Sunday, September 30, 2018

Silence

I shouldn't write I shouldn't write I shouldn't write...my brain keeps telling me this since I am so obviously triggered by what has happened this past week. All the signs are there and I know my patterns pretty well, though they can still surprise me. I know a lot of people read this who might use my vulnerability in ways I can't control, who might not know they add to the grief, who are mostly respectful but also might be compelled to read this like people watch wrecks...for the juice, for the life exposed, and it doesn't make me feel safe. My safety is an illusion I cling to with both hands.

I know I go to this confessional to lay bare my emotions, for myself and in case there is someone out there who needs my clarity and help. I know the confession hurts me more and any net gain is dubious. Trauma just keeps giving and it doesn't matter what the original source or the recent event is, it doesn't matter what the specifics of this episode are. Damage is real and accumulates, and truly I don't believe it is healable. For me. I hope it is for you. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help in real life, in some subtle way. You help me, and I know it, and I appreciate it. The more quietly you do it the more I appreciate it.

I know I no longer walk around feeling like I have a visible gaping wound in my chest that shows my faintly beating heart with all of its scars. I healed that over with fifteen years of therapy with a wonderfully supportive woman. I know I forgave my Dad by visualizing a tiny flame in the ball of ice that lay in my pelvis blocking me from a healthy sexuality for decades. That tiny flame did melt that ice, but only just. What helped the most with him was looking at his wedding photo, where both he and my Mom looked so innocently nineteen, with no possible idea what their lives would bring. He didn't mean to do anything to hurt me, but was a product of his own damage. If anything, I blame alcohol, but of course that is too simple. I don't really want to blame, I mostly want it to not have played out the way it did. Yeah, no do-overs. As I recall I was having a beer on his birthday when I made that forgiveness happen. I love irony.

Between episodes of this PTSD I am always certain that another will never come...that learning my patterns gave me the tools of prevention and self-care that would steady me so I could turn it off. I am always so discouraged when the lie is put to my faint denial. I'll carry this damage to my grave just like my broken ankle and heel and whatever else simmers inside me. The task now is to be strong despite it, to speak out through it, to use it for the forces of good instead of complete submission.

I cried yesterday just trying to watch twenty women on the street corner dressed in black. I was so grateful to be working so I didn't have the option to join them as they asked. I was grateful that they didn't walk by my booth so I didn't have to dissolve in tears of gratitude and horror. The pains are always so fresh when I am around other hurting people. I love my empathy, and wouldn't trade it, but I see too much of all you transparent people and it makes me so vulnerable to know how transparent I also am. I also derive joy from this...and hope. If we can see, we can help.

We can carry each others' pain, maybe easier than we can carry our own. I am crying for my brother and my son as they have to sort through all the ways I didn't help them, protect them, teach them how to be better men, though I suppose it wasn't completely my job and I probably did okay at it. I know, though, that my damage prevented me from projecting a healed sexual being who could teach the good ways. I hope I gave them some skills to find their own paths through what our culture throws at them. I have always tried for honesty, to an extreme, for justice, and to not be phony. My son didn't see me put on makeup to be something I wasn't, or dress to seduce, or use controlling behaviors to get my needs met...or more correctly, he helped me identify them and stop using them, a constant life process of learning improvement. I dragged him and one early girlfriend to an NVC workshop. I asked him to teach me what he knew of NLP and how it operated from his perspective. We were able to be allies rather soon in his life, though he might have rather had a bit more parental authority in place. Can't re-do that one. He seems fine: exploring, balancing, being honest.

My brother is part of our deep family tragedy that is so far back we can hardly address it any more than we have. It doesn't unfold so much now, but we've kind of evolved into addressing ways it set us up for what happened later, when we left the family and tried to find our way as independent adults. At our recent reunion all was not comfortable in our family group, despite our mutual wish that it would be. None of us have all the keys to make it so. We try pretty hard, and have the gift of the great-grandchildren and the kindness of each other. Mostly it's good, but then the damage seeps out. I try to minimize it as much as I can, keep it in my journal. None of them deserve it either.

