"Sixteen years conditioned" ... something is lost, something is found
A few things.
First, I have a medical reason for acting so stroppy. Those of you tuned into the feminine cycles might have been able to predict it. I did feel it was coming two days before today but I was not certain. Then I thought it would come tomorrow and what a shame if it was a holiday. I do have a holiday, effectively, until the 24th. This will be a healing and refreshing time ... I hope.
I lost my 1996 Englishbook for a little while but I found it very recently. And I have lost The Virtue of Selfishness which is too dreadful. It is not on any of the 35 shelves in the study. Nor on the 12 shelves of my bedroom. (4 bookcases in the study and 1 in the bedroom - the other is my lampside table as it were). My globe has blown. It is the main one. Turning on the other two gets me in trouble. Interestingly the one in the study doesn't even though it's just about the brightest of all the lights and it got me in trouble lots when I had the old one. But that was the unit, and that was the end of 1997, the week before Christmas to be specific. As things do when they are lost they bug my visuo-spatial memory. When I took back some of grandfather's books last May I think Virtue of Selfishness may be there. I want to use it to prove some arguments.
"What of the ones who are not so hypocritical"?
Second, I did not go to bed last night. I wanted to have control and sleep is control. I was stopped from reading something I needed to finish and that can make anyone stroppy. Also I have run out of printer paper for now and I haven't a Palm Pilot to read it that way. Besides I would have to bind it in some fashion. I think that I am not worth pens and pencils and binders and filing cabinets and all the usual accoutrements of a study/office and pretending to be a neet when I am really a preet (privileged re-entering education employment and training, and you say it prayet). The NEET is a Japanese word. In another world I might have been an office lady. And we talk about hair dressing and child care as virtual ghettos for young women with disabilties. Sorry, people have to learn theory now.
It is funny to write in and for newsletters. People forget so much for a week. I had to pretty much assume that people wouldn't read it or publish it.
When I hear Tina Arena's In Deep I think of Tamagotchis and psychological feti. I wrote a fan letter. Pretty gory. Might share it if I choose to. I am in a letter writing mood, and I did write a letter. To a newspaper.
Decided that ... oh, what did I decide?
I'm floating badly. It's a floating world, one of black and green and red.
Making gaffes right and left before I realise I even make them. It's the old difficulty of not letting people solve their own problems. It's wanting to have power or at least mastery. To think that I compete with a 13-year-old girl in mathematics and then prepare to embarrass her by suggesting she speak in public over the heads of her parents and uncle. I mean, rationally, I understand and all.
There is a big conference on just now. It is on English and education. I am looking for where I put it. I am putting lots of interesting files in the Geopolitical Woman folder. Will have to write abstract, summary and thoughts.
moggymania continues wise and constant. She wrote a nice reassuring reply. It is not quite such a threat to my identity. To speak in the general at the moment -Autism is a state of being after all - it is not a thing that anybody did to you. And even when you don't have abusers per se, or non-traditional abusers - the connection and the temptation to blame is strong. Not as strong as it was, but you still want them accountable somehow. Maybe to compensate for your loss of accountability in the legal and moral spheres. Loss of accountability is as strong as a loss of humanity. I think we are the only creatures who can be accountable. Though monkeys and dogs and other social animals may have their own version of accountability.
I want to share something I wrote to Pan Marek of Canada. He was so good to me and he met me on my own level. Where I was. I was scared to say the least. I was doing my very first steps into the world of action research. I hadn't even thought of The Geopolitical Woman in its present form yet for a year (I started to think of it in June 1999 after reading important feminist literature and knowing that's where I wanted to go).
I am telling myself, be brave. And if you can't stand it, friends-cut the thing. But it is in the public interest. I remember Marek is in the Janie envelope. And the questions to immigrants I asked. I prided myself on asking good questions. I cannot pride myself on hearing the answers, especially when I don't want to hear them. Oh, I am so vain!
2000 is sort of a lost year, a limbo year. And it is a year in which I achieved and learnt so much that I am proud of now. I guess every five years after something important has got to be a reincarnation. Often a shadowy reincarnation ... I am being irrational, but true to my experience. Trying so hard not to be judgemental of me. I am a jellybean and blancmange today and have really been for the past week and so. Not in front of many other people, no. It is okay to be vulnerable with them. But I saw and heard things I shouldn't have done ... I am in possession of information I shouldn't have ...
Mme Spoolstra wrote about sixteen years of conditioning how she expected that someone she loves very much and whom she has invested a great deal in. This is back to 1990. I was so young then! I try to think of today's children. Woo. The world is going to be ruled by people born in 1990. You people don't know what it's like to have a post-communist world and you can take it for granted. My generation is the last with cognisant memories of the Cold War ... though mine kicked in late. Lots of Asia is still fighting it ... even my subcontinental friends, as far as nuclear weapons go.
I want to write my final chapter very soon! I've been wanting to do it for six months.
I have been vacilliating a little about whether I should concentrate on Europe or Asia for the next few years in my further studies. This depends on what committments I make now and what stands I take. But the last few days have been calling Europe, Europe, Europe. I would be quite stupid not to do what I am told in this instance. I would be foolish to disobey.
And on Mme Ward's board there is something like this. A CLASS ACTION!
Now that is the lowest form of tolerance ...
Most of the pain inside me just now is 3.5-5. Nothing that can't be treated with yoghurt, bicycle riding and positive thinking. The bicycle stands still and lives near my bookshelf - the one closest to the record player.
I made cards today. And I want to make a third one. It will focus on the stage and theatre and will have pictures. My style of making cards is finding every picture I can find and making 2-d and 3-d simulations of it.
There I will not tell the children of 1990 to be grateful. You can't be truly grateful or cognisant if you don't know what's missing. You know only that you have an empty hole.
In command is the flipside to Sixteen years. It is about a strong, ambitious woman.
May 2000
Have you ever heard the Tina Arena song In Command?
There are four lines that mean so much to me:
Philosophy
Won't save you when you're public property
Psychology
Is all you could ever offer me
I am a very determined and bloody-minded person, and philosophy and psychology have meant a lot more to me than most people. While not conventionally sociable I have very high expectations of communication and contact. I have a high IQ and being smart gives me a comfort zone. I out a lot of pressure on myself and am often insecure and confused and uncertain. Mostly I put on a brave front and suffer quietly.
