Sharing

I love to write. I love to read. 

These have been true for all of my life that I can recall. When that was taking away from me for a while because of The Incident, I was inconsolable. I was inconsolable about a lot of my losses, but the names of my loved ones and reading and writing were the top of that list. Buttons, shmuttons. I have clawed a lot of that back, and I am both proud and grateful for all the help that my loved ones offered (and offer, they rock).

I really dig blogging. Hell, I have left a LJ path behind me that has at times been huge. I dig reading blogs, looking into you as you do into me.

Every time I pick up blogging again, it is for a reason. And I find as that reason passes or I have done what I can with or about it - I start to write really personal things about living my life.

Those get left in the draft folder and or deleted - although every once in awhile I will share one. And you respond by reading it a lot. Which is great.

It also happens to scare me to death. 

That article on wheelchair etiquette is born of a thousand indignities suffered by me and other people. I try to imagine the folks that visit it, and I think it appeals more to folks in chairs that need a release than maybe it does to the able-bodied. The sharing of those indignities, in my particular way, seems to have helped some some bodies out there. I think I want to do more of that.

I have been hesitant  though, most of the time, to really peal the skin off and show you, J.D. Ballard style, the workings and brokenness underneath.

I think this has to change. I have decided to write. To be. To share. To be more vulnerable. Maybe to YouTube. 

To dare to do enough to risk being wrong. In front of you.

I am not so much inspired as I am tired of the shell I have insisted on living in for my own protection. I am a big girl and I can handle getting hurt. Hell, pain has never really been the deterrent for me that it is for most folks. I am not coming out all Bob Flanagan, but something closer to that than where I am now.

Struggle Days

Lately, I have more struggle days than not. A struggle day is when some symptom, some part of something out of my control makes the day harder than it should be. Sometimes it feels like a victory to see the end of one day and the beginning of another. Now, I do believe that in general, but I rarely actively feel it.

One rabbit hole that has made this last set of struggle days better is the Green Brothers. Crash Course, Vlogbrothers, all of their efforts. They are amazing. I recommend pretty much everything they do as far as I can tell. I knew John Green was on my computer before, and I could not remember why until I saw him talk about being on PotUS's first G+ hangout.

Another was Yo Is This Racist, which you can enjoy here. 

The Buddhism thing is moving along at a pace. What is helpful is that so far there has been nothing I have learned that has contested my own standards of honesty, compassion  and trust - while I do not always meet those as I would like, there they are just the same. The Boyfriend and I went to a weekend local event and it went well. I had a crushing moment of vulnerability and moved through and with it rather than pretending it was not happening, or taking it completely private.

I am trying to live more honestly, which brings up the vulnerability thing again, which I am experiencing quite a lot of lately (even if I need spell check to tell you that!). That means shedding the facade of not being in chronic pain. This is awkward, because good people are made uncomfortable by people in pain - they want to fix it for you, bless 'em. And they just cannot, which makes them feel bad. Now, I do not mean griping about it all the time, I just mean being honest when something hurts a lot, not hiding the signs of pain as they happen, and just going with whatever I can do every day: if it is just to get my ass dressed and sit and be with folks, or head downstairs and do some crafting or minor sewing (I love making actual things that can be held or given.)

So here I am. I hope you have been well.

Stealing Memories

In the middle of a bunch of personal drama, a package arrived for me. The package had a t-shirt for a web site and YouTube series I was supporting until the middle of said personal drama. So I was in a quandary about what to do with said t-shirt. Do I throw it away? Keep it? Give it to one of the kids and get reminded of the drama every time they wear it, but give the money I spend some use? 

Mentioning my quandary created what I should have known, given hindsight, yet more drama. I ended up refusing the offer to refund my money. Here is why: not only did I pay for the shirt, I _earned_ it. I earned it for watching every episode. I earned it promoting episodes. I earned it talking up the show. Least of all, I earned it by buying the damn thing. I was not going to let a damn social mess tell me any different, even as this guy tried to steal my memories.

