A couple of weeks ago I announced that I’m going to Netroots Nation 11 on full scholarship through the LGBT Netroots Connect initiative. Now it’s time to finish preparing for it — if only because I’m just about to fly outta here.

I’m sticking a couple of hashtags in my post title so this post will tweet nicely. FYI, #nn11 stands for Netroots Nation 11, to be held starting next Thursday in Minneapolis, and #nn11lgbt is the hashtag for LGBT Netroots Connect program, via which I got the full scholarship to the LGBT preconference next Wednesday as well as NN11 itself. Got that? Cool. Too geeky for you? Oh well, sorry. I’ll translate: it’ll make my post, when Twitter picks it up, easily findable by other geeky NN11 attendees & vicarious spectators who want to know what’s being said about NN11 and NN11lgbt.

Bow ties are cool. — The Eleventh Doctor

A few days ago I wrote on Henkimaa about the cool-as-bow-ties Netroots Nation 11 mobile app that I downloaded onto my iPod Touch. So cool that it turns my iPod Touch into a veritable sonic screwdriver.  Don’t get that reference either?  Here, I’ll help you out: it makes my iPod Touch even more useful a tool than it was before.  Especially, it makes it easy for me to figure out which sessions I want to go to at the conference, and where they fit in my overall conference schedule.

Then the app went funky on me. Obviously, the good folks of NN11 were fixing it. They loaded some Netroots Nations sessions into the app that hadn’t been in it before. But other sessions disappeared completely, including some of those I was most interested in.  The attendees registered in slowly started climbing, though. For awhile there it looked like 90% of them would have first names starting with M. Now other letters are starting to fill out.

And now most or all of the sessions seem to be in there too.  Again with the bow-tie coolness and sonic-screwdriverly usefulness.  And so I can, again, better prep for NN11.

Good thing, too, because I’m flying out tomorrow morning.  (I’m writing this Thursday night.  By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way.)

Portland

Obviously, since even the LGBT preconference doesn’t happen until next Wednesday, I must be doing something else first.  Yes: I’m flying to Portland — the one in Oregon — to see my ex-but-still-beloved Ptery.  Ptery, a transman, is currently (& somewhat by choice) homeless, and is a homeless activist living in Dignity Village, a city-recognized homeless camp. But tomorrow — that is, Friday — he’ll be participating in a peaceful & direct action for homeless rights: camping with homeless & formerly homeless community members on the Rose Parade route. And since it’s Friday I’m getting there, I’m participating too, and thus will be sacking out in a tent Friday night somewhere along that route.  I’ll spend a couple of nights at Dignity Village, too, with in-between a night with my friends Genny & Deirdre, who I haven’t seen in a couple of years.

I hope to write a blog post or two while I’m in Portland. Homelessness issues… the trans community of which Ptery is part… the incredible community response to a viscious gaybashing that occurred recently on Portland’s Hawthorne Bridge, about which we included an item (including video) in Bent News a few days ago.

Then Tuesday I’ll fly on to Minneapolis via Seattle & Denver… yeah, that airport layover thing again. Arriving there quite late Tuesday night.

Minneapolis

And it’ll be pretty strange, after one night in a tent and a couple more at Dignity Village, to be residing for several days in the Hilton Minneapolis. Hopefully a hotel that’s not subject to the unfair labor practices that have been plaguing workers at Anchorage’s Hilton (as well as our Sheraton) the past few years.

The LGBT preconference will be all day Wednesday.  I have no idea what’s in store there, except to know that Mike Rogers, the guy behind LGBT Netroots Connect (as well as a whole lot else!) tells me that a lot of the folks down there are pretty excited that an LGBT blogger from Alaska will be there.  (I am still, by the way, waiting to see if anyone got the joke I inserted in my “I’m going to Netroots Nation” post about which famous Alaskan Mike was curious about. First person to write the correct answer in comments on this post gets some kind of cool NN11 swag from me.)

I should have Wifi, & whenever I do — here we go Twitter, again.  I intend to tweet from Netroots quite a bit.  So if you’re interested in what I or other LGBT Netroots Connect and NN11 participants are doing, get used to those hashtags. Here they are again: #nn11 and #nn11lgbt. Interested persons can also follow me on Twitter @yksin.  And my Tweets will be automatically compiled, as usual, into Daily Tweets posts at Henkimaa (but not at Bent), to which I’ll try to add descriptive subtitle & useful commentary as I have time.  I’ll also be writing regular posts (as indeed I’m required to by the terms of my scholarship), which will be posted at Henkimaa, and/or Bent Alaska (especially those that are directly LGBT-relevant), or both.

Netroots Nation itself begins Thursday, June 16.  If you’re curious, you too can download the cool-as-bowties NN11 mobile app from iTunes or whatever Android users use (assuming the app is there too). Or you can simply visit the Netroots Nation website.

Now, the reason I’m going to NN11 isn’t for Henkimaa.  The kind of conference Henkimaa would want me to go to would be one in which a whole bunch of writers sat at tables with laptops and coffee and wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote.  But hey, I do that with my writing buddies every Side Street Saturday and every Sugarspoon Tuesday — just a walk up the street or a brief ride on the People Mover.

No, I’m going to NN11 for Bent Alaska. Which is an LGBT blog.  And a blog, furthermore, which — well, let me quote from my scholarship application:

In 50 words or less, what do you hope to gain from your participation in Netroots Nation?

I recently became coadminstrator of Bent Alaska, Alaska’s LGBTQ blog. I hope to get counsel on how to bring in other writers/bloggers to enrich Bent Alaska with more content from more voices.

That question, that answer, is my single biggest reason for going to Netroots.  Hand-in-hand with it is the desire to connect with other LGBT bloggers and allies around the country to talk about our common goal of LGBT equality and how we, as the “media voices” of our movement can help to bring that about.

Thus, the very first session I added to my schedule as a “must go” was Managing a State Community Blog — “Need ideas for expanding your state blog’s reach? Trying to build your frontpage crew?” — no kidding, yeah.  I am. Especially to build the frontpage crew — because, y’know, I’m still that reluctant political blogger, who still wants to be a Henkimaa‘s version of a conference, where I can write write write write my “own” stuff.  We want to get more people in on Bent — more bloggers, more voices, more parts of the state represented.  (And not just on “political” stuff, but on the whole gamut of LGBTQ life, culture, politics, interests.)

Then I went through and added everything in the LGBT topic:

• Life Since Vegas: How the Netroots Forced Action on DADT and DREAM
• LGBT Strategy Session
• What to Do When the President is Just Not that Into You (one of the panelists: Dan Choi, kicked out of the military under DADT, and recently arrested in Moscow for participating in Pride there)
• Bullies and the Blogosphere: Creating Safe Spaces in Our Schools and Online
• Queer Media and the Alternative Revolution
• The Plan to Advance Marriage Equality, Inside and Outside of the 112th Congress

But there’s also lots of other sessions I’m interested in, and none — well, let’s say “not all” —  of these are cast in stone.  If there’s any Bent Alaska reader of an activist nature who sees something in the NN11 sessions that you think I should really consider going to — please get in comments or message me via my Facebook profile and tell me why.  And I’ll consider it. I really will.

If I had a highest goal of this Netroots: it’s that my participation in it this year could lead to the participation of someone else from LGBTQ Alaska next year. Someone, I hope, who becomes as committed to the health & welfare of Bent Alaska & the whole of the Alaska community we serve, as we strive to be.

* * *

But there’s one last item of note in my preparing for NN11.  I wrote on my scholarship application,

[B]y far the most important work I’ve done for the cause of LGBTQ equality and progressive politics in general is to live openly and matter-of-factly as who I am — as a lesbian, yes, but also as a writer of poetry and science fiction/fantasy; as someone with a B.A. in Religion who continues to be fascinated by the human religious impulse; as someone who has struggled lifelong with depression/despair; and as everything else I am .

Emphasis added.  That bolded item is another big part of why I initially had no interest in going to NN11.  It’s also the reason I didn’t go to my college class 30-year reunion, which was held last week, despite the urging of friends that I come.  And one of them — a classmate I didn’t know well in college, but with whom I’ve recently been getting better acquainted (no, not that way) — seemed just a little hurt, or at least dissapointed, when she learned that I’d stood up reunion, but was going to Minneapolis.  So I wrote to her:

I basically decided to go if & only if I got that LGBT Netroots Connect scholarship … & mainly because I felt (& continue to feel) that the conference can drop some wisdom on me about how to get other folks involved, consistently & reliably, with the blog. Because I am subject to burnout, thanks to my well-known (because I write about it) propensity to go into some Very Bad Places Inside Myself when I become overwhelmed with too much to do that doesn’t feed my spirit, that isn’t “mine.” (Like my writing is.) I want to do what I can for Bent, but not at my own expense.

I just wanted you to know that. I didn’t just stand up reunion in order to go to Netroots. Either of them is somewhat dangerous for me, b/c the Bad Places Inside Myself shit —

… (I don’t much like calling it “depression” anymore b/c what used to be a term of convenience for what I consider primarily a spiritual issue, though it does have it’s biological components, has been so medicalized & psychiatrized)…

— can easily have its wire tripped by big social events containing lots of people wanting to be talked & schmoozed with, with little downtime. Kinda like reunion. Kinda like NN. In fact, I’m just about to start writing a blog post about prepping for NN that will include some discussion of this: the care I’ll need to take to avoid derailing myself through what is otherwise a pretty cool thing.

I don’t mean to give the impression I’m some fragile vase or something that will shatter at a touch… but it was a long hard haul, figuring out how to take care of myself around this stuff — my dance with despair is the central stuff of my life — & I pay it mind.

So while you’ll find a lot of afterhours parties and late entertainments on the NN11 schedule — I doubt I’ll be going to many of them. With all the excitement of learning lots and meeting lots of cool people, I know I’m likely to become overhwelmed.  And I’m going to need some heavy duty downtime, and plenty of sleep.  If anyone wants to drop in the occasional reminder for me to remember that, please do.  I want to come back to Alaska invigorated… not swamped in a pit of my own making.

Did I say plenty of sleep?  And here it is 12:10 PM, with a 7:00 AM flight.  And I haven’t even packed yet. Gee, Mel, that’s a great start.

I’m prepping this for posting at 8:00 AM, Alaska time.  By that time I’ll be an hour in the air on my way to Portland.  Fast asleep, I hope.

See you on the other side.

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets 2011-06-03: The Netroots Nation 11 mobile phone app is just as cool as bow ties
2. I’m going to Netroots Nation
3. Help John Aronno of Alaska Commons go to Netroots Nation

Crossposted at Bent Alaska

A couple of years ago, Bent Alaska announced a LGBTQ panel at University of Alaska Anchorage, an institution of which I am both an employee & an alumna.  So on April 1, 2009, I attended the panel which held in the Consortium Library just upstairs from my department.  After I got home that night, I even started drafting a blog post about it.  Then I forgot all about it…until I discovered it hidden away amongst my old drafts.

This post is that post, completed.

Some of the discussion at that two-years-ago panel revolved around improving the kind of support that LGBTQ students, faculty, & staff receive at UAA, whether through the existing student organization The Family, or institutionally through expanding the Women’s Studies Program (which sponsored the event) to be a Women’s and Gender Studies Program; through other institutional means at UAA or the University of Alaska statewide, such as a nondiscrimination policy; or through strengthening the connections between the university LGBTQ & the larger Anchorage LGBTQ community, including ally organizations like Anchorage PFLAG.

(Just a few weeks ago, the UA Board of Regents finally passed a policy on February 18, 2011 which added sexual orientation to the University of Alaska’s nondiscrimination policy.  It is as yet unclear whether the Regents intend this policy to also cover gender identity/expression.)