I am polite and conscientious almost to a fault and want to be a leader and at least to have a good influence over people. I want to be remembered.
I am a humanist, who likes to see the good in people and 'the real person' and for this reason am direct and upfront about the real me.
I don't believe in 'normal', 'socially acceptable' or 'developmentally appropraite' and so psychological labels have no meaning or relevance to me. Yet we have to wear them for the system to recognise this.
These are the traits I developed in my upbringing and education - essentially a Piagetian view of the world. I lost my faith.
I thought I was a paranoid delusive and [my experiences of psychiatric and educational betrayal during 1995-98 and the consequences] were an illusion. I see now that it was the consequences of too much psychologising (medicalising) too soon. I do everything with my heart and soul, yet people said things to the effect I was obsesssive.
1995 was the Year of Tolerance - April 6 was my breaking point. [I have come to believe the authorities at that time - who I trusted] put me in a seige-like situation. She denied my natural desire for knowledge regarding [another immigrant's] roots and background and the psychological comicontants of this.
I was part of the system which damaged and incited racial hatred.
I could see it coming for a long time ... I had a heightened sense of intuition. Everyone else appeared to despise because [redacted] was different but I despised him because he was the same.
'But for the grace of God ...'
[My doubts about meaning on many linguistic levels are evidence in the redacted paragraph, and I share what I have recently learnt. I look at factors within me which precluded a meaningful relationship.]
[I reveal my doubts and resentment and the fundamental challenge to my values.]
Noah Chomsky says that we all crave a linguistic pattern. I do not believe that it makes things easier. Quite the contrary.
We think of learning language as natural. We are not born to do it. It is a cultural thing - a will, an effort.
[I then speculate about the choice of migration and whether it is traumatic. In hindsight I was corrected on this point pretty sternly by those who knew better.]
... Even if my experiences did not develop tolerance inside me and make it real, even if I didn't feel cheated by not telling the whole story when the time was right it is still important and enlightened for others. All I ever wanted to do was help others.
[After I walked away from this reductionist model and reclaimed my moral courage to a degree] I did try to look for satisfying geopolitical relationships, for alternative means of expression and communication ...
[In regard to French nuclear testing] ... I never expressed my real opinions in a personally hostile institution and all seemed external to my personal journey. I was tired of outbursts - I had been interested once in the Pacific.
I have had reflux of some sort twice today. And coughs and sneezes. Perhaps it is dust getting up my nose.
I am not very good at summarising paragraphs. What I put in is nothing more than I have just told you all.
Yes, I would rehearse and rehash with each important new person. That was a principle of self-disclosure which I was following. This was really the first time I had spoken about these matters outside of my immediate circle. It was like unrobing myself to strangers, what indigowombat would call Emotional Public Nudity. I do not think it was a strategy. I had to tell and tell until somebody believed me and validated me. Mind you that didn't have to mean condoning what I did.
Basically it was a particular 'there' and how I got 'here' which I am trying to explain.
I am aware that a lot of it sounds very defensive, 'she protesteth too much', if you're from the outside. And I was very much viewing the situation subjectively, and I admit as much. Though the sentence about the journey shows as much my personal ambition and universal goals.
The anxiety is about 6 at the moment. 10 would be frozen or numb, 2-3 would be irritable. The 6 is for physical pain deep in my stomach, separate from my female parts. There are issues of thoughtfullness and choices and gifts. It is much more like tension. I feel lumps around my heart too. And there is a brass torus around my stomach - that is the feeling of some three-dimensional shape
Mother's Day was and is so triggering.
A mere three months before I had slept with two girls in a dorm-like situation. One of them a powerful charismatic personality and the other so quiet and decent. I confided in both of them to some degree, and they made me laugh. They were so intelligent, both of them.
And Marek really cared about me. A lot. He treaded softly around my personal issues. So I could do my healing in a safe non-judgemental climate.
I've been seeing flashbacks of the girl. She is a dynamic person and I can see how she would appear entitled and disdainful of her privilege. Many many girls I knew took things for granted. If she is like this still ... I am worried. Because I was a woman I could see the soft and sensitive parts of her, whereas a male might not. She was one who had been with us all along, since my "sixteen years conditioning".
There was a third girl. She was a new girl to us. Very blonde and very self-contained and ethereal in her features. She was someone who stood beyond and above our pettiness and didn't make a noise about it (unlike yours truly!).
The girl I see in my flashbacks had dark skin and sort of pixie features. Dark features. She was more like a Gypsy and her hair would bounce short and she would have a very sexy stance, as far as you can be sexy. She had a sort of nascent yet mature sexuality when I knew her, and many men and boys would have liked it. She would probably have been able to hold her own with men too, in a way I really admire and respect.
(Honestly my face looks scrawny thin in the group photo, especially around the chin area. The chin on the right side is far too defined).
Only the swimmer boy is separating us. He is a gentle, shy creature for whom water is his natural habitat and New Age music his preferred listening style. He too had a way of filtering things out. Interestingly, I am between two great swimmers! That is so awesome! There is a blonde, snowy-haired boy on the left side of me, and I know - my eyes and mouth both tell - that I have so jockeyed this position at the expense of somebody else. If dear and influential friends were there to save me from myself!
There, from the portrait, she does not look like a person to be having flashbacks about. In fact, until last week, I only had nice kind memories of her. Sometimes flashbacks can be good, but they are not like a pure unalloyed memory.
The girl is one of three sisters. I dearly loved the middle sister. She was talented and a very jolly girl. The elder sister I sort of admired from afar. The middle sister was a good friend of a VERY good friend of mine. I idolised the P.... girls ... almost too much. Yet the youngest makes heaps of impressions on the vast majority of people. She has made hearts and she has broken hearts.
The youngest had many many close friends, and I think I had met her once before. And known them quite well as I knew them all after the first year or so.
"My classroom is my family; now my classroom is the world."
is about as true a saying about the shift in my mind and heart as you will get.
