Love is a Battlefield
I've been holding this in for a month or better, trying to find the words to say it, and when I found myself wanting to gut some stupid blogger tonight, I realized it was time. I have a lot of anger in me, and generally writing brings this to the surface
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Your post about birth control really got me worked up last night, but I found I couldn't formulate a comment because I was already frustrated past the point of breaking and i couldn't form words to be outraged about anything else. It was either you or that woman whose post you quoted (I want to learn to cuss like her) who said something like, "they are saying that our lives are not worth saving" or that "we're not worthy human beings" or something like that and it really got me going, but I still couldn't form words. Then I traipsed over to Shapely Prose, and that did it. She was saying something like "women don't consider this [how diet logic goes in circles] because they're taught that someone else knows their bodies better than they do, which is why fat and dieting are still feminist issues," that finally broke me. I hear people say that all the time and I know what they're talking about...hell, people like Therapy Boy are doctors, and here they are perpetuating this culture of body loathing and body hatred and women are buying it. But I've been damaged more by what women have said and done to me than what men have said and done to me, or at least as much, and yes, you can say because those women are living in a patriarchal society they're corrupted by the system and they say what they've been taught, but at some point we need to slough off the maligned crap and just admit that we say and do horrible things to each other without laying the blame game. It pisses me off that I've lived the life I've lived and not for a second am I allowed to blame my past for how I act today, and if I do people call me out on it, but whenever someone else degrades me and tears into me it's not her fault, it's society's fault and it's society's lies, and I'm so sick of it.
I've never been valuable, I've never been a human life that anyone saw as worth saving. The inspirational stories on Law & Order: SVU never happened to me and they still don't and people have an amazing lack of sympathy for that and for people like me, the damaged ones who don't fit in and don't look or act or talk the way we should, and hearing how women's health is being discounted for the health of a fetus DOES make me mad because I hate abortion but I know sometimes it's necessary and I think all lives are valuable but at some point we have to make a choice and it's never a good choice, but it has to be made, and to say a women should die for her fetus, mandatory death, it DOES outrage me. But you and Rachel were saying if we're not outraged we're not paying attention, and I'm outraged every day at the way people get treated (even in the freak movement of which I am part) and it seems that no one ever notices us or our issues or our struggles, and that outrages me...
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I'm writing a novel here. And I'm not mad at you and Rachel, I'm just saying you got me thinking again, and I wanted to say "Yes THAT, but also THIS" because I've been outraged for months and it gets worse for not saying it, but I didn't know how to say it, and finally this post was born. And I've been up all night and probably won't sleep at all for the next 36 hours because of work. but I had to say SOMETHING. I'm getting a book in the mail called "Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws by Kate Bornstein, and perhaps that will help me, maybe it will say some things I need to hear. I'm hoping. I need something.
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Though I think the phrase is applicable to just about everything else, and that it's only useful up to a point. We can get outraged all we want, but at some point we've got to use it or we're going to be turned into incubating wards of the state (or "whiny bitches playing the role of the victim to get attention" or whatever nasty epithet gets inserted) while we're not looking.
but at some point we need to slough off the maligned crap and just admit that we say and do horrible things to each other without laying the blame game.
Call me crazy, but I've never understood how we (we women, I mean, though I'm sure this applies to men too) are supposed to stand up and say "we are grownups and expect to be treated like grownups" when we can't say "hey, we're not acting like grownups, let's knock that shit off." But that just probably means I need therapy or something. :P
I'm not sure how it fits into your post here exactly, but I just wrote a bunch of stuff in my own journal about how I am not getting along with my current psychologist because I feel like everything is either patronizing (I once paid him $200 for the privilege of explaining how I've made my sleep schedule a priority for my entire life, and he treated this information like a major breakthrough) or like I'm being told that not being "normal" is the reason I'm unhappy and in so much pain (which he has not said in so many words, but being advised to do things I know do not work because they Are Not Who I Am and treated like I'm "uncooperative" for not doing them, or for trying them one more time and stopping because, hey, they make me feel like an impostor-ing idiot, is basically the same thing). It terrifies and pisses me off to hear that not being "normal" is the reason I'm fucked up, but you know, even if it is, I'd rather be myself and unhappy/painful than be "normal," because I've met the person I am when I'm trying to be "normal," and I can't stand her.
Long story short, I need a psychologist who understands that I want to be as functional and happy as possible while still being me, who is never going to be the person in their psych textbooks no matter how hard they try. Which is not this guy.
...Way to turn Lillian's post into about yourself, Self. :P
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