But there was also a lot of discussion about the whole gender identity/expression and sexual orientation thing, and how we had variously experienced it. We had gay folks, lesbian folks,  male-to-female and female-to-male transfolk, a Samoan fa’afafine alum, a PFLAG mother of a lesbian, another mother of a daughter who might actually be her son (i.e., trans).  We had students, a couple of staff members including me, a faculty member, and a number of people from the community.  We had various ages from college student age all the way to people in their 50s and 60s.

What really stuck out for me was the common experience most of us (all except the “allies”) had of pushing through to be ourselves in the face of huge pressure to conform to other people’s expectations about how we should dress, how we should act, who we should love, how we should be defined in arbitrary cultural ways by the genitals we were born with. How painful it was to not be accepted simply for who we were and are.

Well, sure— I’ve lived through plenty of that myself. It’s just (usually) not quite so visceral to me anymore because it’s been many years since I came out, and I’ve been openly lesbian for most of that time.

But damned if I don’t remember the pressure to wear dresses that I never felt comfortable in, to be “feminine.” Or the fear I felt as a sophomore in college when an acquaintance wanted to talk with me about being lesbian and I frantically counted the very few friends who knew about me — who told her?

As I wrote in another post in 2009, shortly after the veto of the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64, about coming out when I was in college,

It was scary, it was painful, & it was a slow long job to learn who I could or could not trust with this important aspect of who I am.  And as hateful as the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech that we heard constantly spewed from the mouths of red-shirted ordinance opponents over the course of the summer, the sentiments they expressed were not so different from the conventional wisdom of the majority of my peers in the East Coast women’s liberal arts college I attended from 1977 to 1981. Yes: the same college that Hillary Rodham Clinton attended, a supposed bastion of liberalism.

Sitting in that meeting, I was sent back into those memories, and began to feel worse.  In April 2009, when I started writing this post, I was just coming out of a lengthy period in the cave — the cave being my name for one of the varieties of “depression” (or sometimes plain old despair) I sometimes experience.  The cave is probably why I didn’t finish the post at the time: I was afraid I’d go back into it.  I was coming face to face, for the first time in a long time, with how deeply I was scarred by all that shit of a lifetime in homophobia-land, all the fear and distrust I had for the people around me simply because of who and what I was.

As far as I’ve come along from the all of that, I still have the scars. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve struggled with despair/depression off & on all my adult life — actually, dating back to my last couple of years of high school. For almost as long, I’ve tried to figure out what it was about, where it came from. There are other strands in my background that I can point to — most prominently, the effect on my mother, and through her me, of her having grown up with an alcoholic father — but the effect of growing up in a society that actively hated my difference, well… its hard to measure exactly.  But it’s there.

And it goes far beyond me.  How many friends have I had who’ve suffered similarly because the church, or their family, or their friends, or some combination of all of the above and then some, has been unable or unwilling to accept them on their own terms?

Bob, a coparticipant of mine in a high school enrichment program at University of Wyoming who, at age 17,  jumped to his death from the 9th floor of White Hall, after having reportedly being harassed by other participants about being a “faggot.” My friend in college who was raped after a male visitor to our campus learned she was a lesbian.  My friend up here in Alaska who at age 20 was gang-raped by eight men in his Army unit, then further raped with a broken bottle, for no other reason than that he was gay. Other friends and acquaintances who have gotten lost in drugs or booze, like my namesake Melissa who died of a heroin overdose in July 1983 just a few months after I arrived in Alaska.  Other friends or acquaintances who have attempted, or succeeded with, suicide — at least two women in the Anchorage lesbian community that I can think of off the top of my head, and undoubtedly more.  Other people I never knew but might have, had they not been murdered, like Raymond Barker, murdered by Charles Cole and Matthew Decker in April 1985; Oscar Jackson, murdered by William M. Justice in December 1984; or Peter Dispirito, murdered in August 1974 by Gary Lee Starbard, who received a sentence of just one year for — in the judge’s words — the “unfortunate accident — incident” that led to his victim’s death. (Dispirito is still remembered through a public service award bestowed annually by the Imperial Court of All Alaska.)  By circumstance, this post follows the publication last night on Bent Alaska of Johnathan Jones’ post on the death of his foster sister by suicide. I share, we all share, his grief.

Self-hatred: it’s harm at the very center of us.

And it doesn’t only enter us due to overt acts of hatred against us, or even from hatred at all. I’d say in fact that the most common harm any human faces — the one that most harmed me — come from people who care about us. People who, well-intended, attempt to pressure and coerce us to behave according to arbitrary standards, rather than according to our integrity, our selfhoods as human beings. Strip away all the warnings about God’s commandments or What will Grandma and Grandpa, our friends, the neighbors, your schoolmates, the people at church think? — strip way all the reassurances that We’re saying this because we love you and It’s in your best interests: in the final analysis, it’s the harm that says: Your own account of yourself is meaningless; your feelings don’t count; you don’t count.

Who does not despair, violated in that way in the very core of who we are?

But if the harm is at our center, then so is the cure. The foundational step towards finding a way for myself that didn’t involve killing myself or hating myself was coming out and accepting and loving myself as a lesbian. I was 19 when I did that, a sophomore at Wellesley College.  It took me a few years after that, but that first foundation ultimately gave me the strength to give up self-hatred altogether.

Love others as you love yourself.  But first: love yourself.  Trust yourself.  Respect yourself. Walk easy in your skin. Let no one convince you to do otherwise.

Related posts:

1. Coming out
2. Ode to Alcohol (poem)
3. Letter to a Straight Friend — a poem for Pride

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2010).
416 pages. ISBN 978-0-307-45241-2.

An epidemic of gargantuan proportions has been afoot for some time, according to Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic. I have felt it so myself, but who listens to previous customers of the great professional class of biological psychiatrists?

The epidemic

Whitaker originally came to this research in 1998 as a journalist reporting on clinical testing of new drugs, when he became aware of studies in which schizophrenia patients were withdrawn from their anti-psychotic medications. He was appalled, believing that anti-psychotic medications were as necessary for schizophrenia as insulin was for diabetics — which is what the psychiatric profession wanted us all to believe. But he came across the results of two World Health Organization studies, both of which showed better outcomes for sufferers of schizophrenia in Third World countries like India, Nigeria, and Colombia than in the Western world (U.S. and European). The kicker is that only 16% of those sufferers were maintained continuously on anti-psychotic medications, compared with 61% of the patients in developed countries. This began a long research for Whitaker, leading to his earlier book, Mad in America (2001), and Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010), both of which confirm what many opponents of forced treatment have been saying for years without the benefit of “a white coat” or the aura of respectability (they were “just patients,” or they were “just members of a mind control cult called Scientology” — biopsychiatry’s largest opposition). Whitaker has shown that there is no “chemical imbalance” that is rebalanced by anti-psychotic medications, but that the medications cause harm to the nerves of the brain, which do not always recover, creating more illness over time than there had ever been. The result has been an epidemic rise in the population of disabled mentally ill, from 355,000 adults in state and county mental hospitals in 1995 to over 4 million on SSI or SSDI for mental illness — 1 in 76 American adults.

Anatomy of an Epidemic goes far beyond how those suffering from schizophrenia are treated, but covers all major classes of mental illness. The epidemic is most evident in the history of depression and bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder especially used to be very rare, occurring in only 1 in 13,000 people in 1955, but now occurring in 1 in 40 people. Whitaker points to antidepressants as the culprit, giving those who suffer from depression debilitating outcomes, where as before many people recovered from depression on their own. In one study discussed by Whitaker of 87,290 patients from 1997 to 2001 who were diagnosed with depression or anxiety, those treated with antidepressants converted to bipolar illness at three times the rate of those who didn’t take antidepressants.

The epidemic has also spread to children all the way down to toddler ages. In children, ADHD has been the beginning diagnosis, leading to high outcomes of bipolar and poor outcomes further on as the children grow into adulthood if they are placed on stimulants that are supposed to address their issues. From 1987, when the practice of prescribing psychiatric medications to children gained traction, to 2007, the number of American children getting SSI or SSDI checks for disability because of mental illness increased by 35 times, from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007. This is in spite of medications that the psychiatric profession has assured us are supposed to help people — not disable them.

So, finally after 60 years of misinformation and withholding of truth from psychiatrists, a book of rational upstanding merit has hit the media. Anatomy of an Epidemic also documents how psychiatrists and their allies the pharmaceutical companies have managed such a scheme. It has been the most important book for me to read in over twenty years as I struggled to tell others about the possibility of real disability from taking psychiatric drugs. Those who did the research chose alternatives to drugs. I also have friends who are on the medications because they have been on them too long to stop. They are still in pain and it saddens me, but I understand.

Getting off psychiatric medications

I also understand that there are some people who have been helped by psychiatric drugs, and I would not want them to go off them because it is better for them to be taking them. No one knows why they work, or what causes mental illness in the first place. Whitaker himself does not advise anyone to stop taking their meds. One reason is that withdrawal from medications is a process that will uncover the nerve damage from the medications and any previous problems that were unsolved will be more present. I will not hesitate to suggest to people to do their research and read Peter Breggin’s book Your Drug May Be Your Problem. Breggin provides food for thought about medications and life itself for someone contemplating trying life without drugs. Breggin gives sound information on how to safely transition off psychiatric medications. It is dangerous, but many people have done it successfully. BUT DO THE RESEARCH and HAVE A PLAN and BACK UP people you trust to go through this with you, including a sympathetic doctor. I understand that this can be hard. So many people are locked into their drugs with housing, SSI, SSDI and family relationships that make it even more complicated.

The reality is that no one knows what causes mental illness. All this talk of a biochemical cause has been a nice looking charade for people to look like they are scientific and keep their jobs. [not to mention gaining professional prestige and making lots of money.] They’ve done an amazing marketing job on the American public; unfortunately they have misled us all in a way that is worse than criminal. Prozac was known to cause suicidal thoughts and impulses in the first trials of that drug. But did they [Eli Lilly, Prozac's manufacturer] tell anyone? Did they put it on the label? Did they hold it from production? No. They did none of these things. It was the reporting of incidents and several lawsuits that finally led to a label being put on the bottle. Many places in Europe the drug is banned. Whitaker’s book fills in a lot of the gaps in information that people so desperately need that the press has not delivered — having gone straight to the “experts” for their information.

A Finnish solution: Open Dialogue

Besides the research with many graphs showing the numbers and history of pharmopsychiatry, the most exciting thing to me about Anatomy of an Epidemic is Whitaker’s ponderings of what to do and who’s doing what. Particularly, the Finns in Western Lapland (which once had an incidence of schizophrenia twice and even three times higher than in the rest of Finland and Europe), use need-adapted treatment and Open Dialogue and have shown a sound record of success with psychosis and schizophrenia. In this method, the recovery rate for patients is astonishing. Only 20% of first-time psychotic patients are treated continuously with anti-psychotic medication, and only about one-third are exposed to anti-psychotic medications at all. Yet 80% — most not treated at all with medications — are back at school or in jobs within two to five years. The Open Dialogue method works by creating a team of three who work collaboratively as a team with the patient and his or her family and support system. Meetings, usually in the patient’s home, are conducted openly, with every person, including the patient, included as a full participant in the conversation, and all treatment decisions are made jointly between the patient and treatment providers. There is no forced treatment, most patients never receive medications, and only around 20% end up using medications continuously. Since 1993, not even one first-episode psychotic patient in Western Lapland has gone on to be chronically hospitalized — a very different outcome than had been common there before, or what is still common in the U.S.

