july 31, 2010

engagement.

I’m having a really hard time with it lately.

I’ve been on a medication for months now that is causing mood swings, suicidality (more serious than has ever happened to me before, even through far, far more traumatic events) and significant dissociation. My doctor won’t give me a prescription for the old medication (which we know works, but hoped this one might work better) until I see him and he isn’t available until well into September. I call every day for cancellations. I have yet to catch one.

I can’t connect to my own experience. There are these huge changes in my life and I can feel a radical shift in my political consciousness but I cannot even figure out for myself what it is, much less articulate it for the people existing outside my shell of skin. Can’t even describe it to my husband or best friend, much less to strangers and minor acquaintances.

I want to be out there. I want to be doing this work. I want to be out there thinking, speaking, shouting. Pushing, pulling, exchanging. My heart is in this so deep.

It has been continual frustration over the past year, year and a half, as I’ve lost connection with myself, lost spoons, lost wherewithal, watched as so much has passed me by and all I can do is putter along the side of the highway, slow and careful baby steps beside large and powerful vehicles zooming by in a flash.

I can only do so much and unfortunately, what I want to do requires so much of me. It’s not as easy as “think smaller,” do little things, they still matter, etc. Because even the little things require a base investment that I am just not able to afford most days.

So I think to myself, hey I have time tomorrow, this weekend, next month. And by that time, my mind has lost connection with whatever it is I was wanting to do, read, think about, write about. And to be able to go back to it, I have to give that base investment again. Take myself away from whatever is going on that moment, and immerse myself in this point from my detached unaware fleeting past, and try to re-connect to whatever was going on in my head at that time.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this never really works.

So I flit about from day to day, trying to keep my brain awake, taking in information, revving and whirring and trying to do something with it — but I never quite move far enough up the levels to the ability to engage. To stop struggling to just exist, to start doing something other than just be.

And the day passes, and I haven’t done anything, and I go to bed and wake up the next morning to start from the bottom again.

***

i’m going to be doing this in small, incomplete doses. it will be disjointed, incoherent, and inconsistent. the parts may not seem to have connection to the whole, or may seem to repeat themselves. this is the only way I can do things, so bear with me.

***

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting in recent months.

I honestly don’t know what to do with myself.

My ability to be meaningfully involved with the various communities in which I have found place has slipped away. The condition I find myself in now leaves me mourning the loss of my ability to consider, to plan, to change or to modify, the things that I do.

I can only do what is immediately available to me. If something is not immediately available, I am not going to be able to do it – at all.
If I am writing, I can either write the words that spill out of my brain or write nothing.
If I am reading, I can either read the words I can comprehend right this moment or read nothing.
In all that I do, I can either engage with what I am emotionally capable of engaging with or not engage at all.
No matter what, I can either do something right now or not do it at all.

The me that is available right this moment is the only me that you’ll ever get. If I can’t reach every part of me, then those parts of me aren’t going to be available. Only the parts that are here right now effectively exist for you.

***

august 1, 2010

I’ve noticed certain patterns in my social life. In the way I interact with other people. In the way I conduct myself as a member of the community. In the approach I take to working with others.

I am not liking some of what I see.

I’ve spent the last six months or so trying to dig deep, clawing down and down, trying to reach the depths of my soul, so  that I can see them. So that I can figure out why things have happened the way they have — but more than that — what is within my capacity to change that will allow me to become the person I want to be?

***

august 6, 2010

I don’t know whether this is a function of what was modeled to me as I grew up (my mother has borderline) — or something innate in me just starting to come out — or whether I’m misinterpreting it altogether.

I do know I’m ok with it. It’s not wrong. It’s just difficult to deal with internally.

I lay low at first. Then I feel out my place. Then I grow comfortable, and I assert ownership of my place. Then something happens, something huge or something tiny I don’t even commit to memory, just something, and I grow scared. I look inward. I want to change something. Not in the sense of “something needs to change” but in the sense that I have identified the specific thing and know what to do about it. And this is where things fall apart: I cannot change anything, large nor small. I can only throw out the whole of me and start over. All over.

I’ve done it a few times. And I’m tired. Just tired. That building process takes energy. Energy I just don’t have anymore.

And when I think about it, I like my place. I’ve set things up pretty nice. There are aspects of me I wouldn’t change for a minute. I’ve grown into something that I like, and appreciate, and value. Immensely.

And I’ve made connections. Come to know people. Come to have people know me…

but that’s what’s so scary.

Because I can’t change. Not consciously. Because people have one concept of me in their minds… I’m not me, I’m not mine. I could change me, this person right here, but the me that exists in all those other minds out there… I would have to change each one, individually, one by one, and some of them wouldn’t change, and some of them people would fight changing, and I would have to assert my change, my right to my change, and put forth the energy, energy, energy…

Because I’m not me. I’m not a person. I only exist insofar as other people have concept of me in their minds. I don’t exist in reality. I exist in other people’s minds.

If I need to change — and I don’t have the energy to go from person to person, changing their minds — then I have two options: remain the same…

… or leave it all behind, and start over.

but I can’t. I don’t want to. I don’t want to dammit I finally started building a real person and now I am losing it, losing that, connection slipped away. Here I am again, removed of reality, a personless entity. Confronted with something difficult, the tangible person might just slip away, and I am a ghost again…

***

that started out being about the way I handle relationships with other people… and ended up being about the way I handle being.

***

august 7, 2010

Today I am going to MedExpress because I broke down this morning and almost killed myself. My medication is part of it. But my situation can’t be removed from it either. I can take care of the medication part now. The other part takes a long time to process.

***

written privately:

I have been withdrawing further and further, from everything, and every single time I stick my neck out even an inch and try to say something I end up regretting it. regretting ever speaking a single public word. regretting being a real-life person that doesn’t close herself in one room for the rest of her life, only observing, never participating.

I’ve been regretting a lot of things I’ve said and done in the past.
regretting a lot of my patterns of behavior, a lot of my own tendencies.

trying to figure out WHAT is bothering me. WHAT is wrong.

doubting the “social justice” structure, doubting the Set Of Rules that are set in stone and the choreographed steps of the One Way To Do Things that one must follow at all times or else be consumed in abuse.
that includes “callouts” it includes gotchas it includes the focus on Bad Words over all other forms of oppression.
have ALWAYS hated the word “ally” and have come to hate the entire idea of binary identity, you are X or Y, and the Rules that must be followed to count as either/or. always hated the way it incentivizes people to get involved in matters of justice insomuch as it boosts their cred to other people. rather than to help a fellow living being.

I’ve been wondering, fuck, how are we raised as children that we are extremely fluent in Good and Bad Words, in tv shows and music, but as a community can’t meaningfully engage on all the thousands of little pieces of people’s real lived lives? the way we treat each other, the way certain types of people are left to starve or left in solitude or left to die because it’s not our responsibility to _____.

I hate these discussions. cant fucking stand them anymore. don’t know what to do with myself when I get home, because I can’t imagine being happy with myself ethically with being involved in anything. anything.

I can tell you that the more I look back on everything I have done, the more I hate myself. over the past three and some years.

there are a few things I am proud of. and will always be. but they can probably be counted on one hand, the things that I would not change. out of all the thousands of words I have spoken, or nto spoken, for those three years.

I’ve been working INTENSELY on processing this. figuring out WHAT is wrong and then figuring out how to apply that.
i spend every single day thinking through all of this.

[a particular incident] was radicalizing for me, and not in the way most people mean when they use that word.
i think it broke my spirit.

I am thinking more and more that I give up on having a conscious part in this, or any community focused on justice, because I feel like being known as A Person starts to poison my ability to act toward the actual betterment of hurting people. it poisons things from the start. I don’t know if I, just me amanda, am capable of handling a public presence at all without doing some really awful things.

I just don’t want to say I’M DONE GOODBYE to everything and then find a way to be a help. to be wholesome. and go back on my word.

I just want to poke along in quiet, just be an average nobody who isn’t trying to be known just wants to do things to herself and let people take from that what they want but not go and engage them when they do. I want to exist as just words. not a person.

The only reason I can’t quit, if I’m 100% honest, is because I can’t EXIST without having this community and this reading to feed my soul. If I give up my involvement, I basically give up on living, because I haven’t found anything that feeds me in that way other than this, and I won’t survive trying to walk that gap. If I quit, I will die.

I don’t know that there’s such a thing as organizing that doesn’t turn to shit.
I don’t know that humanity can return something worthy when we try to invest in it.

***

august 8, 2010

I don’t even know what I think. I spent  this weekend thinking about blowing everything up. This blog, my identity, my involvement in anything at all. Today, I feel ok with continuing as who I am. Knowing that I can change, and that’s a good thing. Standing by what I’ve said in the past, because it’s more honest than trying to erase what I’ve done. I’d rather be real but complicated than be a squeaky-clean, artificial symbol of perfection.

I thought back on the things I’ve written, and there are some things that I think are good. and successful. and important.
and I don’t want to blow those things up.

I have no idea how I’ll feel tomorrow.

***

I think that for the health of a community it is essential that a wide variety of approaches are supported, encouraged, nurtured, valued.

No community can thrive, and make progress, for so long as it limits the range of human reaction in its members.

This means that anger must be accepted. Embraced.

It means that being measured and reasonable must be allowed from those who feel able to be as much.

It means that being measured and reasonable must never be glorified or set up on a pedastal as the one true way.

When people declare that they cannot tolerate sarcasm – or hostility – or any other negative-realm reaction — they declare that they will not recognize those who feel or display these things as fully human.

It is fully possible to feel one way yourself — to tend toward certain patterns of behavior yourself — or even to look into the advantages and disadvantages inherent in various approaches to engagement. It is ok to recognize that anger can skew things certain undesirable ways.

But you must also realize that “reason” has disadvantages. “Logic” skews things certain ways. Being “even-handed” or “level-headed” or “fair” can cause harm on the margins as well.

And we all must recognize that anger is an integral part of healing. When a community, or an individual within it, faces trauma, survives abuse, endures violence and coercion — part of human reaction is anger, even hatred of the other party, or those who enable the abuse.

Some people never feel it. Sometimes, it’s merely one of many phases a person must go through to make right. And for others, it’s one facet of the prism through which they view their day-to-day life, in perpetuity.

And all of  that is ok. Because all of that is human.

It is dangerous to deny these things to people. It is harmful to stunt their growth, their recovery, their building, by only allowing, or only approving of, the pleasant and easy parts of them.

Perhaps you want no part in an activism that engages in snark. Or that doesn’t frame itself for the benefit of those outside the community.

I believe it is far healthier for the future of the community and the rest of  the world to meet people where they are, and work with them, than to wrinkle your nose at their messy reality and wash your hands of them.

