Category: things that are hard to write

Categories
someone is wrong on the internet things that are hard to write you need to do better

The deeply pathetic intimation of violence

Last night I was bemused to see some referrals to my cranky blog from a post on John C. Wright’s that I hadn’t linked to. Curious, I took a looksee, and lo and behold, I got name checked in the comments. Which is fair enough. (Gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry your delicate constitutions can’t handle some salty language, by the way. Kindly get the fuck over it.) And then there was this comment:

I found myself briefly regretting that duels of honour are illegal and, if to the death, immoral; but that is the level of anger I’d feel at being called a liar, multiple times.

Of course, the difficulty is when it’s a woman impugning your honour; it is dishonourable to strike a woman, but equally dishonourable to allow slights to your good name to stand. Never did figure a way out of that paradox.

Which honestly made me laugh, a lot. Seriously, how can you react to that other than by telling all your friends would you get a load of this fucking guy? Curse my ovaries for making it dishonorable to challenge me! Friends across various social media sites had a lot of fun laughing about it and there was a lot of “oh you’d totally kick that guy’s ass” chatter and that’s always pretty fun too in a sort of drinking beers and slapping each other on the back kind of way.

But now I want to get real about it.

This is not actually the first time I’ve had a random stranger on the internet publicly fantasize or imply how awesome it would be if he or someone else perpetrated an act of violence on my person. (About a year and a half ago it was someone making noise about taking a baseball bat to me because I had the [lady]stones to say I thought the president of the NRA is a terrible person.) Frankly, answering words with fantasies of violence is already a sign, at best, that someone needs to take a deep breath, count to ten, and remind themselves firmly that they are supposed to be an adult. That these notions–duels! baseball bats!–are immediately excused, often in the same metaphorical breath, with assurances of how that would totally never happen because it’s illegal, or they’re really a nice guy, or haha you’re a woman, is actually even more pathetic. It sure looks a lot like trying to have your cake and eat it, by being vaguely threatening at someone so you get to feel all big and tough, but then having the plausible deniability of no, seriously, I was only joking.

I do not care if you are my friend or my enemy. You are not tough or impressive when you do that. You are pitiable.

Because this is the thing. You may believe that violence or the “joking” threat of it will somehow end the argument, and in your favor because you’ve “won.” That is the magical thinking of a child. If the only way you can manage to respond to an argument is by puffing out your chest and waving your fists, you have lost, and profoundly. I don’t particularly want to have a baseball bat taken to me, or get cornered by someone wielding a pistol who desperately wishes it was the eighteenth century. But the fact of the matter is, no matter what could be physically done to my body, that does not actually prove me wrong.

I set down facts. I had an opinion. Even if someone found me in the parking lot tomorrow and beat me to death with a pipe wrench, that would not change any truth I’ve written. Climate change will still be real. Wayne LaPierre will still be a terrible person. Abiotic oil will still be horse shit. Powerforce bands would still be magical money wasters. John C. Wright will still be a disingenuous liar.

The truth doesn’t give a shit who hits harder or shoots faster. At best, maybe you get to be the last man standing who dictates his delusional vision of the world into a history book. But it’s just that: a delusion. Even if you could take every scientist who has ever researched sea level rise and threw us off a cliff, the sea level would still be going up. Even if you could duel everyone in the world who called someone you like a liar, that does not change the fact that he’s a fucking liar when he makes statements that are provably false.

You want to win? Then use your words. You don’t like statements I’ve made? Marshal your facts. Write a cogent argument. Prove your point in a substantive way. I’m a scientist. I might not like admitting when I’m wrong–seriously, who the fuck does?–but if I was incapable of doing so I never would have made it through graduate school.

But this “joking” about duels and baseball bats and the infinite number of nastier and more substantial threats that have been made against people far unluckier than me speaks not of the capacity for violence, but rather an ultimate lack of intellectual courage and a profound smallness of spirit. This is the ugliest possible version of a child sticking her fingers in her ears and shouting “Lalala I can’t hear you!”

And for that, anyone who practices this feeble tactic has my pity, whether they like it or not.

While I’m on a roll and talking about violence, and fights…

To my friends and loved ones: It is incredibly sweet that you have that kind of confidence in me, even if in a joking way. Yeah, it does feel good to be patted on the back and told I could totally kick someone’s ass, like I’m some kind of chubby, red-headed action star. That kind of thing can make a gal feel nine feet tall and fearless.

But let’s be real again.

I’ve practiced kung fu for twelve years now, and I’m still going strong. I’ve also been in precisely two fights in my entire life, both of which happened more than twelve years ago. What I learned about fights is that they’re terrifying, and chaotic, and painful, and then later sickening. They are not glorious, or cool, and anyone who claims they are probably hasn’t been in one, is dealing with it in the only way they can, or has bought into a mode of thought I’ve come to despise.