Before you start to think that "stealing memories" is a bit dramatic itself, let me explain. People have tried to steal my memories before. It has happened to you. A person makes an exit from your life, and in the process tries to invalidate every good memory you have of them on the way out the door. Maybe they claim they were only friends with you to make a social situation easier  Maybe they say that they were only there because you give a fine blow job. They do their damnedest to sully or erase the good times, whatever fellowship you may have shared, the contagious smiles, the talking too long, the shared heartache - all of it they take a hearty piss on before they are gone. Now you know what I am talking about, I think.

I decided a couple years back that I would no longer let people steal my memories. If my brain held onto something pleasant, it was going to stay. This was when a couple we had considered great friends and part of our family was making their exit. On the way out, they were stealing what memories they could, and I just decided to not let them. Sure, they were gone shortly after, but I protected my good memories of them and kept them separate from the bullshit that was happening right then. I would remember the bullshit too, but separately. They could retcon their own lives, but not mine.

Do not let assholes make you forget why you thought of them as decent folk. Do not let people erase your good times. Do not let them take away the rough times you shared.

Do not let people steal your memories.

Oh, and the t-shirt? It is going straight into a keepsakes box, unwashed and unworn.

This Knapsack Here

The other day I was trying to be supportive in a chat room discussion about the issues that many black and brown women regarding feminism in general, particularly first and second wave feminism. It was a great talk and it seemed to me that folks were able to express discontent freely and talk about how intersectional feminism was still not enough of a force to reach them, let alone include them.

I really wanted to talk about how the disabled were right there too, in line for forced sterilization in the beginning. And later. And still now.

I wanted to talk about how bisexual and lesbian and trans and queer women have struggled for recognition in the women's rights moment, too. How we were institutionalize and lobotomized in this country (US). 

I wanted to reach across the room and connect on how poor women are still struggling to get recognized in an era where they are still ignored and pathologized. Where the poor get lost in the shuffle.

It is hard to say that you are supporting someone's right to express themselves without interrupting them. So I stayed quiet, offered reference points as to which wave of feminism could be fairly characterized as doing what (human footnote machine!), and otherwise reading and learning and feeling what other people were writing. They hit a lot of the problems I have with the feminist label, too. Maybe I did the right thing, maybe not - and there is not always someone that will tell you. I did not have one this time, and I do not expect anyone to take on that job, but I appreciate it when someone does.

For all my sympathy, for all my intersectional connections to issues inside of the movement, I have a distinction: I am white. I am a whiter shade of pale. I am Whitey McWhiteson. That whiteness shields me, even with the shield seems pretty pathetic. As a white disabled woman, I am at an advantage over an Asian American disabled woman. As a white bisexual, I am at an advantage over a Hispanic (Latina) American bisexual woman. That is my knapsack, even if it is sometimes pretty useless feeling, it is always in effect.

I would not fault the folks that would never have that conversation in front of a white woman proclaiming feminist tendencies. There are some disability issues that I do not share with the TAB unless they are family and need to know. There are some bi experiences that are pretty exclusively understood by other bi folks. Poverty is a very specific way to try to live, and those that have never struggled with money seen to have a very hard time even understanding the basics, given the rare occasion that they seem to try to understand at all.

I did not feel left out of the conversation. I felt honored to be there. With all of feminism's problems, I was honored to see it, glad to offer what little I could and otherwise bear witness with no let or hindrance. 

(The links are kind of disjointed, and I am unhappy with them and just stopped using most of them. I am just going to leave my thoughts here and let them stand as they are.)

Mixed Week

I am glad to see the end of this week. I am happy that you and I have seen more of each other than usual. I was very happy to be on The Black Guy Who Tips. I have some cool new makeup. My hair is a silver white that I really, really like. I have semi-rimless glasses for the first time, and they have my first progressive lenses for the bifocals I will probably wear the rest of my days. I can see well, for the first time in a minute.

