Mother's going to make all of your nightmares come true

When I was a child, I knew that I had no privacy.

Not in the sense of constant surveillance or diary-reading (had I kept a diary). But I had nowhere to retreat to. My bedroom would be charged into, sometimes without knocking, to check on me, to see if I was behaving, to inspect me; once we moved to a house where my room had a lock, if I actually used the lock I would get screamed at. So I locked my door regularly, but ... only when nobody was around to notice, or when I could listen to hear if someone was coming. Sometimes I toggled the lock but did not close the door. My space was in regular danger of disruption. Even the insides of my head were subject to rearrangement at her whim.

One of my deepest expectations about interactions with others is that I do not have a safe retreat space. This deeply tainted my adolescent sexuality, though at least I had pre-pubescent sexuality that nobody interfered with because it's a cultural taboo to imagine that kids that age have sexualities.

(As I've developed a sense of boundaries, I've gotten touchier and touchier about people who want to co-opt my experiences and ignore my self in order to feed their own desires and narratives, which is one of the reasons Nine Deuce and her crowd's monstrous behaviour towards kinksters annoyed me so spectacularly.)

But I only ... just ... realised that I was set up.

That the positioning I have as pawn, as tool, as palimpsest for an agenda, that I fight against so damn hard, the stuff that feeds into my massive damage around privilege feminism, the stuff that leads to me thinking a lot about mechanisms of social control and how they show up, my generalised outrage at being rewritten ... was all carefully taught to me.

That maybe treating rape as normal came about because that was the lesson I was supposed to have learned.

Rolling Home to a President Like Me

Truth with all its far-out schemes....

I was raised on a diet of Pogo and Doonesbury, sixties protest rock and NPR. One of my standard jokes is that Album 1700 is my deeptape; I would sometimes listen to one side of the tape copy I had with the tape recorder under my pillow as I was going to sleep at night. (Other times it was one of the Charlie Brown musicals. Never say I'm not a bit eclectic.)

Lets time decide what it should mean....

I came to the first beginnings of real political awareness in 1986, listening to the Iran-Contra hearings and people stressing about the epic deficits of the Reagan era. I was a serious, earnest child, and I scowled while listening to the news and drew lopsided pie charts trying to figure out where the money should be going. I was sure that if I could just go through it, I could straighten it all out, and I wasn't sure why the people in the government couldn't.

It's not the time, but just the dreams that die.

The following decades kind of burned out that little spark of, "Oh, if I could only get at the stuff here I could make it all add up."

And sometimes, when the room is still...

I'm registered as unenrolled, which means that I can vote in whichever major party primary I feel more strongly about. Which means that if I hadn't been stuck in a morass of bad nerves in 2000, I would have voted in the Republican primary for John McCain.

Time, with so much truth to kill ....

I wouldn't have voted for him in the general, but I felt that his dedication to talking about issues rather than playing the mudslinging game was something worth supporting. Given the choice among a Democratic field that didn't excite me terribly, and the possibility to make a difference to the flavor of the Republican Party for the next while, I knew which way I wanted to gamble.

Of course, it turned out I was too busy being mad to vote, but that's how it would have gone if I had.

Leaves you by the windowsill so tied.

In November 2000 I was up until some ludicrous hour of the morning talking with my ex (we weren't exes at the time) and watching election results go wildly everywhere, and I commented that when I'd been walking down to the polls I'd seen a man on a unicycle bouncing a basketball as he crossed a minor highway (sometimes catching the ball in front of him, sometimes behind his head), and said, "This is gonna be a weird election."

Without a wing to take you high.

I watched the people I knew online start to slowly melt down, my newsgroups become less and less readable and more and more hostile, an atmosphere that only got worse after 9/11.

Without a clue to tell you why.

I went, a year or so later, to a local hearing on same-sex marriage access, intending to speak in favor as a heterosexual married in Massachusetts. I put my name in the hat to speak to the legislature, and I waited, and I waited, and I listened for hours, and I have stories about this, but the long and short of it is that I wound up having to go home without speaking, in part because my husband had another obligation, in part because I started gushing blood from my nose for no particular reason other than, I suppose, it being cold and dry.