Practicing in the controlled environment of a school is not anything like being out in the real world; the closest you can ever get is sparring, and I’ve always avoided that because I don’t like it. I don’t like fighting. So I have no idea how I’d actually fare in a fight these days. And you know what? I’ll be overjoyed if I die at a ripe old age without ever finding out.

But let me tell you what I have learned, after twelve years of kung fu:

  • It’s okay for girls to hit.
  • Pain isn’t as painful as you think.
  • Practice is fun. Fighting is not.
  • It’s easier to train your fists than it is to train your will, or your temper, or your spirit.
  • Violence is the first resort of a bully and the last resort of a true disciple.
  • It takes the most strength to walk away.
  • You don’t ever, ever start fights, but you damn well finish them.

And yes, maybe there are situations where your back is to the wall and you or someone you love is in physical danger and then maybe, just maybe, you have no choice but to fight. But people seem to forget that often the quickest, most decisive way to end a fight is by choosing the most difficult path of all and walking away.

I won’t walk away from an argument, but I will walk away from a fight and consider myself the better person for it, always.

Categories
science fiction things that are hard to write thinking out loud worldcon

Drawing the line

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, these last couple of days. Well, as much thinking as possible considering I’ve been getting about five hours of sleep a night and work is slowly consuming my brain, my soul, and probably my major viscera. (But hey, workshop day is tomorrow! Then I get to relax have severe panic about all the end of month work that I didn’t get done because of the workshop wheeeeeeee.)

Anyway. I’ve been thinking drawing the line. You know. The Line. The Line That Must Not Be Crossed.

It’s an expression that can have some real macho bullshit baggage with it, I guess because it makes for nicely threatening language. See anything involving foreign policy. But that’s not what I mean, here. It’s not about denoting territory in a power struggle, be it between international powers or people. It’s not about maintaining physical safety. Those are the lines you draw outside of yourself, whether you’re a country or a parent with a cranky toddler or someone trying to hold the distance between you and an evil shitbag that doesn’t comprehend the meaning of No–and that’s a whole different matter.

The lines I’m thinking about here are the ones you draw inside yourself. They’re part of the way you define and shape yourself into the person you want to be. They are yours–only yours. You don’t get to force your configuration of internal borders on anyone else, and no one has the right to reach into you and redraw those boundaries.

These internal lines read: if I do this, if I am a part of this, I will no longer be the person I am or the person I want to be. I will no longer be right with myself. Crossing these internal lines will probably never hurt you physically, but will wound you in ways that never heal.

And make no mistake, other people aren’t going to have the same internal lines as you; it’s never easy to hit a point where you think something is unacceptable, but your friend is okay with it. Being human ain’t easy because no two of us are exactly the same, and that’s another thing you have to decide for yourself.

But these lines are important. These are the lines you draw between yourself and the dark.

#

So why all the navel-gazing? It’s not really my style when I’ve got movies I could be bitching about. As you might suspect already, this is another dispatch from the gift that keeps on giving: this year’s Hugo short-list. In my previous post, I said I’d be doing my best to read all the entries with an open heart. It was the best I could come up with at the time, because my first urge is always to ask what’s fair.

But then I made the mistake of getting lost down the comment rabbit hole of Natalie’s post, and one of the people there invoked Orson Scott Card, Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen as similar situations to the Vox Day being a Hugo nominee. (Insert your own feelings here on if you think that’s even a fair comparison to make on the scale of artistic merit versus complete shitbaggery.) And god I wish he hadn’t done that, because I’d almost managed to stop picking at this particular scab and let it retreat to no more than a nagging itch.

I’ve already searched through this little sector of my soul in relation to Orson Scott Card. (For me, he’s the only really pertinent example, because in all honesty I’ve never really liked Woody Allen’s work.) I fought with myself, blood was drawn, wounds were taken, and I came to the conclusion that I have a line. There is a point at which I can no longer separate the art from the living artist. I cannot escape the fact that my support of their art, however miniscule in relative scale it may be, implicates me in what they then use their platform to do and say. It makes me complicit, if only peripherally, in the harm they choose to do. I said of Orson Scott Card:

If you can separate the art from the artist, maybe that makes you a better person than me. Feel that way if you like. But I cannot support someone who believes that me and many of the people I love and esteem are not full human beings.

If that’s true for OSC, whom I have met and actually liked as a person, it’s just as true for Vox Day. And I’m ashamed of myself for not having considered this sooner. Though I guess that explains why I’ve been so damn uncomfortable about this entire mess.