The Finnish psychiatrists and psychologists in Western Lapland also have the idea that the illness is social rather than biological or even psychological. “Psychosis does not live in the head,” Whitaker quotes Tapio Salo, a psychologist at Keropudas Hospital in Tornia, Finland. “It lives in the in-between of family members, and in the in-between of people. It is in the relationship, and the one who is psychotic makes the bad condition visible. He or she ‘wears the symptoms’ and has the burden to carry them.”

This is novel language for me, who has felt that this kind of communication is essential to healing but didn’t have a name for it. Knowing who you are, what you need and having people to share your reality with is crucial to mental health. Having used a talking stick (a Native American communication tool) at home when things got out of hand with my nephew, I can attest to this firsthand. (See my story below). And it follows along with what systems theory says about how things work: that the relationships within any system are much more important to look than just its “parts.” An individual person is just one part of a system of social and physical relationships.

The Finnish doctors talk about repairing the social fabric the “sick” person is in. It makes so much sense to me that Open Dialogue therapy as used in Tornio works. Why don’t we get unafraid of being seen as “crazy” and speak up? Why don’t we get unafraid of “crazy” people and listen up as well? They’ve done it in Finland and since the 1980s have reduced the incidence of schizophrenia in Western Lapland down from 25 a year to 2 a year as measured from new cases. I could see collaborative methods like Open Dialogue working with all sorts of problems. Creating this space, we could face a lot more than we can alone and in this process we could do restorative justice, heal our children, change the school system, and change how we all look at what’s important.

I highly recommend Anatomy of an Epidemic to anyone associated with psychiatry as a patient, family member, friend, city planners and care providers because the truth must be made known and the large construct of lies that underlie bio-psychiatry and the the psychopharmaceutical marketplace needs to stop. If you want the short version before buying it, watch Whitaker’s on BookTV here: http://cs.pn/magicbullets. (Whitaker also has links to all the studies referred to in his book at his website: http://www.madinamerica.com/.)

A personal story

But before you go and hate all these doctors, think about what kind of culture we live in. I for one have had to struggle with my own illness and treatment that was supposed to help. In the late 1980s, I had several problems that I understand today, but didn’t at the time. It all culminated in me starting to drink — alcohol was my lead-in drug. It led to LSD really fast, and then to me getting lost in the streets of San Francisco, losing four days of sleep and food. Of course I was crackers. I needed sleep and food. I got it in the hospital, but I also got a cocktail of heavy drugs. I only survived not becoming a statistic through having become aware of what Haldol (an “antipsychotic”) was and what others have suffered before me by the hands of psychiatry. I had a short stay in the hospital because I started tonguing the meds (and secretly spitting them out) as soon as I was able to figure out where I was. I think it was day three, when I finally got enough sleep that I was able to look at the map of San Francisco that was on the wall, and it all came back to me. I was oriented again times three. (This is medical provider talk meaning that the patient can state who he/she is, where he/she is, when he/she is — day, year, etc.) So, very shortly I got my support team together and advocated myself right out of there.

It took years for me to overcome the stigma from what happened to me and finding words for who I am, what I need in order to form healthy relationships. Even though I knew the system was screwy, I had a rough time with what I did. I did take too many drugs, I got lost, and I felt a lot of shame about that. That was over 25 years ago and I’ve recovered and I understand what happened from a deep level. I can now talk about how it started for me: being a kid from an alcoholic family who also happened to be a transman. I started drinking when I hit adolescence, but before I could even face my rare “queer” identity, I was sexually molested by my therapist. Now if anyone understands how that can affect a kid, well, of course it felt weird, but also I was getting attention for being special and getting attention period. It also gave me the idea that I was really an adult. Other than giving me a few tools on how not to drink, he didn’t “cure” me, but instead gave me a sexual addiction to carry with me for a number of years. I went off to college to try and figure out my vocation and didn’t succeed.

When I returned from college, I was assaulted again, but after this time I went on to a woman’s festival in Michigan. During the four-day event, a woman was taken off the land to a psychiatric facility. There was uproar and I became politicized from it. It could have been me freaking out, but was lucky I had someone to talk to about what happened with me. So in short order, I learned about class, race, mental-ism, able-ism. Then I went on a journey to Big Mountain in Arizona, a portion of the Dine Nation’s reservation lands, and there learned about what community was. In all that journeying, I became closer to coming out as trans, but alas, what led up to hospitalization was getting back to the city where everyone is supposed to watch their own back, get a job, with no one to feed or house them if they fail. In this condition, so many things hit the fan at once. At the point of my forced hospitalization, I understood something at a gut level that took another 25 years to sort out and articulate.

I spent those years as an activist. I also found my partner who suffers periodically from depression who says she’s “dodged the magic bullets” of psychiatric medications, instead learning to take care of herself successfully in other ways. Together we raised my nephew who came to us at age 9, diagnosed “severely emotionally disturbed” and on the antidepressant Imipramine — at least the fourth drug that he’d been tried on (the others being Ritalin, Dexedrine, and Thorazine). We took him off it over the course of 6 months where he finally stabilized without it and started to work on his violent behavior. He’s been completely drug free since age 9-1/2, and is now a strapping good-hearted 22-year-old who’s just finishing up Job Corps.

Being trans was the last piece that put my life on track. I now have an inkling of who I am what I need and have found happiness in being able to communicate this to others. I have also taken off from this culture to research what needs to change before I can come back and work. I am without a house to live in, but I am not homeless. I look back in on a culture that is not facing up to facts and certainly not comfortable with facing the despair that many who are leaders of this new movement towards sustainability have felt.

Mental health & sustainability

Finally, to share what is most importance to me about this book: The kind of collaboration demonstrated in Open Dialogue offers a way to heal in a wider sense. Open Dialogue fits into the 4th step of The Natural Step, a sustainability framework put forth by a medical doctor in Sweden (Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt) who cut through all the confusing arguments around what needed to be done about the environment. He saw a direct correlation to the rising rates of cancer that was killing his patients.
Simply, the four steps of the Natural Step are:

1. Reduce the amount of materials that are brought up from under the earth in to the level the natural system can make it non-toxic again.
2. Reduce the amount of man made materials to levels the natural system can t transform back into none-toxic again.
3. Reduce the destruction to natural systems so they can do the work of detoxifying these substances.
4. Meet human needs worldwide.

The fourth step — meeting human needs worldwide — is the one most confusing to sustainability folks, and I’ve given it a great deal of thought over the years since I learned of this framework. I see Americans suffering form a spiritual poverty and great alienation from their environment, while third world countries suffer from hunger and a dearth of material needs. Given the World Health Organization reports of higher cure rates in Third World nations points to a possibly more intact society, whereas in developed nations like the U.S. there is more alienation, broken families and a rare occurrence of extended families with rich supports intact. The ideal of the independent person has been very destructive to the social fabric.

Open Dialogue and similar collaborative methods offer a means of healing. It’s important as we move through this economic/ecological crisis that we find a way to mend the social fabric. As the casualties of our mental health system pile up and people are unable to take care of themselves, we will not be able to sustain all the costs. This is one of the reasons that the downtown shelters run by officials that cost so much are having so many problems. They are bearing some of the cost of psychiatry’s methods.

Where I am in Tent City 4, we’re taking care of each other and keeping our heads on straight. We do so by coming together and working it out collectively. All the people here are learning that we can take care of each other, where the system failed us. We don’t ask for much, just a job and an apartment, but we’re keeping our heads together in the meantime and living in tents and organizing so that we stay safe. This is revolutionary for people. The amazing thing is, is that it works. To run 16 shelters in the area costs SHARE about $725,000 per year to run, while around 500 beds are provided. I have faith in humans to fix all the stuff going on by talking about it.

As the epidemic of mental illness rises to a crisis point, so does the pathway to a sustainable future narrow. As more people become aware of the ecological crisis, we’ll need some kind of safe communication space to work out our despair and grief. Again, this is prohibitive work on a public scale. Much change needs to happen soon if society wants to continue.

It’s all connected. It’s time for us to start talking to each other rather than relying on the experts. We all see how it is going — we need to gather together and think together. There is such a thing as collective intelligence, and I think the Finns are on to something big. There is such a thing as opening our hearts in safe space and working it out, rather than waiting for our “superiors” or “experts” to tell us what to do. We have eyes and something special between our ears. I believe we can do it. Let’s get it done.

Related posts:

1. Government by psychopathy
2. Night of the butcher knife
3. We are all, or none

Valentine’s Day. One of the stories Julia O’Malley included in her Anchorage Daily News Valentine’s Day piece about love stories was that of a woman at a florist shop, who purchased $200 worth of flowers. When the shop clerk asked who she wanted to write the accompanying card out to, the woman replied, “To me. With love, from me.”

In 1984, during my troubled early twenties, I fell in love with a friend of mine.  This poem was written to her.   But it’s especially a poem about how I came to love myself, & to give up my former self-hatred.

Alaska Love Poem

For L.

If I thought I had let go, I did not.
It was hidden only, riding low,
deep in the labyrinth of my soul.
But now I play the waiting game:
the labyrinth dissolves — soon my heart
will have courage to speak to you –

I practice here now.

I

Just past the longest day last year –
but the nights were still bright with the light of the sun
until very late.
And we met on the dancefloor where the music played loudly,
we danced where the fan blew our sweat down to coolness,
we danced when the others fell off the floor
in exhaustion.

Then another told me your words of me –
that I could hold my place in the song
as long as could you.
And when next in the noisy rhythm,
the loudness of the soap opera bar,
we moved our bodies to the beat –
I opened my eyes to your movement and knew
that my heart could open in such a way still,
and the protest of my mind and fear
could not dampen the joy that rose above
the smoke from so many nostrils.
Still alive! — I could feel this
for one, for you, the love, the hope
I thought had forsaken me –
dropped dead in the post with the letter
that at last said goodbye to one far away.

The woman can hurt me as no man can,
so far all that time in this country
I counted only men friends, too afraid
to end the pain of my long loneliness.
I clung like a fool to she who was past,
who I could not touch, not in my dreams.
I let go of her, at last, to find
myself face to face with you.

But our eyes were all drawn to the woman who died
a month later.
We gathered and mourned, and her loss sealed us all
in a friendship blessed by remembrance, then more.

In those days my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth
like thick peanut butter.
I sought like one possessed, obsessed,
in the bar, in the smoke, the music, the dance,
the hope of you there within it.

But my tongue now cut out — I bought you a rose,
cut the thorns off — I
would give you no bitterness, no — just the rose –
clean-stemmed — its thorns
cast away, like my voice.

In my silence I uttered no protest when
I saw how you spent time with her.
My friend also she was, and is, and I
said nothing when she told us that
you loved one another,
that you were together — I
said nothing.

But deep inside I screamed as though
my life were being taken from me.

I knew I’d survive.
This I’ve gone through before.
And I heard her say it with some relief.
I taught myself that it was due
to my leaving, how I did not want to be
tied down when another place called me.
But the deeper truth I well knew, that my
relief in spite of the pain was due
to the knowledge of how now I need not dare
to be brave, to tell what I felt to you.

For I know quite well how to hide.
This game is mine, conceived of shame,
the shame I somehow grew up with.
To hide, and to no one show what’s inside,
this deep confusion and maze of myself,
disbelief at my right to exist — or to
love a woman — such as you.

II

A year passed.  I was doing a dance with death.
I can’t count the times, the times, the times
you both rescued me from that fixation.
Just someone to talk with, just someone to hear,
just someone to witness the tears, the tears
that had drowned me for so many years.

You both were important to me.
I did not know always why.
I left but came back because I knew
that something awaited me here.
As if by merest accident,
I came upon some faith –
I felt I was on the brink
of some vast realization
that would make life bearable for me.

