues of attack is ... a problem.

It's not a problem I know entirely how to address, though I've been talking with my inner puppy a lot and asking about what could help....

(I think "railway spine" is actually "whiplash" but you know that works as a metaphor too.)

C is for the Craft

Mostly when I write religion, I write reconstructionism. I write books and research and the joy of finding a little nugget of something somewhere and bringing it out and polishing it until it shines and fits into the whole of the system. I write ancient theologies and stories written in ruined stone buildings.

The thing with recon, even the kind of deeply mystically oriented and extrapolative stuff that I do, is that it's fundamentally all known things. You could, if you got a burr up your arse, go read the same things I do and do the same work, and you might even come to basically the same conclusions. It's all out there.

It's not all that I do, of course, but that's the nature of icebergs.

Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because, as a student, I'm not fully qualified to do so. Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because what I do there is not that interesting to people outside my head - or I *do* talk about it, but I don't explicitly label it as religious work. Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because the Craft doesn't want me to talk about it.

Silence is a crocodile.

Someone asked a group I was in recently what the "goal" of the Craft studies was. They compared it to an idea that the "goal" of Christianity is salvation, is reaching heaven.

I don't trust goals. Too much gets lost along the way.

The Craft is about getting my ass moving, not getting my ass to a specific location and then being done. The Craft is about relationship - within myself, with others, with the Powers, with the cosmos. The Craft is about the edges of things, the twilight space at the edge of a knife.

It's not about where you're going. It's not even about where you are. It's about how you choose to proceed.

Since I'm all about the quotations lately, let's do a bit of poetry. This is one of my favorites, and I think its relevance is obvious.

pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness --- electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go E. E. Cummings

I got the formatting from this site because my HTML skills are not up for attempting to convey Cummings properly.

Growing Up Vulcan

(I am endeavouring to not make this a spoilery post, but I recognise that some people are very sensitive so such things. Here's your warning. All direct references to the movie itself are from the character-background setup scenes rather than, y'know, the plot.)

I saw Star Trek: Rebooted on Wednesday.

I'm not old enough to be heavily steeped in ST:TOS, but I've been a Trekkie for all my life, so I know the gestalts. I have a handful of the novels, level of know the gestalts. Went to Trek cons in high school. That kind of thing. So I knew enough to make a reasonable judgement on how the new movie treated the characters.

What I didn't expect was the intense familiarity of Spock's childhood.

It is one thing to know that the Vulcan contemplation of logic and reason and strict emotional control is because they have a history of violence and extremes that they are attempting to avoid recapitulating, and another to see a child, keenly aware of his half-alien nature, confronted by a set of taller bullies whose sole desire is to provoke that emotional reaction, that explosion, that display of response to their taunting. The game is to break Face, to get that feeling engaged; it is a life-or-death game, and if one loses, then one is a lesser being, an alien, not really qualified to take up space among real people.

I know that path, know the cultivation of intellectualism as a form of Face, the deadly risk of emotion that comes up in shaking tunnel-vision quakes. I invented the beginnings of Surak's stoic discipline before I ever saw a Tribble, to survive at home, to survive at school, to never break Face. And I know the gnawing, undermining doubt of the half-alien, wondering if I am destined to fail because of my tainted nature, driven to succeed to prove it is no taint, proud and tenuous and fragile and able to make "Live long and prosper" come out like "Fuck you" with no more than a quirk of an eyebrow.

I know Quinto's Spock in a way I never could know Nimoy's - know the painstaking awareness of every detail, every limitation or feared limitation, every weakness, the guarded protection of every place that might possibly be vulnerable, be a place where someone could get that final snap into violence or sorrow or joy that would show too much and expose everything. Nimoy's Spock was too polished and familiar, too skilled, to ever show that he had a Face rather than was Face, and I was not old enough to empathise.

And now I can remember growing up Vulcan.

At The Beginning

I got a lot of laughs this weekend commenting that I finally had everything in order, and now I was at the beginning. There was a gesture made at my six months pregnant belly and a "Just you wait."

It's a big deal, though. Because I do.

One of my long, secret fears was that the empty space I had that just wanted these things to be satisfied would not, in fact, be satisfied by them: that it was like my mother's empty space, a yawning chasm into which all the universe could be poured and never be enough. That every time I achieved the milestones or got things settled that my gut told me I needed to have in order something hidden in the next layer down would reveal itself with an, "And before you get settled, you need to deal with me," and send me off on some new chase into the wilderness looking for something to feed the emptiness. That, perhaps, the emptiness was something within me, a crack in my personal pot that would leak out anything that I might possibly try to fill myself with and greedily try to suck up more.

But no.

I have everything I need, and I am finally at the beginning.

I have had my [legal] husband in my life as a partner for the past fifteen years, and he has been a tremendous and amazing support to me all that time. Without him, without his unfaltering love and support, I could never have made it this far. He is my lion, my love, my mate.

I spent years afraid that I would never have partners the way my heart and mind seemed to settle: first, the fear that a second partnership would never last out much beyond a year; then a fear that no time in such a partnership could ever lead to a commitment, a settling down, a place where I could relax and be confident in my possessiveness without it feeling like it was crossing a line or demanding too much. Years and years of this, and now I can take my liege's hand and feel the ring that I put on his finger, and the release of it makes my eyes water with tears of relief as much as anything else.

