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

Related posts:

1. From moderate-carb to low-carb
2. The Healthy Hobbit plan
3. Carbohydrates & depression 1

Yesterday I picked up my third box of produce from Glacier Valley Farm CSA.  When I got home & unpacked them, I decided to array them on my stove (best lighting) for a little photoshoot.  Above, you can see displayed:

From Alaska’s Glacier Valley Farm, VanderWeele Farm:

• 10 carrots
• 10 red potatoes
• 5 yellow onions
• 1 celery root

From Outside (all certified organic):

• 2 Bosc pears
• kiwi
• celery
• lacinato kale
• green chard
• fennel

And also:

• a really big squash.  I don’t know whether it came from Alaska or from the Lower 48.

The squash, of course, goes to my friend Sylvia, because she still likes squash & still don’t.  Some of this other stuff — hmmmm…. what am I gonna do with celery root or a full fennel plant, having never cooked either before?  Lucky for me that this week’s issue of the newsletter that Glacier Valley Farm CSA sends out with its boxes, Glacier Grist #59, has some suggestions: I’ll use the celery root & some of the chard, kale, carrots, onions , & potato to make the seasonal soup (probably adding some bison or grassfed beef); & the quinoa salad with apples, pears, fennel, and walnuts suggests a great use for some of the fennel as well as the pear.  But tonight I’ll make my own adaptation of an oven potatoes with fennel recipe I found online.

I didn’t order a box for two weeks from now because first I need to play catch-up & use all the stuff I’ve got now.  In particular, I’m finding it hard to use the potatoes very quickly.  I love potatoes, but I have to be cautious about eating too much of them because they’re a starchy vegetable &, being insulin resistant, I need to moderate my carb intake.  But aren’t these potatoes beautiful?

Living in Alaska, it’s hard to be a complete locavore — that is, someone who eats only food that is grown or produced locally. Even this produce box is only partially local. But I’m glad to be able to be at least a partial locavore. I’m reducing my carbon footprint because trucking stuff in from the Valley costs a lot less fuel than shipping it up from the Lower 48; I’m supporting Alaska famers; & wow — such great food! Just $35 for the box.

Time to go cook.

Related posts:

1. A box of produce, & homemade sauerkraut
2. Local farmers, local food
3. The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-12: Faux Palin, Prop 8, DADT, & fresh produce

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)

Lucy Cuddy Hall on the UAA campus, one of a number of Glacier Valley Farm CSA's dropoff locations in Anchorage

Yesterday I picked up my second order of produce from Glacier Valley Farm CSA. CSA, again, stands for community supported agriculture; I wrote a long post about it when I picked up my first produce order a couple of weeks ago.  I didn’t take as many photos of it this time, but up there you can see it was a pretty good sampling of fresh yummy produce.

This week’s goodies included:

From Alaska’s Glacier Valley Farm, VanderWeele Farm:

• Alaska-grown onions
• Alaskan-grown potatoes, a whole bunch of ‘em
• A big pile of Alaska-grown carrots, which are the best kind of carrots I’ve ever eaten.

This week 13 boxes were delivered by Glacier Valley Farm CSA to the Lucy Cuddy Hall pickup point.

From Outside (all certified organic)

• 3 Fancy Fuji apples
• 3 large navel oranges
• 2 bunches of Rainbow chard. I think one of these was supposed to be romaine lettuce, but that’s okay, I like chard well enough I won’t have problems eating it all.
• sunchokes. I don’t have a clue what to do with these, but I’m sure Google will have an answer.
• broccoli

And also:

• a really big squash.  I don’t know whether it came from Alaska or from the Lower 48.

I’ve never liked squash, so I took mine over to my friend Sylvia, who really loves it.  I like everything else.  Had one of those oranges in my lunch today.

GVFCSA includes stuff from the Lower 48 during the wintertime because, hey, it’s winter in Alaska so a lot of that stuff is out of season up here.  The Alaska-grown stuff they include in their produce boxes in the wintertime are storage veggies.  Thus, GVFCSA can claim to be the only year-round CSA in Alaska.  But there are some other really good CSAs in the Anchorage/Mat-Su area, too, including Arctic Organics, which is the oldest CSA in Alaska & serves about 150 families with its CSA program; and Spring Creek Farm, which belongs to Alaska Pacific University & began a CSA program in 2007.  They also have an Environmental Learning Center.  Like Glacier Valley Farm, these two farms are located in the Palmer area of the Mat-Su Valley.

