04.18.2016
After an intense, creative and utterly exhausting weekend volunteering at a leather conference, I find myself thinking about love and the language(s) of loving. Thinking in this case about falling into a different sort of love, with someone you already say I love you too. Thinking of all the various ways of love and loving that I feel towards my various intimate play, sexual, relationship and family partners. This weekend I told a dear boy that I love them, after realizing that 8 years of play might make it safe enough to say it back.
Conversely I risked the chance of rejection of naming the desire to say these words to a friend, who said I love you first, but shifted language in the face of growing and branching feelings between us. Pondering this again, excited to see what comes out of this beginning...
After an intense, creative and utterly exhausting weekend volunteering at a leather conference, I find myself thinking about love and the language(s) of loving. Thinking in this case about falling into a different sort of love, with someone you already say I love you too. Thinking of all the various ways of love and loving that I feel towards my various intimate play, sexual, relationship and family partners. This weekend I told a dear boy that I love them, after realizing that 8 years of play might make it safe enough to say it back.
Conversely I risked the chance of rejection of naming the desire to say these words to a friend, who said I love you first, but shifted language in the face of growing and branching feelings between us. Pondering this again, excited to see what comes out of this beginning...
04.06.2016
Thinking today about micro-exhaustions. All the seemingly small obstacles and difficulties that add up to gross inaccess for diff abled people. Currently feeling flooded with a storm of micro- aggressions and exhaustions. Feeling daunted, and struggling to feel accomplished despite working my butt off this week and last at work, home, and in volunteer position. Finding this reframe helpful in the moment... Now back to work.
Thinking today about micro-exhaustions. All the seemingly small obstacles and difficulties that add up to gross inaccess for diff abled people. Currently feeling flooded with a storm of micro- aggressions and exhaustions. Feeling daunted, and struggling to feel accomplished despite working my butt off this week and last at work, home, and in volunteer position. Finding this reframe helpful in the moment... Now back to work.
02.27.16
Not Lazy
I find myself coming repeatedly up against the wall of my childhood understanding of laziness. At this point in my disabled body I find myself uneasy, not restful, more often painful. People treat the word lazy as if there could be some magical way to rest without discomfort, without displacing the things that always need to be done. I sit uneasy, dis-eased in ways that leave me wishing for rest after 12 hours in bed.
I recently attended a retreat with a dozen other people who are struggling in some ways with loving, with inhabiting, with embodying our bodies. What came up for me was not all the other issues that relate to my disability, not being fat, or trans, or the struggles I’ve had with feeling worthy of attraction and touch, not all of the things that I thought that I would be looking at in the course of a long weekend with a trusted person holding the reins.
No. What I wound up looking at was my inner eight-year-old child faced with too much to do every day, and someone to blame me for everything I couldn't get done. Waking up early to make lunch and breakfast and often dinner for my mother who worked 12 hours a day, and wouldn't be home until 8 PM. Looking back, I can say that it’s too much for 9 year old children to be responsible for running a house. Too much to be trying to stay awake in school after waking before dawn, and too much to be left alone 6 hours a night after running the gauntlet of bullies that lay between my school and home. And yet, I find myself again looking at how I still hold myself to these impossible expectations, at how I blame and harm myself in the wake of those experiences. Because, like most children, I took it all in. I internalize not only my mother's derision, but also the untenable expectation that we can never, ever, stop working.
My mother's work ethic was phenomenal. She worked 60 hour weeks in the rain and snow. She came home and spend whatever time she could on weekends trying to hold together our beat up house with spit and glue.
She worked longer hours than any of the men she worked alongside, adding weekends, picking up hours wherever she could to make ends meet. And in the end it was never enough. Her money management skills were mostly lacking. Living a life of impoverishment means spending it all sometimes, spending it all every time because you know that you can't count on the next paycheck.
So now I am this theoretically fully grown adult, who finds deep discomfort in class and privilege, and particularly in the idea, the entire concept, and especially the experience of recieving entitlements.
I made it through my graduate program and the successive seven years of work skating the line between safe and unsafe. I survived five anesthetized surgeries, two new diagnoses, and I worked until my life fell completely apart. I worked until I literally couldn't see straight to drive home anymore. I worked until I couldn't stand it, until it was so unbearable that I let go of the tenuous grasp of being employed. Let go of the dubious cachet of being a fully employed disabled person.
I'd like to say that I spent the last year devoted to self-care and healing. But I've spent months literally months of the last year and a half mostly in bed. I've been sick more often then I've been well. I've spent days that stretched and compounded into months of my time and energy fighting for basic supports to allow me to survive without regular work. I've held onto my small private practice with a death grip honed by decades of terror, and the desire to spend 10 hours a week thinking about somebody else. It's such a grace to have that time to step out of my own life, to stop feeling ungraceful, unworthy, disabled, and always, hauntingly lazy. To have a place where I feel competent, supportive, graceful even in the support of other’s growth and healing.
