BongWater20. Cancer survivor. Meta-physics enjoyer (heavy on the physics, I keep as close to science as I can without being a scientist). I've been around since at least the '70's
Back in the 90's, the anti-racist position was that we should "not see color" in hiring, promotions, friendships and support for others.
That was a noble thought, but it was immediately co-opted by the right so that it was "racist" to mention color at all and white people played along for decades while the right demonized the poor (of any color of course, but predominantly Black), immigrants (from any country, but clearly and specifically those from non-white majority countries), single mothers.... wait.
I think there are more white single mothers than Black ones. So why are single mothers included? Is that because they really AREN'T seeing color?!
No, it's because they hate women who are not dependent on men almost as much as they hate anyone that's not white.
So now as we're firing up for Kamala Harris, women and men are gathering groups of their "in groups" including white women and we are recognizing FINALLY that we are WHITE. We are not the default color and the rest of the world is BIPOC.
Being recognized as your skin color is not racist. Some of us may not look like what our ethnicity is, but we all get treated like our skin color brothers and sisters, don't we?
The problem was that white men could ALWAYS organize themselves for the benefit of one of their own BUT THEY CLOSED THE DOOR. No one could see what they were doing. And all they did was create laws and policies that kept women and BIPOC out of rooms of power.
Our Black Women/Black Men/Latino Women/White Women for Kamala Harris were open forums for ANYONE to see. But only the in group could participate on a call directly addressing that in group.
If there was a Knitters for Kamala call, would you think you should speak out if you're not a knitter? Same thing.
We're in a moment in history that is about to elect our first woman President, but we are also in a moment in history that is blowing up institutionalized racism. We have so far to go, but we need to fight within our own in-groups and get people to understand that "not seeing color" IS racist and we need to fight TOGETHER as defenders of liberty for all.
It's commonly repeated that your first thought is the way you were raised, your second thought is who you are.
It's also commonly repeated that your thoughts do not define you, your actions do.
I don't disagree with either of those, but I think they both let people off the hook WAY too much. Because the fact is, if you think that bad thing first, there's a reason. Yes, it's likely the way you were raised, but if you go WTF, Me, that's not okay! to a thought, but don't later sit with that thought and go "Okay, what's that about? Why do I have that thought in the first place?" then you're allowing the thought to live on in you.
It's smaller, sure, and it doesn't show much in everyday actions, but it still lives there. Saying it's because of your upbringing may be true, but not confronting that thought and following it to it's root is doing yourself and everyone else a disservice.
When I first started doing this work regarding ingrained racism (but the work needs to be done around everything, this is just how I figured out how to begin to undo it), it was tough. I resented that Black women found me more dangerous to be alone with than a white man. Then I listened to Black women and understood. And because I understood, I wanted a cookie!!
But I knew that was dumb, so I didn't ask for one.
Then I traced some thoughts back to some REALLY ugly racist opinions that were living in me without my conscious knowledge and I was honestly kind of disgusted with myself. Then I found more and I was shocked. And every time I found another one, I wanted SO BADLY to go to some of the Black creators that I follow on social media in order to LEARN and do the work and tell them "Hey! I'm so good at the work! Look at this ugly racist thought I found!"
But I didn't because those Black creators already know about my ugly racist thoughts that I don't show. That's why they're doing the work teaching those of us who claim to want to listen.
Then I questioned why I kept wanting to post on their socials and tell them how good I was. "I'm one of the good white women!! Look how anti-racist I am doing the work!! LOOK!" And I realized it's because I wanted to be their friend, even though we don't have much in common and they have shown no interest in being my friend, they just want to teach me to be better.
And it eventually sank in. All of it. So much of my "anti-racism" behavior was because so many Black women are cooler than me and I want to be accepted into their world. Just like racist people think other racists are cooler than them and want to be accepted.
But what I have just begun to understand is that being a white American woman, our culture has told us that being super nice will get us whatever we want. A man, a job, a gift, sympathy, empathy, understanding. But only if we're super nice always. And it works! It works very well in fact.
