Neko

[troubledneko]

I'm in Seattle, planning to go to Olympia in a couple days. For those who don't know, Olympia is basically the birthplace of the riot grrrl movement, a punk music expression of third-wave feminist ideals. Riot grrrl played a big part in my development as a feminist, giving voice to everything I was feeling and letting me know that I was not alone -- that there were so many other women who'd experienced what I had, done what I'd done to cope, and most importantly, that what I'd done was not wrong. Needless to say, my trip up to Olympia will be pretty emotional. Just how emotional can be seen in the fact that I attempted to write. I *never* even come near creative writing because it is not my forte and I am well aware of that. So, it should say a lot that I tried to write a riot grrrl-inspired something... my first non-academic writing endeavor since middle school, save for a few journal entries. Here it is... *gulp* You said you loved me You said it every time You made me play our "Special game" Your so fuckin' special game No, you're not so fuckin' special I never thought love Could hurt so much I never thought your touch Could take so much From me Yeah... You lived my life inside my head For so many years For so fuckin' many years I let you live my life I let you live my life Oh, but now... But now you're dead And I am finally alive I am finally alive So now I wanna say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU Yeah, you taught me not to trust Anyone but me And you taught me how to starve And how to bleed And how to be Anyone but me But all these fuckin' years And all this fuckin' hatred Just taught me how to love So much more So much more

[troubledneko]

WTF just happened

So, I have managed to teach a course on eating disorders for the past five weeks and not be triggered at all. I haven't been symptom-free, that's for sure, but it's been as close to recovered as I can imagine. I've been eating pretty randomly, just whenever I'm hungry or want something to snack on, which is actually a good sign for me, since I don't feel compelled to stick to a meal plan just to get food in me.

I don't know what happened today that made me come home and have a dinner that consisted of baby carrots, 2tbsp of hummus, and peppermint tea. And then to turn on my Ana/Mia playlist full of triggering songs. And then to open my food journal from one of the lowest points of my life. Instead of feeling disgust at seeing all the days where I consumed nothing more than a sugar-free Ribena and a cube of vegetable broth and still walked 5 miles to/from college, I felt nostalgia...

Rationally, I *do not* want to return to my eating disorder. It sucks ass and I know it. I do not want all the health issues that come with restricting and purging. I do not want all the obsessive thoughts about weight and calories and exercise. I do not want my hair to start falling out. I do not want to struggle just to climb a flight of stairs. I have *way* more important things to do, *real* struggles to overcome.

And yet I long for the feelings of power, control, strength, single-minded focus... I know it's all lies, that nothing positive ever comes of it. But part of me still wants it so badly.

[feministfaery-blog]

how do you explain to your professors that your mental disorders are preventing you from attending class and completing assignments without them thinking that you’re just a lazy fuck trying to make...

[troubledneko]

If it means anything, I just had to explain to my professors that my mental health (or lack thereof) was preventing me from getting a lot of work done. It was one of the hardest thirty-minute conversation and follow-up email of my life, but it was also one of the most beneficial. I only explained what was going on to my actual adviser because, having talked to older grad students who'd also "come out" about their mental health issues to him, I knew he would understand to an extent. For the professor whose class I needed to drop, whom I knew would likely not understand, I just sent him an email with some semi-bogus academic reasons for dropping. It all ended up fine, and with my adviser's help, nobody, not even the DGS, had a problem with it; my adviser actually commended me for being honest and taking care of myself.

I've also generally found professors to be some of the most understanding people ever. EVER. I think every professor I talked to in undergrad -- really talked to, not just about assignments -- understood what I was going through because they had either been there before or had at least been through therapy and medication for other issues. It was really helpful for me because I can BS my way through classes without showing any significant drop in my work, so nobody really had reason to suspect that anything was wrong until my all-out mental breakdown my junior year. After that, professors would check in with me, give me advice on how to deal with school, and even occasionally offer me "special treatment" to help me cope. (By "special treatment" I just mean the opportunity to email them and honestly tell them if I needed to skip a class because the subject matter was too difficult to handle at the time...not like extensions on assignments or anything.)

