Facing Abuse

Sunday Salon: The Memory Bird

danica — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 08:41:17 +0000

The Memory Bird:
Survivors of Sexual Abuse
Edited by Caroline Malone, Linda Farthing, & Lorraine Marce
Temple University Press, 1997

Like Dangerous Families, The Memory Bird is an amazing anthology of writing by abuse survivors, free from intervention or direction by psychological “experts.”

Its rareness (at least to me) comes not only in presenting the voices of sexual abuse survivors, but in the particular community involved: survivors of all sorts from New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

The authors range from utterly unknown to nearly famous activists, pouring their hearts out sometimes for the first time; and the anthology’s editors are no slackers themselves.

Who Are These People?

Caroline Malone is an artist and an activist for survivors’ rights and needs. She is involved with – in fact, she’s the founder of – a successful self-help network for sexual abuse survivors which began in 1989.

Lorraine Marce educates people on the psychological effects of sexual abuse and the rights of children, via workshops, lectures, and political lobbying.

Linda Farthing is a therapist with seventeen years of experience in working with sexual abuse survivors of all ages, and manages her own family therapy center.

With such a political group, it may be no surprise that this book stands out in one other important way: its political awareness. The art, stories, letters, poems, and essays within its covers run the emotional gamut, but unlike many books about abuse, this one has a special place in its heart for rage.

Shouting Out, Not Speaking Out

The Memory Bird is divided into different sections with names like “Claiming the Right to Feel Pain” and “Learning To Dance.” Each section illustrates vividly the struggle to break the rule of silence and shame and speak out, as well as the beauty and strength of each person’s recovery. But my favorite section by far was the last: “You Want a Witness?”

They end the book with a bang. One review of the book remarks that this section is about recovered memories and “helpful comments on false memory syndrome.” This is what we call exceedingly subtle sarcasm.

This section is beautiful. The whole book is beautiful, in the particular way that truth is beauty and people sharing their truth is beautiful and the feelings and the strength and…. But you know, in this last section there is some TRUTH. Ass-stomping, how-dare-you, get-your-fucking-ass- out-here-motherfucker kind of truth, in which everyone who ever said “You know, that incest happened a long time ago, you need to just forget it and get on with your life,” or “Well, you know, kids can really be very flirtatious, and….” or “Well, at least you’re experienced,” is utterly called on their shit.

It’s a wonderful little book, full of good writing and especially of people being very open about a subject which has for so long been hermetically sealed. I think in many ways the angry parts make it easier to read, because anger is easier on many people than grief. This is the sort of book which inspires plenty of emotion.

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Little House, Big Vision (Sunday Salon)

danica — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:44:55 +0000

I have always loved the Little House books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read them many times as a child; I especially loved Little House in the Big Woods, with its holiday stories of peppermint stick candy and rag dolls and dresses with buttons that look just like fat juicy blackberries. And the pig’s bladder balloon! And the stories-within-a-story of Pa’s childhood, a trillion years ago. That must be the one, too, where they make maple sugar candy in the snow, because the dress is at the sugaring party at their relatives’ house through the woods. There’s a lot of great food in that story.

And I LOVE reading @HalfPintIngalls on twitter. (The “@” is just how usernames show up on Twitter.) It’s someone’s hilarious rendition of what it would be like if Laura Ingalls Wilder, as she is portrayed in those books, were Twittering. She has the slightly sarcastic bite of teenage Laura, a good dose of historical parody, and a lot of just plain funny. “Pa says if the blizzards keep up there’s going to be a ‘donner party.’ Whatever that is, it’s high time we had some FUN around here. Hurrah!”

So today while I was catching up on some of HalfPint’s twitter posts, I ended up at the Wikipedia article on Wilder and found that, although her daughter Rose Wilder Lane helped write the Little House books, Laura did quite a bit of writing on her own – in large part as a columnist for The Missouri Ruralist (which still exists!), writing a regular column called “As a Farm Woman Thinks.”

(She wrote it as “Mrs. A. J. Wilder,” which confused me until I remembered the olden days less than a century ago, when otherwise perfectly normal sane women took not only their husbands’ last names but their WHOLE ENTIRE NAMES as their married names. So you’d call someone Jane because you knew her, but when you invited her to your formal dinner party it would be “Mrs. Albert E. Hannigan.” I used to work for my college’s alumnae association – it was a women’s college, so we got to spell it like that, even though technically that leaves out the boy graduate students and the trannyboy alums of all kinds – and even in 1999, we’d still frequently have to address thank-you notes that way. It was just What Was Done, for so many women; Tradition, disconnected from any sort of rights or oppression. But that’s another story….)

I googled her writing, of course. And I found one of her columns so far, which I thought was so excellently suited to the subject matter at hand, and tied so well in with the last entry here, that I would like to share it with you in its (short) entirety. It is, in part, about the way in which we judge others is really a reflection of where we are. Which is very recovery.

In 12-step programs, the fourth step in large part involves exploring our resentments and fears, and what part we play in them; in doing that work, I’ve repeatedly found that my resentment of others is just me projecting my self-judgment onto them. Like, if I internalized the idea, growing up, that I shouldn’t take up space, it just plain riles me up when other people barge around the supermarket aisle with their enormous carts, taking up not only their own space but the little space I thought I was allowed. Of course, that’s not what I think is going on at the time – I just think “how rude! That person is in my way! I hate them! I hate this store! Damn yuppies! Taking up all the space! Why don’t you leave your cart in one place and walk to find things like I do! I am in a hurry! Get out of my way!” And in reality, they’re probably just doing the best they can to navigate the store – maybe it didn’t occur to them that they could leave the cart off to the side, or maybe they have a good reason not to right then. But when I look at them through the lenses of my own abuse history, all I see is red.

But what struck me more about this article, the first time I read it, was the way that our vision of the world around is different when we are “blue” than when we are happy, even though we are looking at the same situations, people, and objects. It is so easy to focus on just the negative, and find it everywhere – in fact, it is so easy to choose to focus on the positive too, but when we are stuck on the negative it’s very hard to see that. And our negative thinking argues, “If it’s easy to find the negative everywhere, why would I look at the positive? That’s just self-delusion! The bad stuff is just as prevalent as the good, and if I focus on it, I will know where to find it and how to avoid it!” Sounds perfectly logical, but in fact it is madness, because it’s not a matter of knowing both of them are there, equally: framing the world as a series of pitfalls and crises poisons our lives and obscures all of the good stuff. What we focus on grows: whether it’s the good or the bad, what we see and think about spreads out like ink on wet paper, slowly eliding anything else from our experience.

But you don’t have to take my word for it; here is Laura Ingalls Wilder’s own insights on the matter, with enormous thanks to DakotaGirl for finding and sharing it. I hope she shares more. And if you are at all interested in these books or that historical time, I think you too will love her blog. She has some amazing stuff on there – but I guess that is obvious, since she seems to be the only one on the web with copies of this writing!

As a Farm Woman Thinks
BY MRS. A. J. WILDER
February 1, 1922

A WONDERFUL way has been invented to transform a scene on the stage, completely changing the apparent surroundings of the actors and their costumes without moving an article. The change is made in an instant. By an arrangement of light and colors the scenes are so painted that with a red light thrown upon them, certain parts come into view while other parts remain invisible. By changing a switch and throwing a blue light upon the scene, what has been visible disappears and things, unseen before appear, completely changing the appearance of the stage.

This late achievement of science is a good illustration of a fact we all know but so easily forget or overlook-that things and persons appear to us according to “the light we throw upon them” from our own minds.

When we are down-hearted and discouraged, we speak of looking at the world thru blue glasses; nothing looks the same to us; our family and friends do not appear the same; our home and work show in the darkest colors. But when we are happy, we see things in a brighter light and everything is transformed.

How unconsciously we judge others by the light that is within ourselves, condemning or approving them by our own conception of right and wrong, honor and dishonor! We show by our judgment just what the light within us is.

What we see is always affected by the light in which we look at it so that no two persons see people and things alike. What we see and how we see depends upon the nature of our light.

A quotation, the origin of which I have forgotten, lingers in my mind: “You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window thru which you must see the world.”

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An attitude of gratitude?

danica — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:51:43 +0000

Gratitude is a huge tool in 12-step programs. People often make gratitude lists, or find other ways to have “an attitude of gratitude” – to focus on what is positive and the ways in which they are showered with support, rather than giving in to the urge to grouch around and make everything negative.

I used to see that as a burden. Like, OHHH, you should be GRATEFUL for what you have. Like SUCK IT UP! There will always be someone worse off than you, so you can’t be justifiably upset about anything! You have to make like you are happy about it all! Or like a threat: be grateful or I’ll give you something to really be unhappy about!

Eventually I let go of my resentments around it and learned to use it as a tool, to practice thinking about all the great stuff in my life or the overlooked silver lining in whatever is pissing me off. Like people say, what we put our focus on grows. Our minds work like microscopes, zooming in on great or horrible details until they fill our entire field of vision and seem like the whole universe.

But it’s only recently that I figured out that gratitude equals joy. Being grateful about things just means ENJOYING them.

I like this much better. It suggests that “having an attitude of gratitude” means I get to ENJOY my life. That I can go around just looking for things to enjoy about what I am doing. The sun, the wind, walking outside, seeing someone I like, being at work, not being at work, having a cool idea to think about, eating some chocolate, whatever. There’s a lot to enjoy in my life. And that means I get to use this idea to work on being present in my life, which is a lot easier than trying to, separately, be present AND every so often list things I am grateful for. It means integrating joy into my every day – and not just that, but that I am SUPPOSED to have a joyful time here. That this is a reasonable, laudable goal.

So rather than trying to stop and mentally list things that I can be thankful for, I get to enjoy my life on an everyday basis. Like the keychain I got that says, “Don’t postpone joy.”

And it’s a good reminder: if I’m not enjoying something, why am I doing it? Sometimes there’s a good reason: I don’t enjoy filling out my timesheet, but I will certainly enjoy the money that follows as a direct result. Sometimes I can find something to enjoy in those necessary things, too: I can make it a little challenge to fill it out correctly, like a puzzle. (I have a really hard time getting the timesheet all the way right!)

Sometimes it’s ridiculous: I’m not enjoying myself because I am spinning my wheels, looking for jobs way past my bedtime and cranky because I am tired; hanging out with people I would normally enjoy but secretly just stressing about when we are going to stop and eat because I am hungry and I don’t know what to do about getting some food where we are; reading a book because I really wanted to earlier and I think that must mean I still want to, instead of checking in with my feelings to see what I actually want to be doing now. In other words, neglecting my needs – a classic survivor pitfall. Stopping to notice this stuff helps me shape my life, carving away behaviors and experiences that don’t work for me and choose the ones that are fun and fulfilling.

What are you enjoying right now? How much more do you enjoy it when you take a moment to consciously notice that joy?

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Dangerous Families

danica — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:17:57 +0000

Dangerous Families

Queer Writing on Surviving

Edited by Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein-Sycamore

[an imprint of the Haworth Press|Harrington Park Press], [2004]

Dangerous Families is a ground-breaking book: an anthology of writings by queer survivors of childhood abuse.

People have only been speaking out publicly in great numbers about abuse for a few decades, and been allowed mainstream visibility to talk about this for even less time, perhaps twenty years.

For much of that time, the discussion was moderated by therapists analyzing people’s experiences, as in The Flock or The Minds of Billy Milligan, or as currently happens on talk shows like the loathsome Sally Jessy Raphael. In fact, old-timers in our local Survivors of Incest Anonymous meetings talk about an era when meetings fell apart partly because therapists would come just to goggle at the survivors who were, inexplicably, getting healing without their help. (“You… talk to other abuse survivors? But… everyone knows that’s bad for you! You’re just going to get re-traumatized! There should be a therapist guiding the discussion at least!”)

Queerness is usually erased from the discussion, too, except for the unfortunate and now-rare occasions in which a mental health professional of some kind is attempting to “blame” queerness on abuse. Because, you see, they’re both so rare. And sexual. (Never, oddly, because they’re both so common.) And as a result of this, for some people it became forbidden to talk about being queer and being raped, for fear of reinforcing that farcical link and helping reduce a community to some Freudian wet dream.

Furthermore, most if not all writing about abuse is partitioned off: it is just about child sexual abuse, or specifically about domestic violence, or focusing on spanking. There is a sense that we must deal with our problems one at a time, a societal tendency to “divide and conquer” – a tactic which never serves anyone but the abusers, regardless of the milieu in which it is being used.

And maybe most importantly, the little speaking and writing about abuse allowed is usually limited to white women – or really, to straight, able-bodied, affluent white women. The effects of abuse and the silence around it pose two more barriers to communities which already have many hurdles between them and writing and publishing and the visual media. On top of that, there is a perception that abuse is already weird enough – we don’t need to alienate people more by talking about male survivors, survivors of color, queer survivors, Deaf survivors, working-class transgendered Latina ritual abuse survivors… mainstream culture, in the United States at least, reduces these different communities to the punch lines of anti-P.C. jokes.

Dangerous Families breaks all of those unspoken rules.

