Eredien's Journal

This is how I feel about Scallion Pancakes every day.

I miss going to Yenching with my friends.

Hey there, friend who is trying to convince me that soy is bad for you! I appreciate that you have been kind of on a personal health kick lately, but I already know that soy is not a miracle food. I know it has some problematic estrogens, and have been slowly cutting back on it because I don't think that's good for me. I know that it's generally pretty high in fat. I know that you shouldn't base a diet around it.

Guess what: I'm not! But my diet is something I really shouldn't have to defend to anybody. Any food is gonna have its problems, large or small, and its detractors, and its scientists with agendas. I've seen this happen with foods from grapefruit to milk--somebody writes an article based on extensive lab testing and FDA approval saying "x is healthy," and then a year or decade later there's a book on Oprah or a peer-reviewed article saying "x is gonna kill you!" I gave up trying to track it all long ago, because it was impossible.

I decided to take my body's own advice, and go vegan. It's worked great for me. It's the best diet I've ever been on, in terms of my health. If no soy works for you, that's great. You should eat what you like. And I will eat what I like. But I do not appreciate hearing, "you shouldn't eat that thing you like," especially not from a friend.

Reading a book about how soy is horrible is not going to make me change my mind about soy, when my own body was telling me to give up cheese and milk, and I (stubborn) kept at it, and eventually only stopped when I got very sick indeed.

You also probably didn't have much of a way of knowing this, because I don't generally talk about it, but I have had a lot of people criticize my eating habits--both when I was younger, and today. When I went vegan, it took me a year and a half to convince my mother that I was not going to waste away and to demonstrate to my father that what I was eating actually tasted good. When I was younger, I spent an entire year vegetarian. and having my food supply and choices passively-aggressively managed by my mother. My aunt has suggested that I change my grammar structure at family parties so that my extended family will be more comfortable with the fact that I choose to eat how I choose to eat.

Even when my parents are not criticizing my eating habits and choices specifically, or asking me to "just try a little meat," they have spent years generally criticizing my eating habits in terms of everything I ate or didn't eat, every time I ate, on top of the vegetarian and vegan stuff. I have pushed away from the table uncomfortably full, only to have my mother complain that I didn't take seconds, and then an hour later get a lecture on "my health." It feels like they may have spent more total time criticizing me at all points of my life about whatever I was eating than I actually did learning that it was ok to eat what I wanted, finding my own food style as an adult, and learning how to enjoy cooking and (mostly) eating without guilt or stress. That project took me several years.

I really think adults shouldn't criticize each other's food choices. That may sound weird coming from a vegan, since in a lot of ways the way I eat really seems like I'm doing it to stick it to the man. A lot of vegans do that actively and deliberately, and are angry about it.

I will admit that I do stick it to the man a bit, simply by choosing to consume or not consume various products, and talking about why and how sometimes. And I will admit I'm pretty angry about the ill-treatment of workers and animals in factory farms. But if making my own food choices consciously and enjoying what I eat and talking sometimes about why I eat the way I do is sticking it to the man, then everybody who's ever chosen what they will or will not personally consume or talked about why is "sticking it to the man" in the exact same way, if not along the same axis that I am.

There's a lot of people who say, "I hate vegans/vegetarians because I feel like they make me feel bad about the food I eat." I think that's because a lot of veg*ns really do feel strongly about stuff like factory farming, so any discussion of veg*ns it comes off as "you shouldn't eat this thing you like because it's awful!" But please keep in mind that veg*ns have a tiny little corner of the huge socio-political machinery set up in our culture to make other people feel bad or good about their food choices and consumption.

Every day, this machinery tells me and everyone around me that I'm already "supposed" to feel bad about eating the way I do because talking about my food choices around people who have chosen other choices for themselves is rude and it's my own fault if I talk about what I do; I should expect that it will make people angry at me and my food choices. Or, alternately, this machinery tells me and everyone around me that I must be eating really disgusting and unhealthy and nutritionally incomplete foods, so I must be crazy for wanting to set up my food choices the way I have, but no one else should make these food choices because they're just not wholesome in some way.

So if you--any of you, or even all of you--feel like you really want to share some food information with me, I'd prefer that you say something like, "I'm not eating x right now [ENTIRELY optional short explanation: because I hate it/it's bad for me/I'm trying to be healthier, etc.], but here's what I am enjoying and here's what I cooked last week."

