Privacy (when its new)

I grew up with no privacy. To give you a clue how extreme this was, I felt like I couldn’t think freely unless the room was dark.

I didn’t have a diary, journal or piece of paper that wouldn’t be read. My mother even went through my trash.

I didn’t get to mail anything that my mother couldn’t read. I never had a pen pal. Opportunities to have pen pals came and went, but my mother always put this down or rolled her eyes about it and I knew it would never happen.

I was even strongly monitored when I had no choice but to move back home when I was an adult. My bills were read. My phone calls screened. Messages never given to me. I wasn’t 18. I wasn’t 21. I was 27.

The entire community I grew up in seemed to believe that everyone’s lives should be open for examination by everyone else. I still battle this. I still fear this.

To add to this, I had a relative pass away and leave many journals in her family’s possession that recounted her affairs and so on. In my subconscious, anything I wrote would be scrutinized, even if I was dead. And if I wrote something down that I “shouldn’t”, I’d probably die. God or Fate or whatever would make sure I died, purely out of spite, probably at some point when I thought things were going really well.

More recently, a high school boyfriend has sought out my relatives and parents as a means to influence me. My mother is very bad at dropping exceedingly obvious hints. Like, finding reasons to bring up names she might not otherwise. Mentioning things in an all-to-convenient fashion. As if a fully-formed person would be influenced by such things. At this point, wouldn’t any involvement on my parents’ part be an immediate red flag?

I am annoyed that he would violate my privacy by talking to others about me rather than seeking to talk TO me. That is what I see this sort of gossip-with-an-agenda as– a violation of privacy.

I still feel more honest with my thoughts when I am in a dark room. I still feel more real. I have started journaling now, but I still feel a sense of great unease when my parents appear at my house. Even more so when they are here any length of time without me. They appear to view the houses of family members as simply an extension of their own, subject on some level to their scrutiny. While my mother doesn’t go through drawers and look under mattresses, she does tend to wander about in unoccupied rooms and ask people about their possessions: the painting on the wall, the ceramic statue on the table. “Now, what is this?” “Where did you get this?”

As my parents age, I realize slowly that my visions of my likely future that I saw in my 20’s are less likely to happen. I will probably outlive them, and they will not read a journal entry discussing fears about my slowing aging body that vaguely reference sex with punk musicians or computer geniuses. I will eventually outlast them and come to a space that is free. A place where I finally feel OK.

The Eowyn Problem

I am going to refer to the Lord of the Rings. Here, I am talking exclusively about the movies. I will say (the great blasphemy of anyone in my age group) that I have never read the books and probably never will. I also don’t care. I hear that the female characters are different in the books, but that is NOT where this train is going today.

SO, In the Peter Jackson movies, Eowyn is a tough girl, loves her man, would do anything for him, and he marries the sickly looking elf instead.

It is a similar storyline to secondary female characters in westerns: a cowboy would have a woman (usually a saloon girl or a Mexican woman) who was in love with him and willing to get shot or go against the sheriff or face some dark situation but he would instead plan to marry some fragile fluffy lady, the real heroine of the story.

I have seen people project this onto women in real life quite frequently also. A woman unattached (or sometimes just unhappily attached) MUST be secretly pining for someone. She can’t be broke or busy or exhausted. NO. The REAL reason must be that she is holding a candle for some guy she once knew. I’ve seen some amazing farces play out because someone made this presumption for no good reason at all. No evidence. Nothing at all.

The really tough question is : Why do we need women to pine away for a man, and why do we find the idea of it so satisfying that we project it onto people who are simply minding their own business?

Let’s talk about abortion.

I am fully aware of the use of abortion as a rallying cry in the 1970’s early 1980’s as a way of masking the religious right’s issues with desegregation. I am hoping to shed a different light on the anger and attitudes that tend to appear from the evangelical right.

As a person who grew up around many, many evangelicals, I feel like a lot gets lost. I feel like when issues like abortion come up, that no one is quite getting the mindset right.

I have heard person after person puzzling over why evangelicals are against abortion and also against any reasonable form of sex education and also against providing contraception access, policies which reduce abortions.