If you live in another part of Alaska, you might be able to find another CSA through the Community Supported Agriculture page on the Last Frontier Locavores website (though I don’t know how up-to-date it is).  There’s a lot of them in the Fairbanks area! Also check out the website of the Alaska Community Agriculture Association. This is an organization of small Alaska farms which grow food crops for direct sale to the public, whose members are — per their mission statement — “committed to promoting, supporting, and working towards sustainable and regional local food systems. We want to encourage agricultural practices that benefit our environment, our communities, and our customers.” They’ve got a good page of links to CSAs, farmers’ markets, & other community agriculture resources.

My first order of produce from Glacier Valley Farm CSA included a humongous Alaska-grown cabbage.  Somehow I didn’t get a photo of it when it was still whole, but take my word for it: it was big & beautiful.

I used it last week to make sauerkraut.  I also had some red cabbage that I’d bought at the Natural Pantry, my usual grocery store.

Making sauerkraut is easy, but it can take awhile. Took a long time to chop all that cabbage up, mixed in a bit of salt & caraway seed, then kinda pound it down to bring out the brine. (For lack of anything better, I used my metal Kaladi Brothers car cup: worked great.)

Here’s my sauerkraut the night I made it.

There’s no water added other than about four or five tablespoons of lactic-acid rich “water” from some fruit kimchi my ex-partner Ptery (then named Rozz) made three years ago, that’s still in the fridge (& still good!). All the rest of the fluid is simply the brine from the cabbage itself, which I guess the salt helps to draw out. That kimchi fluid had the stuff to begin the process of fermentation that makes cabbage, salt, & good guy bacteria into really tasty sauerkraut.

I took a bunch of other pictures of the sauerkraut that night because macros of it made some really nice abstract sauerkraut art.

Here’s the same batch of sauerkraut two days later. See all those bubbles? Fermenting nicely.

Fermentation had also caused the cabbage to rise up in the jar (an Italian-made jar with a lid that provides a hermetic seal).

You might also notice how much more purple the lower region of the sauerkraut is than the upper region. That’s because when I first cut up the cabbage, I didn’t think all of it would fit, so I kept about a third of the light green Alaska-grown cabbage out. Then looked like it’d fit after all, so I put in the rest of the light cabbage.

I first tried out some of my cabbage last Friday while I was watching “Caprica” (hence my Daily Tweets post that day, “Caprica w/ sauerkraut”). That was about three days after it was made, & it was pretty good! But sauerkraut is even better after you’ve let it age a bit. Here’s what it looked like tonight, when I had a small bowlful with my dinner. See how the dark purple pigments from the “red” cabbage have mixed all up to make my sauerkraut pink?

Yummy good. And good for you too. Sauerkraut has tons of Vitamin C, & the fermentation process means there’s also lots of good guy bacteria to keep your internal flora all nice & happy.

Please enjoy my Sauerkraut Slide Show:

Related posts:

1. Partial locavore
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-27: Community supported agriculture
3. Local farmers, local food

In the wake of my mother’s death in late 2005 from complications of diabetes, I completely overhauled my diet in early 2006. My growing consciousness food extended not only to what kind of food I was eating, but also how food is produced and marketed — & interestingly enough, turns out that there’s a lot of overlap between crap food that leads to chronic lifestyle diseases like Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc. & crap ways of producing foods — for example, the megaindustrialization of food production that has led to the Standard American Diet (SAD indeed) & the preponderance of vending machines, fast foods, & the carbs in a box that fill out our grocery store shelves.

To my mind, the industrialization of the food system is not only just as antidemocratic as the rest of the corporate way of doing things, but is unhealthy to boot. So thank goodness for the farms of the Mat-Su Valley, whose in recent years have been bringing fresh, Alaska-grown produce into Anchorage grocery stores and farmer’s markets. What’s more, now there’s a Mat-Su based community supported agriculture program that weekly (except the first week of each month) delivers boxes of fresh Mat-Su produce to Anchorage subscribers (as well as subscribers in Eagle River, the Mat-Su, Girdwood, & Homer).

I learned about Glacier Valley Farm CSA a couple of weeks ago, & immediately made my first order. Yesterday I went to pick it up.

What’s community supported agriculture?  Glacier Valley Farm CSA’s website explains it very well:

A Community Supported Agriculture program is a community of people who pledge support to a farm operation so that the community feels a sense of ownership of and responsibility for the farm. The growers and consumers support each other and share the risks and benefits of food production. Subscribers to the CSA program pledge some amount in advance to cover some of the anticipated costs of the farm’s operation. In return, they receive shares in the farm’s bounty throughout the growing season, as well as satisfaction gained from connecting with the land and participating directly in food production. Members also share in the risks of farming, including poor harvests due to unfavorable weather or pests. By selling directly to community members rather than selling their produce wholesale, the growers receive better prices for their crops and gain financial security, because they have a guaranteed market for their vegetables.

