I finally put my thumb on it. I figured out what happened that started my current downward spiral. I wrote about it at one point late last year in a document on my desktop called "hopeless". I even published it to my blog for a time before deleting it from there. It takes a lot for me to delete a blog post, but there was so much anger there. Too much, and too widely swashed around. Sloshed? Is swashed a word?

Anyway, two major heart crushes happened in 2015. I was really sad after the first one, but the second one changed me. Changed me in a way that I can't get back. I lost my hope. Apparently, I lost all of it. I've always felt that hope was my worst enemy, because no matter how upset or depressed I get, it's always there, tormenting me. But not any more. It's just gone. And apparently, after that I just kind of withered away.

I was going to talk about the appointment with Dr. Bess, but I can't right now. I just don't fucking care enough. Apparently there is some hope in me, because I'm going to have these procedures. I'm going to shock myself into better health. Things are extreme when you have to introduce an electrical current to your body to feel better.

Let's do this, here is an excerpt from my Letter of Surrender, otherwise titled Hopeless.txt:

I've never quite understood the phrase "to wear your heart on your sleeve". Oh, I know what it means, but why your sleeve? Wouldn't it make more sense if your heart was visible on your chest? If your love was tattooed on your forehead? Telegraphed through your handshake?

I've always worn my heart... on the outside. If I care about you, I let you know. If I love you, I've said it. If I have a crush on you, it's been in my fierce blush and my wide eyes and my hushed stammer.

It may be difficult to guess what I'm thinking about, to understand my passions and nightmares, but I've never really been able to mask my heart.

And I'm not going to change that.

But I thought maybe someone should know that there has been a change, nonetheless. Somewhere it should be noted that things have finally gone too far. Life has trampled on me and my pathetic little heart a few dozen times too many.

It's been some time since anyone has reached in my chest, torn out my heart, thrown it on the ground and stomped all over it. But it's familiar. Very familiar. But what You have done to my heart this time was so subtle, I've hardly noticed it.

I've run out of hope. It's left the building. Flown out a window?

One thing I've always had is hope. I've cursed it, actually. It's a vile thing when you are on the ground and someone is kicking you in the face and you still feel some hope that you will see the sun again. You'll still have snow days and cat cuddles and brownies and music and art and forests and beaches. There might even be a nice person or three to walk beside you from time to time. Wow, I can even imagine another person to hold my hand, maybe even to help pick my heart up off the slaughterhouse floor.

But that left some time ago. The last one out the door turned off the light and snatched my heart and my hope and discarded them outside somewhere that I can't even begin to think where to find them now.

When they swept around the corner following their leader with a selfie-stick like a parade, I groaned. I sooo did not want to end up on Youtube. They were young, so young. And loud and chatty and happy and laughing. "Youth is wasted on the young."

I had been trying to keep the aisle around me somewhat organized, but given how many pairs of shoes I have to try on before something fits, my stuff was still scattered everywhere. I quickly tucked my purse and shoes under the seat, then they were on top of me. A tidal-wave of giggly snark, they stopped right next to me. Because of course they needed the shoes just opposite me. And they plopped down on the floor around me.

I half grinned and half groaned. They were invading my personal space, but I was very amused at the unconscious way they unceremoniously planted themselves on the floor the way I had been doing all my life. I wondered if they were truly oblivious to the opinions of those around them or if, like me, they liked to act bold while secretly wondering who around them was shocked at their unladylike behavior. One of the girls almost smacked into me, trying to weave her way between her friends and all my crap on the floor, and that annoyed me further. But I still kind of liked them for just taking over the place like that, despite the social anxiety buttons it was pushing.

Were they all going to try on the same pair of shoes? Dear Lord. Best get out of here. Just one more pair to try then I could move on. Maybe I would grab the last pair and re-situate down the aisle a bit on another seat. I stood to do just that, reaching for my purse underneath me.

The girl who had almost knocked into me wanted to be the third one to try on the shoes, but something in her voice said she was not happy about something. I half looked at her as she bemoaned, "I don't want to sit on the floor." Her eyes happened to meet mine at just that moment. I made an internal sigh, and stopped reaching for my purse, instead standing up.

"Please," I said, gesturing at the seat. "Go ahead." As she began to reweave her way back through the chaos at her feet, I turned to head for that last pair of shoes.

And then my mouth just kept flapping.

"Just don't steal my purse and we're all good."

I was smiling at my own stupid joke. An odd smile was on her face as if... as if she couldn't wrap her mind around the absurdity.

Oh. Shit.

Did I mention they were all black?

Why did I say that? WHY? Whywhywhywhywhy?

Because as I get older, I have less control over the things that go from my brain straight to my mouth, combined with a tendency toward the absurd and inappropriate and illogical. And because 95% of my conversation on any given day is with a 3 year old. My wits are being dulled, not sharpened. My speaking skills devolving into monosyllabic phrases. I miss my run on sentences and dry, sarcastic humor. It comes out in public like some odd invisible force I've kept locked up for too long.

Earlier this week I had made both bizarre and inappropriate comments with a shoe salesman. He was awesome and rolled with it. I felt mortified each time I found myself saying things like, "My long toenails are catching here, but is that better than the other size where my toe just falls out and flops around to gross everyone out?"

It's common for me to turn to my daughter, strapped in her seat, to tell her not to go anywhere.

I say stupid things to people all the time because I'm trying to make fun of myself, not them. The absurd part is that I'm wondering why anyone would care about my toes, why I was worrying about my daughter being snatched because I was walking 20 feet away instead of 10, and why was I uncomfortable turning my back on a bunch of young people while one of them sat over my purse?

I'm the dumb one, not you. See? See how weird my mind works? Isn't that funny?

Why do I have to share every time I think of a crazy thought? Why do I think everyone else will be as amused as I am?

Of all the things I've wanted to say about race in America since Trayvon Martin's and Michael Brown's killers were absolved of all wrongdoing, why this?

But this isn't about me.

This isn't about the way she trash-talked my teeth or how little money I probably had to steal. This isn't about them agreeing that they hoped I didn't have kids, cutting right to that constantly exposed nerve that is my conviction of what a terrible parent I am. This isn't about the way she publicly announced that I had seen a black person and instantly thought "steal", causing me to attempt to explain. It's not about the way they refused to see the comment as reasonable, so I became offended and was only too happy to walk away when told "get away from me." This isn't about the name she called me after we managed to all walk out of the store together - after I had held the door for them and they had each graciously (ironically? sneeringly?) said "thank you" - and how that made me feel like I was in the 7th grade again and afraid of the local girls who were going to beat the shit out of me if I looked at them wrong.

It's not about how crazy I am, how stupid I feel, how hurt I am to be misunderstood, or how I couldn't help but crying after realizing that my mouth had hurt other people.

It's about her. It's about them. And us. And America. And Ferguson. And racism and privilege and government bullshit and the police state and prejudgement and our racial filters and our parents and our upbringing.

Intent is not magic. Offense is defined by the person offended. Explanation of miscommunication be damned. Why do I feel the need to be forgiven by someone I've just wounded? Why do I feel the need to be declared unracist by someone whose lifetime of experience tells them that is exactly what I am? Why do I feel the need to demonstrate that I would have said the same thing to anyone else sitting there? Why do I feel the need to bemoan that white people shouldn't have to weigh their every word before spoken so that innocent speech does not cause offense? Why do I feel the need to self-flagellate myself for not knowing how to properly parent my child so she doesn't repeat my mistakes?

When you try to turn your car and accidentally jump the curb and mow over a pedestrian, is it appropriate to get out of your car and jump around flailing your arms so that no one can concentrate on the injured person while you insist it was an accident?

Why can't I just own up to the fact that I'm in this situation now. Who cares if it's inadvertent? I hurt someone, angered someone, pressed their buttons, and caused all this. I did damage. I should apologize.

I can't believe I didn't apologize.

There have been so many moving things written in the wake of Robin Williams' suicide, it makes it a little easier to accept his death. Who knew Robin Williams had made such a large impact on the American psyche? I certainly hadn't suspected how much his death would affect me, let alone my friends and family on Facebook.

A lot of people have taken this time to relay personal stories of depression, and that is incredible. I feel the need to add my own voice, but I have no idea what to say. I get the impression that most of my blog posts are reactions to other people's ideas, responding to other people's take on things and focusing all my energy on proving myself right and their position so clearly in the wrong. (Gods forbid I ever find something to blog about that I agree with!)

So I told myself, this time, I need to write something that's just me. I'm going to talk about what depression and suicide have meant to me.

Depression is terrifying. Sometimes, in moments of clarity, I will sort of become "awake" within my own mind, the rational part of me seeing my thoughts and actions, knowing they are incorrect and/or harmful and/or dangerous. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it makes everything so much scarier, feeling trapped within my own mind. I have, however, had some success with using this part of myself to overtake the rest, and at the least get me out of an especially dark or dangerous situation. Part of the painful and yet more successful parts of my treatment for depression has been tapping into this rational area, so that I can notice when I'm having the downward spiral and talk myself out of the endless loop of self-hatred and self-pity. Painful because the two parts of my psyche resent each other. Truly. "Sane Me" resents having to deal with this crap, resents that we're here *again*, resents how hard this fight is going to be. "Crazy Me" resents that someone wants to take away the pity party. Sanity always wins once I get to that realization, because it's just so easy to see how silly the Crazy has become at that point.