***

All organizing is doomed to replicate the very structures it purports to destroy.

There is no such things as a human being free of influence. All human beings are shaped and moulded creatures, moving through their world differently than any other human being around them. All of the things that happen to us, all of the things that are impressed upon us, are irreversible. We can take those things and move in a somewhat different direction, but we can never be free of them altogether.

Given this, there is no possible way for an individual human being to create something that is not foundationally built upon the very things that person is trying to counter.

This is true in so many ways. For example,

By fighting gender oppression in the US, we are accepting as a basis the gender structure that the US maintains, and forming ourselves, our lives and our work around it.

By fighting gender oppression in the US, we are accepting as a basis the social structure that belongs to it, and imposing it on those who live outside of it, living entirely different types of lives under entirely different influences.

But even if we were to (claim that we) forsake that structure and instead build something entirely, completely new — we still begin that structure in the ways we have been taught to build. We still operate together in the ways that we have been taught to operate. We are still using the same language we began with, still interacting by the same patterns we began with.

There is no way to escape a system. Ever.

This means that movements are guaranteed to devolve in certain ways. Guaranteed to commit injustices against the people already beat-upon. Guaranteed to hurt each other, to experience divisions, as time wears on.

***

This does not mean that therefore, organizing is useless. That therefore, movements are worthless.

What it means is that we will perpetrate the worst of sins against our fellow human beings and we must accept that it will happen. We must let go of the idea that we can ever, ever, be free of the virus that infects us. The tighter we cling to it, the more the injustices spiral out of control.

***

I actually think that part of the beauty in life is found in the ways that we build imperfect things upon even more imperfect bases. The way we take things that have myriad problems, and push and shape and coax them into being something new, something entirely different, something existing on its own right — something still imperfect, but deep.

Deep.

Deep, containing multitudes, changed and changed and changing, storied and historied, inconveniences and complications…

We will never create something out of nothing. We will never begin a movement that is brand new, that is pure and free of mistakes at the start.

Perhaps we are better off for it.

***

can I have that kind of history? can I be that kind of complicated? and still be valuable?

***

august 9, 2010

I’ve found over the last few months, my own internal reaction to the same sorts of stimuli is broadly (but slowly) changing.

I’m finding myself more reflective. More peaceful. More generous in consideration.

I’m mulling over things and reaching different sorts of conclusions.

I like these things, because they are pleasant to experience.

But I refuse to think of them as being better. More moral. More right. I refuse to comply with anyone who would expect those things of me, or of anyone else. I refuse to have these things set as ideal, to create them as a standard.

Because this is just another route to edification. To building and sharing and bettering.

The different conclusions I reach mean that I get to internally enjoy a wider range of thought now — not that these conclusions supercede the older. Not that they are “right” and the older “wrong.”

The benefits that I give to others (of the doubt – of kinder, gentler interactions – etc.) are benefit that they do not deserve, and I am not obligated to give. They are benefits, not rights. They are not the right thing to do to one another. They can elicit certain desirable reactions in those others, such as being more likely to listen, more willing to consider my point of view. But I also know that human beings have a hard time changing until they get a spanking. That sometimes, it takes a rough fight for something to click — or for them to understand the importance and necessity of the concepts being communicated to them.

To really grasp the depth.

The right thing to do to another person is to engage with them without oppressing or abusing them.

That is a very wide set of boundaries to set, allowing for a very wide range of interactive approaches.

Including screaming “fuck you” at someone who has hurt you.

Even when they have no contextual understanding of why – or even that — you are hurt.

They don’t have a right to understanding. You have a right to be free from abuse and oppression.

Roughness, on the other hand, is a necessity.

A child might never understand why sie is supposed to avoid the stove if sie is never allowed to experience the pain of the burn.

A person might never understand what’s so bad about what they’re doing if they are never exposed to the pain that they wreak.

Pain is necessary to human experience. Pain is a signal that something is wrong.

***

I’ve made the mistake of trying to protect my husband from ever having to feel bad about anything he had done to hurt me.

I’ve made the mistake of trying to protect my husband from ever being exposed to the pain that I was experiencing.

Because…

Isn’t it just as bad –

Isn’t it equally wrong for me to make him feel pain?

Isn’t it equally bad for me to expose him to that pain?

If he knew that he did something wrong, why did I have to add, for him, guilt and regret on top of knowledge?

If I was hurting inside, then there was already enough pain for the two of us — there’s no need for me to add more pain — right?

Wouldn’t it be cruel of me to reduce my pain by asking him to feel some? Wouldn’t it be highly selfish?

Two wrongs don’t make a right — right?

I’ve made that mistake before. In the end, we almost lost our relationship, and both he and I endured personal (related but separate) traumas — because we were denying each other the privilege of sharing in one another’s burden. (You know, that whole thing monogamous relationships are supposed to be about.) We were trying to shoulder burdens individually, avoiding honest communication that would, yes, cause immediate-term pain, but which would be better for the health of our relationship in the short and long terms.

And I discovered something –

– sometimes, I have to let him feel that pain that exists because of his own actions. I have to let him feel the true weight of it. I have to let him experience the injury of it.

Because if he never feels that pain, he never makes that intuitive connection about why his actions were harmful.

He has to burn his hand to understand that the stove is dangerously hot. He has to feel the searing pain — and he has to work on healing his own wound.

I have to be there with him, through all of it. Be there to hold him up and help him process and recover.

If those things don’t happen — then he cannot be there with me through my troubles. For him to “be there with me,” I have to open up and let him go through the things that I need to “be there with him” for.

One cannot occur without the other.

If even just one of the two doors is closed, nothing can get through.

***

i realized smth abt myself

i shouldn’t let ppl “let me down” bc i shouldnt be expecting them to be perfect allies, a concept i hate applied to me, so why do i apply it to them

they are ppl they will make mistakes they can do hurtful things

but i shuoldnt turn it into a personal slight or a way theyve personally failed me

bc that makes it about a rel’ship btwn 2 ppl and not abt the structural issues and cultural attitudes that need addressed

those attitudes n those structures can be changed

we can work on that w them

not end that conv prematurely to focus on how they failed me…

***

august 11, 2010

I am too tired to write today.

I find myself wishing that I could just step into an alternate life space. Like stepping into clothing. But I would step into being me – the me I want to be. Already have the history, the approach nailed, the habits set, the emotional and communicative vocabulary mastered. Just step into the outfit, zip up the side, and be there.

I can imagine a me who is comfortable, happy, and at peace. Who has interactions she is proud of her behavior in.

It doesn’t mean she’s necessarily going to be the popular kid at school, that everybody is necessarily going to like her. Or that she’ll never have conflict, never be at odds with someone, never have a frustrating exchange that goes nowhere and wears her down.

It just means that she will be calmer. And gravitate toward different modes of conversation. And maintain a different focus.

Then again… can the first ever be true, when the second is allowed for? If people don’t like me, if I have conflicts, if I make mistakes, will I still be happy with myself, and at peace? Will I still stand by my own actions?

***

I realized something else today.

So much of what goes wrong in many of these conversations happens because of inelegant phrasing, misunderstood points, poorly-connected concepts, poorly disclaimed assertions.

So much of what I kick myself over, I do because of these things.

But, I think: I just have a physical disability that sometimes has cognitive symptoms. Sometimes my wording is clunky and I have trouble really communicating my point; I have to beat around the bush and hope that people will look toward the center of my circular path to try to deduce what I am actually trying to say.

I fault myself for those things.

But fuck. Why? Why do I fault myself for that? Why do I accept the standards practiced by wider society, wherein speech must be precise, artfully navigating complicated subjects, or else the speaker cannot be taken seriously and any misunderstandings are hir own fault? Those standards serve to effectively shut out certain people from public conversation. People who lack access to high-quality, long-term education. People who live with learning disabilities or cognitive disorders. People who learned English as a second language. People who speak nondominant dialects of English.

These people will suffer a greater burden under that sort of standard, fighting against constant resistance, dealing with far more misunderstandings and having their arguments endlessly derailed.

All because of an insistence on maintaining this standard built on expectations of a certain ability, a certain background, a certain experience.

and no, I will not apologize for  thinking that is fucked up.

what I will do? is try to put into practice a flexibility, and budget a little more energy toward, as a standard, making sure I am understanding what a person is trying to get across, and allowing room in any response for my reaction to take different direction as my understanding of the conversation adjusts to the person’s expressed meaning.

That does not mean that people can rationalize their way out of saying offensive things.

but… maybe it means I will let go of coming down hard on them, especially from the start. let go of the need to make a Big Deal out of what they just did wrong.

because maybe, I’m not even understanding what they did.

this is something I *hoped* others would apply to me, all along, with my difficulties with spoken/written communication. a benefit I hoped some would offer me.

I don’t think I’ve ever really connected, on that deep-down level, on why, and how, to offer it to others.

and I really need to do that.

I really hope I can do that.

***

I can offer you explanations why I have done certain things.

Why I have rushed to judge people.

Why I have judged people. at all.

Why I have — while knowing I hated the very idea — given in to labeling certain people or groups as Bad People because of certain things they had done wrong.

and discounting everything they say or do from there on out, because of those wrongdoings.

(i will not take argument about the fact that they were, in fact, wrongdoings.)

Why I have invested in “call-out” culture.

Why I have practiced — and propogated — The Rules(TM). the set of laws governing the precise process a person must follow in a given situation. the precise steps they must take. the precise words they must say. the precise reactions they must offer. [sometimes, The Rules(TM) call for a person to offer the "wrong" reaction, instead of the "right" one, so that The People may have a target for blame, feigned righteousness, and ridicule. if the "wrong" reaction is not offered, The People have the right, under The Rules(TM), to make one up wholesale.]

(by the way, what is the definition of “objectification” again? making a living, breathing person into a vessel for someone else’s purposes? … hm.)

gdamn, I am horrified at how I have participated in that culture. and how I have participated in forcing it on others — in completely overtaking a conversation about a concept — sometimes about people’s lives — and turning it into a conversation about how The Rules(TM) have been followed and how they have now.

that shit is poison.

***

I want to believe in redemption. I want to believe in power. the power to improve. the power to stretch, to learn, to grow.

I want to believe in capacity. I want to believe in potential.

I want to be there alongside someone who is pushing and pulling, struggling with new knowledge that they may not have even accepted yet — but often they do accept it, and process and digest it, and over time incorporate it into their daily life…

I hate the way I’ve discounted the very possibility of any of that, sometimes.

I hate the fact that I know I’ve made people feel that way — that their potential is being discounted, that having done one thing wrong means being written off the rolls of the good for eternity.