I may still read Vox Day’s story if it’s in the Hugo packet, because what little of his prose I’ve seen has been downright florid, and I have this “hobby” (some might call it a “problem”) where I watch or read terrible things and then go on seething rants about the awfulness I witnessed. So I might give this embarrassing shitstain in the shorts of humanity that much of my time. Or I might just watch a couple episodes of Master Chef reruns instead. The series where it’s all kids is super cute, after all.

But I will not be putting Vox Day above the No Award line. I gave up Ender’s Game because being right with myself was more important than a novel I treasured as a teenager. This isn’t even a contest.

#

You don’t have to agree with me. I don’t expect you to. These are my lines, not yours.

Feel free to discuss this with me. Feel free to offer me arguments (I’ll do my best to consider) or ask questions if you’re going to actually listen to the answers. If you think less of me as a person for my melodramatic little choice, well, it is what it is. This is personal. I didn’t make this decision for you, and I sure as hell didn’t make it just to spite some guy I wouldn’t recognize if I bumped into him on the street.

It’s the end of the day, and I feel right with myself.

Categories
the human body is made of bullshit things that are hard to write

The hardest part of discipline

So last week, I let a doctor jam a needle into the proximal joint of my big toe. Then pump cortisone into it. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt pain like that. The only reason I didn’t haul off and punch him in the arm was because he was holding a needle. Stuck into my fucking toe.

Today, it actually feels pretty good. I can wiggle the big toe on my left foot. Which is more than I could say this time last week. I’m doing physical therapy exercises now, which means picking up marbles with my toes, after first retrieving those marbles from the far-flung corners where Tengu has put them when I wasn’t looking. That cat loves marbles.

So I guess this another installment in my ongoing series on how the human body is made of flimsy bullshit.

I ended up at the doctor’s office last week because my back has been bothering me off and on since August. The big toe on my left foot has been almost immobile far longer, and I thought I’d have the doctor look at it while I was there. The x-rays on my back came out fine, thanks for asking. My toe, not so much. The joint is badly narrowed and I have extra bone growth, which is a bad thing. This lead to the cortisone shot and the exercises, and hopefully that will work because otherwise I get to look forward to foot surgery in the near future.

Though I guess, having made it through shoulder surgery, foot surgery can’t possibly suck that much.

But it’s also incredibly upsetting. Because I feel like I did this to myself. Over a year ago, I hyperextended my toe pretty badly while I was practicing kung fu. (Which means, by the way, I screwed up when I was practicing, since that isn’t something that should normally happen.) It hurt like a bitch, so I went to the doctor after a week and got told it was a sprain. I just needed to wear one of those immobilizing shoes for three weeks and give it time to heal. But it didn’t heal.

I should have gone back to the doctor when it didn’t stop hurting. But I figured I’d just work through it. The pain steadily got worse, but just a little at a time so I didn’t really notice. Until I started tap lessons.

I should have figured out already that working through the pain when it’s that kind of pain is a stupid move. Look how it turned out with my shoulder, after all. Maybe some day I’ll figure out that these aren’t the kind of problems that can be cured with tenacity.

I’m big into discipline, into making things a habit so you feel weird if you don’t do them. For me, it’s worked for writing, and it’s worked even better with exercise. But with writing, there’s yet to be a time when doing daily wordcount could hurt me. Maybe that day will come. With exercise, though, there are times when exercising can and will hurt you. Exercising injured may sound like a badass thing to do (keep going on your broken leg! win the game!), but it’s not. It’ll likely just get you more hurt. And while I don’t think you get any prizes if you get buried with all of your original parts, you also don’t get any prizes for breaking yourself into non-functioning pieces because you were too damn obstinate to just pause.

One of the hardest emails I’ve sent in recent memory was the one to my tap instructor, when I told her I wouldn’t be able to continue with lessons until my foot was better. Just like when my shoulder blew out, one of the most upsetting conversations I’ve ever had was telling Shifu that I had to drop out of class for a while. Good teachers, good coaches, are always understanding about these things. Good teachers don’t want you to hurt yourself. They understand.

It’s a lot harder to give yourself that kind of understanding. First off, there’s the disappointment of it, but I’ve had my fajitas (and a margarita) now, and I’m over it. It’s more that I’ve never been any kind of fucking athlete. After fighting so hard to be able to run or do kung fu or dance when once upon a time I could barely climb a couple flights of stairs, I’m just so afraid I’m going to lose it. After going so many places and doing so many things powered by sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness, maybe I don’t know how to deal with a problem that I can’t just wear down. I’m lucky I have friends who are willing to tell me over and over again to stop being stupid and rest.