I never truly believed I would have anything even remotely like the partnership I have with my liege, something where my kink could be uncramped and live wholly, where my religious life could interweave with someone else's, any of those things. It was not even on my plate as something to want, to think a part of the beginning, but having it and being as whole as having it has helped me to be, I do not think I could really begin without something that at least let me find that wholeness.

My spiritual life is settled into a course of knowing where I am going, with roots deep enough to nourish me where I am. I am at peace with not knowing everything, and learning.

I have worked hard on my mental health, and am finding myself in a place where - overall - I suspect that I am okay. I have untangled huge reams of complexes, including my fear of motherhood, and can now open myself up to wanting what I want, taking steps towards the future.

And in overcoming that fear and taking on this life tucked under my ribs, I found a last piece that I did not know that I needed: I have found peace from the yearning for motherlove. It is not unattainable, not something that cannot be hauled out of the bottomless pit of need for any price. It is something that I have in sufficiency, not only for my child to be, but for myself, sufficient to make up for all the yearning after something that I could never have from my actual mother. This amazing gift leaves me awestruck each time I notice it, each time I realise that I am no longer bound.

I have built my foundation and made it secure. This is not to say that I will never step in a hole or get in over my head - life is not so tidy - but I am at the beginning now, and I have everything I need to begin.

I am grateful, beyond grateful, to be able to be at the beginning.

Not One Of Your Holiday Games

One of Ren's prompts for this next round of the Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy was on the importance of women naming their own sexuality. And I've been thinking about that one for a while.

And after a lot of contemplation, I'm left with the feeling that it boils down to "If I don't do it, someone else will." If I want to leave it inchoate, unnamed, mysterious, I have to keep it entirely secret, because any sign that I have a hint of sexuality somewhere will be dragged out and assigned meaning by someone else. Even the category of being unsexed can be sexualised in some cases.

I have to make my own meanings, hold to them, define myself, or someone else will try to override me.

I am a cissexual woman. If I don't work on what, if anything, that means then I can get swept away in all of the cultural meanings of 'woman' and buffeted between them. Trapped between madonna and whore, career woman and brainwashed housewife, all the dichotamous piles of what 'woman' means. Whether it means I'm perceived as a set of penetratable holes and some boobs, or a little child in need of paternalistic protection, or both simultaneously, or one of the other godawful forms of womanness that floats around and tries to latch onto people like a facehugger out of Aliens and infest them with parasitic larvae doesn't matter: if I don't have a strong enough narrative of myself to refute these things, I can get infected and corrupted by these things. I am someone with these body parts and no dysphoria about them; it has no ontology, no deeper truth.

I am heterosexual. I am not in denial of my true and intrinsic bisexuality; I am not compelled into unsatisfying relationships by a heteronormative culture; I do not experience my orientation as fluid and malleable because I am a woman; I do not project my sexuality into images of women in the media; I do not consider my attractions to be oppression. I like looking at certain men, because I find them attractive, and I am just fine with that, thanks.

I am a sexual assault survivor. I am not a victim for revictimising, an object of pity, someone whose entire life and reality orbits around a golden afternoon in 1992 that left its marks in my mind. I will not be truncated and boxed into no more than helplessness and damage. I will not accept the myths, that I have a perpetually defective sexuality because of my experiences, that I just need to loosen up and get laid more to get over my trauma, that my kink or my polyamory or my anything else is a result of being warped, that my flashbacks or fears are a sign that I am a defective. All of which I have heard. I am a person who had a horrible experience; I have suffered, and I have worked to heal.

I am polyamorous. I am not looking for a quick lay, I am not available to just anyone, I am not too damaged to commit, I am not incapable of real love, I am not any of these other stereotypes or condemnations. I was not abandoned by my father, nor was I sexually abused. I am a person with two wonderful, committed, loving partners to spend my life with and another person of whom I am quite fond indeed.

I am kinky. My kink was not created by assault, manufactured by patriarchy, adapted from a need to seek abuse and disparagement, born of a sense of inferiority, a sign that I am a pathetic doormat, an invitation to treat me like a victim, or a signpost to deeper psychological defects. It is what it is, and I have invited commentary on neither the legitimacy of how I choose to conduct my relationships nor the progress of my spiritual development.

I am pregnant. This is not a validation of traditional barefoot-in-the-kitchen mores, a sign that I am more interested in baybees than my own autonomy, ownership by a man, a betrayal of women's freedom, a perpetuation of patriarchy, a sign that I am the right kind of woman with correct values, an embodiment of The Goddess [tm], or whatever other crazed myths that come up about motherhood. It is a part of the process of mammalian reproduction, which is not unrelated to sexuality.

Also: I am an emotional abuse survivor. I have my stories. If you want to define my reality for me, to override who I am and where I came from, to erase my stories, you are just like the one who abused me. I will exist in defiance of you and your fantasies about who I am, and I will not be quiet because you find me inconvenient. I don't care what your agenda is, whether it is important to you as a feminist or a traditionalist or a whatever else that people like me not exist and not be heard: you are the enemy of my personhood and my souls, and I deny you the power to name me.

