So, early this morning I was incited to post this on my Facebook after seeing the newest ridiculous "Everyday Collection" ads from Target:

Dear Target,

Unless you are trying to market adult-sized diapers to infantilists, trying to market diapers and wipes with "sexy" is not appropriate. In fact, it's just fracking stupid. Please stop with the dumb "sexified" Everyday Collection commercials. Do you think women are so stupid that they will believe shopping at Target for items for baking and baby butt diapering will make them sexy? Really? Just stop it.

Share and like if you agree!

If you're not familiar with these ads, they are shot on an all white background. They feature women in really tight and/or short and revealing clothing who are wearing pretty much way too bright make-up. They have these women using overly fierce/sexual expressions and body language as a voice-over tries to convince us that baking cakes and "defeating" other moms in the school bake sale is empowering and oh-so sexy as the penis representing pillars the model walks between ejaculate colored glitter because she's such a hot MILF with her cleavage and short skirt. The latest two show a 1) model in very short shorts from various angles climbing an impossibly tall and odd-angled ladder to change a light bulb and reminds us to "Remember: righty tighty, lefty loosie" and 2) a model in the ever-present cowgirl fantasy garb (all white) with little girl braids kneeling on the floor and wrangling babies as she sexily diapers their butts, bouncing and jiggling like she's on one of those mechanical bull rides (hence the mention of diapers and infantilists).

So, my post didn't get very much response. Things that I post like that rarely do, which honestly worries me. But this one in particular got this response from someone who subscribes to my feed:

I actually really like those commercials. They are funny, and have good meta messages.

Okay, maybe I'm just really not like other women. I admit it, I'm not very girly or feminine. I've never been the kind of female who gets all swoony dreaming of the knight in shining armor and the fairytale wedding BS. I grew up in far too rough a life to believe in any of that nonsense. But it boggles my mind (and disturbs me a little) when I post about disliking these ads and a female friend says something like that quote above.  Am I missing something? Or are women today just that programmed to mindlessly accept that they have to strive to achieve the unrealistic fictional version of femininity, to turn a blind eye when advertisers are basically telling them "Hey, we think this little of your intelligence." and the rest of the world continues to tell us "You have only one thing of value: your sex"? Has the majority of females in  the world just given up and stopped noticing these messages veiled as supposed "humor"? What the hell are these perceived "good meta messages"? Apparently, I'm not receiving them....

My ADHD does useful things... sometimes

**Just some fluff after an arduous week following Hurricane Sandy and before another possibly rough road from a nor'easter about to pounce us. *groan* I sure hope we aren't about to be without heat and buried under a bunch of snow. It was bad enough going through that without the piles of really wet snow. I'll go bonkers. :-( **

So, I just came back from the Dark Ages which is being without power for just over a week due to Hurricane Sandy. Yes, I am positively GIDDY to have heat, a working stove, the TV, the internet (and the friends it connects me to) back. You never realize how much all this tech runs your life until it's gone for days on end. So, YAAAAAAY!

Right before this all happened, I had mentioned on Facebook that I was going to do some Turks over on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service so I could save up the credit to get myself a Kindle Fire to enable more choices with the NJ online library books. Well, it happened that fellow artist, Brandy Stark, had a Kindle Fire which had met with the destructive forces which can sometimes be generated in a house full of pugs. Seems the kids had managed to knock it from a table, crack the screen and nibble at the power cord a bit. None of it was enough to keep it from functioning. She offered me a wonderfully cheap price. I was more than happy to be her excuse to upgrade herself to a Kindle Fire HD. LOL

Originally, I had planned to have her wait until AFTER things got to rights after Hurricane Sandy, but the message got to her after she'd sent it already.  The mail was back up and running amazingly fast after the storm and the Kindle, to my utter shock, got to me pretty much on schedule. It proved to be a good thing, actually. See, without power, my poor ADHD riddled brain has nothing to DO once the necessary and still doable manual labor tasks are done. Bless her, Brandy had sent it fully charged which allowed me to do a little training in how to operate it and read the manual on it. I couldn't load anything, but it still gave me things to mess with. Not long after I started fooling with it, I realized I had nothing to carry it in at all. Not good. It really needs some manner of protection to keep it from getting all scratched up.

So, I started poking around at some random things in my room and thought, "Hmmmmm. Surely I can figure something out." And I did. I gathered up mat backing board, grey duct tape, an old boot lace, a slider from a broken camp chair bag closure, a wrist strap from an accessory pack for my Sansa MP3 player, a stapler, a pen knife and a pair of scissors. This is the result:


Ugly, yet functional. LOL And it'll serve until I can go do some Turk jobs to get an accessory pack for the Kindle with a case, screen protector and stylus. :-D

Why would anyone?