I have to believe in myself, that when I get injured it isn’t the end of the world if I have to stop and rest. That I will recover whatever ground I might lose, or that I’ll be able to find new ground to cover. But that’s the hard part. The scary part. It’s easier to do something than not do something. It’s easier to stay in motion when you’ve been in motion.

And that’s why this is another part of discipline that I have to learn.

Categories
health things that are hard to write

The Year of No Sleep

I open my eyes and I’m not in bed. I’ve got a dark road in front of me, fields on either side, red, white and blue lights throwing shadows across the tarmac as they flash. My hands jerk on the steering wheel. My mouth tastes like death and regular Coke. “Shit. Shane? Shane? Where are we?”

My paramedic’s annoyed, barely awake himself, but he tells me where we’re going, where we are, where to turn. I get us there all right, followed by a drive down to the hospital at a much saner speed. The call’s a non-specific abdominal pain, everyone’s favorite. (Not.)The whole way, I see shadows move along the side of the road, keeping pace with the ambulance, black dogs and man-shaped things. I know better than to look directly at them now.

#

It sounds like a horror story, right? The start of a cheesy-ass horror story, which is honestly the only kind I’m capable of writing. It’s not. It’s a thing that happened to me. It was 2004, and I stopped sleeping for over a year.

No, that sounds too dramatic. I didn’t quite stop sleeping. I just stopped sleeping normally. Two or three hours a night at most, snatches during the day when I sat down for more than five minutes. I fell asleep at my desk at work. I fell asleep standing up as I leaned one shoulder against the wall.

At first, for a few weeks, I just felt cranky and exhausted. Then I felt strangely okay, like I’d hit some kind of point where I didn’t really need to sleep, except I’d close my eyes for long, dizzying blinks. Then I felt like I lived in a different layer of reality than everyone else, sometimes floating, sometimes crashing. That was how it felt, like being mentally untethered.

It’s strange the things I can remember from that year, because most of it is a blur and what I recall best is being constantly hungry, cold, and nauseated. I’d sit at my desk and shiver, and I was so hungry all the time I ate nearly everything in sight to the point that it made my stomach hurt. I particularly craved deep fried things, which then made me feel sick, so I’d shiver and think about vomiting. I packed on weight at a shocking pace. I felt dizzy, light headed, and completely disconnected from my body. I tried to exercise but had no energy. My eyes were always tired and heavy, itching.

I felt like I had been scrubbed raw, inside and out.

Some things I remember are like the incident above. I remember them because they frightened me into momentary, true wakefulness. I recall my boss catching me falling asleep at my desk. She called me into her office (well… cubicle) and told me as kindly as she could that I needed to make myself uncomfortable enough to stay awake or I was going to get in a lot of trouble. I remember hitting my head on my desk once because I started falling out of my chair. Several times I somehow got myself from a friends house or work to home with no memory of how I got there, just opening my eyes in the parking spot by my house. I remember laying under three or four blankets and shivering violently, unable to warm myself.

That’s really what I remember most vividly: never feeling warm no matter what I did.

The other memories I have from that time, I don’t trust. I had conversations that no one else remembered later. Friends would say things to me and I couldn’t understand the words. I watched television shows that didn’t exist. I saw black dogs whenever I drove. I glimpsed people and cats out of the corner of my eye and found nothing there when I turned to look, startled. I have several notebooks of half-paragraphs I wrote, which don’t make sense when I go back and look them over again. I hallucinated. I know I hallucinated, and that makes me doubt even the things I’ve already told you.

At the time, I couldn’t really say why I stopped sleeping. I liked to blame it on the EMT work, which was bullshit. I only did between four and six night shifts a month, and the busy nights were rare. It was a load of stress, but I was maintaining all right. I just couldn’t ever fall asleep. I must have just been one of those people who naturally go to bed late and can’t get up early. (That is bullshit, by the way. I am more of a night person, but these days I manage to get in bed and sleep by midnight, and I get up by seven, no problems.)

And I didn’t tell anyone. Because I had everything going for me, right? I had a great job for someone with only a high school diploma. Sure, I was working sixty hour weeks, but I was making bank. I owned a house at the age of 23 and lived independently. I had money to throw around. And weren’t we all burning the candle at both ends? I had a busy social life, most of it centered around roleplaying and board games. If I wasn’t sleeping enough, boo fucking hoo. Catch up on the weekend. Everyone else was short on sleep too.

I was just too much of a pussy to handle a little sleep dep.

#

I started sleeping again suddenly, a few days after I learned I was going to be laid off, after the initial shock had worn away and I realized that my job really did have a set expiration date. That probably should have been my biggest clue. It wasn’t until years later that I was doing some research on depression and realized that might have been the reason behind my year of no sleep.

