#abuse issues

[disassociation-culture-is]

dissociation culture is not feeling a thing and going about ur day everytime your parents are fighting. no panic. no fear. just pure apathy.

-🫁 (could i take this sign-off?)

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[disassociation-culture-is]

TW: ABA, ableism, abuse || Autistic dissociation culture is being forced to dissociate from a young age because you were put through ABA and they punished you for having sensory overload

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[uschi-the-listener]

Odd duck

Maybe I will never know

and maybe it’s all chaos anyway

but

and here’s the kicker

I can face anything

because I faced things

instead of having childhood

like a kid.

I know things

and don’t know things

but you can’t shock me

and the reason for my existence

why I didn’t die

when I should have

again and again

maybe the reason

is so I can hear you

and bring something new

to life.

I know things you don’t,

and likewise.

I think we have something

to share

and I think it’s a real thing.

Give it a chance.

I dunno.

I have pretty good instincts

and I’m always on guard

all betting aside

if you’re there,

I’m here

Could be important

or chaos.

Welcome.

Take the risk.

[itssuec]

New Year Blessing

Psalm 30:2 says, “Lord my God, I called to you for help, and you healed me.”

As we look forward to a new year we can know that the Lord our God is Jehovah Rapha, the Lord my Healer. He knows the deep hurt, pain, and suffering that we have experienced and will bring the deep healing we need to be able to be all that He created us to be.

As we seek His healing, through confronting the issues and…

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[kivablog3]

Two Pieces: “Everybody Knew” and “The Right to Be a Girl”

TW: domestic violence, violence toward animals/hunting

This post has two of the pieces I’m working on right now (hence the name), I haven’t “cleaned it up” since it will all change. But I wrote about what happened to me as a kid, which is new, to say the least, and this is my blog so I’m posting what I have. 

Everybody Knew 1556 wds

“Don’t be so ill towards me!” my grandmother used to say when she was admonishing me for saying things angrily to her if I didn’t want to do something. about whatever. We’re talking eight years old, around then, when she was trying to civilize me. Mom taught me grammar and composition, and manners, but Memaw taught me how to treat other people. She was gentler with me, they both were until Pepaw died in 1969, around the whole gender thing. They never admonished me for wanting to play tea party with those little plastic tea sets, I was forever losing cups and saucers and soon would ask for a new one, and they’d get it for me. I also liked to carry Pepaw’s lunch pail and pretend I was an electrician too, which was one of the photos from when I was little that they kept. Or at least, the ones they showed me.

But they both knew, Memaw certainly knew, that my mother had raised me as a girl, that I had for all intents and purposes been a girl, and that de-girlification was really hard on me. She’d paddle me, that’s what they did then, but she never said, “Don’t let me see you cry” or “Stop crying” or anything like that. She knew that most of those photographs from 1958 to 1960 were gone, the ones of me in a dress. There were those 8mm film cans I found in the top dresser drawer one day, three of them, which was apparently actual film of me as a kid (!) and electrical tape around them, the woven kind, and you can’t open them because it will ruin the film if the light hits it. Why? It hasn’t been developed. Why not? Can we develop it now? Well, we don’t have a projector or a screen. Can we buy a projector? Borrow one? And you don’t need a screen to show a movie, you can hang up a white bedsheet, you just need a flat surface to show the film, I just want to see what I looked like….

The cans, of course, had film of me in a dress. Probably a lot of me twirling around until my skirt flew up, I got dizzy, and fell over giggling. At any rate, that’s the only thing from being a girl that I can remember. Aunt Nancy clued us in on what our mom was like after she had passed in the 90s, and I had been out as transsexual for three years or so and seemed pretty determined about it. She told my sister, when she went to visit her in Texas in that huge house in Farmer’s Branch we went to every Thanksgiving, driving around the golf course like forever before we got to their house. It was on a street with a funny name.