Wow. I forgot I had been working on this. I suppose I should thank a certain all caps using child  for drawing my attention momentarily  back to my blog. I've been too busy dealing with health issues and PITA crashing computers and lack of artistic inspiration to muck about in the past much lately.

Looking through the posters and stories over on Project Unbreakable really drove home the fact that far too many people are told "No one will believe you." And far too many say it was true, too. Why? First, I don't understand why  there are stupid people who are so desperate for any attention or want to hurt someone so badly that they would falsely accuse someone of rape. Let's face it, sexual assault (especially against a child) is THE worst thing you can accuse someone of. Even murderers will go out of their way to torture a pedophile or spouse abuser in prison. Murder at least CAN sometimes be "justified", after all.  You have to be severely fucked in the head to cry rape to "get back at" someone. You have to be a total vindictive asshole to want to ruin someone's life so completely because you feel slighted in some way. Mature people learn to walk away and get over things rather than deciding to become a wrecking ball aimed at someone's life by falsely accusing them of things.

Second, I don't understand why "They're lying" or "Maybe if you didn't (insert action), it wouldn't have happened." would be anyone's first reaction. So many of the victims over there said that their FRIENDS didn't believe them or said "I thought you wanted it." Far too many of them were raped by people who claimed to be their "best friend", usually but not always a male. What the hell, people? So you think your friends and family members WANT the kind of shame/blame shit sexual assault victims are going through?? Why would a doctor administering a rape kit say something so stupid as "Are you SURE you were raped? You don't seem to have much bruising."??  Does it not occur to people that someone who has been told they'll be killed might be AFRAID and unable to move or resist? Yeah, a rape victim so enjoys the "attention" of having a speculum rammed up inside an already sore vagina, snapped wide open (usually PINCHING because you bloody men have no fucking clue how sensitive that area is *scowl*) and having swabs rammed up there in the hopes the rapist actually left some evidence. Oh, and then there's the humiliating "attention" of having photos taken of your injuries. Sounds delightful, doesn't it:?

I have a lot of respect for the women who take a rapist off the street by going to the ER IMMEDIATELY and reporting it. Waiting for even just days runs the risk of prosecuting someone with no evidence and I'm not real fond of the idea of prosecuting someone on words alone. A persuasive enough person can call together a horde of "witnesses" who will say whatever they want them to. Without some sort of evidence, I can't say it's right to lock someone up. We have legal process for a reason and that is why it's important for  a woman to be brave and keep it from happening to another. I've got friends on both sides of this fence, either raped/molested and gone without justice or falsely accused.  So I kind of have a rather unique perspective. I AM one of those who were molested and never got justice. The bastard died peacefully in his sleep so I didn't even get the vengeance of him suffering in death. Kind of lame, really. But would I have tried to take him into court with nothing but my own words? No. Especially not when I was the only one at the time who willingly spoke of it. No. I would have recognized the futility of that option and just kept up our little war of occasionally bitch slapping each other to acknowledge he was, indeed, still a scum sucking piece of shit and I was not, with no exceptions, going to ever allow him to molest me or my nieces again.

I  know I sure as hell didn't "want attention" when I was 12 and trying to suss out with my siblings what the hell all of the crap I suddenly had crashing down on me was about. I mean, when you fall to your knees because you all of a sudden have back all those blank spots in your childhood memories and they are horrifying, the very last thing going through your head is "Oh, boy! Everyone is going to be paying attention to me!" In fact, that NEVER went through my head at all. What when through my head was "Why did my brothers keep running off and leaving me there by myself with him?" "How much did he do to the other girls before I caught him at it and stopped him?" "Could I have stopped him sooner if I'd been more brave and told Mom?" So many other painful and confusing thoughts hit me. Having people pay attention to me abecause my sperm donor was an evil, abusive piece of shit was definitely NOT something I wanted.

I definitely didn't want the feeling of needing to protect everyone for the rest of my life, either. Do you have any clue how fucking exhausting it is to always be on guard, trying to keep the "bad people" from hurting the innocents of the world? I have to stop, examine and make a call any time I see anything remotely messed up. Do I get involved or am I just being paranoid because of my life experience? What if I blow and off and it turns out I was right, but I did nothing? What if that mother goes home and drowns that kid or beats it to death? It makes me responsible for that, doesn't it? Intellectually, I know it doesn't. Sure. But tell my psyche that. It's something I have to deal with every day.

In my experience, I've seen what I call Defender types and Victim types, an odd sort that's a blend of those and  the Outright Denier among abuse survivors.