It was rough, my past, though not so much compared to what I've read and heard about other women and children. My experiences in college and during the Sexual Revolution of the 70s and 80s were mild enough but deeply unsettling. Rough enough that I don't like to think about them. On Thursday and Friday as the world watched a battle on TV, I worked myself to exhaustion on my roof hammering on shingles one by one in the extreme heat. I didn't eat and didn't drink enough water, obsessively working in silence. I wanted to "finish it." I finally stopped on Friday at 4:00 which was probably my breaking point, and had the sensibility to take a bath, drink so much water I was amazed, and sit still after making a beautiful meal and smoking some bud. I did not allow myself to walk down to the store for a beer, though I dearly wanted one or two more than just about anything.

Escape is necessary in some form, it seems. I know better than to add alcohol to the mix at these times, though the impulses are very strong and are why I keep it at the store and not at home. I know it can be cathartic, but it's just too loaded with guilt and shame. Sugar is safer...bud is good in that it limits what I will do and say. I need limits...it's at these times when I wonder if a supportive partner would indeed help, but really, the silence of my backyard is what works best. I drink that in.

I went though the first stage, exacerbated by my 50th HS reunion which I missed. I would've liked to go, but 3000 miles and thousands of dollars prevented me, since I had to go to the same place for my family one month before. But I would have liked to see some of those friends I went through so many years with. Some of us were together since first grade. We stumbled through a lot. The first stage of examining my past was thinking about some of the hundreds of harassments and assaults I experienced as a woman born in 1950. Stuff was just built in. There was no way to avoid a lot of it, and I was unprotected, mostly, except by suburbia's relative safety, and my privilege of being in the middle class. Plus I was a smart kid, so got some entitlements. But no one encouraged me to think big back then...not really even to go to college, though you would think someone in the 99th percentile would get more encouragement. Maybe it was those old men who were the Guidance Counselors. I had one brilliant English teacher, Kay Booth, but she stands out as the only one who empowered me, and she just made me give up on college when her estimation of me didn't follow through into my treatment by my male teachers there.

College, oh dear. I dove into the revolution. We ended the war that was killing off the  boys of my generation. We all sacrificed our psyches too, though it took a long time to realize that. We had our bodies on the line as well. I can't think about the details. I stopped adding them up long ago.

What surfaced for me, this time, was all the ways in which I was complicit in the oppression of others. I feel devastated by ways I turned on other women, and even men. I see no way to make amends. I can't even remember names for sure, or all the details, and I feel sure none of the other people involved want to talk about it. I am sure no one at the reunion wanted to talk about the party where someone "pulled a train," which is a deflected way to describe gang rape of an incapacitated girl. In my memory I heard about it the next day, and it was outsider boys, not anyone in my friend group. I turned on her, though, and took away the support she deserved. I was at that party. We didn't do much to monitor each other, our level of drinking, our willingness to go all the way with our boyfriends. We were all confused kids lying to ourselves and each other about what was right and wrong. I was raised Catholic...a bad setup for sexuality, at best. No parents were watching us. They were off drinking with their own friends, I suppose. I would love to check out these memories with my old friends, to see if maybe we took better care of each other than I remember. We would now, I think.

I remember two incidents of assault, one physical and one verbal, on the day of my Dad's funeral in 1970. Really, grown men? Did you think because he wasn't there to protect his daughters, they were now fair game? So damaged. I remember being angry, and telling my Mom, but what could she do? One was a neighbor, and one was someone from my Dad's job. She couldn't respond. I could barely respond. Were they just drunk? I'm sure they had their excuses.

I don't want to list my credentials for MeToo. I don't want to have these credentials. I am fully aware that I participated in some of my own damaging experiences more or less willingly. Trauma victims do that. They often ruin their own lives, unable to imagine anything else. On some levels I have done that, though my life is far from ruined.

Yes, the challenges today are to work right though the damage to keep on shouting for less of it. I am so happy to see how powerful young women are these days, at least ones in the progressive culture. I fought hard for that, with so many others. We bought that with our painful experiences. We want that for you. That's one reason why it is so devastating to see it erode, to see the Kavanopes and the Brocks get away with their shit over and over. I am so tired of bullies. I am so dedicated to calling out bullying, no matter who it takes down, even when it is me.