Basically Aunt Nancy said, “She may feel that way because to start with, she was raised a girl, at least with her mother.” And for some reason I was so fucking happy to hear that. Studies, research, indicate it’s much more complicated on a medical level, explaining why almost all kids raised in the “other” gender get irritable when they hit puberty if not before and demand their “own” gender back. But clearly not me; I really had just never stopped being one, and it was apparent to everyone around me. I just didn’t quite know I wasn’t one anymore, even if did stand up to pee (and so I was like, what the hell was that about? why do girls have to sit down? Again, no real explanations were forthcoming.) I used to love showers, bridal or baby (I wasn’t really clear on the difference), those were so much fun, and all girls because that’s how it worked. One time, a fiancé had stopped by and a relative rushed to the door and basically told them to go away. The energy changed when he showed up, changed suddenly, then went back when he left. I used to go until they told me I was too old to go because I was a boy.

And so on. Aunt Nancy was my nice relative. Nice to me. I think she must’ve felt bad for me because she was empathetic and could tell I was unhappy as a boy. She could tell, and she was always very sweet-tempered anyway, which I can’t say for most of my mother’s relatives. She’d let me hang around the kitchen when the women were making the Thanksgiving dinner, while her husband, sons, and whoever else it was, watched the Texas A&M game after the Cowboys game. So, Cowboys, Aggies, amen. When the Aggies took over the TV, the men hollered for however long the game took. Then, finally, we could eat.

They were Aggies, which let me tell you may be different now, but to an 8 y.o. they looked like a cult then. They were the tough school, the military academy (along with Agricultural & Mining? clearly their mission changed at some point) and all that crap. They were AggieAggieAggie, Aggie this and that, the way some ex-Marines couldn’t seem to stop talking about “the Corps” all the time. Other Texans told Aggie jokes the way people in other parts of the country would tell Polish jokes (remember, we’re talking Sixties here). You didn’t want to be in the living room until the damn game was over. So I just kind of watched them make food, and tried to look inconspicuous.

Everyone knew. All those adult relatives of mine, all were sworn to secrecy. No one talked about it, least of all my mother the gender cop (and abuser, but that was later on in life). I didn’t understand why some of them would get so worked up over me doing or saying something they thought was girly, or standing there looking like a girl. “You’re not a girl, you’re a boy.” Why did everyone keep saying that? Always an admonishment, always something I was doing wrong, fell short of being able to do, failed at. I might do well in school, but I was terrible at being a boy. Dealing with other boys was actually the main problem with trying to be one while in school. You didn’t want to get stuck in the bathroom with one of the mean ones between you and the door.

None of them ever hit me, they’d’ve been expelled; but always threats to do it “after school,” sneering insults about what a queer I was and I acted like a girl and did I want to suck their dick (good god, no, is he nuts? why would anyone do that?). Being girly was both wrong in itself, because it was supposed to be contemptible to be a girl, and it was of course extremely wrong if you were born with a penis. There was a lot of running away during recess, and I did get put in headlocks occasionally, but the point was always really to humiliate me. To make it clear that I was Disgusting!, as Donald Drumpf would have tweeted, if we had social media then (that would’ve been intolerable; at least when I went home, the abuse from other boys necessarily stopped).

Everyone knew. Every relative, they all knew. I never did, the one thing I must never find out, they were probly thinking, is that I used to be a girl. The thing most important to root out of me was everything that looked or sounded feminine. I never understood why it seemed so fucking urgent to them, like there was a danger I wouldn’t be a boy when I grew up. I’d be “queer.” They had to avoid that at any cost. They were basically thinking, “We have to undo the damage that Carolyn did to that boy.” That was why my mother said to me, thousands of times, “You have to be a man!” like it was up in the air, whether I was going to be, when by then (say, age 15) I always thought, “I have a penis. How can I avoid it?” And why does she keep saying that?

Everyone on Team M in Texas, and a lot of the people on Team W too, felt the need to enforce this unwritten invisible omnipresent set of rules, what [[ in a documentary I haven’t actually seen yet and really don’t want to ]] has been called the Boy Code. To extend this unpleasant but useful metaphor, I was in constant multiple violations of the Code just by existing: I walked wrong, I talked funny—being smart didn’t help—I didn’t even understand the rules of softball, or baseball, and I really wasn’t clear on the difference, why was the smaller ball harder? Why didn’t they show softball games on TV?—much less not being any good at the game itself. The only sport I was any good at was tetherball, which you could play with girls too, without any of the Playground Monitors telling either of us we were violating gender norms while playing and therefore someone could get hurt (girls) or I wasn’t even supposed to be there in the first place (e.g., me playing hopscotch, not that we played it much anyway, was a no-no).