Yes, its about control. And its about punishment. But I don’t think you understand the type of control this is really about.

Stop hashing over it- it all makes perfect sense when you realize that it is about viewing children as property as long as parents exist. And there is a deep, deep DEEP desire for that property to ultimately refuse to question the core values of the parent.

We told you not to have sex before marriage. We told you God said not to do it. So now you are getting what you deserve.

Its about the “We told you”.

If you have sex before marriage and nothing ill results, then you may in fact, start to question other values. All the desperate hits for control of women, control of this, control of that…

Ultimately, you have to start seeing it as mental control. Its about making sure you don’t think too far out of the box. That if you stray, you get beat up enough by life that you return. That satisfying story arc of redemption can’t happen if you get an abortion in a tidy, clean clinic and don’t really regret it. It can’t happen if you have the child and a social safety net catches you in a full and sufficient manner.

Anything less than either mental obedience initially or the story arc of a returned prodigal results in a situation that sounds too much like someone “getting away with it” after an authority figure told them bad things would happen. Life is refusing to carry out the threat made about consequences.

It isn’t about the sex. It isn’t about the pregnancy. It isn’t about the child. It isn’t even about the abortion.

It is because you did something you were told not to do.

Its a drive toward a life where jive, jazz, beatniks and later hippies never did anything to make the young people question the rules of their parents or act in some disobedient way that was in any way beyond being a mischievous scamp who ultimately finds out that his parents were right, a la Leave it to Beaver.

Its about the loss of authority by people who assumed that the payoff for being obedient was that they would get to be “right” one day.

That is why the politics of it are so angry, and when granted a win, become so smug and punitive.

If Authority in their world derived from age and parental seniority and religious standing, and now we find Authority in science or expertise, then a generation has lost its “turn” at being in charge of the people who were supposed to obey or be punished for not obeying.

Once you start to view it all through this lens, it all makes sense.

I don’t have to like you. You don’t have to like me. And it is ok if we don’t like each other.

Gonna put on my grandma hat here. I know I’m only 45 but in internet years that is damn near ancient.

One of the more heart-wrenching things I have noticed about social media is how desperate it makes everyone to be liked, to be approved of, to bask in the warm glow of no one ever saying anything negative about them. The conflation of comments with physical assault. The statements like “—– suffered backlash” as a headline.

Suffered?

SUFFERED? Oh puh-lease.

Some of it is internet hype. Inflaming minor shit for clicks creates interest where there would be none. I can only encourage people to stop clicking. This only dies when we (the real humans, who are not internet bots and plaid fake clicks) stop paying it any attention.

But some of this is wrapped up in social media’s way of hacking our brains with endorphins and a wham of toxic acceptance culture. Yes, we should, as modern thinking society, accept people regardless of the big things: sexual orientation, gender expression, religion (provided their personal brand of religion isn’t causing harm and havoc), race, ethnicity, national origin…

But, on the internet, it has gotten so that you aren’t allowed to dislike someone’s hobbies or areas of interest. The phrase “don’t yuck someone else’s yum” smacks of a level of social entitlement that I personally cannot comprehend.

Or the even worse “Let people enjoy things!” What the fuck? I don’t recall jumping into your brain to stop you.

Maybe its generational. Maybe its my environment. I was always a bit of an odd one in my school and large extended family, liking music I wasn’t “supposed” to like, enjoying books I wasn’t “supposed” to enjoy. I wasn’t well-liked or popular in any sense.

The result is that I don’t need to be liked. I don’t leave my home or hop on the internet expecting to be liked or given a lot approval or not have the things I like shot down. To me, assuming people will like you seems weirdly entitled. The luxury of a Rich-Kids-of-Instagram kind of entitled, but for the social sphere. Being “socially entitled,” if you will.

I am somewhat impervious to other people’s opinions about what I should like, how I should feel, and so on. I don’t react to people shitting on my unironic love of an 80’s hair band and I don’t react to people shitting on my unironic love of traditional furniture and I don’t react to people shitting on my political decisions.

My question for you:

Have you tried not giving a shit? Not giving a shit is great. If people like you, great. If they don’t, that’s ok too. If someone “yucks your yum” just … go on with liking it anyway because those people aren’t YOU. Why should it matter to you?