***

august 12, 2010

written in early june, unfinished (i say that like there’s any other status for anything i write):

Maybe I’m not supposed to say it, but I’ll say it: I regret pretty much everything about my involvement in that Feministing boycott.

Look, it was bullshit. Bullshit what they did, including dropping the “tone” argument (in those words) on me for being mildly assertive. Bullshit that they think a history of five posts that almost all played into exactly the disability tropes we want to deconstruct constitute a history of meaningful engagement with disability. Bullshit that they are OK with having a comment space they don’t want to put the effort into maintaining — leaving it to the wolves.

But here’s what I regret, truly, deeply, to the bottom of my soul:

Getting into the blame-the-individual game.

It honestly eats at me. I hate it. I just hate that I went there. I hate that I did that. I hate it for a variety of reasons.

It sets me, or the criticizer, up as somehow more righteous than they, the people/group being critiqued.

That sets me, the criticizer, up for failure when it is revealed that I am no perfect child myself, and have my own issues and have made my own shitty mistakes.

It makes it difficult to engage with them, the criticized, if they do make a genuine effort at improving, even if they stumble as they navigate new territory (even if it’s territory that shouldn’t be new).

It divides the audience, you, into camps. People on Side A and Side B and over there, people who don’t give a shit about this drama and just wish we’d all shut the fuck up already. (Those people don’t matter.)

It makes the whole conflict into a controversy to be consumed.

And that’s the issue here. That’s what I’ve learned in the intervening time. Either it’s a controversy that can be parsed for the consumption of the hungry masses, those eager to find a way to make a name for themselves — by playing the reasonable one, or by staking out a righteous position — and those who are just using your issue to settle old grudges … or it’s nothing.

Either it can be consumed as a product, a way to prove something about yourself, the bystander, the individual — or it’s not worth any attention at all.

Pay no mind that the struggles of marginalized people every day go on in ways that are not easy to gin up into “controversy” — ways that are messy, difficult, not easy to navigate — but because they are not of use to the observing masses, for the personal betterment of the people unaffected, they aren’t even worth more than glancing observance. Onto the next Gawker slideshow.

***

I think part of the reason I tended so much toward a flip of a finger and a “fuck you” was because I didn’t know how to assert my own boundaries.

I didn’t know how to say “This is more than I can handle,” or “You have crossed a line,” and add, “but I cannot articulate what or why right now, and I should not have to” … while still being ok with what parts of the conversation were OK, and perhaps (but not required to be) OK with addressing those without addressing the bad parts.

Part of why I would start flipping out and go into pile-on mode is because someone crossed a line, and I had these intense feelings of violation inside me, but to acknowledge all the other parts of the conversation that didn’t cross a line felt like it would be denying, to myself, the feelings that I had. That were very real.

And what I have desperately needed, all my life, is realness.

To deny those feelings would be to deny my very self, my very being, my very existence in reality (as opposed to dissociated ether).

It would be a violent act against my own body, and I could not do it.

But I couldn’t identify that boundary. I just… knew it was there, and had this hot, intense, wordless instinct/impulse/inner knowledge that I could not violate it, that to violate it would be as to death. Just that incredible, deep, burning feeling of being trapped, knowing something is threatening your life. What do you do to that? Except lash out, beat out, violently thrash about in a thoughtless attempt to survive, without even having the time to know what it is that is threatening you?

I feel now, like… I see something that crosses one of those lines, and my heart wells up in my throat and I feel the burning behind my eyes, but my self-awareness is on, and I can stop to consider what it is that is bothering me, and what it is that seems wrong, and evaluate the idea and its validity, and possibly engage it on non-flipping-out terms.

I’ve also started asserting, to myself more than anyone?, my right to not engage on things that I know threaten my being that way.

Like when I’m this close to committing suicide, I had offered thoughts on a touchy subject, and someone responds to it in a way I can already tell is not going to be pleasant for me.

I can respect that person, and know that she was probably, actually, making some good points (while I might have disagreed with her on a fundamental basis, or had a different perspective) and important pushback. But still acknowledge that this discussion threatens my being and just stay away. Click away or scroll away from any mention of it, stick with things I know I can handle.

I never used to be able to do  that. To stop. And assert that boundary.

If I felt connected to something — a person was saying something directly to me, or it was something relating to me the person, or something which is of deep and far-reaching importance to me — I felt… not obligated… but drawn, strongly to engage with it. Even if it was something that was going to upset me during a dangerous time. Even if it was something that had a good possibility of crossing certain lines. Even if it was a person I knew was acting in bad faith, or just plain known for being intentionally difficult and cruel. My attention was just… a given, something that wasn’t even under consideration, of course I had to pay fucking attention, and possibly put in my two cents. Usually in one of those nefarious tones.

I could not look away. Boundaries were extremely difficult for me to manage. Extremely difficult to make myself create them, and maintain them. Tending to them, caring for them — out of the question, because I was terrified of them.

I’m learning, slowly.

And I think it will be better for me, in managing my relationship with my peers and community members.

***

august 13, 2010

focus on language can be a learning phase for ppl new to the movement/concept of disability rights

we shouldn’t focus on it to the exclusion of all else, but it is a subject that newly-political folk can cut their teeth on, a way for them to get used to disability centered analysis, and talk of it should not be suppressed

tabs otoh need to leave language alone, because no matter what when they speak up to enforce good words/bad words, they are participating in a diluted/lite version of dis. activism that refuses to go any further than the safe and easy parts for them to modify, in a way that helps them make a name for themselves as “true allies”, again taking the entire focus off the conversation about any number of things affecting disabled ppl, and again making tabs dominate conv. (now instead of being about whatever topic, including disabled ppl talking abt their lives, it’s a tab person talking over everyone about whether or not some person said a bad word)

language is important, but language should not supercede all other concerns.

tabs need to let the disabled ppl talk about language, let them be the ones to decide when a word or phrase is harmful, let them be the ones to point it out in the situations they decide are appropriate. if they want to support pwd in this matter, they should not talk about it themselves, but should lift up and promote the works of pwd who talk about it. rather than talking themselves, they should reference and direct other people to the works of pwd.

***

I’ve been struggling to make sense of everything that is going on in my head, that has been going on for months.

There are so many changes I want to make. Part of why I try not to run around declaring my intent to make them is because I have to identify them first; I have to figure out what’s wrong before I can figure out how to make it right. Sometimes it takes me months of shaking things around inside my head to get some of those ideas to fall out my mouth in words rather than lurching gibberish.

But part of it is, as I wrote a little while ago:

Right now I am trying to refocus. To take a look over my activism and engagement. And seeing shit I’m embarrassed about. And hate myself for. And want to change.

But as my husband and I have done in the past: don’t make promises that you will change. Because what matters is that you do. And you can’t guarantee that you will. So I would rather you just hold your arm around me and stumble forward with me. And work on your shit. We will only ever know if the other is going to change once that change is put into effect. That takes years. Years.

Years.

***

I wonder sometimes whether we do injustice to the whole picture of people’s lives by trying to make judgments narrow slivers of their experience.

It manifests itself in the way we try to slice out human experience like we do sections of beef. The way people are easily __categorized__ into binary states of being, into neatly-delineated pre-set __identities__, the way those identities can never combine into something different than the simple sum of their parts, but must be as easy to understand as the addition of single-digit whole numerals.

But another way it manifests is in the way that we judge people’s actions.

The way it’s “just as bad” when the woman beats back on the man. (to the point that hetero women often get arrested for DV because their abuser knows its another avenue to abuse them. case in point, my sister with her ex-marine husband with a buddy in the system.)

because when you look at one narrow slice of that person’s life: yeah, the pure act is “just as bad” no matter who does it.

The way DV victims will often not let on that they are being abused to the people around them — family, friends, teachers, coworkers — because they know of the swift and unequivocal condemnations of the insidious beast that is that person’s partner.

because in a situation of your hypothetical het man and your hypothetical het woman, in your stereotypical het relationship, it is understood that abuse happens because a person is evil and malevolent and mean and there can be no room for any other facts.

but what happens when you step back? and look at the whole?

that woman is looking, not at a narrow slice of a hypothetical situation with imaginary people. she is looking at her life, her real life, in all its complexities. she’s looking at the things that her partner does that endears him to her, or the history they have together, or the fact that he is working his ass off to keep her and the family fed, or the way he stays at a job that is killing him because they need the health insurance it offers, or the sweet things he does for the kids.

Or maybe none of that is true, maybe there really isn’t much positive in the relationship, but it’s fucking HERS.

And to have someone loudly, unhesitantly condemn that? and if she squeaks a single word in protest of that condemnation — or simply lets on to the complexity of the situation as a whole, the conflicted feelings she has about it? what do people do?

they call her brainwashed, battered wife syndrome, inexplicable. No one would have “abuse” happen and rationally choose to stay.

and maybe all this does is just solidify her devotion to him. or to silence. because it’s just been demonstrated to her, that no one else is on her side, either.

just the side of that imaginary hypothetical stereotypical person.

no place is really safe for her. the real, true being, her. everything encompassing all that she is, and does, and feels, and lives. no one accepts that. only the pieces of her that they like, that are convenient to them — that they can use for their purposes (proving to themselves a point about their own lives, or a stereotype about abuse victims as a group).

She is a slice of a person, a sliver of an experience that we the community can extract from her, to inspect and analyze, to hold up to make a point off of. She is just a piece, a section, a portion. Not a life, a living being, a breathing throbbing soul, a person with her own experience that is made of her own history and her own personality, that is completely and totally different from anyone elses.

But we have grown comfortable with this practice, taking that huge and complicated beautiful mess of a life and narrowing our focus in to one tiny spot in its landscape, and have entire conversations about this one little tree without ever one acknowledging the huge and intricate ecosystem in which and on which it survives. Whether that system is thriving or deprived and dying makes a big difference in what conclusions to draw about that tree, but we never want to acknowledge the rest of the expanses of that whole landscape, that whole picture, that whole being. That would complicate things.

To an extent, simplification is a tool that can be put to useful ends, but it is one of many, many tools in the chest, and we should caution ourselves about its drawbacks, about the costs that come with using it. Right now, we seem to be using it while pretending that there are no costs. And vast swathes of living breathing landscapes are scrubbed out of existence and we wonder why the tree starts dying.

***

There’s something else that I think is highly important to any healthy community, or movement, that slips through the cracks when we engage in this narrowing of focus, this eliding of — not just context, that’s not really the concept I’m going for here — but wholeness…

That is, in any conversation on any issue there is going to be a lot of pushing, and pulling, and tension, and conflict, and difficulty. It is going to result in strained patience, hot faces, teary eyes, and sore feelings. And these things need not always be. There is no reason to create them where they would not otherwise occur. The things, themselves, are not necessarily valuable in and of themselves. But they can be symptoms of healthy change.