Bullies hurt all of us, whether they do it through sexuality, racial injustice, economic injustice, or the current depravity of power over all. I hate America so much right now. I hate old white men (I give some exceptions to that, for those of you who are really trying, and I hope you know I see you and love you for it.) I am sad to be feeling hate. I am full of grief for so many reasons. I am stalled and can do only this.

But I'm going to call my Mom in 30 minutes and talk about none of this. Then I'm going to go out and put on some more shingles and work harder on forgiving myself, and most of you. I'm going to look harder for what's going right, to be grateful for the young man who had my back yesterday, when in my trauma I took it on myself to kick a vomiting man out of the Market. I wasn't thinking. He almost clocked me. It wasn't my job and I wasn't keeping myself safe, because traumatized people often can't do that. Thank you to my fellow member, who might not have known that he was there yesterday to save me from myself for a minute. That's the good news: allies. We are legion.

We are in this together, and we are in the right. We may not be winning all the many races and jumping over the many obstacles, but we will. It has taken our lifetimes, and it will take the lifetimes of our children, and theirs, but it is not all pain. We also have joy. I saw the Bewick's Wren and a woodpecker at the same time today, because I could rouse myself to put out the suet. The birds are hungry. I'll start there. Forgiveness is a process. Practice peace. Work for justice, one foot in front of the other. And cleansing it all with tears is pretty cathartic too, so I can feel good about that skill. I can weep. I am proud to be a woman who cares.


Sunday, September 16, 2018

Looks like Fall

Lots of emotions swirling around today. A friend lost her husband, and he joins a list of lamentations that are a function of my age that I am struggling to get used to. Sure, we know people die, but many of us are still not equipped to ride through the storms of feelings that come each time. I guess it gets easier. Mom, at 92, is much more philosophical than I am about it. I'm sure I'll learn, the hard way.

OCF struggles with deep structure at the moment, and some issues are so complex I haven't even wanted to weigh in. I try to pay attention, to witness, but this last Board meeting wasn't livestreamed, though I sat there waiting just in case it kicked in, while I watched the Eugene City Council on another channel. I monitor the City Council for my Market community, so we can prepare for when they come to us soon about the changes to our home ground, the Park Blocks we have rented for 34 years (and 15 or so more if you count the Butterfly and Courthouse Plaza.) This is our 49th season. I've only missed the first five. I should have gone to the OCF meeting I guess, but I just don't have enough energy to get deeply involved when it's so complex. Even witnessing takes a lot of energy. It's chilling to think that my own volunteer efforts could come back to bite me. I have the skills to be a good Board member, but skills wouldn't be enough in the current climate. It takes true dedication to work very hard to find that balance of all those needs. I can't do it for more then KF and SM right now. I'm still working, too, when I can fit it in. I'm drawn to help OCF, but I can only be part of the mostly silent network that supports and waits. I will most certainly vote.

I find myself wanting to go out to Fair site in a deep way, to visit the Spirit Tower where I have always connected with my lost people, even though it has mostly disappeared and lost its sacredness. The river is still the same, the land is still quiet, and you can still hope to see the Pileated Woodpeckers and hear the tree limbs clacking together in the high breezes. That land is ours, is mine, when I need it, something which feels like the most amazing accomplishment of the community I am so lucky to be in. Grateful for the people who had the foresight to make that happen, the big group that raised the money and understood the need.  It's a safe place. Still, when I go, it's a bit like work.

I go to my booth, all packed up for winter, and poke around looking for lost pushpins or scraps of wood that will float, but it's usually quite clean. Sometimes I rearrange the vegetation into the living boundaries of our camping clearing. I try to envision the next project I'll do, and talk myself into the new design of the roofline. I am the one who has to do this. It's the same ownership as I have for my two houses. I'll think about my 50th Anniversary projects. I have big plans, but can't do them right now.