LET IT BOUNCE OFF. BE IMPERVIOUS. Flip ’em the bird and go on.

If you really like the things you like, you should be able to like them without the whole world giving you their tacit, silent approval.

And besides, what does this need for approval serve? And more importantly, WHO does it serve? Yes, you need to ask yourself this. Every time you feel the need to bend to social approval for minor shit. Every time you feel that inner whine because someone on your feed told you that whatever you are into–the color green or Douglas Adams novels or doo-wop bands of the 50’s– sucks. Stop and ask yourself-ultimately, who and what does your need for approval serve? Do you feel that people should internalize your criticisms just as deeply? And is that thought process maybe a little narcissistic? Do you, in short, think the whole world exists as a set of youtubers doing reaction videos and reaction to reaction videos?

But the big question I have for society is this: why has the opinion of others become king? Maybe we need to really think about that.

What am I doing?

I haven’t felt pushed to write in a long time. I didn’t feel like I had anything to offer, anything to say that isn’t being said. I don’t like this, I do like that, but in the end, what difference does my opinion make?

There have been huge bundles of time when I knew I could not write without letting too much escape. I could literally feel the tug of my words tumbling out and giving some personal information, blurting out my profession or employer. Just giving too much away that would make me appear “unprofessional” to someone out there. Not a chance to take if you want to remain on any kind of upward trajectory. Or even remaining stationary. One must be a team player. You know how workplaces are. God for-fucking-bid you fail to be a team player.

In a few years, all the team stuff will go away and the toxic positivity and be replaced by a new wave of different leadership styles that are “proven” to work. They are all “proven” to work. No matter how often they change. I guess it sells books. Helps people pad resumes with TEDx talks.

I don’t know what I want anymore, but does what you want even really matter? At the end of the day, are we all just cogs turning?

I have heavy decisions coming up in life. I have aging parents. I’m not sure what I am going to do. Could I handle the therapist’s bill if I moved closer? What is healthy for me and what do I want versus what will be eventually expected of me?

Trump and the Evangelical Love of the Prodigal Son

Trump continually (let’s not kid ourselves) has made a mockery of his own life and has ruined everyone else’s as much as could be imagined. At every turn, people I know were dying to excuse him, project some reason onto his being that he never even brought up himself

I have had people who I know tell me time and time again, when a man they are related to, or even a man they just happen to be acquainted with, pulls some stupid crap, some piece of ridiculousness, that I have to understaaaaaannnddd something that excuses it. Usually by a woman defending them. Their mother. Their wife. Their whole host of pick-me‘s. I have repeatedly seen women get thrown under the bus by their own mothers, who will even go so far as to invent all sorts of fantasy hypotheses to defend a man who they barely know.

Do you have any idea how sick I am of being told to understaaaannnddd? I’ve had it with this whole cycle that plays again and again and again because, and we have to be honest with ourselves, it isn’t taking any of us anywhere.

The defenders are somehow always all the same people. Over and over and over again. They develop this weird sickness of infinite defending and no consideration whatsoever for reality, evidence, your experience or anything else. They want to gaslight you into maybe-ing a person’s possible-ish reasons for behaving as they do into “Yes, that must be it. Here, let me be more understaaaaannnding.”

It is the adoration of the prodigal anything. The love of the arc of the story of forgivness and redemption over the very real people that may be affected or any fallout that occur afterward. The story arc of that person as a redeemed character in the soap opera of life is what matters. If you are really close up to the story, it looks like and gives the impression of progress.

The secret is, if you are wrapped up in the emotional highs and lows of something that looks like a character arc, looks like progress, you don’t have the emotional energy for deep self-reflection. But what kind of growth happens if the person is only milking the system because they know its part of the batch of cultural expectations?

The Bible tells the story of The Prodigal Son. The father rejoices over the son who returns after many years of indulging in whatever he chose, and the father doesn’t seem to care much about the son who never did. The son who never did anything out of line didn’t have a compelling story, did he?