It was like a seismic shift, a tsuanmi. A Fallujah on my heart to coin a phrase. Of course it is an impact in feelings. I am well aware of the connotations; otherwise I would not use it. But there! It is a commanding arrogance I can muster in words. The way I have behaved this past decade I am lucky to preserve even that.
I hoped a good fairy would strike me dead and take away my powers of speech ... well harmful speech.
Not a fairy really ... but more like a god or goddess. I did not learn consciously of the Furies until much later in my life.
How good to be in the company of these gifted young men and women. Dear, innocent girl. She had conjured up a changeling myth in two sentences which goes right to the heart of the matter. I could recognise the other two pixies straightaway. Shows us that pixies can come into different shapes and sizes like many mythical creatures especially the quasi-human kind.
I wrote many long letters to many friends, and my friends passed them on to their younger sisters so they would learn to be delicate. And when they faced their own Rubicons of tolerance, perhaps they would learn not to do - not to step so clumsily as I did.
Back then I even looked arrogant, which is more than I can do now. I am softened, made more honest and modest by experience. I have not that statuesque beauty which I grew into like the fawn grows into the deer. Think of Princess Diana when she first became Princess and when she separated from Charles; think of the evolution her image made. There was an article once where people talked about their favourite Diana photographs. Of course since 31.8.1997 there is a great glut of them.
I was a fine, upstanding young girl with the world at her feet. But looking at things from only a major power point of view festers ignorance - developmentally and geopolitically. I stood up against corporal punishment. In those years I would try to fit my writing into 50 words like Cinderella's slipper in the foot of an Ugly Sister. To be fair, the Ugly Sisters always had more character anyway, particularly in recent stories where Cinderella is a whiny self-centred chuianua or some other small yappy dog. Female, of course; would you like a cross-dressing Cinderella to add to your cast of subversive literary characters?
The mini-sagas of subsequent years gave me good practice and even setting up quite contrived scenarios I claimed literary prizes quite easily. Almost too easily. That meant I did not appreciate my opponents and their steel. There were a few I could always notice and compete with and interact quite nicely in between because it was in all good humour. It's good to have people running close to you, particularly if it's a marathon and not a sprint. I was preparing for sprints when I should have run a marathon pace and taken a marathon journey.
Every day someone takes time out to tell me "Life is not a race!". I don't know how I came to believe that it was in the first place. I knew the prizes always went to the swift. I identified with the swift, and became the swift. I'm like the hare who never sleeps - who never CAN sleep.
Here I was meaning to write about my love life, and how I celebrated the men I loved through poems and stories and through actions in real life. Oh, there are some funny stories! And some sad stories! But I do not think I could have written a true love story without having resolved all this ... the feelings of jealousy one does sometimes get among other girls, the schoolgirl/undergraduate crushes which one gets, when one is not supposed to be noticing the opposite sex so very much, or one is meant to be very discreet in one's signals.
Anyway, these were the thoughts of last week.
I will try to go through some retail therapy.
The second girl is a model of rectitude. She had a bit of a Catholic upbringing and understands things like confession very well. And expiation. I swear, I was full of the shakes, which some Christians might interpret as demon possession due to some terrible sin.
I think I did talk about God when I was doing my public duty. I did not talk about him much in private except to put his name in vain. I thought he was all loving, all fearing, all the time. I knew things in theory about Islam, pagans, Judaism.
And I was always much more comfortable discussing religion than the other two, particularly in the first stages of my conditioning.
The first time I stood on a political issue I really really believed in, I cannot believe I was such a wimp.
If wimpishness is the central characteristic of moral relativism, then I was so it.
I also confessed to a dog.
Dogs, logs ... the rest is history. I had a horror and terror of limericks for some time. This was not helped by people I loved and respected trying to strike the fear into me about rhyme. Rhyme is bad, rhyme is evil. The horror, the horror.
And now when I'm triggered I go into glib rhymes. Press something in me and I'm attracted to what I hate.
It would be well if I had some sort of language processing disorder that left me unable to process or appreciate rhyme, or for that matter any other aspect of poetry other than the most informal. (This is another face of the Strike me dead, please - and thus a parasuicidal ideation?).
It isn't fair that some people are born with a natural gift of rhyme which shines through their second language and whatever language you learn. Now that notion is so Chomskian I wonder I didn't discredit it sooner. Sure I think the man is Way Out There, but that doesn't deprive me of my right to call potential as I see and saw it.
I am sure the person who has this beautiful gift for rhymes and who has nurtured it through his boyhood and manhood would trade it all for true sweet love, and none of the deviance and bad luck which seems to have dogged his encounters thus far.
I hope he finds a soulmate who is truly enriched by his presence in her life and his committment to her.
And that is nothing more and nothing less than I hope for all our guys. All those gentle plums who made an impression on me and showed me oranges were not the only fruit (pace Winterson - and Louisa May Alcott's child characters in Little Women!)
No. It is not worth wasting our gifts and our talents for. Love, I mean. I could not shape myself into a prim-priss if I tried. I admire that girlishness from one who can truly pull it off. Some of our girls were like this, whereas others were much more energetic. See these two girls at the bottom row? Well, I'll make you see them. They are like Daisy and Nan respectively, again in Little Men. What is this obsession with Little Men? I know out of all my Alcott reading, the one that made the most impression on me - evah - was Good Wives. The teacher's elder daughter enjoyed Louisa May too and I know we were always glad to talk about classic novels. I preferred the younger as she was much realer to us. This teacher loved to stock classic bookshelves and modern classics. We would miniminally fill from the library.
The Daisy character had a passionate love for music. I knew her elder sister well, as she had taken me under her wing. She was a committed musician and an all-round nice person.
The Nan character - well, we had lots of larks together. Truly! One of our larks was planning a trip to Germany and we would touch the spot where the Berlin Wall was. She was the one who motivated me to really keep up my German as far as I could. She was a keen sportswoman, particularly with a rubber ball. Her tiny frame did not stop her from conquering the court like a female latter-day Shaq.
Oh! How American culture swept through our veins at this time! I dare say we adopted some of its tougher values. I have learnt much from the pioneer culture. It is on Americans that I depend on much of my psychological knowledge. I mean, you guys practically wrote the Bible ... the inerrable Bible. Especially sport. We all wanted to copy the Americans at sport. Even me.
