I want to know the story of the image on that wall. But I found the photo on a random scraper site, source uncited, with no extra info except that it is a “Siberian ghost town.”

Yesterday it was chilly and grey and the air was damp. After digging around in my renegade compost pile to move stuff around (one of my favorite things lately), I heard a red-bellied woodpecker flying up behind me. He flew almost to the side of the house and then made a quick turn to cling to a pine trunk above me. We looked at each other. He flew off a bit, but I could still hear him clucking.

I should mention that I knew a woodpecker made a hole in the side of the house again, but I had never seen what woodpecker.

I took a few steps down the hill behind the compost pile, crouched down, and got still. Red Belly isn’t stupid. He knew where I was. I suppose I backed up and became non-threatening enough that he eventually flew back to the pine tree above me, gave me a look, and then impossibly disappeared into the hole. It looked like he got sucked into a pneumatic tube.

Well, now I know. And I should call my landlord, but after I buy a woodpecker house or something to get the repair person to hang where the hole is now. There’s a slim chance Red Belly would move into that rather than start excavating another hole in the siding immediately as usual. While I do like the idea of him sleeping in the wall next to me while I am in my bed, I do not like the idea of him in there with the insulation. It cannot be good for him. I wish I could control who would fix the hole and when. I have a horror of them sealing the woodpecker up in the wall.

Anyway, after learning for sure that Red Belly is my close neighbor, I walked around in the woods for a little bit.

I am not sure how I missed this most amazing tree for so long, because it is very near the house but off at a weird angle. It is a huge, five-trunked tulip poplar. I must photographic it because it gave me chill bumps when I circled around the side of it and saw how three of the trunks join.

Then a little more walking, slowly, eyes scanning the ground and… what… oh my… THAT is a segment of a branch about the size of my upper arm… with a round opening and a cavity hollowed out… and mycelium wallpaper. Woodpeckers, woodpeckers, woodpeckers…

-=-=-

A week ago I walked home from campus between 9 and 10pm. I stopped for dinner on the way and walked slowly because there was still ice in places. Downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro were deserted. Icy ghost towns. The temperature was in the low 20s/upper teens. A hoarfrost covered all the plants.

I do not know how or why I have never seen hoarfrost at night, but it may be one of the most beautiful things there is. Twinkling white Christmas lights are such a cheap imitation.

That morning I walked up the hill to downtown to catch the bus. Of course, I saw the bus I meant to catch go by while I was still half an icy block away. But before that… on the way up the hill… all was deserted and silent. Silent except for the thrillingly satisfying and LOUD cracking of the ice crust as I broke it with each step. I could hear the sound moving away from me as the crack traveled. I pretended to be Godzilla for a moment. It is true. I also giggled out loud and then looked around furtively.

Later that night I happened to think, “I haven’t heard any owls around here in quite a while. I wonder what’s up with that.” A few minutes later, I popped out onto the front deck to put some things in the recycling bin. And of course I heard a Great Horned Owl.

As I told my friend, I had a conversation with an owl. She asked, “What did the owl say?” I said, “I don’t know… the conversation was in owl.” I think it was probably saying, “God your accent is horrible,” or “Would you please be quiet, you ridiculous human?” Or maybe just, “Don’t worry. There are still owls here.” Who knows. Owls. They are never what they seem anyway.

-=-=-

Too late to do anything about it this past weekend, I learned that a pileated woodpecker was photographed in a not-too-distant state park just a few days ago. Also, I learned that bobcats are photographed at night by wildlife cameras in a few other state parks farther away, but not beyond a weekend trip. Of course LYNX RUFUS would also pop up. Can’t let the woodpeckers get all the attention.

And no, I do not think I’m going to go camp at a state park and see a bobcat, but just to be in a place where true wild cats live is what I want. Not since second grade, when I lived just on the line of the Olympic National Forest in Washington, have I spent time in an area with wild cats. Oh, and that area also keeps popping up.

I keep smelling the moist clean mossy wood forest smell of where I used to play. It may be the best smell in the world.

My friend keeps telling me the Rainbow Gathering is in Western Washington next year. I don’t know about that. I got stuck at finding out you have to poop in a trench in a non-secluded area. Yep. I don’t know about that one… I think my inner hippie may be more of a hermit that that.

Taylor Mali reads his poem, “The The Impotence of Proofreading.”

I paint on cardboard and have some other ideas for using it as an art material. But I didn’t think of anything quite like what Mark Langan does:

It takes 11-13 minutes to walk up the hill to downtown.