I am many, many things, multitudinous beyond listing, and I. Am. Not. Yours.

I don't want other people's stories about me. I have my own.

If you want to have stories about me, listen - or, as a friend put it once, refrain from copulation and discorporate.

School Daze and the Mobs

Inspired by some talk elsewhere in the blogworld and such about abuse and female abusers ...

I'm not actually going to go into depth on the mommy issues front, though that is obviously a major factor; I want to write about adolescent dynamics.

It has always been easier for me to write about the bullying from the boys; it was so concrete and clear and distinct. I can trace chunks of things to those specific actions, those specific situations. And it's ... acceptable, easy, part of the standard narrative, for a woman to write about trauma inflicted by male entities, to put stories about sexual harassment or violence out in the forefront and talk about them. Talk about this, and one will get the support and the emotional recognition and the sense of community that comes of having the experience recognised and categorised as like the rest of us.

In my early adolescence, there were adults (sex largely irrelevant, generally positively inclined towards me), background people (sex largely irrelevant, generally just Face In Crowd people and irrelevant), individuals (sex depending on the individual; of the individuals who were actually positive presences in my life, the overwhelming majority were male), and The Boy Mobs and The Girl Mobs.

To the Boy Mobs, I was a target: prey, a toy, an isolated female-appearing figure with no support network, an object on which they could vent their explorations of sexuality. I was under no illusions that they were friendly; their hostility and depersonalisation was simple and straightforward enough that it presented a certain amount of protection from them: what I saw was what I got. It just happened that what I saw was negative.

Girl Mobs were ... complicated. For the most part they were content to treat me with a distant, mocking derision, laughing when they did not ignore me. Sometimes they stared, making great goggle-eyes of pointed attentiveness to the space alien; every so often one might detach to approach me and ask a question - pop culture, stylish fashion, that sort of thing - in order to determine that yes, I was completely incompetent at socialising like real people and take that information back to the Girl Mob to titter over.

For some reason, though, I thought the Girl Mobs might be less hostile. I suspect because I had picked up on some of the cultural assumptions that People Of My Sex Are My Natural Allies And Likely To Think Like Me, because there's no damn good reason to think of it otherwise. Perhaps it was also because they were more likely to be content to simply ignore my existence than make a game of me, and that might almost pass for benign. Sometimes, when a member of a Girl Mob would approach me, she would pass herself off as an Individual, someone with whom I might be able to form a relationship, someone who might be a friend ...

... who might invite me to a slumber party at a nonexistent address.

Yeah.

Boy Mobs were more likely to be physically dangerous, but at least they didn't even pretend to treat me like a potential person in order to get my guard down. I didn't trust them, I didn't have any reason to like them, and even though they hurt me badly, I didn't expect anything but hurt from them, so there was no betrayal.

Girl Mobs, when they deigned to notice me, lived for the joy of crushing hope and destroying the dregs of capacity for trust that my mother left me. At least they generally considered me beneath their notice, and besides, setting up a good and proper backstab takes more finesse than trying to cop a feel on the bus.

The Enemy of the Good

One of the first parenting books I picked up, well before I was actually pregnant, was titled The Good-Enough Parent. I saw the title on the shelf of a used bookstore and grabbed it immediately, without my usual taking time to dither that occupies hours in used bookstores; it was obvious to me that I needed it.

Perfection is bad for me. Believing in it, looking for it, considering it a relevant factor for anything. I'm not nihilistic enough to look for perfection.

Anymore.

I used to be hung up on the perfect. It was clear that "perfect" was what I would have to be to avoid abuse from my mother, so I worked for it. And worked for it.

And I failed. Every damn time. Because "perfect" is unachievable; it is always possible to find something to critique. And every damn time my lack of perfection won me a screaming fit, some howling rage, or a casually poisonous comment that drove me to flee to the dubious safety of my room (where, if I locked the door and anyone noticed, I would be bellowed at some more, because my space existed to be barged into so its imperfections could be catalogued).

Caring about perfection is defining me in terms of utter, absolute failure, reframing me into a universe where, if I cannot be perfect, the least I can do is cease to be, as the nuisances of the flawed should not be inflicted on my betters.

This is why I don't trust theory as a basis for political action. Not just the fact that so many popular theories theorise that in an ideal world I would not exist (which is hard not to take personally) -- so many theories posit an ideal world. Either as a lost Eden, something to which we can only aspire, or as a goalstate, something to be laboring towards.

I can't deal with perfection.

I must focus my attention on what is good enough. I need to know the criteria for satisfaction, and look at what satisfies them; from there I can pick among options that meet the need to select one. It doesn't need to be the best, the ideal, the perfect -- it needs to be sufficient. With sufficiency, there is no need to keep digging, to find a way of improving and aspiring to the perfect -- things can rest, be still, unless there is a clear and obvious improvement to make.