What we need when we talk about issues affecting real lives is for the conversation to be bursting with a wealth of different focuses, different approaches, different goals, different methods.

We need people to be “reasonable” and to try to reconcile our ideals with the reality of the world. We need people to figure out how to implement these ideas we have, and how things might go wrong in doing so, and what issues might come up in doing so, and how we might address those things if they do.

We need people pushing back strongly against those who would strike out middle ground and forge compromise, reminding them of what they might forget in their focus on the achieving the possible. We need people who will cry out against injustices, no matter how it might offend those outside, and people who will take middle-grounders to task for the things their movement-programs fail to address.

We need people who will do diplomacy to people outside, who will try to introduce them to easy topics, try to wean them onto a diet of political awareness, try to frame things in a way that they will understand, try to find ways to convince them how this issue is relevant to them. We need people who will be kind and gentle, who are there with reassuring words to fall back on when they make a mistake, and positive reinforcement when they do something right.

We need people who are harsh and grounded and ready to make clear those same outsiders exactly the greusome realities they have a role in creating. We need people who are hardened and unsympathetic, who are credibly able to make an uncooperative outsider’s day quite unpleasant if they choose to engage in bigotries.

We need people who will explore the boundaries of the conversation, searching for new frontiers, pushing into places that are uncomfortable, unsettling.

We need people who know how to get shit done to keep everyone fed and clothed and sheltered and stimulated. We need people who know how to work the system, and we need people who know how to work around the system.

All of these things get lost when the conversation, instead, becomes focus on one tool in our toolbox. One very narrow method or process, one particular style or approach, one device, one instrument, one tool in the enormous toolchest of relationships or organizing or community building. When one style of speech is condemned, or one point of view is diminished, or one way of accomplishing something is held up as exemplary.

Because when you are looking at a cropped picture of something, it might look bad. It might look insufficient to reach its stated end goal, or it might look unpleasant in the absence of context.

But when you widen your view to include the entire scene, that act might change in connotation. It might not be perfect, and might not accomplish everything. But it serves a purpose that perhaps wasn’t being addressed. It fills a need that might have gone unfilled. It shapes a space in a slightly different way. And perhaps we couldn’t move forward, in the original space. Perhaps we were smacking up against the boundaries we had created before, and finding our needs growing all the while.

Maybe it takes a lot of different approaches to help shape our space the way it needs to be.

Maybe we never fully understand what we need, and constantly have to make adjustments, and find ways to accomplish a reshaping, to account for newly gained knowledge.

maybe we all serve different roles. and maybe we all need to realize that the role we fill cannot fill the needs of our entire community. that our role is very important, but at the same time, so are the other sorts of roles people fill that are different than ours. and that personally, we might not fully understand where they are coming from or how they go about things, but we must realize the unfortunate limits of our own individual imaginations and allow for the possibilities of the collective imagination.

of course, what we collectively imagine is subject to a lot of push and pull, teem and throb…

***

we need people who can write reasoned, objective analysis.

we need people who can write impassioned pleas, and compelling attempts to persuade.

we need people who can bring deeply-felt emotion, who can get across the importance of a situation, or the true effects something has on a living breathing life.

and we need people who can write from experience, who can tell personal stories, who can convey humanity.

***

august 15, 2010

scribbled on a notepad on my bedside table, in the dark

putting

things in stark terms

overusing as a device

people get distracted

i can be more

– generous? –

neutral in

explanation

to give greater number of people access to my analysis

then again, over-

reliance on “reason”

logic neutral objective etc.

shuts out many

marginalized people too

discussion approach

centering around preferences of dominant group not

needs of marginalized group

speaks to necessity of

many approaches

& space for multiple

& variant conversations

not all needs can

be served with one

approach

choosing just one

as the only “good” or

allowable approach

means explicitly

rejecting certain

people’s place in

any conversation.

***

I do feel highly uncomfortable with my own overreliance on stark, unforgiving terms.

I want people to give me room to breathe, room to work, in any interaction. Because I want to be able to learn something from it. That doesn’t mean that any wrongs are ignored, or immediately forgiven. It means that sometimes, the shape of the conversation changes, when the focus narrows on a specific part of  the interaction, when there is a whole wealth of material and opportunity to explore in the greater conversation.

I want to explore. I want to discover. I want to pursue a politics rooted in wholeness.

***

I want to be someone who recognizes and acknowledges the whole of a person.

We cannot live for so long as we are chopped up into conveniently-sized portions for the consumption of others.

***

I’m wondering about the way I interact withmy communities.

I’m thinking about the structure of internet activism and the incentives it creates for bad behavior, abuse, manipulation.

I’m thinking about the way that every group is, in some way, an enormous failure. The way disability organizing is overwhelmingly white, for instance.

No matter how radical any group is, they are limited. Humanity is limited. It can only understand things through lenses, and no lens can take in the whole of a scene at one time.

We are all limited by the lenses we use.

If we are looking through an anti-racist lens in the US (and I mainly mean the lens that white folk use),

we are probably eliding the structure of racial inequities in the world as a whole. We are applying the structure of the US racial system to our thoughts and actions elsewhere in the world — even when we are trying our hardest not to.

If we are looking through a disability-positive lens,

we are probably assuming certain things about society where we live that may not be true in societies across the world. How would disability activism change in an area where there are no modern streets to worry about curb cuts? How would we re-focus and  re-center the people affected? Would we be able to?

Every lens skews the view of the person looking through it. And we cannot see without those lenses.

I’m thinking about how even some of our most venerated leaders held considerable prejudice, and advocated for the “wrong” side of certain issues.

About how Obama seems to be personally uncomfortable with queerness, and is deporting great masses more people under his administration than

About how Gandhi wrote against dark-skinned people in South Africa in his early years there.

About how important it becomes to us to deny that there is any possibility Martin Luther King, Jr. might have personally disapproved of gay marriage, regardless of what he may have thought himself (point being, if he were shown to inarguably believe in the rights of gay folk too, we would clutch tightly to that — and that is indicative of something).

About how we fashion our leaders into idols. About how we strip them of their humanity, scrub them clean of any blemishes, cover them in white virgin cloth, and freeze them in stone, so that we can display them to the public as a point of righteous pride.

I am also thinking about the way these shining idols shape the way we view each other.

I’m thinking about how I would see a person, and expect them to be close to perfect. And when they failed on one thing, grow immensely disappointed with them and feel as if I have been betrayed. As if they were lying to me about their perfection. That they probably never claimed, but that I wrote in for them.

What good does this do me? To expect nothing but the best, find out that these human beings are human, and feel that I must disassociate myself with them to protect my own image (of myself)?

It doesn’t leave me with a lot of people to associate with, I’ll tell you.

***

Does it count as depression when you know you’re too emotionally tired to go any further, and you just want to go to bed now to avoid the mood down-swing you can feel coming, but when you look at the clock it’s only 4pm?

***

for a long time, I have been creeped out by a certain type of person in the blogosphere.

for a while now, I’ve been hating and fearing the times I know I’ve played that type.

it’s the person who is there for every fight. there for every drama.

the person who’s got the gossip on all the parties and can report on the game.

the person who has to take every drama and analyze it to death. has to give the play-by-play and offer commentary on every little move. where so-and-so went wrong here, said a Bad Word there, broke The Rules(TM) over there. where so-and-so followed The Rules(TM) well here and you all should observe so-and-so’s example.

the person who can always fit an incident into a convenient narrative mold, shove it in as tight as you can and pop! out comes the pre-shaped narrative. the person who can always find a way to create two clearly defined and opposite sides, and set up the argument in such a way that the Right Side and the Wrong Side are easy to deduce if you know The Rules(TM).

the person who hangs around like a vulture, waiting for someone to slip up, trip up, fuck up — so they can pounce, and pop them in the mold, and serve up the resulting conveniently-shaped thing for the public to devour.

consume.

the person who knows the right words to repeat, and the right people to suck up to.

the person who knows how to network. how to build a following.

the person whose interactions in the community always seem to come down to winning. being the best activist. the most perfectest. the best “ally.”

and it just feels weird because they sau all the right words along the way, but ultimately it feels like … they aren’t in it because they care about the issues they’re talking about. they’re talking about those issues so that they can be in it.

and seem to get so excited when something new erupts. because it’s not a clear sign that there is some pretty tough pain going on. it’s a clear sign that there’s a new drama to reputationally profit off of.

***

you know when this finally came to head for me?

that big fucking feministing blow-up. (which one, you ask, and i say exactly)

i regret ever getting involved.

i regret it deep down to my bones.

ever since it happened i’ve been withdrawing further and further, because i saw some ugly shit in that, and what did it result in? what good became of it?

i came to distrust a lot of people after that because they kind of… disappeared… after the drama was gone.

there were people who were glad to talk the drama, but weren’t there for the quiet moments when we were talking about something that couldn’t be played against someone else…

that was unsettling.

and i started examining exactly what was unsettling me

and over time i’ve come to realize – it’s my involvement in the first place.

the fact that i stood up and “called out” someone

the fact that i got into the realm of blaming individuals, shaming individuals for being *ist, and therefore Bad People who shouldn’t be listened to by the wider community because their reputation was tainted

that game is poison.

“calling out” and categorizing people by their perfection-in-my-area quotient and demanding that they repeat after me the Right Words they were supposed to say, that they follow The Rules(TM) to the letter or have their misstep (or conscious refusal to play the game) used against them, used as examples of their bad faith.

it’s poison.

it kills communities.

it eats them from the inside out.

***

august 16, 2010

I don’t know if this place has anything for me anymore.

If I have anything for it.

I don’t know if I have anything left to say.

and I’m tired of fighting.

and I think I need to just let go.

let go of my idea of community, of relationships.

just stand on my box on the street corner, and speak.

and once the words have left my mouth, let them go.

let the world do with them what they want.

I’ve been through this before.

I’ve lived in closeness with people I deeply feared. I could never show my fear, because the very reason I feared them was their propensity to take advantage of any weakness shown, to weaponize it against the person, and to intimidate the rest of the family, group, community into harassing that person as well. I had to be aware at all times. I had to watch everything I said and did, and everything I didn’t say or do. I had to know the rules down to the letter and follow them without fail. And I had to know that even doing all of that, I would still be a target at some point, for the simple reason that the person had to have a target at all times, and I was within their line of sight. At some point, for some impossible-to-predit pretext, there would be a big blowup, and I would be in the center of it. Wishing I could shrink so far they couldn’t see me, but every effort to shrink away only escalating the harassment.