When I checked this morning, I saw that the next buses would be arriving up the hill downtown in 4 and 14 minutes. “Aha!,” I thought. “It takes three minutes to walk down the hill to the ‘at trailer park’ stop. I can just go there and it will be just perfect timing.”

If the bus stopped at the trailer park after it stopped downtown, it would have been perfect timing. But it is the other way around. It’s not as if this is news to me—the whole reason I like to walk up the hill to downtown is so that I spend less time in the over-heated, motion-sickness (not-helped-by-drunks-reeking-of-cigarettes-booze-filtered-out-the-skin-and-and-sometimes-also-urine)-inducing bus.

I arrived at the trailer park stop feeling quite satisfied with myself. And then I thought I’d check when the next bus was going to come so that I could inwardly gloat over my great timing. Then I received the text telling me the next bus was in 36 minutes. I went blank and confused for a couple of minutes as I tried to process this. It slowly dawned on me that the bus that would be downtown in 14 minutes stopped at the trailer park while I was traipsing down my driveway on the way to the trailer park stop.

Sigh.

I go through periods of obsessively tracking how much time everything takes. This is how I know it is 3 minutes to the trailer park stop from home, 11-13 minutes to the downtown stop from home, 9-10 minutes from the frat house stop to my desk at work, 12 minutes from the cheap parking deck to my desk, and so on. I always think that if I just know how long everything takes, my problems with time will be solved. I am always wrong.

Times just do not stay in my head in a meaningful way long enough for me to line them all up properly. This is why I have spreadsheets to calculate when to leave for the airport and what time to start baking bread if I want toast at 4.30pm.

Now, this morning I was super-fixated on getting to work at 9:30am because a) that’s what time I am supposed to be there; and b) I had a meeting at 10am and I needed to refresh my memory on the matters at hand. At least, I was pretty sure the meeting was at 10am, but I realized I needed to check just as I shut down my computer before leaving home for the day, and I hadn’t written it in my calendar—because for some reason I always think I will remember the time. Or that I will remember to check the time before I shut down or leave my computer.

Finally it sunk in that I was totally going to be late to my meeting if I took the bus, walked, or biked. I clambered back up the hill and jumped in my car, hoping I’d be able to get back up the hill after work (winter storm alert!).

When I hit my desk at work at 9.20am, I felt slightly heroic for being 10 minutes early. This gave me plenty of time to prepare for my meeting, because it didn’t start until 11.

Every time I have a time-fail like this, I resolve to get my act together and do better. I try, but it never works for long.

Perhaps this is what used to make my parents say “She’s book-smart but she has no common sense.” Which is not true. I have plenty of common sense. It’s just that, between the ADHD and the depersonalization, I happen to nearly lack the normally-functioning time-sense module of the common sense package.

At least I’ve long since given up beating up and berating myself for being an idiot and feeling ashamed when these things happen. Now I can usually laugh at myself and accept that I’m far from an idiot, but certain tangles of my brain just aren’t hooked up right. I do what I can. What I can’t be is perfect, and I’ve got no time for feeling bad about my humanity (except for when I’d rather be a cat).

Oh look, suddenly it’s an hour later than I thought it was and there’s a 9am all-staff meeting that is still on despite the weather being bad enough that the university canceled classes until 11am tomorrow.

The blowout from the Macondo well has created a terminal condition: denial. We don’t want to own, much less accept, the cost of our actions. We don’t want to see, much less feel, the results of our inactions. And so, as Americans, we continue to live as though these 5 million barrels of oil spilled in the Gulf have nothing to do with us. The only skill I know how to employ in the magnitude of this political, ecological, and spiritual crisis is to share the stories that were shared with me by the people who live here. I simply wish to bear witness to the places we traveled and the people we met, and give voice to the beauty and devastation of both.

To bear witness is not a passive act.

…

The system is breaking down not from one thing but everything.

–The Gulf Between Us: Stories of terror and beauty from the world’s largest accidental offshore oil disaster by Terry Tempest Williams

Finally subscribing to Orion, I think…

Randomly ran across a blog by one of those anonymous Internet somewhat kindred spirits. One of those things that reminds me that no, I am not alone in experiencing the world the way I do, which has the effect of reducing the existential trauma that often threatens to overwhelm me (see quote that rocked my understanding from the previous post…) Having that happen occasionally is why I continue to ever write anything on the Web—the thought that something I write might lighten someone else’s burden of alienation in some tiny way. See (post from aforementioned blog):

I have some cultural dysphoria. American culture seems abusive, needlessly controlling, morally debased, hopelessly cruel, shallow, and really just stupid.