Defenders usually spawn from abuse survivors who started to fight against their abuser while still stuck with them. They're the older siblings who stand between their abuser and the little kids. They are the ones who fight every inch of the way, giving the abuser nothing freely and causing as much damage as possible in the process. What fuels them is not really quantifyable as anything other than sheer will. Defender types have that "protector" mentality like I do. Often they're tough and armored outside and a mess inside like me, too. They can be a dangerous foe in combat because they will do whatever it takes to stop harm from coming to an innocent, even if it means they die instead. It's hard wired and as difficult to control as a wolf's prey and territory drives. It's how we raise ourselves up from what happened to us. We pull ourselves out of our suffering by saving others from similar fates. It's the only way we see to make what happened to us MEAN something other than nasty evil stuff. We OWN it, USE it to give others protection and strength that maybe we didn't have when we were abused. It's how we manage to keep on keeping on. This type, if they finally get free of their abuser generally NEVER allow anyone to do that to them again. People who try find themselves kicked to the curb like my ex husband and one of my ex boyfriends. My philosophy is "I didn't put up with that shit from my daddy and I sure as fuck won't put up with it from any other man."

The Victim type is one I have a LOT of trouble understanding. They're like a loyal to a fault puppy who will keep crawling back to lick the very boots that kicked them. Sometimes it's not because they're just that submissive. Sometimes it's because their own psyche deludes them into forgetting they were kicked in the first place. Or, perhaps, it deludes them into thinking the abuse is how love is expressed. Even if they manage to get away from the one who initially abuses them, they tend to end up right back into circumstances which allow another predator to put them right back into the abuse cycle. Sometimes it's a conscious thing because they're seeking love. Sometimes they don't even realize what they're doing because they don't remember.  Often the Victim type believes so strongly all the lies they were told by their abusers that they feel they aren't worthy of being treated decently. They feel they deserve not only what theyir abuser did to them, but also whatever anyone else may choose to heap upon them. I used to help get women out of abusive homes and into safe houses where they could get help . SO many I talked to had been raped or beaten by their own parents and, when they became adults, their brains said "pain equals love". So they ended up with men who emotionally and physcially battered them. Sadly, they were often the ones who went back eventually, believing all the bullshit "Baby I Promise" lies told to them by their abusers. Things would be all peachy keen for a week or a month and then there would be another call for help. Sometimes they died before they could call for help again. It was both crushingly sad and maddening at the same moment when that would happen. I often wondered, "Why did she go back? She was SAFE! She was overcoming all the bullshit! Why the fuck did she jump back into the manure pile after all the counseling she's had??" I've never found any satisfactory answers to those questions. I have asked before. Most of them said they went because they were afraid... afraid he'd hunt them and/or their children down and kill them as he always threatened.

The blended type of survivor often doesn't even recognize themselves as a survivor. They'll step in if they see imminent danger to an innocent, but only to a point. If the situation is too scary, they may say something, but back away if threatened. They may draw a line where they would NEVER stay with someone who hits them. Yet, if someone is only verbally or emotionally abusive, they may not even recognize that it IS abuse.  The few I've met who are like this kind of function in their own little plane of existence which only lightly touches ours.  They try their damnedest to make our horrid world match their sunshiny plane and then seem puzzled when it can't be made to mesh nicely. They're not exactly oblivious to the abuse they suffered, but they don't really acknowledge it, either. It's as if it's kind walled off like my memories were as a kid. They just make it to adulthood with the walls still up. They kind of peek over the wall occasionally and go, "Hmmmm. What's this? Oh, well, time to make cake." Then, sometimes out of the blue, they'll look you dead in the eye and say something like "All those dreams I've had about my brother... they weren't dreams, were they?" All you can do is pat their hand and say, "No, honey, they weren't." All you can do is hope that some day they'll really understand the scope of what they've been through.