Now, I just want to keep my name ....

Time crawled onwards. I watched my country slowly slide into a perdition that I felt I could do nothing about. My personal activisms started to burn out quietly, between my perceptions of the risk and my lack of hope for effectiveness. In the 2004 election, I voted in the Democratic primary, for someone unelectable whose voice I wanted at least heard a little, and I watched a lackluster Kerry campaign fail while wondering what happened to the war hero who had been elected.

Not bother anybody's game....

Time continued crawling. I grew increasingly insular, increasingly weary, increasingly disgusted, and increasingly helpless. I needed to protect my own people, a wide and varied group of various sorts, and had no energy to spare for anything outside of that. I cut what I did down to the bone, preserving sanity and energy for what slowly started to seem like the inevitable need to defend. I couldn't see the world changing to suit what I wanted it to be unless I went up and did it, and I could not afford to do it - not the mental cost, not the risks to my family, none of it. So I knew it wouldn't happen.

Without ideas of gold or fame or...

When the election season rolled around again, I could not bring myself to be terribly interested. There was nothing that would stop the slide downwards, after all; "politics as usual" would be the same established interests, the same voices, the same faces, the same donation sources, the same sorts of policies. I had reasonable confidence that whatever Democratic nominee made it through would have the ability to win, given the overall status of the Bush administration, and that was all I could bring myself to care about, all I was able to invest in.

Insane heights.

I have friends who are political junkies; I absorbed things they said quietly, without really engaging with any of it. I poked around and did "Which candidate matches your views" quizzy things occasionally, on a lark. I mostly ignored the process for a long time, finding myself unable to care terribly much which of the sets of talking heads got the nomination. I mostly watched the Republican side, because they made me anxious, and I knew whichever one of them came out on top of the slugfest would be setting a tone - and I wanted to know where my enemies were going to be coming from. I needed to defend, after all. That was all I could believe in.

I don't want a lot of money, I don't want a Playboy Bunny....

I don't remember when that started to change. But I remember listening. I remember Jon Stewart on the Daily Show saying, "... gave a speech about race that treated the American people like adults." I know that was after I started listening, started paying attention, started thinking about possibility.

Started waking up.

Just a love to call me honey late at night...

And I still didn't want to talk about politics, talk about the races, talk about the vast dramas played out on the national soap opera stage. But there was something different out there - not the same old figured with their various policies, but all basically a part of the flow of The Way Things Were. There was a possibility of something being different, and someone doing it other than me - that thing I'd had no hope of.

In my arms, by my side, in my arms, late at night.

Quietly, in my own space, I started reading party platforms. When it was down to Clinton and Obama I laid their websites out side by side and compared the issues. When McCain looked likely to take the Republican nomination I remembered 2000, and had hope for a shift back to what he had been then and there. There was ... something there, a possibility, the sort of world that I would like to see, where the people who had their differences could address them themselves.

But I don't know, I ain't been told...

There was a little spark there, that the era of hostile campaigning might come to an end, that people might have a vision and work towards it, something might change - and it wasn't policies that I wanted that change in so much as zeitgeist.

Everybody wants a hand to hold....

I thought a lot about the civil rights movements that this country has had, working for racial equality, for women, for gay rights, for so many things. It flowed in and out of my mind, the old tunes, the ways of being. I watched Across the Universe and read that speech, and I felt myself in tears.

They're so afraid of being old....

I was quiet, and focused, and almost reluctant to make comments supporting one candidate over another, because of the weariness of those years. But there were the songs in my heart again, and I remembered them, and hummed them quietly to myself.

So scared of dying so unknown, and all alone....

Something in me started to live again.

Rolling home.

I watched the hardening of the discourse, the negativity, and folded in on myself. The insulting terms that were thrown every which way about the candidates and their supporters depressed me almost catastrophically.