But Sanity doesn't like to pop up until things have gotten too close to the edge. So most of the time, Crazy has free reign. She has some wicked tricks in her bag.

The soul-sucking, color-leeching, joy- and love-banishing Giant Invisible Suffocating Wet Blanket is her stand-by. And it's the most effective, the most insidious. Because she just creeps in when I'm not looking, and slowly pulls the wool over my eyes and my head and my soul and suddenly the world looks like crap. Sometimes it's months before I notice. I'll start trying to trace my mood backwards when I realize I don't have a reason for feeling this way. And I never find the beginning, not the moment that it crouches behind me, not the moment it starts to cover me, not the moment that I am finally swallowed whole. If I'm lucky, I'll find a "before", a moment of happiness that has enough information and emotion connected to it that I can realize that not only was I happy in the moment, but I had been breathing easier before the laughter and saw things just fine immediately after. This can be a good tool to use against the blanket. For a moment, or an hour, maybe a day.

Oh, I guess I left that part out: everything in Crazy's Big Bag of Nasty Tricks is indestructable. Sanity and memory and good friends and happy moments can push the blanket off, halt a downward spiral, pull me back from the brink.

But nothing makes them quit. I think eventually they wear out for some reason that I'm not privy to. There is no pattern to it. It certainly has nothing to do with anything that I do. But when that happens, I can find myself without the blanket and blinking at how bright and beautiful everything has become. And I ask myself, when did this start happening? And again, I can't recall. But I quickly tell myself to forget it, because I don't want to lose or destroy or waste this moment.

No, it's not medication that does it. Medication is a life-saver for me. The support of friends and family is immeasureable. Training myself to halt my natural thought processes has been helpful now and then. But nothing overcomes that Blanket. Nothing. All of those things mentioned help lighten it, make it a little less opaque, a little less heavy. Medication helps the other things help more, if that makes sense, a sort of boost to the power of outside support. It makes it easier to find the Sanity voice in my head. It makes it easier to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning. It makes it easier to leave the house to meet people and share joy.

But nothing I've ever done or experienced has bested the Blanket. Ever.

So let's talk about suicide now. I'm not a fan. If we're not talking about me, I have somewhat different responses to it.

My mother has attempted to take her own life on more than one occassion. The first terrified me, then angered me, and now leaves a bitter taste in my mouth when I recall it. I still have her, and I console myself with that, but she still hurt me deeply, and there's still a chance she'll try it again and this time succeed.

When Kurt Cobain did it, I was devestated. He had touched something in so many people, and now he was gone. He had been in so much pain and couldn't take it any more. He would never see his daughter grow up. This all made me so very, very sad. But not angry or hurt. As much as he had touched me, as important as he was to the world and his family, it wasn't about us. It was about him. I was sad for him.

When the singer of Blind Melon died from a heroin overdose, I felt rage. I still can't listen to their music. I cannot forgive him for accidentally killing himself. In my mind, every hit of heroin is like a gamble with your life, but a gamble that you take willingly yet with almost no thought at all. If a person is in so much pain that they need to end it, I feel for them. If someone is in enough pain to do something stupid that may or may not have any impact in either direction, I feel contempt for them. I have a feeling this is blaming the victim. But there it is: I would rather you kill yourself out of pain than seek out a way to just play with the idea that can backfire permanently in your face.

When Michael Hutchence died... I was even more devastated. The fact that there are so little facts is a problem. They have not to my satisfaction proved that he died intentionally or by accident. This makes it easier not to feel anger. There are the circumstances of his life, his wife's death, the custody disputes over their children, and recently the death of one of those children now grown (who is always referred to as Geldof's daughter and not Hutchence despite his hand in raising her). The whole thing makes me miserable. Then there is the personal aspect. I can't explain it, but he meant more to me than Kurt Cobain did. So it hurts more. It hurts the most. It's hard not to cry when I hear some of my favorite songs, even though he's been gone for so long now.

Robin Williams has been hard, because it was so unexpected. The event itself, and the effect it's had on me and most Americans it seems. None of us were very prepared to face just how much he had meant to us, and then he was gone and now there will never be any more magic for him to create for us. But also I find it to be ironic, in a rather horrifying way, that he would kill himself after his film "What Dreams May Come" made such an impact on me. Granted, I never bought much stock into the idea of a special Hell for suicides to go after they die, but the message and beauty of that particular Heaven resonated deep within me. There are some versions of an afterlife that I yearn to discover are true, despite being an atheist-leaning agnostic, and that one is pretty near the top.

But I said this was going to be about me, so I might as well get it over with. Do I have a more personal experience with suicide than these? Yes and no.

Yes, because I have had suicidal thoughts at multiple points in my life. No, because they were usually fleeting.

There have been... less than a handful of times that I have given it any serious thought. I can't and won't talk about them here. That's not fair to my family. But I can explain that just about the biggest reason why I am still here today is because I cannot stand pain. I am more terrified of causing myself pain than I am of living through whatever anguish has driven me to those thoughts. The physical pain I've accumulated over the years has been good for something, at least.

I'll tell you what kind of bothers me more than those moments, are the countless times that the thought has popped into my head and had to be dismissed. Countless because they are all so similar, the all blend together.

Yes, I managed to talk myself out of it, usually rather quickly. But the mindset... it's harder to shake the memory somehow, so maybe that's why it's scarier. I guess because I was rational enough to talk myself out of it, I have a better memory and understanding of it after the fact than the times when I was crazy enough that it was serious.

The utter hopelessness that births these thoughts is soul crushing. There is no other way to describe it. I can only speak from my own experiences, but these thoughts usually come from a very specific place: fear of being alone. I already have so little steady connections in my life, the idea of losing those last, most basic pillars in my life is more terrifying than death or pain or nuclear holocaust.

How to describe this in a way that an outsider can get some glimpse? Do you truly understand what a downward spiral of negative thoughts is like? The real pity party, the kind you can't control? They say that in a near-death experience, your life flashes before you. Well, what if it was just the bad parts? The really bad parts. And it was by no means a flash. You are somehow capable of bringing to life the perfectly preserved feelings of pain and anguish, physical and mental (usually mental) of these moments. And you play them back-to-back, going in circles to revisit them. And each moment seems to carry on for a day, so that it feels like you've always been in this place and you always will be. There is absolutely no hope for you, because the only thing in your life that ever was, ever is, and ever will be is the most excruciating pain you can imagine. When suddenly, you've had enough. Either your brain snaps you out of it, or you come to realize the only way for it to stop is to end everything. If your entire existence is pain, the only solution is to end your existence.

People put pets to sleep who are in too much pain. We put murderers to death for the pain they cause. The average person would eventually kill themselves if they were in enough physical pain for long enough, each one of us just has a different breaking point. It's why torture is so effective, because eventually, everyone has a place where, if pushed beyond, they would rather die to end the pain than continue. Even if it means betraying everything and everyone they love. Pain reduces you to that lizard-brain place of survival-of-self over everything else. It's only a matter of finding the depth of pain that will turn death into a better version of survival than living through any more pain.

Someone with depression is very, very good at finding that place. This is where the "depression lies" concept comes into play. Because it's not enough to feel pain or to feel worthless, no, there is The Voice that compounds everything by constantly confirming your worst fears. You really are that insignificant, that stupid, that miserable, that evil, that fat, that lost, that hopeless. On a daily basis, The Voice convinces you that sitting on the couch will feel better than going for a walk. It will convince you that talking to someone will make you feel worse, or make them feel worse, and how can you burden another person with this? It will tell you you're selfish. It will tell you you're not selfish enough, that you deserve to reward yourself with something harmful. It will tell you that you deserve the pain caused to you and that you cause to yourself. It will tell you every single last lie it can think of, and then think of new ones.

It's hard enough to get off the couch or out of bed or pick up the phone when that's going on in your head. Can you possibly fathom what it's like to listen to that while you are stuck in an infinite loop of feeling all the worst pains of your life all at the same time? The Voice is sometimes your own, sometimes your mother's, sometimes the one you love the most, sometimes the one you hate the most. The pain is mental and physical, in your head and your ears and your skin and your gut. And you can't breathe. It is too much to breathe or think or move, what else can you do but use everything in your power to MAKE IT STOP!?

And this is what it feels like for just a moment in time, and the more you fight it, the more moments of eternity you will feel, when all you want is for it to stop.

I have been lucky. Something has stopped the onslaught of infinite pain and loathing before I acted on it.

Some are not so lucky. For them, The Voice and the pain together were just too much to take any longer. Their own minds convinced themselves to end it.

How do you fight that? How do you fight yourself? How does sane fight crazy if sane doesn't exist?

Feel free to judge. That's just giving The Voice more ammunition. Do you think we're unaware of what our death will do to those we leave behind? Do you have so little grasp of the power of The Voice to not understand that the moment those thoughts pop into our head, they are used against us to convince ourselves we are horrible, rotten human beings who don't deserve what little we have left?

There is no understanding the unexplainable. There is no way to comprehend insanity because you have to be sane to even attempt it, at which point you're no longer insane enough to be insane. Questioning your sanity is a sign of sanity. The fact that you're capable of questioning means there is hope for you. If you can't even question yourself? You're lost, utterly lost.