I was working sixty hours a week at a job I hated but was too afraid to leave because I feared losing the money. In one sense, I stopped sleeping because I knew that if I went to bed, I’d have to get up in the morning and go to work. It wasn’t until the end was in sight and I knew I’d be free of it–as terrifying as that was–that I started sleeping again.

It’s taken years for my ability to sleep to recover. It took years to get rid of all the weight I gained when I was trying to compensate for lack of sleep and emotional distress by eating. It took years to shake the unhealthy habits I learned during that time, and even today I still sometimes overeat to the point that it makes me sick. It took years to regain my ability to exercise.

Sometimes you don’t have choices about your job. You have to eat. You have to keep body and soul together. But one of the biggest lessons I learned from this experience was that if it’s a choice between a job you like and a job you hate that makes a ton of money, take the job you like. I know I did some good shit with my money in 2004, some stuff that I probably enjoyed at the time. Fucked if I can remember it now, because my brain was so completely fried by lack of sleep.

I think the more important lesson is that some things, you can’t just try to bull through and pretend that everything is okay. I don’t know how things might have gone differently, if I’d actually told someone how completely fucked up I felt. I can’t even really guess. But I like to think I could have arrested my slow-motion physical self-destruction.

I’ve never felt anything like it since, and I hope that I never will again. I hate the idea of anyone else feeling the way I did. It was, quite literally, a waking nightmare, one that I couldn’t escape because the line between waking and sleeping had blurred past all recognition.

And I want you to know if you’re going through something similar, it’s not just you going crazy or “not being able to hack it” whatever the fuck that means. It happened to me. I want you to know it’s okay to reach out for help. That you should reach out for help. And I want you to know that it can and will get better.

Categories
me things that are hard to write

It’s okay to…

(An non-exhaustive list of things I wish I had figured out twenty years ago.)

It’s okay to:

  • say I don’t know.
  • say I was wrong.
  • dance even if you suck at it. Especially if you suck at it.
  • be gay.
  • be alone.
  • be unpopular, because you will always have at least one true friend cheering for you even if you don’t realize it at the time.
  • run at your own pace.
  • not fit societal beauty standards.
  • not want to fit societal beauty standards.
  • depend on other people.
  • not be okay.
  • make mistakes. In fact, you’re better off making mistakes, it’s how you learn.
  • not like things (as long as you’re not a dick about it).
  • like things, with enthusiasm and passion, even if other people don’t understand.
  • not clean your plate.
  • sweat, and have pimples, and fart, and grow body hair. You’re a goddamn human being.
  • be a dork.
  • spill food on your shirt. It doesn’t mean you’re a slob or a pig, and there’s this awesome stuff called Oxi-clean.
  • cry.
  • be yourself, once you figure out who that is.
Categories
lgbt movie things that are hard to write

Still Not Going to See Ender’s Game: Separating the Art From the Artist

Orson Scott Card would like us to be tolerant of his anti-gay marriage views, now that we’ve won. The point is, apparently “moot.” I call bullshit on that one.  DOMA may be dead, and the language of that decision may be what will make the rest of the dominoes fall, so to speak. But the point is not moot. Gay and lesbian citizens still can’t get married in the majority of states in this country, many of which have enshrined homophobia in their constitutions. Transgendered Americans are still even further behind when it comes to having full rights to be who they are. And that’s not even taking into account the fact that there are rights beyond marriage.

So no, the issue is not  moot. The issue will not be moot until every one of us is equal under the law. Telling ourselves that we have already won and stopping the fight before the finish line would be foolish indeed.

And even if victory is inevitable (oh how I hope that it is), OSC is still in prime position to fund the foot dragging and last tantrums of a lost conservative cause. So no, I don’t think it’s time to forget that yet, not when he hasn’t backed down, hasn’t changed his mind. He’s just been overruled.

What about separating the art from the artist? You don’t have to like someone and their views to like their art, to consume and support it you know.

I’ve had this argument with friends before, specifically in regards to Orson Scott Card. It’s an uncomfortable subject, and I have conflicted feelings about it. Not in the least of which is the fact that when I met OSC in person years ago, I thought he was a pretty nice guy, and he gave me some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. He’s very likeable in person.

Then I remind myself that, as a bisexual woman, he thinks there’s something wrong with me and would want me to be a shamed, second-class citizen if I had fallen in love with a woman instead of a man.

But separate the art from the artist. It feels like a horrible twist on “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

There is a reason, for the most part, that I don’t actively seek out the opinions of artists. Sometimes knowing too much ruins it. Sometimes knowing too much means you can no longer read or watch or listen to a piece of art you enjoyed without thinking about how the artist has harmed something about which you care deeply. Sometimes you wish you just didn’t know.