And a good thing, too. It is difficult to effectively break the rule of silence surrounding all abuse while sticking to all the other rules that keep us in line.

Dangerous Families is an amazing collection of essays for more reasons than those. Those are all the political reasons to read it; the personal are just as compelling.

It is a book full of stories in which the authors tell nothing but the truth, bold and clear and direct, the truth as it is right this minute. Some of the authors’ stories have arced up and down all the way into safety and healing; others are caught in the middle of figuring it all out, in chaos, or on some other bump or valley in the journey. In that way it offers both recognition and hope to its readers.

So whenever that magic moment came when I needed to slide over on the couch or run my hand down her ass, I felt like I was becoming her perp. It shocked the shit out of me when I started having friends who touched one another casually. It shocked me when I popped my cherry a second time, casually sleeping with a not-friend. “Fuck, this is weird,” I remember thinking, “he’s not leaving his body.” And neither was I.

– leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha, “gonna get my girl body back”

In the introduction, the editor observes all that is left out of writing on childhood abuse and talks about how it we need “literature that focuses on something more than the time line of events, the feelings involved, and the process of recovery.”

There is another book, called The Memory Bird, which collects personal writings about abuse. It focuses specifically on sexual abuse, but it is similar to this in many ways, as a collection solely of people’s thoughts and experiences instead of a prescription for life. I remember, when I first read it, how intensely struck I was by seeing my experiences and opinions echoed in the words of a few other survivors halfway around the world. It was amazing.

Dangerous Families serves a similar purpose with a wider scope. It can be difficult to read, particularly with its wider range of abuses: the more abuse is involved, the more readers are likely to see themselves reflected therein. There will be people who never thought of what happened to them as abuse before, and people who thought they had “dealt with it,” who find that something in them is opened up by reading this book. For those who are willing to see that part of themselves, this anthology can bring amazing fellowship and revelations about life.

The editor goes on to comment that,

“I always conceived of Dangerous Families as an anthology of non-fiction stories that goes beyond the recovery narrative to create a new queer literature of investigation, exploration, and transformation…. These stories… go right to the horror, the beauty, and the joy, often throwing the reader off guard, revealing layers of meaning before the reader can step back. As survivors, we become hyperaware; our vigilance enables us to dissect everything.”

This anthology has definitely achieved its goal. Each piece packs in powerful layers of experience and imagery, asking for multiple readings. As a whole, the layers of pieces and experiences and identities add up to something densely packed, multi-dimensional, world-changing, and amazing.

Eli Clare’s work, always lush and powerful in this way, goes even farther in this anthology, and serves as a good example of how much is contained within:

What I have to tell makes language a club, a bludgeon, sticks and stones wielded against advancing tanks and trucks. Yes, a weapon. Not even a tool, much less the snow tracings of the last wet storm before spring, bending the boxwood, elderberry, scrubby pine almost double. A story, yet another story.

Last night at the theater Jeffrey Dahmer’s voice came alive in one brilliant monologue – that black gay performance artist, cross-gendered and beautiful, leading us from hair salon to drum to Jeffrey’s seductive murder of black boys. I fled the building, bolting from the memory of blood. Dahmer the lone crazy man taking his full.

Let me tell you, my father was Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey lived in my hometown over and over again. Too many people to count. We drank blood, decorated our bodies with blood, shaped symbols in blood. Human blood, animal blood. Sometimes I wake up in the deep of night, that taste still on my lips.

This book is incredible and important: important for survivors to read to see they are not alone, important for survivors of any kind of abuse to see the commonalities between abuse of all kinds, important for (those extremely few) people who have never been abused in any way to read to understand their friends and loved ones and the world in which we live. Read it piece by piece, slowly, read it in giant gulping banquets, read it alone, read it with support, but definitely, as soon as you can. Read it.

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Me and Will

danica — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:08:11 +0000

Warning: this review gives away the ending.

Me and Will (1999)
Directed and written by Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose
Starring Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose
A Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose joint.

This is not a good movie.

It is a long movie. An unintentionally funny movie. An erratically dramatic movie. A very, very badly edited movie. But it is not a good movie.

Gory Losers? Groinal Lodgings?

Why, if it was so bad, did we watch the whole thing?

I’ll tell you why. Because the cable movie ratings warned us about how it had AC and GL and so forth, and my roommate was convinced that GL stood for Gay and Lesbian.

To be fair, we had plenty of reasons to think that they might, as I think my roommate put it, “realize that they really loved each other all along and then do it.” First of all, it was on Showtime, home of the cornier American version of Queer as Folk and of The L Word.

Secondly, it’s a buddy movie about two hot tough femme women riding motorcycles across the country, which is usually Hollywood code for lesbian. They even code one of them as “butch,” making her “the tough one” and naming her Will, of all things. Why Will? Because she’s butch, I guess. We didn’t really get any other explanation. The other one is named Jane, which at first I thought was just a pseudonym she was giving out. Nope. Her name’s actually Jane.

Thirdly, the only actual city we see on their road trip is San Francisco, in which they spend a ludicrous amount of time considering that they’re going from Los Angeles to Montana. They rave about how they’re going to move there. All right, they’re saying it because hot men are passing them – and there’s a reason they’re passing you, ladies – but then they go into a diner with a ridiculously flirty waitress (played by Traci Lords). We are just getting so many mixed messages here.

The Good, the Bad, the Plot, and the Editing

The plot. The plot? The plot….

Well, there was a plot. I remember it; we drove by it several times. Occasionally we even slowed down enough to see what was supposed to be going on.

See, they’re in rehab. And they hate rehab. And they like motorcycles. And one of them knows where the motorcycle from Easy Rider is, because her dad’s friend owns it.

So of course they break out of rehab, get ahold of some motorcycles of their own, and drive up to Montana to get it. I mean, wouldn’t you?

The rehab angle actually provides much of the movie’s unintentional humor. I watched it with my roommate, who had two years in Alcoholics Anonymous at the time, and a friend of ours who had a year, along with my own year and a half in various other twelve step programs. As my roommate remarked, it seemed like it was written by someone who had a month sober and said, “Oh wow! I should make a movie about this!”

This inspiration, you see, provided the subplot, which is that… well, it’s that Will has a drug problem, basically.

The subplot is supposed to be that Will and Jane make a passionate commitment to each other to stay sober until they find the famous chopper – and then get totally wasted. The movie has a very difficult time sticking to a plot, so this subplot basically turns into “Hey! Addictions sure are tough to shake, huh?” But we do get a lot of accidentally funny moments where one of them, out of nowhere, starts spouting twelve-step slogans, or yelping about “the committee in my head!” or reciting the Serenity Prayer – and then they go right back to their standard “bad girl” personas.

Pacing and Plot Problems

This would be a pretty good plot if it made any sense. I mean, yes, break out of rehab. But how? What are the dangers? Where are the wacky or dramatic chase scenes? How the hell did they get those motorcycles? We don’t know; I mean, we’re only the viewers. We only planted our butts in those seats for two entire commercial-free hours for this movie. Why should we know what’s going on?

I’m not bitter at all.

That’s one example of the terrible editing. We repeatedly go from Dramatic Disclosure to Sudden Resolution without much thought. The editing is problematic on another level as well. For example, when they go to San Francisco – inexplicable as that already is – we are treated to at least two separate montages in which they appear to cross the Golden Gate Bridge repeatedly. It’s not that they like to ride their bikes across the bridge and pay that stiff $5 toll over and over – it’s simple overuse of “Hey! Look! They’re in San Francisco! You know ’cause you can see that bridge!”

And that’s not even the bridge they would take if they were coming from L.A.

Then there’s the amount of time they spend in San Francisco. See? Why would they do this if they weren’t setting us up for that all-important lesbian subplot? Damnit. This movie – like the bad hustler movie we saw afterward, and the really terrible softcore porn after that – has a little difficulty with pacing. There are long pauses, slowly delivered dialogue, and a lot of scenes that just show people walking, or sitting, or putting their clothes on.

Possibly the most egregious examples of the movie’s rocky pacing are in their relationships with their parents. Quite a way into the movie, with no warning and no previous voiceovers, we are suddenly assaulted by the sound of Jane’s voice reading what appear to be cheesy song lyrics. But no: it turns out that she is telling us that Will was sexually abused by her father, and that Will suddenly realizes at this point that she needs to confront him. No sooner do we learn this than Will goes to a pay phone. She calls him, freaks out, hangs up, goes into a bar, does shots, vomits up blood, and they never, ever speak of it again.

The same time and effort are put into the five or ten minute scene with Jane’s mother. Her mom is clearly supposed to have obsessive-compulsive disorder; they play it subtle by not telling us this outright, but they are thwarted by the incredibly over-the-top OCD stereotypes. She twitches, she mutters numbers and counts fish sticks under her breath, she washes her hands every five seconds… they’re not taking any chances that we might not get it. She’s also quite abusive: she screams at her daughter at the drop of a hat, hits Jane’s hand when she puts a drink down without a coaster, and manipulates her shamelessly. Jane apologizes meekly and wipes off the coaster (not the counter) with the hem of her shirt. Yet after five or ten minutes of this cavalcade of scenery-chewing, Jane takes her mother’s hand and has a Meaningful Moment where All is Made Right Between Them.

Man… those two days of rehab must have been good.

Credit Where Credit’s Due

This movie did keep us guessing. It never took the easy solution to a crisis: although the famous chopper was ridiculously easy to get, none of the other plot points were resolved. Will does not confront or reconcile with her father, who we never see. She does not resolve her drug and alcohol abuse problems; in fact, she overdoses at the end and dies. When her boyfriend turns out to have been following her throughout the road trip and she gets back in his car, she doesn’t go back with him; he just comes along for the ride. When they stop to fix one of the bikes and a cop hits his wife with a flashlight, throws her out of the truck, and then Will and Jane try to rescue her and he comes back and assaults Will, they just let her get back in his truck. Nobody gets easy answers, least of all the audience.

The movie also gets some credit because it was written by the two leads, Melissa Behr and Sherrie Rose. One review raved about them; apparently they’ve been unjustly relegated to roles in “exploitation (movies) and cheap TV shows,” and wrote and produced this movie on their own. That’s pretty impressive, and this movie has great potential. Someday, perhaps, someone will remake it — or just edit the version that’s already out there.

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Bookends, chick lit by Jane Green

danica — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 07:15:22 +0000

I don’t know where this book gets off saying “A Novel” on the cover. Bookends is chick lit, pure and simple.

What’s the difference? Well, chick lit books are of course novels, in the sense that they’re fiction, but novels aren’t necessarily chick lit. Chick lit is very specific: it has a female protagonist; the purpose of the story is to hook her up with the guy who the author has, early on, chosen as the obvious perfect guy for her; it’s narrated by the protagonist; and the protagonist has almost no personality, only a collection of fun facts you know about her.

I’ll write later about Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, but suffice it to say that they’re almost universally wildly codependent, with very little self-knowledge, compulsive emotional eating, no idea whether the guy really likes them even if he comes in with “I Really Like You, Protagonist” tattooed on his forehead, and deep shame about themselves and especially their bodies (which are always telegraphed as very very beautiful despite what the protagonist thinks). Oh, and every man in the book is either gay, married to a friend of the protagonist’s, or a future love interest. There are no other options.

This one also can’t tell a story. Jeeezus. The pacing of this book is rocky; it starts out with several chapters about the characters in their early twenties, then rockets forward to the 31-year-old present with no explanation for the early chapters, then much later on brings back the one character who left the group in those early chapters. It’s obvious that she must be coming back, but only because it would be a terrible book if such a pivotal character were introduced and then totally dropped.

The story gets back on track with her return, only to drift off again toward the end as every plot thread has to get wrapped up, often off-camera. I can’t tell you how many of the characters’ experiences are just summarized for us by the narrator. There are times, in the last few chapters, where days and even weeks of intense character development are retold at a breathless pace. Like, she has the narrator tell us that her friend Si is telling us his friend Eva’s life story, and we hear the whole ENTIRE thing third-hand, and then we get this:

“And she really is [fine],” Si told me, in wonder, in awe, and then he said goodbye and put down the phone, because he had the rest of the night to think about what she’d said.

Come on: how would the narrator even know what he was going to think and do after he hung up? It ends up ringing false because (like any good codependent) the narrator has no boundaries. That is, Green is trying to write the story from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, but puts her in the body of a specific character who couldn’t know all this stuff and isn’t the right vehicle for it.

The problem here is that Jane Green has too many great characters with fascinating stories for one book – the way that she chose to tell it. Si’s story would have made a much better book. Or she could have told different chapters of Bookends from different perspectives, letting the overall story unfold as each character played their own part. That would have made an incredible book. Instead, the story is hamstrung by being forced through one rather passive woman’s perspective.

There are also too many stories happening – the opening of this new bookstore, Bookends, which is co-owned by the protagonist and another main character, and even lends the book its name, takes up a lot of time but barely serves to advance the plot at all. It’s a major undertaking, and a major success, and yet there’s no emotional impact to it: we’re told that it makes the other main character’s life very busy, which puts stress on her marriage, but it causes so few problems for the protagonist that it seems pointless other than as occasional comic relief.