I think the difference between someone who contemplates suicide and someone who attempts it is that sanity is just completely gone in the ones who act. At least, I think that's why I'm still here.

I imagine there are some people who still have rational thought, who are still making decisions at the time of their suicide. They leave notes, they settle affairs. Maybe they are the majority. But is it any less awful? To be so desperate to end it, that you overrule your own sanity while there's still some left?

What is worse, to be so utterly hopeless that you kill yourself to end the pain, or to have enough hope to actually realize how little is left, and still feel there is no better choice than death?

Neither is selfish. Both are irrational. Both are devestating. Both are final, if you do it right.

And who does it help to blame someone at that point, now that it's over? Maybe it helps you. Maybe it scares away some of the shadows. Maybe your anger and blaming shouts out the Voice a little. I wish you well with it.

ps: no, there is no happy ending or revelation or lesson to take away. Because life is not a half-hour sitcom. It's not even a Saturday Afternoon Special. It's life. And life is messy and unexplainable, with no instruction manual or reward or even a moral to learn. No wonder I never finish any of my fiction or publish my non-fiction. Because I end things when I'm out of words, not when I've tied a finishing bow. The fact that I use so damned many of them before I run out probably doesn't help though.

Why, oh why didn't I write about "Stranger in a Strange Land" when I had actually just finished reading it? It's been at least a year (two?), and although I know it moved me and changed me and set me on a new path, I feel as if I can only talk about its points in relation to what other people are saying about it. Because I didn't capture those personal responses to the work immediately. I'm going to regret that forever, I know, because you can never re-read a book for the first time.

I know that it changed me in two ways: it returned some of my hope about life and humanity, and it put me on a new path that has reinforced that hope time and again. This book set me on the path to devour all things Heinlein. And with very few exceptions, each of his works has brought me to that place of "Oh my god, yes!" again and again. I don't think I'll ever be able to adequately describe the effect that Robert A. Heinlein has had on my life, or my great sorrow that I've only discovered him so long after his death.

This book moved me because it expressed so well my core beliefs about myself and humanity, beliefs that I have never been able to properly name, beliefs so slippery and elusive that I forget about them and have to be reminded. What does it say about me that I have to be reminded of a personal belief in hope?

Something that has bubbling to the surface over the years, the same something that caused me to start a new blog, was momentarily brought to the surface and shown in a shining light. A connection with and hope for humanity. The realization that yes, it may be paradoxical, but it's time to face the truth that although I am an atheist-leaning agnostic, I seek out and yearn for and suspect there is meaning to life. There is enlightenment to be had, if only we can let ourselves open up to it. Life can be chaotic and random, but somehow serendipity and fate can still occur. Without some overlord or god or grand designer. I can't explain it any better than that, maybe because I haven't been enlightened. I suspect it is merely the journey to enlightenment that *is* enlightenment.

But I was going to talk about this book, about Valentine Michael Smith, the human raised by Martians who became a sort of messiah. As I said, because it's been so long, I can't remember the details well enough and have to describe my reactions to the book as a response to what others have said.

I'm going to attempt to respond to the GoodReads review written by "Christy".

1. She has a strong response to the ugliness of the word "grok". I can sympathize with this, truly. I definitely feel like there are words that sound or feel "ugly", and "grok" is definitely one of them. But at some point I got over that, possibly at the point that I actually figured out the true meaning of the word. Something I suspsect that Christy has defined in a slightly different way than I have, which could explain a few things.

2. She sees a bit of hypocrisy in Heinlein's critique of religion and his use of religion to get his point across, saying that using religion as manipulation is too cynical for her taste and goes against the "Thou art God" philosophy. This is where I begin to suspect she has a different definition of the word "grok", as well as the concept of "thou art god", but I want to get to that later, as it's the meat of everything.

3. "The sexism of the text, which is inseparable from its heteronormativity and even homophobia." Yep, she's got me there. I still can't get over that line, "Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault". shudders But it's easier for me to give him a pass on the sexism than it is for homophobia. I just don't understand where the homophobia comes from. It is so very much against everything that I've come to love about Heinlein as I've read more and more of his work. Which makes me wonder about it. A comment on Christy's review by "Stew" suggests much of the book's offenses are contrived to be offensive, as their own commentary on things wrong with society. Speaking of the sexism, I don't think so. But the homophobia? Maybe. I can't recall much, if any, homophobia in any of the other works that I've read by him. I just don't know what to do with these sentiments. They will probably always be the most disturbing thing to me about Heinlein.

Why is it less disturbing when confronted with the sexism? Mostly because it's pretty much in all of his books. It's difficult to stomach, but you eventually have to roll your eyes and move on. Because at some point you have to remember that no one is perfect, and it's ok to recognize someone's contributions without letting their faults overshadow their good works. Do you point it out? Hell. Yes. Do you ruminate and question and let it frustrate you? Yes. Then you set it aside and move on. One does not judge the Constitution by the way it sets up how to count slaves. Critique it, yes, but don't throw it out. It being a living document, in fact you work to change it, while keeping the historical records as a remembrance of how times have changed.

One does not ban Huckleberry Finn for its use of the "N-word", but instead focuses on its message that black people are human. One does not judge the sermons of Martin Luther King Jr. for its heteronormatism or religious content, but for the message of overall equality. One does not throw out the contributions of Margaret Sanger for access to birth control because she support eugenics. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Christy has done this. No, this is me explaining part of my reasoning for giving Heinlein a slap on the wrist rather than a beating for his sexism.

All of that aside, I have a more slippery reason. I think it's part of Heinlein's sexuality. Yes, I will go so far as to say that I think Heinlein himself was sexist. Time and again, Heinlein's male characters physically dominate the strong women they are drawn to. The scenes are like an eroticized breaking of a horse: the two fight for dominance, the man uses physical force to still the woman into true submission until she stops fighting and listens, he tells the woman how maddeningly feisty she is and how she is never to do "x" again and by the way she is the most amazing woman ever and so beautiful and intelligent and awesome and lets have babies now, she melts into his arms and their relationship is instantly transformed into one of loving hen-pecking and hot sex and adoration and baby making. The man and woman instantly understand everything about each other and all the conflicts from before this moment become silly endearments. The woman can be as "uppity" as she likes until the man raises an eyebrow, then she instantly knows she has crossed a line and with contrition she acknowledges that of course it is her duty to defer to his judgement in the matter.

Bleck. But... I can't ignore how very much this sounds like the relationship between a true Submissive and his/her Dominant partner. Yes, I'm talking about "BDSM" culture. I'm talking about a very real, valid, and contemporary (as in it's not just 1950s prudish patriarchy) form of sexuality.

Feminism is still divided strongly between sex-positive and sex-negative views. I am strongly a pro-sex feminist. Some of the anti-pornography and anti-dominance arguments I can understand, even occasionally agree with. But overall, I see sex as a positive human endeavor, pornography as a way to enjoy it, and submission/dominance relations as valid forms of sexuality. In light of that, I strongly suspect these scenes are exactly in-line with Heinlein's personal views. His work is filled with social commentary, much of it along liberal lines, but by no means is he a "flower-child". The man is pro-military and anti-democracy for crying out loud. These are just facets of his world view that we must accept as part of Heinlein, and move on from there.

Also, I am very frustrated with the entire second paragraph in the 3rd point of Christy's review. I don't see the problem with Jill's leap to the conclusion that appreciating poronography makes sense. It about sums up how I feel on the matter: it's ok to want to be looked at and it's ok to look. Pornography as an industry may have issues of power, and I have a big problem with the everyday objectifying of women as sexual objects in order to sell products, but I don't think pornography itself is wrong or anti-feminist, nor do I feel that seeing a person as a sexual object is wrong. The quote about Jill's relief at not having lesbian tendencies is troublesome. Part of me ridiculously holds out hope that we can take the comment at face value - that Jill wasn't ready for that much change, but that it isn't necessarily commentary on homosexuality. But of course, there's all the rest of the anti-homosexual sentiment to quash this. *sigh* But where does Christy get the impressions that Jill thinks "women are the spectacle, never the spectator" and "women's role in sexual behavior is essentially passive"? I find this whole paragraph to be too close to the sex-negative view point for my comfort.

4. Christy's response to the "emphasis on self" is where she completely loses me. She says "but if feeling good and being happy are the primary goals of life, then that opens the door for abuses of others in the name of love or happiness and seems a rather meaningless goal in and of itself. Hedonism alone is not enough for me."

Well damn. Crap on toast, woman, hedonism is basically the core of my entire life view. But for the love of all that is unHoly, how does any of this "open the door" to abuse and make life meaningless? Christy ends her review contrasting Heinlein's view that God is in all of us with Vonnegut's view that there is no god anywhere, saying that she finds Vonnegut more appealing. I've yet to read any Vonnegut, but I can see how someone can believe that view is more realistic or true. But more appealing? She faults Heinlein's finding meaning in the physical as too meaningless, but favors Vonnegut's view that life is meaningless? How can you prefer meaningless but fault someone for being too meaningless? It makes no sense to me. It makes me scratch my head so much, I wonder if I've misunderstood it somehow. (She thinks Mike duping people into knowledge via false religion is "too cynical", but Vonnegut's no god scenario is "appealing"? Huh???)

But this is a good transition back to my feeling that Christy does not define "grok" the way that I do, and that the definition goes to the core of my beliefs.

