Dis/Ability

Little white pills.
(One and a half of them -
I cut them with a kitchen knife every other day.)

Little white pills
Treating to the numbers
(I never knew to notice but
Maybe when you're fifteen you don't pay the right sort of attention
Or maybe
The kid with the dissociation problem
And PTSD
Is not the best at body awareness.
Ya think?)
They checked my throat,
Little pen marks and a tape measure,
And told me
"Little white pills, one and a half of them."

Eventually
I stopped taking them
It didn't seem to matter.

When I had doctors
I would tell them
"I took little white pills,
One and a half of them.
I want you to find the numbers."
They found the numbers,
And sent me on my way.

I argued with one,
"These are the wrong numbers.
Here are my printouts.
This is what the new standards are,"
And she told me
My numbers were fine.
The one time they weren't,
She checked again,
And they'd changed.

Sometime in my late twenties
I found a bentwood cane
In an antique shop.
"Necessary tools should be beautiful," I said.
It was about the right height,
Red and knobbly and wonderful.
I didn't usually need it
But it was nice to have.

I took little white pills
For a while
They made me feel stoned
When I changed my dose
But the world didn't hurt so much
In my mind
And that was nice.
I had to stop
When I was pregnant
Though.

My knees never recovered
From the pregnancy
And stairs were hard.

I got a new doctor
And I said to him
"I had little white pills
One and a half of them
And I want you to check my numbers."
And he did.

And he said, "I don't treat numbers,
But your numbers
(The lab would say they're fine
Like your other doctor did)
They aren't good.
I would give you little white pills
Just for this
But look --
This other number --
Those are antibodies
And they shouldn't be there."

And he gave me little white pills.
Half of one a day, to start,
And I went home with a scrip
And told everyone I knew
"I have an autoimmune disease!"
And some of them understood
Why I was so happy.

One day
There was a truckful of rocks to unload
And I took the kids outside
And I helped
Because I had little white pills.

The little white pills
Don't change my body
Into a body that isn't nonconsensually suicidal
But they start to take away its weapons
And I didn't notice
All the ways I felt better
Until the little white pills
Went away.

And then I noticed
That my knees hurt again.
That I was so tired
Too tired to think.
I noticed
All the things I knew before.
(Fatigue, depression,
Constipation,
My appetite is gone because
My metabolism is fucked
It didn't go long enough
For my fingernails to shatter
But I bet when they grow a little more
They will.)

I noticed I needed that
Bentwood cane
And I hadn't remembered
The last time
I needed it to make it through a day.

"I need new little white pills,"
I said
While trying not to want to die
In a body that was trying to kill me
Because somehow
Having it all come back
The chills
The acne down my jaw
The way the pain kept me awake
And my ankles felt like tennis balls
Of flaking, brittle skin
With the fatigue
And all
(At least my heart didn't go flipping out
Like it was doing before I got
Little white pills
This time
That scared the fuck out of me
And I couldn't say
"I think I'm going to die"
I have kids
I can't leave them like this
I couldn't even tell the doctor
Which was stupid
But it was all the same damn thing
My life a ruin for a lack
Of little white pills
I suppose
But I digress)
It broke me
Hard
And I could barely get out of bed
The day I was going to see the doctor
Who could give me
Little white pills.

(My grandmother took the pills
I don't know if they were little and white
I wonder sometimes
If that was why--
Or part of why--
But no matter.)

He gave me little white pills
I gave him blood
To check my numbers
He said "I'll call if they're really bad"
And I took my scrip
And yelled at the pharmacist
Until they gave me
Little white pills
Just one at a time
To replace
The ones that didn't work.

Today I had to have a beer
To make the pain stop.
I will take my little white pill
And hope
To be more than a little better than I was
Tomorrow.

V is for Vino Veritas

Hetharu is the Lady of Intoxication.

There's a lot to be said around that, and a lot of it is actually kind of difficult to express.  I mean, there's the obvious point that the use of alcohol is not something problematic, but it's hard to avoid that on a culture that is heavily constructed around beer in any case.

But here is a thing: one of the effects of alcohol is what gets called "lowered inhibitions".  It brings forward all of those desires that one wouldn't admit to ordinarily, and takes the brakes off, meaning they're more likely to happen.