So: chick lit. Because of the boundary problems, the Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, and the slapdash writing. I’m not saying that chick lit can’t be well-written, but this particular kind of slapdash fast-paced gallop through a storyline, with little pause for real emotional depth, is characteristic of the genre. I enjoyed Bookends anyway, but I don’t think I would read it again.

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Sunday Salon: Take a Thief, by Mercedes Lackey

danica — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:43:35 +0000

With Take a Thief, Mercedes Lackey has delighted fans and self-abusers alike with another steaming pile of horrific crap.

Think I liked it? Well, I didn’t.

Take a Thief is….

Dear god.

The Plot

Let’s take this first. This is the main reason people read her books, I believe.

There is one thing that Mercedes Lackey does well, and that is escapism. Specifically, it is the boilerplate plot from which all her books are spawned.

There is always someone who had, or is having, a terrible, terrible childhood. There is always some waif who gets rescued by the Throbbingly Beautiful And Incidentally Psychic White Horse and becomes a Herald. Or a Herald who has repressed all the pain and torment of their childhood and is only now resolving it, in the middle of winter, trapped in a cabin with the one other Herald with whom they are destined to Do It, in a howling snowstorm which is the worst blizzard Valdemar has seen since the Most Recent Dramatic Historical Event Which Everyone In This Book Is Referencing.

The symbolism! The electricity! The DRAMA!

People read Mercedes Lackey for the emotional release, just like a good (or in this case, an asstacularly horrible) Greek play. The more tormented the teen, the more they will enjoy Mercedes Lackey. In fact, readers of all ages can dive into any one of her over-italicized creations and thrill to the vindication of the mistreated character du jour.

Most of the biographical blurbs about her specifically note the fact that she had a “normal childhood,” and I’ve heard that she refuses to talk about her normal childhood in interviews. Other than to insist that it was perfectly normal. Yet many of her books involve the recurring theme of some mistreated youth overcoming tremendous odds to become a beloved hero and then graciously forgiving their family.

I’m just saying.

And it is addictive stuff; there is something exciting about the dramatic build-up and release of all these experiences, no matter how badly written. In fact, the worse the better – we don’t want our dramatic orgasm to be all cluttered up with silly things like a cohesive plot!

The Setting

I’m not being entirely fair. There is one other reason I can see to read her books.

She spends a tremendous amount of time in each book simply explaining exactly how every single teeny-tiny aspect of this particular place in her imaginary world works.

This may not sound like a good thing. And it isn’t. But there is something pleasantly hypnotic about it at times. She is the perfect author for any gamer who has ever spent more time fantasizing about creating a perfectly, infinitely detailed society and history than actually setting up a game.

Normally, this habit of hers drives me crazy. She desperately needs a decent editor, for this and other reasons. With proper editing, Take a Thief could have been a really snazzy short story instead of a mediocre novel. Of course, with proper editing, she would have far fewer books out, so it’s not really in her financial interest to sacrifice quantity for quality.

But in Take a Thief, she got away with it a lot of the time. This is one of the few novels of hers in which some of the ridiculous exposition made sense; for example, having seven pages of endless natter about exactly why and how Skif committed each crime did actually add something to the book.

If she could only have omitted every other ten-page stretch of expository obsessive musings and faux-humorous asides….

The latter is one of my main problems with “Misty” Lackey’s writing.

The Writing Style

Have you ever been invited to sit in on a game of Vampire: The Masquerade, or whatever the kids are playing nowadays? And you’re surrounded by people you don’t know that well, or at all, and they keep shouting out things that are clearly in-jokes, which don’t make any sense to you, as if the in-joke itself is inherently funny?

“Look! A frog!”
(uproarious, hysterical laughter all around)

Kind of like the advertising for Napoleon Dynamite, which offered a free watch that said “Iiiidiot!” out loud. I’m sure that’s hysterical to the fans, but I’m left wondering why I want a watch that insults me.

Well, “Misty’s” books are like that. She loads ‘em up with italics, dashes, and exclamation marks and proceeds to make jokes that — well — aren’t exactly funny! Like this:

This was not the sort of atmosphere he’d expect a priest to seek out!

To make matters worse, she elbows us in the ribs like that all the damn time. It’s not just for jokes: any time she wants to make a point, or show someone’s reaction to something, she breaks out the italics and the leftover bags of cut-rate punctuation.

Alberich examined the subject, asked his questions, made his statements, came to his decisions, and left it alone.

If he trusted the person in question.

And he trusted Skif.

That was a very, very strange realization.

And when all else fails, when she’s hammered her points in so hard that the hammer broke, she starts veering out of the universal narrator voice and breaking the fourth wall:

So Bazie had built this thing in the first place?

Best of all is when she does all of them at once:

Even if this one hadn’t actually murdered poor folks, he probably wouldn’t care that his friend had. And my Lord Rovenar was oh, so conveniently away on his family estate in the country.

But wait, there’s more.

The Characters

God help her, they speak in dialect.

Now, in real life, there are many reasons to write in dialect. But to invent her own accents and slang and differences in linguistic structure and then make everyone speak that way is… impressive, and also, astonishingly annoying.

People, in real life, had to fight for the ability to write in their own dialects, the way they spoke, the rhythms they grew up with, and still be published, and not get raked over the critics’ coals. Like Zora Neale Hurston. And this is what Misty does with that:

“Nah, I’ll be doin’ that t’ all uv them, then into th’ bleach they goes, an’ no sign where they come from!” Bazie rubbed his hands together with glee. “An’ that’ll mean a full five siller fer the lot from a feller what’s got a business in these things, an’ all fer a liddle bit uv easy work for ye an me! Nah, what sez ye t’ that, young’un?”

Skif could only shake his head in admiration. “That — I’m mortal glad I grabbed fer Deek’s ankle yesterday!”

And Bazie roared with laughter. “So’m we, boy!” he chuckled. “So’m we!”

It’s a little-known fact that Daw Books had to create a special area of their budget just for replacing Misty’s worn-out apostrophe key over and over.

The Screams Of Her Victims Before At Last Sweet Death Claims Them

I think my favorite thing about this whole wonderful fantastic book is the way she addresses child sexual abuse.

The plot, eventually, centers around what the FBI calls “child sex rings”. Additionally, Skif grows up working in his uncle’s tavern alongside a young woman who is forced into prostitution as well as taken into the proprietor’s bed. This is how Misty deals with them finding out that the young woman has just barely turned fifteen:

“Fifteen!” Skif’s eyes bulged. “I’da swore she was eighteen, sure! Sixteen, anyroad!”

Then again – he’d simply assumed she was. There wasn’t much of her, and she wasn’t exactly talkative. She had breasts, and she was of middling height, but some girls developed early. Wasn’t there a saying that those who were a bit behind in the brains department were generally ahead on the physical side?

And she says it again later:

In the years since running off, Skif had learned a lot about his uncle, and he’d learned that when it came to women, Londer had to pay for what he got. Since he’d already paid for Maisie, it followed that he’d probably seen no reason why he shouldn’t have her first. Not that he’d shown any interest in anything too young to have breasts, but half-wits often matured early, and Londer probably wouldn’t even think twice about her real age if he’d taken her.

See? It’s okay, because he didn’t rape her out of a desire to fuck little kids – he did it because he paid for her! And plus she already had breasts! And anyway, the real issue is that she looked eighteen!

Regardless of what it is that she meant to achieve with this subplot, all it does is detract from her later claim that child sexual abuse is “worse than death.” If Skif really thinks it’s worse than death, he should probably have a worthier reaction than “Oh well! Half-wits got some big boobs!”

That’s quality writing, right there. And, while she keeps sort of obliquely referring to people sexually abusing much younger children, she never lets the characters actually think about it or reference it openly – the entire thing is kept pretty much peripheral to the plot, even when it becomes the denouement of the novel.

Actually, I take it back. My favorite thing about the book is the way that she addresses horsefucking.

Now, she doesn’t talk openly about that either. But consider the following interactions between Skif and his magical pure white throbbingly beautiful psychic blue-eyed horse who “Chose” him:

She paced close to him, and once again he was caught — though not nearly so deeply — in those sparkling sapphire eyes….

He gazed into that abyss, and thought back at Cymry as hard as he could — :Is that the only reason you Chose me?:

Because if it was –

— if it was, and all of the love and belonging that had filled his heart and soul when he first looked into her eyes was a lie, a ruse to catch someone with his particular “set of skills”–

:Are you out of your mind?: she snapped indignantly, shaken right out of her solemnity by the question. :Can’t you feel why I Chose you?:

That answer, unrehearsed, unfeigned, reassured him as no speech could have. And something in him shifted, straining against a barrier he hadn’t realized was there until that moment….

:Skif — do you really, really want me to leave you?: The voice in his mind was no more than a whisper, but it was a whisper that woke the echoes of that unforgettable moment when he felt an empty place inside him fill with something he had wanted for so long, so very, very long –

He rushed to greet her, and as he touched her, he felt enveloped in that same wonderful feeling that had been creeping in all afternoon, past doubts, past fears, past every obstacle. He pulled her head down to his chest and ran his hand along her cheeks, while she breathed into his tunic and made little contented sounds. He could have stayed that way for the rest of the afternoon….

Isn’t that sweet? The pure, soft-core love between a boy and his psychic horse. It reads like the romance novels in the supermarket, the ones that used to inspire my friends to dramatic readings, the ones where people would gasp out things like “So bonny! So very, very bonny!”

Mercedes Lackey’s writing bears every resemblance to a quasi-historical romance novel with a geek twist. She pumps it out at great velocity, with little variation in the basic characters, setting, or plot elements; she uses wildly purple prose at times, and lacks any subtlety in her language; she coyly skirts the edges of any really difficult issues, or treats them with very broad strokes, as if they were dressing for the main characters’ emotional roller-coasters; and she puts most of her literary effort into trying to show off the sheer detail of her fictional setting, impoverishing the characters and robbing the novel of any emotional depth.

However, it must be said that this is not her worst book. Her stand-alone novels tend to suck less than the stories which she tries to stretch into trilogies. So if you must read a Mercedes Lackey novel, this might as well be it.

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Sookie Stackhouse in general, and Dead Until Dark in particular (by the marvelous Charlaine Harris)

danica — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:05:22 +0000

I’ve heard a couple of people condemn this series as badly-written, “trashy” in the bad way. I don’t really get that; I’m INCREDIBLY picky about writing, how can anyone be pickier than me? They must have a different meaning for “trashy.” And for bad writing.

I really enjoy Charlaine Harris’ writing style. Her other mysteries tend to be a little on the depressing (or in some cases just depressed) side for me, but what we now call the “True Blood” series is saved from that by heroine Sookie Stackhouse’s determined optimism.

It took me a while to figure out what Harris was doing that I liked so much, stylistically. I finally realized that she is in touch with the sensory world here in a way I haven’t seen in her other novels or in many books in general. The pacing alternates between action and regular, everyday experiences like sunbathing or taking a bubble bath. Sookie, as the narrator of the series, shares her feelings about everything, often subtly – both physical feelings and emotional ones. Harris doesn’t hit us over the head with “THIS IS HOW SOOKIE FEELS ABOUT THIS GUY,” either; she weaves all these psychological and sensory impressions into the narrative so deftly that it’s easy not to notice they’re there, even as they flavor the entire experience of reading her books.

I enjoy the fact, too, that these are survivor novels. It’s made perfectly clear from the beginning that Sookie was abused by her “funny uncle”. It’s a more active plot line in this first book, but Harris doesn’t just drop it after that; the fact comes up from time to time in later books as appropriate, just as it would in real life. Sookie occasionally gives some thought to how it’s affected her, and we can see more ways that she may not even realize: her self-image, for example, starts out fairly low and slowly blossoms over the course of the books, and she is a 26-year-old (if I remember right) virgin when the books start, which supposedly is because she is also telepathic but can’t be totally unconnected to the abuse.

Fun, adventurous reads, although I will say it gets pretty violent from time to time. There’s always the sense that the good guys will win, as opposed to in real life, plus the excitement of seeing HOW they will win – since werewolves, magic, fairies, and all kinds of other really well-thought-out supernatural nuttiness keeps getting thrown into the equation.

Really, my ultimate recommendation for these books comes from a gut level: no matter how many times I read them, I still just want to read them over and over and over again. There aren’t a whole lot of books that work that way for me, so the Sookie Stackhouse books hold a special place in my heart.

Sidebar: I enjoy the HBO series a great deal too; although they often take extreme liberties with the plot and characters, so far (halfway through the first season – yes, I’m behind) the plotlines still seem very true to the original characters. Cut for spoilers:

(...)
Read the rest of Sookie Stackhouse in general, and Dead Until Dark in particular (by the marvelous Charlaine Harris) (332 words)

LBD: It’s A Girl Thing

danica — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:19:14 +0000

Fair warning: I didn’t actually finish this book. I don’t plan to, either.