But artists are people just like the rest of us, and they have opinions, and they have a right to express those opinions. Wil Wheaton points this out eloquently and often whenever someone complains about him daring to have politics out loud where people can see them. And like for everyone else, the freedom of an artist to express an opinion is not the same as the freedom to have no consequences because of it. When we’re talking about artists like OSC, his voice is louder than that of many others because of his art. He has a platform. We, his fans, built that platform for him with our support.

If we do not like what he is doing with that platform, I don’t think we are in any way obligated to continue that support.

But separate the art from the artist. Why can’t you do that? Shouldn’t you do that?

Does art happen in a vacuum? Is it truly a thing separate from the artist? This isn’t just an academic question for me, when it comes to Orson Scott Card. I read Ender’s Game as a teenager. I literally finished the book in twelve hours, unwilling to put it down. It had a lot of meaning to me.

And yet.

At the reading where I met OSC, someone in the audience asked him a question: As a Mormon, did he try to put his religion into his work? And OSC gave what I thought was a very true and important answer that has stuck with me—he doesn’t try to do that. Preaching at your audience never turns out well. But he said that his religion is fundamental to who he is, and he wouldn’t be surprised if it comes out into his art in subtle ways.

Because as artists, even when we are imagining ourselves as other people, we are the ones doing the creating. I am a white, bisexual woman, and I’m sure that no matter how hard I try, my experiences will always subtly reflect in how I create. Because it is my art.

Can you truly separate art from the artist? How do you deal with, say, Chris Brown and Roman Polanski if you like their art but cannot support them as human beings?

Art does not occur in a vacuum. And while you can appreciate art as good or bad without knowing the person behind it, regardless of the person behind it, consuming that art does in fact mean you are supporting its creator. And by supporting them, you are complicit in their causes. I have joined in boycotts of companies when it was revealed they were donating money anti-gay groups. Why should an artist be any different? Because he wrote some books I like? I’ve eaten Chik-fil-A sandwiches and nuggets more often than I’ve re-read Ender’s Game.

If you can separate the art from the artist, maybe that makes you a better person than me. Feel that way if you like. But I cannot support someone who believes that me and many of the people I love and esteem are not full human beings. Orson Scott Card chose to use his platform to denigrate LGBT people. I can damn well choose to take a tiny sliver of his platform, a platform I joined with countless others to help build, away.

Categories
things that are hard to write

I will never be beautiful

I will never be beautiful.

I’m not saying this because I want or need reassurance. It’s the knee jerk reaction, and I understand that, when someone sounds like they’re feeling down about themselves. But I’m not feeling down about myself, and I don’t think reassurance really works, for all its good intentions.

I’ve spent my entire life being told by others that I look okay, that I’m pretty, that I’m beautiful. It doesn’t matter how many times I hear it, it feels like a well-meaning lie. I don’t feel beautiful; I don’t have the necessary magic to look in a mirror and see myself as anything but the sum of my flaws. I don’t think you can convince someone that they are beautiful, or smart, or talented, if they truly don’t believe it themselves. I hear that I’m beautiful when I feel ugly. I hear that I’m beautiful when I don’t even look like myself any more.

There’s something wrong with me, or there’s something wrong with that word.

Some people want to redefine beautiful and I say, good for you, do it. But what I want is to be free of the tyranny of that goddamn word. Beautiful is nothing but a series of endlessly moving goal posts. It’s the unattainable, and people are ruthlessly mocked for not being able to attain it.

Rachael Author Photo 2

Beautiful has murdered countless women and men since its invention. We starve ourselves while surrounded by food, break our own bones, destroy our muscles and tendons, die from infections caused by this and that cosmetic tweak. At least when people die for love, they get immortalized in odes. Being disfigured for beauty just invites more mockery, for being superficial, for trying to please people who will never be pleased. It’s a no-win game.

And why should the fuckability rating complete strangers put on me have any grip on my soul? That isn’t what moves me.
No matter what I look like, I’m still me. Is there anything more pointless than trying to hammer myself into a foreign shape for the benefit of a word? Better to try to use whatever art I have in my soul to try to get the outside to match the inside so I can finally be content.I’ve cried more tears over beautiful and the way it’s twisted me up than I have over all of my dead relatives combined, and I feel fucking ashamed to admit that. I’ve spent years wondering why I can’t find a dress that doesn’t make me feel shakingly stupid when I would have better spent the time and energy trying to figure out who the hell I am.

I will never be beautiful.

I will never be beautiful.

But I will always be me.