And we white American women can get very very angry when being nice doesn't get us what we want.
And that's when the demon comes out. Sometimes for good - like fighting white men to be allowed into the halls of power. But very often for bad, like when a Black woman points out something relatively small that we do that's harmful. We get defensive, we get angry, we start calling names and saying stupid terms like "reverse racism" and "women should stick together".
Yes, women should stick together. But why are white women so unwilling to listen to Black women when they tell us how we are being harmful to that solidarity?
Anyway, so next time you see someone doing a thing and you have THAT kind of thought that you push away, go back later and ask yourself where that thought came from and examine it. Figure out where it lives in you and go after it with the intent to kill. Most of us will never get ALL of it out, but doing to work to actively - not passively - fight it will make your life better and could possibly help to make the lives of other women better as well.
I started putting birdseed out with one of those feeders that stick to the window and got TONS of little thrushes and wrens. But what I REALLY wanted to attract are the crows (I long for my own crow army) but they're not interested in regular seed and are kind of big for the feeder I have.
So I started putting raisin bread pieces, raisins, and nuts on my window sill.
The crows, bluebirds, and mockingbirds LOVE IT!! But they're mean motherfuckers and fight each other on my sill all the time.
I love it, but I don't think the crows will ride for me....yet.
I'm on medication for generalized anxiety - like a lot of people - and occasionally still need to use other tools to overcome it when I do something that triggers anxiety in a less general manner.
So I'm sitting here thinking about something I did wrong at work that might cause a slight disruption, but is generally not that big of a deal.
Except to my anxiety.
So I'm square-breathing and tapping and finally it hit me "Is this anxiety just ME looking for more temporary relief (i.e. nicotine)?"
And when I realized that I was really just jonesing for nicotine, the anxiety fizzled out quite a bit.
I went through a whole period where I was defending nicotine (not smoking, just nicotine) and while I stand by the fact that vaping and patches and lozenges are MUCH safer than smoking, they're still addictive. Just not as physically damaging.
So I'm thinking about making this a real blog and posting frequently.
As I was considering this, I kept thinking how I would deal with ugly anons and haters from my past that will use my fandom stuff against me.
Then I realized that I always do that when I think about doing something creative online, I think solely about who might hate me instead of who might love me.
I had a sudden memory of someone I haven't given a thought to in 15 years. And I started digging around in my head for clues to that period of my life, I remembered several things I had forgotten about
A Pagan Festival I went to in North Georgia in the late 90's
My hippie-Pagan chiropractor that was amazing and his very odd girlfriend that had primal scream sessions with clients in the space next door to his office.
The Whole Foods on Briarcliff when Whole Foods was still new and cool and hadn't been aborbed by the Borg.
Sevananda co-op grocery store in Atlanta and how I used to just haunt that place and the New Age/Pagan/Wiccan shops and how wonderful they smelled.
And the hundreds of books I read about spirituality and healing and how much BULLSHIT was fed to me... along with some pretty decent life advice.
Took a damn long time to figure out which was which.
But most of all, I was just... I barely remember that time period. It was several years of my life and it's so vague instead of being a clear part of my past that I can link my present to.
Getting old is kind of weird. You feel like you've had the most ordinary, boring life imaginable, but thinking back. I got stories man. I did some stupid shit, some kind of amazing shit, and I've met phenomenal people along the way.
I've had a really interesting life and I had no idea while I was living it.
I came across a wonderful video of an atheist answering the question "What will you, an atheist, say to God after you die?"
She was SO eloquent about the failures of the Christian god and how unreasonable it is to expect any of us to believe, but it reminded me of how that kind of failure was explained to me.
When I was much younger, I got into the New Age stuff and was a true believer for a long time. So they got to answer questions that the Christians wouldn't.
One of those questions was "Why do bad things happen to good people?" Good question, right? So the New Age-y take on it is that at a soul level, people decide with love and gratitude that there are things they need to experience in the next life and someone else matches with them to help them experience it.