I've worked on this lazy thing before, but I've never gotten traction, despite a decade spent on disability, spent on my back, spent fighting tooth and nail for access, and for the ability to use my brain for money. I wish I could just tell myself to stop calling myself lazy. But it's so ingrained that it comes out every time I lie in bed An extra hour no Bauder how hard the fatigue is dragging me towards the earth.
It's 11:30 on a Saturday morning, and I have so many things to do, and nothing that my body will cooperate with today. But this isn't a lazy Saturday morning. This is me three hours after my breakfast time still unfed. This is me living on Facebook today because I just can't imagine living out in the beautiful world. The sun is shining in and my bones are aching, literally, inside my skin.
And the story of my laziness continues. Even when it doesn't come from all the external sources that tell me, if you can walk at all, you should walk, you have to walk because anything else will leave you impossibly alone. I tax myself with the burdens of shoulds and coulds and ought to have done....
Not Lazy
I find myself coming repeatedly up against the wall of my childhood understanding of laziness. At this point in my disabled body I find myself uneasy, not restful, more often painful. People treat the word lazy as if there could be some magical way to rest without discomfort, without displacing the things that always need to be done. I sit uneasy, dis-eased in ways that leave me wishing for rest after 12 hours in bed.
I recently attended a retreat with a dozen other people who are struggling in some ways with loving, with inhabiting, with embodying our bodies. What came up for me was not all the other issues that relate to my disability, not being fat, or trans, or the struggles I’ve had with feeling worthy of attraction and touch, not all of the things that I thought that I would be looking at in the course of a long weekend with a trusted person holding the reins.
No. What I wound up looking at was my inner eight-year-old child faced with too much to do every day, and someone to blame me for everything I couldn't get done. Waking up early to make lunch and breakfast and often dinner for my mother who worked 12 hours a day, and wouldn't be home until 8 PM. Looking back, I can say that it’s too much for 9 year old children to be responsible for running a house. Too much to be trying to stay awake in school after waking before dawn, and too much to be left alone 6 hours a night after running the gauntlet of bullies that lay between my school and home. And yet, I find myself again looking at how I still hold myself to these impossible expectations, at how I blame and harm myself in the wake of those experiences. Because, like most children, I took it all in. I internalize not only my mother's derision, but also the untenable expectation that we can never, ever, stop working.
My mother's work ethic was phenomenal. She worked 60 hour weeks in the rain and snow. She came home and spend whatever time she could on weekends trying to hold together our beat up house with spit and glue.
She worked longer hours than any of the men she worked alongside, adding weekends, picking up hours wherever she could to make ends meet. And in the end it was never enough. Her money management skills were mostly lacking. Living a life of impoverishment means spending it all sometimes, spending it all every time because you know that you can't count on the next paycheck.
So now I am this theoretically fully grown adult, who finds deep discomfort in class and privilege, and particularly in the idea, the entire concept, and especially the experience of recieving entitlements.
I made it through my graduate program and the successive seven years of work skating the line between safe and unsafe. I survived five anesthetized surgeries, two new diagnoses, and I worked until my life fell completely apart. I worked until I literally couldn't see straight to drive home anymore. I worked until I couldn't stand it, until it was so unbearable that I let go of the tenuous grasp of being employed. Let go of the dubious cachet of being a fully employed disabled person.
I'd like to say that I spent the last year devoted to self-care and healing. But I've spent months literally months of the last year and a half mostly in bed. I've been sick more often then I've been well. I've spent days that stretched and compounded into months of my time and energy fighting for basic supports to allow me to survive without regular work. I've held onto my small private practice with a death grip honed by decades of terror, and the desire to spend 10 hours a week thinking about somebody else. It's such a grace to have that time to step out of my own life, to stop feeling ungraceful, unworthy, disabled, and always, hauntingly lazy. To have a place where I feel competent, supportive, graceful even in the support of other’s growth and healing.
I've worked on this lazy thing before, but I've never gotten traction, despite a decade spent on disability, spent on my back, spent fighting tooth and nail for access, and for the ability to use my brain for money. I wish I could just tell myself to stop calling myself lazy. But it's so ingrained that it comes out every time I lie in bed An extra hour no Bauder how hard the fatigue is dragging me towards the earth.
It's 11:30 on a Saturday morning, and I have so many things to do, and nothing that my body will cooperate with today. But this isn't a lazy Saturday morning. This is me three hours after my breakfast time still unfed. This is me living on Facebook today because I just can't imagine living out in the beautiful world. The sun is shining in and my bones are aching, literally, inside my skin.
And the story of my laziness continues. Even when it doesn't come from all the external sources that tell me, if you can walk at all, you should walk, you have to walk because anything else will leave you impossibly alone. I tax myself with the burdens of shoulds and coulds and ought to have done....