The prodigal can always have infinite bratty boyhood in reach, provided that every now and then he seeks forgiveness. He can always manipulate his mom or his grandma into stamping their approval on his sincerity. Who knows, maybe they will even help him find a suitable, gullible girl who will gobble it up with starry, blank eyes. And when he gets the underage church youth group leader pregnant, and makes a big show of crying for all to see, they will expect people to forgive. To see it from his point of view. God was telling him that 16-year-old was his soul mate. UNDERSTAAAAAAAANNNNNDDD.

He’s a faux-rebel who has a confederate flag on his gas-guzzling truck that he is 2 payments behind on. He drinks beer and *gasp* sometimes maybe smokes weed and has a tattoo. He is a rebel, but in exactly the socially acceptable way his culture allows. He will never encounter or engage the messier aspects. His “rebellion” will never lead to a serious rebellion of thought. Not publicly and not openly, as it would cost him social capital. He’s not going to question the base of the social game he is in. Even if he has ever read the Bible himself, he will defend it as true to the end. He will never question what he believes himself to be. He will never become a Buddhist, move to Vegas and vote for the Green Party. The core will always remain, and he needs that to exist, because he uses it to be sure he can be perpetually excused and forgiven.

I know people who used to get re-saved and re-baptized every few years. Mostly, they were men. They were men getting re-saved and re-baptized in front of an audience that was well over 50% female.

When do the free passes stop?

Is it before or after an insurrection?

I spent most of my online life for several years reading posts from various and sundry relatives and oddball acquaintances talking about the second civil war. This was well before Trump. At least from the start of Obama’s presidency. Do you have any idea how many times I have seen badly photo-shopped memes with photos of Nancy Pelosi or President Obama with a gun pointed at them? Because I lost count ages ago.

But when I called it out, the refrain was that I had to understaaaaannnnd.

No, I don’t have to understaaaaaaannnnd anything.

Getting unstuck

COVID has given me a lot of time to think. I have heard it said before that life likes stasis. That is why it is ultimately hard to make any kind of positive change in your life. Life itself is against you. When you take two steps forward and then get blown a step or two or three back, it is because life likes the consistency of where you are being where you stay.

I don’t know if that is true. I do know how certain things affect me psychologically more than others. I tried attacking some things from the direction that the world told me would solve my problems. I did well in school. I did not so well in school. I dated the unpopular guy. I dated the popular guy. I have gone up and down the scale. I have been on stages in front of people cheering. I’ve been popular at parties thrown by the coolest band in town. I’ve dated musicians and computer geniuses and everything in between. I’ve been semi-dedicated at work and ultra-dedicated. All the stops in between, all along the way.

I keep somehow circling back to the same points over and over again.

So now, I’m doing something else. I’m slowly redoing my house. Little by little. Some paint here, a faucet there. I’m only one person and my expertise is pretty limited to the minor kinds of repairs that you can figure out from a few youtube videos and what I have seen my father do in the past. I don’t know why I think this direction is going to ultimately be a fruitful one, but we’ll see.

I’m not your soap opera.

When I was young, there were a great number of boys that my mother refused to allow me to see.

Since I’ve become an adult, she, at different times, has pushed me to date those same guys.

I’ve realized that she ultimately was after the greatest drama at that moment. If I wanted to be with someone and it made sense and we were happy, she had to be against it.

As an adult, she has tried to push those same guys on me because they are a known quantity that comes from the same religious and political background.

She wants things to be exciting and for her to be “in on it” somehow.

I have noticed when people try to matchmake, it is for ultimate dramatic payoff. And – wouldn’t you know it? Studies bear this out :

http://www.dailylife.com.au/life-and-love/love-sex-and-relationships/people-play-matchmaker-to-make-themselves-happier-20140307-34bot.html

I look at the past of my life- the constant tendency of my nuclear and extended family to withhold information and drop bombs and sit back to watch me react…

Its all to get a rise. To see a reaction. To see a soap opera unfold in real life that they can titter over and discuss.

I may be crazy, but I think I deserve better.

I deserve the chance to determine my own life and live it without an audience for my emotions.

I’m not wrong to say that.

I get to save myself.