Those hornets are still stinging for me!
I still remember the day I sat next to Daisy when we were experiencing the works of Robyn Davidson. Now there's a Geopolitical Woman to hold on to! We didn't read that she went out with Salman Rushdie. I didn't even get to hear of this writer until a few months later. And I was told strictly about his writing and his influence on Anglo India. We did not spend time speculating on salacious details of writers, at least not until I felt more like I was one myself. But no-one could control our daydreams, I suppose. Our teacher would always have a look as penetrating as her sense of humour, which was strongly satirical and often poked not-so-gentle fun of members of our class - at least those who had a taste and appetite for it. She would even do this to me, as I was an active member of the class, and she got a certain pleasure out of poking at my soft spots. That's me. I leave the things uncovered and I am quite unwary.
Classroom discussion tends to envelope me like a cloud, at least when I am passionately involved in it, either talking or listening. Not doing nearly as much of the latter as I ought to have done. After ten weeks of constant intrusions, however, I lost my patience. Tell the truth, I lost my patience in the second week. And I was pretty much warned I was going to lose my patience sometime the previous November. I have blocked much about deserts out, and I have got my just deserts since! But even the Robyn Davidson classwork I could not block out.
When, however, it is not recipriocal or courteous - or when one feels more subtly that perhaps, just perhaps something is deeply wrong here and one cannot leave it only to feeling. One must cognate, one must outspeak the outspoken. Or the bespoken, in my case. Daisy was suffering too, and my poor head and heart were buzzing like a hornet's nest. I felt like the gadfly.
Children, imagine there's Donald Rumsfeld in the room. I did not believe so passionately then as I do now in "We are all one world" (that just happens, because of human selfishness and desire for personal space - Geopolitik as messy teenage bedroom or fraternity house - to be divided, often cruelly and opportunistically so. Take your pick) and so I did not stand to what I should have done. Did that make me a coward? I don't know.
I do try to be delicate and polite, even when I am doing something very unpleasant. I tried with all my heart and power. As you can imagine, when gentle persuasion did not work, I used force. Later on in my life, when I met an ice-hockey-obsessive redhead (and this was not so very later on, though each progressive month felt like twenty years) I would have called it a 'swearing fight'. But when one is wondering just where or from whom - and is so thickheaded not to consider her own mates could have done this - one's opponent could possibly have got this language, one sits succinct in her advantage and fails to give in.
It would be right and natural that I should choose for my friends those who dearly love language and use it honestly, appropriately, vivaciously and beautifully. Many of them were indeed intelligent and articulate. I idealised and devalued them by turns, with natural consequences for their - and my - use of language to communicate. It is such a solemn responsibility after all. Yes, really, and truly. I can still speak in these terms with a plum in my mouth. Oh, dear, I exaggerate so! I mean only that they were virile in their use of language. That their language was vigorous.
But there did come a time when language was no longer a holding environment, pace Winnicott. I should not have expected it to have been so for too much longer than I did. Taunts and insults will never ever provide a language-enriched environment, which is what you do need if your own family is going to abandon you to the wolves of their own problems. And this probably tells more about me than about whom I am talking. (And I never ever, with a preposition, my sentence end). As does all such ... uninformed speculation?
And I am not going to cheat by giving myself the knowledge that I found eight years later. Much of the knowledge I did gain was confirmed, more or less. And to think my journey of enlightenment began in a petrol station. I savoured the irony, even in my numbed state. I tried to take in the information. The print was like another language.
I am fairly well known for giving doozies rather more attention than they deserve. People, things and situations. Some is out of a genuine belief that they do need the proportion they are demanding, and certain other people who get the attention have way more than enough air-time as it is, me included. And if someone is going to make a fuss, you may be sure I will do the logical thing, unless my better judgement gets in the way. What better judgement? This was nineteen-ninety-kacking-five, for goodness sake. I had no mode of thinking but the logical ... all right, just kidding. But I think I convinced some people when it was to my advantage. Convinced, regardez-vous, not manipulated. I had no intention of messing with anybody's mind. I just wanted to clean out some of the junk which was making me increasingly allergic to their otherwise wonderful and decent and enriching company.
Yes, I am well aware that we fully debased ourselves when we did this ... thing. It was deeply abnormal behaviour, which would produce a sense of fear, helplessness and horror in a highly sensitive person, who took on far more than the three percent of responsibility she ought to have had. Who at times took on a hundred and ten percent when others obviously would not carry the slack and see the damage that they had caused. When three or four lead by the nose and have leverage of 20% of the people 80% of the time you are obviously going to have a few very nasty situations. That the United Nations had declared this year a year of Tolerance does not preclude this sort of thing. They are not the most responsible people, but they are popular and they are funny. They make you laugh, and when one is under pressure, one likes to cut corners on things like laughter and humour. Even if in one's better judgement things are screaming Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong! Where are your morals? (I think I left them with my lost socks around Good Friday, chere madame is not the proper answer to questions of that kind. It may well appease the conscience temporarily, but ...) And somebody might well develop a personality disorder from this. Oh dear, where did we go wrong?
Forgive me, this is a serious blog, not the Comedy Festival.
I suppose that woman's sense of humour and absurd imagination got to me a lot more than I possibly could have imagined.
I don't suppose it has anything to do with the position of authority which she had over me for two years at a most vulnerable time.
But there, I blame too much.
And though she is not completely blameless, she now lives a life full of vino in the countryside, A Year in Provence-style with her second husband.
She deserves it for sure.
May she drink wine and eat cheese to the rest of her days.
And indulge in all the retail therapy and bubble baths she wants.
I am sorry this blog sounded rather like Clueless at times and like Monty Python at others.
The pain went down from 6.5 to 1.5 and that's good. The only thing which hurts is my right eye, and it is not from winking, winking and nudging, nudging, the second of which you can't really do on a keyboard, at least not when one is typing with ten fingers and elbows way off the table.
The stomach pain is down to 2 now.
The anxiety probably goes up to 11 when "the whole horrible lot" read it, at least I contemplate it.
And I am sure I sounded like Emma Woodhouse writing a blog. Remember the opening sentence. Then compare it to my photo.