Christy bemoans "philosophy that believes that YOU are the center of the universe, that everything will work out for the best." She mentions The Secret, something that I haven't read (because I suspect I won't like it and there will be much eye-rolling), so I don't understand her "name-it-and-claim-it" comment. Working out for the best... huh?

As stated, Mike's lesson for humanity isn't religion. Christy doesn't see that although the word "God" is in there, "Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God" has nothing to do with any "God".

I'm not Heinlein, and I'm not the character Michael or any other Martian, but I have always understood that to "grok" is to understand the existence of something completely and implicitly. And essential to this understanding is that there is no one thing to understand, there is no God or creator or meaning, there is no me and there is no you. Everything just is. Everything is Everything. There is no chair or you or Martians or books or God or... I suspect no love or hate or fear or action or movement or... anything. Because all there is is everything. There is no ONE thing. There is just EVERYthing, which is one thing. To grok is to understand this. To use Michael's mind powers, one simply taps into Everything, to be One with the All. It's that simple. This isn't religion. It is fact. The meaning of life is that life and unlife and existence is... existence.

Everything is Everything.

It's not cynical to dupe people with religion. It's using religion to bring them closer so you can whisper to them that there is no religion, there just is. The lesson is not religion. The lesson is that we are all part of a single existence. It's easy to say "single entity" here, but I don't think that's right either.

I was in tears when Michael told the ant "Thou art God", not because the ant is part of God and so is Michael and therefore everything will be ok in the end. No, "God" is merely a human name for something unnameable. "God" is the name for the realization that everyone and everything that ever was and is and will be is All. He was saying hello and goodbye to himself. He was acknowledging there is no death. I believe the only reason he uses the word "God" at all is because it is the closest word in the English language that comes anywhere close to covering it.

And this is as close to something that I can believe in as I've felt since I realized I didn't believe in God when I was 18. It's how I can be an atheist and say there is meaning to life. Do I believe that if I can truly transcend, to somehow actually BE the concept of everything is ONE, that I could then manipulate the things around me? Make my own reality? No. Maybe. It would explain some of the unexplainable phenomenon. It would explain afterlife and quantum physics and ghosts and non-linear time. Because there is no time either. There just IS. Psychic phenomenon*, all of it. Because everything just IS.

Maybe when I die, all of me will just BE everything else, and everything will sigh in relief that everything is finally one Evertyhing again, and I will know that it's all ok. I'll know how it all ends, I'll know the meaning of life and the universe and god, because I always will be and always have been Everything. Or maybe not. Probably not. But I like this idea better than anything I have ever heard. And it sounds much more probable than anything else too.

*Heinlein's book "Beyond This Horizon" and Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" both imply the psychic phenomenon can be explained by the fact that time is non-linear. If there is no time, or if everything that happened/is happening/will happen all happens at the same time, then having fore-knowledge of something is just that person having tapped into non-linear time.

I am attempting to pull something elusive out from the ether that has been percolating in my brain. It is about the juxtaposition of the current American sense of of individualism and the basic human need for companionship.

I recently discovered the This I Believe radio series via Audible.com and, while it took awhile for the slower pace to grow on me, I am now a firm believer in listening. We would all be a lot happier if we slowed down and listened to others now and then, and this is a great jumping off point.

Two essays had content that jumped out at me, stayed with me, and are partially responsible for my current percolation. Albert Einstein and Robert A. Heinlein. How many of us are aware of the human side of Einstein? The title of the piece alone is illuminating, An Ideal of Service to Our Fellow Man. Here I will quote a snippet:

The individual feels more than ever dependent on society, but he feels this dependence not in the positive sense — cradled, connected as part of an organic. He sees it as a threat to his natural rights and even his economic existence. His position in society, then, is such that that which drives his ego is encouraged and developed, and that which would drive him toward other men (a weak impulse to begin with) is left to atrophy.

Couple that vision of 1950's American individualism with Heinlein's observations of community in the same decade. His essay, titled Our Noble, Essential Decency, brought tears to my ears just from hearing someone so important to me expressing feelings of hope for humanity. Here is a snippet:

I believe in my neighbors. I know their faults, and I know that their virtues far outweigh their faults.

Take Father Michael, down our road a piece. I'm not of his creed, but I know that goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. I believe in Father Mike. If I'm in trouble, I'll go to him. My next door neighbor's a veterinary doctor. Doc will get out of bed after a hard day to help a stray cat—no fee, no prospect of a fee. I believe in Doc.

I believe in my townspeople. You can knock on any door in our town, say "I'm hungry," and you'll be fed. Our town is no exception. I found the same ready charity everywhere. For the one who says, "The heck with you, I've got mine," there are a hundred, a thousand, who will say, "Sure pal, sit down."

So what has been percolating for me, is this question of what happened to Heinlein's vision of his fellow Americans. What has happened to the notion of doing good for one another? How have we gone even further into Einstein's example, of Man avoiding Man, afraid of asking for help, afraid of needing anything or anyone at all?

So with those thoughts setting up my frame of mind, I have been dwelling on my loneliness and my depression. A recent conversation brought up, again, the concept that if I don't go out and find people, I will continue to be lonely. And I have gone out. I've gone out of my way to break through all of my blockages due to depression and anxiety, and the end result was very close to nil*. Zip, zilch, nothing. So I am back in my hole at home, nursing the wounds of extending myself without reciprocation.

[*No, not zero. No, not everyone's fault but mine. There was some reciprocation. There were near misses. There were huge failures on my part. In the end, I think nothing really panned out purely because of my inadequacies.]

I started thinking about all of the "checkpoints" to make sure that new mother's don't get lost in the depths of post-partum depression. How every single health worker I encountered during my daughter's first year of life asked me to talk about myself, how was I doing, who did I have to talk to and share my burdens. How both of my PEPS groups set aside blocks of time to talk about PPD and the need to reach out to those in need. How I revealed to both of my PEPS groups that I had depression.

And a completely new thought came to me.

Healthcare workers know they need to reach out to people at risk. They quiz me, the listen, some of them even sought me up for follow-up. So why is it that normal, everyday people around you don't know this? Or if they do know it, why aren't they acting on it?

I am a person very vocal about my depression. I am a first-time mother to a toddler who spends almost all of her time alone at home. Where is the line of people knocking on my door to make sure that I'm ok?

This thought shocked me. It is so self-righteous. People can't be expected to just drop everything and cater to me just because I'm sad and lonely.

Oh, but I'm not just sad and lonely. I have a disease. A disease with known symptoms of suicide, child abandonment, child abuse, and infanticide.

Long ago I discovered that I need medications for my depression the exact same way that a diabetic needs insulin: I need it to live.

Depression is like all diseases: there are things that help, and things that make it worse. So why not treat it like a disease? If I have Type 2 or 3 Diabetes, would you be inclined to sign me up for a Dessert of The Month or simply inquire about my health, my well being, and ask if I need help with anything? If I have a cancer and I'm taking chemotherapy, are you going to invite me to a rave complete with a hit of Ecstasy, or are you going to stop by for a visit, bring some chicken soup, and tidy up the dishes in the sink?

I'm guessing most people would enact any of those scenarios. Most people would just stay home and live their lives, maybe drop a line on Facebook or make a phone call now and then.

But while Diabetes is helped by insulin and cancer is helped by chemotherapy, depression is helped by companionship.

You are my medicine. I've asked for a regular dosage. So where are you?

I know it's difficult to get out of your comfort zone. Believe me, I've got a very small one and I stay socked in there constantly, so I know how hard it is to stand up, shake the dust of the rut off, and take the plunge into foreign waters. But I'm worth it, aren't I?

Maybe it's a tangent, maybe it's not, but I have to rant here. I am literally sick of hearing about "baggage" and how loathsome it is. The sentiment makes my blood boil. You've got baggage, I've got baggage, the freaking Pope has baggage, I assure you. I am not less of a person, I am not less worthy of respect and love and affection, because bad things happened to me in the past. When was the last time you looked in your closet and were surprised people still like you? That's what I thought. So can this sentiment about baggage making people less. Stop this sentiment that broken people aren't worth you time. Can we please halt this sentiment that someone is unworthy of you? I am all for girlpower, but who coined the phrases "You're better than him" and "He doesn't deserve you"? Those things sound nice when your heart has been stomped on, and they absolutely apply if your man beats you, but other than that... should you really be encouraging people to believe that they are better than others? That some people are beneath them?

That's about all I've got, folks. I said it was something percolating. I didn't say it was coherent. I have no solution. I have no Magic Wand of Fxing. I just have thoughts and hopes. And lately I'm hoping that we can find our way back to a sense of humanity where we're not afraid of each other or ourselves. I'm hoping we can all live in Heinlein's little town where all we have to do is ask for help and it will be given, no question asked. We're all hungry for something, and we all deserve to eat.

Finally, a disclaimer: This is not a cry for help. This is not a guilt trip. This is not about you. It's not really about me, except that these are my thoughts. My thoughts on humanity. People in general.

