Eredien's Journal

So, I just wrote the BMC admissions office asking for their policies on admitting transgender students, as I couldn't find them outlined anywhere on the admissions website, and have found some other info suggesting that the Transgender Task Force convened to make recommendations about this very issue a few years ago recommended the current possible admissions policy, which is admitting FTM students (great! (edit: or more like, "hm, are we actually respecting these students' gender identity when we admit them as women, if they're identifiying as men? But are we really gonna kick out students who transition to male in the middle of their undergraduate years?") but not MTF students (ugh).

I've been thinking about doing that for a long time, but I held off because I was scared. But I realized holding off wasn't going to do anything except stop me from making a decision and dealing with its consequences for as long as possible--I'd still eventually have to make the decision and deal with the fallout, and the longer I delayed the harder it would be for me to make a good decision because I'd have been worrying about the potential consequences for years, and my head wouldn't be in a good place to deal with the actual decision making and its actual consequences after that.

I wanna change that policy, if in fact that is still the official college policy, and asked how to get involved. I also wanted confirmation from the source itself--who knows, the policy might have changed in the last few years (one can hope). I don't know if the task force is even still around, for instance--and those were some of the questions I asked.

I am pretty much setting myself up for a firestorm here, but hey, if there's one thing that I learned at college, it was to be unashamed of the person I am, and stand up for myself as a woman and as a thinker, and stand up for others as a woman and a thinker, unafraid. If Bryn Mawr's goal is really to allow women to stand up for themselves and be taken seriously as human beings and as intellectuals, then they need to stop deliberately denying MTF women a chance to reach that goal during the applications process itself. To say that's their goal for all women, but deliberately encourage that goal for only some women and discourage it for others, is just sad.

I don't support other organizations with such exclusionary policies with my time or money, even if they mean a lot to me otherwise. Why continue to support this one? I'm not about drawing lines between "real Mawrters" and "fake" ones, then trying to support only the people I agree with while demonizing those I don't, such that those people in turn have a reason to label and demonize me.

It's taken a while for me to decide this, as I'm back in Boston now and I'd sure like to get involved with the BMC Boston folks again, but I certainly won't donate to or volunteer any more with the school until they change this policy (unless they want me on the Transgender Task Force, which I'd be happy to volunteer my time and effort for).

Every woman (and FTM persons, too) should have the opportunity to have Bryn Mawr mean as much to her as it did to me, but they don't, because as far as I can tell, the college has deliberately cut them out of those opportunities from the very beginning. That's not right.

I will post more when I hear back from the admissions office, because I want to make sure that I have the current and accurate facts in line. (Really, the first thing I want to try and get them to do is post their current policies somewhere people can find them).

If I ever live anywhere where I can build a treehouse, I think this would be a great, cheap treehouse to build. It's buildable for about $100, looks awesome, and would be great to hang out in and read, which is what I kind of always planned on doing with a treehouse anyway.

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.

Please fill out this poll on graduate education. I find myself woefully undereducated on:
- How other people decide what they want to do for graduate education
- How they fund it when they decide what they want to do

[Edit: this poll hasn't gotten any responses today. Do you guys think it's too personal?]

Since I want to go back to school, I figured I should at least figure out which directions to start looking in and try and ignore the ones that are not actually salient, but I realized that I didn't actually know which directions those were.

Typing "grad school funding" into google is a nightmare of conflicting advice, and talking with people about how they picked their career path seems to net me a lot of people who either already knew what they wanted to do and what degree they needed to do it with, or got a job doing something they liked and then ended up going to graduate school for it, but I don't fit into either of those options and figure some of you might not, either.

I figure that a poll of several hundred people is bound to get more than 10 replies and is a good place to start.

( How did you fund and understand your post-undergraduate education? )

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.]

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!

CKD wrote earlier today about his support for the SANE program. If you haven't read his blog post on it or the Boston Herald's article about the SANE program in MA, please go and read it.

Basically, the SANE program provides nurses that have been specially trained to help all rape survivors emotionally while still giving compassionate medical care and getting forensic evidence. Their budget is getting cut 66% in the proposed 2010 FY budget, which means that services will be halved by mid-December and cut entirely by January. This is a proven program (12 years) with a track record of not only providing medical care and emotional support for the raped, but also many convictions for rapists. Without this program, many rape victims in MA would have to do what rape victims in many other states do: wait in the ER for many hours to be eventually seen by harried, busy ER healthcare personnel with little to no specalized training in providing compassionate care for rape victims specifically.

There is more info at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center's website, along with info on how to find your MA state rep. or senator.

There are also some other bills under consideration by the MA House and Sentate:
- Having to do with getting restraining orders against stalkers who are not related to you or who have not been in a relationship with you.
- Making it easier for people who have suffered rape, sexual assault, or rape in the home to do things like change locks or break their lease without penalty if they have to move for their own safety.
- Protecting gender expression or identity in state law in the same way that race, religion, or disability is now protected against discrimination under state law.

I have to admit, I now feel that creating endless categories of people for whom discrimination is a problem, and then enshrining those categories in law is not the best solution, or even a possible solution, to the problem of bias/discrimination, since there will constantly be new categories being created (thanks for suggesting a sane solution to the problem that protects minorities as well as majorities, "Covering!") But I would also like my fiancee rax not to get fired from her job, and I would like to feel safe going to the grocery store as a genderqueer woman. So, I wrote this letter:

( Dear Representative Provost )

Then, I wrote another letter to my mom about it. My mom is a healthcare worker for the county in which I grew up. She cried when she found out I was queer and told me it was her fault and that I should never get married and should try to date boys because I was bi and it was easier, but threw condoms at people during Woodstock '99 and told us about STDs over the dinner table and threw an engagement party for me and rax and my sister and her fiance this year after reading Ellen's mother's book (yeah, that's my mom). I don't know if she knows people in MA who are involved in healthcare, government, and politics, who might be able to read my letter to her and actually get something moving with any of these bills, but I wrote her anyway, because if she did, and she has a higher chance of it than me, then it was better than not writing to her.

And I told her about the other bills, and did a little arrow, like this, <, next to the Gender identity bill, and said "this would really help me and my friends." And then I deleted "me." And then I added it back in again, and sighed, and said, "oh God, now she's really going to worry about me," and then I thought, "well, better she know what to worry about and be able to help with the actual problems I am having than manufacture things to worry about that aren't real." (yeah, that's my mom.)

And then I pressed send, because if I can write to Representative Provost and tell her I am genderqueer, then I can write to my mom and tell her the same thing, and arguably should.

I dunno if I'm going to regret this decision. I dunno if she's even going to notice the litte arrow and the one line of text. I dunno what I am going to say if she calls me and says, "so does this mean you're really a boy?" and start crying or if my dad is like, "why do you do these things to hurt your mother?"

But I know that even if they don't understand and can't accept my position, or hold another position, or think falsely that I took the position I did deliberately to hurt them, better for me to say what my position is--truthfully--so that I can start talking with them about why I make the decisions I make, and how their decisions affect me and how my decisions affect them, so we can start to talk, and recognize that we can talk and love each other even if--especially if--we disagree, and that love is stronger than that disagreement. I guess I feel that if the disagreement goes unacknowledged out of fear of hurting them by disagreeing, then I'm hurting them anyway, because then I feel like I can't disagree with them on anything, and am lying to them about my position and its effects besides. If my positions are strong enough, they will stand up to disagreement, and if they are not, then I ought to decide how and why I will change them, especially if it's at the behest of my loved ones.

I kinda want to call her and I kinda don't. I also have to ask her to please stop nicknaming me. Maybe I should just call.