Outright Denial is, unfortunately, one of the most knee-jerk defensive mechanisms human beings have and, possibly, the most destructive as well. The Outright Denier has told themself so often that nothing like that could POSSSIBLY have happened to them that the memories are locked in a box, covered in concrete and sunk to the very darkest depths of their own psyches. A Denier doesn't get that some of the issues they have as an adult are spawning from their abuse earlier in life. They do things like take drug or become alcoholics in an effort to feel better. But these are not solutions.  These things becomes crutches that prop them up  and then hooks that pull them down. They'll rage about their bad luck and take that rage out on others, not even realizing they are perpetuating what they grew up with. They have such blinders on that they often don't even recognize that the wall in their psyche exists. They don't realize that there are huge chunks of childhood where there simply is nothing.  They're like my brothers who have quite angrily denied what their own father did to them right in front of me. They angrily espouse the virtues of the one who beat them bloody in front of their little sister. The Denier often raises their abuser up on a pedestal as if to worship them as some sainted hero, turning them into the very opposite of what they really were. Of all  survivors, this type is the least likely to succeed in finding a happy life. Because they haven't dealt with what is causing all of the negative emotions in them, they never overcome the issues these emotions generate. They can't find the strength to say "Well, I'll show them." because they don't realize they NEED to. I guess for some people the betrayal of having someone who is supposed to love you and protect you do horrific things to them is just too much for their mind to process. So it gets shoved down never to be acknowledged again. Or maybe it crashes in eventually and they can no longer deny.

I get that, having had my own very painful WTF moment. But, in the case of my siblings, it just angers me that they refuse to stop trying to make ME the villain. I've met so many people whose families have just ripped them to pieces because an Outright Denier shouts "How dare you foul the name of our good and sainted, blahblahblah.?!" Then it becomes a rallying cry and the next thing you know, the person who spoke the truth is on the defensive and running for cover from the entire family. Only sometimes that person is someone like me who says, "You know what? Fuck you people! In fact, UNfuck you! Why should you have any fun? You have no clue because YOU didn't live with them!" Sometimes we survivors who are very aware of what was done to us don't run. Sometimes, not only do we not run, we may just charge you and punch you in the face for being an ass. Sometimes we just sit back and go, "I pity you the day your wall comes down. You go on and git. I don't want you in my life anymore." Regardless of how exactly it plays out, we know that it's necessary if we ever want to glue all the pieces we have left back into place.

Just Some Things

Since some people in my blood relations seem to be drinking their own Kool-Aid and have repeated certain lies so often that they have become their twisted version of truth, I'd like to point out some problems in your stories. I doubt it's going to change your perception that you are wonderful people who are the victims in all things. But at least I can say you were informed since I know little pitchers have big ears. 

First: It's rather difficult for things to occur as laid out in your lies when you state events happened at a time when YOU DID NOT HAVE the vehicle the alleged events happened in. Oh, you thought no one noticed that? Wrong. I did. My mother and I were threatened with jail time when we tried to request an inquiry into that little bit of sunshine.

Second: When you are conspiring to tell lies on someone, perhaps you shouldn't do it when other people are around. Didn't think I knew about an arrangement with a certain cousin to say HER kid was messed with, too, when it was a lie, did you? Wrong again. Have another drink of Kool-Aid.

Third: When you have a known history of lying to my face when I know the truth, you can hardly expect I'm going to believe ANY of the verbal diarrhea that spews from your face. I seem to recall a certain pear shaped girl being in my room running up my mother's phone bill while the children  she was supposed to be taking care of destroyed about $1000 worth of collectibles. This when they had been allowed to come into our house only with MY nod of approval when my mother asked about it so that their CHILDREN would not be sleeping in a car in winter. She then tried to deny it when confronted with the shattered bits of collectibles she tried to hide under the bed and a phone bill showing she was making calls from a phone which she had been told NOT TO TOUCH and which was in MY ROOM on the call dates. Yeah, your credibility is about zero in my book, liar.

Fourth: Let me give you a little enlightenment about child molesters so you can understand why your story gets shakier every time you tell it. When a molester targets little girls, there is only a 21% chance that same molester will target little boys.  So, you say my nephew molested a bunch of little girls and then just because you're too stupid to know better, sure why not let's make him look REALLY sick in court and toss in a couple of little boys, too. Yeah, he admitted something DID happen with his sister. I know why, too. It happened because they were trying to mimic the PORN you losers left where your kids could get it. Oh, did I mention I know the kids had been left in the house ALONE that day? Sorry, you idiots, but a kid doesn't lie about something that humiliating to their GRANDMOTHER when she asks what has been going on and says she wants the full truth. Oh, and a guilty boy would not have called me in tears and said, "Aunt Jolie, they're saying the only way I'll ever get out is to say I did all those things. But I didn't! What should I do?"  Yeah, indicators toward a bunch of immature, vindictive liars targetting a little boy? They're in there.

Fifth: The youngest children involved in this whole mess have been groomed and prepped and told the lies to say so much that they believe them now. Yeah, I heard about that, too. Again, you're too stupid to be cautious about where and when you plot and who you threaten.Things get around.