First, I have a medical reason for acting so stroppy. Those of you tuned into the feminine cycles might have been able to predict it. I did feel it was coming two days before today but I was not certain. Then I thought it would come tomorrow and what a shame if it was a holiday. I do have a holiday, effectively, until the 24th. This will be a healing and refreshing time ... I hope.
I lost my 1996 Englishbook for a little while but I found it very recently. And I have lost The Virtue of Selfishness which is too dreadful. It is not on any of the 35 shelves in the study. Nor on the 12 shelves of my bedroom. (4 bookcases in the study and 1 in the bedroom - the other is my lampside table as it were). My globe has blown. It is the main one. Turning on the other two gets me in trouble. Interestingly the one in the study doesn't even though it's just about the brightest of all the lights and it got me in trouble lots when I had the old one. But that was the unit, and that was the end of 1997, the week before Christmas to be specific. As things do when they are lost they bug my visuo-spatial memory. When I took back some of grandfather's books last May I think Virtue of Selfishness may be there. I want to use it to prove some arguments.
"What of the ones who are not so hypocritical"?
Second, I did not go to bed last night. I wanted to have control and sleep is control. I was stopped from reading something I needed to finish and that can make anyone stroppy. Also I have run out of printer paper for now and I haven't a Palm Pilot to read it that way. Besides I would have to bind it in some fashion. I think that I am not worth pens and pencils and binders and filing cabinets and all the usual accoutrements of a study/office and pretending to be a neet when I am really a preet (privileged re-entering education employment and training, and you say it prayet). The NEET is a Japanese word. In another world I might have been an office lady. And we talk about hair dressing and child care as virtual ghettos for young women with disabilties. Sorry, people have to learn theory now.
It is funny to write in and for newsletters. People forget so much for a week. I had to pretty much assume that people wouldn't read it or publish it.
When I hear Tina Arena's In Deep I think of Tamagotchis and psychological feti. I wrote a fan letter. Pretty gory. Might share it if I choose to. I am in a letter writing mood, and I did write a letter. To a newspaper.
Decided that ... oh, what did I decide?
I'm floating badly. It's a floating world, one of black and green and red.
Making gaffes right and left before I realise I even make them. It's the old difficulty of not letting people solve their own problems. It's wanting to have power or at least mastery. To think that I compete with a 13-year-old girl in mathematics and then prepare to embarrass her by suggesting she speak in public over the heads of her parents and uncle. I mean, rationally, I understand and all.
There is a big conference on just now. It is on English and education. I am looking for where I put it. I am putting lots of interesting files in the Geopolitical Woman folder. Will have to write abstract, summary and thoughts.
moggymania continues wise and constant. She wrote a nice reassuring reply. It is not quite such a threat to my identity. To speak in the general at the moment -Autism is a state of being after all - it is not a thing that anybody did to you. And even when you don't have abusers per se, or non-traditional abusers - the connection and the temptation to blame is strong. Not as strong as it was, but you still want them accountable somehow. Maybe to compensate for your loss of accountability in the legal and moral spheres. Loss of accountability is as strong as a loss of humanity. I think we are the only creatures who can be accountable. Though monkeys and dogs and other social animals may have their own version of accountability.
I want to share something I wrote to Pan Marek of Canada. He was so good to me and he met me on my own level. Where I was. I was scared to say the least. I was doing my very first steps into the world of action research. I hadn't even thought of The Geopolitical Woman in its present form yet for a year (I started to think of it in June 1999 after reading important feminist literature and knowing that's where I wanted to go).
I am telling myself, be brave. And if you can't stand it, friends-cut the thing. But it is in the public interest. I remember Marek is in the Janie envelope. And the questions to immigrants I asked. I prided myself on asking good questions. I cannot pride myself on hearing the answers, especially when I don't want to hear them. Oh, I am so vain!
2000 is sort of a lost year, a limbo year. And it is a year in which I achieved and learnt so much that I am proud of now. I guess every five years after something important has got to be a reincarnation. Often a shadowy reincarnation ... I am being irrational, but true to my experience. Trying so hard not to be judgemental of me. I am a jellybean and blancmange today and have really been for the past week and so. Not in front of many other people, no. It is okay to be vulnerable with them. But I saw and heard things I shouldn't have done ... I am in possession of information I shouldn't have ...
Mme Spoolstra wrote about sixteen years of conditioning how she expected that someone she loves very much and whom she has invested a great deal in. This is back to 1990. I was so young then! I try to think of today's children. Woo. The world is going to be ruled by people born in 1990. You people don't know what it's like to have a post-communist world and you can take it for granted. My generation is the last with cognisant memories of the Cold War ... though mine kicked in late. Lots of Asia is still fighting it ... even my subcontinental friends, as far as nuclear weapons go.
I want to write my final chapter very soon! I've been wanting to do it for six months.
I have been vacilliating a little about whether I should concentrate on Europe or Asia for the next few years in my further studies. This depends on what committments I make now and what stands I take. But the last few days have been calling Europe, Europe, Europe. I would be quite stupid not to do what I am told in this instance. I would be foolish to disobey.
And on Mme Ward's board there is something like this. A CLASS ACTION!
Now that is the lowest form of tolerance ...
Most of the pain inside me just now is 3.5-5. Nothing that can't be treated with yoghurt, bicycle riding and positive thinking. The bicycle stands still and lives near my bookshelf - the one closest to the record player.
I made cards today. And I want to make a third one. It will focus on the stage and theatre and will have pictures. My style of making cards is finding every picture I can find and making 2-d and 3-d simulations of it.
There I will not tell the children of 1990 to be grateful. You can't be truly grateful or cognisant if you don't know what's missing. You know only that you have an empty hole.
In command is the flipside to Sixteen years. It is about a strong, ambitious woman.
May 2000
Have you ever heard the Tina Arena song In Command?
There are four lines that mean so much to me:
Philosophy
Won't save you when you're public property
Psychology
Is all you could ever offer me
I am a very determined and bloody-minded person, and philosophy and psychology have meant a lot more to me than most people. While not conventionally sociable I have very high expectations of communication and contact. I have a high IQ and being smart gives me a comfort zone. I out a lot of pressure on myself and am often insecure and confused and uncertain. Mostly I put on a brave front and suffer quietly.
