Tackle It Tuesday + Inner Champion Workbook Chapter 3: Staying on Track

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In Chapter 3 of her autobiography, Lauren reveals how her tendency to jump into situations both feet first without thinking led to a detrimental lifestyle of nonstop partying and drugs. One day she woke up and realized that if she kept on the same path, she was going to die. She successfully went through a rehabilitation program and has been sober ever since.

I am often surprised that I didn't end up either an addict or dead. I have an addictive personality and a self-destructive streak six miles wide. Which, to hear some people talk, is approximately the same width as my ass. These people are incorrect. My ass is, in fact, seven miles wide.

Butt-related jokes aside, I am an adrenaline junkie at heart, but my body won't allow me to indulge my addiction. I also have very low self-esteem. The ravenous hunger for acceptance combined with an addiction to excitement led me into some bad situations in my youth.

When I was younger I was infamous for trying any substance that didn't need to be snorted or injected. It's a good thing that I have a strong aversion to things in my nose. As I discovered when I was in the hospital 25 years ago after having an emergency Cesarean section, I really, really, really like opiates. Not the kind you swallow, those make me nauseous as all fuck. Codeine makes me projectile vomit. But morphine coming through an I.V.? That's the shit! I knew I would be addicted quick if I had a steady supply of that, and I was pretty sure that I would have been addicted to cocaine with the first sniff if I had ever tried it. 

Cocaine has similar effects to drugs like morphine. Fortunately, crack wasn't a thing in the area where I lived back in the day, and the crowd I ran with was too plebian to have access to coke. Also, there was the aversion to putting things in my nose. Much though I liked alcohol (and I liked it a lot), I never became addicted although I was a very heavy drinker and hard partier well into my thirties. I stopped drinking when I got pregnant but picked it back up once I was done nursing.

And now you know that part of my story.

Here are today's Inner Champion Workbook questions:

Wrong direction/action:

Equating excitement with happiness and lust with love. I partied hard and allowed guys who didn't care about me to take a piece of my heart in the hopes that if I was good to them they'd fall in love with me. It doesn't work that way.

How it didn’t match my values or goals:

I was destroying my body and going against my belief that a person should have to earn my trust in order to obtain intimacy, especially that degree of intimacy. I was disrespecting myself and it was destroying not only my body but my will to live.

How I got myself back on track:

It didn't happen until I was finally diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder at nearly 40 years old. I was at last able to see a pattern in my behaviors. I learned about hypomania and hypersexuality. I was able to start treating the physical component of my condition and understanding some of my psychological motivations. 

It took me a while to heal the most important relationship in my life, the relationship with my son. I am forever sorry about the chaos my untreated illness and my lack of self-respect introduced into his life until he was 14 years old. It took a while for him to forgive me. When I think back on how broken our relationship was, it fills me with sadness.

Wrong direction/action:

I equate my value as a person with money or lack thereof.

How it doesn’t match my values or goals:

I know that money doesn't make the person. Case in point: the rich but rank shitgibbon who holds the title President of the United States. Or, in my case, Mr. Not My President. However, my family always equated wealth with personal worth, and that is something that has stuck with me on a very deep level. 

I do not personally believe that a person's wealth has anything to do with their personal worth. If they don't do anything worthwhile with their wealth, if they squander and flaunt it, they're nothing but a giant walking rhinestone-encrusted asshole. Yet although I don't believe that wealth reveals anything about a person's true value, I believe on a deeply ingrained level that my lack of it defines mine.

How I’m going to get myself back on track:

I don't really know. I'm going to keep striving both to improve my position in life and my own self-respect. That's really all I can do.

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Carpe Diem Little Ones: Sedoka: In the Mirror

Image by Michael Gaida from Pixabay

Face in the mirror

Painting its cheeks with color

While painting its heart with lies

Painted-on pretty

Never healed a single wound

I was lying to myself

~Cie~

Notes:

It's been said that I have body dysmorphic disorder. In any case, I have always thought myself shockingly, astoundingly, hideously ugly. I used to wear a lot of make-up. I haven't worn make-up in about 15 years because it causes my eczema to flare.

I think this society places far too much value on a very narrow definition of physical "beauty." We live in a world where hotness is the most desired attribute and lust is the most coveted sensation. I don't think this is healthy for either individuals or society as a whole.

The Cheese Grates It: The Effects of Bullying Last a Lifetime

A response to a post on "The Mighty."

I'm now almost 54 years old, but the bullying that I endured all through school still affects me to this day.  I have always felt that I was hideously ugly. If I'm completely analytical about my appearance, I'm actually fairly ordinary-looking, but when one lives in a society which has a very narrow view of beauty and constant bullying is added to that, one learns to loathe one's physical appearance. I honestly don't like it when people compliment me on anything because my initial thought is that they are just trying to get something out of me.

When I was in the third grade, I was sexually assaulted by two of my female classmates. I was too ashamed to say anything.  Later, a boy in that same class pinned me up against the wall and told me that he was going to kill me with his pocket knife. I wet my pants, and when I went to the school nurse, she laughed at me and told me that I was being silly. This boy was very popular, and he was never punished.

Throughout school, the bullying that I endured often had sexual overtones. There were horrible rumors that I would have sex with any boy who wanted it. In fact, I was so naive that I thought a "bl*w j*b" was blowing in someone's ear, and I wondered why anyone found that sexy.  Boys would often grab my breasts or buttocks. The adults never did anything about it. In one math class, the teacher was sitting right there while my classmates said things like "she plays with herself" and "she'd play with her t*ts if she had any." Up until I turned 18 and realized that my breasts tended to get in the way when I was doing things, I hated my "flat chest." I actually have rather average-sized breasts, not that anyone should be bullying someone with smaller than average breasts.