Sixth: You people have made an art of using little children to carry out personal vendettas. My brother's wife should be ashamed of herself that she is so jealous that my moronic sibling screwed someone else before her royal hiney that she has to take it out on the kids from the previous wife. Yeah, that's mature. Oh, wait, she wasn't exactly grown when my ADULT brother started boffing her. So perhaps expecting maturity out of a psychotically jealous, lying KID was too much to expect? I'm telling you right now, you people need to start acting like grown ups and leave my nephew and his sister ALONE. They are not in your lives or your homes any more, so you need to just shut the fuck up and leave them be. Yes, I've heard all about you verbally and emotionally battering the sister when she speaks up for her sibling. Don't you all feel so proud bashing on a young woman trying to cope with having a disabled son? Why don't you all do what you do best and just go get drunk and fall down all over each other and call it lurve?

Seventh: Do not EVER think for a minute that just because you can squirt out more little mini mes like a good little Catholic that any of you are in any way better than me. Do not EVER delude yourselves into thinking you are the ones who pulled away from me.Let me tell you something, I only went to family functions because it made MOM happy. Being forced to be around you drunken asses who couldn't make it through a holiday without a fucking fight was a nightmare. Don't make ME the villain when YOU people are the ones who are still pickling yourselves in alcohol at every available opportunity. YOU are the ones who still do drugs and act like no one knows it.

I'm clean. I pulled away from you people because it was necessary to save myself. Given the choice of save myself or hang around with you poisonous people, guess what I chose? In order to recover from addiction issues, you have to cut the people who refuse to get help out of your life. Guess what? That means you had to go. You know what else? I have been SO much happier without all of your bullshit drama going on around me all the time.  Know what else? I'm willing to give up that peace if it means you  fuckers have to wake up and face reality. I am sick to fucking death of you pointing fingers at me and at little kids who never did anything but be born and ask to be loved.  My brother may have thrown away the boy HE chose to claim as his son. I have not. Michael is MY NEPHEW and if you don't like that idea, it's just tough shit. As far as I'm concerned your opinions matter less than a little bird poop on a windshield because, at the end of the day, you're still a bunch of drunk assholes and I'm still a recovered addict/alcoholic.

Eighth: If you don't want to hear the truth, then you are more than welcome to not read what I have to say. You can't make me stop. It's not slander if it's true. In order for it to be "defamation of character" people have to give a shit who you are and you have to have a GOOD reputation beforehand. None of you do.  Your names are readily available online thanks to you having made sure you spread around all the articles about Michael being once again incarcerated without just cause to every body you could think of. Oh, you thought suddenly hiding all your little "yay us" posts meant I wouldn't find out? Yeah, online is a funny place. There are little crumb trails everywhere.  Oh, just so you know, since YOUR names aren't on here, you can't say I'm slandering you anyway. I have the right to speak about my life publicly if I want to. If people can dig your names up easy as pie on an ancestry or public records  search, well, that's not my fault, is it? *smile* See, I'm tired of cowering and hiding from the past. This shit has only continued to be the bane of our society because people like you continue to deny, twist things and take out your vengeful wrath for what's been done to you on the wrong people rather than dealing with your real issues. You plug your ears and yell rather than listening to the truth. Well, you can still choose to do that by closing your browser window. You're as free to do that as I am to write it.

I'd just like to say in closing that I really do pity the whole lot of you if you truly believe all the stuff your Christian faith espouses. Because come judgment day, ya'll are screwed and not in the fun way. I understand it that God supposedly has some mercy for people who acknowldege and repent for their downfalls. You people... hell you're so full of denial that you believe your own bullshit. And that means you're not getting the pass when the time comes. Poor itty babies.... Am I perfect? Nope. But I never claimed to be, either.

To My Niece

Since, as you do on FaceBook and taking after the chichenshit ways of your parents, you prefer to scream and yell in caps where the people you are yelling at can't reply, you get this, kid.

First of all Michael IS my nephew. Regardless of blood, my brother claimed him as his son on his birth certificate. That makes him MY nephew. Your father then threw him away like trash, so don't try to sound all high and mighty about your father. I RAISED that kid with your Memaw more than your mother and father EVER did. Second, how do I know Michael didn't do the things he was accused of as a kid? Because, unlike you, I was an ADULT at the time and privy to several pieces of information which were presented to the court by your lying mother and her scummy cousin which were LIES. Who am I supposed to believe, little girl? The child raised by a vindictive and manipulative mother who thought it was perfectly okay to beat on little children just because she didn't squeeze them out of her fat little body? Do you know Michael and his sister CONSTANTLY showed up at my house with welts and bruises on them telling me that your mother had been beating on them? And who else would it have been since they hadn't been with their mother and the bruises were fresh? Do you know that your mother constantly sent  you kids to her family KNOWING that members of her own family had molested her? Or has she just conveniently neglected to tell you these things so she can further warp your perception of things? Do you know those molesters in her family have STILL not been punished for the things they did to her AND to Michael's sister? The courts used FALSE ACCUSATIONS from when he was a child to prosecute Michael as an adult. Just FYI, little girl, that's illegal.  You want to know why the bitch he was married to accused him of this shit EIGHT YEARS after the fact? Oh, it could be because he was making something of himself without her and was planning to get the kids away from her ASAP because she's unfit.  Yeah, I've talked to MY nephew, kid. He's been put in jail with NO EVIDENCE and with your mom telling his ex exactly what to say because she's done it to him once already. How convenient.