She told me the way from my troubles
was to find the right woman for me.
But I knew that the warm old wool
of my anguish could not be unraveled
by pulling another under my blanket,
a lover to suffocate with me.

I wanted to breathe — not stale old air,
not the air of my bell-jar depression, not
the smoky air of the soap-opera bar –
but to breathe, fresh and clear and new,
to inhale the mountains, the sky, and the sea,
and to know that someone shared in this breathing,
someone who wanted to explore
what it means to have life — with me.

But the noose around my neck was tight.
I was my own hangman, adjudged guilty by
the interrogator inside, who did not
recognize the existence of innocence.

III

Do I believe I am to die,
my last words to be spoken to you? — or is this
an instinctive necessary step,
one step closer to liberation
from this lonely cell on death row?

You are tired, but you sit with the patience
that only my friends can muster.
I am afraid, I cannot meet your eyes.
Each word is an effort of all of my body.
This one sentence takes whole minutes to say,
whole hours, it takes my whole lifetime:

I am . . . in love . . . with you.

When I have said it you ask me
how long I have held this hidden.
Its history I repeat to you,
puncuated with tears, aeons of fear,
despair so much older than only a year.

It is only a year that I tell you…
but in lifetimes past I have ever been
ashamed of my desire,
ashamed of my lust for life,
convicted by the illusion that
I was not worthy of it.

I sentenced myself to whole lifetimes
of wandering lost in the labyrinth,
suffocating on stale smoky air
I had breathed countless times before.
And for what crime?  The simple fact
that I was afraid to love.

IV

Some nights later we went to the soap opera bar.
There, without warning, the fear came upon me.
I stood unmoved by the noise of the dancefloor –
all its rhythm was but a dull thumping –
I stared, transfixed, at the terror within
and deeper and deeper the maze sucked me in,
it swallowed me whole with a terrible grin.

When we went home my body moved to the car,
but my mind and my soul were locked into the hellhole.
The butcher knife beckoned, its sharp gleaming called.
I wanted to cut the hole in my belly,
the empty chunk of unreasonable pain –
to slice through skin and muscle and tissue,
to kill the demon, even if
my murder would be accomplished with it.

I cried in the dark for someone to save me,
to come to my aid.  But I knew that you could not.
Not you, not her — you both had tried
too many times before.
We all knew that.  What I must face
here, in this last confrontation,
I must face alone.

Never before would I have believed
there existed such utter loneliness.
All that there was in the universe
was me, alone, agony, me –
no care, no hope, no love, no reprieve…
no reprieve but the butcher knife.

My hands tight on each other, they thrusted
my thoughts through my belly.  Had they
held not just thoughts, but violent steel
reality, stabbing — had they held the knife…
then the rug I had countless times soaked with my weeping,
this my bed between couch and coffee table,
would have been my final bed, my deathbed,
brown shag stained dark with my red blood.

But the butcher knife was in the kitchen.
That alone saved me — the distance to me
from the right-hand drawer, the second one down –
only that distance prevented the living
blade from sheathing itself in my guts…
in a tangle on your living room floor,
I fell to a drunken slumber.

V

I woke numb, glad to find that you both still slept.
I could bear to see no one, too full of remorse
and shame at what I had put my friends through,
how I had tortured myself.
Too certain that it would happen again.
It always had before.

I escaped to the grey day,
the dull routine of a mundane life,
hopeless resignation.

I’m not sure what it was I waited for.
Some escape, some release,
a saviour to cart me away
the next time, the ambulance, DOA….

VI    (Arctic Valley)

Remember the day we hiked Arctic Valley?
You, me, and two dogs –
one which you lost and found over the hill –

so did freedom find me.

How we climbed, our legs straining, over the city.
We sat at the summit, the world at our feet.
We ate in the high place where ancients saw god….

The way back down was more difficult yet:
it was steep, we used muscles we normally didn’t.
Our legs shook like the legs of delirium tremens…
but peace found them again when they found flat ground –

so did peace find me.

Slowly as the slow dawn
of the sun on an autumn morning
I awoke from my delirium.
Nine years to recognize my healer –

so did life find me.

Day followed day, the old stream of time,
just the same as before.
But each day I saw the mountains change –
one day growing gold in the afternoon sun –
one day dusted white by the season’s first snow –
one day touched by clouds as soft as white roses –
I could see them and breathe them and touch them and feel them.
Each day I saw the mountains change –

so did change find me.

VII

Things about me have changed.
Not in what I feel for you –
I find that I still do love you.
I also find that where there has been
occasion to speak of it to you
I can meet your eyes.
Across a table, in the light,
I can meet your eyes.
I can love you without shame.
And of all joys, surely this is the greatest –
that I, at last, consider myself
worthy to love and to be loved.

But in awe I hold the power of this
feeling — how it takes hold of me –
when I am so at a loss to know
how with this strength and depth of care,
I do not hold you.

At times I am plainly satisfied
to enjoy your company –
to visit your home, you and your lover,
to drop by for lunch and sit over coffee,
to go to the malls and watch women together,
to drink dark beer, to talk, to dance…

but then as we wait at Baskin & Robbins
for our scoops of Jamocha Almond Fudge
a rich and vibrant chord of you
plays itself upon my intestines
and echoes and echoes and echoes, fading….
My whole body rings of you
and groans at the lack of your touch,
groans at the wanting to touch you,
to show you all the ways,
the infinite ways that I love you.

I am at a loss to understand
how the great power that freed me from my living death
can imprison me yet in this unfulfilled love.
As the days pass in my wanting you
I begin to wonder if I have returned
to my folly of loving, as a lover would,
a woman who I cannot reach.

VIII

I still feel sorrow.  Each time I’m afraid
the old dank despair will possess me again.
But I know too much now for that.

I have a guide.  I know the way.

The staleness that turns to a petrified stink –
no longer can it envelop me.

I have a guide.  I know the way.

In my deepest sadness there is yet joy.
I know I won’t die alone in the wallow.
I know I’ll come out on the other side.

I have a guide.  I know the way.

On my arm, tattooed, is the large wave, the boats,
the mountain — my life, crisis on crisis:
opportunity rides on the dangerous wind.

You’re my friend, and in that way I’ll never forsake you –
just as you, my friend, never have forsaken me.
But I find myself caught in the hurts you are going through.
I find them likewise hurting me
in the old pattern — to place expectations on love.
When I expect things of you, am I really a friend?
Is love to enslave, or is it to free?

This love, my love and desire for you,
is a dangerous wind, destructive and mean,
and though in the past it has helped sweep me clean,
given me breath and a hope to cling onto –
my only hope now — opportunity –
is to let go at last, all the way to my bones –
to my soul, no longer a labyrinth.

Understand me — I am not angry,
not depressed — that is past history.
I am grieving this death, the death of a dream.
A hard death, a cruel death, to fall like a leaf
from the thrill of riding a dangerous wind.

To fall like a leaf, to fall to the ground.
I come to a leaf and, turning it over,
I find myself, a woman, and stand.

Alive without protest, I’ll be on my way.

[Jul 8-Nov 17, 1984]

Related posts:

1. Distance
2. Theodicy (poem)
3. Ode to Alcohol (poem)

… when they look as cool as this, anyway.  I caught these clouds one morning on the UAA campus at the beginning of October 2003, on the first of what I still remember so clearly as a two or three-day period of some really remarkable skies in Anchorage.

Even though I was feeling pretty crappy yesterday, I like the cloud pic in my yesterday post too.  I took it from my dentist’s office a few months ago.  I take a lot of cloud pics, because — well, yeah.  Clouds are not really all about bleakness.  It just feels like that sometimes, when one is inhabited by grey.  But the grey I feel when I’m in that state of depression I call the grey is not full of lifegiving rain, or a blizzard of snow, or even the destructive force of Job’s Voice from the Whirlwind — like that Oklahoma tornado I posted last week.  The grey is just this featureless, lifeless, blah.

But when it dissolves away… ahhhhh.

Or aha.

The aha! experience — that’s what I call the thing that happened to me in August 1984, when self-hatred went away — one of the central defining experiences of my life.  (But it was my sister-in-law Linda who first called it that — thanks Linda! & happy birthday!)  I wrote a brief account of it a few years ago.  Very brief account, which leaves out a lot.

As soon as it happened, it’s as if I could feel all the universe flowing into me, breathing in & out with me.  That lasted a long time, & I can still feel it on my best days.  I later came to call it the cool breeze — another one of those phrases for my various feeling states.  But here’s the deal: I found I could feel it even when I was sad.

One day, not long after the aha, I had a big falling out with a friend of mine who lived in that big trailer court that used to be at the corner of Muldoon & Debarr in east Anchorage.  Bang! — I slammed out the door & left her, & I walked a long ways crying about it, until I stopped and sat on Russian Jack Hill overlooking traffic.  It was late September.  I was still crying, but at the same time I could see the Chugach Mountains just to the east of Anchorage dusted with their first snow — termination dust, we call it here — & it was beautiful, & I could feel that beauty inside me instead of just perceive it intellectually. And here I was still crying. And I suddenly realized: This is what sadness feels like. Not depression: but sadness. I had never known that feeling before.  It was like other feelings I hadn’t known before, like beauty that I could see with my eyes & recognize with my intellect, but not feel at all.

Now I could feel it.  Ever since then, I’ve been able to feel it… except when I take one of those dips, long or short, into the pit or the grey — but now those times are the exception, rather than the rule.

But it still always feels pretty damn good when the blanket of yuck slides off me. & I can breathe again.

Day followed day, the old stream of time,
just the same as before.
But each day I saw the mountains change –
one day growing gold in the afternoon sun –
one day dusted white by the season’s first snow –
one day touched by clouds as soft as white roses –
I could see them and breathe them and touch them and feel them.
Each day I saw the mountains change –

so did change find me.

– from “Alaska Love Poem” (1984)

That was half my life ago.  I thought at the time that the depression/despair gig & I were entirely quits, which of course proved not to be the case; but on the other hand, I never returned to the self-hatred; & it was a fundamental step #2 in having the stuff I needed to deal with depression/despair ever after.  (The first step having been to accept my lesbianism five years previously.)

So… I’m feeling pretty good now.  Heading over to my friend Sylvia’s for our normal Wednesday night get-together.  Tonight, we’re re-watching the pilot for “Caprica” as a refresher for its season premiere this Friday.  I’m stopping to get some Bear Tooth food on the way there.  Life could be better, life could be worse — life goes on.  And right now, that’s just about right.

Here’s some more clouds from October 1, 2003, with some Chugach Mountains thrown in for good measure.

Related posts:

1. Dissolve
2. Pausing under the clouds: A how-to guide for getting out of the grey
3. The grey

In the grey.

What better time to write yet another post about depression? Or, rather, about the process of dealing with it.

Over a medium-length life (so far), I’ve learned a lot about how to deal with this stuff.  It’s something of an art, really.  Some of its practicalities can be handily recalled by use an acronym I used to hear people in 12-step groups use: H.A.L.T. As in, if you’re a recovering alcoholic, recovering drug addict, or recovering emotional wreck — the latter of which fits me — & feel a tempted to fall back into your addiction, HALT (or at least pause)  & consider whether you are:

• Hungry
• Angry
• Lonely
• Tired

These don’t cover everything — taking care of oneself is an art, not something that can be summed up completely in any kind of rulebook. This is just stuff that it’s good to be mindful of, tailored to an individual’s own best practices for thinking about & dealing with any of these aspects of one’s day to day life.

Tired. For me personally, tired covers not getting enough sleep but also includes emotional exhaustion from , taking on too much (which is why I now avoid joining the boards of nonprofits), overstimulation, & so on. Overstimulation? — too much noise, too many people: see below.  If I feel myself tipping towards the pit — time to cut back, alone time, get lots of sleep, etc.