“So when you look for guidance, direction, mentorship, we all look to institutions… but it’s really yourself that is the final arbiter. And if you keep yourself as the final arbiter you will be less susceptible to infection by cultural illusion. Now the problem with this is it makes you feel bad not to be infected by cultural illusion because its called alienation. But this is I can’t solve all problems. The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”
- Terrence McKenna (video link from last year)

–Hermetically Blonde

From a review of a book going on the to read at some point list:

But nature is humbling on both the largest and smallest of scales. You don’t have to be in the wilderness any more than you have to stay in bed to be awed, to be jolted or slowly prodded back into the world of the living, to feel connected. Look big enough or small enough, and all things start to take on a familiar geometry. Nebulas swirling in space, the tight twist of the double helix, the “marvelous spiral” of a snail’s perfectly curled shell. Size and distance become variable, unimportant. Bailey acknowledges that “Snails may seem like tiny, even insignificant things compared to the wars going on around the world,” but through her eyes we are reminded that nothing, no matter how small, is without significance.
–The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, reviewed by Kathleen Yale

Last night and this morning, I read The raven’s gift : a scientist, a shaman, and their remarkable journey through the Siberian wilderness by Jon Turk. I loved the part where, when Turk’s PhD advisor questioned him on why he had not been applying for any academic jobs, Turk basically said, “I can’t be in academia. I have to be able to smell the earth with my dog.” Also loved reading about Turk’s holding the tension between rational western mind and wonder mystery mind. I like that the latter gets the seat of honor at the table.

Finally, lynx are popping up everywhere. No, not literally, but it’s getting seriously a little spooky.

A sane person is someone who is tolerant of his own and others’ conflicting desires, ideas, foibles. One is reminded of the title of a book by Stuart Hampshire: Justice is Conflict. This is an important idea. Sanity or justice does not consist in striving after perfection. Sanity is a space where life in all its messiness can take place.
– Review – Going Sane: Maps of Happiness by Adam Phillips Fourth Estate, 2006 – Review by Sjoerd van Hoorn, MA, Mar 27th 2007

the problem is not that we too are cave dwellers, unaware of the illusionary and limited state in which we exist (although undoubtedly that is a problem too), but rather that we buy into distinction between inside the cave and outside the cave, i.e. we think that there is a place outside the cave. This worldview is what Lear calls the seduction fantasy. We want to believe there is an outside to the cave – that there is a place outside suffering, outside frustration, outside the tension life contains – but ultimately, this seductive idea (seductive because of its promise of a better place, a better life, of happiness) will only harm us by frustrating us with its unattainability.
– Review – Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life by Jonathan Lear, Harvard University Press, 2000 – Review by Havi Carel, Mar 6th 2001

The following just shifted my understanding of everything:

…it is not quite right to say that trauma occurs when the psyche becomes ‘flooded’ with an affect-state that it cannot inwardly regulate, but that trauma occurs when the we cannot find a relational home for such an affect. The feelings experienced by Stolorow at the conference were almost unendurable, because no one else could share them. Thus Stolorow:

Trauma is constituted in an intersubjective context in which severe emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held. In such a context, painful affect states become unendurable- that is, traumatic.

For Stolorow, the context in which an emotion is held is indivisibly linked with the way in which we experience it. In terms of developmental theory, a child met with misattuned responses to their pain may have a propensity to dissociate from or disavow affective reactions.
– Review – Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections by Robert D. Stolorow, Analytic Press, 2007 – Review by Laura Cook, Jun 24th 2008

It a is well known fact — therapists know it quite well — that it is almost absolutely impossible to think, write and talk about traumatizing causes and effect of trauma. There is something deeply mute, alogic and inhuman in the bottom of traumatic experience. There is something essentially atheoretic within the traumatic experience. There is no place for metaphor within the traumatized subjectivity. Traumatic core of traumatic experience is beyond any symbolization and ideation (or we could say mentalization). Trauma is something ontologically unmediated. One of its logical consequences is (just mentioned) trauma’s atheoretic essence. There is no place for any symbol within it. There is no functional ideation. The traumatized subject is deeply frozen in unbearable reality (reality that is not symbolized and not mentalized) of his primitive mental state.
– Review – Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and Beyond Psychoanalysis by Karyn Ball, Other Press, 2007 – Review by Petar Jevremovic, Jul 22nd 2008

It is this absence of being able to remember, describe, narrate, psychologize, symbolize, and mythologize those dreadful black spaces stored in my body’s implicit memory that is so disturbing to me—a person who is driven to map out, look at, and connect up everything. And there is just nothing to connect anything to.