I am polite and conscientious almost to a fault and want to be a leader and at least to have a good influence over people. I want to be remembered.
I am a humanist, who likes to see the good in people and 'the real person' and for this reason am direct and upfront about the real me.
I don't believe in 'normal', 'socially acceptable' or 'developmentally appropraite' and so psychological labels have no meaning or relevance to me. Yet we have to wear them for the system to recognise this.
These are the traits I developed in my upbringing and education - essentially a Piagetian view of the world. I lost my faith.
I thought I was a paranoid delusive and [my experiences of psychiatric and educational betrayal during 1995-98 and the consequences] were an illusion. I see now that it was the consequences of too much psychologising (medicalising) too soon. I do everything with my heart and soul, yet people said things to the effect I was obsesssive.
1995 was the Year of Tolerance - April 6 was my breaking point. [I have come to believe the authorities at that time - who I trusted] put me in a seige-like situation. She denied my natural desire for knowledge regarding [another immigrant's] roots and background and the psychological comicontants of this.
I was part of the system which damaged and incited racial hatred.
I could see it coming for a long time ... I had a heightened sense of intuition. Everyone else appeared to despise because [redacted] was different but I despised him because he was the same.
'But for the grace of God ...'
[My doubts about meaning on many linguistic levels are evidence in the redacted paragraph, and I share what I have recently learnt. I look at factors within me which precluded a meaningful relationship.]
[I reveal my doubts and resentment and the fundamental challenge to my values.]
Noah Chomsky says that we all crave a linguistic pattern. I do not believe that it makes things easier. Quite the contrary.
We think of learning language as natural. We are not born to do it. It is a cultural thing - a will, an effort.
[I then speculate about the choice of migration and whether it is traumatic. In hindsight I was corrected on this point pretty sternly by those who knew better.]
... Even if my experiences did not develop tolerance inside me and make it real, even if I didn't feel cheated by not telling the whole story when the time was right it is still important and enlightened for others. All I ever wanted to do was help others.
[After I walked away from this reductionist model and reclaimed my moral courage to a degree] I did try to look for satisfying geopolitical relationships, for alternative means of expression and communication ...
[In regard to French nuclear testing] ... I never expressed my real opinions in a personally hostile institution and all seemed external to my personal journey. I was tired of outbursts - I had been interested once in the Pacific.
I have had reflux of some sort twice today. And coughs and sneezes. Perhaps it is dust getting up my nose.
I am not very good at summarising paragraphs. What I put in is nothing more than I have just told you all.
Yes, I would rehearse and rehash with each important new person. That was a principle of self-disclosure which I was following. This was really the first time I had spoken about these matters outside of my immediate circle. It was like unrobing myself to strangers, what indigowombat would call Emotional Public Nudity. I do not think it was a strategy. I had to tell and tell until somebody believed me and validated me. Mind you that didn't have to mean condoning what I did.
Basically it was a particular 'there' and how I got 'here' which I am trying to explain.
I am aware that a lot of it sounds very defensive, 'she protesteth too much', if you're from the outside. And I was very much viewing the situation subjectively, and I admit as much. Though the sentence about the journey shows as much my personal ambition and universal goals.
The anxiety is about 6 at the moment. 10 would be frozen or numb, 2-3 would be irritable. The 6 is for physical pain deep in my stomach, separate from my female parts. There are issues of thoughtfullness and choices and gifts. It is much more like tension. I feel lumps around my heart too. And there is a brass torus around my stomach - that is the feeling of some three-dimensional shape
Mother's Day was and is so triggering.
A mere three months before I had slept with two girls in a dorm-like situation. One of them a powerful charismatic personality and the other so quiet and decent. I confided in both of them to some degree, and they made me laugh. They were so intelligent, both of them.
And Marek really cared about me. A lot. He treaded softly around my personal issues. So I could do my healing in a safe non-judgemental climate.
I've been seeing flashbacks of the girl. She is a dynamic person and I can see how she would appear entitled and disdainful of her privilege. Many many girls I knew took things for granted. If she is like this still ... I am worried. Because I was a woman I could see the soft and sensitive parts of her, whereas a male might not. She was one who had been with us all along, since my "sixteen years conditioning".
There was a third girl. She was a new girl to us. Very blonde and very self-contained and ethereal in her features. She was someone who stood beyond and above our pettiness and didn't make a noise about it (unlike yours truly!).
The girl I see in my flashbacks had dark skin and sort of pixie features. Dark features. She was more like a Gypsy and her hair would bounce short and she would have a very sexy stance, as far as you can be sexy. She had a sort of nascent yet mature sexuality when I knew her, and many men and boys would have liked it. She would probably have been able to hold her own with men too, in a way I really admire and respect.
(Honestly my face looks scrawny thin in the group photo, especially around the chin area. The chin on the right side is far too defined).
Only the swimmer boy is separating us. He is a gentle, shy creature for whom water is his natural habitat and New Age music his preferred listening style. He too had a way of filtering things out. Interestingly, I am between two great swimmers! That is so awesome! There is a blonde, snowy-haired boy on the left side of me, and I know - my eyes and mouth both tell - that I have so jockeyed this position at the expense of somebody else. If dear and influential friends were there to save me from myself!
There, from the portrait, she does not look like a person to be having flashbacks about. In fact, until last week, I only had nice kind memories of her. Sometimes flashbacks can be good, but they are not like a pure unalloyed memory.
The girl is one of three sisters. I dearly loved the middle sister. She was talented and a very jolly girl. The elder sister I sort of admired from afar. The middle sister was a good friend of a VERY good friend of mine. I idolised the P.... girls ... almost too much. Yet the youngest makes heaps of impressions on the vast majority of people. She has made hearts and she has broken hearts.
The youngest had many many close friends, and I think I had met her once before. And known them quite well as I knew them all after the first year or so.
"My classroom is my family; now my classroom is the world."
is about as true a saying about the shift in my mind and heart as you will get.