I will not be a perfect mother. There are no perfect mothers; the surrounding culture demands perfection of its mothers and invades them, screaming, when they inevitably fail. I reject the siren song of perfection, the luminous Madonna and Child figurine that I am supposed to embody and will be judged upon when my example does not match up.

I will not be perfect. But I can be good enough.

Getting Into My Head

I hate the way she does it. The way she's able to do it.

I can get a note and have it roll off me and think how great I'm doing, how easy it is to look at that and say, "Oh look, she's pulling this trick, that trick, the other; the subtext here and here is all about how great she is, the subtext there and there is all about how horrible I am. It reads surface-level as supportive, and is completely full of undermining. Ha ha ha, how remarkable. Good thing I'm able to draw that boundary, huh?"

And then ...

... then there's the way a decision I had more or less made winds up getting ripped out from under me and turned on its head because of a totally reasonable conversation, just letting you know, and of course she would do this responsible thing rather than the thing that I was intending, and it wasn't like I told her what I was doing anyway for her to undermine, I think she just guessed, or maybe it doesn't matter and she'll do what she does without knowing anything and ....

Yeah, around and around in a giant damn loop of self-doubt and uncertainty and needing to balance what is real and what isn't, and I don't know anymore.

I'm full of hormones and full of fear and my mother is in my head again and I don't know how to get her out.

In my head in my head in my head ....

Scale to Skin

There is a snake on my leg. A winged snake, coiled to protect an egg.

She is wrought in blood and ink and time, from my initial vision and the skilled hands of an artist who knows how to work flesh.

She is a sacred snake, a royal python, who guards her eggs when she lays them. She is a sacred snake, winged like the uraeus, the guardian of the king (though the uraeus is a cobra).

I was born in her year, the Snake, though just at its transition; my summer boyfriend when I was sixteen, four days younger than I, was born a Horse. When I was a child, we caught a garter snake once, kept it in a jar a while to study it and learn to have no fear, released it in the stump at the bottom of the yard, into which it wriggled and vanished like a mystery.

She is wise, is the snake, a liminal creature. She knows the mysteries of rebirth, shedding her skin to be made anew over and over again, many times in her life. She is a primordial, one of the first gods, guardian of secrets. There were times she bargained with people, to live in their homes and keep them free of vermin, in exchange for the warmth of their hearth, the protection of their children. She gave oracles, sometimes in the dangerous edges of the effects of her venom. Her reputation as a healer is multicultural, touching many worlds, many serpents.

She spreads her green, feathered wings widely, wrapping my leg in a gesture of benediction; green for life, living, birth, rich against her fertile browns. She can freely move in any direction she chooses, and chooses to mantle protectively over one egg, tucked luminous dark into her coils.

The egg she protects is a pisanka, an egg of old, old tradition among certain of my ancestors. An egg now marking and celebrating the mysteries of life and death, the shedding of the skin, being born into salvation. Blue for breath, breath for soul, ruach the colour of sky; the starburst sun in white and gold, pure and joyous and the brightness of the laughter of children.

She is my ancestor mark, my protector always with me. She is my memory of those who came before, my promise to those who come after. She is wrought in flesh and bone and blood and breath, etched under skin, holding close and gentle.

When the healing skin peels away, it will look and feel just like snakeskin.


(As I started writing this, some weeks ago before the work was done, Stephen Bodio's Querencia linked to this post at Atomic Nerds about ink and the shapes and meanings thereof, and what people will see.)

Crazy For You

There's an interesting and largely unfortunate consequece to being up-front about damage, and it's why I rarely am.

It's the way it exposes things. Generally, the exposure is in the form of, "You're reacting that way because you're broken in this way." And if one's disclosed having been hurt in the relevant this way, well, there's glory for ya, catch-22 style.

Back when I was dealing with the jerk who was pulling the "What horrible thing happened to her that she doesn't believe she deserves monogamy" schtick, when he was prying and going at 'did you have an abused childhood? were you molested?' and all the things that were looking for someone to blame, I didn't talk about things. Not just because I know that talking about, say, my mother in any other circumstances would get the usual borderline-description-response "Oh, that's perfectly normal, you're the crazy one", but this time would be siezed upon as some reason to justify my responses. Not just because talking about the assault is hard, and I don't want to hand over little bits of the rough stuff in my head to someone who just wants ammunition to hurt me with.

But because sometimes, the reactions aren't a pathology. I don't need horrible-things-happened to explain being poly or kinky, as I don't consider them broken states in need of correction.

With real people worth talking to, it gets harder, though.

Especially when getting aftereffects of The Crazy One.

"You're reacting that way because ..." and wham, off to the races.

Any response can be characterised as belonging to The Crazy One, if one's dissected one's past enough. Especially if there is any genuine damage in there to deal with. And if it belongs to The Crazy One, it's my responsibility to deal with; it doesn't necessarily bear on reality.

Only sometimes I really am just that upset.

And after getting a "You're reacting that way because ..."

... I spend hours taking myself apart, trying to figure out if I'm delusional, if I'm The Crazy One and didn't notice it, because maybe someone else actually knows why I'm reacting better than I do from inside my head ...

... because ...

... what if I am The Crazy One?

... what if ...

... if ...