That doesn't come off as "I think you shouldn't eat this food because I have been convinced that it's absolutely awful to do so!" It comes off as what is is: "I have made this food choice for these reasons, and here's how it's affected me and what I've enjoyed eating instead." That's *way* more likely to make me interested in and sympathetic to your food choices, even if I choose not to share them myself--because I know I'm not gonna get a lecture about how I am wrong; I just get to find out what you're all excited about and might get excited about it too.

That mutual reciprocal joy in happy sharing and learning more about the awesome person in question is the kernel of all good relationships, whether you're talking about food or friendship or anything else. That's what makes me happy to be friends with you, all of you. That's what makes me happy to share who I am with you, all of you. (It's also awesome when even if you and your friends don't hit perfection and joy all the time, you're honest enough with yourself and each other to admit that you still want to aim for it together, and try again with a different plan, after admitting the first one missed.)

Really, I just want to find out what makes the people I care about happy, and try and make the people I care about happy, because making those people happy makes me happy in a way that's separate from, but related to, their happiness. I bet you do, too, friends. It's harder to do that when the people I care about are telling me how unhappy I should be because the choices that I made to make myself happy--including making the choice to make myself happy by making them happy--shouldn't make me happy as they do, and I'm wrong for finding happiness in the things that I find happiness in, and I need to make different choices, and then I'll be happy. Really, I just want to be happy, and I choose my path so that I will be happy. Making my friends happy is an altruistic way of going about making me happy, which also benefits you, my friend. I really like it, so I do it a lot, partly because I can often combine it with non-altruistic or less altruistic ways of making myself happy, like cooking (sharing cooking with friends), or writing poetry (talking about something I've written), or sex (well, it usually takes at least two people, though not all the time). Don't worry that I'm spending all my happiness on you, and ignoring my own needs, because I find that what I need is that balance in the combination of the less altruistic task and the more altruistic ability to share the task. And I find that balance in different ways, once I finally got the hang of it--performing the task directly with someone is one way; discussing the end-result of it is another; going away to be entirely alone for a while and then listening to someone else talk about their own tasks is another. Most of my choices are a mix of the altruistic and the more selfish.

Like, for example, talking about my personal food choices. :)

And you thought this was gonna be a vegan ranting about how tofu was perfect! ;)

[Edit: Yup, this post was up for like five minutes yesterday night. It wasn't supposed to post until this morning, but LJ's date-setting feature never works right whenever I try to post in the future. I wanted people to see the trans rights stuff first, so I just hid this post until now.]

I had an extra bit of energy today. I called my parents. The call was going pretty well until I told them I was going to drive back to Indiana to pick up my stuff and they weren't going to be involved in any way, because I didn't want them to be.

It is really very, very useful to be able to understand the exact tropes and language that your parents are using to dismiss your legitimate concerns and problems about your relationship with them.

Today I got:
- I know what your life was like better than you because I happen to have some privilege you don't which of course allows me to see everything that ever happened to you more clearly than you yourself see it ("we're older than you and we have experienced more of life so you should listen to us")

- Don't Ask Questions You Don't Want the Answers To/I Had Problems Too/Tone Argument ("When weren't were there for you?" "Well, how about when you didn't pick us up from school? When you didn't drop us off on time? When you didn't build the treehouse? When you didn't build the dollhouse? When you didn't go skiing or play backgammon?" "When dad didn't come into our apartment and I had to explain to Rachel that he wouldn't tell me why he wouldn't come in, and how that hurt both of our feelings?" "Well...my parents also didn't do things with me that I wish my parents had done. I'm not upset or angry. And your father totally came in and toured the house [lie].")

- Outright denial of my lived experience ("I feel like you weren't always there for me." "We were there for you 110% percent!")

- My personal failings couldn't have impacted you at all, and certainly not in the way that you say they did ("we recognize that we have a problem with procrastination, but that's our problem, not yours")

- I Will Privilege My Interpretation of Events Over Yours, which allows me to Discount Your Point of View as Irrational so that I Won't Have to Solve the Problem that Hurt You ("We had problems with procrastination, but that stuff about being late happened way less than you think it did!")

It's sometimes necessary and good, even if it doesn't feel very nice, to say "Fuck you," and hang up the phone.

Thank you, anti-racism and anti-sexism and anti-homophobia and anti-cisgenderism, and all my friends and family who have encouraged me in my learning even when it's hard. By learning how to get rid of my own prejudices and bigotry, I am also gaining the tools to help myself heal.

So, I need to apply to some jobs. But I'm stuck.