Lonely. I’m pretty much a loner — hence my frequent username yksin, a Finnish word (deriving from yksi = one) which means by oneself, solitary, singlehandedly, and related meanings.  But it can also mean lonely.  Sometimes I get completely wrecked from being too much around other people or too much noise, so I need lots of time to myself — not too much of a problem these days, since I essentially live alone nowadays — but on the other hand, I still need to keep in touch with the people I care about, who care about me. At times in my life I’ve found it incredibly difficult to ask for help — or even to remember that I can ask for help.  I do better nowadays than I did when I was younger.  In practice, lonely is more an issue for when I go into the pit, than it is for the grey.  With the grey, I’m better off not having to talk with anyone.

Angry. A friend of mine told me not long ago that she sometimes had to switch off outrageous news because she’d get so angry she’d want to punch the TV — but for me the pattern is explode then implode — & this pattern holds whether its people I know, or people in the news: if I go into a rage about it, I’m immediately on dangerous ground.  I like to be informed, but I always have to take care not to spend too much attention on political or other types of news that makes me angry & outraged, because pretty soon it turns into a sense of futility & helplessness, thence to depression.   I’m not a particularly optimistic person, & have to work pretty damn hard to find  happy happy joy joy to begin with — & seldom find any of that in politics or news.

I should add that I don’t think explode & keep exploding to be any more healthy or helpful a pattern than explode then implode.  Just read some of the reader comments at the Anchorage Daily News website on any story that is the least bit controversial: is all that apoplexy good for anyone‘s blood pressure?

Hungry. This is the last one for me that fell into place, just in the past four years, prompted by my mother’s death from heart-related complications of diabetes. I already knew I was prediabetic, but I hadn’t really done anything about it; but after she did I went all geeky on the nutrition thing & completely overhauled my diet, stopped eating (mostly) refined carbohydrates, moved gradually to a carb-restricted diet (moderate carbs usually; very low carb during major fat-shedding times).

This is not just being hungry in the moment: it’s about all the factors having to do with I am a body not just a mind — that without my body, I would have no mind, no spirit. And the body needs to be properly sustained. Thus, not just food itself, but the right kinds of food; and also all the other stuff that goes into making the body healthy. So I think of it as including exercise: exercise isn’t eating, duh, but it does “feed” the body’s desire/need to be active, which is a kind of hunger.

5-HTP  capped it as the last element (that I know of right now) for handing my depression: since I started taking it May 1998, I’ve not once gone into the pit. I have gone into the grey — obviously, since that’s where I am now — but usually only when I’ve forgotten to take the 5-HTP for a couple of weeks (because I’ve always been lousy at remembering to take daily supplements) & then I’m hit by something that challenges me. But usually all I have to do now to get back out of the grey is to pay attention to the other elements of HALT, & start taking the 5-HTP again. I’m usually out in a day or two, where it used to take me as long as a month to get out of a grey.

But — I haven’t been missing out on the 5-HTP over the past few weeks, so it’s not the problem this time.  This time seems to be about tired.  I’m a night owl, & often have difficulty sending myself to bed at a reasonable hour — like almost every day last week, so that by Saturday I was fairly leached out.  Slept in & vegged out both Sunday & Monday: it hasn’t yet turned the trick.  And so, grey, & a bit of a headache too.

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on. Blah. More sleep. And maybe up the 5-HTP for a few days. Tomorrow I’ll feel better. I hope.

Related posts:

1. Depression & despair
2. Dissolve
3. The grey

And so I begin the new year by coming out of a period of silence.

A silence, to be sure, less profound than the one I inhabited this time last year.  And for different reasons.  In the last month or so, mainly I’ve just needed a break.

1. The cave

But on New Year’s Day 2009, I was living in a kind of emotional cave, with no desire or wherewithal to communicate with anyone outside my day-to-day life except immediate family.  Especially my dad, who I’d learned just a couple of weeks before had been diagnosed with a terminal lymphoma. That news came on top of stuff I’d already been struggling with for some months, after my then-partner, Rozz who is now Ptery, made the decision while in school in Seattle to transition as a female-to-male (FTM) transsexual, & made accompanying decisions that have essentially ended our partnership as-it-was.

Thus, the cave, about which I wrote on April 2, a few days after coming out of it,

I seem to be have come out of the cave now. Not just feeling better — I’ve felt better a number of times (only to then go back into the grey again) — but actually able & willing to communicate. Maybe it was that I’m finally accepting the inevitable with my partner. Maybe it was finally getting the plane tickets bought to fly down in late April to see my dad. Maybe it was taking enough 5-HTP to keep the serotonin cooking in my brain. Maybe it’s the light coming into the days after a looooooong winter. Maybe it’s all just been perimenopause. Anyway… seems I’m back in the world again.

Now, before I go on, let me explain: this post isn’t just about the history of what I did or experienced in 2009: it’s also about what it meant.  Or, better yet, the meanings I’ve made of it — because that’s what it’s all about, for me — the story, the stories each of us make of our lives.  And this is my blog, of course, so this is my damn story.

And the story of coming out of the cave also has these meanings attached to it:

(1) The cave itself became a new term, describing a new form, of that rather large aspect of my life popularly known as depression (or, sometimes, despair): along with the grey, along with the pit, along with limbo — all of which are described in my late 2006 post The grey — the newly-discovered environment of the cave can include any one of the first three, or exclude all of them; it is chiefly characterized by that deep inability & lack of motivation to communicate.  Big whooptie, a new term — but I do find the language useful in understanding myself around this stuff.  Since, hey, halfway through my life give-or-take, I don’t see the depression/despair gunk suddenly evaporating from my life.  It’s a part of who I am.  I’m just lots better at handling it than before, & part of that is in refining my understanding of how it works in me.

(2) If I were to mark the exact date the cave walls dissolved around me, it would probably be March 30, 2009, which coincided with some important phone calls with Ptery, & also with my brother Mark & I buying our tickets to Spokane to see our dad for what we both understood would probably be the last time this side of our own deaths.  And also on that day, I wrote a lengthy post in memorial to Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist formerly at University of Alaska Fairbanks who had taken his own life the previous week.  I hadn’t known him, but he was the son of the poets Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, & Plath especially had been an significant figure in my life.  Not for the right reasons, initially — but the post explains that: it was my effort to honor Mr. Hughes not as mere adjunct to his famous parents’ biographies — as many of the news accounts of his death seemed to view him — but for who he himself was & for what he brought to all the people in his life, who were mourning him that day.

(3) My dad knew I’d been having a hard time. He was at peace with his own approaching death, & wanted us to be too.  But beyond that, he wanted our happiness.  He was so glad when he heard I’d come out of the cave.  That was one of the very best things about it.

2. Lima beans against WAR

Wow, after the Summer of Hate experienced by the Anchorage LGBT & allied community over Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64, one almost forgets its political prelude, when then-Gov. Sarah Palin named Wayne Anthony Ross — widely known by his license-plate acronym as WAR — to succeed the disgraced Talis Colberg as Alaska’s Attorney General.  Alaska’s top LGBT blog Bent Alaska informs us that its post about WAR, “Palin’s AG Pick Called Gays “Degenerates” (3/29/09), was one of its two 2009 posts to go viral — & that was even before he compared gays to lima beans, a vegetable that he “hates” but still claimed he could represent if he were, say, the lawyer for “United Vegetable Growers.”  We lima beans were, needless to say, not favorably impressed.

Ross also had a history of biased & even misogynistic attitudes in relation to domestic violence, sexual assault, & violence against women; hostility to Alaska Native sovereignty & subsistence rights; a mediocre reputation as a practitioner of law amongst his fellow members of the Alaska Bar Association; & a pretty shaky attitude about executive branch ethics.  Bad news all around: it motivated me to spend a considerable amount of time & energy researching him, listening to legislative confirmation hearings, & writing a very long letter to legislators, which I posted on my blog — thus embarking upon a part-time career as an occasional political blogger.  I wrote a few other posts about WAR, & commented on other sites’ coverage of him (especially Bent Alaska), & celebrated with most of the rest of Alaska when the Alaska Legislature rejected him by a vote of 23 yeas to 35 nays — an unprecedented rejection of a governor’s cabinet pick.

It took a day or two for the Alaska Department of Law to remove WAR from its website. This screenshot was taken on April 16. The red X is mine.

3. Dad

I flew to Spokane with my brother Mark in late April to visit Dad.  We also saw my sister Mer & brother-in-law Julius, with whom my Dad lived, and my brother Dave drove over from Montana.  Ptery hitchhiked up, at my request, so I got to see him too.

Dad was so happy to have all of us there. He had a lot of energy too, considering how ill he was; but near the end, as we began to return to our homes, he took a turn for the worse, as if he’d been holding to life so that he could see us all before he left us to be with Mom.  She had died in November 2005.

I took this picture during that trip: Dad telling one of his wonderful stories about growing up in the lumber camps of eastern Oregon in the 1920s where Grandpa Claude ran locomotives on the Sumpter Valley Railroad for the Oregon Lumber Company; or about the bootleg operation he & his pals in the Army Air Corps had in England during WWII; or about how he met my mom when he was looking for a job, & guy at Ellingson Lumber Company suggested he head to Izee because the camp cook there had two beautiful daughters. It was the younger of the two daughters, my Auntie Pat, who actually introduced my parents after Dad gave her a ride into John Day, where Mom was then working.

That photo on the wall behind Dad was his favorite picture of Mom, taken by a professional photographer shortly before they met. When I look at this photo, I feel his yearning to be with her again.

I last saw him on April 29.  He died not quite a month later, on May 27.  My sister was with him.

I’ve been at peace about Dad’s death almost from the beginning, partly because the peace he himself had about it put me at peace, & partly because of what for lack of better words I will call the messages that came, three of them — two of them to other family members, & the last one to me. My message was from my mother, in the form of sunflowers.  It told me that Dad was with her, & they are both okay.

On July 12, as many family members as could make it, including me & my sister & brothers, all gathered together in Spokane to remember Mom & Dad & to celebrate all that they gave us.

I love you, Mom & Dad.

4. Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64

The Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO 2009-64 was introduced in the Anchorage Assembly on May 12, & thus was my career as an occasional political blogger made much less occasional.

AO 64 would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of personal characteristics in Title 5, Anchorage’s equal rights code, which prohibits discrimination based on those characteristics in employment, housing, financial practices, education, and practices of the Municipality of Anchorage. The summer of 2009 in Anchorage featured a protracted period of public testimony at the Anchorage Assembly, with accompanying sign-waving and letter-writing both by ordinance supporters and those who opposed equal rights — led in particular by Jerry Prevo of the Anchorage Baptist Temple, who used “perverted” and other hate-terms to describe LGBT people, hence the name given the summer by commentator at the Anchorage Press: the Summer of Hate.

Identity Reports (1989) and One in 10 (1986)

From May to September, I wrote in the area of 60 posts about the ordinance, including a number that delved into the background & prevarications of its most vociferous opponent, Jerry Prevo.  I also testified in support of the ordinance on June 16 ( the second of five nights of public testimony). My testimony was based on two major research efforts in the 1980s for Identity, Inc. in which we documented the rampant discrimination in Anchorage & in Alaska based on sexual orientation. (Our research unfortunately did not cover discrimination on the basis of gender identity, which we knew little about at the time.)

The ordinance passed the Anchorage Assembly on August 11, 2009, but was vetoed the following week by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the third time in Anchorage history that equal protection for at least some LGBTQ people in Anchorage was first granted, & then stripped away again.

We weren’t real happy.

5. Friends & allies

The Summer of Hate wasn’t all hate & horror.  There was also some really cool stuff.