It was not all good. Shannon Larratt died. I am having some difficulty writing about him right now. A couple of folks were unhappy about choices I made. A few were loud and mean about it. The money situation is looking bleak. We have to mess with health coverage again - although I am hoping this will be one of the last times the family will get screwed over in this particular way thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

Whenever a friend leaves, it is painful. Unless you were not committed, when one prunes itself, it hurts. You bleed. I was reserved to just let it happen by the time it reached self-parody. Seriously, the engagement had reached a point at which I was accused of martyring myself for telling my own story. This was aside the fact that when you tell a story of a wrong done to you, you tell a story of a wrong done to you. I threw up my hands. What do you even do with that? The very act of expression on my part was delegitimized. Of course your decisions are correct in your own narrative: otherwise why would you have made them the way you did? The conflict had turned around and started eating itself. 

I told you a tale of being triggered. I am still working on that, and I know I will be for quite some time. By being present, though, by experiencing it real and raw, rather than needing to suppress it or deny it - I feel okay. 

I hope you feel okay, too.

Trigger

This post is not about triggers. This post is not about trigger warnings, although I will talk about them.This is about one trigger. My trigger. My hidden trigger that got pulled yesterday.

I am using terms without much 101 today - I need to get this out now or lose it.

Trigger warnings are good in visual and audio media, I support their use. In written media, I find the genesis of them in lazy writing. If you, as a writer, hit even three of your Ws (I count six: who, what, when, where, why, WTF?) the reader should be able to tell if the piece is safe for them. Now they have become de rigor for most folks of conscious out here in the wilds, including me, but I do stand my original opinion.

I had grown, developed, been imbued with by circumstance, a trigger. Sexual assault touched our family recently and has caused rifts and deep harm. I had not done the usual self analysis that would have let me know I had a trouble button waiting to be pushed. I had been busy, you know, living this out and doing what I could for my family.

There is no shame in having a trigger. Life is life, and sometimes life is just fucking hard. It leaves it's marks, and sometimes when coping we develop these fetid warts of damage. With good self-maintenance, some folks can reduce or remove those warts. Not everyone can, or should be expected to, and the advancement of trigger warnings in media is a boon to the folks that are dealing with triggers at any stage. (I have noticed that they have a great side effect: teaching those new to the ideas of triggers what the whole thing is about when they hear "trigger warning" from a trusted source.)

In a discussion of rape culture on a podcast, I was participating in the chat room and my trigger got pulled. I started typing one phrase repeatedly, and until some called it a trigger I had no idea I was doing it. #ShoutOutToTheChatroom, there were wonderful about the whole thing, never ridiculing and being exactly the sort of folks you need in that situation. Thank you, Chat Room. The show runners were great, checking to see if they had done something to provoke it. They had not, and I thank them for asking. If I did not see it coming, I do not know how anyone without a knowledge of what me and mine were going through lately, could have seen it coming.

So, if life is hard, remember to check yourself for untended damage. Get help if you need or want it. Do not be ashamed.

Have You Seen Me Lately?

Yes, I am trying to be back here more often. This is a quick note to let you I had a good time hanging out with Rodimus Prime and SayDatAgain on their show, The Black Guy Who Tips. We talked about me and disability, about being pervy and poly - it was one of the better conversations I have enjoyed lately.

You can, and should go see it here: Spreecast, iTunes. You are missing out if you do not!

I was really happy with how Rod and Karen interviewed, they have a good touch on the ebb and flow of a conversation - a lot people really struggle with that, but not these folks. They talked about the topics with curiosity, some study (wow, rare, thanks, hurrah!), and an overall respect that made me feel really comfortable for the hour we talked! I hope that they feel I respected their home turf and treated it well.