A lot of YA (young adult) lit involves dysfunctional parents. As with a lot of chick lit, some of these narrators are aware the parents are crazy, and some seem to just think they’re describing harmless wacky fun. This book, obviously (pink cover! “girl” and girly acronym in the title!) has some overlap with that category; it’s teen chick lit. And, unfortunately, it takes the “harmless wacky fun” attitude toward the parents.

I just couldn’t read it. I was hoping for a fun grrl power romp, which it may be. Hey, the girls want to go to a rock festival, and they’re not allowed, and then their annual school picnic (described as pretty much being a day when they can all dress their skimpiest and make out as much as possible) gets canceled – so rather than do yet another boring kids-sneak-out adventure, they plan their own local music festival!

Sounds fun and empowering, right? But I just couldn’t make it past the first chapter or two. The protagonist – like most chick lit protagonists – has very low self-esteem, and it became agonizingly clear early on that that’s mainly due to her mom’s emotional abuse. The narration treats her mom as if she’s going to be an amusing terror, but that only works if the character is sympathetic and loving when good people are around. Instead, we get classy scenes like this one, where I threw the book down for once and for all (page 43-44 in my paperback copy):

Okay, between you and me, [says Veronica, the protagonist and narrator], what terrifies me most about asking for help is being officially certified “dumb.” Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen. I’ve seen the special stickers they put on your personal files to signify “borderline retarded.” I’ve skated pretty close to this with a few school reports too. Not in cool lessons like English or religious studies, no, I tend to A grade them. I’m talking about maths and science. That’s where I blow, big time. Those snidey little remarks written on my end-of-year report cards really keep me awake at night:

“Ronnie is a capable girl but loses all interest when the going gets tough. Grade: D,” my science teacher bitched last year.

“Pah, that’s what you’re like with everything. You’ve always been a quitter,” snapped my mother helpfully.

“Gnnnngn,” I grunted, grasping around for one really difficult thing in my life I’ve actually finished. And failing.

I am such a loser.

It just killed me to read such a concrete, obvious example of how her mother’s rage was destroying Ronnie’s self-esteem. I mean, when she gets good grades in something, she doesn’t understand that she’s good at it or smart, she just thinks that means it’s “cool” and kind of tosses it aside; when she gets bad grades in something, she’s so traumatized that she thinks it means she’s stupid, or that she may be developmentally disabled in some way.

And she can’t ask for help because if even admitting her grades are bad makes her own mother call her names and shut her down, asking for help must mean something even worse would happen. She imagines that she wouldn’t get help, she would just reveal to everyone that there is “something wrong with her” and get labeled and set aside by the whole world. Because that’s all she’s experienced at home.

No wonder she “quits” when things are too hard – she can’t see any other options. This is typical of the way that abuse survivors are set up to self-sabotage at work, in our own projects, and just in life.

The author is, at least, clear that Veronica’s parents are fighting and that their fighting in front of her is not okay, that it terrifies her – which usually means that the fighting will be resolved later on in the book. When I typed that quote up, I remembered that and regained some hope that the book would eventually come around. Maybe author Grace Dent really got how terrible the mom was, and they would have a heart-to-heart where the mom vows to get help and change her ways….

So I flipped through the rest of it. Here’s what happens: the mom TAKES OFF. Disappears to her own mother’s house. Doesn’t tell Ronnie she’s leaving. Ronnie, who is in the middle of planning a freaking music festival at age 14, doesn’t realize her mom has gone until FOUR days later – nobody, apparently, thinks to talk to her about it at all, including her father. When someone who works in the family restaurant admits her mother has gone, Ronnie calls her and her mom, if you can believe this, goes, “Oh, hello, darling. Oh, so you’ve eventually called me. Have you run out of clean knickers or something?” And rather than being outraged that her mom ran off, didn’t tell her, didn’t call her, and is now being a passive-aggressive bitch about it, what does Ronnie think? “Touché.” GAH!!!!

And then it’s all, blah blah blah, music festival, blah blah blah, agonizing about whether her mom will ever come back, blah blah, and at the veeery end her mom comes back, out of nowhere, no warning at all, and her dad is all “This is the best excuse anyone has ever given you in the whole world,” and the excuse is that her mom went nuts and ran off because she’s PREGNANT and the dad had said they were “too old to have another little baby in the house.” And Ronnie, of course, agrees that this is the best excuse EVER because it means she will be a big sister and hey, who wouldn’t go nuts if they had “a real actual person growing” inside of them. OH DEAR GOD.

I should have expected all this, really, because the book’s dedication reads, “for mam – who lives with the world’s worst teenager”. And usually people who think they were the world’s worst teenager are people who have no perspective on normal child development or on how abusive a family has to be to result in “the world’s worst teenager.” Hey, I work at an outpatient drug and alcohol treatment center for teenagers – I KNOW.

So in short: not worth the pain of reading it to get to the great bits about how she and her friends successfully throw this festival, or the one time her mom says something nice to her about how “competent” she is. There are a lot of other books out there; read one of those.

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Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally

danica — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:23:20 +0000

I really enjoyed this book. It’s the story of a couple who took a year to try to eat locally, as in food grown within 100 miles of them. They take turns writing chapters. I enjoyed:
* the quality of the writing
* the fascinating stuff I learned about food and about the culture and cuisine of the far north of Washington State and the far south of Canada
* the inspiration to explore different local farms and other food producers where I live because it involves so much adventure and connection with the earth

My favorite thing I learned:
* Local food is not the same thing as native food! you can grow a lot of stuff practically anywhere and it “counts” as local. I always bought into the ideas (debunked through their experiences) that there is only a limited array of things that we can grow even here and that the best way to get diversity in what we eat is by having supermarkets ship stuff like starfruit and year-round grapes from all over the world. SO not true.

My main problem with it:
* I can put up with a certain amount of people’s crazy without any evidence that they are dealing with it. But there was a growing amount of crazy coming from one of the authors, to the point where it became its own plot arc. It was about depression, maybe even suicidality, intense shame, you know, the usual. While reading it, I wrote, “I don’t totally trust them to resolve it rather than doing the super-common ([unhealed] addict/abuse survivor) thing of ‘And then it just went away and we never talked about it again.’ We’ll see!”

Well, I was right. And it boggles my mind. I’ve heard, recently, that editors at publishing houses are not for copy-editing so much as for checking spelling errors; my fantasy that they go through the text saying “Well, now, this plot line never got wrapped up, and are you sure this is the approach you want to take with this section of the book?” is, in reality, apparently rare to nonexistent, depending on the publisher.

What this book needed was more of a critical eye on the story as a whole. All the food stuff was great, but the personal stuff was extremely wobbly. And, I have to say, it’s difficult on the reader to go through the emotional rollercoasters of a couple struggling with serious mental health issues, without any open acknowledgment that that’s where we are going or any closure. (It also kind of kills me because early in the book, they openly introduce a “protagonist” who then dies, and they talk about why they brought this person into the book even though their time in it would be so short, and I’m like… so you can notice and acknowledge that? Where was that skill later on?! Throw me a bone here!)

Basically, while the rest of their stories boil down to things like “People are great and quirky all over,” or “There is adventure to be had no matter where you are,” or “We can all eat fantastically well and save the environment to boot,” there is just this one that sticks out, throbbing, sore-thumbly: “Sometimes people struggle together because at least one of them is insanely depressed and really obviously drags that internalized shame around at all times, but it doesn’t really matter because… hey look! Spring greens!! LOOK AT THE SPRING GREENS EVERYBODY”

This problem isn’t limited to Plenty: plenty of other food books, I’ve noticed, feature the Real-Life Protagonist Struggling With Unacknowledged Unresolved Heart-Wringing Shame. Julie & Julia, and The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry, really stick out in my mind as belonging to this category. It’s striking because the food parts are always so well-written here, but the emotional landscape remains so unexamined.

I would recommend this book heartily for the insights into local food, local gardening, into exploration and connection with others, into the joy of meeting strangers and bonding over an apple, into the amazing foods I had never heard of and the journey of eating locally for a year all of a sudden, with no preparation. Just be prepared for a few emotional pitfalls along the way.

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Inspiration

danica — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:11:49 +0000

One of the things I love most is writing not just about abuse and recovery, but about how those themes show up in the media. Last night I was thinking about two books I had been reading (“LBD: It’s a Girl Thing” and “Bookends”, about both of which more later) and just dying to review them on GoodReads and really go off about things like The (Codependent, Abused) Protagonist Of All Chick Lit Novels.

And I realized: that’s what this blog’s focus should be! It should be a book blog, centered around reviews of books (and occasional other media) from a recovery perspective. And within that, I can post other things that are unrelated to books, that are specifically and solely about recovering from shame or having healthy relationships or whatnot.

It’s this blog’s DESTINY.

So I am finally using GoodReads, going through and spitting out my reviews of what I have been reading that really caught my mind. I’ll be cross-posting here, maybe adding content to the reviews, and definitely adding other content here that wouldn’t be appropriate for GoodReads.

Comments and suggestions, as always, are welcome!

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Dollhouse, Episode Two: The Target

danica — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 05:08:06 +0000

Recapping the second episode of Whedon’s Dollhouse while I watch, or live-blogging, or whatever you want to call it in these heady internet days….

(...)
Read the rest of Dollhouse, Episode Two: The Target (2,802 words)

Dollhouse, Episode One: Ghost

danica — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:43:02 +0000

Recapping the premiere of Whedon’s Dollhouse while I watch, or live-blogging, or whatever you want to call it in these heady internet days….

(...)
Read the rest of Dollhouse, Episode One: Ghost (2,286 words)

Welcome to the Dollhouse

danica — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 02:24:53 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been waiting for Joss Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse, with a sort of queasy anticipation for months. On one hand, it’s obviously about government ritual abuse, and it’s a little shocking and exciting to have that portrayed on TV – even if it turns out to be in a subtle, “this doesn’t really happen we swear,” X-Files kind of way.

(I’m torn about whether the X-Files made people more suspicious of government cover-ups, or whether it crossed the line into making it seem more like all such ideas are fiction. I think it went back and forth during its time, but I don’t know what the ultimate impact on people was.)

On the other had, it’s obviously about government ritual abuse, and will I really enjoy watching that? Even if Dollhouse is obviously on the side of the people being manipulated and abused, and the process of finding yourself again?

Well, maybe a little FAQ will help people process this series. Or: maybe writing a little FAQ for you will help me process this series.

What is Government Ritual Abuse?

Simple answer: ritual abuse is any abuse that is connected to an ideology – religious, political, whatever. Genocide, holocausts, clergy abuse…. Government ritual abuse is abuse by governments. Most commonly, in the United States, this includes things like Project Monarch – mind control experiments, experimenting on people general without their consent – but also situations like prostituting children to government figures. It’s scary shit.

How is Dollhouse About Government Ritual Abuse?

So my understanding of Dollhouse is that it is about a secret (non-government) agency, a corporation that programs people to be whatever the client wants. Erases their memories, controls what they think about themselves, how they behave, et cetera. This is eerily similar to what the CIA (according to their own documents – see the link for Project Monarch for more info) tried for so long to do. The goal was to create a sort of super-spy, who could be extremely convincing while also being no threat to the government because everything they knew and believed could be controlled.

This worked to varying degrees; you can never control everything people think, but ritual abuse in general is often all about controlling what a situation seems like so that people are too traumatized and too confused to trust their own experiences and build the consistent, coherent memories that normally let us function on a day-to-day basis. Often, to the extent that this ever worked, it involved creating or training people within multiple systems (what used to be called MPD or DID) to serve various functions for the government without being aware of what was happening most of the time. (And, in fact, a lot of their early experimentation involved explicitly trying to “create MPD.”)

But It’s Not About the Government!

Yeah, that’s true. Which is very interesting to me, that the reality is that the government has done (and could still be doing) this kind of work, and the fiction (which will probably be much more widely disseminated) is that a corporation does it. Anti-capitalist? Pro-government? Hey, I’m just glad this is coming out at a time when Obama, not Bush, is president. Because this is the kind of thing that the Bush dynasty was very involved in, (my fiancee suggests “bunch of douches” as a substitute for “dynasty”) and if we’re going to even imply a sort of support for the government by changing it to the act of a corporation, I’d rather have someone who seems trustworthy in office.

But yes: it’s the acts that are redolent of government ritual abuse, not the organization. Technically, Dollhouse is not about government ritual abuse; but in showing a fictionalized way that those very acts and plans could play out, it is.

At least in theory. Now let’s see what happens on the small screen!

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Addiction Explained

danica — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:54:35 +0000

[I started to write about how being an addict is like being LGBT. Actually, being an active addict is like being a closeted attacked member of the LGBT community; being in recovery has a lot in common with being out and proud. But before I could explain all that, I got into this digression and I'm going to share it as its own post....]

Addiction seems very complicated. In reality, it’s incredibly simple. Simple like gravity. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground. Sure, you can get all obsessive and detailed – what’s the ball made of? How heavy is it? Are we outside? How far away is the ground? What’s the ground made of? Is there wind? Is the ground level? Am I dropping it, or sort of throwing it a little bit? – but ultimately none of that stuff really matters. The bottom line is still that the ball is going to hit the ground. (And I once took a class called Physics for Liberal Arts Majors, which I thought would be all about the lyrical splendor of the universe and which in fact was basically physics for people who hadn’t yet noticed that things fall when you drop them. So I know what I’m talking about here.)