I can either:
1.) Apply to part-time jobs, or temp jobs for commission, that will leave me with time and energy to work a second part-time job for no pay (art and writing), which has massive happiness benefits for me. These jobs will not have health benefits.

2.) Apply to full-time jobs which will leave me with health benefits, but not have any energy or time left over for art and writing once I, say, have eaten dinner and cleaned the laundry. (I thought I could do this, and worked from 2005-2010 in jobs that I thought would let me do this, and it didn't happen. If I go this route, I will give up art as a career--I don't want to squander another half-decade of my life pretending like I'm going to write a novel, but knowing full well it's not going to happen because I've got no time or energy).

Oh, and I also need to:
- Get an apartment
- Move again, paying all moving expenses
- Figure out a way to afford grad school
- Pay for expenses, including special cat food that runs $45/bag

I'm secretly terrified of going to grad school. Remember that summer course I tried to take a while ago, the Urban Studies one at Tufts, which I was really excited about and was going to use to catapault myself back into academia and figuring out what I wanted to do for grad school for real?

I quit not because the workload was too much, but because when I tried to do the readings to do the work, the part of my brain that understands how to do hard academic reading shut down--and doing the work was impossible under those conditions. I was reading the words, but couldn't remember the ideas in the individual sentences long enough to follow a train of thought through a paragraph, much less from one paragraph to the next. I would finish an article, and have no ability to recall or summarize the main points of what I just read. And this is urban studies, not literary theory--the points are generally pretty straightforward, like "we can use these techniques to increase pedestrian safety; here's why America isn't using them."

That's also why the paper I gave a week later at Readercon was something that I was ashamed of--it felt like it kind of ran from point to point, and when Thrud asked a question that made sense given the paper's topic, I panicked because her question (about the trope of the flawed hero in early myth) literally made no sense to me. I heard the words coming out, in academic English, but I did not understand her question because I could not parse the sentence because I didn't catch the individual words. This was humiliating. I'd never written a paper that I wasn't proud of before, much less given one that I wasn't happy with at a professional conference.

I told everyone that it was the workload because I felt freaked out, confused, and ashamed, and had no idea what had happened to my brain or my ability to remember or think. I saw indications of the problem before--I thought that I was just rusty--by subjecting myself to things like independent essay-writing projects or summer classes, I would soon get back into the thick of things, and not have to worry about it, but the problem got worse as soon as I tried to fix it.

The same thing happens with novels. Unless I write down what I am thinking about the novel immediately after I read it (which is why I have been writing book reviews), I forget that I read it. I don't remember what it was about. I don't remember the characters very well. If it pick it up again I will remember that I read it, but it's like a transient experience.

That's why the only thing I've really been reading lately is political commentary and webcomics. The former is a few paragraphs that I can understand in a short burst of thought; the latter is not reading in the way that I usually understand it in that it is not entirely audio-based (when I read, I hear the phrases more or less spoken aloud in my head, and with comics, it's more like a movie, since a setting/scene is also provided).

For someone who desperately needs intellectual stimulation to keep her happy, I am pretty miserable, and I have no idea what to do about it. I've been miserable like this since I graduated college, when I felt intellectually at the top of my game and then took a minimum wage job working a call-center because that was all that was available, and then a job where I was routinely writing at top-speed, and editing, but not reading that much.

This is why, if you ask me to do something, sometimes I will stand there slack-jawed. I am not trying to be stupid. I am trying to remember what the word "washcloth" means.

This is why I haven't pursued grad school, while having dreams about screaming in horrible jealousy at a roomful of the people I know who are attending grad school (which just made me feel like an ass). This is why I constantly complain about going back to school and don't, well, apply for anything. This is why I've only written a handful of poems since 2005, and one short story finished. This is why I've switched to doing things with my hands, and why I've started complaining about it--I love doing things with my hands, but not as a main occupation; the fact that I feel as if I have no other choice but to do the things I still feel I can do has embittered me about those things, and I can't love them as much as I want to, or need to.

I am kind of terrified, as the only thing that really gives my life a deep meaning is writing and thinking and reading, and I appear to be losing my access to...whatever it is that gives language meaning in my brain. Sometimes I can think, and write, and churn out an idea, and manage to fix it on the page as a poem or something, or maybe part of a story.
But even then there's a clarity lacking that I know I am hieing after, and not finding. And I don't know what to do about any of it.

I'm really, really scared.

And I'm broke, so I need a job, desperately.