Cool stuff was people like Vic Fischer, Jane Angvik, & Arliss Sturgulewski testifying for the ordinance — people with just a teensy bit more credibility than, say, self-declared homophobic Bible-thumping Nazi “rascist” Eddie Burke.

Cool stuff was the huge number of people who turned out on the lawn of the Loussac Library to dance, blow bubbles, & hold signs upholding equal rights for all. The second week of public testimony, on which testimony was heard on two successive nights (June 16-17), was also the run-up to PrideFest, & every time I stepped out of the Assembly chambers for a breather, I felt like PrideFest was already in progress (once, that is, I got past the ABT redshirts & their hot dog tables).

I remember going out there one day & seeing how everyone — members of the LGBT community, & lots of non-LGBT folks including my nephew Miles & some of his friends — was celebrating equality & love for their fellow human beings, as sour-faced, red-shirted opponents stood nearby with their preprinted “Truth is Not Hate” signs agitating against equality.  I thought to myself, I’m so proud of my people — & I found myself for the first time consciously including in my people not just other LGBT people, but all the numerous non-LGBT allies who took it for granted that equality meant all of us.  And were as dumbfounded as we were at the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech dropping out of the mouths of red-shirts both inside & outside the Assembly chambers.

On a personal level, I was lucky to make some new friendships.  John & Heather Aronno, both now of Alaska Commons, who I met a few days before the first public hearing, became my favorite folks to sit next to at Assembly public hearings: three bloggers, all in a row.

One of my other favorite new people was (& is) Janson Jones, whose fantastic photography at Floridana Alaskiana v2.5 (including of the ordinance battle) first drew my attention. He’s also an all-around cool guy who also became a new dad over the summer — & his photos of his precious daughter Aurelia are pretty wonderful too.

Thanks to the ordinance battle, I also got reaquainted with a friend from way back, Linda Kellen Biegel of Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, who I hadn’t seen in years. I’d known Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska through email, but not until this summer did I meet him in person. I’ve known M.E. Rider of Grrlzlist, E. Ross of Bent Alaska, & longtime activist (& maker of Equality Works buttons) Stef Gingrich for years, though it was only through the summer that we saw much of each other, since normally — yes, true story — I’m pretty much a hermit.

It was the ordinance that brought me out, for ill & for good. Despite the ordinance’s eventual fate — for me personally, thanks to people like these, it was mostly for good.

6. Palinesque

Somewhere in the middle of this was Sarah Palin’s announcement on July 3 that she would be resigning her position as Governor of Alaska.  I don’t blog that much about Palin — there are other Alaska bloggers who cover her quite thoroughly (thank goodness!) — but within a few days after her announcement, I got fed up with how the national mainstream media was uncritically passing along what I dubbed the 2 million dollar meme: Palin’s claim that $2,000,000 taxpayer (or rather, oil revenue dollars — this is Alaska, after all) had been spent on responding to ethical complaints against her. So I started taking it apart, & continued to do so over at total of six blog posts.

Wow did that raise traffic on my blog. I got nearly 1,800 hits on the first post of the series the first day after it was published; to date it’s gotten 5,530 hits, making it the most read post on my blog.  The pie chart I created for that post also proved to be pretty popular.

My stuff didn’t stop Palin from repeating her lie; but then, who expected that it would?  I’m no fool.  I just hoped the damn mainstream media would wake up & do the job they’re paid to do — so that bloggers like me wouldn’t have to do it for free. I am proud to say that my efforts, which Anchorage Daily News reporter Sean Cockerham picked up on, contributed to Linda Perez of the Governor’s Office being forced to admit there were errors in the hokey spreadsheet the Governor’s Office had cooked up in an incompetent attempt to back up Gov. Palinocchio’s claim.  Cockerham’s story (posted, as far as I know, only on the ADN’s Politics blog, but not as a full-fledged ADN story) said that Perez was going to follow up on further questions he’d brought up — I’ve seen no sign that she ever did, or that ADN itself cared.  I didn’t follow up further myself because by time Perez ‘fessed up as much as she did, I was in Spokane with my family remembering my mom & dad.  I have a feeling everyone who had actual responsibility (because, of course, they were more than mere “community organizers”) decided to drop it.  Gee. I wonder why.

7. I got a new couch

More properly, it’s a futon loveseat. Whatever.  I got it in August, & I’ve been vegging more happily (when I vege) ever since.  My cat loves it too.

8. An effort to up-end the Alaska Judicial Council

Other things were going on in my life too, of course.  But the political stuff stands out, because political blogging is not my great purpose in life — writing my own stuff is. And yet, I kept doing it.

And so it happens that in late August I learned of a lawsuit by which certain Alaska conservatives, most if not all of whom have ties to the so-called right-to-life movement, had filed suit nearly two months before — a fact not covered at all by Alaska’s mainstream media in spite of all of them having received the press release when the suit was filed — which would, if successful, overturn major provisions of the Alaska Constitution with regard to the selection & retention of state court judges. The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, James Bopp, Jr., is a big name: he has litigated similar issues elsewhere.  My own feeling is that this guy is more likely to have shopped around for the Alaskans who could be named as plaintiffs in this case, than that the plaintiffs shopped around for him.  His agenda appears to be a nationwide effort to politicize judicial selection, so that candidates can be selected through popular vote based on litmus test questions on hot-button issues (“What is your opinion on abortion?” — “What is your opinion on same-sex marriage?”), instead of being selected for their judicial integrity & knowledge of the law.

Through my job on staff of the Justice Center at University of Alaska Anchorage, which I’ve held since 1990, I’d become very familiar with Alaska’s judicial merit selection process, & have a lot of respect for it too, & for the quality of judges we have in this state.  Not perfect — but a helluva lot better than in states that have the politicized & often politically corrupt types of selection processes that Bopp seems to prefer.

So, I read about Miller v. Carpeneti, & I wrote about it, & I even took a day off work to attend the hearing before Judge John W. Sedwick in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska on September 11.   I’m not a lawyer, but I read through most of the briefings, & it didn’t seem to me that Bopp’s arguments held much water.  Judge Sedwick apparently agreed: he heard arguments from both sides & then dismissed the case. His opinion was published on September 15.

But we haven’t heard the last from Mr. Bopp: he’s appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, last I heard, the last briefs in the case must be filed no later than February 10, 2010. Oral arguments might then follow.  If Bopp fails at the Ninth Circuit, there’s every possibility he might appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court — he’s argued before them before, & won.

Meanwhile, I continue to wonder what in hell is wrong with the Alaska mainstream media, including our supposed paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News. First they all failed to follow up any further on Palin’s spreadsheet-of-hooey in support of her 2 million dollar meme-of-hooey; now it turns out they sat for nearly two months on a press release issued in early July about a lawsuit that could theoretically undermine our state constitution with regard to judicial selection.  Phil Munger at Progressive Alaska has drawn attention to numerous other instances in which the press has sat on its duff instead of investigating & reporting stuff that in some cases is right in front of their faces — for instance, the numerous lies propounded throughout Palin’s putative “memoir,” which the ADN has yet to write any review on.  What else are they sitting on?  How are we to have democracy that way, if the MSM isn’t doing its job?

Oh yeah, I remember now.  Bloggers like me are supposed to do that job nowadays.  In our spare time.  For free.

(All due respect to those reporters who as far as I can tell are doing their best to do their job — but are being shut down by management. I know you guys are out there.)

9. True Diversity Dinner

In the aftermath of Sullivan’s veto of AO 64, several of us bloggers who had been heavily involved in writing about it started talking about what we might do keep the flame alive.  Several of us met at lunchtime one day, & out of someone’s suggestion — I don’t remember whose — next thing you know, the True Diversity Dinner was born.  Its immediate impetus was that the upcoming Mayor’s Diversity Dinner, an event originally created during the administration of Mayor, now Senator, Mark Begich, had been renamed Mayor’s Unity Dinner by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the same guy who had just vetoed equal rights for Anchorage’s lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transfolk.

Instead of protesting, we decided to celebrate the rich diversity that the Mayor’s renaming of the dinner seemed designed to whitewash away. The True Diversity Dinner was our alternative, with the motto, “Because we all deserve a seat at the table.”  It was organized by the bloggers of Alaska Commons, Anchorage Won’t Discriminate, Bent Alaska, Floridana Alaskiana v2.5, Grrlzlist Alaska, Henkimaa, and SOSanchorage.net — but especially by John & Heather Aronno (Alaska Commons & SOSAnchorage.net), who I fear fell far behind in their studies thanks to the dinner.

But it was well worth it, right guys?  It was a tremendous event, with great speakers including my Assembly person Elvi Gray-Jackson, former Congressional candidate & longtime activist for Alaska Native rights Diane Benson, Rev. Marquita Pierre of the Center for Spiritual Healing, & radio host & blogger Shannyn Moore.

On top of that, I was honored to be the recipient of a True Diversity Award for Excellence in Online Media for coverage on my blog of the battle for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance.  Booyah!

10. Hilton workers

And more occasional politics.

When the True Diversity Dinner was first thought up, I hadn’t known that Mayor Sullivan’s Unity Dinner was booked for the Hilton Anchorage Hotel — which was (& still is) under boycott by its workers due to the bad faith practices of its management on orders of the Hilton’s owners, Kentucky-based Columbia Sussex Corporation.  A blog post by Shannyn Moore brought my attention to the fact that the Mayor’s Unity Dinner was also a union-busting dinner. I spent some time researching & writing about the labor dispute, & also attended the Hotel Workers Rising March from the Sheraton (which is now also under boycott due to similar management abuses of workers) to the Hilton two days after the True Diversity Dinner was held.

11. But I’m really about writing my own stuff, & that’s what I need to do now

I’d like to follow up on the hotel workers struggle, both at the Hilton & now the Sheraton.  I hope someone will.  But I can’t.  Here’s the deal.  There are people on this planet, there are people in this state, who thrive on political blogging, & what’s more excel at it.  I think I’m pretty damn good at it when I’m doing it — but I don’t thrive on it.  I start with enthusiasm, but over time… I wear down, my spirit flags, & pretty soon it winds right back into what I started this post with: depression & despair.

Midyear, in the post in which I claimed to be an occasional political blogger, I wrote,

The main reason I set up this site & blog was to help me get back into the flow of writing, of living my life as a writer.  And while writing about politics is writing — well, it’s not my writing, the stuff close to my heart.  Besides, I also work a full-time job.

Besides, sometimes the political stuff can really whack me out….

Another factor about how I handle political posts is that my style isn’t really amenable to fast-response writing, which is a feature of a lot of the best political bloggers I read.  But me, I like to think a lot about what I’m writing.  I like to go deep.  I like to be thorough & as comprehensive as I can.  I like to source all my references thoroughly.  I like — apparently — to write term papers.  (I sure never thought so when I was in college).  And that takes a long time.  Especially since, as previously mentioned, I work a full-time job.  And I also need a certain amount of down time or I am liable to put myself into a depression.

Sometimes, writing my own stuff actually feels like down time.  Reason: I said it above, it’s stuff that close to my heart.

So October saw me returning to writing — at that time, mostly background stuff or responses to stuff that I was reading in preparation for National Novel Writing Month 2009 (NaNoWriMo).  In looking back, I remember that True Diversity Dinner month — that is, September — also saw a bit of focus on writing: a couple of politically-oriented pieces about homophobia in science fiction, including one involving a publication I was writing a story for.  As it happened, I wasn’t far enough along on that story to meet the submission deadline of September 30 — so I picked up & polished an older thing instead.

And whaddaya know! in early October, I was told they wanted to publish it!  Which did much to make me feel like a writer again.