Here is what happens. People are abused. (“How” and “for how long” matter, but so does “by whom.” Pretend I drew you a little graph here where intense infrequent abuse is high up on the chart, and so is living with people who have ever abused you in any way – and living with people who frequently abuse you intensely is especially crazy-making – and we’ll move on.)

More specifically, children are abused. And, since they are children and developmentally are supposed to think everything is about them, are in fact in a molten crucible of diverse experiences which are constantly creating and re-creating their vision of the world, what they learn from the abuse is that they are not worthy human beings. They learn that they deserve shame, pain, and disrespect; often, the bottom line to them is that they are not worthy of life. That’s the message of abuse, after all; that’s what distinguishes abuse and trauma.

Trauma, like falling out of a tree and breaking your leg, or losing your house to a hurricane, is genuinely random and obviously not about you. The only time that people take messages like “I’m not worthy” from trauma is if they’ve already been set up with those messages by abuse. Abuse, on the other hand, carries those messages whether it’s done on purpose or not – and it’s rarely on purpose. Most adults who abuse children think that they are doing their best, that yelling at their kids, hitting their kids, raping their kids, is an example of their shining love and excellent boundaries. Most adults who abuse children are kind of crazy. (Sidebar: it’s not always adults. Sometimes it’s the classmate or neighbor kid or babysitter, acting out their own abuse. Doesn’t make a huge amount of difference, in terms of its effects.)

So, abused kids melt that down. Their molten worldview hardens around “I am not good enough.” It can be conscious or subconscious, but it is there, rock-hard and deeply embedded.

And they do two things with it: dissociate, in any way they can, and choose more pain, because they think that is what they deserve. Which becomes a vicious cycle: more pain brings with it more need to dissociate, which means choosing more pain in an attempt to feel anything, which means dissociating from the feelings, which means worse choices because we can’t really make good choices if we can’t feel the effects of what we choose, (not to mention if we think that we don’t deserve good things), which means dissociating harder, which….

That cycle is addiction. That’s all that you need to know about addiction. It means doing something to check out of our feelings, or our lives. The popular perception is that it has to be something inherently harmful – but the reality is that checking out like that is the most harmful part. (All right, yes, there are drugs that will kill your body and soul faster than checking out. On the other hand, you could argue that people can’t really choose to keep doing drugs that harmful without checking out in the first place.)

Addiction doesn’t necessarily mean beer, pot, heroin, cigarettes, nice recognizable drugs. Just about every addict (abuse survivor) has a whole lot of options for what lets them check out. That’s why Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, has an implicit rule against “thirteenth-stepping,” hitting on newcomers: because so many people put down the alcohol and switch right over to the sex and love addiction that they don’t even realize is a problem. That’s also why there is so much caffeine and cigarette consumption at a lot of meetings. People quit things in the order that those things are killing them, or at least in the order of most to least immediately painful killers. Not everyone can even stand to use drugs to check out: substance addictions have a genetic switch that gets flipped on by abuse, and lots of people lack that genetic component. But process addictions (codependency, emotional eating, sex addiction, compulsive debting, et cetera) are available to everyone who’s been abused. Isn’t that great? In fact, every addict, every abuse survivor, is a codependent, because codependency is all about trying to control the uncontrollable (like trying to control our emotions and histories) – and what else are these other addictions there for but the illusion of control?

There are more details. (Wind velocity. Density of the ball.) On another level, checking out is a way to try to avoid the emotional pain of the abuse, and of beliefs like “I am not good enough.” The flipside of that is that pain tells the body to check out – it presses the same “oh no, terrible things are happening and I have no other options – dissociate!” button that is installed by abuse. And seeking out pain is also a way to try to control the abuse. That’s why people date people who are like their parents – why they choose jobs and relationships and situations, over and over, that don’t work for them. Our brains, deep down, think “If I can get THIS one to treat me right, that will stop all the pain! It’ll erase all the abuse I ever experienced!” Maybe it’s a lizard-brain thing. It seems fine until we get it out into the open and actually give it some conscious thought.

But once you know all this, it boils down to something deeply simple. Abuse a kid, and they learn to harm themselves in order to check out. Abuse kids, and they become addicts.

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The agony of de-flirt

danica — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:38:51 +0000

A friend of mine just wrote, in passing:

So, for instance, I didn’t realize that my roommate, whom I loved, was a dyke, and into me, until TOO FUCKING LATE. I mean, how I could miss that is still not clear to me. I was an ignorant het, is all I can say.

I had the same problem in college. Not, as far as I know, with dorm roommates, but with plenty of other people. Why I missed it so much is pretty clear to me though – I couldn’t have told you this at the time but I had pretty wretched self-esteem, and constantly second-guessed myself anytime I thought somebody liked me or was flirting with me. It seemed worth it to constantly second-guess it, the times I did notice SOMEthing, because (I thought) it would be so horrible if I thought they were flirting or liked me and THEN THEY WEREN’T/DIDN’T. (Translation: I subconsciously shamed myself for thinking anyone would like me, because I was so afraid of rejection that trying to keep myself from even thinking someone liked me seemed like the best recourse.)

And also, I rarely did notice it because I had so little experience of healthy sexuality. Because I was raised with (on the face of it) a near-total absence of any talk, especially sane and positive talk, about sex/flirting/dating, and (underneath) a huge lack of physical or emotional boundaries around sexuality, in the form of everything from my dad just plumb walking around nekkid at night or telling me my mother was “frigid,” to of course flat-out (and well-repressed) sexual abuse. So I never really got the concept of flirting, or of what it might be like when people like each other and want to be sexual with each other.

Actually now that I type that I don’t think it’s true: obviously I spent a great deal of my time with someone who wanted to be sexual with me and who thought that was a great thing. (and obviously, when only one of the people involved wants to be sexual, it’s no longer sex.) I think the truth, which makes even more sense to me, is that I couldn’t afford to, or couldn’t bear to, recognize people flirting or wanting me until I was well away from my family. It wasn’t until I was off in college that I could even start learning what that stuff was like and experimenting with it and testing the waters, and so I missed a lot of what was otherwise perfectly clear stuff.

Funny thing: everyone in high school thought (I was told, *eventually*) that I was a huge flirt because (well this is what I thought at the time) I didn’t differentiate between boys and girls when I joked around – I joked around the same way with everyone. I was like, I’m not going to start censoring that based on gender norms or whatever, just to change what people think of me. In retrospect, the way I joked around was EXTREMELY sexual. I mean, I knew it at the time; I’d sit around in drama class or at lunch talking about how we could see anything as phallic and daring people to come up with something that I couldn’t sexualize in some way.

And a ton of the jokes I made were based on some kind of sexual innuendo. Because while I experienced a lot of bullying in junior high, in my high school people seemed to have matured past that, or maybe I had just gotten away from the kids who had done it, or something. I had my own community of drama geeks I could hang out with all the time. I was finally safe, in high school (and only in school) to – like a small child discovering naughty words for the first time – experiment with this stuff safely. I am so grateful for the other kids in that community who patiently waited it out, or participated in it with me.

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How Do I Know if I Have Repressed Memories?

danica — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:59:19 +0000

I’ve been seeing a lot of visitors led here by queries about repressed memories. Especially over the past few days, seems like. People have come here by googling stuff like…

how do I know if I have repressed memories
can an 8 year old repress a sexual abuse incident?
memory loss sexual abuse
child abuse body memory

And only that last searcher found what they were looking for, if you believe the server stats. That was the only visitor of those four who stuck around and looked at various pages, anyway – but I am not sure whether to believe the stats when they say someone was here for “0 seconds,” so who knows what the other folks did.

So I thought maybe I could address some of that for this week’s Thursday Thirteen!

Thirteen Things about REPRESSED MEMORIES

Yes, an eight-year-old can repress an experience of sexual abuse. Even an adult can repress memories of a traumatic adult experience. Adults are likely, in my experience, to recover the memory sooner than a child would, for a few reasons:
Even an adult in an abusive relationship is safer, better-off, than a child in an abusive relationship, because they have more coping skills under their belt, and more freedom – more options in general.
Adults also have a better-developed sense of what’s normal. Kids, especially younger kids, are still learning what is “normal,” and so they are much more likely to accept that abuse is deserved and standard and unquestionable – even though it’s NOT. (It is, however, pretty common.) So an adult is more likely to notice something like missing time, because they know it’s not normal. They’re also more likely to have friends who are not part of the abusive system, who have strong senses of what is normal, who may point out blank spaces in their memory or effects of the trauma that aren’t apparent to the survivor themselves.
Adults, even those who have had parts of their emotional development arrested by childhood abuse, are usually farther along developmentally than children. Which means they have more reasoning skills to devote to the various clues of repressed memories that might come up. It also means their psyches are more willing to release the experience of trauma, because they know on some level that they are somewhat safe.
Repressed memories are surprisingly common. The most common argument I’ve heard against them is “How could anyone ever forget something so unusual and traumatic?” The answer, as Jennifer Freyd pointed out in Betrayal Trauma, is that people (most often children) repress traumatic experiences when there is secrecy, betrayal, involved: when they have the sense, for whatever reason, that it is not safe to talk about it. When we are denied any other options for healing, we try to protect ourselves by sealing away the traumatic experience – but we can’t seal away its effects.
Repressed memories come in several flavors. We can remember things – any memories, not just repressed ones – through feelings in our bodies (body memories), through emotions that seem to come out of nowhere and be connected to nothing in our everyday lives, through words that come out of our mouths (or our pens) when we had no intention of writing or saying or drawing any such thing, through dreams, through intrusive mental images, through phantom smells or sounds that aren’t coming from the present day, even through full-on surround-sound PTSD-style flashbacks which make it seem as though we are back in the abusive experience. And more.
Usually, it is sort of unreasonably undramatic. Our memories leak out of our psyches in all these more minor ways, waiting for us to put the pieces back together.
How do you know if you have repressed memories? The best way I know of is to look back at your life. What is missing? It’s easy for us to assume that our memories, however patchy they may be, are normal, unless we take time to examine them and compare them to others’.
For example: I always assumed it was “normal” (in the sense, I thought, of healthy – instead of just common) to not remember anything much before age 5. I could name a few memories, but I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be 5 – I had no sense of what my life was like, in general, before that. Even after that, I had some pretty fragmentary memories going on: I couldn’t honestly tell you all that much about any specific age in elementary school, but I knew a lot about what I did in elementary school and that let me overlook not having a sense of really being there for most of it. P.S.: that’s not “normal.”
For a while, I went around telling people I knew that I was taking a poll: if someone told them that they didn’t remember anything much before about age 5, what would they think? It was amazing how many people would say that they’d figure something terrible had happened to that person – and then, when asked when they started having real substantial memories, would quote some age like 5 or 7 or even in their early teens – and insist that there was no reason for it. I’m related to some of those people.
Repressed memories aren’t all Hideous Trauma. In my case, for example, I dissociated a whole lot of regular everyday stuff because what I learned from Hideous Trauma was that it wasn’t safe to be present in my life. Hence the lack of much of my elementary school years. I’ve heard other people talk about having tons of everyday memories of childhood but nothing after, say, bedtime or sunset, or all the school memories but nothing much at home, or just having little patches missing that they almost didn’t notice at first, or missing an entire year or two, or not having concrete memories of summer trips to relatives, or…. Those are more easily tagged as Probably Hiding Hideous Trauma – although there are also people who experience abuse both in school and home settings (for example) and lose most of their time because of that, not because of being generally dissociative.
Repressed memories, both of trivial everyday things and of abuse, can be recovered. I can think of three particular ways off the top of my head. One is to learn about repressed memories, read others’ experiences about them or more literature about how they work, in order to be able to recognize any that have been coming up for you. (I overlooked body memories of rape for years because I didn’t know what they meant – my survivor’s logic was something like “It’s either some horrible STD or nothing, and I don’t want it to be an STD so I won’t get it checked out.” Fortunately, it was not a horrible STD…. And I’ve known one person who was diagnosed with epilepsy and medicated for years, even though they could find no other indications of epilepsy, until he realized that his seizures were actually body memories of electroshock stuff. Which is fairly common in ritual abuse scenarios.)
A related way is, when memories come up (in any form), to see if you have a sense of what was coming next, or what came before, or where this stuff was happening. It’s easy to get caught up in the specificity of just a feeling of abuse or a remembered phrase, and not even think to see if your memory will throw anything else up there. Renee Fredrickson talks about this in her book Repressed Memories. And a third way – and my preferred way – is to work on recovery, even in seemingly unrelated ways. Like via working the twelve steps on abuse issues, or in general. Because working on our stuff makes life much safer and better. And in my experience, not only are memories more likely to come up in recognizable ways when I have safety in my life, but I am a million times more able to just learn from them, deal with the feelings in painless ways, understand everything better, and move on.
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Thursday Thirteen: Two more lists on the way to solvency

danica — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:35:24 +0000

Three weeks ago, for Thursday Thirteen, I made a list of Thirteen Steps I Can Take Toward My Dreams. Because, you know, I have a history of sabotaging myself around work and finances. In fact, here’s a little inventory of thirteen ways that I have had a pattern of sabotaging myself:

I procrastinate because things are too scary;
I don’t market my business because I buy into all this internalized shame that tells me that it’s creepy and invasive to share about it;
I expand too quickly, before I have enough customers even for the original idea;
I pay no attention to how much other work I am doing in other areas, so I don’t scale back to give myself time and energy for my own dreams;
I imagine, codependently, what other people might want my business to do, and don’t balance that with what is actually reasonable for me and still desirable to them;
I under-charge, or come up with what I think is actually a reasonable and abundant price and then offer everyone greatly reduced rates;
I fantasize great ways to advertise and then never put them into place;
I make commitments and find ways to avoid showing up for them;
I spend all my time dreaming about how I want my business to look without spending any time on how it looks now and how to bridge that gap;
I trip myself out, telling myself shame-inducing crap about how underqualified I am or how useless what I am offering is;
I try to start my business cold, without any other funding or income, so that I am distracted by the financial struggle and under artificial pressure to grow it or quit;
I ignore my great resources, from business-focused support groups to enthusiastic friends;
I spend my time on non-income-generating activities, telling myself that it’s ALL income-generating if it is all something I will need when I am generating an income (?!);
I give up too quickly, letting my fear and insecurity crush the project instead of scaling back to a livable, exploratory pace.

