Fairytales of a Childhood That Never Was, Part III

To hell with anything sacred. Rather than tackle something safe, I'm again going to try to tackle the other narrative I hold to be sacred and true. Which is going to be damned hard to do, because I'm not already questioning it. Here goes:

Fact: I could trust Tex whenever I was on him.
Truth: For all I like to pretend that everything was perfect, there were moments where I was terrified to be on him. Mostly earlier on, but, they existed. A couple of times, he sort of ran away with me, and I had to run him into a fence. Stopping was always a dicey proposition, especially bareback, because he does this weird thing where he tries to deccelerate, and ends up flailing about with his legs for a bit. (Note: I'll be jumping around with tenses a bit, trying to convey the state where he's not mine, and he's still alive.) I fell off him no fewer than six, more likely 8-10 times. Some were my fault, but once he took off, once he stopped in front of a jump...some were definitely his fault.

That said, I want to question whether the narrative is true that I became able to trust him more, or whether those last few days, and that last ride, bareback, with one lead rope going to his halter, and no helmet, was as much a profound statement of trust as it was a display to prove to myself that this was special, or a subconscious desire to crash and burn.

In a way, I was putting myself in harm's way, doing things we were always bad at, like bareback, without any bit (he only did well with contact on the bit, and it was absolutely necessary to stop him), and while not wearing a helmet, which I'd always been told to do, but I'm not sure whether it was a grand gesture to reassure myself that this narrative I've always built up, where I could trust Tex no matter what, was real, or whether it was a way of tempting fate to prove me wrong. Ultimately, though, I think the two desires are intertwined. By tempting the fates, I was testing, proving to myself that this was real, and not an imagined connection. (The fact that I didn't wear a helmet throws in a sort of morbid element to the test, a sort of statement that I would be nothing without this particular fairytale.)

Fact: Tex loves green grapes.
Truth: A couple of times, he actually got excited about eating grapes. It wasn't that he ever dislikes treats, and being fed them is never a bad thing. He does get excited about carrots sometimes, too.

I really remember the grapes because it was special, and unique, and not something you think of feeding a horse. But he did kind of mellow out about them after a while. And I forget that.

Fact: I always treated Tex with the utmost respect.
Truth: I was far from perfect. I hit him occasionally, usually with good reason. But not consistently.

He nips occasionally, and sometimes I'd slap him for it. Sometimes I'd just let it go. Sometimes I'd blow up in his face, but not hit him. Sometimes I'd outright hit him for it.

To be clear, all of those are valid training strategies, if you're consistent. If you do the same thing every time the horse nips, and it fixes the problem, and it's not something that causes physical damage to the horse (Trust me, my bare hands couldn't do that.), it's a more-or-less valid strategy. But the key is consistency. And I wasn't consistent. Nor does hitting him necessarily suggest respect.

When we did groundwork, I was a long way from respectful. When he was too close, or moving crooked, I would slap his nose with the loose end of the reins. I didn't have much patience or tolerance there.

In retrospect, Tex was a damn good first horse for me. In reality, he's still a damn good horse, period. And someday I'm going to take apart this fairytale more, I think, but it's not ready to unravel just yet. I can't really get into tearing it apart. It doesn't feel cleansing, like the others, it just feels like I'm needlessly tearing out part of myself.

So don't consider this one dealt with.  I'm not ready to pull it apart just yet.  

Fairytales of a Childhood That Never Was, Part II

This one is a bit rougher, and more personal, or at least even more emotionally fragile for me, than Part I.  For certain privacy reasons, this one's harder to get at, but is for some reason I have a reader I don't know about, you can leave a comment, and I'll get back to you with a copy of it, or an explanation as to why, such as "I know you, and you'll get butthurt."

But I will give you all the following notes:

1. Expect more of these.  Upcoming themes include my relationship with my father, my weight, and the role of class in my childhood.

2. Cliffsnotes of Part II:
       Fact: I hated dolls.
       Fact: I've always had issues with being seen in certain ways.
       Fact: The Kentucky Incident was prompted by an internal need.
          Truth: All three are misrepresented by the narrative I wish I could establish.

Fairytales of a Childhood That Never Was, Episode 1

(Consider this the first in a series of posts that may or may not appear.  As I stress out about prelims and shit, I find it oddly cathartic to go back and question everything I ever knew about my own childhood.  Up first: My history with depression.)

Today, I came to the sudden conclusion that my timelines are all fucked up. And I may never be able to sort them out in any meaningful way. I'm going to talk about my history of depression again, because in a lot of ways, I'm trying to figure it out. For a while, the narrative was simple, easy, undeniable. I was depressed for years, I went on antidepressants, and I stopped being depressed.