No. Make a note. There are things that do not support the cultivation of ecstasy. They include reading all friend Facebook statuses indiscriminately because this leads to being exposed to a) the worst of the ‘news’ of the day, and b) too much of the nothing with which we continually stuff ourselves.

I don’t have words for the resultant sensation, but the more I feel it the worse I am at tolerating it.

But, oooh, I haven’t got one. I haven’t got one.

Anger is easier than hurt.
Offense is more tolerable than invisibility.
Grief creeps in circles.
To be sedentary aches. To move nauseates.

Last weekend, I watched this show (53:54) called In Search of Ecstasy:

In this episode of Global Spirit, host Phil Cousineau explores the ecstatic state — a global phenomenon found in all kinds of spiritual, religious, and wisdom traditions. Cousineau is joined by guests Sobonfu Somé, author and teacher of African spirituality, and Andrew Harvey, a British scholar specializing in the works and teachings of Jalaluddin Rumi. This lively discussion is interwoven with video segments that transport the audience on a journey inside different cultural expressions of divine ecstasy, asking why and how ecstatic trance is practiced around the world, and why it fascinates so many people today.

This episode includes unique video footage of a Sufi Zikr ceremony in Turkey – the practice of remembrance that brings participants to an ecstatic state of connection with God. Also featured are powerful scenes of traditional and modern day trance rituals which uncover the altered state experience which people seek through dance, trance and spirit possession. The program features Orisha priestesses from Nigeria and Brazil, and Shaman healers from the Kalahari and Korea, all pulsating to a provocatively similar beat with thousands of young people losing themselves at an all-night techno-rave event in an Australian forest.

First let me say that I want to hang out with Andrew Harvey and Sobonfu Somé. My computer screen was exuding joy just because they were on it. Andrew Harvey also said something that I loved (well several things, but this one…): that the West is a concentration camp of reason.

Second, the show reminded me that I have not been getting enough ecstatic bliss in my life over the past few months. Yes, there are not infrequent surprise hits… coming out onto the top of the parking deck just as the bats are emerging at dusk. Watching snow fall. A certain slant of light on one afternoon when the leaves are at a specific point in turning color and the wind just right so that the tree appears to be flashing on and off—standing there watching with mouth agape and forgetting to cross the street when the cars stopped. Being so in the moment while driving, accepting having only an illusion of control over what happens next, knowing that anything could happen next, that I laughed at the idea of the road peeling itself off the earth and flapping around like a length of caution tape in the wind. Getting down with my face close to the earth, entering my moss garden at different scale through a magnifying glass or jeweler’s loupe, and being so thoroughly immersed that I am surprised and for a moment terrified by the entry of an ant into my field of vision. Playing chase with Cuchulain and having to sit down because I am laughing too hard.

But I prefer to ensure a steady diet of intentional self-cracking* bliss. I am not sure when the impromptu dance parties in my living room ended, but it had been at least a few months. I remedied this last night and totally lost myself in music and movement for a while. I heard some parts of some songs I never heard before that made me feel like my face was splitting open from beaming.

I didn’t realize it until years later, but I believe ecstatic dance was among the things that preserved my ability to function while I was an undergrad. Goth/industrial/fetish clubs are not so exciting that they are worth driving to 45 minutes each way two or three nights a week. However, in the sort of mental space I was in during those years, moving my body to pounding dark music until I as I know me was driven out by sound and sweat and swirling and stomping and energy and breath, such that I would stop and find out an hour had passed… this was essential.

Clubbing was not for drinking, drugging, flirting, fashion showing, or dramawhoring. It was for Dancing. I did not need Gabrielle Roth. I had my own 5Rhythms:

• The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove
• Cuts You Up
• Temple of Love
• Stainless Steel Providers
• Thieves

One might suggest that my relationship with dancing and music in general at the time was a mite unbalanced in a slightly unhealthy manner. Such a suggestion would not be untrue. However, it helped me keep myself together (mostly) until I powered up another level and was able to address some of my state more directly.

Cure shows–also bliss. Just thinking about certain moments in sets gives me goose bumps, wets my eyes, and makes my chest feels like it is expanding such that wings might burst out and I might take flight. I am not being flippant when I refer to them as a like religious experience.