There is a peculiar honesty to alcohol.

I suspect that's where "in vino veritas" comes from, that sense that people who have been loosened with that particular drug will show something less constrained, something that is in some way more real.  (It will reveal people whose secret desires are foul and antisocial as well, which is knowledge worth having at times even when dealing with someone who is a "good person" when sober....)

Not all the things people feel constrained from are awful.  Some of them are small things.

It's worth knowing where the narrow spots are, sometimes.

(Tipsy, I stop fixing my typos.

I make broader, more expansive gestures with my hands.

I poke people in the nose.  Generally people I'm close to who won't mind.  Much.

I pun.)

Treating Pain

The book I'm reading right now, Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey To Motherhood, quotes an obstetrical anesthesiologist as saying, "There is no other condition in medicine where we allow patients to have severe pain and not treat them."

It says something about me that my response to this was to bark out a laugh. Or something about my knowledge of the world. Or ... something.

I read this a few days after spreading the word to some fellow bloggers about the research fraud on Celebrex/Lyrica combinations.

I read this in a state of awareness that the "War on Drugs" has led to doctors being unwilling to prescribe narcotic painkillers - because if they do so too often, they will be investigated, because they don't want to "feed the addiction" of people suffering from chronic pain.

Out in the real world, people with a wide varieties of "conditions in medicine" are actively denied pain treatment, or denied adequate pain treatment. I know more people with chronic pain conditions who are unable to get competent treatment than people who can - many of the ones lacking competent treatment know fully well what medications will ease their condition, but if they go and ask for them they're labelled "drug-seeking" and turned away to suffer.

There is an illusion that pain is treated, that pain is taken seriously, that pain is recognised and respected and dealt with in an appropriate fashion. It is the mythology.

It is a lie.

Election Special

In honor of tomorrow's US elections, I give you:

Ten political positions that some people probably want to throw things at me for.

1) A foreign policy that does not acknowledge that people around the world have genuine grievances with the colonizing West in general and the United States in particular is doomed to horrible failure. Acknowledging that other people might possibly be pissed about American exceptionalism, imperialism, and meddling in their internal affairs is not unpatriotic, it's not being a damned fool.

2) Corporations are not people. As they cannot fulfil the obligations of citizenship or face the consequences that actual people do for their actions, due to not being people and all, they do not merit the same access to choice that people get. In other words: I'll start to care about corporate "free speech" when a corporation can do time for negligent homicide.

3) Neo-Prohibition does not work; those who do not learn from history, doomed to repeat, etc. It funds organised crime and terrorism; it ruins lives; it is fundamentally racist. And if that wasn't bad enough, the "War on Drugs" is fucking expensive, and even if we really want to waste our money on increasing crime, destroying families, locking up nonviolent drug users, and other idiocies, we can't afford to be that stupid right now.

4) Prevention is cheaper than crisis response. Harm reduction works better than wishing problems just wouldn't happen. Education and opening access to options improve things in the long run. This applies to health care access, sex work, sex education, drug use, juvenile delinquency, same-sex marriage rights, and approximately everything else in the political universe.

5) The question of "when does life begin" is totally irrelevant to the political discussions it appears in. The answer is "probably somewhere around four billion years ago", give or take half a billion, and if you think otherwise you need to be locked in a small room with a biology textbook that includes a section on the refutation of spontaneous generation and the development of omne vivum ex ovo. When it matters that there's life there may be an interesting question, but that's a completely different field.

6) Anyone who says "get the government out of the business of marriage" needs to be slapped, and then have explained to them in very small words about the whole fact that we have an entire branch of government there to sort out people's legal contracts, and what makes marriage such a sooper-speshul legal contract that it should get excepted from that? (Oh, you think marriage is religious? Enshrining that in the law's a violation of the Establishment Clause.)

7) While I'm on the subject, marriage should be gotten the hell out of the tax business. The sensible filing for taxation purposes is at the household level, and marriage is simply one way of establishing a household relationship -- one that is both the only one effectively recognised and woefully inadequate for addressing the variety of households extant. Households are not now, and never have been, all single people and marrieds-and-their-offspring. Some people have extended families, unrelated dependents, or other broader setups. Some people have untraditional family structures. Make it as annoying to establish and dissolve a household unit as it is to establish and dissolve a marriage if you have to, but fucking sheesh.