'Like what?' you ask. Like a person wants to know what it would be like to be tortured, so another loving soul agrees to be the monster that tortures them. Kind of like BDSM if there was no safe word and you don't remember agreeing to anything.
Anyway, there's more to it than that, but hopefully you get the gist.
And I believed that. Because it was the ONLY way to continue believing in some kind of benevolent higher power and still be conscious of the suffering around me.
But since I'm a decent person even without any religious rules to follow, when I tried to justify my own poor behavior by saying "well, on a soul level they wanted that" I just couldn't buy it, I felt like shit. There's nothing holy about hurting someone. So I decided that if their souls need to be oppressed and abused for the experience, someone else could do that. I'm not gonna play. And I didn't.
Now that I'm a full on 100% atheist, sometimes I remember the "answers" to these questions about god and it infuriates me that so many people choose to think that way just to make their own actions less abhorrent.
Everyone says it's good for you, common knowledge really. And most of my life I've been pretty flexible so every month or three I'd do a little yoga then forget and a few months later do it again and all was well.
Now I'm old and sometimes my lower back yells FUCK YOU! at me for standing up or picking up my 10 pound dog, so the whole "occasional" part of stretching wasn't doing the trick.
So I have discovered that if you move as many parts of you in a circle as you possibly can at least 5x, you will shockingly find that things hurt way less and it doesn't take much time or effort.
Things to stretch by rotating in a circle:
Head - aim for a gentle, full stretch in all 4 directions for 5 circles, reverse for 5 circles. Then go sit down and feel good about exercising.
Lower Back - put your arms above your head, bend to 90 degrees and rotate just like you did for your head yesterday. Gentle full stretch foward, to the right side, to the back, to the left side. 5 times. Then the other way. All done, go get a smoothie and relax.
Arms - Remember middle school? Hell yeah! Both arms at the same time, 5 small circles forward, 5 small circles back BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE! 5 big circles forward, 5 big circles back. WHOOSH! That was a workout! Go take a nap, you've earned it.
Legs, Feet, Hands too. Same principle. Fingers, toes and any other dangly bits might be pushing it, but go for it if you're into that!
I know I wrote this in a joking manner, but I'm dead serious. If you will stretch your major appendages every day - taking less than 5 minutes, it will go a LONG way towards making your body hurt less if you have ordinary aches and pains.
Then when you don't hurt too much, you can maybe do a little more, but that's up to you.
I will never get over how weird it feels to have tragic and emotional chapters of your life where you just also still go to work, and the grocery store, and see funny videos online all while feeling such paralyzing fear and heartache
The "new normal" lasted about 8 months. I got really skinny and was profusely complimented by everyone. I'm sad to admit that I enjoyed that part of it.
Then in May 2019 I got sick. Really sick. I had already arranged to work from home as needed with my boss months prior since my stomach pains could be so bad sometimes and it had become a semi-regular thing. But I was still working every day.
That May, on a Monday, I was too sick to work. I'd had a pizza - damn the lactose torpedos! - that weekend, so I figured that was the issue. So I called out Monday. Also Tuesday, which I hadn't done ever without notice. Then I had to work Wednesday because we were moving our office and I was in charge. I made it about 2 hours and I looked and felt so bad that they sent me home.
I took a nap and still felt horrible, so I decided to go to the local Urgent Care. Somehow I got in my head that it was appendicitis, don't ask why. So when I got there and told the receptionist what I thought it was, she turned me away, saying they didn't have the equipment for that. She suggested the ER.
I will never forget the moment. I sat in my car in the parking lot of an Urgent Care center debating whether to go home and sleep it off or go to the ER and spend thousands of dollars on what could be nothing (like the last time I was in the ER - yes I'm in the US).
I almost went home. I didn't want to spend that money. I had been saving so diligently. But I had it. And I could go.
So reluctantly I went to the ER and apologized profusely for bothering them.
It was a slow night so I saw a doctor pretty quickly. I remember texting my BFF to pick up my dog please because the doctor was keeping me there for a while.