I have never enjoyed sex, but once I got into high school, I allowed my boyfriend to take my virginity. He dumped me after that, and I ended up in the mental hospital over the weekend with a slew of unkind doctors and nurses looking down their noses at me. One nurse even told me that I was a freak and I would never be normal. To this day, I'm proud of my sixteen-year-old self who told her: "better a freak than a b*tch like you." I don't know how I found the strength in me, but I stood up to those jerks, and I tried to be helpful to the other patients who were in there with me. My roommate was a woman in her 50's who was so severely anorexic that all her bones were showing. She had trouble voicing her needs, so I tried to be her voice.

Remembering these things makes tears of anger come to my eyes, but they won't last long because the message that crying is weak was so deeply internalized. I have a lot of trouble crying. I didn't cry after the deaths of some of my close relatives. I didn't cry when I had to have my beloved rescue cat put to sleep on his sixth birthday due to kidney failure. It's not that it didn't matter. I've never recovered from it. There's a gaping wound in my heart that will never be filled. I get accused of being cold and uncaring because I don't cry, but I simply can't. Crying was a weakness that my bullies would exploit, so I never let them see me cry.

I have major mental illnesses (type 2 bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder which manifests as hoarding objects, not animals.) Any coping skills I have with these diseases have been developed on my own. "Mental health professionals" have only tried to medicate me into normalcy even though I do not respond well to psych meds. They make me manic and psychotic. Family members offer wisdom like "just stop being like that," "just stop thinking like that," "just stop looking for attention," and "just act normal."

I have been completely unsuccessful in life, and, if it weren't for my son, the honest truth is that I would have been long gone. My life has been a series of loss and disappointments. With the psych conditions I have, it would have been an uphill battle anyway, but with the self-loathing I learned from being bullied all through school, the battle became impossible.  

When my diabetes worsened, I became unable to work the difficult jobs and long hours that I had always prided myself on being able to work. I am now living in poverty. If it weren't for my son, I'd be homeless. I do not have hope for things getting better.

Bullying destroys lives, but all I ever heard is that it was my fault that I was bullied, and if I would just "act normal" and "ignore it," I wouldn't "bring it on" myself.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

Not So Wordless Beautiful Wednesday: I Can't See Anything Beautiful In My Mirror

I wasn't a fat kid. I didn't actually become fat until I was an adult, but I feared becoming fat so much that I became bulimic when I was twelve. I also thought that I was fat because I wasn't stick skinny. I have the kind of hips and thighs that would never allow me to be perceived as thin, but I don't have the "rack" to match, so I would never be perceived as the coveted "curvy" body type either. 

However, I've been told I was ugly from a very young age. 

I've never been able to see myself as normal, let alone attractive in any way. I've always seen myself as hideous. It's led me to allow myself to be treated in absolutely wretched ways for the sake of a warped kind of "positive" attention.

At least I've learned enough self-respect that I tend to avoid the people who will use another person in that fashion now.

This was written in response to a post by Virgie Tovar.

http://www.ravishly.com/2017/01/12/take-cake-ugliness-myth

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

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~

Psychic Does Not Mean Omniscient

Copyright: schmetfad / 123RF Stock Photo

Once many years ago, I was given an opportunity to do Tarot readings at a nightclub. For the most part, the people who approached me were polite, and I have fond memories of one young fellow. He asked what he should do about a critical issue in his life, saying that he'd been pondering what action to take for a long time. 

I don't remember the exact cards I drew, but I immediately realized that he was considering coming out. The cards advised that there would be some strife regarding his decision, but in the long run it was the right decision and would bring him long term happiness, whereas if he kept the truth to himself, he would struggle more in the long term.

The young fellow was very happy with my advice. He squeezed my shoulder and thanked me with a big smile on his face. I will always remember this moment.

There was a young woman on that same night who came up to me and asked me where the bathroom was. I told her I didn't know.

"Well, how can you call yourself a psychic if you don't even know where the bathroom is?" she sneered.

"The cards don't tell me where the bathroom is. Such things are a waste of the spirits' time," I responded.

The lady for whom I was about to do a reading said "she's scared," as the young woman huffed off.

"I know," I replied. "A lot of people are. I wish they wouldn't be. I only want to help people."

I tell this story to illustrate an example of the way that many people think about those who identify as psychic. They erroneously believe that being psychic means being omniscient. It doesn't, any more than being a doctor or scientist means being infallible in your given field; or that a musician, artist or actor lacks talent because ze occasionally creates work that is not up to par. 

Sometimes even a psychic with a good track record is off the mark. Situations change dramatically not long after the reading, or they were simply having an off moment due to personal extenuating circumstances.

Sometimes a psychic is adept in one area but not so much in another area. For instance, I am good at reading Tarot cards, but I lack aptitude at scrying (i.e. using a crystal ball.) 

I am clairvoyant, but my clairvoyant abilities are better expressed when aided by a tool such as Tarot cards. 

I am clairsentient (otherwise known as empathic). I have the ability to sense the emotions of both incarnate and discarnate people. I am not always accurate where factual information about a person is concerned, as I tend to let my emotions and my imagination interfere, which is why I would never advertise my services as a spirit medium. 

I also want to believe the best about people in spite of the fact that I have been fucked over six ways to Sunday more times than I care to admit because of my unfortunate tendency to ignore red flags and to believe that someone taking offense at my perceived standoffishness is more important than protecting myself. My low self esteem is my downfall on many levels.

I say this as much for my own benefit as for anyone else's. When you are off the mark with regards to your psychic abilities, assess the situation. In what way were you off the mark? What else was going on at the time? Learn from the situation rather than beating yourself up or believing those folks who feel that if you can't guide them to the nearest toilet on demand, you're obviously not psychic.

~Cie~