8) The US economy is structured in a manner that is fundamentally anti-family. The evidence is overwhelming: hours in our work week, vacation time typically available, health care costs, access to parental leave time for births/adoptions, and that's just stuff I can think of official statistics for off the top of my head. Not things for which there are statistics that I can't think of off top of head, or the pervasiveness of culture of overwork to replace self-value, or the tendency to work people double-time rather than hire more workers, or the fact that large numbers of people have to work two or three part-time jobs to bring in enough to care for their families and still don't have any goddamn health care.

9) Political name-calling makes people look like they're stuck in a rather petulant childhood. I don't care if it's Nobama or McSame, Democraps or Rethuglicans, or any of the other oh-so-grade-school variations. "Libtard" is one that's been going around my sports group a lot, and I'm sure there's an equivalent conservative one but I've probably killfiled whoever uses it. All the cries of "commie" are like the schoolyard braying of "gay"; if they are, who fucking cares? Liberal, conservative, progressive, socialist, and so on are not Bad Words to throw at the other children after pulling their hair and then run away tittering in the corner with your little clique of puerile delinquents. (Neither is "Muslim".) It doesn't reveal you as clever, it reveals you as an uncreative brat who needs a time-out and possibly a nap. Stomp your little velcro-sneakered feet all you like, but as long as you continue with that tantrum you're going to have to sit in the corner.

10) Formulating things in terms of "rights" is a defective way of arranging policy. Speaking of petulance, how often does one hear a sullen, "Well, I gotta right," in response to some critique? Operating in a rights-based framework feeds an attitude of entitlement that, frankly, the US doesn't really need. Too many absolutes in the picture, and too many mistaking a right to one thing for a right to something only peripherally related -- how many times have you wanted to say, "Your right to free speech does not obligate me to listen to your idiocy"? Frame things in terms of what people can do, not what they have a right to do, and you start to actually have some nuance.

Measure of a Medication

Fear is how we measure ourselves.

(I know it because a god told me. I know it because I feel it in my bones, blood and bone, breath and blood and bone. I know it.)

Fear is how we measure ourselves and that's how I got out, got out, got out of the laughing crying hysteria of terror the slip-slide of the inside of my brain. I said it, said it in the car when we were driving, driving because my husband was willing to go and get me the only food I could imagine myself eating, was willing to listen to me giggling through the tears with, "I'm crazy!"

I said it, and got a handle on the sideways-slipping weirdness of the brain, the sense of Things Moved Around in ways that I don't understand and don't have a grip on, not feeling less of the madness but maybe better able to float rather than flail.

Fear is how we measure ourselves.

And I'm about 90% sure that it was hormonal, is hormonal, with a side leavening of physical illness, and that does not help as much as I think it ought anyway. And half the things on my mind I can't formulate the words to talk about right now, anyway, half the fears, because of the overbearing weirdness of my brain.

I measure myself anyway, measure against the unfamiliarity of the inside of my mind, test it, try to figure out what is bearable, where the fractures are, pray for the hormone break that will restore something familiar if not sane. I measure myself, with only the occasional gibber of, "Moved the furniture! Inside my head!" like an affronted cat who has to sniff everything twice to make sure.

One of the things I said while I was laughing mad, crying mad, shaking mad, was that this was one of the things that I had been afraid of, that my reactions would change, that the unfamiliar would become overwhelming. And no amount of knowing that I'm still falling within the range of potentially normal responses makes this feel normal for me, makes it anything other than a mental intrusion about which I circle, stifflegged and slightly fluffed.

And at the same time I think about the line I came across for work, the thing about it being okay to be depressed now and again, to not be 'medicated until normal', and I don't know how to respond. For work, I corrected the punctuation and let it be, never mind that I wanted to scream at the smug ignorance that can let someone who clearly hasn't been curled up in bed until the sheets were stained black with body oil mutter about how it's okay to be depressed every once in a while, that's normal, that's acceptable.

You think you know something about the world, I wanted to say, you think you know, try it in here sometime, try being in a mind so broken it curls up the body and isolates itself from loved ones while desperately lonely and in need of touch. Take the sheets stained rigid with the effluvia of mental illness and wrap yourself in them for your next toga party. Try out knowing for half a week that you need to do some laundry and have that knowledge crush you rather than inspire you to produce clean underwear. Try on the desperate ground-in habits of depression, the hopelessness, the anxious hyperawareness of failure.