It’s a familiar situation.

When I see it play out in this community, it hurts. Because there are several common holdings in this community: seek the truth. Support the underdog. Believe people who say they have been wronged.

Unfortunately, the community develops in such a way that people start manipulating that.

And there are bystanders who will jump on the wagon, and use you as a way to improve their Good Ally cred. The actual issues aren’t of importance, but the chance to make a name for yourself on the backs of someone else.

And I cannot sit here and play the familiar game. The one where both sides yell to everyone listening: THIS IS HOW SIE WRONGED ME. And the other side yells back: THIS IS WHAT SIE DID WRONG. Pay attention to hir, not me! It’s all hir fault!

I don’t like doing  that, especially here, because I know that the community as a whole cannot be trusted not to take “this person did something wrong” and take parts of that person’s identity and use it against them. I do not trust the community not to bring out racist shit toward a person of color. I do not trust the community not to start holding that person to standards they cannot meet because they are working three jobs to make ends meet or they have a disability that makes constant engagement difficult. I have watched this community devour people, destroy destroy destroy, because they cannot work on Internet Time, where responses must be instant. I have watched this community take  things from the other person’s past and weaponize them in ways that just turn ugly.

I just don’t like that game.

So I don’t want to play it.

That means that I have to sit here, while someone is all over the place attacking me or people I care about, knowing part of the story, but not wanting to tell it. Not wanting to shout it. Not wanting this to turn into me-vs-you, us-vs-them. Not wanting to watch, as I have watched before, people intentionally look for the other person’s weakest spots and try to hurt them. Because they did something wrong.

I don’t want to be responsible for that shit.

What that means is that I have to sit here and take it. Let the other person raise a fuss. Depending on the person, let them twist the truth so hard it breaks under the pressure. Let them make up wholesale bullshit lies about me and those close to me. Lies that are conveniently constructed to play into the community’s sore spots. I have to sit here and let them try to destroy me, destroy people around me, destroy anyone who doesn’t immediately denounce me.

My reputation takes a hit, and I have to take it, even if it’s based on claimed events that never happened.

People believe things about me that are nowhere near true.

And people never get a chance to see the things the other person has been doing behind the scenes. The things they’ve been saying, the people they’ve been sending against me, the absolutely prejudiced things they do where they know no one else can see. While putting on a public front as the only true friend to my type of people.

How many different dramas have I had to sit through, watch them play out, sit on these things, never reveal them, because I really believe it would be unethical to do so.

It’s more ethical to sit here and take a beating than to just push back. Not beat back, push back.

I’d rather take the beating.

But damn, it hurts.

We need look no further than the story of this sixteen-year-old young man, who is facing a flurry of attention after filing a lawsuit against his mother for hacking his Facebook account. He also requested a no-contact order on her.

It appears that the mother, at best, took advantage of her son having failed to log out and clear all cookies and personal history from his computer every time he leaves it for half a moment, and at best, straight-up hacked his account — read some things she didn’t like, and responded by posting things all over his page in an attempt to embarrass him and then going to the length of changing his passwords on his Facebook account and his email so that he couldn’t do any damage control after he found out about it.

She thinks that these actions constitute a “conversation” with her son.

The son lives with his grandmother. Someone, somewhere (I can’t find an attribution) claims that he and his mother had a “great relationship,” a claim that sounds suspiciously like the refrain that commonly comes from assaulters and abusers, from cheaters and absent parents and partners. They truly have no idea that something is deeply, thoroughly wrong with the relationship, and the signs of the second person in it — the object — protesting against that wrongness are lost on them.

Like, you know, the fact that her son does not live with her and prefers not to have any contact with her at all.

The mother is living it up in the face of all this attention. She gets to assert her ownership of her near-adult son and know that a great many will rally to her defense in response.

New plans on fighting the charges, as she believes she was fully within her legal rights as a parent to monitor her son’s online behavior.

“Oh yeah, I’m going to fight it. If I have to go even higher up, I’m going to. I’m not gonna let this rest. I think this could be a precedent-setting moment for parents,” she told KATV-TV. [source]

Denise New says she plans to fight the charges saying if the suit is successful it will be “open season” on all vigilant parents who seek to keep their children in line. [source]

“You’re within your legal rights to monitor your child and to have a conversation with your child on Facebook whether it’s his account, or your account or whoever’s account.” [source]

“If I’m found guilty on this it is going to be open season” on parents, New said Wednesday.

“You’re within your legal rights to monitor your child and to have a conversation with your child on Facebook whether it’s his account, or your account or whoever’s account,” she told KATV. [source]

“The things he was posting in Facebook would make any decent parent’s eyes pop out and his jaw drop,” Denise New said. “He had been warned before about things he had been posting.” [source]

Denise New acknowledged changing both passwords to keep her son from getting access to his Facebook page. She denied hacking into the account.

“He left it logged in on my computer,” she said. “It’s not like I stole his laptop.” [source]

Readers will note a common refrain in many of the non-strictly-news sources above (and found here): “What ever happened to de-friending?” As though this is a matter of a son allowing his mother to have viewing access to his page through her own account as a friend. The son may never have allowed his mother to have an inkling that he had a Facebook account: she still forced her way into it. Not in view of it, in control of it. This doesn’t have anyfuckingthing to do with who you friend and who you don’t.

Of course, most sites focus on the potential implications for parents’ rights, and there’s a good reason for that: our society cannot deal with the idea of children as full human beings with ownership of their own selves. It is firmly entrenched in our social consciousness that children are objects, possessions, things lacking full personhood, desire, decisionmaking ability, agency.

Much like women used to be (and are still, to some extent) considered, hm? Objects for the benefit of the full beings who own them. Women would be passed along from fathers to husbands, traded for physical and monetary property, no distinction between the two things in that transaction. Not identically, but similarly, children are considered objects owned by their parents much the same as wives were objects owned by their husbands. (I expect that mothers reading will feel this a little more intuitively than fathers might — knowing that oneself might be on the object end of that transaction can produce a different reaction, sometimes.)

It is interesting that the immediate reaction to this story on the part of adults, especially adults who have children, is to consider the parent’s plight in this story, completely neglecting the concerns of the child. And it reminds me how (feminist) abled women immediately rush to think about the plight of the caretaker in any story of caretaker abuse of PWD, completely neglecting the concerns of the person being given the care, as though they don’t even exist. As though they are objects: things that cannot be affected themselves, that can only affect the full persons in their non-lives.

It is telling, really, who we consider to be persons worthy of consideration, whose problems we consider to be important and worth solving — and who we consider to be persons completely ignorable, whose problems aren’t worth consideration and don’t particularly need any attention, much less any attempt at solving. (In fact, the solution to their problems might interfere with the solutions to the important problems — so they should be crushed if possible.)

This is what we are. People read this story of obvious, clear violation of boundaries, and think immediately on their own right to violate others’ boundaries: or else they resort immediately to blaming the victim for this clear violation of their own boundaries. The reaction more comment from non-parent adults.

How ridiculous, right? That a boy would assert his right to his own fucking life without his abuser’s interference. Especially when this parent doesn’t even have any fucking custodial rights! And we still rush to her defense. How poisoned are we?

I have been on the Internet for a full half of my life. I was twelve when I got my first computer. I am days from turning twenty-four.

I more-or-less grew up on the internet. I’ve been part of a variety of online communities. You definitely start to notice some commonalities. I think I’ve pegged the median life of an internet community around three years: after that time, drifting sets in, or conflicts create divisions, or original members have moved on and it feels like the essence of the community went with them, and so on. And there’s often one or two people from the group that you keep contact with over the long run.

I’ve gained so much from my time online. I’ve connected with some amazing people. I’ve made lasting friends. I’ve had space to grow, to explore. Making those connections online as a young teen actually helped me learn to socialize offline (contrary to the panic of traditional-media sorts as new media grows more prominent and the new generations make use of the technology available to them). I still had access to a network of support when I found myself unable to leave the home or socialize in-person. And access to information, the opportunity to learn things that might never have been in my reach otherwise — from sexual education to photography and design concepts to politics and social awareness. And I needn’t go into detail, I think, for most of my readers to understand the value of activism no matter where it happens.

For all the internet has to offer, it can also be a dangerous place. And I’ve watched it happen in a number of communities I was a part of. There are all kinds of people out there, and not all of them with a sense of understanding or respect for boundaries. And it only takes one person, out of hundred or thousands, to change the shape of the community they target.

It can happen in many ways. Some of you might remember that I met my husband online. The community we met in was a close-knit group of friends. Every year we planned a meeting, choosing a place close to some percentage of the group, and would go out together to museums, restaurants, theme parks, local/historical points of interest, and so on. We associated with one another with our real identities, for the most part. As far as we knew. Until one member faked his own death to us, for reasons unknown, and several people who had grown very close to him fell out of the community as a result.

There was another community, a much larger one, where members sorted themselves into sub-groups of friends. And one group was dominated by this particular woman. She made a point to be as inflammatory as possible. She wanted to see drama. And she would target any individual who raised her ire (whether they spoke against her or just happened to be in her way at the moment). Target with harsh words, target with customized insults, target with twisted stories or speculations about the person, designed to exploit their vulnerabilities, displaying knowledge of the target and hir situation — she had done her research — that was as much a personal violation as the infectious lies that she weaved into her attacks.

I’ve seen this happen in multiple communities. These toxic individuals who strongarm their way into prominence. In the beginning they are boisterous but nonthreatening. But their loud, commanding style immediately sets them into a dominant position, no matter how few people know them at first. They use their dominant position to reward people who make a show of flattering them. They make connections early, carefully cultivating supporters, rewarding them with insider status if they show themselves willing to play by the dominator’s rules.

This toxic person begins to gain prominence, in part because sie begins to sew conflict. Sometimes it is subtle, not overt or obviously conflict-seeking, but rather setting hirself up to be wronged, or finding a sensitive issue to exploit. But sometimes it is blatant: outright picking a fight with other people, seeking out enemies. Either way, sie becomes a person that no one can any longer ignore. Sie forces hir way into a place of importance and relevance to all community members; they have to pay attention, because otherwise they might stumble in hir path, or break one of hir rules inadvertantly, and suddenly find themselves in the middle of a shitstorm.

This is the point at which the shape of the community changes: this person is terrorizing the community. Hir supporters are no longer simply part of another sub-group of friends, but now become enforcers. They cannot believe that anyone would speak ill of this person who has treated them so well, and they make sure that anyone who does so is promptly punished. They make sure that no one breaks the dominator’s rules; they pick fights with others in an attempt to prove their loyalty to the dominator.