“Cold” was published on October 31, 2009 in Crossed Genres Issue #12, the LGBT issue, & you can still read it online there.  (When it’s no longer live there, & my contract with Crossed Genres permits, I will republish it right here at Henkimaa.com.)  “Cold” was also selected for inclusion in Crossed Genres‘ first-year anthology, which will include one story from each of the magazines first 12 issues.  I think it’s still on schedule for publication in February.

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

November for me was the headlong hurry of NaNoWriMo.  As a result, as anyone who knows this blog saw, I didn’t do much blogging at all.  Such blog posts as got posted were mostly automatically generated “Daily Tweets” posts from my Twitter feed.  And I haven’t done much blogging since NaNoWriMo ended, either.

But whoa! I did a lot of writing — 51,607 words worth of it in November, making me a NaNoWriMo winner this year…. er… I mean, last year.  I was writing in the same story universe as “Cold,” which is about two young women on an extrasolar planet (that is, in another solar system) in the late stages of terraformation, which I’ve finally named Oikos — but my NaNovember 2009 writing was mostly about three centuries earlier in the timeline, before & around the time the ships that will eventually arrive at Oikos leave our solar system.  I called it Long Dark.

And a lot of it was background writing, rather than the story itself.  Because there is so damn much science that I need to have at least some kind of grasp on before I can do the story for real.

Though I came up with at least four stories over the course of the month that I know I can shape into good damn stuff.  And I also discovered that a character of mine from a supposedly completely unrelated project is, whaddaya know, an important historical figure for the society in Long Dark and Cold.  And since that character is very closely based on me… whoa, it’s an awful lot like, well, writing myself into history.  How cool is that?

(Or how egotistical?)

12. Since then…

… that is, during December — what have I been doing?  Not blogging, clearly. Except for one extensive rant about the leakage in various portions of my ceiling.  (Now cured, but the holes in the ceiling still need patching.)  Other than that, lots of vegging out, some writing, lots of reading — my latest topics have included atmospheric pressure, altitude sickness, & spacesuit design (background research for a story in the Cold universe) & how people with strabismus or amblyopia (the latter being the case for me), most of whom grow up stereoblind, might be able to develop stereo (binocular) vision.  Even at 50 years old. Which is what I am now.

50 years old, soon to be 51. And now I reflect on where I was at when I turned 50, early in 2009.  I was still in the cave.  But there were inklings of possibility.  I was still in the cave, for instance, when a confluence of ideas led me to decide how to go about my writing life, which included blogging & other forms of social media to get my stuff out there, instead of just through the old “send out craploads of query letters & get a shitload of rejection letters back before someone finally decides your stuff is good enough to publish” method that has been standard for a very bloody long time.  I knew I’d feel a lot more at ease finding my own audience through social media than going through the query letter drudgery.  It was still pretty remarkable that I made such a decision at such a time, though: social media? for someone who, at that point, was incapable & unmotivated to communicate at all?  But then, I knew the cave walls would dissolve sooner or later.  And they did.

I was also deciding, back in February of 2009 that age 50 was a good time to reach the milestone that I had apparently reached in the sorrows of that time.  The boy that I & Rozz-now-Ptery raised from age 9 was now 21 (& now, some months later, is actually 22), & is setting out on his own course in the world.  He’s in a residential job training program; I seem him some weekends when he comes into town.  Ptery is embarked on another course, living a nomadic life mostly off-the-grid in the Lower 48; we are no longer partners, however much we still love each other. So, I am single &, except for my cat & the boy’s dog, essentially alone.

When I was in college & took a class on Hinduism, I learned that the traditional life path for very pious Brahmin males was supposed to consist of several stages — four of them, I think — with the third stage being that of husband, father, & householder.  When the householding stage was over, these guys were apparently supposed to just up & lickety-split out to the forest to become religious ascetics.  Or something like that.

And when I turned 50, I thought: that’s it, I’m no longer a householder.  Well, I still have my apartment.  And I don’t plan to go live in the woods as an ascetic.  (Ptery’s path is a little closer to that, really.)  But I no longer have the responsibilities of a spouse/partner or of a parent to a minor child.  I can do what I want.  And what I need.

Which is to write.  But dang, it sure takes me a long time to get the politics out of my way to do it.

But I got to that point, & now I plan to continue.

That’s my story.

I’m such a cathead.

Related posts:

1. True Diversity Dinner 1 & 2: Video by Janson Jones
2. True Diversity Dinner video, part 3: Hotel workers, & Elvi's speech
3. True Diversity Dinner: September 25, 2009

I created this photomosaic & posted it to my Flickr photostream on November 9, 2007 under the title It’s all just an act.

This is another story about how depression & its close relative despair work their way in my life.

But first I will explain what occasions this topic over any other today. For reassurance to my friends, if nothing else.  Today I’m in the grey, & something of a light grey at that, which is all to the good.  I’m not in the state that most of this post is about: what I call the pit. I’m just a little low in mood from having had to go through some boxes yesterday that allowed an egress to some of the grief that I need mostly to have shuttered away right now.  (It’s time will come.)

So I feel crummy. But not dangerously crummy.  Not even as crummy today as yesterday.  In short, I’m okay; tomorrow I should be even okay-er: I’m doing the necessaries to take care of myself.

But sometimes on such a day it’s good to remind myself where things can go if I don’t stay mindful.

A self-portrait I took on October 23, 2007 -- my mom's birthday. I didn't realize until after looking at it that I was feeling pretty low. It's there in my eyes. It was just short of two years since her death.

Two years ago, when I made that photomosaic: I was feeling pretty bad, from a combination of things. We’d entered the dark of the year, which also means the cold of the year, plus there was the approaching anniversary of my mom’s death on November 29, and it was also very shortly after her birthday (October 23). Add in some relationship stuff, & probably I was a bit run down.  Nor did I know about 5-HTP then.

And, as is common for me, I had a hard time just coming out & saying I felt bad.  Even in in how I created & posted the photomosaic: I used Photo Booth (a Mac program), which has one setting that allows for particularly lurid colors which give a sense of melodramatic overkill.  I gave the mosaic tags like Mel o’drama which lent further credibility to the idea that, hey, I was just screwing around, this wasn’t serious (even though it was). I was a little more honest with another tag: the actor sometimes becomes the character played — though even that was sufficiently obscure that unless someone knew me really well, they would be unlikely to interpret it to know its relation to me.

So what was going on with me?  I was in the pit. The black hole.  The well.  Those are names I have for the worst form of depression/despair that I get — when I’m just hanging on by threads, & the threads are unraveling.  My thinking unravels, too: it’s a form of craziness, what my partner Rozz called at the time warped in mel darkspace. Yep. Rozz has seen it many a time. When I’m in that place, I no longer know things that I know when I’m sane, & I can cycle into the crazy pretty damn fast.

I actually pulled out of it that November — can’t remember quite how.  Maybe I just did my basic self-care stuff.  I was in the midst of NaNoWriMo 2007, & in looking back, I see that I wasn’t turning out much writing for a few days around that episode in the pit.  I wouldn’t have finished NaNoWriMo that year if I hadn’t come out of it.  But once NaNoWriMo ended, I started descending into it again in December.  Still, I was just enough sane that on December 2, 2007, three weeks after posting the photo, I wrote a long explanation of what the photo signified.

Written Dec 2, 2007, 3 weeks after posting this picture:

Thing about these pics is that I really felt that way: the mood I was attempting to depict in the photos. Despairing, fucked-up, in the black hole — ridden by my own personal demon that I’ve had most all my life. Over the years I’ve learned to deal with it, what to do when I start falling into the pit, & normally my time there isn’t that long anymore. Two or three days, maybe, instead of weeks or months, & the really horrible intense parts complete with suicidal ideation or at least the desire to disappear last maybe a few hours, instead of as a near constant. When I feel that way, I look to myself: I pull back from obligations, I make sure to get more sleep, I eat healthily, I don’t require things of myself except to take care of myself. Mostly, I try to get horizontal.

Although I have thoughts about suicide or of other self-destructive things at some times, I have never in my life made a suicide attempt. To the extent in my past that I’ve engaged in self-harm, it’s been of the nature of hitting my head against a wall, or hitting it with my fists, or tearing up writing (though that’s a form of suicide), or throwing something of mine. I don’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Lately, my thoughts frequently will run towards cutting myself off — say, removing all my profiles from sites like Flickr, kicking off all the mail lists I’m on, destroying my files… disappearing. It would be hard to do. Pieces of me are scattered all over the place. When I feel like that, I want to find each & every such piece & extinguish it, & then myself. I don’t do it, I have never come close to doing it but it’s incredibly painful to feel like that.

I have always been held back from trying by thinking about my family, friends, people who love me. I couldn’t do that to them. One time when I hurt that way, I told my friend Scott, who at that time was my roommate, that I almost wished that everyone who loved me would turn their back on me, because then I would be free to off myself. Though it was painful to contemplate such a possibility, too: everyone I loved, betraying me at once? Anyway, Scott just kinda smiled at me wryly & said, Sorry Mel, you’re just going to have to put up with us loving you.

But dammit, when it happens, it hurts like all buggery. (Thank you, Sian, for teaching me that Aussie phrase, which captures the pain of it perfectly.)

So. Why then, the title of this photo? Why the tags that make it seem this is a joke? Why the lurid colors, which also melodramatize it?

Because some of how this demon came to take such tenacious residence in my soul was through an invitation of sorts, back when I was in high school, & I used to “pretend” I was in such a bad place. At that time it was — or so I though — all just an act. I didn’t have the maturity at the time to consider that maybe there really was something wrong inside of me, that I felt need to manipulate people’s behavior toward me with such an act. I only thought of that when I decided to try to put the act aside, & discovered that it wasn’t an act anymore. Act as if for a long enough time, & you become the character you play.

So I’m caught, ever since, between the rock & the hard place. Even though it’s real, & I really feel this way, I’m also very conscious of how people around me are reacting to my behavior, & I feel that I’m being manipulative, & I feel wrong about that because manipulation is wrong. So nothing I can do is the right thing. If I show myself in this state to people, then I’m manipulating them. If I go into hiding, that may in one part be another way of manipulating, but even more importantly, I cut myself off from the people who care about me, who I often need, to help me climb back out of the pit.

Pretty screwed up thinking, really. Now, don’t get me wrong. I have come a far long way since I was 16 or 17 in high school, & I’m usually pretty good about asking for help nowadays when I need it. But this screwed-up thinking still occurs sometimes, & it’s been occurring a few times over the past couple of months, for reasons that I’m only starting to figure out.

That’s what this picture is. It’s a visual demonstration of that screwed up thinking. Which I put together even as I was struggling with it. Because yes, I took these photos when I was in the deep in the pit, trying to communicate to any who would see them that I was in pain, that I needed some kind of help, if only that my state of mind would be recognized. But see — I believe, I truly believed in the midst of my pain that if I just showed the photos straight on, or even just said outright, “I’m hurting bad right now,” that I’d be manipulating. So I undercut it. Use the “glow” effect in Photo Booth to get those lurid, melodramatic colors. Use tags & a title that make it seem just pretend. Though it wasn’t.

It’s hard to communicate honestly when I’m like that. Because when I’m like that, I’m crazy. It’s a form of delusion, of madness. I literally do not understand that it is okay to simply say, “I’m in pain right now.”

Remote. Photo taken Dec. 2, 2007, the same day I wrote this account.

But you know, lately I’ve been noticing a couple of friends/acquaintances on Flickr who have been going through tremendously painful situations themselves, who have reminded me of that. I’m writing this from a state that is near but not quite in the black hole (same date as the photo Remote), so I’m still near enough to sanity that I was able to check my descent into that screwed up thinking. I’m in a bad headspace today, but today (December 2, 2007) I’m just going to say that. Instead of putting on the act that isn’t an act.