I also have been writing too much Ruby code and not enough meandering stream of consciousness personal digging. Now, there is something to crafting some code that does something cool you could never do by hand without a warehouse of data grubbing minions. But it is more a satisfaction. Clearly I did this with my analytical brain.

But when time gets lost and suddenly I am finding myself writing things that make connections and unearth insights I had no idea that I had or knew. When I suddenly understand something deeply vexing I’ve been circling around for years by letting myself get sucked into the funnel of it, and the truth is suddenly just… there. When I paint for a couple of hours, and then realize my back is killing me from hunching over and I sprawl out for a while and sit back up and think, “Where did this amazing image come from??” These things feel like magic. A connection to something beyond what I go around thinking I am. Even if it is just my larger self, bliss. Ecstatic.

Like… it has suddenly become clear: 2009, Year of Danger. 2010, Year of Presence. 2011, Year of Ecstasy.

I wonder how much my sudden focus on this topic comes from the fact that I found out I could finally buy this song online. I will never again play this on repeat while I am at work. It has… side effects:

How do you feed your soul the recommended daily (weekly? monthly? ever?) allowance of ecstatic experience?

* Oh god, now I see in my mind: a giant nutcracker painted to look like Carl Jung.

Evans, Ian M., and Pia Pechtel. “Phagophobia: Behavioral Treatment of a Complex Case Involving Fear of Fear.” Clinical Case Studies (n.d.). http://ccs.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/12/04/1534650110391085.abstract.

Phagophobia is the fear of swallowing. Like many phobias, the Greek name—phago (to eat)— turns out to be slightly misleading. It would suggest, for instance, that the phobia refers to a fear of eating (Nock, 2002), whereas the more usual usage is for a fear of swallowing (Shapiro, Franko, & Gagne, 1997). Even then, “swallowing” may not capture the full spectrum of the fear, as fear of choking is a particularly common form of this phobic pattern. Generally, the phobia is concerned with swallowing food and liquids; however, there are some people who are unable to swallow their own saliva, irrespective of there being food in the mouth. Swallowing pills and tablets generates anxiety in many people, and they are then unable or unwilling to actually swallow pills in whole. A common manifestation of phagophobia is not fear of eating per se but fear of eating in public, which is therefore more akin to a social phobia.

Cited

Nock, M. K. (2002). A multiple-baseline evaluation of the treatment of food phobia in a young boy. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 33, 217-225.

Shapiro, J., Franko, D. L., & Gagne, A. (1997). Phagophobia: A form of psychogenic dysphagia—A new entity. Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology, 106, 286-290.

I did not plan to read this section of Jung’s Red Book this morning, but it just worked out that way…

And suddenly to your shivering horror it becomes clear to you that you have fallen into the boundless, the abyss, the inanity of eternal chaos. It rushes toward you as if carried by the roaring wings of a storm, the hurtling waves of the sea.

Every man has a quiet place in his soul, where everything is self-evident and easily explainable, a place to which he likes to retire from the confusing possibilities of life, because there everything is simple and clear, with a manifest and limited purpose. About nothing else in the world can a man say with the same conviction as he does of this place: “You are nothing but… ” and indeed he has said it.

And even this place is a smooth surface, an everyday wall, nothing more than a snugly sheltered and frequently polished crust over the mystery of chaos. If you break through this most everyday of walls, the overwhelming stream of chaos will flood in. Chaos is not single, but an unending multiplicity. It is not formless, otherwise it would be single, but it is filled with figures that have a confusing and overwhelming effect due to their fullness.

These figures are the dead, not just your dead, that is, all the images of the shapes you took in the past, which your ongoing life has left behind, but also the thronging dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past, which is an ocean compared to the drops of your own life span. I see behind you, behind the mirror of your eyes, the crush of dangerous shadows, the dead, who look greedily through the empty sockets of your eyes, who moan and hope to gather up through you all the loose ends of the ages, which sigh in them. Your cluelessness does not prove anything. Put your ear to that wall and you will hear the rustling of their procession.

Now you know why you lodged the simplest and most easily explained matters in just that spot, why you praised that peaceful seat as the most secure: so that no one, least of all yourself would unearth the mystery there. For this is the place where day and night agonizingly merge. What you excluded from your life, what you renounced and damned, everything that was and could have gone wrong, awaits you behind that wall before which you sit quietly…

…The animal does not rebel against its own kind. Consider animals: how just they are, how well-behaved, how they keep to the time-honored, how loyal they are to the land that bears them, how they hold to their accustomed routes, how they care for their young, how they go together to pasture, and how they draw one another to the spring. There is not one that conceals its overabundance of prey and lets its brother starve as a result. There is not one that tries to enforce its will on those of its own kind. Not a one mistakenly imagines that it is an elephant when it is a mosquito. The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it.