The really disturbing part is when the big fights break out: anyone who speaks out against this toxic person is swarmed. The toxic person may or may not be personally involved. Sometimes, sie sits back as hir supporters do the work of harassing the dissident, picking at all their flaws, manufacturing them if need be. But sometimes, sie will get involved — seeking this person’s greatest vulnerabilities, and exposing to all observers — knowing that sie does not need to say the nastiest things — someone else will step in and do the dirty work for hir.

And people get the message. It only takes one time, although it may happen well more than just once. People see what the consequences are for speaking out against abuse. And people, quite rightly, would rather protect themselves — even if they feel brave enough to speak up, they can see already that it’s not enough to make it stop. They might have seen a great many people speak out against the abuse, and each of them individually targeted for attack, and the dominator keeping hir place of influence in the aftermath. People may not be happy, anymore, but sie still holds this power.

This is highly damaging in any community. I’ve watched it happen, watched how the dynamics of the community change, observed the consequences of pushback. In one particularly extreme incident, the bully actually researched the real-life identity of an enemy and called around to anyone she could find, including the target’s in-laws and boss, with a fabricated story that was just plausible enough to sew seeds of doubt, and the target actually saw consequences at work because of it.

But even when the abuse is confined to the online community, it can have real effect. I’m not a person who believes that the internet is a somehow less-important space than physical proximity. We are all real people, and we are having real interactions and making real connections, medium regardless. Harmful behavior is harmful behavior, no matter how it is facilitated. And abuse is no less abuse because the abuser isn’t sitting in front of you.

To the contrary: the invasion of space, the assault on a person’s autonomy and integrity, the violation of a person’s freedom of association, are just as real when they happen over a data line. These spaces are important. They might be the only space you can interact with distant friends. They might be the only space you can interact at all, because you are dealing with disability or poverty that makes leaving the house (or bed) and socializing in person difficult or impossible. (Which is why it’s frustrating when people dismiss online spaces as somehow not-as-real or not-as-important.)

When I’m part of a community that houses one of these bullies, I live in fear of the person ever being clued in to my existence, knowing that I could not handle being targeted like that. I have had to leave communities I cared deeply about because I couldn’t keep subjecting myself to those conditions. I have had to break connections with people I cared deeply about because they had some connection to the abuser.

And not just with online friends.

After I moved to Pittsburgh three years ago, I lost contact with every friend I had in California, my closest, deepest soul-mates (in a BFF sense). You see, my mother started stalking me online, seeking out every social media account she could find, invading every space she could find me in. So I left them. All of them. For two straight years I never logged in to my Myspace or Facebook accounts because she would be able to see that I had; certainly I couldn’t have interacted with anybody on them because she would find out. The friends whose emails I didn’t have before, I lost contact with. The friends whose other contact information I did have were the ones in my home-town social circle — the social circle my mother had infiltrated. So now, 2500 miles away in a place I’d never lived, knowing no one but my husband and his immediate family, I was completely isolated from the only support system I had.

Abuse has real ramifications. On real people. No matter where it is carried out.

When it comes to online spaces, some people may not see much of a problem. It doesn’t feel threatening to them. Annoying, maybe. But not threatening. And they don’t see why people can’t just ignore it. It’s not that hard to get past, for them.

But there are some people who can’t just ignore it. People who have been through this before. People who have been primed by previous abusers, primed to respond to certain tactics. For these people, even if they are not the center of a conflict, just being exposed to those same dynamics again can be incredibly harmful. It might not be the same person, the same place, the same situation — but the same patterns are playing out, and it’s not just that you have flash-backs to previous events; it’s the way you return to the state of mind you were in during the previous abuse, the way your patterns of thought go back to how they were then, the way you react to things restored to its previous setting. You might find yourself becoming highly self-critical, questioning your own experience of things, doubting your knowledge of yourself and what happened. You might find the same problems with self-loathing come rushing back. You might be wondering whether you really deserve it. You might start to see yourself as a burden again, highly aware of all the ways you drag other people down.

You can’t just ignore it away. You can’t just Think Positive your way out of it. You can’t just tell yourself that all these thoughts are untrue; no matter how well you understand something intellectually, there is something about the human psyche that still follows those same self-destructive emotional patterns when exposed to the same kind of situation that originally set them in place.

Just because you don’t actually feel like the community bully is going to find you at your workplace doesn’t mean hir actions aren’t having real effect on you — no matter how much you fight it.

Survivors of abuse are everywhere. And they are not always known as such. They are often invisible. And the consequences they suffer are not always apparent to outside observers.

What disturbs me as I watch this play out in yet another community I care about deeply is that this community is different. It’s not just about making friends or sharpening your debate skills or sharing memes with each other. This is a community with a purpose, and it has real effect. Real change is happening because of the conversations that we have with one another, puzzling out the direction of a movement, examining systems and learning how to change them, working with one another to advance the theory behind the movement, to find relevance, to find need, and to fill it. A lot of people have been introduced to concepts they might never have encountered without a thriving network of communities dedicated to common purposes. And, as a believer in bottom-up change, I fully believe that the influence of this community will spread.

And maybe it’s naive of me to expect better, but I rather do expect that groups of people centered around advocacy and activism would have some measure of awareness of abuse, how it works, how devastating it can be to the person/people targeted. I would definitely expect many of these communities to know that the abuser has often made sure to become in some way valuable or indispensable to the larger community, doing good things for other people, even as they do such harm to others. How often do people rally around an accused rapist and close in on the accuser, because they know what a good person the accused is and what good they are doing in [other area], so there’s no way they could be capable of something so heinous, and anybody who suggests something so patently ridiculous must have some sort of insidious motive…

You will see similar narratives play out in online communities — often without even the precept of an accusation. It is not the target who (publicly) initiates the conflict, in this case — the target may have been minding hir own business — but the abuser. All the abuser needs is a slightly modified version of reality — just plausible enough that supporters/enforcers and passers-by don’t bother to check for accuracy, but instead go on the abuser’s version of events — but just twisted enough to set up the target for harassment and humiliation, just something enough to suggest salacious details (real or manufactured) that a motivated supporter might dig up about the target, and just set up in such a way that any way the target might defend hirself would only create more embarrassment or incite escalation.

This is called manipulation.

What is most frustrating is that there are people who know that something is wrong here, people who are seeing red flags, but rather than choosing to back out of the whole conflict, they step in to question the target. Because maybe there are personal issues between the abuser and the target, they figure, but on the merits (as posited by the abuser), doesn’t the bully have a point? And then they unquestioningly accept the abuser’s terms of engagement, imposing those terms on the larger conversation, forcing the target to either engage on the abuser’s terms or not at all — which, of course, sets the target up for failure. And the conversation may not have proceeded on the abuser’s terms without the intervener’s assistance.

This is called enabling.

These people are willingly being used as tools. They are allowing themselves to be manipulated, for what reason I can only guess: sometimes, for the approval of the dominating person, for the points they win by staying on the right side of the conflict (“right” as in most dominant), or maybe they’ve had conflict with the target before too. Maybe there are other reasons, reasons I don’t understand right now, that aren’t as malignant in nature, even as they have a negative effect.

But it’s especially awful, when it happens that way — because it hurts so much worse coming from the innocent bystander, the person who had previously been a friend — it cuts so much deeper when it is coming from a person who generally acts in good faith, a person who generally acts with respect.

The target, then, is isolated: the people who see what is going on are too afraid to speak up, knowing that the consequences of showing any support for the target are having some of that scrutiny diverted their way. And it is understandable to protect oneself in that case, especially when past incidents have shown that even a great many people speaking up against the abuse cannot break down the power structure that the abuser has built.

And that is why the enforcers (whether willing or oblivious) are so frustrating. Because they are the ones who are defending that power structure. They are the ones who are making sure that even when the vast majority of the community is unhappy with the state of things, they cannot wrest back control of their space. The abuser, by hirself, could not win against an entire community that is sick and tired of hir actions. But when the abuser “has a point” — “does so much good” — when people would rather stay willfully ignorant to the structure they are reinforcing as they use it for their own benefit, because any position of influence is worth it because they would use it for good things –

And the system forges on.

How many voices have been silenced by this system we so casually reinforce?

How many people have been intimidated out of writing, building, working within the community?

The answer isn’t zero.

I’ve watched enough of these conflicts now to have lost count of the people who did speak up, who bore the consequences of doing so, and whose voices disappeared entirely after the storm passed. I’ve lost count of the people who became targets, and the campaign was a success, the person humiliated, and even when attention turned elsewhere they were too scared, too depressed or burned out, questioning whether they could ever contribute anything valuable — their voices quieted.

And there is no way to count the people who were observing silently, who might have joined the community, adding their voice to the conversation, contributing valuable perspectives and insights — no matter how small their circle of influence — who were too scared, having witnessed what can happen if they inadvertently step in the path of the wrong person — who decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

Again, this is devastating in any community. But particularly in this one — a community where we want people to use their voices — we want a diversity of perspective — we want a high degree of participation. This is a community where the entire point is to listen to these voices, and to engage with one another, to build upon each other — and no matter how small the voice, no matter how unknown the contribution — it still matters. A great diversity of small contributions makes a stronger, more stable foundation for a movement.

Every little bit is just as important as the next. And the higher degree of participation you have within a group — whatever commonality they share — the more likely the movement is to actually better their position in society, in life. The more you discourage participation, the more the movement becomes dominated by a few competing leaders. And the fewer people participating, the less relevant the movement becomes, for lack of a diversity of knowledge and perspective. The fewer people participating, the more the faults of the few leaders matter. And the more likely the movement is to eat itself inside out.

I don’t trust that it will make much of a difference, just me writing on my little blog. Especially when I am too fucking scared to name names. Especially when I already spent two days suicidal last week, and still don’t know whether I feel up to meaningful participation in this community going forward. Especially if that scrutiny comes back. I’m being fairly risky, writing about it outright like this. And it’s my own safety that I’m risking. And if I find myself targeted again, I might have to pull out of yet another community because of it.

But I will mourn this one a fair bit more. Because it’s more than friends lost.

It’s purpose.

Short background: Rush Limbaugh (link goes to Wikipedia article) is a US conservative radio talk show host who has risen to prominence in the US by inciting “controversy” after “controversy” with hateful rhetoric. He also went through an ordeal some time back for addiction to prescription painkillers, an incident that the US left likes to use against him. Recently he was rushed to the hospital again, which has spurred a new round of derision from US liberals.

Rush Limbaugh isn’t exactly a sympathetic character. His politics are vile and he makes a career out of escalating white male resentment into white male supremacy. And that causes real harm to real people who don’t meet the requirements to be part of Limbaugh’s He-Man Woman-Haterz Club.