So, what am I doing instead, now?

Well, I did everything on that list! (The one from three weeks ago. Not the one you just read!) The scariest, most difficult one was the first one: “Actually tell people I know about what I am doing“. After I made and posted my Google ad, after I revised the entire website, after I resurrected the blog, after everything else, I finally managed to write an email telling everyone what I was doing, and go through my address book, clicking on everyone I knew well enough to share with.

It was kind of agonizing… not writing it, but all the fear and resistance to writing it! All those subconscious messages coming up about how much people will hate me if I tell them about this, if I “pressure them” to “give me money” (neither of which is what is going on there), if I invade their free time with information about what someone they might BARELY EVEN KNOW or NOT EVEN WANT TO HEAR FROM is doing. I managed to meet that insane babble with trust in the people I was sending it to, and in my own process. This is what I wrote:

I have a tendency to not let people know what I am doing, and launch businesses and other big projects without telling anyone, and just assume everyone sort of psychically knows what is up. And then I am like, “Why doesn’t anyone know about my [book/business/move/etc].?”

Well, no more! I am taking the super-daring move right now of emailing all the cool people I know and telling you that I am officially launching my awesome grocery/meal planning business. It is called PeaceMeals, because people can enjoy an hour (or three) of peace instead of going to the crowded grocery store, and also because 10% of the profits go to non-profits that support peace. (Like UNICEF, and Heifer, and PeaceAction.)

Basically, it is awesome: I make a week of healthy meal plans and (for $40 a week, or $60 for the premium plan, plus shipping) send people the meal plan plus all the recipes and groceries they will need for it. Mostly organic stuff from independent companies/farms. The basic plan is healthy; the premium plan is super-healthy because it’s gluten-free, sugar-free, and has more emphasis on protein and veggies.

If you want to learn more, you can check out the website at http://fortydollargourmet.com/peacemeals. There are also free resources there for folks who like to do this stuff for themselves: there’s a free meal planner and a blog where I write a lot of stuff about where to buy good food for cheap, and what recipes I like, and so on. If you are interested, of course you are welcome to sign up for a week or a month of boxes; you can also share this info with any friends who might be interested, and of course you can always just delete it! Anyway, thanks for reading about my life

The hardest part for me was to think of an “appropriate” subject line. Then I remembered that I don’t have to come up with a subject line: I could let my higher power/the Universe/my intuition write it for me! So I checked my gut and it said to title it, “doing an awesome job sharing about my business.” I had my misgivings, but then I thought that I don’t need to obsess about it and be a perfectionist and try to control and analyze it… this is going out to my friends, and I can trust my intuition.

Well, I had gotten I think zero click-throughs on my ads at that point. Now, a week and a half into it, I’ve gotten more click-throughs, maybe three people who made it to the order form, and no orders from the ads. But I’ve had FOUR people place orders from my email!

My little brother was the first one. And then a very good friend of mine. And then my brother also posted about it on this really great green website he loves, and I got another one, and a good place to talk to people about it directly. And then another great friend signed up this morning! Plus, the three people I actually knew all signed up for the more expensive box, which was very exciting.

Plus, before I even got any orders, I got a flood of wonderful supportive excited emails from people who love me and are thrilled to hear about what I am doing, who just wanted to cheer me on and tell me how inspiring this all is. It was both unexpected and delightful. And it’s so great to not just have this support at that time, but to have these emails I can read again and again, and the opportunity to touch base with the people I love some more. This one from Annie cracked me up:

You are an inspiration and a delight! I feel so honored to witness your awesome!! We are great! I love getting to watch you put yourself out there and I love watching the ways that when I show up for myself I can show up for you, and I think it just builds on itself. So, I get to get excited about what you are doing, I get inspired, I do my thing, maybe inspire others to do their own! It reminds me of what I was reading in that Shakti Gawain book today, about the hundredth-monkey!

I paraphrase right here: in 1952, Japanese scientists were studying monkeys, and the monkeys loved sweet potatoes, right? So they were giving the monkeys sweet potatoes, and then one monkey, just randomly, on his own, decided to wash his potato before he ate it. Then another monkey saw him and did it, and pretty soon all the monkeys on this island were washing their sweet potatoes. Cool, no? But it gets cooler!! Then monkeys on other islands started washing their sweet potatoes too! And not because they had any contact or learned about it from other monkeys or anything. It appeared to happen spontaneously!! But it spread to the other monkeys, through the ether or the collective consciousness or whathaveyou!! Neat!

You are my monkey!!! |)

(Isn’t she a delight?!)

I am having fun doing it now because I am moving with the flow and guidance of my intuition. And, although this is a tautology, I’m having fun with it because I’m having fun with it. That is, because I’m treating it as something to be enjoyed and not something to frantically binge-work on.

I wrote a welcome letter and a note to put in the invoices, and learned that I want to send those out right away when I get a new customer because waiting is too risky and doesn’t seem professional to me. And I’d like to come up with thirteen more next steps to do, from my intuition to my brain:

Write a (fun, joyful) press release.
Look through the Food section of the Chronicle today for that column where people can send in local food news, and send them the press release. Also send one to the local food magazine, and another to the View By The Bay.
I realized there are still a lot of people who I’m only in contact with via Facebook, so they didn’t get my email about PeaceMeals; I’d like to either gather email addresses from them and send it, or just go send it to each of them individually as a Facebook message.
Make menus for the second week of July.
Post the menus for the second week of July.
Find a template to make the menus and meal plans look pretty, or find someone else who can do it.
Make (and prettify) the meal plans for the first week.
Do the grocery shopping. (Remember to put a special treat in each box.)
Box up the boxes.
Make some kind of little press release, brochure, or other (more) shiny thing about PeaceMeals that can go in the box. (Something giving the menu for the next week or rest of the month? It would be good to send them a link to an anonymous feedback poll afterward.)
Make nice-looking recipes for the sample boxes (or have someone else do it.)
Pack the sample boxes up for the several foodbloggers who are getting them. (If you’re a foodblogger, I might could send you one too – comment or email me!)
Print out the shipping labels and schedule a pick-up by Friday.

I also want to make a clearer spending plan for the business, but that is slightly less urgent.

Not too bad, right? And I believe that wraps me up for then. I am having a hard time trusting that I will get any more customers after that, but that’s just the crazy-fear-as-a-result-of-abuse talking. I don’t have to figure out where my customers might come from or when I will get them or how to get them; all I have to do is what is set down on my plate each week. It’s all about trust and following the guidance of my intuition, and having fun doing things that I love. Thanks for witnessing my awesome continuing journey!

Sunday Salon: Cody’s Books Felled By Abuse At Last

danica — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:53:26 +0000

Cody’s on Telegraph

Originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes

Cody’s Books is a famous and beloved local chain that began in Berkeley in 1965. It’s been struggling for at least ten years, I think, despite (or, in my opinion, because of) trying to expand across several cities to at one point three whole locations. On Friday, with very little warning, it closed its final location.

It’s tempting to color this in as a story about multinational conglomerates crushing local chains, or about the painful losses caused by an ailing economy. But the fact is that Cody’s struggled with the same circular, self-sabotaging addict behavior that is so familiar to many survivors.

I’m no expert on Cody’s Books history; I’ve only watched and read about the drama for the short time (12 years) that I’ve lived in the area. But in that time, I’ve seen them shoot themselves in the foot over and over, each time crying out to everyone who will listen that they are just victims of gun violence.

First, they opened their Fourth Street location, a nice big store in a swankier part of Berkeley than their original spot – and, when it naturally drained some traffic from the first location, they complained loudly that their decreased revenues there were because of the homeless people on Telegraph Avenue. They began hustling the neighborhood and the city to “clean up” Telegraph, increasing the police presence on the street and instituting new policies trying to keep homeless people away from the area around the store.

The San Francisco store opening came next – an odd choice at a time when the business was already struggling financially. It stayed open for only 18 months in the high-rent, high-profile downtown location. Owner Andy Ross mortgaged his house to open the San Francisco location: a basement-level local bookstore, with just the door and sign at street level, in an area that caters to tourists who want the familiar and the visible.

When it hemorrhaged money and closed, Ross again searched for someone to blame. He seemed baffled by the possibility that any big store in the busy area could fail: “In spite of the location and the size, it just didn’t work. I can’t interview the customers who didn’t come. The customers who did come liked the store.” Well, that’s all there is to business, right? You see if the people who become your customers like you, and if they do, then you should make a profit? You spend all your money on a fancy spot and wait for it to pay off? No?

In the end, Ross concluded, the killer was… construction of a nearby Barney’s. Even though they chose not to stay open through the end of construction because they weren’t sure it would make enough of a difference.

That store closed April 20, 2007. All that was left was the Cody’s Books on Fourth Street, which – depending on your viewpoint – either closed or simply moved to Shattuck Avenue in April of this year.

APRIL.

The Shattuck location was open for TWO MONTHS before its abrupt closing. This was the most shocking development of them all, and the most telling. Nobody knew that the store was going to close. There were no press releases sent out; no signs announcing its departure; no inventory close-out sales; no attempts to find a new owner or new investors; and certainly no attempts to do anything differently.

It’s shocking because when the original store on Telegraph closed, the community was up in arms. People begged them not to close. Every newspaper, both the daily and the free weekly papers, wrote about it – often more than once. There were letters to the editor, calls for action, and a huge closing event where people came all day to pay their respects.

Which means that Cody’s had options. They had a huge fan base to call upon: not only whatever customers they normally had, but also the many bibliophiles and radicals all over who had fond memories of the store. They just chose not to call on that community at all.

The funny thing is that when the San Francisco store closed just over a year ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “the Fourth Street location is thriving and Ross said he plans to keep it going,” and quoted him as saying, “The Cody’s brand lives strong in the East Bay, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.”

It’s frustrating because the store, inasmuch as a store can be, was the victim of addict behavior. It suffered from the classic signs of addiction, which of course are also classic signs of abuse. The Chronicle’s article about it today had a telling quote:

One local Pulitzer Prize winner, Berkeley author Michael Chabon, said of Cody’s closing, “I think it’s a terrible shame. It was a wonderful bookstore. It’s painful, sort of like watching someone suffering from a chronic illness painfully and slowly die. (Cody’s was) part of the fabric of Berkeley, the social fabric and commercial fabric.”

It was very much like that, and the chronic illness killing it was abuse. And, of course, addiction – untreated abuse – is a progressive disease. If you don’t deal with it, it will get worse and worse until it kills you. This is not only true for drug addicts or alcoholics; any abuse survivor who does not have a way of dealing with the effects of that abuse will have an increasingly numbed, deadened, painful, difficult life until they can begin reversing that damage with the tools of recovery.

There was even a twelve-step program for Cody’s Books. Business Debtors Anonymous is a sub-group of Debtors Anonymous which provides lots of clarity and guidance about what does and doesn’t work for people in business. They have a huge emphasis on being clear about spending, assets, business plans, agreements, and detaching from drama with customers, competitors, and employees. It seems as though Cody’s management was missing a lot of those tools.

There was the tunnel vision, that special form of denial where people look at everything as an isolated incident in a desperate attempt to make it controllable and deny the big picture.

There was the constant attempt to pass the buck, the refusal of appropriate responsibility for anything that was happening. “Appropriate” because it’s quite common for abuse survivors to feel tremendous shame and guilt for things that we’re not actually responsible for – while continuing to feel like powerless victims in our lives because we have no idea how to set boundaries, take care of business, or reclaim our power. And because we want to find proof that what happened to us is not our fault, and misguidedly look for that in our present day instead of in the past. It’s the homeless people’s fault! It’s because there’s not enough parking here! It’s because of the construction! It’s because of the internet! Because of the chains! Because the darn students aren’t buying their books from us anymore! Because people don’t read!