But at the same time, I saw people inspired. Creative. I saw LOLcats. I saw an entire blog of photos of Obama with kids, his own and others, and just this sense of comfort and ease with small people. I saw occasional images of his relationships with his family, laughing with his daughters, heard about the puppy so that when he spoke about it in his acceptance speech I said, "A puppy!" before he mentioned it and drew funny looks from my men. I saw pumpkins. I saw all these different upswellings of feeling, and creation, and, yes, being talked to like an adult.

And there was new music, too. New music, my gods, new music.

There was a story, sometime in there, where a bunch of reporters found Obama in a diner and wanted to get his opinion on the Crisis Of The Moment, and he looked at them, and was reported to say, "Why can't I just eat my waffle?"

Why can't I just eat my waffle?

That was a clinching moment for me, oddly enough; this eminently human reponse, this realness, this sense that here was someone who wasn't going to just spew talking points or declaim on positions at the drop of a hat, but who was a real human being who occasionally has breakfast.

A friend made me a livejournal icon of it.

And I watched the first campaign that actually started to speak my language. Not just in terms of what I called the first political campaign of the 21st century in terms of its grassroots and internet work. But in the sense that somehow, somewhere, someone knew about that little girl who drew little pie charts about the budget, putting huge slices of it towards education, because damnit, if we only had the numbers we could do something to put it right. Someone wasn't ashamed of having been the little kid who said, "Hey, I'm smart enough to figure this out, just let me at the problem," in a country where politics has had a strong anti-intellectual current for my entire lifetime.

And I saw, just before Halloween, a photo of Obama on some tarmac somewhere, talking with an aide, with a pumpkin tucked under one arm, as if that were a perfectly normal thing to do.

I had never seen a politician preparing to carve pumpkins before.

You want the real America? Goddamn, a politician with a fucking pumpkin.

A friend posted this image today and I laughed at the sticker on the computer, but, again, this is a real human thing, something familiar and real and I laugh not just because it's silly but because it's human and known and damnit I wish I'd thought of that, you know?

And it's a trivial thing, a silly thing, not enough to put a vote on ...


... but it's enough to make the vote I cast mean so much more.


Because I voted for a President who's actually like me, and I never thought that would happen.

I never thought it would be okay to be the little girl who hoped her government could be fixed again.

Brain on Fire

The proper word is probably "imbas", but not many people know that one. (Filidecht practitioner Erynn Laurie defines Imbas thus in her sidebar: "Imbas is an Old Irish word meaning poetic inspiration, with overtones of ecstatic mysticism." She has a whole entry about it too.)

My brain is on fire.

Do you know that feeling? There's that sudden arclight spark, just a moment, that illuminates everything, and suddenly all the connections are clear, for just a moment, just a searing moment that burns into the mind's shape of the world and goes again like lightning, leaving afterimages to taste and chase.

My brain is on fire.

I spent two years studying the Anderson Feri Tradition with Thorn Coyle, finishing in spring of 2007. And spent the following year integrating, building on what I learned there, sorting myself out. And, after some consultations about balancing my responsibilities and needs, I have taken up studying with Thorn again, as of last night.

My brain is on fire.

The first work for this study was meditation on a particular poem written by Victor Anderson, a man not unacquainted with imbas. And I, trying to catch up with my classmates, read it, and ...

My brain is on fire.

My brain is on fire in one of those ways that is so intensely, individually tuned to who I am and where I came from. I can chase the threads of this spark back to the winter of 1985, in one case, sitting with an issue of Sky and Telescope in my lap reading about the approach of Halley's Comet. I can track it to looking for the divine in the night sky and finding Her, a process that began sometime in my mid-teens as a conscious process. I can track it to the beginning of this month, when the answer I gave when asked to give divination was "It is bright light in darkness."

My brain is on fire.

It is on fire with the dance of light and dark, the starkest Twins. It is on fire with the metaphysics of the black body radiation curve. It is on fire with the loving nature of finitude and the way illumination swallows gloom. It is on fire, on fire, on fire.

I tried to explain what's in my mind to my husband, shine it all out, the way it is on fire, and he smiled at me and told me I was cute.

You can only shine what you have.