Long story short, just talk to them. In my experience, they have always been the most supportive, understanding, helpful people I've encountered.

[bite-your-lip-n-fake-a-smile]

[troubledneko]

Day three no calorie-counting.

Day five symptom-free.

It feels so foreign and disorienting and frightening. And yet it feels kinda good at the same time. Wonder how long I can keep this up...........

[professional-widow]

I would really like to beat that “there’s something wrong with 13 year old girls wearing short skirts!” post to death with a baseball bat.

Yeah let’s keep blaming girls for their “behavior”! Lets not talk about social pressure, or how girls hitting puberty might be...

[troubledneko]

I wonder how much of it is not the fault of the "intellectually lazy" but rather women's attempt, albeit a counterintuitive one, to make themselves feel like they have some control over the assholes and predators. Same with women perpetuating rape myths with other women. If they can blame it on clothing or supposed promiscuous behavior, then they can convince themselves that there is something they can do (or not do) to prevent their own victimization. It's not intellectually sound reasoning, and maybe it is lazy to an extent, but can understand the desire to feel like we have some control over how asshats treat us -- because it's really not socially acceptable to call those men out on their bullshit misogyny. That doesn't mean women should perpetuate rape myths or judge other women for choices they are more than entitled to make.

I dunno. I've always struggled to understand why women are so quick to victimize other women, and it seems to make sense as a kind of false consciousness. The people who criticize and fall back on "moral umbrage" seem to be just as victimized by the broader patriarchal sex/gender system, just in a different way. Should they try to see beyond it? Yes. But maybe blaming them in return doesn't really accomplish anything either.

* If the original post was written by a man, then none of that really applies, I guess. Chastizing just seems to be more common among women, especially slut-shaming (usually in the context of Wife of Bath discussions, haha).

[thedisorderedlife]

Deciding to recover:

[troubledneko]

And yet making that decision still feels like death.

[findingmarissa]

[wheninacademia]

WHEN YOUR UNIVERSITY CONGRATULATES ITSELF FOR BEING *SLIGHTLY* LESS HOMOPHOBIC THAN IT USED TO BE:

[troubledneko]

Georgetown College

[troubledneko]

Ode to Prozac

So...I've basically been off my meds for the past 5 days, on 1/4 my usual dose for the first three days, and two more days of none at all to go. Even though I was still frequently depressed on it, I never really appreciated how much it allows me to suppress things and filter out unwanted thoughts before now. The last few days haven't had any specific triggers, but it's just like every little thing that reminds me of something upsetting brings up a whole slew of emotions that I didn't realize were there, that I don't want to be there, that shouldn't upset me as much as they did. Despite spending time with so many wonderful people and finally being back home to my darling kittehs, I'm curled up in bed crying because my brain is just in complete overload. I'm hoping writing will help, and it's narcissistic of me to post this rather than just leave it in a journal, but whatevs. It's more likely to stay in my head if it stays on paper.

I love everyone I spent the weekend with, and Kalamazoo was the most fun I've had in ages, but it is Mother's Day, as much as I would like to forget that fact. Normally it's not too bad. I arrange for something nice to be delivered at home and send the obligatory "I love you" text on the actual day. I do the bare minimum, a testament to my incredibly conflicted feelings about my mother. I love her, don't get me wrong. But it has taken so long to get to a place where I can say I love her -- and I'm not even sure I mean it in the "normal" mother-daughter way. She's always been aloof, more concerned with work than her only child, too wrapped up in her own problems to deal with anyone else's. When I say I love her, I mean that I respect her and no longer resent her. I did used to hate how much time she spent with her students (early childhood special ed) because she was too exhausted to spend time with me afterwards. I know now that that was to provide minimum financial security, a sign of love in its own right. I respect her struggles and how hard she has worked to overcome everything like growing up in poverty, having an abusive alcoholic PTSD father, losing both in her early 20s, getting stuck with a child she never intended to have while she and my father were both broke grad students, losing the child they did want to a late-term miscarriage, enduring crippling depression after that, trying to take her life after my father left, ignoring all my struggles to keep her ideal image intact, now pretending like none of that happened.