I read business books and business blogs like they’re chick lit, and let me tell you: from a business perspective, all those things are challenges, not business-killers. So revenues dropped from $30,000 a month to $10,000 a month between 1990 and 2000 – so what? As long as your doors are still open, that’s an opportunity to take inventory of what you could be doing better, and to come up with some really exciting and innovative changes.

Powell’s Books is a fantastic, if over-used, example of this: like Cody’s, they had a huge store and a huge following before the internet came along. And the market changed, and they changed with it; now they have a huge internet following, and more thriving stores. They evaluate what is working for them, and change what is not, and try new things, and evaluate those too.

Surprise: this corresponds exactly to what people in recovery do. It’s just like the twelve steps, where people learn to take inventory of what has and has not worked for them and make it right, without beating themselves up along the way.

Then there was the search for a quick fix: moving stores around, closing stores, selling the business, mortgaging the house, trying San Francisco, anything but change what they were actually doing within the business.

And the relentless negativity that goes with searching for someone to blame. They were literally surrounded by thriving independent bookstores: Moe’s Books, Half Price Books, Shakespeare & Co., Black Oak Books, Pegasus Books, and many more, in a community that still supports as many as three bookstores on the same block. And yet, they had this growing chant of complaints about how terrible everything was, which rose eventually to drown out even their ability to do business.

And, my favorite, the all or nothing thinking – either we have to be doing the same thing we were doing before, or we have to just close everything down and run. They could never seem to see any other possible solutions than keep trying what they were doing or close down.

This spiraled out of control, by the end, to the point where they left with a store full of books and a pile of paperwork on the street. On the street!

I was there today. I came with three friends, in part specifically to go to Cody’s. (Which, by the way, was in what we thought was finally the perfect location for it: right next to the university campus, on a huge street with lots of bookstores but none right next door to it, with tons of foot traffic and enormous windows to show them what it had, right next to BART and lots of bus stops, next to the Berkeley City College campus as well….)

We were surprised to find the still-full bookstore locked, with printed-out notices on the front doors explaining that they had shut those doors forever on Friday. And we weren’t the only ones who were surprised: during the course of hanging out on Shattuck for a few hours that afternoon, we saw at least a dozen other people try the doors or collect in front of the store staring at it in shock, at several different times. There must have been dozens of surprised would-be customers who went through this on Sunday alone. What the hell was Cody’s doing that meant that that kind of foot traffic wasn’t enough to support one store?

I’m guessing that at least part of it was the former owner’s lust for opening new stores. (Ross sold the business in September of 2006 but stayed on as president, which – along with the store’s continuous bad choices – makes me suspect that not much changed at Cody’s with the sale.) When the San Francisco store closed, the Chronicle quoted Ross as saying, “This is the second store I’ve had to close in two years. This is not what I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to open stores.” While clearly at least some of that cost came out of his pocket, I suspect that the business took a series of financial hits too, hits it was still trying to overcome.

From BDA’s Signs of Compulsive Debting in Business:

We confused our personal finances with our business finances and drew from one set of funds to cover the other.
We lived in a state of self-deprivation for the sake of our business. (Ross had to sell his mortgaged house after the SF store closed.)
We did not or were unable to ask for help when we needed it most.

The most intense sign of the chaos, to me, was that stack of papers. One of my friends spotted a dumpster full of boxes as we were about to leave, and ran to snag them for her upcoming move, with my girlfriend’s help. A long while later, they returned with news: the boxes were full of discarded paperwork from Cody’s Books.

So, not only did they not even bother to pack up the books and clean out the store either before or after closing it, but they for some reason spent some time throwing out papers first? How very fishy.

Upon investigation, they found a wide selection of different kinds of paperwork. There were records of orders the store had made, of advertising and ad prices. There were in-store memos and recent store newsletters. There was at least one whole box of personal correspondence from customers, complete with names and addresses as well as any other personal information the customers had happened to give them. And there was another entire layer of sealed boxes, which they speculated might have been the bookstore’s way of getting rid of more sensitive information. Of course, in a way you don’t need to have more sensitive information when a person or organization is already telling you at top volume how crazy it is.

So that’s Cody’s coda. After decades of passionate work with books, they chose to go under unannounced, unnoticed, and unsung. Maybe over the coming days we’ll see a community response to their closing, or more explanation of it, or some kind of good-bye from the long-lived store. Otherwise, fans will have to get their closure from the awareness that the beloved bookstore was just another victim of the same patterns we see all around us every day: the effects of abuse in our society.

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Sidebar:

danica — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:41:15 +0000

That last post didn’t seem any longer than the ones I usually write, and I don’t think it was. It took me about 40-45 minutes to write. And then I dropped it into Pages to save it because I didn’t have an internet connection right then, and it was almost FOUR FREAKING PAGES LONG.

How DO you guys read all this?

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Growing roses from manure

danica — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:56:39 +0000

I’ve noticed feeling more anxiety lately. Anxiety is a good signpost, for me, of what’s going on. Precovery, I had really high anxiety levels. I used to take kava to manage them. It was pretty good, but the thing about anxiety is that it fucks up our baselines. I mean, I didn’t have a consistent everyday experience of what “calm” or “healthy” or, god knows, “safe” felt like. I didn’t even identify myself as having an anxiety problem, and I certainly didn’t want to go TALK to someone about it, or mess around with horrible pharmaceutical chemicals or what-have-you. I just knew that sometimes I had a lot of stress, sometimes for no particular (apparent) reason.

(And I think that having a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, as an everyday part of life is pretty much a guarantee that there’s past trauma or abuse behind it. It’s a very simple, powerful, connection: trauma and abuse teach us that we’re not safe, and often teach us to disconnect from the conscious knowledge that we’re not safe since there’s nothing we can do about it as children. And then we go around as adults, hypervigilant, reacting to everything with a lot of extra fear, anger, shame, and other emotions left over from the trauma, but often unable to make that connection because by then it feels so damn normal.)

And, after a while of working on my abuse issues, learning to trust that I was safe and learning to let go of what wasn’t mine to try to control, I realized that I hadn’t even thought of taking kava in months. Recovery is a wonderful thing….

Lately, over the past few days, I’ve noticed that I’m feeling much more anxiety than normal. Which is to say, “any.” There’s an undercurrent of tension, of stress, going through life with me. I realized that it is coming up as I start taking the final steps on that list I made. I’ve been doing all those things that I would have to do if I celebrated my awesomeness, if I stopped blocking my goals and dreams out of fear.

Now I’m down to the last few steps to make it all concrete. I set up my AdWords account. I wrote my little text ad, which currently reads something like this:

Meal Plans At Your Door
If you shopped here, you’d be full
by now! Recipes & groceries.
fortydollargourmet.com/peacemeals

I think I’d like to also test one that says:

Save On Groceries
If you shopped here, you’d be full
by now! Ingredients & meal plans.
fortydollargourmet.com/peacemeals

(You should see Target’s ad when you search for online groceries. The headline is something hideous like “Shop On Online” – and it doesn’t get better from there.)

I found out I can use a bank account to pay it, even a savings account, instead of linking it to a check card (which I don’t have) or a credit card (which I don’t want to use). Oh, and here’s a fabulous story about following a higher power’s guidance and how things work when I go with the flow: I had tried many times before to set up an AdWords account, back when I was both terrified of starting this business and trying to force it to happen. And I had always stopped when it wanted a credit card (don’t know if they just didn’t allow bank accounts yet or if I never went far enough to see) or gotten stalled out somewhere.

And then yesterday, I was reading my email on my cell phone and found an email from AdWords that offered me $50 in credit (which turned out to be $55, with $5 covering startup fees). I immediately started setting things up, using my little cell phone browser. It didn’t work all the way – I ended up at a page that had no exit button – which, as it turned out, was perfect because I hadn’t read the email closely enough to realize I needed to copy down the special code to enter to get that credit. So if I had been able to push through and do the whole thing, it would have cost me money. I went back today, though, on my work computer, and set the whole thing up with the code. And I realized that in my Gmail account, the email that offered me that credit was already in the trash.

I don’t even know how I saw it on my cell phone. It just appeared, by magic, right when I was ready to start setting up advertising.

So, it’s both exciting and validating when things just start coming together of their own accord like that. And I’ve been pushing through the fear, just a little, to set up advertising and plan all the meal plans so that they’re delicious and realistic – the last, biggest steps. And it’s these steps that (in my mind) make or break the whole thing that are so scary to me.

It’s not that the steps themselves are scary, although I notice that I want to make them scary, obsess about details and throw up roadblocks to each one. It’s just this anxiety – fear – comes up underneath. And this is a good thing, because I know that if I am willing to sit with the fear and to explore what it is telling me, it will release all that energy that it is currently sucking up and I will learn all kinds of stuff I can use here.

So what is the fear saying to me, deep in my subconscious? If I half-listen, and brainstorm:

You’re not good enough. People are going to see you. You’re not prepared for this. You’ll be swamped. Then people will get mad at you. You’ll hate doing it. You’ll be so sorry you even tried. You’ll die in an avalanche of full boxes. They won’t find your corpse till weeks later, under a mountain of orders that you never got paid for. You’re going to dig yourself into a hole you can’t get out of. You’ll hate it and not be able to let go because it will be all that makes you survive. If you quit you’ll starve. If you don’t you’ll die from hating it so much. You’ll be hot and sweaty and people will hate your food and they will cancel their orders and never tell you why and laugh to their friends about you. Nobody will like you. Nobody will tell you why they’re not ordering from you. Nobody will ever ever want this. It’s too complicated. It’s confusing. How will they ever choose to want this? They will run away because it sounds weird. They will want more control over it. They will each have four thousand special orders. No one will just take the regular box. It will take forever to put together and you’ll be trapped in it. You’ll be perched forever, indeterminately, on the edge where you desperately need other people to do this but you don’t quite have enough money to hire them. You will be scrabbling and scraping and living hand to mouth and running around like a chicken with its head cut off and going crazy and everyone will buy it only if it makes you crazy. Everyone will ask you a million questions and you will be spending all your time answering them or feeling guilty that you didn’t and losing customers because of it. You will hate it hate it hate it but you can’t sell it and no one will let you close it down because you will feel so guilty about it if you do. You will struggle on forever trying to keep this tiny birthday candle-sized light alive in the world and never ever getting what you really want.

It’s the old binary: the extremes of “either it will be so successful that it will be far too much for me” (which is why I’m only allowing 15 regular customers or 60 one-time customers a month to start, so that’s taken care of) “or nobody will come and that will mean that I, personally, am a failure.” Or worse: just too few people will come and it will somehow mean that it’s not worth my time – even though it is paying work.

Clarity is the antidote here, at least in part. In fact, I seem to remember that there is something in twelve-step literature that says along the way, “Clarity will replace fear.” Vagueness? “Clarity will replace vagueness, faith will displace fear”? It’s in the promises, the things people get from, when all is said and done, working on their abuse. Faith is turning it over, accepting the reality that we are safe right here and now (and learning to go with the guidance of our intuition, and make safe choices, as our part in that).

Once I have done that, I can employ clarity to get to the reality of the fears. For example: If I am worried that I will be overwhelmed by the amount of work, or that it will not pay me enough to justify that work, I can figure out how much I am willing to work for, listen to my gut to see how many hours it is reasonable to work on this a week, and crunch some numbers.

I’d like to spend no more than three hours a week grocery shopping, which I think would be plenty – because even if I am shopping for 15 boxes full of food for 15 people a week, it’s all the same ingredients. So it’s not 225 items, it’s 15 heads of organic cabbage and 15 pounds of organic locally-grown peaches and 15 small tubs of organic fresh-ground almond butter, for example. (I could get a shirt that says “I Feed Hippies”.) (It’d be funny to make one with that hungry hungry hippos game that said “Hungry Hungry Hippies,” too. Especially what with 10% of the profits going to peace-working non-profits.)

And I’d like it to take no more than an hour to stuff and seal and label all the boxes. I know that the post office has some deal where they will pick up your packages to mail for you, but I don’t know where along the line I’d be paying them if I did that. That’s something to look into soon. I may have to drive them all to the post office during open hours, which sounds like much more of a pain on my end: loading 15 boxes into the car, driving there, trying to figure out whether I had to unload and drag each one in and then push them along while I waited in line or what. Research here is definitely a must.

That’s pretty much it, other than making meal plans. Which I’ve been doing over the past couple of days, with the realization that I need to offer a premium plan that has even healthier food instead of trying to cram that into the lower budget that I came up with when I first started the business in December or so. Now I eat even better, and I want to be able to offer that to people, but not in a way that bankrupts either me or them! I’m thinking that there will be the $40/week option and then a new $60/week option.