Categories
politics things that are hard to write Uncategorized

Suicide is cheaper

A lot of you may not know this, but I used to be an EMT-B. I volunteered on a 911 ambulance service, and spent most of my time running out of fire stations in Commerce City.

Commerce City (aka Combat Shitty) is an industrial area of Denver where there are a lot of poor and working poor. There’s a lot of violence and chances for industrial accidents. It’s one of the places you go if you want to see trauma calls and gunshot wounds.

That’s not all you see there, though.

Sometimes you get a call out to one of the little trailer parks, because people do live here even though no one really wants to, and it’s for chest pains, possible heart attack. It’s an older man in a uniform (you decide what kind) pale and sweaty and shaking, his face like dough. He’s got a crocheted afghan in a startling color combination covering his lap, and his wife (you guess she’s the one who made it, she’s got that look) wrings her hands nearby. She’s the one that called you. He’s as mad as he can manage when he can barely breathe.

The paramedic hooks up the EKG.You don’t know how to read the bouncing lines, but even you know it’s not good. Okay, let’s go. We need to get you to the hospital.

“No.”

You’re probably having a heart attack. This could kill you. You need to come with us.

“No. It’s too expensive. I can’t.”

He’s got kids, and grandkids, and too much debt already. That’s what he tells you. And you try to tell him that life is worth a hell of a lot more than money. Grandkids, right? You want to play with your grandkids.

“I don’t want them to pay my bills.”1

Your paramedic calls the hospital and has one of the ER docs talk to the man, try to scare him or cajole him into coming along. The sick man’s wife wrings her hands some more, rubs his shoulders, but she doesn’t argue with him, doesn’t help us. She’s in the shadow of that same specter.

And that’s all you can do, in the end. You can argue, cajole, even threaten a little, and it doesn’t matter. The man knows who he is, where he is, when it is (that’s called AAOx3) and he has the right to refuse your help, by law

So you pack up your things and walk, really slowly, to the door. You drive away so slowly that cars honk at you. Because you’re hoping, you’re goddamn hoping that poor man will collapse while you’re still only a couple miles from his trailer, and his wife will call you, and you can come screaming back and save his life whether he wants you to or not, like you’re some kind of goddamn hero.

This happens every goddamn day. Heart attacks and car accidents and sickness, and they won’t go because they’re so fucking scared of debt collectors harassing them, harassing their families. This is one of the reasons I stopped being an EMT. I couldn’t handle seeing people kill themselves like this any more, because I want to believe we live in a world where life is still more important than money. I couldn’t handle feeling complicit and responsible for someone’s life when they had to make a shitty, impossible decision like that.

So yeah, maybe people without insurance don’t get thrown out of the doors of an ER to bleed out in the snow. I guess that’s the image Mitt Romney is going for because it sounds incredibly ridiculous.

“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack,’  ” he said as he offered more hints as to what he would put in place of “Obamacare,” which he has pledged to repeal.
“No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”

We do have people who die in their apartments (or trailers, or houses, or by the side of the road) because they lack insurance. But it’s not necessarily because no one will take them. It’s because they won’t fucking go in the first place, because suicide is cheaper. Because if you’re going to die, it’s better to not leave your already grieving family drowning in debt and destroying what pride they have left in searching for charity that may never materialize.

Every goddamn day.

1 – Debt collectors can’t legally go after anyone but spouses (and in some states not even that) in a case like this, unless it was the kids/grandkids that signed the hospital admissions. This does not stop unscrupulous debt collection agencies from trying however, and many people do not understand their legal rights. (Also, families can be put in the position of supporting the person who is trying to pay the debt, which is a whole other ball of wax.)

Categories
feminism rants things that are hard to write

Stop calling me a "real woman"

Because you know what that implies? Are there really femmebots out there, complete with boob guns that make up the category of “not real” women? Are there girls made out of plastic? Is there a test you have to take, or are there government regulations sort of like they have for beef that mean we get tagged as real women, right next to the stamp stating we’re organic, because hey we’re composed of carbon-containing molecules?

It’s a bullshit term. It always struck me wrong when I went to Lane Bryant and was rewarded with “real woman dollars” for shopping. But the wrongness burst into ugly life when I re-watched the episode of Project Runway where one of the designers is a giant toolbag to a plus-size lady. The utter patronizing tone in which its delivered and that it’s obvious he’s using it in place of “fat” because he’s trying to weasel out of being eviscerated for being an asshole is even more insulting.