A Social Disease

So I spent my therapy appointment talking about "Baby Madonna" and related.

She doesn't think I need to forgive myself. She thinks I need to ... externalise the victim-blaming, the disgust at self, the sense of failure, into a framework in which what I have is a piece of shared experience of a cultural failing -- not just the assault itself, but the framework by which the people who have had such experiences are further beaten down and abused by the response and expectations, by the thump of falling off the madonna pedestal and the crush of having it land on us afterwards.

That this internalised self-hatred is a taught thing, a cultural thing, a social disease. And I don't need to forgive myself for suffering its symptoms; I need to recognise that it's an illness. And then move to treating that illness.

I ... am scared of collective experience. Not just because the I'm Every Woman feminists make me sick, not just because of the horrible essentialising I've seen of that sort of thing, but because the meaning of it gets out of my hands. It feels like opening it up for someone else to tell me what having been assaulted meant to me, did to me, broke in me, because it's a more generalised thing than just me.

And I wouldn't talk about it, not for years, because I was afraid of being just another faceless victim whose experience was a statistic, who was taken and ruined and discarded into the "broken" heap. In the hope of avoiding the social disease that I seem to have caught anyway.

So I find myself asking: What does it mean, to be a part of collective experience? To be suffering the symptoms of a cultural cancer? It can't mean the universalising bullshit, or that I can be used as someone else's political blow-up doll, the victim, boo-hoo, let's all have a good cry about our collective victimisation, not if it means anything beyond reiterating suffering

It has to mean something about sorting out the boundaries between self and other-than-self, distinguishing shame from what others want me to be ashamed of, if it means anything worth trying. Finding a way of sorting out what pain is my own thing, and what pain is because this ... construct ... has hooks under my flesh.

At that level I can't consistently tell the difference between me and my mother, let alone me and this huge crazy scary planet.

You Are What You Eat

I find myself, for complicated reasons, thinking of my brother today, and differences between us.

It's become clear to me over time that food was something like my mother's second-favorite locus of control. Where I've heard of families in which children were required to at least sample some portion of what was put on their plates, or had control over how much of everything was put there but were expected to finish what they selected, I had no choice about how much there was, and was expected to finish it. My mother finished her meals with the promptness of someone from a working-class family who grew up with three brothers, my father somewhat less promptly, and I was frequently abandoned, often with my brother, at the table, because supervising my staring at the strong-tasting food was probably as boring as being constrained to the table until it was gone.

My brother ... opted out.

I don't know how he did it. He just refused to participate; by the time he was six or seven he was making his own small dinners of things he was willing to eat, and somehow he was permitted to do so. These days my father agonises some about whether letting him do that led to the development of his gastrointestinal disorder or whether my brother's refusal to eat what the rest of the family was eating derived from early attempts on his part to find food he could digest without pain, before his illness surged to its current level.

I don't know how he did it. I don't know how he ducked the whole nexus of control.

And my picky, stubborn brother grew into a giant foodie, full of exploration and joy and gastronomic enthusiasm, something which both makes his disorder kick up to a different level of suffering and makes it that much easier for him to find interesting food that he can safely eat.

And I, stuck in the control games about what I would eat and how much, grew into someone with weird neuroses about food and control, remained picky and conservative in my food preferences, and am still nauseated by cauliflower.

The Crazy One

I'm oddly contemplative after coming back from the crazed winterperiod visitation with the bloodkin and in-laws. Which included a few hours with my mother.

The thing that I constantly run aground on now that I have some distance, some rationality, some capacity for independence, is how much I feel that dealing with her turns me into The Crazy One.

She's so ordinary, so nice, so making my favorite holiday meal when she knows I'm coming to visit and setting it out with cookies. There's this part of me that responds to that, that ... aches ... with wanting to believe in it, to treat her like an ordinary mother I could have mother-daughter conversations with. That buys the illusion, wonders if there's something wrong with me for being on edge, tense, waiting to jump the wrong way, locking up and freezing when I see her doodled note not even written to me about grandchildren, not cutting the ordinary amount of slack for a preference forgotten, that sort of thing. That wonders if I'm The Crazy One, the one with the irrational, unreasoned, unfounded responses.

And then there are the edges, the things that catch the bits of the illusion and make the mask start to fray at the edges. The slick comment like glare ice that I seem to be doing well (when I have said that I've been wrestling with illness), leaving me wishing I'd put on less brave face when I left the in-laws. The little suggestive "I could go somewhere with that, but I am nice, I will refrain" comment to a self-aware remark on my part. The persistent memory of old chafing wounds, some of them scabbed over by this point, constantly niggled at by new edits to past stories, new discussions, new places I find myself suddenly up in arms because a new force has come over the hill at a previously unfortified border.

I despair of explaining why the militia is riding in my mind.

Hiding the Lion

The promised sequel to Hiding the Cow, which I got around to because of Renegade Evolution's latest nony, who fancies spewing about how women are all gentle and nurturing and how that shows what's wrong with people today.

A mythological interlude:

A long time ago, back when the world was forging legends, humankind got kind of pissy and uppity and disrespectful of the gods, as humans have done from before time immemorial. This time was sufficiently bad that Ra, who was having a sensitive day, asked His daughter, named Gold, to go explain to them the error of their ways and instruct them in proper respect.