That was a story I liked to tell because it was easy and comfortable. It never really happened like that. I could state dates, but they all get tangled up into a mess. I can't remember any more which dates go with which years, and sometimes I put them together in different orders. And the fact is, the when I put them together in some ways, they make more narrative sense than others, but I'm not really sure that's how it pans out. But I'm going to try, and I'm going to be as honest as I can.

Fact: In Third Grade, I started having panic attacks.
Truth: I wasn't fine and normal up until third grade. The first time I went hysterical, that I remember, was in first grade, I think. I read one of those books designed to scare kids away from playing with matches. At least, that's what I've been told. The book scared me, and they had to call one of my parents to pick me up from school. Maybe the fact that I was so easily scared had a connection. Or the reading. That's another common thread that gets patched into my narrative. Keep your eyes out.

Furthermore, I don't remember having panic attacks. I remember a couple of times I was scared, generally in the same circumstances to the incident in first grade. I read something or saw something that scared me so badly a parent had to come pick me up, or maybe it just lingered scared in my mind. Either way, something happened. But I don't know what to accept anymore.

My narrative likes to link these to the start of my depression, as well as my grandmother's death. Both of these are a lie. I'm not sure I can point to any particular moment as me being depressed. What I was was different. I don't recall being happier in first and second grade, or even in kindergarten and preschool. I was always an outsider, and always kind of off. But again, my memory could be lying. But both were definitely not linked, no matter how I'd like to be able to remember them. The 'panic attacks' took place early in the school year. My grandmother died on christmas day. That much is true. I'm not sure how they'd connect to each other.

Fact: I was depressed without treatment for 3 years.
Truth: I don't know if it was three years. I can't remember when I went on antidepressants. I don't specifically remember the timeline in here, but I did see a few counselors. It didn't really help. I think I went on antidepressants in 6th grade, but I can't be sure. You see, I remember them having an effect within a few days, but I can't remember what it was. And I remember the spring as being when I got Tex, but I don't know when the Zoloft relates in there. Maybe it wasn't until after 6th grade, but I remember it, as well as my asperger's diagnosis, taking place before that. I really don't know, which makes me question.

I couldn't have been 100% depressed all the time, throughout 3 years. Something must have made me happy. You can't live for 3 years without any kind of joy, right? I like to paint it that way, like I lived in books so I wouldn't have time to think about suicide, but I did other things. I learned other things. And maybe that's why I couldn't remember the change.

Maybe I wasn't depressed at all. Except I sort of remember being depressed, but that could just be a lie I've constructed. Like, maybe I wasn't looking for that. You see, it really got better, I really remember being happy, in high school, with the cabal. Maybe I was just some outcast kid who didn't belong, and they seized on the idea of depression because it might have fit. Maybe the only way my medication worked was as a placebo. And in suppressing sex drive. That's a hard version of the story to take, though, because I fundamentally remember thinking about suicide, but in this kind of involuntary, side-along way. But never intellectually, never in a gut, might-act-on-it-cause-it-seems-like-a-good-idea way. More in a way where suicide was nothing but a song stuck in my head. Which sucked, don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure it was  depression.

Fact: Zoloft worked perfectly for me.
Truth: My dosage had to be increased a few times. The first was during elementary or middle school, when it seemed to not quite be working. Like, I'd get a stray thought here and there of suicide, so up the dosage went.

The second was in, I believe, my freshman year of high school. Other narratives of my life, like the one in 4-H, run more poetically if it is, but it could have been sophomore year, too. Maybe even Junior. There was a crappy little pissing match the county hippology, and a crappy fight with my father on the way home, and then I walked outside barefoot in the snow, went back to the upstairs bathroom and cut myself. Opened a whole nasty can of worms, and most of it was freaking out because I'd actually like sliced myself open, and not because I honestly planned to do it again. My dosage doubled after that, because something was wrong with me because I was freaking the hell out because I did something stupid. Also, because I went and sliced myself open, but I'm still kind of kicking scared old me for needing my medication increased because I was freaking out like a normal person would be, instead of going along with it.

That's three facts I've disassembled, and it's taken a while. Analyzing it is still kind of hard, because I'm still piecing together a puzzle I've lost half the pieces to. But I'll let you know if I every find a concrete truth.

Anti- Adolescence

My peoples...some of you already know this. If I'm going to be pessimistic, all of you already know this. But anyways.

I went on an antidepressant when I was ten or eleven. I don't regret this. I don't think I ever will; you see, I'm pretty much convinced that those antidepressants, at that moment in time, saved my life. I was coping with suicidal thoughts by reading 24/7, could no longer go to sleep with the lights on, and needed my mother to read in q corner of my room when I fell asleep. It wasn't good.