He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power.

When the time has come and you open the door to the dead, your horrors will also afflict your brother, for your countenance proclaims the disaster. Hence withdraw and enter solitude, since no one can give you counsel if you wrestle with the dead. Do not cry for help if the dead surround you, otherwise the living will take flight, and they are your only bridge to the day. Live the life of the day and do not speak of mysteries, but dedicate the night to bringing about the salvation of the dead…

…Then turn to the dead, listen to their lament and accept them with love. Be not their blind spokesman, there are prophets who in the end have stoned themselves. But we seek salvation and hence we need to revere what has become and to accept the dead, who have fluttered through the air and lived like bats under our roofs since time immemorial. The new will be built on the old and the meaning of what has become will become manifold. Your poverty in what has become you will thus deliver into the wealth of the future…

– C.G. Jung, selected from Nox Secunda, in The Red Book (pgs. 295-7)

Actually, it was silent.

One of these years, one of these nights I am going to have a tornado dream and instead of either getting away or trying to get away and blacking out, I will go out to meet it.

In an unfamiliar house. I kept telling someone what to do, but I’m not sure who I was talking to. A storm is coming. A sense of foreboding. I’m standing at a large window or glass door, scrutinizing the darkening sky. A flash of lightning and I see the funneling spiraling and there appears to be a fire inside it.

Blank. End of dream.

I say or think that I’m tired of this blanking out. Too many dreams, too many real memories where there is rising fear and as the terror tightens, everything just stops. Like the power going out just as you are going to find out how the cliffhanger is resolved. Logic says that it doesn’t matter. I am here, so obviously, I survived whatever ended up happening. Something else says it is unresolved. Says we don’t know how it ended. Fears what is unknown. And so I get frustrated and shake my fist and say, “Bring it on. Let’s see the ending. Let’s get it over with. I’m ready.”

And then a slightly nauseating dread, and whatever the mental equivalent of an atheist animist buddhist crossing herself would be. Oh FSM, what did I just ask for and will I really wish I could take it back?

The tornado dream is an old recurring one. Always different, but familiar.

The dream I had the other night… with a talking pig resigned to gorging himself one last time and lying down to sleep to wait for slaughter instead of trying to escape, and then a rat jumping out of a toilet, running up my clothing, and biting my hand when I tried to keep it from running up to my head… hanging on with its teeth in my palm until I just tore it off (my flesh going with it) and threw it against the wall, which did not faze it for a second. It saw Cuchulain jump into the bathtub and went after him and there was the sickening sound of that thumping and growling as I tried to get across the room in slow motion, yanking back the shower curtain only to have the rat run back up me and then be gone… but I thought I saw it everywhere… that dream was totally not familiar.

1. Am I just too cynical that I can’t really feel glad that all this gay teen suicide/bullying crap is getting a lot of attention right now because I expect the attention of the masses will hop on to the next media-hyped thing any day now?

2. One thing about it that annoys me is the use of the word “bullying.” Can we just be blunt and call it what it actually is: physical assault and emotional abuse?

If you are an adult and someone is following you around, tormenting you, leaving you evil notes, tricking you, physically hurting you, what would you do? I know what I’d do. I’d start the legal process of getting a restraining order and so on. If it were at work, I would report them to my supervisor and would fully expect it to be resolved (and not at my expense) because we have clear guidelines about what is and is not expected.

But if you are a child or early teenager, what are your options? You don’t really have any. If you are really lucky you have resources in your parents, but far, far too many children do not feel their parents are safe to open up to. Far too often those children are right.

You are required to go to school every day. You do not get a choice unless you choose to head toward failing out and being a delinquent¹. Teachers and administrators all too often turn a blind eye to what is going on with kids.² Sometimes the teachers even join in.³ It’s Lord of the Flies every day and kids don’t have a choice. No one protects them from their abusers. Instead, they are sent right back in to the lion’s den every day while others look on from the sidelines.