And I'm not sure which kind of job to pick. I desperately want to be able to do art and writing, but I don't know what to do about this problem where I read a page of, say, critical literary theory, or a long-form article, or a novel, and then want to go hide in a corner for the next hour because I can't understand it and don't remember it and can't...think...about it.

That's never happened before, and it's terrifying; I feel really broken in a fundamental way. I have no idea why. Did my brain just get through Bryn Mawr and give up? That feels really--not correct, as a theory, to me. I mean, I've been reading, and understanding and caring about reading, since before I cared about almost anything else in my life. But I could do it once, right, and do it brilliantly to boot--so why not now, when I need and want to?

Given all of this, what kinds of jobs should I apply to? Does anyone have thoughts?

It's taken me a really long time to talk about this--to think about this--because most of the people I know, and all of the people I care about, are really smart people. They value smartness, and quickness of wit and of mind, and that particular type of friendship that comes from recommending mutually agreeable books to each other, and the ability to have an intellectual discussion and follow a thread of argument, and valuing it when they learn a new word or idea. And I used to be one of those people. And I still care passionately about those things. And because I was surrounded--I surrounded myself--with people like that, like myself, it was harder to notice when I felt things going away; and once I realized what was happening, last summer, I was too scared to speak up because, well, things like that just don't go away, do they? And if they do, what will you be left with if you've spent your whole life being smart and thinking of yourself as smart and gradually feel like you don't know how to conduct a conversation anymore, and can't read your way through a text you'd read in highschool without losing a plot point?

It's why I've sat glumly through a lot of interesting intellectual discussions in the past year, while my friends kept looking over at me, wondering why I wasn't joining it, and why I declined to say anything if invited. I couldn't follow the threads of most arguments in book group, for instance; I couldn't understand the way that the sentences that people were speaking built up into a comment or theory or joke; it's been really hard for me to interact with people new and old.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this while putting together a puzzle in the gaming room at Anthrocon--a puzzle, simple, because I couldn't follow the rules for the new expansion of Race for the Galaxy, and kept losing my place when I tried to write the essay I was to present the following week--and feeling terrified that I was going to lose myself and the relationships that I cared about because I couldn't force myself to be intellectual enough for me to be happy, anymore. And now I feel like I kind of have lost those things, because my lack of pursuit of intellectual things and bitterness about working with my hands, which I loved to do before, ate into my life and my relationships. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it when I was outside, or constructing things with my hands, over the last year. That, too, was creative work, and worthwhile--so why was I so bitter about doing it? Why was I saying I hated it, and presenting myself to others as if I hated it, and complaining incessantly that it took up time from art, when what I hated was the feeling that I had to be working with my hands, because that was the only thing I was good at, anymore? I could easily have made time for art in my life, but was terrified that I would try and fail, again.

That's what I've been thinking about a lot, since that summer school session, and things have definitely come to a point where I can't ignore the question anymore.

Thoughts...would be really appreciated, here.

[Addendum: I first noticed this problem when I realized I was having a hard time remembering song lyrics, something I had always been able to do with no effort. This is largely why I don't sing anymore.]

Sometimes you just read an article that makes you go, "Holy shit, really, universe?"
Such an article is this column where a woman writes in complaining that her 7-year-old daughter's unibrow makes her uncomfortable.

The professional advice columnist gives the following advice:

When I first held my darling in my arms and gazed on her mass of black hair, I whispered to her, "you're beautiful and amazing, baby."

If your child has an easily fixed cosmetic problem, it's best to avoid her wanting to take a razor to her face, and she's more likely to do something stupid to get rid of unwanted hair if she thinks she's ugly.

I suggest for now that you stop counting hairs and relax. As the brow fills in, or she starts complaining that other kids comment on it, you can say that she has eyebrows just like Daddy, and that's ok.

Oh, wait, that was the sensible advice I wish she'd given. She actually said:
when I first held my darling in my arms and gazed on her mass of black hair, I whispered to her, "Don't worry, baby girl, I will take care of you when the time comes to get some of your hair removed."

If your child has an easily fixed cosmetic problem, it's best to avoid her wanting to take a razor to her face. Fortunately, today a little girl with a brow like Bert the Muppet can have it transformed almost instantly into something more like Brooke Shields.

I suggest for now that you stop counting hairs and relax. As the brow fills in, or she starts complaining that other kids comment on it, you can say that she has eyebrows just like Daddy. Explain that he takes some of his out with a tweezer, but you're going to do something better for her that will mean the extra hair is gone for a long time or maybe forever. It's OK, Mom, that you want a clear path for your daughter's inner beauty to shine.