For years, it was pretty good. In terms of psych drugs, it was perfect. I only needed one drug, the first one they tried worked, and any side effects were really minimal.

It was only in the past few years, as I started reading more broadly, including sexuality texts, that I began to reconstruct a very different version of events. After I went off my antidepressants, I realized how much of this was correct.

You see, SSRIs, the class of antidepressants mine came from have two notable side effects that no one considered when I went on them, or ever bothered to tell me: they can reduce sex drive and make it more difficult to achieve orgasm.

Reflect back on your own adolescence. Imagine going back and pulling out your sex drive. Think about how it would be different. Maybe you would have liked it. Maybe you would have hated it. I'm actually unsure specifically how it would have changed my life. But either way, I experienced my adolescence in a fundamentally different way than I would have without antidepressants, and I would have liked to have known it at the time.

How should it have been done? Probably not by telling me at age 10, but at a reasonable age, when I'm undergoing puberty. Maybe in middle school, when I got my period? I should definitely have been told by high school. Not that I would have chosen differently, but because I should have been aware of it.

The Bitch is Back

A happy life update: I went to the doctor today, and I am offically off zoloft. Probably for good. Her explanation is that if I'm not taking it, and I'm not depressed, I don't need it.

In honor of this monumental occasion, I give you Sir Elton John:

Updated Julian Assange Rant

In light of some of the recent information that has come out on Julian Assange, I am going to update my previous public opinion on Julian Assange. As with previous, and future posts, this will involve Wikileaks. Julian Assange is closely tied to Wikileaks, in the same way that other large groups are tied to their figureheads. Much as Steve Jobs is Apple, Mark Zuckerberg is Facebook, and Dov Charney is American Apparel, Julian Assange is Wikileaks. As such, it remains continually difficult to separate support for the organization from support for the individual in charge. Consider this once again my official reminder that I continue to support wikileaks.

However, I am going to shift from having doubts about Julian Assange to the formal announcement that Assange is definitely kind of a douchebag. I'm not going to say whether he's a rapist or not (that's for the courts to decide, if at all possible), but I will state that he has shown himself to be fundamentally identical in his views to any other possible rapist.

Believe it or not, there are classy ways to deal with rape accusations. Treat them as serious allegations, make it clear that it was never your intent to rape anybody, and then turn yourself in. Assange has done one of the three. For a while, he was remaining silent, and running. I'm going to be a little generous, and state that he has legitimate extenuating circumstances for the whole fleeing-the-law thing. And silence, well, not talking about the pending rape allegations is pretty classy, too.

Recently, Assange spoke to The Australian, and discussed his rape charges in a way that was decidedly Not Classy. As follows:

Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism, I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism.

He further offers that the woman allowed him to stay at her flat for a week, and that she the other woman, as he described: "arrived at a lunch in a revealing pink cashmere sweater, flirted with him, and took him home."

This is the exact same trite, rape-apologist bullshit that gets toted outed in every god-damned rape case. It doesn't matter if she showed up naked, game him a lapdance, and dragged him to the nearest motel. If she didn't consent to the sex, it's still rape, Mr. Assange.

And blaming the feminists? Real classy. Here's something revolutionary to consider: the feminists didn't turn anybody into a rapist. Trust me, they manage to do that all by themselves. What feminists do is try to improve the lives of women everywhere, part of which is stopping rape. Interestingly, you can't stop rape in any sort of manner that improves lives by redefining it to exclude certain forms of non-consensual sexual activity. Because it's not improving lives.

And until Julian Assange recognizes this, he will remain a complete douchebag. Sorry, fanboys.

Sex, Assange, and Wikileaks: A Feminist Perspective

Let’s get something clear: I support Wikileaks. I strongly encourage you, my reader, whoever you are and whatever you believe, to support Wikileaks, too. As an organization, Wikileaks has broken important new stories in the past. In 2008 and 2009, Wikileaks picked up awards for its method of distributing information. It’s only with Cablegate that Wikileaks, and Julian Assange, have become villains in the eyes of the mainstream.

However, the mission of Wikileaks has not changed. In continues to do the exact same things it has done before, releasing similar sorts of internal documents to earlier leaks. The only thing that’s different is the content. And the response.

Wikileaks has lost hosting, DNS, and key sources of revenue. You can check the news for that. It’s pretty common knowledge these days. But Julian Assange, the founder and voice of Wikileaks, has been arrested in England, where he may be extradited to face sexual assault charges in Sweden.

As some of you know, I’m a feminist. So how can I both support Wikileaks and condemn Assange for these charges? I make the distinction between the man and the folk hero. I support folk-hero Assange, who stands up to The Man and publishes classified documents. I support the Assange that founded Wikileaks and serves as its face and voice. I’m not so sure how I stand on Assange the man.