But this weekend I was exposed to people with "normal" family relationships. They called their mother, had a sustained conversation in which they spoke lovingly of one another, shared pictures of them together, etc. Everything mothers and daughters are supposed to do. Part of me still feels such intense anger at never having had that experience. I know my family is by no means terrible. But it is still so hard to reconcile the evidence that I mean nothing to her with the idea that mother-daughter bonds are supposed to be indestructible, unconditional. I mean, we were living alone after my dad left, and she was still willing to OD even though that would leave me completely alone. I have been suicidal, even attempted myself, so I can understand the pain and how hard it is to think through anything in that state. But still...how could any mother leave her own daughter like that?! Now that I have been depressed like that, I can understand her actions. But I don't know that I can ever forgive her. My existence elicited derision and blame, but Erin's near-existence elicited trauma and unfathomable pain? No matter what I do in life, it will never be enough. A fetus had more emotional impact on her than I ever did. I hate Mother's Day. She gave up that title twelve years ago when she took the pills. But I also know that she's tried, tried so damn hard. My mother is a brilliant woman, just not a mother. So I'm left crying, trying to reconcle the impossible.

[allmyfriendsareacademics]

When writing is just not going well at all

[troubledneko]

I feel that feel. All the time.

[troubledneko]

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much – so very much to learn.”

-- Sylvia Plath

[dang-darlin]

[troubledneko]

HOW I FEEL AFTER 15 MINUTES OF ALEXANDER FUCKING POPE.

[troubledneko]

Wanhope...so deeply entrenched right now it doesn't even need its sling to lay siege on my mind. Too bad I can't get Conscience, Hope, Life, and Elde to come over and banish it from my head.

Just gonna curl up on the couch, eat oatmeal for dinner, watch Buffy, and try not to cry...

[troubledneko]

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfilment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

-- Sylvia Plath, Journals

[troubledneko]

Noon-day demon: right on schedule.

[troubledneko]

Lessons you shouldn't need a PhD to know...

It is not a good idea to cut your own hair with a pair of dulled office scissors. Even if you don't give a flying fuck about how your hair looks.

I am obviously way behind the learning curve.

[mansplained]

In my creative writing class in university, we were having a class discussion on gender in writing. We were talking about the challenges that might come from writing from the point of view of a character of a different gender than you. The male professor said something like “As...

[troubledneko]

So...Joanna Russ addresses this in How to Suppress Women's Writing under the category "the double standard of content." The "double standard" is used to value men's experiences above women's and, therefore, to value books about men's experiences above books about women's experiences. To write about women takes very little experience of the world, since all women write about is the home and family, everyday subjects confined to the private sphere; to write about men is all but impossible for women because men's experiences encompass everything in the public sphere, which women rarely entered. So goes the logic of (mostly) male critics. Basically... Welcome home, Aristotle and Galen! Women are once again derivative of men. It's easy to write about something lesser than yourself, but almost impossible to write about something more than yourself. I'm thinking that's a lot of what's going on in your douchebag professor's head. It doesn't sound so horribly sexist if you justify it based on degrees and breadth of study, but it still boils down to the same sexist drivel that's been going on for centuries.

And srsly! Who painted the lion?! Men, men, men. How is having a good background in literature really supposed to enable one to better understand women when the majority of books he's probably read are considered "literature" precisely because they deal with men's experiences and are written by male authors? Maybe the reason he thinks that other professor writes women better than women is because his portrayals fit with his preconceived notions of what "woman" is -- according to man!

The same probably holds true for women writing about men -- that their portrayals build on preconceived, gender-biased notions of masculinity and femininity -- so it'd be hard to come down on one side or the other. The fact that your professor is willing to generalize like that, though... He accuses women of essentializing men, and then he turns right around and essentializes women authors. Men are the only sex capable of experiencing and articulating the whole range of human emotion, male or female. Yeah, right. I call bullcrap.