What I didn't know is that I was in sepsis and had been for 36 hours. I probably would not have lived if I'd gone home that night.
After the hospital, I saw my GP and he recommended I see a gastrointestinal specialist. The same one that had given me a colonoscopy about 2 years before after my prior GP found a small amount of blood in my stool. The doc at the time said it was just hemorrhoids from my chronic constipation. Here's the thing though. I didn't have hemorrhoids that bled or caused any discomfort at all.
So I always will wonder if he was just fucking incompetent or was it a strange coincidence and unrelated? I'll never know.
Anyway, I went back to that guy and he listened to me talk about my abnormal poops and my incredible abdominal pain and the hard lump that seemed to never go away in my sigmoid colon and agreed that I had IBS and did not examine me except for pressing on my stomach and and did not recommend another colonoscopy. He gave me some meds that didn't work and he didn't follow up with me and I didn't follow up with him.
Definitely a point in favor of incompetent, yeah?
Anyway, so life went back to "normal", kind of, after that. I still had chronic constipation, but it didn't really seem to affect anything, so I just ignored it. The gut pain was still frequent, but infrequent enough that I could live my life pretty normally.
But my perception of normal was getting skewed.
In utterly unrelated events, I'd been having joint pain in my hands and wrists and pretty much attributed it to getting old (I was 53 in 2018), but one day I remembered randomly that white sugar can exacerbate inflammation, so I tested it out and cut out as much sugar from my diet as I could. Holy shit!! It worked! I was eating too much sugar and it was causing - or increasing - the inflammation in my joints. I went back and forth for a few weeks and while I won't tell anyone what's true about their bodies, in mine, sugar directly affects my joints for the worse.
I tell that story because you'll recall from last time that I had suddenly become very lactose intolerant, while I'd been just lactose meh my whole life. So now I cut all dairy and all sugar out of my diet. Guess what happened? I lost weight.
Now I have never been fat. I've never even been heavy or chubby, but as I hit my 50's I had relaxed any moderate efforts I used to make concerning my weight and I was quite comfortable gaining a bit with age.
But now, I was losing weight. Just when I had stopped stressing over gaining, it was coming off fast. I attributed it entirely to cutting out sugar and dairy and the fact that because of my "IBS" more and more foods were off the table for eating.
I just kept thinking that I'd find the answer, that there was a trigger and if I could find it, the pains would stop.
My "normal" had become eating toast and scrambled eggs every day as the only thing assured not to make me sick and constant tests to see what would and wouldn't.
I've been wanting to write down my experience with cancer a few years ago and I think now is a good time to begin.
For about a year and a half, beginning in February 2018, I thought I had IBS. I know it started in February because I was at a friend's house watching the Superbowl and she made this cream cheese dip that I could NOT get enough of. And that's pretty much all I ate that night. I didn't drink.
The next morning I had to call out of work I was so sick, so I immediately self diagnosed as lactose intolerant (I've always known milk would upset my stomach, but I'd never had trouble with other dairy products).
In May or June of that year, I had been severely constipated, so I did the nature girl thing and ate my weight in kale and cabbage. Bad idea. My stomach felt like I had swallowed knitting needles and they were trying to go point first into my intestines. I suffered through terrible pain for hours thinking it would fade away. Until finally I called the overnight number for my doctor's office. The on call guy told me to go to the emergency room. So at 6am I called my bestie across the hall and she, the angel that she is, cancelled meetings and drove me to the hospital while I was crying and shaking in pain.
I got pain meds and I got x-rays, but as far as anyone knew then or now, it was gas and just too much roughage. That's when I decided I had IBS.
I'm a 58 years old and I just realized that ever since I started being comfortable identifying as non-binary, I also got more comfortable wearing pink and earrings and typical "girly" things that I've avoided for years.
I think because for the first time in my life, I'm not performing femininity for others.
“Other religions are not Christianity wearing a different hat” and “All religions have flaws and are not above criticism” are both statements that can coexist.
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