So here it is. I’m in a bad headspace today. It isn’t quite the black hole, but it’s not okay either. It’ll right itself, but it hasn’t yet. Today, it rises out of some events that I’m not really prepared to talk with anyone about. So, I’m probably going to be a little remote for a bit, till I do work it out. But, better to be honest & say so, than to just kite off by myself without leaving a note.

And having written all this, I’m already feeling a bit better. I may not have to go remote for a very long period after all.

Thanks for listening.

As it turned out, the following day was the really bad one, when sanity absolutely fled midway through my day at work.  I was able to hold on to just enough sanity to put out a call for help, which took the form of a tweet, typo & all:

3:23 PM: Imploding. I guess that’s better than exploding & killing someone. But I’m fucked in the head, badlyl.

Wouldn’t you know it: Twitter (still a fairly new thing back in 2007) was updating slowly that day.  I don’t think anyone got my tweet until the next day.  I tried again over an hour later:

4:47 PM: Imploding. Better than exploding & killing someone I guess, but still pretty fucked up.

Twitter still malfunctioning: no response.  And when you’re already crazy, & don’t know the software is muckety-mucking, the paranoid portion of your mind goes, Nobody even gives a shit!

So I’m pretty amazed that I, working late & still in my office, tried again:

6:11 PM: Inside of my mind is getting worse & worse. Could someone pull me out of it please?

6:20 PM: Seriously. Usually I do okay fending for myself, but I’m not fending too well today.

Still no response.  But luckily, my Flickr friend Katie came online in Gmail — probably the very best person possible, because she was someone who knew from the inside the kind of crazy I was experiencing, & therefore knew exactly how to talk me down.  (She told me later her thinking was “hmm. now what would mel tell me when she was sane & i was going through a rough time?”) Here’s a portion of our conversation, a partial transcript, if you will, of the crazy:

me: hey

Katie: hey mel whats up

me: head’s been in a bad place for a couple of days now

Katie: oh dear, whats been going on

me: not sure really but it’s been getting worse today because i’m in a nobody gives a shit mode
& starting to engage in cut & run behaviors
like removing all my pics except one from [a Flickr group we were both in]

Katie: ah yes, i’ve gone through that …

me: & feeling like just removing myself from groups & shit altogether b/c i feel like nobody gives a shit

Katie: dont do that – people do … it’s just the frame of mind you’re in that’s fooling you into thiking so

me: yeah i know i’m just barely remembering that
but it’s on the edge at the moment

Katie: hmm, well i’ll remember for you … don’t do it !

me: some guy here killed his dad with a machete yesterday & then came in to anchorage & shot some innocent grad student in his car & killed him & badly wounded a couple of other people during his rampage
he got caught after a car jacking this morning
& i’m like, well, that’s the way i feel
except i take it into myself
instead of runnign around fucking other people’s lives over
but it’s kinda like today
oh let me not mention how badly i’m feeling, lest i ruin your day

The rampage mentioned was that of Christopher Erin Rogers, Jr. on December 2–3, 2007. Rogers was ultimately convicted in two separate trials of two murders and four attempted murders in Palmer and Anchorage, plus animal cruelty for his attack on the dog that saved the life of his father’s fiance. And I would say that Rogers, whose confession was heard by the jury in his second trial in Anchorage, very much had a similar kind of craziness going on his mind which prompted his crimes. Read the details for yourself. [Ref #1] Something, who knows what exactly, set him off, & he went explosive, harming & even killing other people. And, as is so often the case, refusing to accept that he was responsible: not aliens, not other people with their perceived mistreatment of him.

Well, if I’m going to sometimes go crazy, I’m sure glad I don’t do it that way.  My tendency is to implode: I don’t harm others (usually), I harm myself.  And I suppose another difference between me & Rogers is that I do my best to take responsibility for my craziness.

Not, to be sure, when I’m actively crazy: then I’m just as likely to blame other people.

Katie: you can never ruin someone elses day by tell them you’re having a bad day

me: no i can just tell ‘em i’m having a bad day & they can go “oh shit, mel’s having a bad day, better avoid her so i don’t ruin myown”
that’s the way my thinking’s giong today
because i’m all fucked up

But at least I recognized I wasn’t thinking sanely.  And had taken enough responsibility for my craziness over the long haul of my life that by that point in time, I had at least a few clues of what to do to help myself, by getting help — especially from someone like Katie who had (1) some knowledge of the kind of stuff I was going through from the inside, & (2) had the patience to listen.

Katie: I don’t think telling people you’re in a bad space will put them in a bad mood, at least it wouldn’t to me … i’d just like to help you no longer be there … hmm, do people actually say that? oh right. okay … well, know that people definitely don’t feel that way, they just get awkward in dealing with depression …
what can we talk about that would help you?

me: i dunno, this is probably helping just to say the kinds of thoughts that have been going through me all day

Katie: okay, keep them coming

me: y’know, i wrote a really long thing to that “it’s all an act” photo to about 4 or 5 am satnight/sunday morning explaining how it all works
laura saw it, rozz saw it, they commented
dunno who else saw it
but this morning i privated it
that’s kinda part of what set me off feeling like well basically most people don’t give a shit
they don’t mind you saying you’ve got the flu
but say anything about the really hard shit, then too fucking bad
well that’s not completely true
[some people have lots of people batting for them]
but me, no, i should be over all the kind of shit that i’ve got in my soul
me, i should just take drugs
me, i should just shit or get off the pot

Katie: you feel like that’s how people feel towards you?
that you should just take drugs or shit or get off the pot?

me: wehn i get like this, meds is one of the first topics to come up

Katie: i don’t think meds are a good idea

me: neither do i
mostly i think people just want to have fun & not be bogged down by someone’s shit

Katie: that might be true – but for the most part, i think people geerally just don’t kow how to handle deep things – because it ends up shining a light inwards to their oen stuff – which they defiitely dont want to deal with

me: though for some reason they get along with some people’s shit better than mine
yeah you’re right about that i think

Katie: it’s not that they don’t get along with your shit mel, i think maybe it’s the fact that you seem strong? i think people might think that when you get down – you just want to isolate and you don’t want to talk about things .. maybe? i’m not really sure

me: this is the worst i’ve gotten into the whole rock & a hard place stuff about feeling like anyting i do is manipulating people in a reaaaaaaaallly long time
which is the very worst kind of thinking i have, i get so confused, i don’t feel like anything i do is right w/ regard to other people

Katie: i think that maybe because you feel like you’re manipulating people, you don’t ask for help … so people don’t really know that you want people to surround you in these times
catch 22
perhaps

me: yeah very big catch 22 gods it hurts

Katie: Hmm … well … i’m going to tell you that … you aren’t manipulating people when you want attention. None of us are. We all want help, we all want attention and there is nothing wrong with it, honestly. But i don’t knowif me telling you that will make that belief real for you or not

me: so i have all these destructive urges giong on
i know that stuff when i’m sane but i’m not sane right now

Be that as it may: the conversation helped to restore me to sanity. It’s also because of Katie that I reset the permissions on the “It’s all an act” photo back to public, & left them there. She went on to “babysit” me for the next bit of time while I finished the task I was working overtime to complete, & by the time I left my office I was able to tweet:

8:16 PM: Better now, thanks to Katie.

I reckon it took another couple of days for me to get completely away from the edge of the pit, doing the things I know to do: plenty or rest, good food, keeping the demands on myself low, & — importantly — not isolating myself.  Nobody got killed, including me.  (At the height of the crazy I did indulge in some “virtual suicide” — deleting files & so on — but somehow restrained myself from destroying anything really important to me.)

That was my last trip into the pit.  (Knock on wood.)  Even over the past year, during which I’ve experienced considerable loss — I’ve gone into the grey a number of times, but never into the pit.  When I feel myself at its edge, I’m lots more ready to follow the advice that Katie gave me, same advice I have given others when I was sane & they were not: ask for help from the people I know care about me.

It also helps that I now know about 5-HTP.  And use it.

References

1. 4/2/09. “Accused murderer Rogers blamed aliens for 2007 attacks — ROGERS: Jurors hear taped confession of deadly events in Palmer and Anchorage” by Debra McKinney (Anchorage Daily News).

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Saturn. Credit: NASA, ESA and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona). Hubblesite.org

Saturn is Heavier in My Dreams

My head’s getting squashed again, all low and squat
like I lived on Saturn or someplace like that,
where the planet is heavy, and a woman from Earth
can’t lift her head.

My feet drag like they do in my dreams sometimes,
and I don’t know why . . . like there’s a path
I’m trying to follow but I don’t know how
to walk, one foot in front of the other.
I’m surprised in the morning when I run to the bus
and my feet fly, knowing how to move.

Saturn is heavier in my dreams than it is in waking.
I used to peer through the telescope at it:
tiny in the sky with ears — that’s how Galileo drew it.
It was listening . . . listening to the dark, and glowing.

I want to call it a she.
She feels like a female to me.
I want to call her by some name
other than that of the old
god who ate his children.

In my dreams she has a deep, deep weight,
and every step I take is made of lead.
I try to put the two together –
the silent, listening ears
trying to comprehend the universe;
the roads I have been too weak to follow
cast in Technicolor
against my eyelids on difficult nights.

I am trying to be like her, listening,
stolidly walking her path along the ecliptic.

If I died now I would remain here, a ghost
haunting places I was afraid to leave,
begging the living to release me into
something that might move –
a river, somebody’s feet . . .
Saturn in her purposeful wandering.

[March 21, 1983]

About this poem

Okay, this damn grey business, this damn low-level depression… what’s it take to get out of it?

They — the sojourns into depression — used to be routinely a lot darker & longer lasting than what I go through nowadays.  I’ve learned a lot about how to take care of them.  Enough sleep, beware of overcommitments (& pull back when I have them), friendships of trust, along with healthy food & a few helpful supplements like 5-HTP, vitamin D3 (as reminded to me by a Facebook friend last night), omega-3s.  Not immersing myself in bad news or political hatreds (which was kinda hard not to do this past summer in Anchorage, let me tell you; & the teabaggy birther stuff still going on nowadays, with acompanying ranty ravy hate-filled invective in reader comments on the Anchorage Daily News website is not a happy place to visit either).  Even with all of this, the bad days still sometimes come.  It’s just a matter of taking care of myself & waiting for the relief when they dissolve away.

But back in the bad old days of my self-hating youth, I used to get a sort of sick pleasure out of the bad feeling — like the Carly Simon song, “Suffering was the only thing / made me feel I was alive.”  I had to sleep it off, like a drunk.  And I didn’t like it if I felt it leaving when I was still awake.  How’s that for messed up?

That began to change when I was in my early 20s, around 1983 & 1984.  This poem marked the first time in my recall that I felt the depression dissolve away when I was still awake, & was glad of it.  In fact, it dissolved away as I wrote the poem — which was one early evening when I was alone staffing the Alaska Gay & Lesbian Resource Center, at the time located (briefly) on 5th Avenue in downtown Anchorage.  (At what is now, I believe, a small parking lot next to Keybank between F & G Streets, for what it’s worth).

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• Coming out of the grey. #
• Well, I _thought_ I was coming out of the grey. Maybe not. #
• Yet another example of GOP family values hypocrisy. CA lawmaker open-mic’d his affairs w/ lobbyists. http://tinyurl.com/lumho5 #
• Twitter app on Facebook finally updating FB status about 3 hours behind the times. #
• How much data cited re: homeless in Anchorage is utter bunkum? Hope decisionmakers are using the right data, not the crap I just read. #
• RT: @celticdiva Well…depends on the bar… // Preferably not one frequented by @talkradiohost (tho I guess he prefers crotchgrabs) #

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