Did I...miss something about where hair grows, inner-beauty wise? Are there removal creams for the hairy soul, or razors for the heart? Because, well, otherwise that sounds like a totally *outer-body* procedure.

If you're really hairy, and you feel uncomfortable with it for whatever reason, and you're 15 or 25 or 65, and you want to get rid of your own hair, ok, sure. I'm all for getting rid of hair you don't want--I shave my arms and my legs and my feet, and have a short haircut, because I don't like having hair on my body for spiritual reasons. But that's you, dealing with your own hair.

Don't subject your kid to lasers and hot wax because you think that her seven-year-old unibrow isn't ok, and you can't bring yourself to show her Frida Kahlo's self-portrait and talk about inner beauty without thinking, "God, that woman would have been regarded as even more brilliant if she hadn't been so damn hirsute."

I sort of went to town in the comments, and emailed the columnist, and wanted to talk about why: it feels like my mom wrote into that columnist 10 years ago, and took her advice, and it fucked me up. Maybe this is a case of people being Wrong on the Internet, but I don't think so--I think it's a much, much larger problem about who is allowed to police whose body image, and who is allowed to have and develop a body image of their own, and how casually we cut others down for being different, without even realizing it, and what it does to the people who think it's ok, and what it does to the people who've been cut down.

I used to self-harm. Sometimes I still do. These last few weeks have been really, really hard, and I'm proud that today--as of ten minutes ago, even--I can look in the mirror, and see only one tiny scab from the past few weeks, and think that my skin looks ok, and realize that what I need for it to look better is not a half-hour long session staring into the mirror and digging at my nose with a nail file, but more sleep and a walk outside and the realization that I just had my period, so of course I'm going to have a flare-up.

It is really hard for me to believe, with all the hand-wringing that advice columnists do about teens self-harming and the double standards and beauty standards that women face, that they cannot see letters like these as what those problems stem from, and I think more problematically, what problems like rape, eating disorders, and the perception that women do not know their own minds come from. (Not that self-harm isn't problem enough). I feel like there's a huge emphasis on it being culturally ok for women, especially, to not know and own their own bodies--women's standards are expected to be someone else's standards, and women don't know or care what those standards are, or have their own standards for themselves, they are wrong. This happens most obviously in fashion/beauty and in the workplace and in the family, but it happens everywhere else, too: food, news, everywhere. I can't think of anywhere it doesn't apply. Think of the "we girls can do anything, right, Barbie?" slogan from the 80's. (I had that Barbie, and I hated it. Pink stole, yuck. She was always the one to get run over by the mini Ferrari). Sounds empowering at first, right? But it's not just "we girls can do anything"--"we girls" have to turn to Barbie, of all things, and ask her if she agrees with us, and wait for her approval. And then, then it's ok to do anything. (Not asking Barbie does not fall under the category of things we girls can do, apparently. Apparently Barbie never said "no," either.)

I wonder if this is why so much porn, kinky or otherwise, places such an emphasis on consent or lack thereof;
the idea that women can consent alone of their own free will to wanting things that they are supposed to want is scandalous, and the idea that women can consent alone to wanting thing that they aren't supposed to want is more scandalous, and the idea that women can consent to forego consent is incredibly scandalous. All these stories put women in a place where they gave up consent, or get consent from others, but maybe consent or lack thereof isn't the scandalous thing--maybe the scandalous thing is how they're setting their own standards for themselves, and aren't allowed, by the plot or maybe the gag, to talk about it with anyone else. It's always all a big secret. (To be fair, I think that there are probably cases in which these conventions apply to porn with men in it, too, but I think there one of the big ideas about consent is that the men in porn often seem to be interested in the ways they can have their agency restricted like women. Asking for permission, being humiliated or physically bound due to clothing or social situations, responsibility for cleaning the mansion without having the ability to have sex whenever they want...man, someone needs to write a kinky Austen takeoff with the genders switched and everyone wearing pleather and PVC, just so this can all be seen a little bit clearer for what it is, because I bet it would come out like really generic kinky porn.

Anyway.