For those of you who know me a little, I might appear to be polite, "nice", maybe a little innocent or naive or shy. For those who know me a little more, you might add "kind" but remove the "innocent". If you think about it, hell if I think about it, you may come to the conclusion that I am one of those people who wants to be liked. However, the reality is that I truly just want to be understood, and second to that respected for the truth of who I am, even if you don't like that person. In all honesty, I can be a little mean, I can certainly be bitchy. I am the Queen of Whine, Sarcasm, and Understatement. Above all else, I strive to be Fair. In a disagreement, I want all parties to understand each other and hopefully respect each other's positions - I will usually break out into "moderator" mode to attempt accomplishing this. I find willful blindness infuriating. If you are going to hate something, you sure better understand it completely before you pass judgement. And for fuck's sake, be civil about it.

So it was more than a little surprising to me when I found myself banned from an Atheist forum. I was more than a little bit hurt. Being a Stay-at-Home Mom to a little one who doesn't yet talk, it was a nice place to find a few minutes (ok, hours) a day to rub some brain cells together and enjoy some adult conversation. Of course, that really depends on your definition of adult, but I at least always attempted to remain adult and civilized on the forum.

I was actually getting a bit annoyed with some of the members of the forum. It was getting a little predictable - far too many "let's bash religion X" posts, far too few topics that required critical thinking. I'm hard pressed to think of a single new thing I learned over the course of the few months I was active. Other than atheists have about as much in common as any two religious individuals picked at random. Or that interacting with so many people who do not speak English as their first language and who have so little in common can be quite eye-opening and frustrating and nerve-wracking.

But I tried. I really, really did. On occasion, I did stoop to berating the willfully ignorant. I'm not proud of this. But when everyone else is doing it, and the person is making you just so angry, it's a bit difficult to resist the temptation to drop the pretense of rational, civil discussion and just let loose your own angry tirade.

As far as I can tell, my few slips into confrontational jerkism had nothing to do with my ban. I usually received a pat on the back. And always, always the instigator of assholistic ignorance in these circumstances was banned. Let me repeat that: every time I stooped to a low level, the person I deemed to attack was banned, I was usually congratulated and/or agreed with, and no one on "my" side was banned.

So finding myself banned has me scratching my head. I have gone over and over in my head what could have caused it. I had few interactions in the 24 hours prior to my discovery of the ban. Oh, FYI, Facebook does not tell you when you're banned. And when you are banned from a Closed Group, you can't see the page any longer. Facebook somehow takes direct links out of your history for crying out loud. Searching for the group does not pull them up. In order to confirm that the group did not simply disband, I had someone else search for the group on another account from a different device. The group still exists, it still displays over a thousand members, it's still listed as a Closed group that displays the +Join option to another Facebook user.

So, was I accidentally deleted in a large culling of the ranks? A Group Admin had asked the Group if it was time to do this the previous day, but before an official decision was announced, that discussion devolved into some discussion of some sci-fi reference I didn't understand.

Was it my response to the member who asked how the (Christian) lunatics could be running the asylum? I rambled off a few things about Christianity contradicting itself that really bugged me, like hatred of "unnatural" gays born in a world created by a "God" who is the creator of all life in all forms who thus by definition cannot be unnatural or a mistake. How did all-powerful God allow Satan, his creation, to rebel? Why does he let the guy stick around? I mentioned a particular lack of understanding of American Christians, since Americans seem to share a DNA quirk of hating any sort of tyranny or rule by anyone other than the self, and yet American Christians are perfectly willing, happy even, to bow down and worship a God who allows so much human suffering. End comment. No anger, no bad words, just an honest feeling of dismay. The original poster "Liked" my post.

Was it my post in a L-O-N-G thread that had turned in a new direction the day before when I posted something about Evolution? My post this day began with "Way to take my analogy and run way, way left field with it guys." It went on to explain that I hadn't posted about evolution to somehow say I doubted it, but that there had been some arguing about "faith" and "belief" and some others had made comments about how frustrating the English language can be when we don't all agree on our definitions - because this was really what was at the core of this "argument", differing definitions of "faith" and "belief" - and so I posted a link to how scientists can't even agree on whether Evolution is theory or fact or theory AND fact. We had been arguing semantics, I was annoyed and so brought up another argument of semantics, and I come back the next day and my comment had begun a new argument of semantics. I also called out one person and asked him why he thought this other person was an evolution denier, when in truth he had never said such a thing but rather was trying to explain why he was in the camp of evolution still being "theory".

The Group Admin "Liked" my post. He responded with something along the lines of "and thus the evolution of a post." I loved that. I hit "Like" on his post. The end.

So we arrive to the my third and last interaction with the group. Someone had posted a link to and a copy/paste of a cutesy, feel good story about a professor on the first day of classes explaining to his students about how to important it is to pay attention to the big things in life that are the real influences on your happiness, to see how small and insignificant the rest of your life's annoyances are - basically, prioritize your relationships. Well, it so happens this professor thought that an important relationship, the first one to mention even, was a person's relationship with "God". sigh. So instead of ignoring that part and seeing the post for what it was - a nudge to remember what's important in life and not sweat the small stuff, most of the responses were negative. They ranged from "what's this drivel doing in an atheist forum?" to "I read up until "God" and then just heard blah, blah, blah" to "I have to read this shit every day, I shouldn't have to read it here". sigh. My response to all of this was something about how I was glad this was posted here, because I can use every nudge I can get to remember to step back and remember my priorities. It's too easy to get sucked into silly Facebook discussions and it's nice to get a reminder to look away and listen to my husband read to my daughter. This post is reminding us that relationships are what's important in life. Some people have a relationship with God, I don't, so I skip over that part.

Within minutes, the Group Admin, the same one whose play on words about evolution I liked so much in the other discussion, posted something along the lines of "Having a relationship with god is akin to having a relationship with the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus." That was ALL he said.

I was frustrated. He seemed to overlook what I'd said about appreciating the nudge to cherish what I cherish in life. He was focusing on the silliness of belief in God.

I have not yet mentioned that the earlier "argument" about the words "faith" and "belief" were between myself, the person accused of being an evolution denier, and a 3rd person I'll call SB. SB had become a bit of a thorn in my side, constantly putting down anything that mentioned faith, belief, religion, or "God"/god. He was really coming across as if he merely wanted the Forum to be a place where everyone either agreed with each other on how awesome atheism was, or spent their time attacking religion. No critical thought or debate or shades of gray or thoughtfulness. Just "agree with me" or "stand with me to hate them". He was the one who said he only heard "blah,blah,blah" after the word "God" came up in that silly copy/paste story about the professor. When someone called him on it, he followed that with the comment about not having to read shit like that "here". Because obviously his life is so tainted by religion, he has no tolerance for it, and wants this to be a place to go to hold up and not deal with it. I hope you are all following the irony of a person tired of religion thinking that an atheist forum is going to be a place of refuge free from discussions of religion.

SB was getting on my last nerve. That the Group Admin was giving him, and everyone else being negative about the post, a free pass to be snide against anything that dare mention "God", really chapped my ass. I waited and dwelled and considered. I took my time. Finally, I came up with a thoughtful response.

I addressed it to the Group Admin my name, and it was something along the lines of "Group Admin, your post gives the impression that you are in the camp with SB that anything/anyone that mentions god/religion is crap. I find this mentality infuriating. 99% of the people that I hero worship have/had some sort of religious belief: Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Anne Rice… Where would we be if we threw out everything ever made/created/discovered/said by someone of faith?" And I think, or at least I am very, very sure, that was all I said.

Because I was getting very, very tired of the constant need to put down everything and everyone associated with any and all religions. And the Group Admin wasting a chance to call someone, namely SB, on that position got on my last nerve. And so I said something about it. Something calm and rational. The most incendiary thing I said was the word "infuriating". I didn't say he pissed me off, or SB pissed me off, or even the discussion or any single post pissed me off. I said a particular mind-set made me mad, and it seemed that he shared it. This left room for discussion. Was that really the impression he was trying to give? If so, why? If not, call me on it.

No one responded. I went to bed shortly after this. The next morning, I dreaded going to Facebook. I shouldn't have used the word "infuriating". I shouldn't have used it when addressing the group admin. I shouldn't have lumped him in with someone I was annoyed with because he was flippant. sigh I had gone overboard and I was about to be called out for it. Dammit! But when I finally logged on to Facebook, there were no notifications from the board. No one had responded to what I'd said. Huh.

About an hour later, still no response. That's kind of odd. Considering I had left comments on 3 discussions and I should have expected a notification of someone having said something after me in at least one of them, even if it wasn't a direct response to me. I should have gotten some sort of notification about some discussion on the board. And I had none. I opened my Notifications and there were none from the group the day before. Or the day before that. Or… ever. I looked at my Facebook Page in various places and couldn't find anything about the group, nothing that I had ever said there, no mention of me being a part of it. Was it because it was a closed group? I did a search. The group did not come up. I searched my history. My history was blank except for one place, and when I clicked on it, it said the Page could not be Found.

I had Eric search for the group. He found it. I could not even find them in a Search.

I was banned.

No notice. No message. No warning. No evidence I had ever even been there.

Holy Fucking Shit.

It hurt. I'm not going to lie. I do want to be liked. I appreciated the brain stimulation. But what really bothered me was that I had been misunderstood. Somehow, somewhere, I had said something that a Group Admin had believed was offensive. And I had never, ever meant to be offensive to anyone. Not only was I misunderstood, but I was misunderstood on such a grand scale that I was cut off. I was silenced. I was never going to be given the opportunity to explain myself. I was never going to be given to the opportunity to be understood. I was never going to understand why I was not understood.