 I am well aware of what occurred with Michael and his sister when they were kids. In fact Memaw and I spoke with them both about it at the time fairly extensively.  You want to know why that happened? It happened because your moronic father left pornography where kids could get to it. They were experimenting with what they saw on one of his filthy videos while you kids had been left in the house ALONE. Don't try to convince me how wonderful your parents are. You didn't have to grow up with my brother. You didn't have to put one of your nephews out of a SECOND STORY window to save him from being beaten to a pulp by his apparently coked up uncle. Do you know I had to protect your Memaw from your scum-sucking daddy? He would drink and snort all of his paychecks and then want to come over to Memaw's to take HER money for the things you kids needed. I was having to spend MY paychecks paying Memaws bills for her because she was so in debt from giving your moronic parents money. Oh, you probably don't remember that because you were the mewling baby in diapers he was using to guilt her into giving him money. You probably only remember the fairy farts and sunshine your mommy has been blowing up your ass since you were old enough to understand words.

So, yeah, I'm the bad evil person in the family since I'm the only one who has recovered from alcoholism and drug addiction. It's not YOU people who have nothing to do with ME. It's quite the opposite. When I got clean I had to cut out ALL people who still participated in my addictions OUT of my life. Unfortunately, that meant I also couldn't really spend time with the kids  I cared about because it meant dealing with the parents. Once your Memaw died, I didn't have to go to family functions to make her happy anymore, so I was able to finally make the cut that allowed me to recover from being a pre-teen to adult alcoholic and druggie. So, don't come on here trying to tell me what a horrible person I am, little girl.  I've had enough contact with different parts of the family over the last several years to know that almost all of them still drink to avoid reality and that some of them still do drugs and lie through their teeth about it. Yeah, such good Christian households! It's no wonder I fled and became Pagan. *smirk*

So, little girl, how dare YOU come onto my blog telling me I'm crazy when you don't even know the real truth about what your parents come from. You don't believe what's written on this blog? Go ask some of your older female cousins about what my father did to them. Go ask my half sister what he did to her. I'm not crazy. I woke up and got access to the memories my own mind shielded me from because a 5-year-old little girl usually isn't well equipped to deal with the fact her dad is a pedophile. You, unfortunately, grew up sucking down the bile your mother has always had for kids she didn't give birth to and learning how to be just like her. What I know of her from having been under the same roof with her and having to deal with the fallout of her actions is this: She is a liar. She will do wrong and outright LIE about it even when you hold the evidence up in front of her face. She uses people to the point of bankrupting them for her own gain. She is only happy when everyone around her is as miserable as she is inside. She thinks it's perfectly okay to beat on a kid half her size with a broom handle if it's a stepchild. She's a vindictive and immature little worm who will do anything to "get back at" people she doesn't like, even things like denying a grandmother visitation with her grandchildren when she refuses to give her money. So, forgive me if I can't exactly stand behind someone who, for all intents and purposes, has turned out to be just like her and is still manipulated by her. I've still got parts of my childhood I can't remember because of the shit I grew up with in this family. I can only assume that those times were worse by far than what I CAN remember. Isn't it convenient  that you can remember every tiny detail because they were fed to you since you were little to the point you have come to believe the bullshit you were fed.

Project Unbreakable

I wanted to post about this because I feel like it's a worthwhile project. It's called Project Unbreakable. Here's a little bit about it from the Tumblr Blog: "Project Unbreakable was created in October of 2011 by Grace Brown. Grace works with survivors of sexual assault, photographing them holding a poster with a quote from their attacker. Grace has photographed over two hundred people and has received over a thousand submissions. TIME magazine has also named it one of the top 30 Tumblr blogs to follow."

Before I post the link, I just want to warn you, if you're a survivor and you aren't coping well, this may trigger you.