Circle my mental processes with wary caution I may be, but I at least know what I'm talking about when I say that I feel crazy.

Fear is how we measure ourselves.

At T Two Hours

Have taken antidepressant medication. Doing a very slow, conservative ramp-up because I'm a little anxious about the whole thing. (She said, using her powers of mild understatement.)

My brain has not exploded.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

A Personal Note

Provoked somewhat by discussions on Bastante Already and in reference to Carol Hanisch's 'The Personal is Political', a personal note to the internet.

Those pesky personal problems that I drag into the public arena when I have the time and energy:

Mental health concerns being treated as strongly distinct from other health concerns. Shaming of people with depression and other mental health issues, treating those concerns as being moral failings rather than health matters. Frequent lack of coverage for extended therapy and other mental health concerns in American health care coverage. The dependence of adequate health care coverage on adequate employment in the United States. Attention to diagnosis depending on the sex, ethnicity, class, and other privilege status of the sufferer, such that a suburban kid may actually get the care they need while an inner-city kid may get kicked out of school for being 'disruptive' or something similar. Socially deranged attitudes towards body shape and health that encourage eating disorders, among other consequences.

Privilege-fraught access to education in general. Failure to put forward advancement of actual learning in the schools rather than constant grinding over the same topics repeatedly. Lack of care for students with special needs, whether those are remedial, medical, advancement, or something else. High costs of education. Lack of learning actual essential skills for living. Failure to teach how to evaluate and weigh evidence. The promulgation of misinformation about socially denigrated activities in the hope that fear will keep people from having sex, smoking pot, or whatever else is being discouraged by propaganda. Lack of informed status on such things as the basic beliefs of Islam, the principles of supply and demand, the mechanics of disease transmission, and any of a number of other matters that have worldwide import.

The equation in the United States of form of employment with selfhood. The shortest span of paid vacation in the supposedly civilised world. The expectation that employees, especially but not limited to men, will work overtime rather than have time to spend having their actual lives. The lack of childcare facilities available in most workplaces. The cultural prioritisation of financial gain as measure of success.

The shaming and fetishisation of rape and assault victims as Damaged People. The lack of adequate awareness of social coercion and date rape. Slut-shaming and other tools of oppressive normative sexuality. Seeking to diagnose and pathologise whatever is wrong with people who do not have normative sexuality on the assumption that nobody could be like that without having been abused. Treatment of people who do not constantly adhere to normative sexualities as being intrinsically dangerous, antisocial, abusing, or otherwise disruptive. The unpersoning of sex workers. Treatment of sexuality as something intrinsically unable to be approached with rational thought, commitment-keeping, or human respect. Treating personal sexuality as a political statement.

Lack of awareness and consideration for verbal and emotional abuse. Boys will be boys. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.

Lack of social and legal support for alternate family structures. The inability of same-sex partners to legally marry in most of the United States. The presumption that any non-monogamous family unit is polygynous.

The social presumption of Christianity. The fact that questioning the hegemonial status of someone else's holiday leads to accusations of hostility to Christianity, "War on Christmas", anti-religion sentiments, secularism, or whatever other deranged slanders crop up especially around this time of year. Generalised religion-bashing sentiments that only make sense if one assumes the axioms of a particular flavor of Abrahamic monotheism. Anti-Christian sentiments expressed in the assumption that nobody present could possibly object.

Sexism. Including anti-male sexism. Gender essentialism. Mystical frou-frou womb worship. Sexual reductionism. Transphobia. Ableism. Calling things "lame". Calling things "retarded". Calling things "gay". Homophobia. Anti-bisexual bigotry. Racism. Presumption that the customs of one's people are laws of the universe. Ethnic supremacy. Male supremacy. Female supremacy. Kink supremacy. Polyamorous supremacy. Reconstructionist supremacy. Imperialist treatment of non-Western nations and ethnicities.

And quite likely rather a few other things I can't think of right now.