And Gold gathered her power together, and went among the humans to apply proper chastisement, and was known as Sekhmet, Whose Name means "The Powerful One".

And after She had been explaining things for a wee bit, the other gods went to Ra and said, "You know, if She doesn't stop explaining, we're going to run out of humans." And Ra sent to His daughter and said, "I think they have the idea now, you can come home." And She said, "You can never be sure. And besides, I'm enjoying myself." And her enjoyment ran red across the land.

So the gods did as the gods will do in such circumstances, went to wise Djehwty (Who the Greeks called Thoth) and said, "Djehwwwwwwty, you're smaaaart. Fix it! Pleeeeeeeeaaaase?"

And Djehwty had many jars of beer brewed, vast numbers of them, and dyed them with red ochre. And He went to where Sekhmet, replete with the day's slaughter, was sleeping, and poured out the beer until the land ran red with it around Her. And when She woke, she saw the red liquid, and grinned, and dipped her head to drink, and got completely smashed, and ran away to Nubia.

And eventually that caused problems too, and Djehwty was sent to fix it, and bring Her home, and as She bathed in the Nile at the cataract of the border, the bloodlust washed out of her, staining the waters red, and She was again Gold, the beautiful daughter of Ra.

And these two ladies, Hetharu and Sekhmet, They have Their own lives, their own natures, and yet, if you dig deep enough down, you find that the lady Who loves and celebrates all that is good and beautiful has a rage in Her if that beauty is defiled; the lady Who avenges, purifies, and cleanses taint does so out of that same deep, profound love. The one slides into the other so easily when the balance is tipped. The Lady of Intoxication in both Her Names will share a draught of beer with you, especially if it's red, but there is also the madness of music and the madness of blood, and they are not so far apart as some would like to think. Ask your local maenad.

End mythological interlude.

When I wrote 'Hiding the Cow', I wrote about how I kept running into people who just couldn't imagine me as a Hathor kid, couldn't see me as someone who would revere Her first among goddesses. Too cranky, too abrasive, not nurturing enough, or something. But the face I show the world is much more Setian than rooted in Mother's sister-self; the outsider, the alien, the border-walker and challenger. Not the surgeon, not the plague-bringer, not the cauterising flame, Whose kindness can be so cruel.

I don't show that either, when I can help it.

And one can say that it's because it's not kind to perform brain surgery on random passers-by without getting proper consents first, or that it's not nice to be cruel and one should strive to not make other people's lives that much more difficult.

But really, mostly, I'm afraid of power.

Sekhmet, The Powerful One.

Who can get just as drunk on the joy of slaughter as She can on a shot of something. Who enjoys inflicting the pain and terror. Who ...

... if you live long enough with someone who hoards information, ideas, notions about a person, hones them to a point, to a razored, jagged edge ...

... it's hard to not get good at knowing where to put the knife.

... and now to twist it.

It's so easy.

It feels so satisfying. To take whatever is inside, all the pain at things not being right, at beauty defiled, whatever outrage I suffer or the world around me suffers, and turn it around, and drive it back into someone's gut.

And there are clean ways of doing the surgery, and there's the slide into dipping one's shaggy leonine head to drink the blood from the landscape, and it's not easy, and it's not clean, and there's a line somewhere but it's hard to know when one's crossing it.

And because I fear it, I fear myself, because I hold that potential within me, just as much as I do the potential to nurture and heal. They are not disparate things, cleanly separated, either; the surgeon is a healer, cutting out the cancerous. The mother must defend, and must not smother with overkindness. Joy can be marred. Rightness can be restored. It's all a seamless flow from colour to colour, red and gold mingled together, thread by thread.

Dua Sekhmet.

Heartbroken

So last night I called all my immediate family members -- both parents and my brother -- to wish them a happy Thanksgiving.

Talking with my brother is ... complicated, sometimes. It's like we grew up in slightly different worlds. He was never close to Dad, particularly, for reasons I understand, and maintains a closer relationship with Mom than I can imagine ever wanting. He asked me why I was finally in therapy, and I told him I'd hit rock bottom, and after a moment he said, "I'm happy for you", and ... it's a funny thing to say, though I know what he meant.

He apparently went to a Thanksgiving gathering with Mom and about a dozen (according to him) or twenty (according to her) other people. She had a great time. He felt alienated by all the strangers having their family togetherness holiday, pretty much.

And he said, "I hate holidays like this."

I asked him why.

"I don't have a family," he said.

The divorce and all its chaos happened while he was still living at home -- I was off to college, and then I went mad, and I stayed here rather than come back. Which I needed to do, and at the same time I wasn't there for him. I'm pretty sure he was upset by that, by not having my support, but I could barely keep myself together at the time.

I know he walked out somewhere in there, lived with friends for a few weeks, just didn't deal with them, because of something Mom said to him, trying to pull the coercion tricks on him because he wasn't bending to her will, because he was trying not to take sides.

I know he was a lot more scarred by the dissolution than I was. I don't know how to soothe that at all.