I salute the bravery of the victims who have allowed their faces to be shown with their posters. You are helping others see that they don't have to hide and be ashamed and that it is not their fault. I encourage people to share this. The only way this epidemic is going to end is if we drag the whole stinking mess into the light where people can't deny it anymore. It's long past time for people to stop these cycles of abuse and to stop victim shaming and victim blaming. The best way to make it happen is for us to not be afraid to speak up. We're all survivors together. We can help each other keep out feet.

http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/

Crazy Is As Crazy... Doesn't?

Throughout my life I've often pondered if I'm answering correctly when I'm asked if I have "any history of mental illness" and I say no.  My medical records show only one recognized psychological issue where I saw a therapist. One might guess that, with my past, it was related to my abuse. One would be wrong. It actually stemmed from a burn injury inflicted on me at age 7. I'll tell that incident later as it's not the point of this post.

Basically, while I spent three weeks in the hospital getting soaked in bleach water and having my ruined skin picked off my left arm daily, my best friend's house had been struck by lightning and caught fire while she and her teen sister were there alone. The kids  had gotten out unharmed, thankfully. Their family kitten hadn't. It was found in the debris, burned to death.  My young mind already had freak fits just looking at fire on the TV. Hearing the news of the house fire, my brain made a quick connection: Thunder is lightning noise. Lightning makes fire. Fire hurts! Fire kills little animals caught in it! Already traumatized by the burns and further shaken up by the painful burn treatments, it made my brain equate such terror with just thunder. It wasn't clear until I got home. We'd had an oddly dry spell while I was in the hospital, entirely thunderstorm free. But that first week I was home, we had a big one and I had my very first panic attack. I shrieked and panicked and fought my mom as she tried to hold me down and calm me down. I had no idea where I was trying to run to other than the blindly fearful thought to get out of the house before it burned down.

Doing that at all any time it thundered (and that happens a LOT along the coast near Galveston) was bad enough. The doctors said it would probably calm down as time went on, though Mom seemed skeptical about that prognosis. Then I was cleared to go back to school finally. I was nervous because I was already getting fat by then. I'd stopped growing up and started growing out instead. I already wore ratty hand-me-downs since Joe drank so much of the household money. So, having to go to school with my left arm wrapped in a bulky hard plastic brace and compression bandage affair intended to keep my hand from curling into a claw wasn't my favorite idea ever. I knew I was just going to get picked on more.  I did. But it was worse after that first freak out at school. I laid out two teachers as they tried to stop my blind panic. They had to call  the nurse and Mom and they sent me home. Yeah, that was a self-esteem builder. And all the kids just added that to the arsenal of jibes they already had.

When it continued to happen and I got picked on for it more and more, Mom put her foot down with both the doctors and Joe and decided I needed to see a psychologist. I didn't want to, even at that age. I thought the guy I was sent to was an idiot. He talked to me like I was stupid and I would make up shit to tell him just to see what kind of bullshit I could make him believe. It got to be a game and I actually took a malicious sort of glee in it. In the end, it wasn't the shrink who did me any good. In the end it was me reading about how lightning worked and studying it that helped me ease the panic. It still would make me startle or gasp, but I could close my eyes, count to ten and tell myself I was being stupid and to just stop it. Breathe in. Breathe out. Stop being stupid.

There are so many things in my life like that. When I became a pre-teen alcoholic and pill popper, it wasn't some intervention or rehab that cured me of it. It was me looking into the mirror and seeing Joe. Scared straight. It was hard, but I pushed that garbage out of my life by sheer force of will along with those people who refused to stop clinging to it. I lost a ton of friends that way. But they refused to change and had to be left by the wayside.  I understood that to beat it, I could not be around people who did it. When I would recognize that I would suddenly be trying to replace that addiction with cigarettes or chocolate or whatever, I would step back, take the deep breath. I would close my eyes and tell myself. "Stop being stupid." I refused to be controlled by it. It's a cycle that still repeats now and again even now. I slip up and find myself repeating old mistakes and have to put the brakes on.

I recognized that the traumatic life I had growing up had done things to me as it had to my mother. She was a hoarder. Once Joe was no longer around to yell at her for it, it escalated until it took over most of the house. As I grew older, I fought that for both of us, too. Once I was 16 and working and helping her pay bills, I had enough leverage to lay down rules in our home. I made her start sorting and properly storing usable items and ridding herself of what was garbage and debris. Every six months, like clockwork, if her things had crawled out of the one room she was allowed for her "stuff", there was a great purge and she was forced to constrain her hoard to her designated space again and strictly organize what she kept so it wasn't a mess. Every six months, I purged my own belongings, too,  ridding myself of things I could say I no longer enjoyed or could no longer use. Needless to say, Goodwill and Salvation Army loved me. I was always dropping off huge bags and boxes of things for them. Hoarding is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder. What made it odd in the case of both my mother and I was that we recognized this tendency. We worked at controlling it. It was never diagnosed, because we never let it get to the point of those people you see on Hoarding: Buried Alive and we never sought counseling for it. Of course, back then, they knew so little about OCD and hoarding behavior. They've made leaps and bounds in knowledge with a lot of metal illnesses since then.