Then, too often they are blamed and belittled for their response. They are “too sensitive,” or are told that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”—a blatant, harmful, invalidating lie that research proves; a number of studies have found verbal emotional and psychological abuse to have effects somewhat different from, but just as damaging, as physical or sexual abuse. Children are told to suck it up, expected to pull off extraordinary feats of maturity and inner strength at a time when they are children and still figuring out who they are and how they fit into the world. They are called “tattle-tales” when they complain about other children being cruel to them. They are asked to not have the feelings they are having: By 3rd or 4th grade, I already dreaded going to school because of abuse from other children, and would feel ill and sullen and angry every morning. And instead of being listened to, empathized with, or stuck up for, I was chided for being so negative, told that of course I’d have a bad day if I went into it expecting a bad day, and made to sing a stupid jaunty song about how “I’m gonna have a GREAT DAY!” before I was allowed to get out of the car at school. Which only stoked my rage and sense that no one cared about what I was experiencing.

3. There is another word we use to refer to people having no power being forced to remain in an abusive environment with few external options and no help from anyone around. When no one higher up demands accountability and sets clear, strong limits on behavior that will not be tolerated. When swift disciplinary repercussions for stepping out of bounds do not exist.

Hint: Stanford Prison Experiment. All involved were nice, normal college kids…

4. Here’s a good look at the inside of a child in this sort of torment: Single Dad Laughing: Memoirs of a Bullied Kid. I’d never read this blog until a friend linked to it tonight. His post “You just broke your child. Congratulations” also really touched a nerve in me.

5. I was shocked at the number of people who expressed shock that the Columbine shooting could happen. Frankly, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. That it doesn’t means that most of the hatred and rage felt by victims of this sort of abuse is largely turned inward on themselves. And so children hang themselves.

6. It’s all sad. It’s all horrifying. It’s all extremely angry-making. But it isn’t shocking.

7. Ok, well I guess what is shocking to me is the way children are allowed to treat other children. How their actions are defended. Children tormenting other children have their own problems, and it is not really their fault that they are so wounded they lash out like this, and/or have not be taught to behave decently toward their fellow humans. But that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to keep going.

8. It also is somewhat shocking to me that adults are far too willing to believe/convince themselves that everything is ok with children. It makes sense, though. It is inconvenient and it gets really uncomfortable for adults to acknowledge what may actually be going on with children. It is as if children are expected to have the lucidity of mental health practitioners—to be able to say, “Oh, yes. Thank you for asking. I’m feeling extremely depressed, anxious, angry, invisible, invalidated, and trapped in every part of my life and I’m resorting to these self-injurious behaviors as a coping mechanism. The only way I know how to drown out the inside pain for a little bit is to inflict some outside pain. Endorphins are great. Please get me therapy.” That’s just not going to happen very frequently, as a big reason people adopt these kinds of coping mechanisms is they do not know how to identify or regulate their feelings, they do not feel (or just are not) able to express their feelings, and/or they do not feel safe being open about themselves with the people who would observe and question them on these matters—usually because these people are a large part of the problem.

It’s National Coming Out day. As if it were not obvious, I’ll come out as a formerly very troubled young person. I don’t expect to ever be trouble-free, but at least now I have constructive ways to muddle through any trouble that should arise. Oh, and as an adult I have the power and agency to make decisions about my own life and what sort of treatment I will and will not abide from others.

9. That latter bit in bold is the part that makes me really ache for these young suicides. They will never know the utter brilliant joy I often do when I’m in my own house, doing my own thing, and I realize no one is going to berate, shame, or ridicule me, and no one is going to tell me I’m damned, and no one is going to scream “DYKE!” and throw things at my head. I may wake, sleep, eat, drink, read, work, and be in peace, and I’m not kidding when I say it often makes jump up and down and spin around, usually in my kitchen.

10. So my message to children and teens in the midst of ongoing abuse would be: Hold on, even if it means retreating into yourself in ways that may cause other problems later. Those problems are totally surmountable, once you get to them.⁴ Cling to the promise of escape. Life will likely never again reach the level of hellishness you are currently experiencing. It will suck at times, but it will also be full of love and wonder.

Hold on. If possible, get out into nature and/or get to know some animals. Unless you befriend a tiger or venomous snake, it’s probably safe to say that a connection with an animal is essentially safe, validating, and honest. Most animals will accept you as you are for the qualities you bring—kindness, presence, affection, and, of course, treats—and never hurt you on purpose. Nature and animals can be a good reminder that life can indeed be beautiful and wondrous.

Hold on. Stand really close to a mirror and look deeply in your own eyes until you forget they are yours and you can really see them clearly. Your eyes are amazing, intricate, multi-layered infinities, just like you. They are beautiful, and so are you. And someday you will surround yourself only with people who see that. Tell yourself: The people here are blind. One day I will find people who will really see me.