And feel such peace and absolute
The stillness still that doesn't end
But slowly drifts into sleep
The stars are the greatest thing you've ever seen
And they're there for you
For you alone you are the everything

-- R. E. M., "You Are The Everything"

How I Learned

I was a weird shy kid in high school, a little on the young side, a little inexperienced. I wound up, freshman year, hanging out with a few other mostly weird shy kids, a group that eventually formed into a dynamic social group consisting, largely, of the sort of weird shy kid who had never had a dynamic social group before.

It was the last day of school senior year; the exam for the last class of the day. There were a few of us who were in that class, students in that year, who might never see each other again. It's an odd feeling, the triumphant escape and the mellow bittersweetness of knowing that each of us is going their separate ways.

The exam finished; the bell rang.

One of those first friends, back from freshman year, came up to me as I was gathering my things. "Hey," he said. "I want to tell you something?"

"Oh?" I had my things together; I looked at him. He looked nervous, perhaps shyer than normal, full of light anxiousness that might, if played a little more dramatically, go to fidgeting or handwringing.

"I'm gay." There was a long silent pause, and then he said, "... is that okay?"

Is that okay?

I put my arms around him and hugged him tightly. I had no words, because he had broken my heart.

Baby Madonna

I need to write this, and I suspect it will make me cry.

I'm not sure I've ever really forgiven myself for being fourteen.

And if anyone asks what sort of sins being fourteen might be: I let myself get assaulted. I let someone inflict lasting psychological damage on me, warp my sexuality around fear, take away the possibility of it ever being easy.

And while I have worked a great deal on forgiveness, on self-acceptance, I have never fully forgiven myself for this.

Never forgiven myself for being the sort of fourteen-year-old who could only find a partner three years older and thus well past the explorations of boundaries that are tied up with the experience of being fourteen and learning adult sexuality.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing yet where my boundaries were, none save the last, that kept it to assault from rape.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing how to go back to ground that was secure.

Never forgiven myself for ignoring his protestations of love that I knew were anglings to set up sex in the hope that my lack of responsiveness would make it go away.

Never forgiven myself for not knowing how to say "No", even when I was pinned down with his huge weight and curled into a knot of refusal. Never forgiven the lack of words, lack of articulation, from someone who was only starting to learn how not to be a child. Never forgiven the inability to speak understandings some of which I only achieved years later.

Never forgiven myself, above all, for suspecting "Do you want to come over to my place and watch a movie?" a ruse, suspecting it near enough to be a belief I might even have spoken at the time had anyone asked me, and for packing up my videotape and going in the trust that I would be asked, that time, despite a long, long history of not being asked, of being presumed. For knowing, and hiding in a cloud of denial, of expectation of the civility of directness, of presumed protocol.

For not cutting him off, for not drawing the lines I didn't know, for ...

It never occurred to me before today that I never forgave myself for not being a more competent policing actor on that guy's penis. So of course I couldn't accept the damage that came of falling off the madonna pedestal.

Half a life ago and more, and I never thought of that.

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.

I got your reality right here

The Mayor of San Diego realises that when push comes to shove, he really can't believe in separate but equal, and thus signs a resolution in support of same-sex marriage rights that he was expecting to veto until the moment it hit his desk.

The video of him explaining this brings tears to my eyes.

The world tends towards goodness.

... Whoa

I've been off reading the comments to this thread at Making Light, which have been a fascinating and frustrating discussion of all kinds of things related to sexism and gender identity (and kept me up far too fucking late because there are umpty-hundred of them and I didn't even finish). (It got linked by someone saying, 'Wow, the discussion starting at comment 602 is fascinating'. I read the previous 601 comments, too, as I had last read the thread when it was around 20 ....)

I just got to this chunk of comment by the inimitable Teresa Nielsen Hayden. (This is comment #730, by the way; it has a wee bit of context.)

I once heard Annie Sprinkle say that until prostitution is legalized, no woman will be free. This struck me as true at the time, but it took a long time for me to tease out the implications. One of them is that as long as there are women who are outside the protection of the social contract, all women are threatened with reassignment to that category.

Well, hit me with a fucking brick. I'm just sort of, ... what an illuminating angle to sit at and peer.