It was all so trivial. It was tame. It wasn't mean. It was rational. The only swear word I used was "crap".

I don't want to be part of a group like that. I was quickly coming to the realization that they could be just as closed-minded and bigoted a group as a bunch of Fundamentalist Christians.

But I wasn't given the opportunity to air my grievances properly.

And none of us are going to understand each other because the conversation was cut-off mid-sentence.

If only there was a way to go back, read the last page like Harry in "When Harry Met Sally". I will never solve this puzzle because the mean kid packed away all the pieces and took the whole thing home with him.

Bastards. Mother Fucking Cunt-Ass-Bitch Mother Fuckers!

I am a week away from turning 40. Never in a million years did I expect this life for myself. My teenage self would be shocked. My 20s self would be shocked. In my teens, I wanted the world. In my 20s, I didn't know what I wanted. In my 30s, I wanted a child.

I have the child, finally. And little else. Oh, I have so very much going for me on the surface. I have a home, a loving husband, there is steady income, healthcare, food on the table. We have 2 cars, enough money to feed and clothe and entertain the baby. The baby is happy and healthy and fun and funny and annoying and scary and breathtaking and beautiful and awe inspiring and heartmelting and dumbfounding and confounding and we laugh all the time. But I cry as much as I laugh.

I wonder, would I have kept a handle on my depression, kept it from becoming Post Partum Depression, if there had been more people in my life? I've tried everything I can think of. I joined 2 different mommy groups. I've tried to include the families more. I set up a weekly get together with my sister-in-law.

I just can't get around it - there is no one in my life, not on a regular, daily basis, other than my husband and my baby. I have no Best Friend. I haven't in years. I barely have friends. Most of my communication with the people I care about is over the internet. I have no one that I can call at 3am in an emergency. I have no one that I can call at 2pm with an emergency. I have no one that I can call and just say "I'm crying, can you please come over?"

How do you go about fixing that exactly? I've looked online. That is a joke. If somehow you can get around all the people you have nothing in common with, then around the people who insist "no drama" and "you must be sane", then around the people who don't write you back even though you have a million things in common, THEN how do you write something not completely needy and desperate? This is my life: I'm writing to no one on the internet, crying my eyes out as my husband and daughter sleep blissfully upstairs, won't you please be my friend?

How did I get here? Oh, lots of ways actually. People I've distanced myself from, people who have distanced themselves from me. Shyness. Being shy is the hardest obstacle. Fear of being myself around others because I'm so "different" I won't be accepted, so I don't reach out. When the "true" me is this carefully wrapped mess barely hanging together, it's hard to go out in public, let alone be yourself. And when you're not being yourself, it's hard to connect with people.

I'll feel better in a few days. My routine was messed with and I got off my medication. I'm back on now, I just have to wait for it to kick in. The difference in my thoughts is night and day. But being on the medication won't fix my dilemma: I'm still lonely and friendless. The medication just keeps me from spending all day weeping about it.

If I wasn't so lonely, would I stop being so bitter about my childhood? Would I stop resenting my family for not protecting me? Would I stop being so angry at people who insist on being positive? Would I stop resenting other people's success? Would I stop wanting to shout at Christians who are so thankful for their god who gave them such great lives and allowed me to grow up abused?

For as long as I can remember, it's not horror movies that terrify me, it's real life. For the longest time I lived my adult life waiting for the other shoe to drop and I thought I had finally gotten past that. Maybe not. If anything, now that the baby is here, I am more terrified of the randomisity of life.

Today, the thing that I am most angry about is myself. I have found another Proof that the Christian god does not exist: me. If a truly all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God existed, my child would not have been born to me. My child would not have to grow up with a mother suffering from depression. If "God" existed, I would not have have been abused as a child myself, thus creating that depression. "God" allowed my father to be abused as a child, allowed him to grow up and abuse his own children, then allowed me to have a child who will suffer because of the incorrect coping strategies my childhood beat into my subconscious.

Tomorrow will be better. I just have to keep telling myself that.

A few years ago, someone I cared about very deeply said something about me being selfish. I was flabbergasted and affronted. I've had the time to realize that not only was she right, but that I think it's due to the depression. Both having and trying to heal from depression keeps you constantly tuned to yourself. When the depression is at its worst, I spend a lot of my time seeking out anything and everything that will make me feel better, everything else be damned. When I'm on top of my depression, I am constantly analyzing and re-analyzing my inner-monologue to make sure I'm not thinking "crazy thoughts". I spend a LOT of time in my own head.

And now it's late. I was attempting at some sort of cohesiveness here, but my thoughts are just all over the place in a million different directions lately. Comes from not writing when I should. If I write more often, I can write about one topic at a time as it comes to me, instead of going weeks or months and then having to jam all those thoughts into one short session. The problem is, my current weapon of choice against depression is mind numbing it with useless interneting. Writing makes me think just a little too much about my problems. It's so much easier to pretend they're not there and spend my days clicking mindlessly...

Here I am again, awake too early on the morning of a scheduled pregnancy test. This time, I have zero interest in self testing. Yay! I am kind of stumped though - whatever the outcome, how do I make myself believe it? I was explaining my thinking last time, that whatever that test revealed, I wouldn't believe it without self testing, when someone pointed out that no, I would believe it if it were negative. It's so much easier to believe the negative.

How very, very true. If I were to self-test right now and got a negative result, I would be devastated again and believe it right away. Except for a little niggling of doubt spurred by hope. A little hope can be a dangerous thing.

But if I got a positive result at home, no way would I be able to believe it! I would just be a million times more anxious to get to the appointment, and then waiting for the results to come in!

But the question remains, should I bring a pregnancy test with us? So that when the phone call does come, I can confirm it? What can they say to convince me it's really true if it's positive? I really don't know.

As I'm remembering more, I think it was Susan that I had this conversation with, who said it was easier to believe the negative. Because I remember telling her that I'm a pessimist, who tries to be a realist, but is a closet optimist.

I am usually intensely pessimistic: I stomp around with all my negative thoughts, telling myself "it will never happen". But most of the time, I have reason(s), ie: it's never worked right before. I try very hard to be realistic. But under it all, there is always this tiny, fantastical hope - because I want to believe in miracles.

I think I've mentioned before that it is impossible for me to believe anything 100%. I am 99.999999% sure that: the sky is blue, the earth is round, my cats can't talk, my husband loves me, etc...

So here I am with my extreme pessimism, and my fantastical hope. "It will never happen. This part won't work, that thing will go wrong, someone isn't good enough. But oh! What if I'm wrong? What if by some miracle, all those obstacles are overcome? What if it really happens?! No, never. Too much will go wrong..."

I'm tired just typing all that, and yet it cycles continuously through my mind when I'm anxious/worried about something.

Ridiculous optimisms I have actually thought of at least cursory contingency plans for: I might still get pregnant on my own, my cat will pull through this, she may forgive me, he may still love me, someday I may trim down to 125 lbs, someday I may be able to get off my antidepressants, it's possible to be up over $100 in craps, Jon Stewart might read my blog, someone might publish my blog, I will finish the novel I started when I was 11 years old, Simon le Bon will become infatuated with me...

There are so many variables out there, how can anyone believe in anything at all? How does that admonishment go... "and you might get hit by a bus tomorrow, but if you keep focusing on that, you'll go crazy!"

DingDingDing! I am absolutely bat-shit crazy! So that's where it all started....

I had originally intended to write about Forgiveness in two parts, as I had two separate experiences/ideas to write about. But the universe did its thing, throwing all sorts of relevant conversations and stories at me this week. There has been so much to think about and digest, I can't keep up with it all! For now, I go back to my original plan and the topic I had meant to write about next. I imagine some things from this week will filter in. I'll have to see when I'm finished how much is left unsaid that still needs to be addressed later...

In my last post, I wrote about my need to learn how to forgive my mother. Today, I want to talk about my inability to forgive my father, something that may not just be impossible, but that can be argued may or may not be in my best interest to attempt. I don't want to talk about my father in specifics. There is too much there, and it is all very painful, which will make what I'm attempting to do here much more emotional than I'd like. I'm trying to examine myself, my feelings, the way I think, my opinions - to reconcile this with the outer world, the "normal" world. I don't want to dwell in the past, I want to deal with my present mindset.

But I need to be clear about a few things. First, I believe my father to be the second most evil individual I have ever met. Two, during my childhood my father was violent, alcoholic, quick to anger, extremely volatile - I believe he was/is suffering from schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, or some other psychotic personality disorder. Three, my mother on the other hand was/is merely neurotic. Four, I believe my father should be rotting away in some prison right now for the crimes he has committed against me and my family, as well as others with the misfortune of having been in his life. Five, the most evil person I have ever met was my father's step-father, the biological father of my dad's brothers - but not genetically responsible for my father or his sister.

. . .

I had a full session with my therapist this week, knowing I had more to talk about than just the usual half-hour check-in appointment could allow for. I talked about my bitterness, how hard it is for me to forgive anyone for even the smallest infractions, about my negativity and pessimism. She wanted to know where my pessimism came from, if it was something my parents or others from my childhood might have instilled or modeled for me to learn. The answer to that is while my parents are likely hugely responsible for my negativity and pessimism, I believe the extent is merely through the self-defense mechanisms I developed in response to their actions. I don't recall my mother or father being pessimistic or optimistic. I remember my mother encouraging us to follow our dreams and telling us we could do whatever it is in life we wanted to try. I remember my father always chasing fantastical dreams of wealth.