You’re not fooling anyone. We shouldn’t need some kind of smirking consolation prize for wearing clothing that’s bigger than a 16. We already know we’re real. We exist. It’s a sad disguise for the fact that often plus-size clothing feels like cultural punishment by setting set us in an adversarial position to women who wear “normal” sizes. Perhaps if we’re too busy trying to look down our noses at each other, we’ll miss the evil truth that we’re being compelled to attack people who should be our allies in this struggle, divided falsely along superficial lines.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe it’s just a pathetic attempt to make us feel better about ourselves. Hey, you’re large and are apparently considered unworthy to wear anything other than black smocks (it’s slimming, you know) but you’re a real woman. As if realness is determined by mass rather than an authenticity of spirit. 

Being a woman isn’t a contest that some of us have to lose. There is a full spectrum of women to which we all belong, an infinite continuum of what it means to “look like a woman,” and no part of that spectrum should be defined as inherently superior. Doing that (and then gleefully jumping over a cliff with the invention of photoshop) is what got us into this mess in the first place.

I’m tired of the implication that my struggle to accept myself has to come at the detriment of other women.

Real women are fat. Real women are thin. Real women come in all colors and shapes and identities, and sometimes we have curves, and sometimes we don’t but damnit we’re all real women.

And we’re all really beautiful.

Categories
fitness for fat nerds rants things that are hard to write

Losing weight sucks

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but I’ve been putting it off. It’s tough to write. Anything about weight and self-image and societal bullshit is kind of destined to be.

Over the last two years and three months, I’ve lost about 75 pounds, going from 270 to 195. I’m now back down to what I weighed as a sophomore in high school, before I started training as a powerlifter. The reason I decided to try to lose weight (and keep trying) is because there’s a lot of type II diabetes in my family, and I want to dodge that bullet.

I tell you this not as some kind of brag line, or because I’m looking for congratulations, but because I feel that it lends meaning to the point of this post. I lost 75 pounds. I generally feel healthier as a person. And I would never in a million years get on someone else’s back and tell them they are in some way obligated do what I’ve done.

Losing weight sucks. It sucks a lot. It can be utterly soul-destroying, and it’s self-inflicted.

There’s this narrative that all us fat nerds know. It says that we must be fat because we’re lazy. Because there is something fundamentally wrong with us. Because we’re greedy. Because we’re gross and lack the willpower to resist evil, sinful things like that piece of cake. It’s our fault, and we deserve to be summarily judged by perfect strangers simply because of how we look.

After 75 pounds, I hate that narrative more than ever. I hate that people assume I must be significantly more physically fit now than I was 40 pounds ago. I hate that outside of my immediate circle of friends and family, the news that I weigh less than I used to is greeted with far more enthusiastic congratulations than the fact that I’ve published stories in professional magazines. The latter normally gets a, “Hey, that’s cool.” The former receives the kind of approbation I’d expect if I’d just fucking cured cancer.

I hate that I can’t write about this without crying.

Losing weight sucks.

Anyone who tells you that losing weight is easy is lying to you. They’re trying to sell you something, or they’re trying to make you feel like shit because they’re an asshole.

Between cardio activity and weights, I’ve probably spent 15-20 hours per week on physical activities in the last two years. It’s like a part-time job. I write down everything I eat. Everything. And then I count the calories and wish I could have a beer, but not today.

I know I’m lucky. I have that kind of time I can invest into physical activity. I also know that my 15-20 hours a week is nothing compared to the time invested by people who are professionally good-looking. You know, the people we constantly get told we should look like, as if they are the true norm. There are a lot of people out there who literally do not have that kind of time; they have multiple jobs, they have kids, they have responsibilities that don’t let them go ride around on their bicycle for two hours a night. And there are also people who just would rather spend their time doing something else, and I sure can’t blame them for that. The only reason I’ve managed to keep doing it is because I like biking and kung fu.

I hate writing down everything I eat. I hate counting calories. I can’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to put themselves through that either. I don’t feel like I have a right to demand that my fellow human beings are miserable. I could probably lose weight faster, but I’m human, and there are days where I decide that if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I don’t want to die regretting the fact that I didn’t try the red velvet cake. If anyone has a problem with that, they’re welcome to fuck themselves.

Losing weight sucks.

This is the part that sucks the most: it doesn’t magically make you love yourself. You still look in the mirror and hate the same things about yourself that you hated 20, 40, 70 pounds ago. Losing weight is a slow motion process of punctuated equilibrium. You don’t even realize anything has changed about your body until you look at old pictures. Maybe then you can feel like there’s been some kind of improvement (however you judge that) but then it’s back to the same you in the same mirror and the million things you wish were just different.

If I just lose some weight then I’ll… is one of the dumbest phrases ever spoken. It’s a lie, and an excuse. If you’re not brave enough to do something now, you won’t be when you weigh less.

Because there’s still all the shit in your head, years upon years of the world teaching you to hate yourself, and that’s harder to lose than every spare pound you have.