I didn’t understand the rules of the fucking Boy Code; I was supposed to have absorbed them by osmosis from the surrounding culture, like the rules of softball or even how to catch one. As for football: “You go long, got it?” I did get a lot of aerobic exercise.

>>>>>> RESUME

The Right to Be a Girl story fragment 1244 words

It always felt, not like it was something I wanted or needed or aspired to. It feels like something that was taken from me, I kept thinking/feeling. Because I was also politicized by the infamous 1972 Democratic Convention—I was 14, I thought it was fascinating, even entertaining because no one knew what would happen next—so once I started thinking in terms of politics and law, once I started secretly reading those radical feminist books when they turned up at the branch, what I felt most of all was this intense certainty, at the core of my being, where the idea of the feeling of the little flame that was me, the me that kept me sane through the abuse years. I just kept saying to myself, “My right to be a girl was taken away from me. That’s how it feels.”

A fierce definitive unapologetic sense of a right to be a girl, for real, since it was clear I was in trouble by then as far as what was happening to my body. I couldn’t bear to change into shorts for PE (gym class) in front of other boys, even just people seeing my underwear—boys seeing it, seeing me vulnerable-er. I never went into the shower, I couldn’t bear to be naked there and just the idea of seeing the other boys naked made me feel sick. I hated that room more than any other place in school. It was like normal rules didn’t count, it was like they were speaking an entirely different language. “Shoot the shit”? What does that mean? Sitting around talking? It was bewildering and scary, I always hated being in all-male spaces once we were teenagers, and had managed to avoid them mostly up until then. [Footer]

[[ Footer: I’d just skipped an entire year of gym the previous year, in the 8th grade, and yes, you can fail gym, you just have to try. The Attendance Office ladies let me hang around and didn’t say anything about it. I sold pencils. ]]

Whatever it was about Y chromosomes that made the others different, even or especially the others—apparently there were a few—who transitioned and were angrily excluded from Womenspace for ideological reasons, partly the old essentialist argument wrapped in sociology that you can’t reverse having been socialized as a male. I was different. I didn’t know how or why, but I had a right to have been a girl, to have grown up a girl, to be socialized like a girl, but someone had taken it from me. It was stolen, it felt like, and I never stopped feeling that way, it was in my heart. A right to it, but someone took it away.

It was why I spent so much time in the library, kneeling at 301.4157 and thereabouts, looking for two things: something about gay people that would explain why I was like this inside (everyone seemed convinced they were connected somehow, and based on little or no data) and books by lesbians explaining radical feminism and the need for excluding males so we could figure out what it was we really wanted and needed. I was all for excluding males from spaces, but I wanted to be inside when the doors closed. Apparently some feminists really hated transsexual women, said they weren’t women at all and also no matter how hard they might try or how much they might want it, they could never do it right and their presence would disrupt the energy in an all-women setting, and they don’t really want it, they’re deluded gay men who really [insert 70s orthodox feminist/psychiatric explanation]. It was the original essentialist argument. That, and I’d never had a period. I had never particularly wished I could have them, really, but apparently they did stuff with the blood in their rituals. Toward the end of the 70s it became clear the witches seemed particularly opposed, evidently in good part because of the menstrual blood thing, which was a shame because I really wondered what their rituals were like even though seeing blood made me feel ill (another girly fuckup on my part, for which I got ceaseless crap from men when I was a kid whenever it came up. Was considering titling this “don’t be such a girl!” since I heard this [[ 100s? ]] of times.)

