NaPoWriMo 2020 Day 18 + April PAD Challenge 2020 Day 18: The Happiest Days of our Lives

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Saturdays of youth

a precarious respite

a week of struggle

hearing messages of hate

that stuck forever with me

~cie~

NaPoWriMo: Write an ode to Saturdays

April PAD Challenge: Write a message poem

It's time to stop behaving as if the scars on the inside are trivial.

NaPoWriMo 2020 Catch-Up Day 10 + April PAD Challenge 2020 Catch-Up Day 10: The Word That Destroys

you

say it's

just a word

but

it's a 

word that destroys

you

don't need

to say it

what

do you

gain from it

keep

your hateful

thoughts to yourself

just

maybe the

problem is you

~cie~

NaPoWriMo: Write a Hay(na)ku

April PAD Challenge: Write a the (blank) that (blanked) poem. 

Senryu: The Color Of...

Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

something unwanted

the color of blood on cloth

in the dark of night

~cie~

notes

I recently wrote about an event that happened closing in on 40 years ago that was more of a turning point than even I realized until I started writing about it. You can read the piece here.

Senryu: Two Hearts

Image by Goran Horvat from Pixabay

do hearts beat as one

does a broken soul get crushed

beneath brutal will

~cie~

Carpe Diem New Beginnings: Reincarnation Wave

shrouded memories

wash to the shore like a wave

lives unremembered

shrouded memories

creeping up from the dark past

preying on my mind

wash to the shore like a wave

I wish I could float away

forgetting this strife

lives unremembered

hiding in my troubled mind

preparing to spring

~cie~

notes

We were given two Haiku by Jane Reichhold (1937 - 2016) with which to create a "fusion-ku," and from there, to create a Troiku. Here are Jane's Haiku. My "sleigh" is a Senryu rather than a Haiku, but so it goes.

a huge wave

thundering across the beach

my birthday

sky-clad

the new-born comes wrapped

in previous lives

NaPoWriMo 2019: Day 4: Unwanted Girl

Image by lisa runnels from Pixabay

Will you ever leave

Me alone you damn

Stupid girl who I

Once happened to be

Why won't you be gone?

Why must you come

Back into my

Psyche why don't

You remain dead

Little girl

Zombie girl

Girl I was

Why don't 

You stay

Gone

~Cie~

Notes:

The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a sad poem.

Come on, y'all, that isn't even a challenge! I write two kinds of poems: dark and silly.

The form I used is a diminishing hexagram.

I really wish I'd done the A to Z challenge on this blog this year because I'm crushing it!

Oh, one more thing.

The effects of abuse and bullying last a lifetime.

I learned to hate myself long ago.

I still have trouble tolerating myself, still hear the cruel words admonishing me that I'm ugly, stupid, unwanted, and will never amount to anything.

It isn't like I'm eighteen and just out of school.

I'm fifty-four and the setbacks I've had during the past few years only reinforce the belief that I am nothing.

Diet Culture or Food Insecurity

Hey, Kids! Let's play a little game that I call "Diet Culture or Food Insecurity." Are you ready?

Around noon while injecting my long-acting insulin, I said to myself: "Self, I think it would be good to have some lunch." 

My Self replied: "Do we really need lunch, though? If we just have some nice iced black coffee with a bit of non-dairy creamer, that might stave off the hunger for a while. After all, we can't just go and eat whenever we like, now can we?"

So, is this something I said to myself because of food insecurity, or am I on a diet?

The answer has been both at different times in my life.

Today, it's because I'm food insecure. I ditched diet culture eight years ago. I can't say I've never looked back. I can't say that I never had nagging doubts that if I just tried to diet one more time this would be the time that would take and I would finally be thin and pretty and the Handsome Prince (TM) would ride in on his white horse and fall in love with me and I would live Happily Ever After (TM). 

Gee, that sounds like an abusive relationship or addiction, doesn't it? Abusive relationships and addiction aren't healthy. So, since diet culture puts people in the same mindset as addiction and abusive relationships, why are so-called medical professionals always touting it as "healthy?" Things that are genuinely good for you do not involve gaslighting yourself.

In the past, I placated myself using pretty much the same words I did today in the name of diet culture, although the words I used in the past were more abusive. It generally went a little bit something like this:

"Oh, you want to eat again, huh? Of course you want to eat again, you fat pig! You're always thinking of food! How do you think you're ever going to get a boyfriend if you're always stuffing your fat face? Do you really need lunch? How about doing what the models do and just having a cup of black coffee? You can put a little non-dairy creamer in it if you really must. Maybe that will stave off the hunger for a while."