I liked you better

I liked you better Young
Full of rage and fire
Ready to fight on my side
Ready to be on my side
This person I see now
I recognize But
You see
He’s gone
The anger that made you
Made me
Made you see me
Is gone
I now push forward and away
Breast stroke the empty arms
Finally releasing that thing
The sacred nugget something
That I held
Hoping for one day again
One day is never again
Who did you become?

The meanest man I ever knew

My father is the youngest of 7. He was a late baby. A surprise. His siblings are quite a bit older than he is and all lived within 30 minutes of us when I was a small child (one aunt later moved to Texas with her husband and daughters.) I didn’t have doting grandparents that showed up at Christmas and birthdays. I had a pile of relatives that were convinced they were right about everything, all the time, and they were always there.

One of those uncles generally made a sport out of his personality being mean. He hated kids, dogs, and cats in equal measure.

A good dinner out was when he could pick on a waitress and she would spar and parry with him on whatever he said, no matter how sexist or racist. Picking on people and them picking back at him or laughing it off was the whole point of life for him. That was the highlight of his week. If you got offended, you just weren’t fun and didn’t know how to take a joke.

He was 17 or 18 when he married my aunt and connected with my family. A move that brought a lot of strain in his family. His family, although just as broke as everyone else in the 30’s and 40’s, had come over during the Oglethorpe years of Georgia’s past and had stayed in the same community since receiving a royal land grant. At the time, my family were regarded as not-quite-white trash, and had pretty daughters looking to get married.

In their context, in the 1940’s, a girl getting married early was good- and an expectation. Four of the five girls in my father’s family married before the age of 18.

The aunt that married this particular colossal asshole was in that group.

How do you make a reasonable decision on marriage at that age? You don’t. You marry the guy who asks you because getting married is your job in life.

He was from a generation where that “hate everyone and pets too” vibe was seen as funny and a way of interacting with the world. He would pretend to swerve to hit a cat on the road (but wouldn’t actually do so) just to get a rise out of people.

He was racist and sexist. And he didn’t care if you said so. You were never sure how much was exaggeration of his actual thoughts.

Possibly the most surprising thing is that he would gladly watch Bugs Bunny cartoons with the kids. He loved Wile E. Coyote especially. Who was also my favorite. Its odd to say the one thing you had in common with a giant asshole is your favorite Looney Tunes character, but I guess you can find common ground with anyone if you look hard enough. That was when he laughed the hardest.

He had lot of nerve though. Despite his overriding asshole tendencies left and right, he helped build a relatively large and successful church, both financially and physically. He would go out with their group that visited people to try to “get them saved” and “get them to come to church”. Yes, this guy. He was heavily respected, a church deacon. I can only assume that in the church context he was a different person than he was at home.

He was a person that had opinions so open and so blatant about things, and felt so keenly his rightness in evaluating the world around him. And kids in my family were always under the demand to not talk back. When you grow up around that, you develop some spitfire comebacks while you have to sit there listening to it. You also have a lot of time to reflect on what you really think.

I’m not sad he’s long gone now. He got to an age where he saw his own granddaughter’s go on welfare and “take up with” – the older, southern way of saying “shacking up” – with some prime losers. Did he grow at all in the end? Maybe a little. Maybe.

If there is a hell, he’s probably roasting there and wondering how he got there. I think the fear all of us post-Christians occasionally have is that maybe he isn’t. Maybe, if there is a heaven, he is floating around up there telling the angels they look stupid, and its okay because hey, he believed in Jesus.

————————————–

A bit of a tangent here that gets overlooked:
There are families in the south that never supported Roosevelt’s New Deal. They never were on welfare during the depression, no matter how bad it got. They were against welfare to the point of their own deprivation, and were happy to look down on those who took what they regarded as the easy way out.

People don’t talk too much in basic history courses about the people who voted for the other guy when the subject of the depression and the New Deal come up. As important as Roosevelt’s wins were, each time he ran for president, he went up against an opponent that lots of people voted for. There have always been those who were against the government helping anyone. Those thoughts got handed down, and are part of what happened in the 1980’s and even now.

There have always been poor people who were against helping the government helping poor people. This isn’t something new at all. I grew up hearing stories all the time about people cheating the system in the 1930’s and 40’s, and they were still holding it against those same families 50 years later.