My earliest memories of pessimism are from a volleyball game in the 7th grade. I was not horrifically bad at volleyball, unlike 99% of the other things inflicted on me in school during PE. On this occasion, my team was winning. Every time we made a point or thwarted the other team's attempts to score, all the boys would cheer and trash-talk the opposing team. This infuriated me. I saw no reason to celebrate a game that wasn't over, a game that we could still lose. We shouldn't count our chickens before they had hatched, because it would tempt fate.

Lessons learned through this memory: I was (irrationally?) superstitious from a young age, I am not or at least was not a complete failure at physical activity, and - drum roll please - school kids may be the root cause of my pessimism. Huh.

Today, I feel I am a total failure at anything physical, completely lacking any grace or delicacy of movement, a true "bull in a china shop". In the 7th grade playing volleyball, I already believed this. Why? Because of years of heckling from teammates in PE. It wasn't enough to be fat or white or shy or poor or lacking fashion sense - all the sources of school yard taunts. No, my level of unawesomeness carried over into the classroom, where it was a daily ritual for most of the boys and some of the girls to mock and ridicule my physical ineptitude during Physical Education period. Moving around, this was something that didn't change: co-ed PE was brutal for me in both Hawaii and Port Orchard. Thinking back, I should probably have been more thankful for middle-school PE in Port Orchard, where class was not co-ed, and team sports were rarely (if ever) played. There just isn't room for mocking when every last girl in the class is winded and hating the teacher for assigning yet another day of Cross Country running.

I have always believed I suck at sports. Completely and utterly. A belief in your own worthlessness is pessimism, right? This belief was indeed prompted by actual suckage on my part, but the point was truly hammered home by the voices of cruel little boys who hated losing games by having me on their team.

So my pessimism isn't from my parents. Who knew? But the bitterness, that is another story. As an adult, I have avoided all things physically demanding and voila, I don't suck all the time! But I seem to be incapable of avoiding childhood memories of the cruelty of my father. So pessimism I can work on. Actually, I personally believe I am a closet optimist, because no matter how bad things get, I always hold on to at least a smidgen of hope. This isn't very healthy either, clinging to the hope of miracles in the face of impending doom/failure.

I see my pessimism, my negativity, my bitterness, my difficulty giving forgiveness, as one thing. Maybe it's not? Maybe they're just related? But I definitely see my bitterness as caused not only by my past, but my current inability to forgive and/or let go of the past. I don't want to be a pessimist. I don't want to be bitter. I don't want to spend my entire life dwelling on past hurts to the extent of not being able to forgive. But how?

Actively working on forgiving my mother has been helpful. Time has helped partially heal the scars caused by childhood bullies. But time hasn't helped in the case of my father, and I cannot or will not forgive him. Leaving me to wonder, do I have to forgive my father to let go of my past and finally be happy with my present?

This is my dilemma, and one I don't really have an answer for. Of course, blurting out this statement only came at the very end of my therapy session. Ha! But she didn't shut down the conversation before telling me that it didn't have to be necessary for me to forgive my father. That there are ways of letting go of the past without forgiveness. Now there is a solution I'd like to pay money for! Unfortunately, if it was something simple, it would have been dished out by now in therapy. Nope, I'm thinking it's going to be rather complicated.

This hasn't really been much about my father like I expected, so let me steer back in that direction. I am the only person in my family who does not have a relationship with my father. My mother, my sister, my brothers - they all allow him in their lives. Hell, not a single one of my mother's relatives have ever put a foot down and banned him from anything - it's always up to my mother to convince him that everyone would be more comfortable at Thanksgiving dinner if he didn't go with us over to Gramma's house. All of this passive acceptance of him has added more bitterness for me to deal with. Because I don't understand. I don't understand how he can do the things he's done, treat them just the same for years and years, and still be allowed in their lives. I just don't understand it. It's confusing to me. It hurts, actually. It's been more difficult than I feel it should have been to communicate just how serious I am about not being in the same room with him, ever, for any reason.

My step-grand-father, the most evil person in the world, was never disowned by anyone in his family. Not even by my father, who was an actual victim of physical abuse usually shared for non-family members. Usually. You would think that violence in the home would give weight to accusations by outsiders, but it didn't. You would think that the violence against his stepchildren would give weight to the accusations of his grandchildren, but it didn't. You would think that he would have eventually ended up in prison and then some state graveyard only to be identified by a number, when in fact he lived out his last days happily at home, then was buried right next to my grandmother with a name and honored remarks on his tombstone.

Have all these people forgiven? Just put it out of their mind? Lied to themselves? Denied and remained unbelieving against all evidence? I don't get it, not in the case of my father or his step-father.

The same day CNN carried a story about forgiveness and Casey Anthony, I followed a link to Why people stick by scandal-plagued pastors. The article touches on money scandals, infidelity, sexual coercion. In all cases, there are people who "jump ship", but there are others who "stand by their man". What. The. Fuck? Apparently, disbelief is a big part of it. Cases where there is just no evidence that could possibly come to light to change the favorable opinion of a few loyal followers. Some people are voyeurs actively interested in watching the scandal fallout first hand. Again, WTF? Some "view themselves as participants in a cosmic struggle." Uh, what now? This has got to be my favorite though:

None of this appeared to matter to Kirkpatrick. He said Long would have to answer to God, not him.
"I don't think Bishop Long can do anything worse than what Judas did, and God still loved him," Kirkpatrick said.
Kirkpatrick compared pastors to doctors.
"There are people who we trust with our lives every day, like doctors, who do all sorts of things, but we don't question them. This is our spiritual medicine. We come here to get what we need and then we leave."
When asked if there was anything that would cause him to stop attending New Birth, Kirkpatrick lowered his head and paused before he finally said:
"The church would have to close."

I thought that the article might shed some light on my family's (un)reaction to the crimes of my father and his step-father. The closest that any of it came was the concept that a parishioner (child) can't leave a paster (parent) to whom they attribute a positive action in their life like help with drug addiction or a failing marriage (or... giving birth???).

"There is a suspension of common sense, a refusal to put two and two together," Thompson said. "For a lot of people, this is the man who gave them the keys to a whole new way of living. They can't separate the good they received from the man himself, so they feel it would be a betrayal to turn on him now."
When outsiders ratchet up criticism against an embattled pastor, members often go into battle mode, said Thompson, author of "The Prodigal Brother: Making Peace with Your Parents, Your Past, and the Wayward One in Your Family."
"They circle the wagons to protect their guy," Thompson said. "They don't want to see, and they don't want to be made to see what 'the world' sees. They believe the world's view is false, so they form the firewall."

In the end, I am no less confused. I'm just more in awe at some people's capacity for stupidity and/or ability to self-delude. Some things are just unknowable, unexplainable, to someone not experiencing it for themselves. Even when we're talking about two people having two completely different reactions to the same event.

And I'm no closer in my quest to understand and grant forgiveness.

And dammit if now there has to be a Part 3 in this series.

Forgiveness has been on my mind lately. I think it started when I was inspired by My Life List to make a life Goal to "forgive my mother". (It's an interesting concept, a website to declare and track your goals in life, combined with social media if you'd like to get public support in your endeavors.)

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a very bitter person. I am alternatively snarky or silent on many topics based on the emotional echoes from my past. I've only recently realized the extent that bitterness has infected my life, and it's become important to me to try to reverse. How does one reverse bitterness? Let go of the past, stop living your life there, and keep your past in your past. And forgive. Forgive yourself and others. Unfortunately, forgiveness does not come easily to me.

But the day after declaring to the world that I intend to forgive my mother, I stumble upon some thought-provoking pieces on CNN. The first was the most relevant, Casey Anthony and the challenge of forgiveness. For those living under a rock, Casey Anthony was found not-guilty of murdering her own daughter last week, after a very public trial, to the outrage of the American public. I personally think that trial-by-media is a horrific form of yellow journalism that is both detrimental to those involved in the case, as well as those who get sucked in by the media coverage - the first group doesn't get a proper trial (and in return receive unwanted attention at the worst possible moments of their lives), and the second group is whipped into a riotous feeding frenzy by news agencies. A "trial of peers" is not a trial by every person who has access to a television, it's by a 12 member jury picked to represent the public at large. There are rules about this sort of thing, and those rules are in place for everyone's sake. It is not healthy to become obsessed with media coverage of anything, especially not a murder trial that has nothing to do with you. But after an acquittal, the resulting public outcry is... ferocious, monstrous, and really fucking scary. An entire nation on the verge of rioting is frightening, but when it's caused by something that has nothing to do with them except to feed an obsession... can I just say, holy shit?

So Patrick Wanis wrote this piece for CNN about forgiveness, with Casey Anthony as the focus, but only as a greater lesson.

staying stuck in anger, bitterness, vindictiveness or a desire for revenge does not bring about positive results. As a human behavior expert and therapist, the most common denominator of the pain, mental and emotional affliction that I see people suffer is the lack of forgiveness - the anger and pursuit of revenge against mom, dad, brother, sister, aunt, uncle or self for something that someone did or didn’t do.