It was like a seismic shift, a tsuanmi. A Fallujah on my heart to coin a phrase. Of course it is an impact in feelings. I am well aware of the connotations; otherwise I would not use it. But there! It is a commanding arrogance I can muster in words. The way I have behaved this past decade I am lucky to preserve even that.
I hoped a good fairy would strike me dead and take away my powers of speech ... well harmful speech.
Not a fairy really ... but more like a god or goddess. I did not learn consciously of the Furies until much later in my life.
How good to be in the company of these gifted young men and women. Dear, innocent girl. She had conjured up a changeling myth in two sentences which goes right to the heart of the matter. I could recognise the other two pixies straightaway. Shows us that pixies can come into different shapes and sizes like many mythical creatures especially the quasi-human kind.
I wrote many long letters to many friends, and my friends passed them on to their younger sisters so they would learn to be delicate. And when they faced their own Rubicons of tolerance, perhaps they would learn not to do - not to step so clumsily as I did.
Back then I even looked arrogant, which is more than I can do now. I am softened, made more honest and modest by experience. I have not that statuesque beauty which I grew into like the fawn grows into the deer. Think of Princess Diana when she first became Princess and when she separated from Charles; think of the evolution her image made. There was an article once where people talked about their favourite Diana photographs. Of course since 31.8.1997 there is a great glut of them.
I was a fine, upstanding young girl with the world at her feet. But looking at things from only a major power point of view festers ignorance - developmentally and geopolitically. I stood up against corporal punishment. In those years I would try to fit my writing into 50 words like Cinderella's slipper in the foot of an Ugly Sister. To be fair, the Ugly Sisters always had more character anyway, particularly in recent stories where Cinderella is a whiny self-centred chuianua or some other small yappy dog. Female, of course; would you like a cross-dressing Cinderella to add to your cast of subversive literary characters?
The mini-sagas of subsequent years gave me good practice and even setting up quite contrived scenarios I claimed literary prizes quite easily. Almost too easily. That meant I did not appreciate my opponents and their steel. There were a few I could always notice and compete with and interact quite nicely in between because it was in all good humour. It's good to have people running close to you, particularly if it's a marathon and not a sprint. I was preparing for sprints when I should have run a marathon pace and taken a marathon journey.
Every day someone takes time out to tell me "Life is not a race!". I don't know how I came to believe that it was in the first place. I knew the prizes always went to the swift. I identified with the swift, and became the swift. I'm like the hare who never sleeps - who never CAN sleep.
Here I was meaning to write about my love life, and how I celebrated the men I loved through poems and stories and through actions in real life. Oh, there are some funny stories! And some sad stories! But I do not think I could have written a true love story without having resolved all this ... the feelings of jealousy one does sometimes get among other girls, the schoolgirl/undergraduate crushes which one gets, when one is not supposed to be noticing the opposite sex so very much, or one is meant to be very discreet in one's signals.
Anyway, these were the thoughts of last week.
I will try to go through some retail therapy.
The second girl is a model of rectitude. She had a bit of a Catholic upbringing and understands things like confession very well. And expiation. I swear, I was full of the shakes, which some Christians might interpret as demon possession due to some terrible sin.
I think I did talk about God when I was doing my public duty. I did not talk about him much in private except to put his name in vain. I thought he was all loving, all fearing, all the time. I knew things in theory about Islam, pagans, Judaism.
And I was always much more comfortable discussing religion than the other two, particularly in the first stages of my conditioning.
The first time I stood on a political issue I really really believed in, I cannot believe I was such a wimp.
If wimpishness is the central characteristic of moral relativism, then I was so it.
I also confessed to a dog.
Dogs, logs ... the rest is history. I had a horror and terror of limericks for some time. This was not helped by people I loved and respected trying to strike the fear into me about rhyme. Rhyme is bad, rhyme is evil. The horror, the horror.
And now when I'm triggered I go into glib rhymes. Press something in me and I'm attracted to what I hate.
It would be well if I had some sort of language processing disorder that left me unable to process or appreciate rhyme, or for that matter any other aspect of poetry other than the most informal. (This is another face of the Strike me dead, please - and thus a parasuicidal ideation?).
It isn't fair that some people are born with a natural gift of rhyme which shines through their second language and whatever language you learn. Now that notion is so Chomskian I wonder I didn't discredit it sooner. Sure I think the man is Way Out There, but that doesn't deprive me of my right to call potential as I see and saw it.
I am sure the person who has this beautiful gift for rhymes and who has nurtured it through his boyhood and manhood would trade it all for true sweet love, and none of the deviance and bad luck which seems to have dogged his encounters thus far.
I hope he finds a soulmate who is truly enriched by his presence in her life and his committment to her.
And that is nothing more and nothing less than I hope for all our guys. All those gentle plums who made an impression on me and showed me oranges were not the only fruit (pace Winterson - and Louisa May Alcott's child characters in Little Women!)
No. It is not worth wasting our gifts and our talents for. Love, I mean. I could not shape myself into a prim-priss if I tried. I admire that girlishness from one who can truly pull it off. Some of our girls were like this, whereas others were much more energetic. See these two girls at the bottom row? Well, I'll make you see them. They are like Daisy and Nan respectively, again in Little Men. What is this obsession with Little Men? I know out of all my Alcott reading, the one that made the most impression on me - evah - was Good Wives. The teacher's elder daughter enjoyed Louisa May too and I know we were always glad to talk about classic novels. I preferred the younger as she was much realer to us. This teacher loved to stock classic bookshelves and modern classics. We would miniminally fill from the library.
The Daisy character had a passionate love for music. I knew her elder sister well, as she had taken me under her wing. She was a committed musician and an all-round nice person.
The Nan character - well, we had lots of larks together. Truly! One of our larks was planning a trip to Germany and we would touch the spot where the Berlin Wall was. She was the one who motivated me to really keep up my German as far as I could. She was a keen sportswoman, particularly with a rubber ball. Her tiny frame did not stop her from conquering the court like a female latter-day Shaq.
Oh! How American culture swept through our veins at this time! I dare say we adopted some of its tougher values. I have learnt much from the pioneer culture. It is on Americans that I depend on much of my psychological knowledge. I mean, you guys practically wrote the Bible ... the inerrable Bible. Especially sport. We all wanted to copy the Americans at sport. Even me.