If it speaks to you, put this song on repeat. It’s why I say in all seriousness that Robert Smith saved my life. He was the person from which I heard this message over and over again, enough to soothe me so I could sleep: fight it (mentally). push it away. you do not have to give in. one day, you will fucking fill up the sky with your laughter and love and those who hurt you so badly now will seem like nothing in comparison.

1. Which is not going to help very much in providing a decent escape route from your situation of powerlessness [↩]
2. And not just with abuse by other children! Personal example that astounds and angers me when I think about it: Ninth grade. Study hall. I am cutting the tips of my fingers with a safety razor I keep in my purse and drawing in my notebook with the blood. I think another student said something to the teacher about it, because she called me up to her desk and asked me if I was cutting my fingers on purpose and why. I told her I thought the blood was a pretty color and had interesting properties as an ink and it didn’t hurt. She just kind of nodded at me and I went back to my desk. Did anyone from the school check on me? No. Did the teacher do something to get the school counselor to talk with me? No. Did anyone contact my parents about their daughter doing self-injury in the middle of a classroom? No.

   Similar thing when my then-boyfriend’s foster mother freaked out when she noticed I was sitting in church, pulling out hairs. She recognized this as possible trichotillomania–a not uncommon coping mechanism for dealing with feelings you cannot face or are not allowed to have/express. She freaked out at my mother. When I was talked to about it, I made up some bullshit excuse and stopped pulling hairs when other people were around. I think I resorted to seeing how long and hard I could dig my nails into my arm in church instead. And the issue just went away… [↩]

3. Ah, the lovely day in middle school when, in front of my laughing classmates, the juvenile ass hired as a “coach” and our P.E. teacher took my shoes and put them up on a basketball goal, far too high for me to reach. [↩]
4. Example of what I’m talking about here: I disassociated an awful lot in order to get through and get out. In my mind I was elsewhere. I observed what was happening to me from a corner of the room instead of letting myself really experience the pain/fear/anger/whatever at the time. Later, I have had to deal with (and am still dealing with, in some cases) issues of learning to stop doing this, identifying and feeling my feelings, and feeling unreal, disconnected, false, etc. [↩]

The basic attitude in the air in the West is: “Go and get it.” Whoever wants to go and get it, can. This premise is taken as a given: Everyone has the same opportunities, everyone has the same potential, the same smarts, the same possibilities; the chances are equal and open to everyone. “You can do it just like everybody else; you have the intelligence, you are a human being, you can shape your own success; take it into your own hands.” We hear this said, but what is the reality? Those who are capable go happily along and of course are perfectly fine. For them, there is probably no better system than this materialistic society. But it can be very painful for those who cannot face up to life so aggressively. They feel incapacitated somewhere deep inside, as if they are not complete human beings. Instead they need to hear, “You can still do something. You can create more merit, you can make pure aspirations.”

…who cannot face up to life so aggressively, or who are not extroverts, or who are not capable of feigning happiness when they do not feel happy, or who sink to depths instead of skipping across the surface.

I was horrified to learn that introversion has been proposed for inclusion in the DSM-5, and began filing away fantasies about future flight to Finland.

I have been told, and I tell myself, that there is important work for the quiet, the still, the sensitive, the intuitive to do. That I should think more about “valuable differences” than about “alien traits.” But don’t underestimate the difficulty of out-shouting the messages of faster, louder, more that ring from every direction.

I feel lucky to have found work in a library, a place of relative stillness and reserve. A place where a number of colleagues seem as introverted as I am, if not more. But even a week working at the library wipes me out, and I often cling to my weekends as small solitary retreats.

Yesterday I spent several hours observing and caring for a small patch of ground: clearing leaf litter from nascent patches of moss, separating pebbles from soil, noting the directions of water flow from the patterns of erosion, digging with my hands. The closer you look, the more dizzying the array of life as it unfolds. It was good and comforting. Somewhere in there, I remembered this poem:

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who prey upon them with IBM eyes
And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon.
There are men too gentle for a savage world
Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween
And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws
And murder them for a merchant’s profit and gain.
There are men too gentle for a corporate world
Who dream instead of candied apples and ferris wheels
And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who devour them with eager appetite and search
For other men to prey upon and suck their childhood dry.
There are men too gentle for an accountant’s world
Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass
And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove.
Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant’s world,
Unless they have a gentle one to love.

–James Kavanaugh