Making a meal plan for the week could take an hour. I guess I could even afford for it to take two. So, I just have to look at my profits and make sure that I don’t work more than about six hours, in order to keep my hourly wage at a reasonable level. (I’m running the damn business; I want to be making at least $25/hour. Half of me thinks “that’s crazy! don’t tell people that! they won’t want to buy anything you sell!” Which is the shame/fear talking. The other half is like “That is ridiculously low for a business you own. Your shame is showing.” Yes. I know it is!)

And, of course, I can’t control whether the business succeeds or fails; I can’t control whether even one person signs up for it, or what happens at all. All I can do is whatever is reasonable to work toward my goals, move with the flow instead of trying to push the river, and reap the benefits of being aware of and processing my way through all the old crazy ideas from the abuse. There really isn’t any failure available there.

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Sunday Salon: Escaping from our escapes

danica — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:56:27 +0000

Mrs. S. said something I really identified with in reply to my last post. And I realized that my comment was turning into a whole blog post of its own, so I decided I’d better do it here. We can do lots of Sunday Salons, right? I don’t see any rules about this

So, she had written:

I have a similar issue when I’m travelling. Like tomorrow I have to spend about 3.5 hours ona train – so what should I read. The book I want to read next is heavy – so not good for travelling – so I need to pick another – but what if I finish it? Then I need a spare one – or what if I don’t like either of them once I’ve started?? EEk.

Now this is why I want to buy a Kindle… then I’d have 200 books in my pocket and no stress

Exactly! That’s the exact issue! I don’t think Kindle is the solution tho, at least for me. I mean, it’s one solution for that particular problem… although if I had had Kindle I think I would have then freaked out about whether any of the 200 books it had on it were going to be What I Wanted To Read or not.

The problem, for me, was… basically a lack of serenity. Not trusting that I could sit without books. Not trusting that I would feel okay if I didn’t have something to use to check out. It was a total carryover from using books to survive in childhood. I used them to escape bullying (and got bullied for that!), I used them to have my own life outside of my dysfunctional family, I used them to find my own voice and write about what happened to me… they were a great escape valve, but there was a point where I hadn’t yet truly escaped, where I was still clinging really hard to the books.

I think that there are layers of escape from abuse. There’s actually getting out, of course, but even after leaving abusive relationships or situations there’s still a lot more to go through to get the abuse out of our heads. Because it’s natural to internalize it to some extent. Especially as children. And often we get out of abusive adult relationships without knowing about the internalized stuff from our childhoods that brought us into an abusive relationship in the first place. And often we internalize a lot more of an adult partner’s abuse than we otherwise might in the process of trying to make the relationship work. Adapting and adapting and adapting to a partner (or boss, or friend, or whoever) who isn’t meeting us halfway. (and how much more so as children, when escape is so much harder?)

I think a lot of readers are like me: we have many many reasons to love books, and one is that they were a great escape. And when something saves your life like that, it’s hard to let go of – and it’s also hard to trust that it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t think I set out consciously to Not Need Books All The Time, in any kind of planned way. I set out to escape the abuse in my head: codependency, shame, control issues, dissociation. I worked on my trust issues, and learned how to tell who was trustworthy. I learned what my boundaries were and how to set boundaries with others. I learned what I really liked and disliked and what I felt at any given moment. I learned how to turn things over when I had done whatever I could to change them (or when there was no need to do anything). I learned to listen to and follow my intuition. I learned how I had harmed myself and others as a result of my abuse and to heal that harm so I could trust and love myself. A lot of things just fell away in the process; compulsive reading was one of them. I still read a lot; my relationship with reading has just evolved.

And that’s the kind of stuff that Life More Awesome is going to be about. Near-daily writing and weekly challenges for making our lives more awesome – in part, how to set boundaries, how to trust ourselves, how to love ourselves, how to deal with feelings and shame and control issues and all that other crap that gets in the way of truly enjoying life. That gets between us and serenity, so that we have to work around it, carrying around extra books and extra work and extra beliefs that don’t end up serving us. Taking those big rocks out of the stream of life.

The first challenge will be posted soon….

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Sunday Salon: The anxiety of booklessness

danica — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 01:36:36 +0000

Wisteria commented a while back about how “you never want to run out of something to read. My biggest nightmare. Imagine the anxiety on top of anxiety. Yikes!!!”

I resemble that remark. Or at least I used to. Back in high school, I used to have red marks on my shoulders every night from my backpack. Not the kind of red marks that come from wearing a watch that’s too tight, which fade away quickly. Red marks that seemed to be worn into my skin because the damn thing was so heavy.

I just couldn’t let go of books. My backpack usually had a ton of scrumpled-up papers going back to the beginning of the school year, covered in chocolate stains, a couple of different bars and tail-ends of chocolate bars, some smashed soda cans I had rescued for recycling (I also had, for a while, a serious soda habit which got to the point where I was drinking caffeinated sodas to relax….), a couple of binders and school books, and then at least three books I was actually reading.

There’d be the two books I was in the middle of, and the book I wanted to read next, and then… what about that book in a totally different genre? I might want to read that today! These ones aren’t appealing to me that much right now – I need to make sure I have that one on hand! And those two over there, they’re both really different and I might feel like reading them. And what am I going to do if I don’t have them when I want to read them?! In they go, to join their friends The Books I Finished Last Week And Forgot To Take Out.

It wasn’t just high school, either. It was like that in college and into adulthood. Especially on trips, local or long-distance. I remember going – underage – to a bar to see Fairy Butch’s cabaret show, and getting teased about how horrifying it was that I came in with my backpack, looking like a little junior-high kid dropping by after school. I was like, “But I have to have my backpack! I bring it everywhere! What if I NEEEED something?!”

That was the key, for me. I was terrified of not having something I needed. Not having the book I wanted to read when I wanted it. Not having anything on hand or at home that I wanted to read. It wasn’t just the backpack: I put tons of energy into making sure that I would have Something To Read. I spent a lot on books, bought them compulsively, hung on to them even if I had never read them and didn’t really like them. I HAD TO have books to read. They were my favorite way of checking out, after all. What was I going to do if I couldn’t escape when I needed to?

Or anyway, when I thought I needed to. I slowly became willing to experiment with leaving the bag at home sometimes, with sometimes just bringing one book with me, with noticing what that was like. I found that the reality was that I never used most of what I was carrying around, and that I could always amuse myself if I had down time without a book on hand.

What really struck me was how much fear I had around not having the right book to read. I was scared that I would be struck with the urge to read something I didn’t have with me and then I would be sad. Obviously this is not about what it seemed to be about. I mean, that’s not terrifying; it’s not really even sad. It’s just a minor disappointment if I’m caught in the middle of a really good book I don’t have with me; not having a book it just occurred to me I want to read is even lower on the chart.

What was really happening was that I was just terrified of my feelings, and because I was using books to escape my feelings, I was terrified of not having the right book to read. Like they were magical and the right one could protect me. Which is how it seemed, since if I couldn’t get into the book I had – like if it was no longer one I wanted to read – I would just try to force myself to push through it and feel tons of buzzing anxiety. Or not read it and feel the buzzing anxiety of not knowing what to do with myself. Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to go pay attention to what was happening inside me!

Funny thing… now that I’ve learned how to feel my feelings, and sit with them, and become willing to do that, books are totally optional. They’re awesome and I still read a ton, but there are even times when I consciously decide not to pick up a book or turn on the TV because I’m having so much fun just sitting still and being with myself. Now that’s recovery!

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Super Recovery Quest: Making Life More Awesome

danica — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 04:31:48 +0000

I am preparing to start the blog challenge/carnival/meme/throwdown of a lifetime, over here.

It will be called LIFE MORE AWESOME (in a direct challenge to all my perfectionistic control-freak grammar bugaboos). It will involve weekly memes and daily (or at least semi-daily) posts here about related topics. The weekly meme will vary: it might be a quiz, or a series of personal questions, or a writing prompt, or an art project. (I’m going to be running an art therapy group for tweens for six weeks this summer, so it’s possible a lot of it will be art projects.)

But no matter what it is, there will be two common threads:

1. Every post or project will have something to do with making our lives more awesome. It might not be immediately apparent why or how, but it will be totally life-changing.

2. Each meme will be something you’re invited to share (or share about having done) on your own blogs that week, and you’ll get kickbacks beyond whatever you personally get out of doing that work.

Usually, the point of stuff like this is that you get to meet other bloggers, get a little more community, and also that more people discover your blog. That’ll be a part of this; I think I’ll post weekly round-ups of everyone who’s shared their stuff, and I’d like to make an RSS feed where people can read any post that’s part of Life More Awesome.

But also, I’m thinking about doing contests. So, for example, maybe everyone would get to score points – like, one for every comment on a LMA post here, one for every weekly meme they participate in, one for every comment they post on someone else’s meme that week, one for helping spread the word with a LMA badge on their blog or something – and people could win prizes at the end. I’d like to do something like give prizes for highest number of points, highest number in each category (most comments vs most posts vs most comments elsewhere), and also for a randomly selected participant or two. Maybe even for most participation in each of the TWELVE parts of… what I want to start calling a quest. It’s a quest now!

A quest for AWESOMENESS!

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Thursday Thirteen: Grownup Fun

danica — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:03:01 +0000

Someone in our youth group at work asked me last week, “What do grownups do to have fun?”

It brought back vivid memories of having the same question myself. I didn’t care about or understand adult life when I was a kid, but as I faced young adulthood I started wondering. What did grownups do that was so special? Weren’t they supposed to get to have so much more fun and do such cooler things than kids? What was I going to get to do? When was I going to get invited to the party?

I think this is a huge part of the cycle of abuse and addiction. I mean, there’s even a whole 12-step program devoted to people figuring out how to have fun and joy in their life: Workaholics Anonymous. Basically, as I understand it, it works like this:

Abuse, and dysfunction, separate us from ourselves. We get separated from what we feel, and need, and want, when it becomes clear that those feelings won’t be respected by those around us or that those needs and wants aren’t going to get met, for whatever reason.

Where that gets mixed up with addiction is when we try to fill that hole between us and our needs/wants/feelings with something else: TV, work, drugs, food, sugar, sex, whatever. Our needs – and that pretty much invariably, in my experience, includes our need for fun, for fulfilling, joyful experiences – continue to go unmet. And on top of that, whatever we’re using instead is turning into an addictive spiral that puts more and more space between us and our feelings. Which makes it harder and harder to know what we actually want and get it.

I used to have the worst time figuring out what my hobbies were. I would look at all those online profiles, on dating sites or journaling sites or wherever, that asked me what my hobbies were. And I’d just draw a blank. I knew I liked writing, but that was about it – and mostly I wasn’t writing, anyway. And I didn’t want to put “reading” or “watching TV,” because even then I knew that to me those sounded like the most boring, passive “hobbies” ever. I mean, I liked them, but weren’t hobbies supposed to be interests that had some active part in my life? Maybe if I were MAKING a TV show….

And I just couldn’t come up with the time or energy or interest or know-how to do anything different. I was just marooned out there without a good sense of what I wanted or how to get it. Which is a pretty common stage of abuse or effect of abuse, I think. It’s a natural step after leaving the abusive situation – it’s the “So… now what?? Isn’t my life supposed to be different?!”

I thought I was going to make this a list of things that I think are fun. But I also want to write about how I got to the point of being able to identify fun things for myself and do them. So many choices! I’ll do them all eventually, probably this week, of course…. Fun things first, I think. I realized recently that I was looking at a free day and coming up with tons of things I wanted to do, things that were fun and interesting to me and which I actually try to do regularly now, and I thought: OH! HOBBIES!! Here are some now: tune in later for the next installment of this story!

1. Gardening: messing around in the dirt, watering, watching things grow
2. Preserving: making stuff out of what is growing!
3. Being in nature: barefoot usually, listening to birds, meeting trees, seeing crazy plants and animals and insects and places I never knew existed
4. Cooking: all kinds of stuff, anything I ever wanted to eat and never believed I was capable of making – and things I invent myself
5. Writing: like now!
6. Painting: especially fruit and plants
7. Drawing: whatever comes to mind
8. Yoga: I like this a lot, and I was doing it about every day before I started this job! I am very bendy.
9. Learning about abuse and addiction: and working on my own recovery, which is a constant string of mind-blowing realizations and discoveries and excitement
10. Dancing: especially in my own living room
11. Playing with my cats: they are each insanely individual, loving, bizarre geniuses. also: very very soft.
12. Reading: yes, it’s true. and it seems more of an actual hobby, like, more ACTIVE than watching TV
13. Hanging out with my friends: especially doing karaoke, playing board games, going out to eat, wandering around stores looking at shiny things, and talking about stuff.

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Facing Abuse

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LBD: It’s A Girl Thing

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Dollhouse, Episode Two: The Target

Dollhouse, Episode One: Ghost

Welcome to the Dollhouse

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Thursday Thirteen: Two more lists on the way to solvency

Sunday Salon: Cody’s Books Felled By Abuse At Last

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Sunday Salon: Escaping from our escapes

Sunday Salon: The anxiety of booklessness

Super Recovery Quest: Making Life More Awesome

Thursday Thirteen: Grownup Fun