Again, I apologize for not being able to hang out after, I had to get some sleep (I had not before the show, Rod knows what I am talking about!). I listened later and it was all fun!

(I tested these links, but my cache may keep me from seeing some errors. Let me know if you have any issues!)

Good from Bad

Because I am me, and I have an odd set of values and priorities, I have a particular fondness for occasions when good comes from bad.

Months ago there was a big dust up in my life, and a lot of relationships and ideas of who people were were changed - some for the worst. I lost a lot: time, effort, good will, ties with others... But it was, in the scope of the real world, a small thing, and my hurt feelings and frustration and feelings of betrayal matter very little. Even in the dust up, which I think it is fair to say actively involved at least two dozen people, I cared less about my aggravations than helping others express themselves so some sort of common ground could be found.

In the end, no real common ground was found for the majority of folks involved, and wounds were left to fester. An uneasy truce seems to exist now, but a lot was lost. I think I will eventually detail the story, at least from my perspective, because there is a lot to be learned from it all around.

In the middle of all of that, one person took a chance and reached out. Then I took a chance and reached back. We were both surprised I think, to find the other far more reasonable and reachable than we had thought and were led to believe. So we kept communicating, and started talking about other things besides the dust up. Eventually we had to come to an inevitable, unavoidable conclusion: we had become friends!

Because of some of my interests and past, my new friend thinks I will be a good guest on the pod cast that he and his wife run. I was hesitant - hell, I have a hard time believing that you read this, let alone that people might want to listen to me ramble on! But here you are, and I thank you for your attentions.

So I have a new friend, and will be chatting away on a podcast here soon. When the details are nailed down, you will be able to find them right here, and every where I inhabit! Peace and love to you, Gentle Reader. Peace and love.

Gimpy Come Lately

So this is the part where I apologize for my absence, promise to do better, and then meander a bit before signing off and then keeping the same terrible blogging schedule as before. Well, I am going to do it differently: I have resolved to do better, but no promises to be broken later. I do want to meander a bit about what has been going on lately, so follow me... !

The open carpal tunnel surgery was a success, and while recovery was really difficult at first, it turned out to be less difficult over all compared to my expectations. I do have more to post on what to expect if you or a loved one is going to have it done. It will come from a lived reality and I hope that it will prove of some worth.

Out of some high volume, medium stakes drama I made an unexpected friend that is starting to mean a lot to me. Not every cloud has a silver lining, but this had several and I appreciate them all.

Life at home has been really different lately. There was some high stakes, heart breaking trauma that we are all recovering from in our own ways.  We have a few weeks to wait before I can talk about that.

I have a tablet now, and it makes life both easier and more complicated. It already knows the public wi-fi networks of all my health care locations! If you have some tips on how to use it to make gimpy life, or hell, just life in general, easier, please leave them below!

Here is to 2013!

Here it is, 2013. The world did not end, and JibJab are still doing their thing. I realize I have some priorities to get straight and some habits I need to reestablish.

Do you do New Year's Resolutions? I do, and I have found some success with the following guide lines I want to share with you.

• Keep it short: no more than 10 resolutions, but you are better off with about 5.
• Keep it short, I mean it: no long complicated resolutions.
• Break it down: "Get healthy" is a terrible resolution. "Drink 2 bottles of water a day" is much better. "Exercise" is terrible, too! "Start walking for 10-20 minutes/once a week" is better.
• Keep it handy: whether you use an resolution app, or just a text file on your laptop, keep your resolutions where you can reach them.
• Check in: on a good day for you (1st of the month or whatever), take a look at your resolutions if you have not otherwise. Set an alarm or calendar reminder if that will help!
• Please make a note of it:  and make a note of where you are regarding following up on them. If something got in the way, like an illness, note that too so you will not feel hopeless later when you see little progress for that month.

Once I have my resolutions ready I will share them with you. These are the things that help me. Do you have a good tip or idea for New Year Resolutions? Please share it below!