Those hornets are still stinging for me!
I still remember the day I sat next to Daisy when we were experiencing the works of Robyn Davidson. Now there's a Geopolitical Woman to hold on to! We didn't read that she went out with Salman Rushdie. I didn't even get to hear of this writer until a few months later. And I was told strictly about his writing and his influence on Anglo India. We did not spend time speculating on salacious details of writers, at least not until I felt more like I was one myself. But no-one could control our daydreams, I suppose. Our teacher would always have a look as penetrating as her sense of humour, which was strongly satirical and often poked not-so-gentle fun of members of our class - at least those who had a taste and appetite for it. She would even do this to me, as I was an active member of the class, and she got a certain pleasure out of poking at my soft spots. That's me. I leave the things uncovered and I am quite unwary.
Classroom discussion tends to envelope me like a cloud, at least when I am passionately involved in it, either talking or listening. Not doing nearly as much of the latter as I ought to have done. After ten weeks of constant intrusions, however, I lost my patience. Tell the truth, I lost my patience in the second week. And I was pretty much warned I was going to lose my patience sometime the previous November. I have blocked much about deserts out, and I have got my just deserts since! But even the Robyn Davidson classwork I could not block out.
When, however, it is not recipriocal or courteous - or when one feels more subtly that perhaps, just perhaps something is deeply wrong here and one cannot leave it only to feeling. One must cognate, one must outspeak the outspoken. Or the bespoken, in my case. Daisy was suffering too, and my poor head and heart were buzzing like a hornet's nest. I felt like the gadfly.
Children, imagine there's Donald Rumsfeld in the room. I did not believe so passionately then as I do now in "We are all one world" (that just happens, because of human selfishness and desire for personal space - Geopolitik as messy teenage bedroom or fraternity house - to be divided, often cruelly and opportunistically so. Take your pick) and so I did not stand to what I should have done. Did that make me a coward? I don't know.
I do try to be delicate and polite, even when I am doing something very unpleasant. I tried with all my heart and power. As you can imagine, when gentle persuasion did not work, I used force. Later on in my life, when I met an ice-hockey-obsessive redhead (and this was not so very later on, though each progressive month felt like twenty years) I would have called it a 'swearing fight'. But when one is wondering just where or from whom - and is so thickheaded not to consider her own mates could have done this - one's opponent could possibly have got this language, one sits succinct in her advantage and fails to give in.
It would be right and natural that I should choose for my friends those who dearly love language and use it honestly, appropriately, vivaciously and beautifully. Many of them were indeed intelligent and articulate. I idealised and devalued them by turns, with natural consequences for their - and my - use of language to communicate. It is such a solemn responsibility after all. Yes, really, and truly. I can still speak in these terms with a plum in my mouth. Oh, dear, I exaggerate so! I mean only that they were virile in their use of language. That their language was vigorous.
But there did come a time when language was no longer a holding environment, pace Winnicott. I should not have expected it to have been so for too much longer than I did. Taunts and insults will never ever provide a language-enriched environment, which is what you do need if your own family is going to abandon you to the wolves of their own problems. And this probably tells more about me than about whom I am talking. (And I never ever, with a preposition, my sentence end). As does all such ... uninformed speculation?
And I am not going to cheat by giving myself the knowledge that I found eight years later. Much of the knowledge I did gain was confirmed, more or less. And to think my journey of enlightenment began in a petrol station. I savoured the irony, even in my numbed state. I tried to take in the information. The print was like another language.
I am fairly well known for giving doozies rather more attention than they deserve. People, things and situations. Some is out of a genuine belief that they do need the proportion they are demanding, and certain other people who get the attention have way more than enough air-time as it is, me included. And if someone is going to make a fuss, you may be sure I will do the logical thing, unless my better judgement gets in the way. What better judgement? This was nineteen-ninety-kacking-five, for goodness sake. I had no mode of thinking but the logical ... all right, just kidding. But I think I convinced some people when it was to my advantage. Convinced, regardez-vous, not manipulated. I had no intention of messing with anybody's mind. I just wanted to clean out some of the junk which was making me increasingly allergic to their otherwise wonderful and decent and enriching company.
Yes, I am well aware that we fully debased ourselves when we did this ... thing. It was deeply abnormal behaviour, which would produce a sense of fear, helplessness and horror in a highly sensitive person, who took on far more than the three percent of responsibility she ought to have had. Who at times took on a hundred and ten percent when others obviously would not carry the slack and see the damage that they had caused. When three or four lead by the nose and have leverage of 20% of the people 80% of the time you are obviously going to have a few very nasty situations. That the United Nations had declared this year a year of Tolerance does not preclude this sort of thing. They are not the most responsible people, but they are popular and they are funny. They make you laugh, and when one is under pressure, one likes to cut corners on things like laughter and humour. Even if in one's better judgement things are screaming Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong! Where are your morals? (I think I left them with my lost socks around Good Friday, chere madame is not the proper answer to questions of that kind. It may well appease the conscience temporarily, but ...) And somebody might well develop a personality disorder from this. Oh dear, where did we go wrong?
Forgive me, this is a serious blog, not the Comedy Festival.
I suppose that woman's sense of humour and absurd imagination got to me a lot more than I possibly could have imagined.
I don't suppose it has anything to do with the position of authority which she had over me for two years at a most vulnerable time.
But there, I blame too much.
And though she is not completely blameless, she now lives a life full of vino in the countryside, A Year in Provence-style with her second husband.
She deserves it for sure.
May she drink wine and eat cheese to the rest of her days.
And indulge in all the retail therapy and bubble baths she wants.
I am sorry this blog sounded rather like Clueless at times and like Monty Python at others.
The pain went down from 6.5 to 1.5 and that's good. The only thing which hurts is my right eye, and it is not from winking, winking and nudging, nudging, the second of which you can't really do on a keyboard, at least not when one is typing with ten fingers and elbows way off the table.
The stomach pain is down to 2 now.
The anxiety probably goes up to 11 when "the whole horrible lot" read it, at least I contemplate it.
And I am sure I sounded like Emma Woodhouse writing a blog. Remember the opening sentence. Then compare it to my photo.