Glacier Valley Farm CSA is operated by Arthur Keyes of Glacier Valley Farm in Palmer — who also started the South Anchorage Farmer’s Market in 2006 with his father-in-law Ben VanderWeele — and Alison Arians, a farmer’s market customer who now runs the CSA’s website (as well as the South Anchorage Farmer’s Market website) and writes the CSA’s weekly newsletter.  She’s also has a blog, Alison’s Lunch, about cooking & eating local food, & is the author of the South Anchorage Farmers’ Market Cookbook, which one can buy at the CSA website.  Or, I learned last Saturday, from my favorite writing venue, Side Street Espresso, which gets its bread — good stuff! — from the Rise & Shine Bakery owned by Alison & her husband Dan.  GVFCSA fills its boxes with produce not only from Glacier Valley Farm, but also from other Mat-Su farms including VanderWeele Farms, Three Bears Farm, Stockwell Farms, Bush’s Bunches, Lewis Family Farm, and (next summer) Kenley’s Alaskan Vegetables.  During the winter, when the Mat-Su is under snow, local Alaska produce is mainly of storage vegetables like potatoes, beets, carrots, & cabbage, with greens & other fresh veggies & fruits shipped up from organic producers in the Lower 48.

I was very glad when I checked the CSA’s website to learn that one of its pick-up locations was Lucy Cuddy Hall on the UAA campus — just across campus from where I work.  So a couple of weeks ago I placed my first order, & yesterday walked across campus to pick it up.

As I arrived, three other women were had just finished transferring their produce from boxes to their own bags:

Here’s what my box looked like when I opened it:

The lettuce &  arugula were hiding some of the other goodies in the box, so I lifted them out of the way to get another photo:

I transferred the whole works to my pack, using a plastic bag as an inner liner.

Glacier Valley Farm CSA resuses the boxes, so before I left Cuddy Hall I did as as people before me had done — broke down my box to make it easier for the CSA to pick them up.  There were still a number of boxes that hadn’t yet been picked up.  I counted a total of 13 boxes, both broken down & still full.  It’s possible that some people had taken the full boxes, to be returned later — but basically looks like about 13 people in the UAA community (faculty/staff/students) or who live/work in the university area are getting fine quality produce through community supported agriculture.  Glacier Valley Farm CSA has another 18 or so  pick-up locations for its produce in Anchorage, Eagle River, Girdwood, the Mat-Su, & the Kenai (in Homer).

I take the bus to & from work, so it was important to me that my boxload of produce be something I could carry. No problem! — though I got quite a bit sweatier humping it on my back across campus to my office (since I still had another hour at hour at work).  Not so bad going home — the cold outside more than took care of the heat I generated from carrying it.  Good exercise, I reckon.  Once I got home with it, I put my pack on the scale & found I’d carried 25.2 pounds — of which probably about 22 pounds was the produce.

Here’s what was in my box:

From Glacier Valley Farm and VanderWeele Farm in the Mat-Su:

• 5 onions
• 10 potatoes
• 1 large head of cabbage
• 3 beets

From the Lower 48 (all certified organic):

• 3  Pink Lady apples
• 3 Cara Cara oranges
• 3 kiwi fruit
• 1 large head of  green butter lettuce
• 1 big bunch of  arugula
• 1 bunch of watermelon radishes
• 4 garnet yams
• 1 box of grape tomatoes

Not bad for $35 — & all of it of very high quality.   Here’s some of it after I unpacked it at home onto my kitchen counter.

Here’s a closer look at the radishes.  Big, plump, & gorgeous.  Not only that, but attached to them are those great radish greens.  It’s incredible to me that I used to just throw away radish green.  It wasn’t until three or four years ago that it occurred to me that, hey, might they not be edible too?  Well, of course they are! They can be used just like any other greens in salads, soups, etc.  It’s a good idea, though, to separate them early from the radishes themselves — they’ll keep a bit longer that way, but will get slimy & yucky pretty quickly if you store them with the radishes still attached.  (I also use carrot greens — not in salads, as their kind of ropy for that; but they go well in soups, as the heat makes them more tender.)

A closer look at the onions.  These were grown right here in Alaska.  Onions are a staple in my diet, so I’m very happy to have these.

The little plastic produce box of grape tomatoes from a organic farm in California were a nice surprise — they were an addition to what Glacier Valley told us would be in this order.

Here’s a couple of the Alaska-grown beets.