I just ....

"I don't have a family."

A Sufficiency Of The Evidence

"What do you want?"

"I have everything I want."

I have never in my life been enough.

When I was about twelve, I think, I started getting my mother chocolates for Christmas. Cherries, with the stems on, in dark chocolate, a half-dozen of them every year. Because I was certain she liked them, certain there would be no disappointment at receiving them, no pause, and then the little sigh, and then the muted, "Thank you" that made it clear that somehow, something had managed to fall short. There was a failure there, something unspoken, a perpetual wound.

And that's without getting into the dramatic spikes of failure at impossible standards, the betrayals by the incomprehensible. The messages I get occasionally, seesawing wildly between "we've got the bestest mother/daughter relationship evar" and "I don't know what to do with you, you shut me out, I'm uninvolved in your life, you reject me", the threat of the latter a now-fangless attempt at enforcing the former.

My father would tell me that he knew I could do better, sometimes, and I know he meant it in that encouraging way, look, the goal is a little further on, it's within your reach, just stretch a little. When I pointed out how poorly "you can do better than this" interacted with Mom's "nothing you do will ever be good enough", he nearly cried.

There is always the capacity to strive, the obligation to strive, and the knowledge that it will not suffice. Hamartia is the Greek word, often translated as "sin": missing the mark, missing the target, the arrow falls short. I grew up steeped in hamartia, leaving stains on my bones like tea left in the cup too long; any success was inadequate, any failure was proof of inadequacy. The moral qualities of failure, of sin, turned me into a newt, breathing in guilt and shame in the constant flood of hamartia.

Metamorphosis happens. As does hamartia. I cannot keep breathing the same thing as I did before I grew legs, but hamartia calls to me, a safe place to swim, even the toxins are familiar. Until I realise I'm choking, choking on shame and guilt that's just ... floating about ... and there's nothing here to breathe. Not a baby newt anymore, soaking in poison through my skin. I can drown, here, now, in hamartia and the things that flow in it.

"What do you want?"

"I have everything I want."

They're amazing things, the moments where the world coils in close and simplifies down into just us for a while, the shape of being me and being him and us being the two of us and setting down the outside for a while, his hand on the back of my neck, my face buried against his shoulder, the urge to please and serve told that it does well, that it is ... enough.

I have never in my life been enough, I told him, and I cried. Never been enough. Never been able to put down the striving to be better and more, or the knowledge that no striving will be sufficient.

And he said he had been sad, and I had given him happiness, and this was enough.

For a little there, curled up in his arms, settled into the glowy contentment of satiated service, I ...

... can almost believe it.

Tired Of My Mother

I am so tired of my mother.

Which is, of course, why I'm stuck writing about it, because my entire universe keeps collapsingto "Goddamn, am I tired of my mother."

Every glitch, every petty irrationality, everything I snap at or over, somewhere along the way I come across this moment of revelation: oh, right, I go completely nonlinear here because of a pattern from my mother. I am tired of this. I want to be a crazy freak for a different reason for a bit.

I was going to print out "Have you ever gone mad?" from this blog and my detailed writeup of the assault from my LJ to hand to the shrink tomorrow, to have something to talk about other than my mother, but that was before a dispute and revelation led to me sobbing in my husband's arms about how tired I am of my mother. Sobbing and wailing to the point of nausea (how I hate that emotional upset makes me want to vomit) about how everywhere I turn, she's there, the echoing voice in my head, the patterns, the irrationalities, every damn problem I try to tackle, every issue I want to resolve, oh look, there are mommy issues. So maybe I should talk about how tired I am of my mother.

There's no escape. She lives in my head and I don't know how to evict her. I live five hundred miles away from her for a goddamn reason, and I still have these small signs that light up saying "Please do not push this button again".

And who am I kidding, anyway? So much of the madness is tangled up in having no refuge, no way of recovering, becoming sane, her obsession with the condition of the filthy sheets over showing any concern over my pain-wracked mind, fighting to stay where I was rather than go back anywhere near her where I would have to face the buffeting of her towering contempt. I don't know how to chase down the origins of that break, either, though she's not uninvolved. So much of the aftermath of the assault is tied up in not having anywhere safe to turn to, because my mother was untrustworthy and my father was emotionally shut-in and ... there's no escaping her there either, just a diversion of other reasons to be quite crazy that are at least slightly separate from the all-consuming howling madness that she taught me.

And my liege just asked me, "Do you want some tea or something?"

I said, "I want an exorcism."

He said he'd look for his manual for Catholic priests.

Heh.

I am so tired of my mother.

Therapy is hard. I don't see any way of getting free.

Just Drawn This Way

Back to the mommy issues, alas. But this one is at least interesting.

One of the things that I wrestle with when trying to deal with my mother, trying to explain things and express them, is that the more stories I tell, the more I feel like I'm trying to present a cartoon as reality, present toonspace and toonlogic as things that actually work in the real bound-by-physics world. Trying to explain this makes me look like the crazy one. Which is of course one of those mechanisms-of-control, if trying to explain how something is broken makes one look deranged, there's no way of escape, getting out, getting support. (UTBM has, as one of those things-kids-of-borderlines-say, "My friends all think she's great!")