Through my whole life, I've been holding myself up to what I thought were my own standards, but I realized today--after spending much of last evening in an agony of fear that I would move ahead with my life only because I was afraid, because I was broke, because of all the wrong reasons, and make bad decisions--that they weren't always actually my standards. I think some of them have been. I think my academic performance was largely my standard. I think that many of my hopes and dreams for the future are largely my standard. I think that my coming out and much of my relationship with rax was largely my standard (and hers). But in the larger parts of my life that continue to dog me--my ability to be on time for things, to set long-term plans to achieve those long-term goals/dreams, to be able to trust other people to set standards for themselves that I and they can live with, to form a healthier relationship with myself and food that isn't based on denigrating my body, to form a healthier relationship with myself that isn't based on denigrating my accomplishments and very real progress thus far, to form a healthier relationship with my work that focuses on what I can do rather than what I can't, to form a healthier relationship with others that isn't based on putting myself down to build others up--I realize that I haven't been doing those things much because I was trained to look to others to tell me how to act, and punished emotionally if I didn't look to others to tell me how to act, and/or punished emotionally if I looked to others to tell me how to act and then decided that their advice wasn't for me. I think that's why I was so afraid to do things on my own--all the times I'd done that before, it hurt a lot because it necessitated me cutting myself off from the people who were around me, because I knew they would not approve of whatever it was I was doing, whether it was reading or not shaving my legs. If I'd just been able to go off and do more things on my own, without worrying about whether it was right for me to do so or not, without worrying whether my going and doing things on my own was destroying the relationship between me and rax, that would have saved me, I think, and I bet it would have saved our relationship, too. I think I was starting to get there. I understood that rax kept pushing me to do my own thing because she wanted/needed space and privacy, but I thought she kept pushing for that space and privacy because she thought that my being with her made me unhappy. So I just kept trying harder and harder to show her and tell her that being with her made me really happy, and gave her in the process, less and less space and privacy, and worked on my own things less than I liked or should have. Because I wasn't sure if working on my own things was really okay with me because I thought that setting my own standards for working on my own things would make me lose the relationship, I had constant relapses into worrying whether my doing things on my own was destroying the relationship, relapses that were just way, way too much for both of us, and way too intense. Relapses which of course destroyed the relationship I loved.

Well, no time like the present, I suppose. My decisions need to be made out of love for myself, rather than fear for myself.

( read my reply to the lady who wrote into the advice column )

I was reading this comic today and realized I should probably print it out and put it on my wall.

I think I've always labored under the fear that if I didn't actively put a lot of effort into every relationship, that the relationships (and the people) would just disappear. They, truly, wouldn't exist without my effort. So I over-effort, and lose myself. Gee, I wonder how I could have learned that? *coughmomanddadcough*

That loss of myself through putting too much into the relationship kept me (until a few years ago, when I started having a relationship with myelf) from realizing that I don't really want much of a relationship with my parents, because such a relationship is/was just too much damn effort to maintain. It feels like a siege every time.

I guess this is why I was so pissed off every time I was reminded by my parents that I wouldn't physically have existed without my parents' efforts at my birth and beyond. They were willing to put a lot of effort into having me, but not into getting to know me, the person I gradually became; I had to put all the effort into that, and never saw much dividend.

My sister and I talked today about our mutual feeling that maybe my mother wanted children, but possibly resented actually having us, and possibly resented raising us. I think it's the first time we'd ever discussed it, but the feeling was always there--you know how you're driving down the road and only see the animal crossing the street, black on black, because the light from your headlights catches its eyes and reflects back to you? We were the headlights, and we could see the animal in the gloom from time to time via the reflection, but the animal wasn't created by the car's headlight glow. It had its own separate existence and trajectory in the dark, before the light ever found it.

The meatloaf analogy

In rm's journal, trinker wrote a comment about how surviving abuse makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get.

I wanted to expand on that a little, and wanted to put it in a place where I could talk about how that was rekevant to my own situation right now.

To trinker's comment, I would add to this that it makes people abjectly grateful for whatever they get--even if they don't want it, even if they detest it, even if getting it is actively bad for them. And when people are told and believe that they should be grateful for getting things that are bad for them over and over again, they generally end up not being able to articulate what it is that would actually be good for them, because they have never had the opportunity to have something that was good for them, whether they got it for themselves or had other people give it to them.

When you are starving for food, and someone hands you meatloaf, you are going to eat it even if you don't like meatloaf. You are going to eat it even if you are allergic to meatloaf, if you are hungry enough. And if all that the people who cook for you know how to make is meatloaf, you are eventually going to learn to eat and probably cook meatloaf, even if you don't want it. Then, once you've learned to eat it all the time without throwing up, you will start to wonder if you really do like meatloaf--after all, you're eating it all the time.