Without forgiveness, there is only pain, recurring memories that hurt again and again and again. There is a line between seeking justice and revenge, and holding out for revenge just destroys us from the inside out. Wanis gets all spiritual in his article, but even as an atheist I can understand and take to heart the examples in scripture and real life of forgiveness. He talks of Jesus, he talks of a Holocaust survivor, he steers back to Casey Anthony.

Look in your heart and ask yourself what effect the poison of anger and revenge have on you and your life. We have all wronged and we are all imperfect. Of course, murder is not the same as the wrongs that most of us commit.

But if Jesus could ask God to forgive the people that were about to murder him and if a Holocaust survivor could forgive the people that poisoned her and tried to exterminate her family, then what holds you and I back from forgiving anyone? The next time you commit a wrongdoing, won’t you be saying “Please forgive me?”

This is very powerful stuff. And relevant to my personal struggle with my relationship with my mother. I don't want to talk about what my mother did or didn't do, what was justified or not, whether I'm in the right or not. I love my mother, I know I hold the past against her, and I know that our relationship can't be healthy until I let that go. I have to forgive her.

But how? How does one forgive? There are obviously varying degrees of slights, and varying degrees of forgiveness we must find within ourselves to move forward. I am cut from the cloth that finds forgiveness of almost any level hard to grant. This is so shameful for me. So often, I know I'm being unreasonable, but I don't know how to stop myself. In the past, I have told people I forgive them without actually meaning it. Or meaning it at the time, only to realize later that I'm still holding bitterness against them. Neither is true forgiveness, neither is healthy for me or the other person.

Once again, I'm going to blame my crazy brain and its obsessiveness. I can't really speak for other people's brains I guess, but I've been given the impression that it's not normal to be constantly reliving a moment or emotion or event or series of events. I can be distracted - my mind is constantly going and going and going like a hamster on a wheel, and I'm constantly interrupted by all sorts of stray thoughts. But there is always something that my mind is holding on to like some rabid dog, and the only thing that relieves it is when the thought is replaced by a different obsessive thought. I am seriously exhausted just by what's going on in my head all the time, every minute of every hour of every day.

I'm thinking... Post Traumatic Stress Disorder coupled with Obessive Compulsive Disorder. Somehow, the OCD magnifies the PTSD, so that every negative event gets seared into my brain for reliving in Full Living Color and Smell-o-Vision over and over forever. My memories don't fade. The pain doesn't fade.

This is not really true, not in the long term. I do eventually "get over" most hurts. Most. Eventually. But the constant marathon reliving of the pain in the short term makes the process so maddening, so hard to live through, so hard to come out on the other side at all. Sometimes, I don't. For the most part, the things I can't forgive ever are from my childhood. My brain may find other distractions over time, other things to worry or obsess about over the years. But the smallest thing can set off a memory and suddenly it's as if it just happened. How does a person defeat that?

The answer is therapy of course - it has taught me how to actually notice that my mind is stuck in a rut. Noticing helps you actively distract yourself so you can get out. But... unfortunately, that's about it. I notice I'm doing it and I actively try to stop it. This isn't really all that much more pleasant than not noticing. At least there is some relief more often though.

So, let's see... Bitterness and revenge are bad, forgiveness is good, forgiveness is difficult to achieve, forgiveness of childhood hurts is more than difficult. Guess where my bitterness against my mother stems from? Childhood.

Time is helping. Talking is helping. Life is helping - you hear from other people about their similar experiences, you watch it unfold in movies, you read about it on CNN. It can be chipped away at over time. It just can't be forced.

There are some things that I'm convinced that I'm never going to forgive. But none of them involve my mother. I love her, I need her in my life again, I have done so much more harm through this bitterness - to her, to my siblings, to myself. Can actively trying to put those memories away actually help? I really, really hope so.

I was so sure I was pregnant. At my Wellness group, someone asked how I could stand the wait, how could I keep from home testing? I explained that my brain is so untrusting, such a thing would send me to Crazytown - no matter what the test said, I wouldn't believe it until the official blood test, leaving me to suffer through days of worry or false joy. But, I had a plan. I tested myself at home the morning I was scheduled to go in for my blood draw. I guess I really had this urge to pee on a stick...

It was about 5am, most of the world is still asleep, and I'm watching my pee activate a pregnancy test strip. Not once, but twice - negative both times. I somehow got myself dressed and went out to buy another test - surely my tests had been hanging around too long and had gone bad. I had my hoodie up, sunglasses on, tear streaks on my face, and still the checker cheerfully asked me about my day. I couldn't believe how chatty he was. I couldn't believe he wouldn't shut up and wither and die before my eyes. I still can't believe I didn't reach over and cause him physical harm.

Home again, and another failed test. I cried and cried and cried and cried. I somehow lived through the hours until it was time to wake up Eric to take me to the "real" test. He did his best to console me and keep hope alive. At the clinic, they kept us in the waiting room for an eternity. Seriously, it was the longest wait we've ever had there, and all we were there for was to give some blood. Did I mention there was another couple waiting, and I was spontaneously breaking into tears every other minute?

The lab tech did her best to console me. And she seemed genuinely surprised that no one had told me not to self-test because those tests were so unreliable. I kept to myself about the fact that it was 3 tests, and all those commercials they make about how home tests are "just as reliable" as blood tests these days.

I went home and straight into bed. Eric was the one who took the call. He was miserable coming to tell me, but I already knew. I wasn't pregnant. It didn't take.

"It didn't take."

This is the official phrase used by the clinic, my husband, the notifications we emailed.

It is not the phrase used in my head. If I allow myself to be honest, I had a miscarriage.

I was pregnant. An egg was fertilized by my husband, the embryo was implanted inside of me. Even if the loss occurred that very day, the fact remains that I had an embryo in my uterus. I had a baby in my womb. But the embryo was gone. The baby was dead.

The first 48 hours were the worst. I called my mother to ask her to tell me that I was wrong, trying again wouldn't be murder. Because all I could think about was the idea that now I knew my body couldn't support a pregnancy, wouldn't introducing a baby into that body constitute knowingly putting it to harm? Or, in my mind, a death trap. She told me no, that wasn't true. We talked about all the babies still in some lab, waiting to be born. They were already there, waiting for me. I couldn't walk away from them.

In the end, that was what made my decision. 17 embryos sitting in a frozen vat somewhere, waiting to come to life. I had made the decision to have them created, and it was up to me to do right by them. 17 possible babies.

The past few months have been unimaginably hard. Not only because of the sadness and loss and grief, or the gravity of the decision on what to do next, or the feeling of limbo as if my life is pointless until the next implantation, but the realization that my definition of life has shifted. This is big. Like realizing I didn't think god really existed big.

Because I didn't just have a procedure that didn't take. I had a baby in my womb. I had a baby that went away.

When did this happen? How did this happen? Such an extraordinary change in mindset. I had no idea it was possible, that this was in me waiting to happen. How on earth did I go from the belief that an embryo is just a packet of cells to eliminate when necessary, to the belief that on day one I had a real live baby inside of me?

There is a certain politician on the presidential campaign trail who is using her story of miscarriage to explain the evils of abortion. I understand her in a way that I couldn't have before. And yet now she and those that share her belief are even more alien to me. Because knowing there is a baby inside you and deciding to have it aborted is officially the hardest decision a woman can make. And yet, these people still think I'm incapable of making that decision on my own.

I have changed so much, but I am still the same.

Cycle Day 25 sucked. It was a huge pain in my ass, literally. Who knew that shoving a 3.5" needle into the muscles of your buttocks would not hurt a bit - until 48 hours later when every movement and pressure made me yelp. This morning the pain is much less already, thank you GODS! Not looking forward to the trio of needles waiting for me today though: tummy, left buttock, right arm. Whose idea was it to have a blood draw on a butt injection day?

Other than that, my symptoms so far have become negligible. I've had a headache almost every afternoon, but they go away just fine with some Excedrin - definitely not migraines!

So let us continue on to the second question of twenty that I mentioned the other day...

2. Is this what I want to be doing?
This very moment is, always, the only moment in which you can make changes. Knowing which changes are best for you comes, always, from assessing what you feel. Ask yourself many times every day if you like what you're doing. If the answer is no, start noticing what you'd prefer. Thus begins the revolution.

Outside! Right now my mind is squealing: outside, outside, outside! I would rather be doing anything that takes me out of this house. I want to see the world, but I will settle for something beyond these walls.

Looking beyond the moment and into my current life, I can say yes. Resoundingly. I have my doubts about turning myself into a baby-making machine, resentment of the injections, trepidations about raising a child in this house. But do I want to be making a baby? Do I want to introduce a baby into our lives? Yes. Oh, yes, definitely!

All of my worries and concerns are about how equipped we are to do this. How prepared we are, how responsible we can become, how diligent and clean and house-bound. But do I want to be doing everything in my power to have a child? Yes. No question.

I've felt for some time that being a parent is what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. I feel like I've just been spinning my wheels, waiting for life to call me up to bat. I've always believed that every past moment of life is preparing you for this one, right now, as well as the future. I think my life of physical and mental anguish has been preparing me for this, drilling into me all the things not to do, how not to be. I've lived so much of my adult life so selfishly that I've become sick of myself. I really feel like having a child will bring balance to my life: a way to be both selfish and self-sacrificing at the same time.