I vacillate between feeling too old to do the work and too young to give up using my hard-won skills. I evaluate my abilities to climb ladders and make the right decisions. I try to think about when I will fit the work in. In one sense it's vastly easier to pay someone to do the construction, but in other senses I need to do it. I need to go out there and see how my choices have played out, how my directions have been followed, and how nature has treated what I've made. On my two houses, (I have two small houses on a city lot, one of which is my shop) I've done substantial amounts of the work, in fact spent about fifteen years remodeling the larger house. It was life-altering work and it brings me a great deal of satisfaction. I thrive on a feeling of accomplishment.  Yet death reminds me I could go quickly too, so what projects should I prioritize? Everything's right at the top of the list; everything's vitally important.

I've been trying to find that satisfaction in less physical work, in archiving and writing, but it's harder. I recently removed a piece of the plywood siding on the shop to replace a rotten place, and had to take out the window and add some trim. It took a lot longer than I had planned and while it was relatively straightforward, it was just maintenance, one little project on a long list. I'm reluctant now to start another one, with the weather changing and deadlines coming up. Here I sit on a day when it didn't rain, thinking I need to get out there and start on that roofing. But my friend and her husband were roofing, and now I know she wishes they hadn't been. Certainly today is not the day for me to climb that ladder. So I got out the archives, and told myself I'd spend a day organizing and writing, but I have a feeling I will end up finishing up the summer pruning and preparing for the next rain.

I had to navigate someone's unjust interpretation of my actions again, and his attack. It wasn't the first time from that person, so I could discount some of his ire since I know how he works it, but of course it still derailed me a little. I'm mostly aggravated that he was thoughtless in his actions, in his drive to have his own way, and caused damage, not just to me, but to our process and other people involved. it wasn't major damage, but the discouragement of injustice adds up. Again, I'm getting used to it. I'm starting to tell myself things like "people will always be messy to deal with, and it's unrealistic to think that they will understand ethics in the same way I do." I'm trying to be patient with those who are young, rash, and need more education, because lots of people had to be patient with me while I learned how to be a little wiser and slower to react. I have enough support from people who do understand, but most of yesterday I spent checking in with various people, not even all the ones I needed to, and it was an astonishingly low sales day for me. I didn't even get near to $100, with my great-selling products that easily bring much more than that on a better day.

So it wasn't my day, and I joined the ranks of the discouraged who really get creamed by our fee structure, so I made a vow to bring out my chart early next January, and petition again for fee relief for the low-end earners. I commiserated with a lot of members yesterday who have had many bad sales days, so it isn't about me at all. I can certainly absorb one when it was mostly caused by my inattention to my customers and my job. I talked to many who are experiencing lots of marginal or just really bad days, and I don't think it is "paying their dues" while they build their businesses and improve their products. I think it is the capriciousness of our event, that on any given day there is a lot of luck involved in how well you sell. I think we can build a much more compassionate fee structure that acknowledges that unpredictability and eases the burden on the majority of our members without savaging our profitability. But I will set that aside for now, as it will be better done later and other things are on that horizontal list that push profits to the edges.

Fiftieth Season and Anniversary design projects are in the center, and stories from the archives, and the time is near when I will lose the opportunity if I procrastinate. I have good designs worked out in my mind, but nothing on paper. I dread that feeling when I try to go from mind to pen, when I am not really capable of expressing my vision. I know it's common and shouldn't stop me, but it makes it hard to start. Of course there is only one remedy for that, starting. Or saying maybe later.

At some point there will no longer be a maybe later available. Quite possibly that is the base fear that is behind all of my distress today. At some point I will have to lose my attachment to all my things, to all my future accomplishments, to all my visions and cares. I will have to let go of all of it. Maybe I'll get time to finish up a few, but maybe not. Staying off roofs won't help. Successfully processing small traumas won't help. Calling out injustices won't matter. It's all going to be one big injustice if I don't get my mind around the ultimate justice of It Is What It Is. What Goes Around May or May Not Come Around. Que sera, sera. Be Here Now.

Fortunately I can access a lot of wisdom from my community and what my generation has learned in our explorations, and of course, humans of the ages. They've all stood more or less where I stand.I'm not experiencing anything that new or that serious, just more steps down the human paths. Think I'll wander off for the rest of the day. I always feel at my best when I'm out in the yard, putting things in order, just enough to feel good to me but not enough to really disturb her comforting chaos. I guess I can thrive with a messy garden, so can thrive with a messy life. No sense in trying to change everything at once, even if I could.