Then, you learn that other people eat other things--beans, squash, fish, ice cream, sometimes even meatloaf. At first you are surprised--people eat a variety of things? You spend a while adjusting to that idea, and then you go to the kitchen and tell the chef about pumpkins and they say, "but my meatloaf is the very best!" or "sorry, I don't know how to make salad; you'll have to make do with meatloaf!" or "you don't like my meatloaf? Fine! Don't eat tonight, then!" or "but you've been eating my meatloaf your whole life, so you must like it--and look at how healthy you are! " These last two arguments are quite convincing, because you a.) don't want to stave, and b.) you yourself were already wondering if maybe your hatred for meatloaf was irrational--it reinforces that self-doubt that was already there. You never stopped to wonder if you could have become more healthy if you ate soup instead: for one thing, you'd never had the opportunity to try soup because you'd never had it in your kitchen. And for another, you had no reason to think that eating something else would fix the problem, since when other people said they ate other things and were "normally healthy" you assumed that meant that they were constantly sick, since that was "normally healthy" for you and everyone who you knew, since you all ate from the same kitchen.

But then you finally figure out that maybe you should to learn how to cook.

You go to the cook and ask to use the kitchen, but they won't let you make anything other than meatloaf; so you have to go elsewhere to learn to cook.

There are three options from that point.

( Please read below the LJ cut, this is cut only for length and not for importance. )

I have been--am--guilty of this fundamental selfishness, in terms of relationships. I think that is because I believed that the only permissible way to live with and love others in a relationship--and in turn be lived with and be loved by those others--was the already socially sanctioned way of showing those things. Which is just not true.

Which is probably why I spent a lot of time in the past six months deconstructing arguments against gay marriage and following the news about worldwide queer rights and Prop 8--I was using my thoughts about what was actually happening as a tool to try and work through my feelings about the social sanction of marriage. After the first few months, I was even able to articulate to myself that I was using all that reading and writing as a tool to get to something else, a means to an end, but I wasn't quite sure what end I was looking for. (I was so crushed when the prop 8 victory was handed down a day before R. and I broke up, but the reason I was crushed didn't make sense to me--we had never planned on getting married in CA anyway, so why would the timing have such an affect on me and my relationship, personally? Turns out I was crushed because the social sanction aspect so central to the case was something that I had really believed I needed to have a happy, loving relationship, and at the very point that that social sanction was making global news headlines, I no longer had a happy, loving relationship for those sanctions to apply to). It was that reading and writing and thinking that led me to realize that I didn't actually want or need those social sanctions to have a loving relationship, and further led me to realize that my insistence on those sanctions was what led me to ignore my own idea of what I actually wanted, which led me to destroy the loving relationship I actually had going on already. [After some reflection, I don't think that I destroyed the relationship, and I don't think it was the pressure for social sanction that led it to be destroyed. I do however, think that my insistence on the sanction let me to ignore what I wanted.]
This is not to say that other people shouldn't want or need social sanctions, because I think the vast majority of people do, and deserve them. I will continue to fight for gay marriage. I just won't continue to fight for it for me anymore, because it's not what I want.

(The meatloaf analogy, BTW, is both a metaphorical and a literal analogy--I'm vegan and I literally get the "wow, this is so good but it's so weird, I don't think I could eat it every day; are you sure you don't want steak--and you aren't losing any weight, are you?" with every family dinner for which I make and bring my own food. (When I was a preteen and decided to become pescatarian, my parents forbid me from buying and/or cooking my own food at home. I would eat what they cooked and pick out the bits of meat. I survived a year on frozen/canned side-dish vegetables, pasta, and McDonald's caesar salads, before I realized that I could not get enough protein without the tofu that I could not buy or cook, and went back to eating meat for my own long-term health.) The whole point of bringing the food in the first place is to enable me to make the food choices that are right for me, and stay emotionally and physically healthy by doing so), but my mom just complains that eating fish would make me healthier and feels bad that I won't eat her turkey gravy, and my dad won't try anything made of tofu at all, though I think he had three slices of vegan cake).

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with food--I didn't like the food I was being given, but didn't have an opportunity to eat kind of food I wanted much, wasn't allowed to have my own diet when I found out my ideal foods were radically different from those of the people around me, and was told my choices were invalid so began to doubt my own ideas about what I liked and whether my food opinions were just totally invalid.