I looked at photography books, at tough, independent women, who didn’t need men for anything because they were lesbians, who were building an alternative to the legal and practical subjection women had labored under for 10,000 years, at least. Women at this festival in Michigan (why Michigan?), not having to wear bras or even tops, not having to wear makeup or dresses or those fucking shoes. I remember one image that stayed with me, a muscular woman wielding a large stick. The caption said she was maintaining the fire pit. I didn’t know what a fire pit was, but I was in love. They were awesome, they were fighting back, it was a historic moment. And, yes, those tough muscular independent topless women looked so beautiful to me. It was what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a lesbian.

Part of my mind knew, as I read and thought and wondered and drew, that this was all perhaps wasted effort on my part, if I could never ever become one among the many. I didn’t care yet, though. I imagined a Lesbian Nation in the future, an SF idea that obviously I got from Jill Johnston’s book title. The LN would be a refuge for women of any orientation, and it would fight on behalf of oppressed women in the world.

It wasn’t clear to me where it would be—modules in orbit? Mars? Where could you go to claim the space needed for independence?—and instead of actual stories with characters in them I drew things, and the stuff I wrote were little bits from the future, like newspaper articles or discussion of LN internal politics. I tried to write stories with people in them, dialog, plots, beginnings and endings, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t draw very well, but I drew uniforms and spaceships and insignias, imagined strong indefatigable (women more or less like Xena, to provide a 90s pop culture image which is easy to visualize). They could beat the crap out of the enemy.

And for me, that was men. My mother may have been nuts and a hopeless pill addict and a secret drinker, it turned out, she may have beat me and my sister, but I never associated her with women per se. My allies, when I had them, had always been women. It wasn’t women who seemed to hate everything about me, from the way I walked then to the fact I could read a book. It wasn’t women who tried to twist me into something repellent to me. It wasn’t women who took me to a hunting lease and made me kill a bird, or almost, so I had to watch my stepfather whack its little head against a rock until it stopped making peeping noises, and I knew I didn’t dare cry at this horror. It was men who did these things, and said I should be like them. And so, I hated men. I had no reason not to.

[theweirdwideweb]

I’ve been thinking a lot about my intimacy problems stemming from domestic violence. I always feel lonely. Always! Even in the presence of the people I love the most. There’s this howling loneliness inside me, like being a bombed out building instead of a woman with friends and family who love me. I think it’s because although I can give love, all the love given back bounces right off me. I can’t feel it. It doesn’t reach me. I feel unloved and alone all the time not because I AM, but because my heart is underneath 3 tons of bricks where it’s dark and quiet. Maybe this is why I fall in love with people who don’t want me—my love isn’t conditional on whether it receives anything back.

[heaven-is-my-hell]

Stay Ridiculous, Teen Wolf

So, for most of season 3 and the lead up to season 4, I've been trying to work out just what it is about Teen Wolf that has the ability to send me into an occasional rage. Because let's be real, Teen Wolf is a ridiculous show. It's fast paced and fun, with an array of characters that most of the time make no sense whatsoever, with terrible prosthetics and a penchant for over the top fight scenes and it never tries to be more than it is. Except when it does, and I finally realised that that is what angers me, when I watched the recent episode and the Kate/young!Derek kiss.

Like, campy roll calls showcasing the different colour eyes the pack has going on? Cheesy and awful and so much fun!

A vault hidden beneath the school with millions of dollars worth of bearer bonds belonging to the Hale family while Derek was living in a burned out shell of a house? That's cool, after all, Sunnydale High was built on a Hellmouth, so why not go there.

Kira being made to turn up the dial because she's immune to electricity despite the fact that touching the dial means that she's on the other side of where the electricity is going to be flowing? Okay, I'm not sure where Jeff Davis learned basic science but this is the guy who's given us were-coyotes and jaguars all from the same werewolf genes so I'm not going to be looking too hard at this.

Kate kidnapping Derek and turning him back into a teenager and then kissing him so he'll help her into his family's vault? Well, I'm sure... oh wait, NOPE.

These are the kinds of storylines that I wish Jeff Davis would steer well clear of, because he can't do it with any sense of seriousness attached at all. Season 1 was awesome, because it didn't try to be anything other than the ridiculous show it made itself out to be, complete with the terrible CGI alpha werewolf and the awful prosthetics. Even the issue with Derek and Kate's past could easily be gotten around with a bit of fudging on the exact age of Derek. But then in season 2, the show starts in with the sticky subjects of consent and abuse, and it has not done a single one of those well in any capacity.