I’ve never been a big beet fan, but they’re so damn good for you (see what the World’s Healthiest Foods website has to say about them — which is a powerful motivator for me to learn to like them more), & I don’t actually hate them… so darned it I’m going to let them go to waste.  I decided to include some grated beet in a salad.

Here’s the salad I made last night, making use of several items from my order: butter lettuce & arugula, radishes, grated beet, the entirety of a small onion, & a few of the grape tomatoes.  I made enough for dinner last night & lunch today.  For last night’s salad I added in some canned tuna & a small handful of mixed nuts & seeds (sunflower & pumpkin seeds, almonds, walnuts, brazil nuts).  Today’s lunch has the mixed nuts & seeds, but the protein addition today was salmon.

Last night’s dessert: a kiwi fruit.  Mmmmm was it good — I didn’t realize I liked kiwi fruit so much!  Isn’t it nice they’re good for me too? — Issue #56 of the Glacier Grist (Glacier Valley Farm CSA’s weekly newsletter) informs me that kiwis “contain about as much potassium as bananas, and also contain 1.5 times the Daily Reference Intake for Vitamin C. It is also rich in Vitamins A and E. “

And then I couldn’t help myself, & also had one of the Pink Lady apples. Dessert for lunch today is one of the oranges.

What will I do with the rest of my order?  Well, I’ll want to use the lettuce & arugula pretty fast, so they don’t go bad before I eat ‘em — so more salad for the next couple of days.  I took two yams, two potatoes, & one of the beets over to my friend Sylvia last night, since she has a limited income & doesn’t often have opportunity to get good produce. The other two beets will go into salads, soups, whatever… I usually have to mix them with other stuff because I find them too sweet on their own.  (Kiwi fruit are sweet — why do I have no problem with them on their own?  Beats me.) I have to figure out how I’ll use the potatoes and yams — since overhauling my diet in early 2006, which included learning all about the glycemic index, I’ve tended to avoid starchy vegetables. But it shouldn’t be a big deal to just space out my consumption of them.  The head of cabbage — which for some reason I didn’t get a picture of — I think I’ll make into a jar of homemade sauerkraut.

Glacier Valley Farm CSA delivers every week except the first week of the month, which works out fine for me because it’ll probably take a couple of weeks for me to eat all this stuff anyway (along with the produce I still had in my fridge from my last trip to Natural Pantry).  But I only have to order anyway when I want to.  Since I (mostly) live alone, a box every other week will probably suit me pretty well.

I’ll be making another order tonight, which will be delivered February 10. Per GVFCSA, that order should include:

• From Alaska’s Glacier Valley Farm & VanderWeele Farm: Alaskan red or yellow onions – Farmer’s Choice | Alaskan Red or Yukon potatoes-Farmer’s Choice | Alaskan Spaghetti squash or from Outside certified organic butternut | Alaskan carrots |
• From Outside: certified organic Fancy Fuji apples | certified organic large navel oranges | certified organic kumquats | certified organic romaine lettuce | certified organic Rainbow chard | certified organic sunchokes | certified organic broccoli | certified organic Butternut squash or Alaskan Spaghetti squash-Farmer’s Choice

Yum. Mat-Su carrots are the best.  I’m not as thrilled about the squash — I’ve never liked squash — but Sylvia likes it, so it’s all good.

Already, having eaten just two meals from my first produce box, I feel that same sense of fulfillment that I  get from farmer’s market food in the summertime.  It’s partly because Alaska-grown food is so good. As Arthur Keyes writes:

Alaskan agriculture is the pinnacle of quality and cleanliness. Alaskan carrots have three times the sugar content of the carrots that are being shipped up here, and you can taste the difference! Alaska’s water is pure and our soils are clean. We lack the vast majority of pests that our southern neighbors deal with on a regular basis.

But it’s also that it feels good to support local business & local farmers — contributing to their success, just as their food is contributing to mine.  It feels altogether different from buying & eating some kind of boxed food-like product manufactured by some megacorporation, or even getting from buying produce from Carrs or Fred Meyer or even the Natural Pantry, where I don’t have any real sense of connection with the people who grew it.  When you buy & eat local, you really are forming a connection and a sort of gift exchange with other people in your community, which is good for our health politically, economically, & spiritually too.

And I’ve gotta say that after last summer’s import of people from Wasilla to testify against equal rights in Anchorage, it’s awfully nice to enjoy & celebrate the real goodness & bounty that is native to the Mat-Su.

Thank you, farmers of Mat-Su.  You rock!

Related posts:

1. Partial locavore
2. A box of produce, & homemade sauerkraut
3. The Daily Tweets, 2010-02-24: Local produce is better than government by corporation

… 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