They could sometimes admit that women were oppressed (but only by "the system") and said that we should have equal pay for equal work, and some other "rights." But they belittled us no end for trying to bring our so-called "personal problems" into the public arena - especially "all those body issues" like sex, appearance, and abortion. Our demands that men share the housework and childcare were likewise deemed a personal problem between a woman and her individual man.

From the new intro to "The Personal is Political", linked above.

Shadow Drums

This is something I wrote a while ago, a little bit tidied up; I figured I'd re-audience it or something.

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number--Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysos, every now and then.

--Ursula K. Le Guin

I tend to be of the opinion most days that the culture I grew up in believes that the Apollonian pleasures are the only true pleasures, and the Dionysian pleasures are wicked indulgences that one might sneak into but which are really flaws in character.

The results I see of this are twofold. First, that very few people are taught a healthy way of interacting with Dionysos, such that they either fear him and his servants, or are swept away by him and claim they were not themselves, not in control, not at fault, and such that they do not know how to make _use_ of the secrets of sex, of drugs, of music, of any of the other dark drumbeats of the soul. Second, that those people whose souls balance more naturally as servants of Dionysos than servants of Apollo are lost, unable to find a place where they can stand and feel that the axioms of the universe fit the way they see it.

Where are the places for the ecstatics, for the potion-makers, the dancers, the drummers, the temple harlots, the prophets, the shamans, the makers of poetry, the makers of sculpture, the painters, the singers, all of the people who try to speak to the gut rather than the head, in a culture where what is rational and _productive_ is what matters? On the edges, if anywhere at all, when the Vice Squad and the War on Some Drugs leave them alone long enough.

It's all, "Don't do that, that's bad," "You should wait until you can deal with that as an adult," "You need to be rational about this," and those things don't work so well when the sirens sing and the drums start beating. Is it any wonder that so many people can't deal with sex and drugs when they're never taught how to dance with Dionysos without getting torn to pieces by the Maenads?


And now, after reading some stuff Belledame linked to, including some commentary on Little Light's brilliant monsterdom piece, I'm puttering about reading the Bacchae....

I Want To Live In The Future (Bodies 2)

A couple folks I know have posted about the changes in their cognitive patterns relating to going through transition (in addition to the more publically visible physical and social effects thereof).

The most recent one of these left me with this sort of wistful wish to live in the future, where I can run my brain experimentally on a different hormonal soup for a while to see how the world looks different then. Whether the colours change. Whether my emotional lability changes. How I frame things, how my mind stretches to different conclusions. And so on.

The shape of my mind at the moment is something that I know is chemically moderated -- if it wasn't, as before noted, I wouldn't be as religious about taking my vitamins as I am -- and the process of watching it wobble when poked is something that I fascinates me. (For the sex end of things, 'altered consciousness' is one of the things I'm after in a lot of my kink.) The sex hormone soup I've only skimmed the edges of, with nonconsensual altered consciousness effects from first a pill formulation that had so little testosterone it rendered my psyche into monochrome (I think that it's one of the standard hormone balances, which is an interesting factoid that I don't know how to render meaningful) and later one where the 'inactive' ingredients aggravated my depression.

Back when I was partnered with someone colourblind (*waves*) I would occasionally have fleeting moments of wondering what the world looked like to someone with an invisible six. Then I learned about tetrachromatism, and I started wondering what the world looked like through those eyes, too. It's a similar urge, the expanding of perception, the wanting to be able to see what it's like from over there.

The striving after the impossible.

I want to live in the future ....

Selling My Soul

How fascinating that a thread discussing Faust should go this direction.

The claim was made that "messing with brain chemistry is a bad thing", in a context of the discussion of antidepressants. (Also comparing Prozac to heroin and ecstasy, and making an analogy to defacing written texts.) And was baffled and hurt that this offended people.

There are all kinds of places I can go with this, but I want to go into the mythology of depression. Many of which struck me as being in play in that discussion.

Like:

- Mental illness is fundamentally different from physical illness, and should be treated with different rules. Never mind, of course, that most "mental illness" is organic in some way, whether it's my depression as rooted in digestive and thyroid disorders as much as a propensity to the specific chemical glitch-set, which is just as much a part of my fucked-up body as my other weirdly functioning bits anyway; never mind, similarly, that some physical illnesses are in fact psychosomatic, something that any child who has induced a fever by failing to finish their math homework is well aware of. Never mind that the brain is another body part.