For example, Lydia/Peter. Lydia spends most of season 2 being pulled around and manipulated by a 'dead' Peter Hale, and their relationship is even sexualised by the kiss she shares with young!Peter, and all of this happens after she was viciously attacked by the older man. And yet, this abuse she suffers at his hands is never brought up again (well, apart from that time Derek victim blamed her for what happened to him during Lydia's abuse). Instead, she is expected to help him with a box of fingernails while he uses their previous connection as fodder for snarky comments.

And let's not forget Isaac, the abused teenager whose issues miraculously disappear - except when Derek uses his very real fear of authority figures to make him go away. I can think of many more examples, but I think I've made my point.

Malia is currently making me very uncomfortable while watching the first 2 episodes of season 4. Jeff Davis has made it clear in her interactions with other characters that she was basically feral for the past however many years as she lived exclusively as a coyote. She's having trouble understanding human social interactions - she would leave them all to die to save herself and also possibly eat them oh, and lolololol she doesn't have a clue which president they're discussing in history class, hilarious. And I would be okay with that (except I would still feel sad that they're playing up her lack of education as funny, but whatever you can't have everything I guess) if it weren't for the blatant sexualising of her character. The last time she spent any time socialising with humans was when she was 8 years old, and yet all she seems interested in is hopping into bed with Stiles (literally, which according to both Scott and Stiles means that they're now going out) and dancing sexily with Kira so that the boys can all watch. It's gross and frankly, I could do without seeing it on my screen ever, tbh.

And then of course there's the whole Derek/Kate thing, which grosses me out so much I had to pause the show at their kiss and go for a walk outside to get some fresh air before I blew chunks all over the place. It was completely unnecessary and poorly done, what with Peter's declaration of "biblically" (oh yes, let's make a joke out of the fact that Derek was sexually assaulted as a teenager and is now going through the same thing again through magic) and absolutely nobody giving a fuck that this was happening.

Basically, I just really want Teen Wolf to stick with the ridiculous. Give me more katana wielding kitsunes and were-jaguars living under churches in the middle of towns ruined by earthquakes; more kanimas and werewolf ballet fighting scenes in shut down malls; more werewolf jesus and unpredictable banshee abilities. Just leave the more delicate and potentially very triggering storylines for the writers of shows who are actually capable of balancing the ridiculous with the serious because Jeff Davis, you are not one of those writers.

Just please, for the love of God, stay ridiculous, Teen Wolf.

[dragonflesh]

Today is Father's Day. I'm supposed to be happy and say "HAPPY FATHER'S DAY MY DAD IS AWESOME WOOO!!!" But instead I'm laying here in bed dreading going to my parents' house for lunch. The thing is that I love my dad much more than my mom...but I don't love my mom so that's not saying much. I used to just sit there and accept that I had to be at family gatherings and deal with all the abuse and fighting...but I've finally reached the point where I've said "you know what? No. Fuck this shit. I'm not taking your crap anymore. I am going to take care of myself." But I feel soooooo guilty about it. Not even just from my parents (who have A+++++++s in guilt tripping), but from random people, strangers, and friends, too. They tell me that I should be happy that I have family. That I should appreciate having a mom and dad who are married and live close by. That I should be grateful that my parents love me and want to spend time with me. But the thing is: would you say that to a person who's spouse is abusing them? Would you say that to a child who is bullied at school? Would you say that to a victim? Because that's what you're saying to me. Be glad that your abuser of 27 years loves you and wants to spend time with you. Cherish the moments that she's here. And don't forget to love and appreciate her enabler! Because he loves you, too. That is what you are saying to me. And because society is the way that it is I give in to the guilt and go to their house on Father's Day and I give in to their demands. I need some time away from them to heal and to build up my resolve but I've never gone more than a few weeks without contact from them....I'm 27 and my mother still thinks it's her right to call me multiple times a day. It's mind boggling. All this to say that I am very nervous about going to lunch today. I wish I could just call and cancel. Blah.