Every so often I come up with a story about her, and think, "If I tell this one, nobody will believe me." It's just too implausible, too weird, too off the wall, too ... toonworld. Here's one: Back in 2002 when the snipers were causing panic around Washington, DC, she forgot to stop for gas one morning and barely made it to work. She was furious with herself over this, up until she learned that a woman had been shot that morning at that gas station. At which point she sent my father an email mock-apologising for not stopping for gas that day.

And, okay, maybe that one story can make sense, in the context of a just-finalised acrimonious divorce, but, y'know, stack that up with my 'How I horrified the Shrink' story, with the time she decided to stop washing her hair to see if anyone would notice, with all these other things, and we've got a character that might work in a particularly exaggerated webcomic or a nineteenth-century satire. Not someone who really exists.

But anyway, I pinned down some of my issues -- I grew up in the universe of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" Some people are normal people and operate like normal people, with normal physics, and so on. And some people are toons, and operate on toonlogic and with toonphysics. And some people are toons who look just like normal people; presumably there are some normal people who look like toons. And I don't know if I'm 'normal' or 'toon', or somewhere on the spectrum between them, and some people have implausibly large mallets in their back pockets for delivering chastisements for the violation of one set of rules or the other. It doesn't matter how soundly defeated some people are, they just reinflate and keep coming. And so on.

Are you real? Are you a toon? Am I real? Or a toon? I don't know. Some of my discernment got swallowed up by that borderline-black-box long enough ago that I don't know how to get it out again.

My liege keeps telling me I'm not as crazy as I think I am -- that my functionality is higher than I constantly fear it is.

But if I look down, I might fall. That's one of the unbreakable laws of toonphysics, after all. Never look down.

Tell It To Me Straight

So I continue with this therapy dealie. This past session was spent largely on stories about my mother, at least one of which visibly horrified the shrink. (I may not have told that one here. I'll tell it another time.)

One of the ones I told was when I learned I couldn't trust her. Which ... what almost horrifies me now as an adult was that I knew this from the age of seven or eight or so, whenever this story happened, and yet I kept trying. Kept offering her things to break to see if she was going to break them again, like she always did. Kept giving her opportunities and being hurt when it didn't work out well. (And the shrink says that that sort of faith is good and human, but that doesn't make it not feel like a horror movie in retrospect -- don't open that door, you know the monster is behind that door, can't you hear the cellists?)

Anyway. At seven or eight I was seriously considering running away from home. I planned it thoroughly, in the oddly myopic way that kids do things -- I didn't have plans on where to go, I figured I'd go to a friend's house and work from there, but I had charts and diagrams and lists and things plotted out in where I'd put my stuff in the little red wagon -- money in a particular corner under other things so nobody would steal it, this much space for clothes, these critical stuffed animals, and so on. Twenty or so pages of notes about this -- I was a meticulous kid about that sort of thing.

And in a fit of, I don't know, generosity or weakness or something, I confessed to my mother that I'd been thinking of this. And she comforted me, patted me, made all the right there-there-dear noises, and I thought that maybe I wouldn't need those pieces of paper after all, all those carefully laid plans.

That night at about eleven I decided I needed a drink, and crept downstairs to get one from the kitchen. I overheard my parents talking in the living room -- or rather, my mother declaiming and my father grunting. I slipped up towards the edge of the door to listen, and heard, in vicious, dismissing, sneering tones, "... gave me this bullshit about running away ..."

I stood there, shocked to the bone, and I don't remember anything else of the conversation. I considered, fleetingly, bursting in on them, defending myself; considered getting the evidence of all my planning and presenting it as proof; considered just vanishing that night, I think, or the next day, to show her. And then I crept back upstairs, full of the shock of my mother's support and gentleness being a veneer over that contempt, too afraid to make a noise of getting a drink and getting caught having potentially heard that savagery. If she had that much hatred in her when she thought I didn't know, what would she do if she thought I knew? What would she do if she knew I caught her lying to me, expressing care and sympathy, pretending to be a friend, while she harbored that level of disgust for what I confided?

It's one of those things that has reverberations down the line, echoing in the cavernous hollows of the spaces between people. I am not put at ease by the 'polite social lie', but rather quite the contrary; I also deflect the question rather than speak untruth, if answering it truthfully would be inappropriate. (I honestly have no idea whether this is related to my decision at about the same age to stop lying. They aren't related in my memory, but.) I am not capable of considering the misdirecting social corner-padding a kindness; it's just another way for me to doubt my senses, for me to find a reason to mistrust.

My liege and I had something of a fight this week, because he had the basic respect for me to tell it to me straight. And then we went and we damn well fixed it, because all the parts were laid out mostly in the clear. Which reminds me of back early on in our relationship, when I anxiously told him I had a temper and might blow up under stress, and got the response, "Good. Then we will fight efficiently." It was very efficient; he even held me for some of it, the bit where I got lost in the old mommy-issues tangle of what is real, whether memory can mean anything, all of that mess that's why I can't handle the pretending. Keeping the truth straight is plenty hard enough.