How did he end up abusing prescription painkillers? I don’t know. Was he taking them for legitimate pain due to injury, surgery or a medical condition, and the usage got out of hand? Was he consciously using it as a recreational drug? I have to say I am still somewhat bitter about people who use the stuff I need to be able to get on with my daily life as a quick and easy “high,” ultimately making it harder to access needed medication. (But that is argument from emotion, mostly; I would posit that the real problem is a medical field and larger culture which does not take seriously the needs and concerns of chronic pain patients and is eager to punish people who step outside accepted boundaries.)

But even if he was just out for a high, I still feel unease when I see people use that angle to criticize him.

Because, here’s the thing… the same narrative that you are using to condemn this despicable figure is the narrative that is used to condemn me.

You are feeding, growing, reinforcing the same narrative that codes me as an abuser, that makes me out to be a good-for-nothing low-life, that makes it difficult for me to access the medication I need to be able to live my normal daily life.

When you laugh, joke, or rant about Limbaugh’s abuse of narcotics, you are lifting a page from the book of people who would call me a malingerer and interpret my behavior (frustration at barriers to access, agitation and self-advocacy to try to gain access) as signs of addiction. People who would, in the same breath, chastise me for “making it harder for the real sufferers.” (See why my bitterness about recreational use isn’t actually serving the right purpose, in the end?)

Maybe you don’t really think this way. But maybe the people laughing at your joke do.

And maybe, you just made them feel a little bit safer in their scaremongering about “addiction” and deliberate attempts to make life harder for us.

Scoffing at Limbaugh’s hypocrisy is one thing — but when your scoffing takes the form of a very common, quite harmful cultural prejudice — even when you don’t mean it to — it has real effects on real people’s lives. Sort of like that casual incitement that we hate Limbaugh for.

(Cross-posted at FWD/Forward.)

Feministe. Feministing. Shakesville. Bitch. Kate Harding, Jezebel and Broadsheet.

Every big feminist-inclined blogger who has shown such urgency and import about Stupak and abortion-within-healthcare-reform. Every feminist blogger who has used their standing, their wide audience, to urge people to do something to change this bad thing that is going to happen to people like us.

You’ve been there for all the women with functional reproductive capacity.

Where have you been for all the women stuck in nursing homes and institutions and all the women who are managing to live independently who will have their services taken back from them and be forced to move into nursing homes and modern institutions?

Because this is just as urgent an issue. And just as timely: it is being considered in the current health-care reform package. This one. This same one with Stupak (or analog). This same one you are fighting to improve for the sake of women.

Where have you been for years on the Community Choice Act?

We are talking about policy that is cheaper than subsidizing the cost of placing someone in a modern institution (nursing home, “senior living,” “care home” and the like), that allows women to have independence, autonomy, and self-determination. We are talking about a policy that gives women control over their bodies and the direction of their lives.

Just like access to affordable abortion.

We are talking about policy that lets disabled and elderly people live out in their own communities, with home services that allow them to get by on their own.

We are talking about fighting modern institutionalization, which is alive and well and still just as horrific as the stories from those old abandoned state buildings you’ve all heard about.

We are talking about saving people from being corralled, shepherded, and treated like livestock. Saving people from abusive situations, from sexual assault, from neglect and starvation.

This affects women.

Why aren’t you there with them?

Why don’t I see this addressed with nearly the same frequency or urgency? Nearly the same sense of importance, immediacy?

Because it is quite immediate to quite a lot of people. People who do not have the power you hold in our political system. (Oh, you may hold less than your male-identified young, abled, financially-privileged counterparts. But you still hold a great amount of power compared to many who are not in such a position.) People who need allies to fight with them. Let me spell that for you: N-E-E-D. They cannot see progress for as long as their younger, more abled peers continue to ignore them.

This is your chance to do something that makes an enormous difference.

If you aren’t familiar with this issue, I suggest you make yourself familiar with it. Learn about ADAPT. Read about the CCA and the arguments for it. Look into your local Independent Living center and see about opportunities for volunteering. Whether it’s high-minded political activism or low-status work doing the caring and cleaning and cooking.

Read up about disability activism, and read up about today’s institutions. Force yourself to confront reality.

And, maybe, use that platform you’ve got to share your new knowledge with others.

We need you.

I am under no obligation to interact with any given individual. Not under any particular circumstances, not to any particular degree and not in any particular manner.

It will not advance my activism to maintain the public appearance of good relations with a person who causes me nothing but pain, a person who behaves abusively toward me or others, a person who causes harm to myself or others. It does not advance a cause or better the situation of any group of people. All it does is prevent the rest of the community from feeling discomfort at being aware of conflict. But that conflict will exist no matter what: the only difference will be to my personal health. And no, I am not willing to sacrifice my personal health for others’ minor discomfort with being made aware of reality.

I am not obligated to articulate why I am avoiding this persoon or that one. I am not obligated to prove to you that my decision is justified. My reasons are my own, and they are valid. I do not need anyone else’s seal of approval to continue protecting my personal health.

Situations are complicated. And not all of the situation happens in the public eye. And sometimes, I am keeping it that way — keeping things private — for the health of the community. Sometimes, my avoidance of a person is attributable to my own personal background and triggers and issues, things that I have the right to keep to my own damn self. Sometimes, airing a personal conflict can create wider conflict with other people I care about over something that does not actually directly affect them. And I have the right to keep that to myself.

Sometimes, the conflict is a result of something that is relevant to the wider community. Something that is subject to political analysis or something that affects the concerns of the particular community. Sometimes, this conflict arises because I can see another person doing harmful things, behaving in harmful ways, and hurting other community members in the process. And I still have the right to keep that conflict to myself. I have the right to determine for my own damn self whether the actions I am capable of taking would have any positive result — or whether they might have adverse effect on my community, and how much and what kind — or whether they might have adverse effect on me, and how much and what kind — and decide for my own damn self where the balance falls and what to do as a result.

Sometimes, that means speaking up. It means rocking the boat. It means dealing with the unhappiness that results. And sometimes, it means staying silent. Keeping it to myself. And dealing privately with the pain that comes with this or that person’s continued presence and respect within the community.

Sometimes, I am avoiding someone because they whisk me back to painful times, through no fault of their own — simply due to mannerisms or patterns of behaviors which are not inherently negative, but which are just associated for me personally with negative things.

Sometimes, I am avoiding someone because they are downright abusers, even if it is not readily apparent to everyone else in the community. Abusers, you see, don’t always abuse everybody. It is quite common for abusers to be respected and revered within their wider community, considered valuable and indispensible, doing good things for other people — at the same time as they abuse one or more other people, behind closed doors, or in such a way as to slide under the radar of peers and neighbors. And their good deeds do not negate their bad ones. And I have the right to protect myself from further victimization at the hands of my own community as they come to the defense of this person they see as an upstanding and respected member being attacked without provocation (that they were aware of).

I have the right to tend to my own safety, and the safety of others who might be victims of similar abuse, or feeling similar peripheral effects of past abuse.

I have that right. No person can take that from me. Not for any reason.

This applies to people in my workplace. This applies to people in my blogging community (and yes, there are some). This applies to people in my apartment complex. This applies to people in my social circle. It applies any damn place I go. And I have just as much right to go there as the other person does.

If you respect me as a person, you must respect that right. You can keep on liking and interacting with any person you like. But realize that I have the right to abstain from interaction with those same persons. And you don’t get to question why. No matter how much you like them, it does not change the harm that comes when I force myself to pretend that nothing is wrong for the sake of other people’s illusions of harmony.

I’ve had a handful of names throughout my life.

I was born “The [Mom's Maiden Name] Girl.” My mother had not yet picked out a first name for me. She was living in a hole-in-the-wall shack in a poorer town in agricultural central California — it was where she ended up after my father kicked her out upon discovering her pregnancy. Get an abortion or hit the road, he said. I knew this as a child, but it wasn’t until I grew older that my mother also informed me that he was threatening to beat her, to punch and stomp on her stomach to forcibly terminate the pregnancy. He tried to send her out with no belongings in a scrap car — which was to get her from her then-home on the northern border of Oregon to her adult sons’ home in central California. That’s over 900 miles. She was 43 years old and not in the best of health. My oldest brother — something of a giant — had to gather some friends to physically threaten my father for him to make sure that she was able to make the trip safely.

I’ve never had a moment’s contact with him. My mother claims that when I was around six years old, he called her, having “dropped by” and wanted to take me out for some ice cream with his new girlfriend (with whom he had been involved during the short months my mother was married to him). Fearing for my safe return, she refused. And never heard from him again.

During my first months, my adult sister lived with us — she has told me stories of having to brush cockroaches off of me while I slept. And it wouldn’t be until I entered adolescence that my mother and I settled down in a permanent home: before that, there was not one residence I was able to stay for more than a single year’s time; we hopped around looking for the lowest rents, and spent time living in spare rooms in each of my adult brothers’ homes (three times with one, once with the other).

When I was five years old, my mother married a long-time family friend. When she did so, he legally adopted me, claiming to be my father and being added to my birth certificate as such — whether my mother just went along with this or actively sought it for reasons of future security, I don’t know. Regardless, my name at the time changed from [Mom's Maiden Name] to [This Man's Name].

A little less than a year later, after struggling with him over finances — he wanted her to continue working to support his retirement, with no support for either her nor I — she divorced him. And there, a problem cropped up: in order to get my name changed back to my birth name, she would have to go to court to prove that he was not, in fact, my biological father, and have him removed from my birth certificate. As a newly single mother, she did not have the resources to take on that task. So, even after the divorce was finalized, I remained [This Man's Name] — and she kept that name as well in the interests of having the same name as her daughter.

And that name remained mine for the rest of my childhood, adolescence and early adult life. I hated it. I hated the sound of it, I hated the man it came from, I hated the way he had treated her, I hated the way we were stuck carrying his family name despite having no ties to this family whatsoever.

Ever since I can remember, I have been very eager to get rid of that name.

And ever since I remember, I have been wholly uninterested in weddings and traditional family life. I had no interest in boys or girls as a teenager. I never dreamed about “my day,” about dresses and flowers and music, about honeymoons and housewifery.

Part of that, especially as I grew older, was that I had a distinct sense of my undesirability. I wasn’t interested in anyone else because I thought no one else would be interested in me. As I grew more aware of my health and struggled with my increasing limitations, I never even entertained the idea that anyone could ever be interested in me — not to kiss me, not to hold my hand while we walked through the mall, not to cuddle, not to call me “girlfriend” or “go steady,” not to live with me, not to propose to me and certainly not to legally commit to be stuck with me for the rest of their life. Who the hell would want that? I was a burden; my health was growing worse; they would have to help take care of me, and I wouldn’t be able to contribute to the household enough to count as an equal. So obviously, I wasn’t on the market. It never even got as far as whether or not I wanted to be: it was simply a matter-of-fact acknowledgement of a reality that would never change, and thus there was no point wasting energy trying to change it.