I am pretty sure this is why I have problems with relationships--I didn't have an opportunity to get much attention as a kid, and didn't like what attention I was given. But when I expressed this, I was told that it was not acceptable to ask for or want different kinds of affection, because the kinds of attention I was given were the kinds they could give, and the prevailing socially sanctioned idea my parents and I had of love was "the parents will love to the best of their ability, and since that is all they can do, the child will know and feel loved" -- even though that doesn't really follow. Even when I found out that my ideal forms of getting attention and expressing love and affection were acceptable to ask for from people who weren't my parents, I still didn't have a good understanding of what kinds of attention I did want, or if I wanted attention at all, or if I wanted it how to get it or give my own.

I think this problem, though, has gone a long way toward being solved in the past decade. Some highlights: I learned a lot about what kind of types of affection I actually wanted and about what kinds were no good for me. I learned that it was ok to desire them, and to ask for them. I learned how to say "no" and "yes" when someone gave them to me, and mean it. I learned it was ok to say "I don't know," and wait. I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself beyond "what I desire in my relationships." I learned it was ok to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for myself within my relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires in their relationships. I learned it was ok for others to have and pursue dreams and goals and desires for themselves beyond "what they desire in their relationships."

All those things are really important.

I had started thinking about keeping a relationships and sex blog before rax 's and my recent breakup, and have now decided that it is more important than ever for me to start one.

I realize that to some of you the idea about blogging (rather than simply privately journaling) about relationships and sex may seem crass or too uncomfortably open, and I have to say that while I do not agree with your opinion--I think a blog, any blog, can be a tool for both private and public conversation and reflection in a way that a private journal cannot be--I don't want people who won't want to read about things that will make them uncomfortable to feel like the idea of my writing about this stuff was going to be sprung on them. So, I'm going to keep this post up top for several weeks, so people can really give consideration to whether they want to be on my new relationships and sex blog friends-list, or not.

I will probably start writing in said blog later today.

Please comment below if you would like to opt-ON to the friends list for the new blog. Otherwise, you will not be on it.

You can also ask questions, etc.

Thanks!

Coming Out in Middle School by Benoit Denizet-Lewis. [NYT Times article, if you're not registered use BugmeNot.]

“When I first realized I was gay,” Austin interjected, “I just assumed I would hide it and be miserable for the rest of my life. But then I said, ‘O.K., wait, I don’t want to hide this and be miserable my whole life.’ ”

I asked him how old he was when he made that decision.

“Eleven,” he said.

Wow! Younger people are starting to understand the second part of the benefits of coming out--"you don't have to hide this and be miserable, and in fact, if you don't hide it, you might even get a shot at being happy"--really early. That makes me really happy, if a bit wistful.

Speaking as someone who knew they were queer in middle school and went through about a decade of just assuming that I was going to be miserable my whole life, I am so glad to see that people of all ages are now starting to have the support of a community, even if it's just the implicit community that the visibility of out queer people provides, which is starting to allow them to realize that they don't even have to make that assumption in the first place. They don't even have to make the false assumption and then work to kill what life it's gained from their belief in it; it's starting to be viewed correctly as a flawed premise, a dead premise, from the beginning.

I can't say that I can't even imagine who I would be now if I hadn't had that miserable decade of closeting, self-hatred and reflexive fear of other people (when you're hiding a secret that, if spoken, will make people hate you--and/or make you hate the self that loves, which you are told you yourself should hate--you tend to avoid people as much as possible).

In fact, I can imagine it pretty well now, and I wish I'd had it, based on the very tangible benefits that coming out has made to myself, to my friends and family, and to these people I don't even know.

If I'd been in 8th grade and had a community of people around me coming out, I might have had the courage to do it then (I was a courageous person, in some ways). I considered and rejected it in highschool, when there was a small community, mostly because by then I'd just built up too much fear of myself to bother doing the hard work it takes to find yourself after you've sent yourself away.

So, thanks, people who came out to me in junior high school and high school and college and beyond. Thanks, rax, for loving me, and encouraging me to come out instead of dumping my ass when you found out that I wasn't out. Thanks, queer and kinky friends from around the world and right here in Camberville. Thanks, pastor, for reassuring me of God's love when I was sure I ought to get rejected by it because I was broken in the wrong way and not the acceptable ways. Thanks, parents, for making me realize it's not going to be rainbows and sunshine all the time, and why I need to do it anyway. Thanks, me, for coming out and continuing to come out, and thanks, eighth-grade me, for making me remember why it's important to do so even when you don't particularly think it's going to be easy.

I'm dressing genderqueer today, and probably tomorrow, for that eighth-grade me, and for the today me, and for everybody.

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Trust & Communication.