Adventures du jour!
As per usual after a big trauma barf, stuff shook out. This was a very thinky day.
Yesterday: Talked to a friend with a black sense of humor. I think she was worried about unleashing it on me; it’s been a while since we talked. By the time we were done talking I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes.
I felt refreshed and I think she did, too.
This morning: I got up and Ray had decorated the apartment with orange and black streamers and other decorations. Admittedly, our apartment is a bit of a year-round Halloween festival, but it was a delight, a counterweight to an Easter-morning surprise.
Later, we went out for mediocre Japanese food and picked up groceries, came back and discovered that the power was being stable enough to hazard a round of Left4Dead. Many zombies were killed (1,667 if I remember correctly).
Now I’m listening to Halloween/spooky songs that people have been recommending me, and it’s wonderful. No trick or treaters so far. I’m not sure whether we’ll get any.
I’ve been rolling Halloween Midjourney prompts yesterday and today for those as want them, with lots of dark and/or perverse delights. MJ *adores* one particular prompt with “eldritch candy” that Melissa Dias suggested; I’m naming her because she commented it publicly. I rolled more of that today with additions of “teeth” and some with “teeth, cute.” Just wonderful.
Yoga: my feet hurt less this morning but still need some help. After the big trauma barf, it felt like I was moving into a body that wasn’t quite mine. This is pretty normal for me; every time something big changes in my head I feel like some essential part of me died and got smoothly restarted with a slightly different nervous system (like a game character on a new life). It’s probably just the uncanny sensation of having nerves developing slightly different pathways, the sort of thing you wouldn’t notice unless you were paying attention. It’s Kris & Dean’s classes that taught me how to recognize it; they force you to confront the sensation of being completely fucking wrong on a regular basis, and the fastest way for me to cope is to grieve as if death were involved.
Hips: stiff. Calves: still tight but not as bad as usual. Solar plexus: tight but releasable. Chest: nicely lengthened. Neck: big knot released. Head: achy but fluid in muscle adjustments.
Walk: I had to wear soooocks again. WAHHHHH. Lots of thoughts.
Pics: I took another tripod shot today, or, rather, I took a ton of them and hated them all, but made myself pick one and post it. I did NOT want to see myself. I survived learning how to take head-shot selfies. I’ll learn this, too. Stuff that you feel confident about can’t be used against you.
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Okay, brain dump! What follows is next door to a rant, mostly me sorting out thoughts about being programmed as a kid to take a particular social role. Maybe useful if you’re struggling with a religious background that went dark or a feminine background that went dark. But who knows.
…
I’ve been trying to sort out what was done to me to make me some sort of obedient wife/manic pixie dream girl, what tools I therefore have, and what I might do with it. (And presumably what other people might do with theirs.) I kinda knew that religion was part of it, but it’s probably bigger than I’d realized.
I live in a spiritually alive world. I’m not sure how to explain it; I can’t say that I believe that everything has a spirit, but it sure feels that way. What do I even mean when I call something “spiritual”? I have no idea. Probably because a lot of the stuff related to it got planted in me at a very early age, it’s very difficult to question any of it. I feel like I should resent it, but ehhhhh. I can resent having been meddled with, but still take what was done and run with it full speed, for my own purposes. I hope for my own purposes.
Anyway, I think a lot of what I experience as spiritual comes from learning nervous system management techniques. I grew up Catholic. We spent a lot of time kneeling, praying, and spacing out during Mass. Singing. Repeating chanted prayers on a rosary.
This meant I learned how to control boredom, release my imagination to flights of fancy that were supposed to be directed toward God, accept the idea of rebirth/death on a spiritual level (and on a regular basis), accept the idea that my body was a container for spiritual energy, and that flesh could be transmuted into spirit (via the Eucharist). I learned that nothing is really real, but a creation of God’s mind, and that it might, at any second, burst like a bubble–although God has supposedly promised otherwise.
Outside of religion per se, as a girl I was taught to repress physical pain, discomfort, emotion, facial expression, body language, desire (even desire for things like food/drink), individuality, etc. I was taught to monitor my body at all times. If I wasn’t poised enough to balance a book on my head, I was actively rebelling. (I slouched.) If I expressed anything other than proper behavior, I was sinning and it was okay to hurt me. My knees had to be together; my brother’s didn’t.
–I think boys are taught other things. Re: pain, I think boys are generally taught to withstand violence but not pain per se, partially because being able to tolerate pain means that you’re more likely to escalate violence to levels of maiming and killing people on a regular basis, and you really don’t need that while you’re just roughhousing around.–
Another set of tools I was taught is related to my mom’s strengths and her inability to accept herself. For example, I was taught stubbornness because she couldn’t tolerate the idea that she herself was stubborn, and if *I* could be identified as the stubborn one, I could be screamed at. I was taught how to tell anecdotes, make witty banter, assess people quickly, find points of persuasion, translate between different points of view, etc. When she was in a good mood, I had no talents other than what she’d given me; when she was in a bad mood, I was everything she hated about herself: stubborn, manipulative, intelligent, shallow, evil.
I also have tools that I think are inherent to me as an individual. I’m intelligent; I’m flexible enough of mind to be wrong relatively quickly; I can extrapolate quickly and thoroughly; my nervous system attunes itself quickly to its surroundings and adjusts my behavior very quickly and intuitively to complex stimuli. The “Jack of all Trades” stuff I can do is mine, I think, as is anything related to daydreaming.
Combine all that and I’m pretty useful to a Catholic community. For a while I wanted to either have twelve kids or become a nun. Either of these were fine with my parents and my wider family. I had the tools needed for either. I just didn’t have the tools I needed for pretty much anything else, like being an independent adult.
I used to joke that I trained to become a Bene Gesserit from Dune, either a breeding mother or a witch/nun (have me use the “mom voice” on you sometime if you want a moment of pucker). I have a lot of the same skillsets. The thing was, though, that I was expected to turn all of that off unless it was used for my spouse or family.
What it comes to, though, is that I usually feel like I live in a world that feels alive. I talk to inanimate objects; I personify them; I have discussions with my characters as people who are separate from their roles in the story (I mean, that’s new but I don’t intend to stop); I carry a lucky charm (mostly as a reminder of what I value, but it’s also a lucky charm); I find most music ecstatic and divine; I find myself embracing taking pictures as a form of love for the stuff I see; I take in what’s around me and try to contain and integrate it.
Intellectually, I accept that none of the living world I feel is literally true. But practically speaking, these tools help me write books as well as make art, build relationships, ease hurt, endure discomfort. And I’m okay with two conflicting frames of reference both being useful, if not necessarily true.–Another Catholic thing, I suspect.