Like most people, I hate rape. And I admit, my natural instinct when it comes to rape charges is for juries to convict first and ask questions later. But that doesn’t work in the real world. Innocent people, whether accidentally or on purpose, are sometimes accused of rape. Sometimes, it’s not necessarily clear when something is or isn’t rape

I don’t subscribe to the theory that rapists alone are responsible for rape. Sure, sometimes they are, in those rare, cut-and-dry cases of stranger rape. But for acquaintance rape, date rape, spousal rape, and, though I hate the term “grey rape,” I feel like blame falls on both the rapist and the culture. Not the victim, but the surrounding culture.

You see, nobody talks about consent, and there’s no cultural acceptance for women to say yes to sex. As numerous feminist before me have pointed out, it’s a lot easier for men to not rape when it’s yes that means yes, and not just not-a-no.
From what I gather from the news, in both cases the women consented to sex with Assange if and only is he used a condom. He did not use a condom. According to the above statement, they did therefore not consent to the sex Assange had with them. Ergo, if the news is true, which it could be (we’ll see in the future.), Assange the man is guilty.

That’s not to say I place full blame on Assange. Part of this is because he’s still the folk hero I value, but part of it is because we live in a culture where the only way for women to say yes is by not saying no. And a conditional clause is not a no, my friends.

Do I have respect for Assange? Yes. But I hold that he is still quite likely guilty of sexual assault, so let’s be careful which pedestals we place him on.

Why I'm Not a Cyberterrorist

I was recently asked if I was a cyberterrorist over supper. I don't consider myself one. The initial explanation ran something like this: "No, I don't think of myself that way. I'm not good enough."

Here, for the general public, is the longer version.

I am not a terrorist.

Terrorists work to create terror. This is what they do. They scare people to promote their ideas. I don't want a terrified populace. I want you to live with limited fear. I want you to be safe. A terrorist opposes open discussion. A terrorist commits acts specifically to generate fear in the populace. I don't want you to fear me. I want to create hope in your spirits and open your minds. I want to wake the slumbering masses and incite them to Rise Up! to the powers that be.

Yes, I'll scare some of you. Those that don't want to fight and bleed and die for your cause, you'll be scared at what you want to do. You'll be like me. It's a balancing act. Those who prefer to live blinded to the atrocities around you, I'm sorry. I want to tear those blinkers wide open and hold your head still so you can't look away. You're going to suffer, and it's going to hurt. But that's the cost of revolution. You think it's bad for you? Look at what you're seeing now. Those victims have it worse.

I am not a terrorist. I'm the truthbringer.

I am not a cyberwarrior.

I have a lot of gifts. I'm moderately good with words, moderately able to lift things, moderately artistic. I'm also moderately tech-savvy. Key word being moderately. I'm no genius when it comes to computers. I can't read code, I can't build the tools, I can only run a few of them. Even when I can run a few of the programs used in cyberwar, I'm not particularly effective. Sure, I'm part of the cyberarmy, but I'm no warrior. Trust me, I failed cyber-boot camp.

Antidepressants: A Reflection

As some of you all may know, I was diagnosed with depression formally in elementary school, and have since been on antidepressants. For those who want to know how long, I'd estimate seven years.

Started this fall, I went off them. First accidentally, (I was at college, and not keeping a schedule.) then intentionally, then accidentally-on-purpose again.

Why I went off is complicated. Clearly, I had a lot going on inside my head. But when I decide to get back on the wagon, these reasons tend to feature pretty prominently:

1. I'm sleeping a lot. Like 14 hours a day a lot. If I don't have a reason to be out of bed, I'm in it. Asleep. Also, I sometimes skip things to be asleep. So I don't have to think about them. This is neither productive nor healthy.

2. I'm less creative. Yes, I feel like I've been my most productive when I'm cutting my dose a little low. That's when I come up with the really brilliant shit, and that's when I feel the need to jolt myself with cleaning tizzys. But when I go off, I can't get motivated. I can't write anything, and I can never decide to paint or tinker or build anything, either.

3. I can't think. This one is different from above, although they sound pretty similar. I can't give myself license to think. This is a defense mechanism, that usually manifests itself as constant reading. If I can't think about reality, if I leave no room for self-reflection, I can't possibly think about suicide.

4. Lou's philosophy. That is to say, it's just another drug. Albeit a federally-controlled, prescribed substance. Hell, that makes it a relatively safe drug, by most measures. I know what I'm getting. It obviously isn't a perfect comparison by some standards, since I'm taking it to get to what most people call normal, even though it is, for all effects and purposes, given my natural biology, high. But let's be honest about this one. If I can go through life not judging other people for how they use drugs, how can I go through life judging myself for using one which enables me to function on a day-to-day basis?