- Mental illness is intrinsic to a person and a personality. Sometimes this takes the form of "What an excellent example to others you are!", which is a sort of patronisation that I've seen directed at physically disabled people as well. Sometimes this takes the form of the romanticisation of the tortured artist; how many artistic heroes committed suicide or died young, and we hear, "Yes, so tragic, but would the art have been as good without it?" Sometimes this is in the form of, "If you treat the illness, you are changing who that person is!" whether it's calling Prozac Ecstasy or suggesting that Ritalin treatments for ADHD children are producing 'zombies'.

- Mental illness is not a real concern worthy of treatment; the moral question of whether it is acceptable to alter brain chemistry is significant enough to call medication into question. That medication is the equivalent of illegal drugs or puritanically disapproved euphorics, not the equivalent of insulin treatment for diabetics.

And then the fascinating:

- Mental illness is a special case because brain chemistry is more bound to "self" than other body parts. Modifying other body parts will not change sense of self; modifying brain chemistry will axiomatically change sense of self.


The argument against antidepressants and other treatments seemed to boil down to (I say "seemed to" because the person making the argument seemed to me to be increasingly incoherent; the unawareness that the position was mind-body dualism was a fascinating bit of "Aren't you paying attention to what you're saying?"):

Axiom 1: The personality ought to be immutable and sacrosanct.

Which is bloody nonsense, honestly, in denial of the functions of the real world: personalities shift over time and circumstance all the time. I note, for a dramatic example, that I never used to swear before the assault; it wasn't an inhibition, it just didn't occur to me to do so. Other changes, those Trousers of Time moments where one knows that one's life has forked (but perhaps not what the different ways might have led to, other than "Something different"), the gradual accumulation of experience -- like the post over on SM-feminist Trinity made about gender supremacism and being embarassed by old thoughts while still understanding how the person she had been had had them -- all of these change who we are, how we respond.

Axiom 2: Any modification of brain chemistry is morally questionable.

Setting aside, for the moment, that in practical terms this means that one should not eat, sleep, have sex, fall in love, experience any other emotion, record memories ....

The notion here was that changing the brain chemistry changes who one is, and because of the axiom encoded in (1), that's bad. Of course, for at least some depressives and other people familiar with similar issues, the concept of identifying with the disease is about as appealing as binding one's identity to a pus-filled abcess: that is not the self, that is a lesion on the self.

This notion is one that I have a hard time understanding at all, really. But, mind, I have at times made studies of my mental reactions to various substances so that I know what cognitive shifts they induce -- so that I feel better able to handle the workings of my mind in a variety of states, so that I am familiar with what tools I might want to use in order to get my cognition into functional order. Some of these I maintain long-term (such as B vitamins and various fatty oils, which induce the cognitive shift of 'not suffering from persistent severe depression with anxiety attacks'); others are more situational (such as, say, my awareness of my responses to various forms of alcohol). This does not leave me with much sympathy for the "OMGitchangesthebrainchem" position; I am systemically inclined to want to know how to captain my brain through a variety of waters, not least because I can't count on it remaining smooth sailing on the biochemical sea in the first place.

Axiom 3: A person taking antidepressants or other medications is not the same person as the same body not taking them.

Given my sense of piloting through the Straits of Serotonin I ... don't get this one. Not how it meaningfully differs from any of the other changes in the self over time or circumstance, especially.

Even if I believed that this particular use of medication crossed a line into being a qualitatively different way of readjusting oneself than any of the other ways that people change, consent to activities, or otherwise deliberately do things that have a risk of rearranging their perspectives, I'm not sure I'm capable of seeing the problem. When the meds work, this philosophically-defined suicide and transformation into a new person produces a happier, more productive, more capable individual in the body of someone who was suffering. Considering this morally questionable strikes me as the old suffering-is-virtue trope, which I've never much cared for.



Mostly I'm left with a weird impression of what-gets-called-privilege -- that this level of lack of understanding can only be maintained by someone who has no intimate personal experience of what it's like living in a mind that doesn't work right. Probably someone who has no intimate personal experience of what it's like living in a body that doesn't work right, either.

I'll just continue selling my soul to those demon vitamins.