I have other odd compulsions I fight with daily. My previous room mates had a toddler. My room wasn't big enough for me to keep my video racks in, so they were in the living room. While I lived with them, I discovered that keeping the movies in order wasn't just a preference. It was compulsory. When the baby would knock the videos down and they would just shove them up there in random order, I would actually just twitch upon discovering it. I would have to stop right there in that moment and put them back in order. It was making me twitch to have my things stacked up in the garage in totes. My environment was not MY environment anymore. I was crammed into a space that was far too small. My room mates would leave dishes in the sink overnight. There was really no excuse. We had a dishwasher that worked. I had to fight the urge to stop and wash them just about every morning. I had to tell myself "No. Stop. Deep breath. No time now. You have to get to work. Put the scrubber down and turn away." But there were times that didn't work even though I would tell myself, "None of this mess is yours. Your dishes are all in the dish washer. You are not their housekeeper. Leave it." Those days I would be late to work and say I'd overslept. It wasn't a biggie. I was always ahead of the game at work so five minutes or ten weren't much of a difference in what I got done.

Even before then, cleaning my own house was horrid because I would micro-focus on the "wrong" things, get distracted and flit to and fro like an idiot. I never seemed to get anything done. It took one of my boyfriends actually sitting me down and listing all the stuff I actually HAD done to make me quit beating myself up for that. It was just that at home, where I was in charge of the structure (or lack thereof), I wasn't as efficient as I was at work where I HAD to do things a set way or risk losing my job. Basically, if I'm in charge of everything including the consequences, things will slip a lot before I go "Bloody hell! What am I doing?? Stop being stupid! Get shit done! Move your ass!"

I've taken neuro-psychology tests at various points in my life. They used to give them to you in school sometimes back in the day. One was done when they discovered I had an IQ that was 5 points below super genius on the scale they were using back then. They got curious because I was marked as "precocious" with my ability to read long before kindergarten and my eidetic memory.  I had Duke University all over me trying to convince me to become a lab rat for some think-tank experiment they were doing when I was in 7th grade. They'd given me the SAT and been impressed with my scores, especially since I (unlike the other kids chosen from my school) had declined all of the prep classes because I wanted to see what my "raw score" would be like. My score was high considering I had no idea what algebra and geometry even were and still managed deduce right answers on some of that. On the non-math portions, I scored extremely high.  I took another neuro-psych exam when they were trying to assess me after the brain damaging complicated migraine incident in my 20's. Even in 7th grade, I was cognizant of the fact that I should not answer some of those questions truthfully if I valued my freedom. As a 20-something, those questions actually made me hunch over the desk in an attempt to hide my hysterical giggling. I was thinking, "Yeah, if you think I'm dumb enough to answer THAT shit truthfully, think again." I think that psychologist didn't know what to think of me, really. I seemed to confuse him terribly.

So, if you know that your truthful answers would probably mark you as insane and you don't answer truthfully, are you insane?  If you recognize that you have compulsive behavior and you fight to rein it in,  do you really have OCD? Or are you, as a human being, so fucked up and mentally fractured that you exist as several people at once. Maybe those several people you are each have control of certain things, so you can control yourself or disconnect a part that's fritzing one day so that a part that isn't so worn out can take over for a while. Or maybe those different parts can sort of "gang up" on things that one part alone isn't sufficient to handle. Sometimes it feels like that. Some days I'm just so fucking tired and I want to crawl under a rock and die. Then, after a while,  it's like I kick myself in the ass and say, "Oh, just fucking stop it, wuss. Drag your ass up and do what needs doing. GET OVER IT!"  I'll be okay for a while after that and it starts all over again, one giant fucked up roller-coaster, only without the benefit of safety harnesses. 

As I get older I wonder more and more if I'm certifiably crazy, too smart for my own good or maybe a little of both. I'll probably never find out for sure because I'm not the type who feels the need to go sign myself up for therapy for every little thing. I've always been wary of going to therapy. I don't like the feeling that someone is picking my brain. They're my cobwebs and I'll thank you kindly to stay out of them, pretty much. Up to now I've been strong enough to push through things. There are times, though, when I feel old and tired and wonder if I really can push through some of this shit anymore. It's like drowning in Jello.