Yeah--that sounds really healthy, doesn't it?"

Both food insecurity and dieting invoke a starvation response. This is why people who are dieting find themselves thinking about food all the time. A steady diet of nothing but protein shakes and expensive "meal replacement" bars and fucking boiled chicken with fucking steamed veggies and fucking rice for dinner will do that to you. 

Or maybe you could try the cabbage soup diet. Eat as much cabbage soup as you want, but be sure to strain the good bits out so all you have is a cup of fucking broth. This one might help you lose some water weight during the first two weeks, then it will stop working. Your chances of luring a Handsome Prince (TM) with the cabbage soup diet will be somewhat reduced because you'll be farting a lot. His hounds might think you smell interesting, though.

Perpetual dieting only benefits the multi-billion dollar diet industry.

It's time to stop the fucking madness.

~Cie~

On Porn: The Blinders are Off

Image copyright 123rf.com

TRIGGER WARNING:

SEXUAL ASSAULT

PORNOGRAPHY

SELF-INJURY

The short version is a response to a post on Alternet about the summer's most popular porn.

Reading this turned me off rather than on. 

Porn is utterly unrealistic, and yet it's what people have come to expect sex is like. It harms rather than helps relationships. Yet we as a society glorify it.

A lot of people think of porn as just people being filmed having sex. You've got your guy-girl porn, your girl-girl porn, your guy-guy porn, and your group sex. If it's consenting adults, no big deal, right?

If it were just consenting adults having sex, it would be no big deal and would, in fact, be kind of boring. If you're not the one having sex, sex looks kind of silly.

Once on the Howard Stern show, Howard asked one of my favorite people, Angus Young, how much porn he watched. Angus replied: "I don't get off on watching butts bouncing up and down, especially not hairy man butts."

Angus may not be aware of just how much more disturbing than butts bouncing up and down porn can be. Hopefully he never finds out. I use his statement to illustrate that for the uninitiated, "butts bouncing up and down" tends to be what they think porn is. Thus, they can't understand the argument that porn is harmful, and view those making said argument as pearl-clutching fuddy-duddies.

For many years I had myself convinced that porn was okay and that I was being closed-minded in my knee-jerk reaction that it really wasn't okay and was exploitative of women. 

I also had a complicated relationship with porn, because my own past abuses led me to be simultaneously aroused and disgusted by humiliating fantasies. Part of me believed that I deserved to be hurt and humiliated. While I would never have sought it out in real life, I would spend entire days sometimes watching scenarios in which one person was the target of sexualized demeaning acts.

Back in 1997, I was involved with a very bad guy. He was looking for a victim, and he found a perfect one in the thirty-two year old me, with her untreated mental illness and terrible self esteem.

I had a history of two full-on sexual assaults, and most of my sexual experiences had been coercive. I was molested when I was very young. I was everything a guy like this abusive misogynist could want.

It started out with regular porn, and then he started bringing in worse stuff. At first it was scat, then it moved to bestiality. When I got upset, he laughed at me and threatened to withdraw his "love" from me if I left. 

If you're saying that anyone with any sense would have left, you're partly right. My sense was telling me that I needed to get away from him. My butchered self-esteem told me that I was throwing away "love." I was so desperate to have someone care for me that I put up with this abuse.

My boyfriend started flaunting his other conquests in front of me, and when I got upset he told me that men were incapable of being monogamous, and I needed to understand that. He made me kiss his feet.

At one point I showed up at his house at two in the morning with my wrists slashed, after having wandered about the neighborhood cutting myself repeatedly.

I finally mustered the courage to leave him for my son's sake rather than my own. I didn't care about myself. I thought I was garbage. I was still obsessed with him. It took months for me to fully realize what an absolute piece of crap he was and that nobody deserved to be subjected to his monstrous behavior.

It would be another seventeen years before I could break free of the cycle of psychologically abusing myself by watching demeaning pornography.

I'm going to keep this post in the material realm. One of these days I'll talk about how Gem helped me break free of my porn obsession.

Follow-up:

I should not be surprised that I had someone Mansplain to me that my argument was "completely invalid" because his experience with porn had been the opposite of what I described. Porn is totes realistic, you guys.

As we know, nothing will change a woman's mind quicker than Mansplaining. The poor dumb bitches don't know their own minds, after all.

Well, you've convinced me. Porn is wonderful and makes the world a beautiful place. It does not create unrealistic expectations about what sex is like, and it is never violent, demeaning or ugly. I will now return to my invalid existence, gleeful in the knowledge that at least I can always have porn.

~Cie~