Sunday, November 6, 2011
Happiness and gratitudes
• wrapping up in a big shawl to read or blog
• the German word for "litigious" is "lawsuit-addicted." As my professor used to say, deutsche Sprache, schöne Sprache.
• Mary Daly
• the assigned ethnographies in my anthro elective
• nightclouds
• fisherman pants
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• golden leaves against moody gray skies
• tea and blankets with a friend on the grass/under the trees/in the backyard
• Sui's Letter
• finding a quality travel mug at the campus donation center, and how much it improves my quality of life
• the gift of trust from others
• a silly addictive teen gymnastics drama on instant streaming
• the German word for "litigious" is "lawsuit-addicted." As my professor used to say, deutsche Sprache, schöne Sprache.
• Mary Daly
• the assigned ethnographies in my anthro elective
• nightclouds
• fisherman pants
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• golden leaves against moody gray skies
• tea and blankets with a friend on the grass/under the trees/in the backyard
• Sui's Letter
• finding a quality travel mug at the campus donation center, and how much it improves my quality of life
• the gift of trust from others
• a silly addictive teen gymnastics drama on instant streaming
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Our tentative and groping words
"Women have been driven mad, 'gaslighted,' for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each others' sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
"Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other...
"Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body.
"The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper.
...
"It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I want to tell you.
"It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.
"The possibility of life between us."
– Adrienne Rich
"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying"
"Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other...
"Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body.
"The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper.
...
"It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I want to tell you.
"It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.
"The possibility of life between us."
– Adrienne Rich
"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying"
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Echoing
Bitterness: As soon as you consciously wish to forget something, it becomes almost impossible.
It's hard for me to remember physical pain once it's passed, but I can remember how it felt to be profoundly depressed, and re-collecting the original pain, holding it whole again in my hands — old, but whole — strikes an echo hurt, a meta-pain.
Melissa wrote [trigger warning for eating disorders] that this grief for the past self and for those unforgettable things is a good sign, even when it hurts deeply. Because it means that sympathy has grown where the hatred used to be.
You should read Lexi's post too, about the mean reds vs. the blues and "it's like depression has its own version of ptsd." I'm grateful for her brain.
In what sense can you leave it behind, the days of leaving scars, of wanting to be dead? And how, without forgetting, without pretending that I don't still have to watch against depression?
I want to say, Too much lost. That's part of the pain.
What lost? Some innocence, I guess. Hatred and violence and hopelessness put an end to a certain type of innocence, and those have had their place in parts of my saga with depression.
And so much to leave behind.
Theodicy. Is it the essence of evil, that suffering is meaningless?
The evangelical in me says that that's what grace means here, that this will all mean something, and that it's not just self-illusion to think so.
I have to believe that. In an integrity of experience and purpose that will be clear in the end, with enough distance, or in those rare minutes. That there will be a story to this, to me, and that it will not be senseless.
It's hard for me to remember physical pain once it's passed, but I can remember how it felt to be profoundly depressed, and re-collecting the original pain, holding it whole again in my hands — old, but whole — strikes an echo hurt, a meta-pain.
Melissa wrote [trigger warning for eating disorders] that this grief for the past self and for those unforgettable things is a good sign, even when it hurts deeply. Because it means that sympathy has grown where the hatred used to be.
You should read Lexi's post too, about the mean reds vs. the blues and "it's like depression has its own version of ptsd." I'm grateful for her brain.
In what sense can you leave it behind, the days of leaving scars, of wanting to be dead? And how, without forgetting, without pretending that I don't still have to watch against depression?
I want to say, Too much lost. That's part of the pain.
What lost? Some innocence, I guess. Hatred and violence and hopelessness put an end to a certain type of innocence, and those have had their place in parts of my saga with depression.
And so much to leave behind.
Theodicy. Is it the essence of evil, that suffering is meaningless?
"Humans, including women, construct meaning. That means that when something happens to us, when we have experiences, we try to find in them some reason for them, some significance that they have to us or for us. Humans find meaning in poverty and tyranny and the atrocities of history; those who have suffered most still construct meaning; and those who know nothing take their ignorance as if it were a precious, rare clay and they too construct meaning. In this way, humans assert that we have worth; what has happened to us matters; our time here on earth is not entirely filled with random events and spurious pain. On the contrary, we can understand some things if we try hard to learn empathy; we can seek freedom and honor and dignity; that we care about meaning gives us a human pride that has the fragility of a butterfly and the strength of tempered steel."
– Andrea Dworkin
Intercourse
The evangelical in me says that that's what grace means here, that this will all mean something, and that it's not just self-illusion to think so.
I have to believe that. In an integrity of experience and purpose that will be clear in the end, with enough distance, or in those rare minutes. That there will be a story to this, to me, and that it will not be senseless.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Asleep or awake,/what difference does it make?
Not sleeping — or living — very well lately. Except for when I'm hyper on caffeine, I feel sluggish and dull, suffocating on food and screen time, suffocating inside my prickly layers in this cold room. I don't really have enough of a courseload to keep me busy, though I'm hardly doing as much as I could for the ones I do have.
I hate waking up in the afternoon, and I hate too-long or inadvertent naps. I don't want this groggy restless feeling; I want to feel alert and awake and properly alive. It's so easy to be bored (how is it that "entertainment" is not the opposite of boredom?), but so shameful. What a WASTE. I won't live like this, I refuse to live like this...
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