All this is to say that I wasn’t dreaming of changing my name as part and parcel of the supposedly-universal little girl’s dreams of wearing white and being pampered and fawned over and having pretty pictures taken in rolling green fields. I never had those dreams. I just really fucking hated that name.

So before changing my name as part of an adult relationship ever became a possibility, I had three names to contend with. My father’s name (which I’ve never officially carried), my mother’s maiden name, and that other man’s name.

And not a single one of them was a name I wanted any part of.

My father’s name? Sounded pretty cool phonetically, but it was the name of a man who threatened to beat my mother, cheated on her pretty openly during their short relationship, had some pretty serious class bigotry going on, and was by all accounts — including those of his other children, the half-siblings who wanted nothing to do with me — a complete asshole. Yes: there’s a name I want to adopt!

My siblings (on my mother’s side) actually shared a completely different name — they were from a different father — my mother’s severely abusive first husband who thankfully died in a motorcycle crash, and every single member of my family is convinced it was for the better.

And then there’s my mother’s maiden name. The name shared by my aunt and uncle and family up in Oregon, the name I was born with, the name I went by for my first five years of life.

It doesn’t matter. I don’t fucking want it.

I want nothing to do with any of those names. I grew up in a severely emotionally controlling and manipulative family and experienced abuse to the point that I am just being introduced to the idea that I may have PTSD by my counselor. (I protested, and she said “OK, well, we don’t have to put a name to it, but…”) I have pretty bad dissociative issues I am only just beginning to explore; I escaped with moderate to severe anxiety disorder and panic attacks that don’t qualify as panic disorder only because instead of being random, they are triggered by contact with my family. I fit every other qualification.

I was stuck at home with a mother who afforded me no space to develop an individual self, unable to make it on my own away from her because of my disability. I couldn’t work, couldn’t afford rent, couldn’t live independently. I pushed myself to return to college earlier than I should have — after I dropped out the first time and spent months housebound — cutting short my recovery time, just to get away from her. I lived for a year on Social Security disability (after I was approved), $7500 in needs-based college grants and several thousand more in student loans before everything started to run out — money, my ability to continue school and maintain grades high enough in a busy enough schedule to qualify for further student aid — and I couldn’t stay out on my own anymore.

And then I spent a very painful and traumatic six months stuck in close contact with an abusive mother who was keenly aware that she was losing her grip on me and escalated the abuse accordingly.

And then? I was able to move 2500 miles the hell away from all that shit to live with… a man. Whom I married. And whose name I took.

I was able to move to a place I wanted to move to, to live with this amazing person I wanted to live with, who loved me dearly, who was respectful and affectionate and treated me like a whole person, a person of my own whom he just so happened to be enamored with, whose family was warm and welcoming and accepting and easy to be around…

I was able to choose where I wanted to be, who I wanted to be there with, who I wanted to be, what sort of life I wanted to live…

I chose the family I wanted to be a part of. I built the life I wanted to live. It’s a life I just so happen to love deeply, a life that has given me so much more opportunity than I ever had on the other side of this country, thanks to the person I chose to build it with.

That person? Is a man.

I took his name.

I don’t think that’s a capitulation to patriarchy. I don’t think that’s a compromise of my feminism. I think that is a demonstration of my feminism.

I have a name now. It is mine.

(Cross-posted at FWD.)

I wrote this yesterday in an extreme fog and do not have the spoons to rework and polish it. Apologies for the brainspill, but these days it’s the only option I have.

***

For background, see Ouyang Dan’s post on the problematic aspects of the TV show House. Don’t tell me that people realize this is fictional. Don’t tell me that people know how to maintain that separation. Some do. Many don’t. And they’re everywhere. At the bottom of the totem pole… and in positions of power over the very people they are prejudiced against.

***

I was called back to work two weeks ago. I work at a government office that provides certain assistance programs. (Once you go to work for one government agency, you realize there are a whole lot more of them than you ever thought before.) I really don’t want to go into it any more specifically than that.

It’s been very rough on me. Last winter, work was physically draining. I basically have two whole hours every day that I am awake and not at work, preparing for work, or traveling to and from work, and semi-conscious. Not only am I so physically exhausted that I go to bed three hours after work ends, I am so physically exhausted that my brain just cannot be pushed any further. I have trouble comprehending the blogs and news sites I normally read; writing is usually out of the question. Of course, we won’t even talk about anything more physical than that — even preparing a boxed dinner for myself is too difficult. My apartment is even more a mess than usual, because I don’t have the energy to pick up the clothes that I shed as soon as I get the front door shut, the mail and personal items that trail after me from the couch to the bedroom…

Unfortunately, so far this year, it hasn’t just been physically draining. I’ve been dealing with a sudden onset of severe migraines, and not the type of migraines I’ve had since childhood and have an intimate knowledge of — these are more classic migraines, the nausea, the aura and vision distortion, the intense pain and pressure behind the eyes… The pain is not as overwhelming as my normal migraines (where a twitch of the toe makes me want to scream or cry or at least moan, but the movement and force of emitting any noise at all would hurt even worse, so I just curl up and remain frozen in misery), but the experience is just as miserable because it block’s my brain’s ability to function, even to process the smallest of information. I’ve been having trouble writing six-digit numbers on the top of each application. And normally I work faster than the worker next to me, but the past two weeks she’s been cranking out work three times faster than me.

It’s frustrating. I’ve been doing everything in my capacity to do to fight these headaches off. Everything. And no, I don’t want any helpful suggestions. But regardless, even with all the desperate measures I have been taking, they persist.

On top of it all, my endometriosis has decided to flare up at the same time. So I get double nausea, extreme abdominal cramps, persistent pelvic pain and other symptoms.

I’ve been in a lot of pain.

I take a lot of medications. For pain. I take medications that have no effect on people who do not have a specific type of pain disorder. And I take medications that people who are not in pain popularly take to get high. (I do not, for the record, take anything to get high myself.) And I put up with a lot of shit to continue taking one of few medications that works and that enables me to work.

(I guess I could give it up and therefore be putting up with less shit. But then I’d, you know, not be able to work. And for so long as I have the option to be able to work, I’m taking it. Because I may not even have that option forever. Situations change, bodies change, and bodies change how they react to medications over time. I’m doing what is necessary for myself and my family at this point in our lives.)

So, at work today.

I sit on the far side of the first floor of our building, along with all the other people working in my particular program, the people working on another program, and a couple stray general clerks across from all of us. The other program’s supervisor and one of the other program’s workers (OPS/OPW hereafter) were talking about a certain case, a woman who was being denied medication and needed help obtaining it. This was before lunch, it was a general talk in a work context, that is how to get the problem solved.

My husband and I went home for lunch, as we do regularly, given that we live less than five minutes from our workplace. It takes half the lunch period but it is worth the spoons because it makes the workday so much more bearable — two four-hour chunks rather than one long nine-hour one. We sit around, watch The People’s Court reruns, eat our lunch and laugh at the cats who get in silly, hyper, meddling moods around that time.

I returned from lunch, feeling a lot better having had a break from the fluorescent lighting and ambient noise of the HVAC system. And a few minutes after I got back, sitting next to the OPS scanning documents into the computer system, OPW wandered back over and began talking again about the client from before.

The medication? Oxycontin. Her doctor has been prescribing it to her for over 15 years.

And the conversation? Went like this. (As typed soon after in an email to my husband, as close as I could get to what they actually said, given how stunned and hurt I was while it was happening.)

OPW: do you watch house?
OPS: no not really
OPW: well he has some sort of leg injury, but he takes that other one, what is it? vicodin
OPS: uh huh
OPW: and they sent him to rehab, and he just had to find something to occupy his mind so he wouldn’t think about it
OPS: yeah they get addicted so easy
OPW: and now they put him on regular pain killers and he’s doing just fine
OPS: yeah a lot of the time tylenol or advil works just as well, people just want the high
OPW: exactly, and their doctors prescribe it to them and they hand it out to family members…

And the conversation went on like this for a couple minutes, with the two of them walking back and forth fetching printed documents, attending to the scanning etc.

I just… I’m not terribly private about my condition. I don’t bring it up, but if it’s relevant I talk about it. I do try to avoid telling my coworkers that I take narcotic medications (as opposed to just “medications”) but I have gone over it specifically with HR as it can be a security issue in some agencies.

I was sitting right there. OPW sits on the other side of me, and had to walk around me to get to where OPS was at the scanner. I was sitting right there.

They were talking about me.

They weren’t thinking of me, of course. They’d never make that connection. I’m young and thin and pretty enough. They know I work hard. Most of my office loves the hell out of me.

But if I had spoken up — rather than sitting there holding my breath trying not to cry — how would that opinion change? Would they start seeing me as lazy, as slacking off? Would they whisper about me every time I went to the water fountain for a drink? What was I taking? What was I doing with it? Would they start taking certain behaviors as symptomatic of addiction? If I passed too well one day, appearing to be just fine (to them; I am good at covering up my pain) — would they take that as evidence that I couldn’t actually be in pain and couldn’t really need that medication? And if I didn’t pass well one day — especially these days, when I’ve been stopped more than one time as someone remarks on how deathly pale I am and asks if I’m OK and tells me to take a break — would they see that resulting, not from my pain, but from the supposed addiction?

They were talking about me. They didn’t even know it. But I am that person on that medication. Pushing through the pain to keep working.

The difference is, Dr. House is a character.

I’m real.

And that woman. These were the attitudes of the people who were helping her resolve an issue. As much as I wish otherwise, workers do have some degree of latitude in deciding how they are going to approach a case, and can apply the law in different ways for different people, even if it appears pretty strict on paper.

I am that woman.

I have been there. I am there. I have to deal with unsympathetic figures in obtaining my treatment. Doctors, nurses, office staff, pharmacists, insurance reps, welfare reps, other reps. I have issues I have to call to have resolved. I have that person on the other line who’s promising me on the one hand to resolve the issue — but on the other hand …? How can I ever know?

I don’t know what was going on in this woman’s life. I don’t know if she’s dependent (there is a difference). I don’t know if she would be better off on another course of therapy. Or whether she’s tried all those other courses and they’ve given her awful side effects or they’re contraindicated given her particular condition or they’re unavailable to her due to income or access. I don’t know.

Maybe she’s abusing. Maybe she’s handing it out on the street corner.

Maybe she’s just like me. Just one person trying to power through this world as best she can. And this is the best way she’s found to do it.