A haven for creative people living with mental illness. This is the place where you can tell it like it is, not yet another place where you have to pretend to be someone you've been told you should be.
“Is it too much to ask for it to rain?” I ask as I spend
another summer steeped in sweat.
Yet I remember the year when the flood came, another year
when I often asked: “is it too much to ask for it to rain?”
I remember the wave slamming into the side of my car, the
terror as I wondered if I would be swept away into a field which had become a
choppy lake.
I did not ask for it to rain for a long time after that.
when something well-loved
becomes a thing of terror
everything changes
~Cie~
Image from the Longmont Times-Call
Notes:
For those who are prone to questioning my veracity, the story related above is 100% true and I had PTSD following the incident. One of the ways in which this affected me is making me unable to write for a long time. People lost their lives during this flood, and I didn't know why I wasn't one of them. I've never done anything which I believe makes me worthy of continued survival, and yet, like toenail fungus, I persist in hanging around long past my sell-by date.
I watched the Jimi Hendrix documentary, Voodoo Child, this evening.
I didn't really become a Jimi Hendrix fan until I was in my teens. He died when I was only five years old. I saw a documentary about him when I was eighteen or nineteen, and it was good, but this documentary reveals more of his personal thoughts. He was brilliant and he left a lot of wisdom for the world.
The wisdom he imparted to me today is to stop looking for adulation and approval from others. This is something that I've struggled with my entire life.
When asked how it felt to receive so many compliments about his work, Jimi said that he really didn't care about compliments, in fact, he found that they distracted him from what was important: creation.
I think that's what it really means to be secure in oneself. Not so much thinking that one is flawless, but to be able to see the worth of one's goals and actions regardless of the opinions of the masses.
Lots of views and comments stroke the needy ego of the insecure and wounded child that remains within the crusty, curmudgeonly, and likely not at all tasty exterior shell which houses my soul.
This becomes a distraction to the creator. I start wanting to please my visitors rather than express myself through my words.
Next time I get stuck in that unharmonious groove, I need to remember Jimi's wise thoughts on the matter.
I will always be a fan of Jimi Hendrix the musician.
Perhaps most people won't understand this, but that doesn't matter.
I also appreciate Jimi Hendrix the philosopher, and I'm grateful for the wisdom and works that he left behind.
My truth will make you uncomfortable. You may end up thinking that I’m lying because surely in modern society, nobody could be allowed to fall through the cracks that much. But you asked, and so I’ll answer as briefly as possible.
I was born in 1965 in Denver, Colorado to a doctoral student in literature who had once wished to travel the country like his hero, Jack Kerouac, and his wife, a former nurse with a degree in fine arts.
My parents had abandoned the church but returned to it when I was seven years old. My then-three-year-old brother and I were baptized and became Catholic.
My bipolar disorder onset when I hit puberty, and I was always misunderstood.
Younger Brother (Turned 50 on March 17 of this year)
The Ugly Duckling Who Never Became a Swan (Turned 54 on 14 February)
I am now doing NaPoWriMo and trying to catch up on Poems in April with The Imaginary Garden With Real Toads, which I didn't know was a thing until a couple of days ago.
I'm going to try and get reeeealllly creative with the prompts so I can catch up sooner. The result will probably be a cobbled-together horror which would make Nyarlathotep run screaming into the night. Let's get going!
So, NaPoWriMo wants to know where I'm from, not as in my location, but as in, who am I? It's probably more of a what than a who, but I'll give it a shot.
The Toads want to know the news from my bed and what would scare the thing I'm scared of. Well, go get your coffee and donuts and come back. Eat a donut. Drink your coffee. And don't move, this is a Haibun!
Where Am I From?
Back on February 15, 1965, a thing that really didn't belong in this world was born into this world.
This thing was an awful pain from the start.
It was born in a raging blizzard.
It didn't sleep well.
When it was about a year and a half old, some genius of a doctor gave it phenobarbitol to try and make it sleep. It was awake for three days.
Something was evidently weird about this thing. It didn't play by the rules.
What Did I Become?
Not surprisingly, the thing grew up to be terribly unpopular and not all well liked. Its peers made it their scapegoat.
Since the thing really didn't have any friends among its peers, it found "friends" in other places.
The thing found "friends" in reruns of a very special program called Star Trek.
It especially liked Mr. Spock, because he was kind of sad and didn't fit in either.
What Scares an Abomination?
I could have written about how much I hate centipedes and cockroaches and earwigs, but I don't know what scares those. Cockroaches aren't scared of anything. They are going to survive the nuclear apocalypse. If cockroaches had middle fingers, they would be scuttling around with their middle fingers raised all the time.
I didn't want to write about roach motels anyway.
So, I thought I'd write about the thing that scared that ugly, unwanted little girl monster, and continues to terrify and inspire the ugly, unwanted adult monstrosity that she became. Ready, readers? Let's go!
The Lights of Zetar
One day the child monstrosity was watching her beloved Star Trek and daydreaming that she was grown up and pretty and that Mr. Spock was her boyfriend. Please keep in mind that she was ten years old and stupid.
That was the day when the girl monstrosity would discover the thing that scared her most. Even more than vampires. Even more than the Xenomorphs that would later lurk in the shadows. Even more than malevolent ghosts.
The girl monstrosity was raised Catholic, and the most frightful idea to her was that of being possessed or otherwise overtaken by a demon. But there are ways of stopping even demons if you can find a priest who has mystical knowledge.
The Lights of Zetar were something that could travel through space at warp speed, come through walls, and destroy a person's brain. There is something viscerally terrifying in that concept.
With the medical knowledge that I would later acquire, I could have told Dr. McCoy that the Lights of Zetar cause their victims to have a massive stroke. Fortunately for the story's heroine, Mira Romaine, there was something unusual about her brain, so they only caused her to have a T.I.A. (transient ischemic attack, colloquially a "small stroke.")
From my current vantage point, I know how the Lights of Zetar effect was created. The entity itself is made of gelatin. The flashes are caused by aluminum powder.
The script had its problems. When watching the episode from my current vantage point, I always end up thinking that if Captain Kirk refers to a grown adult woman as "the girl" one more time, I'm going to make him wear his balls for earrings.
Nonetheless, even knowing that the entity depicted is pretty much Jello and Pop Rocks, the CONCEPT remains compelling, and The Lights of Zetar remain the scariest combination of Jello and Pop Rocks in the Universe. I still have nightmares about these fuckers.
As to why I find Jello and Pop Rocks more terrifying than Xenomorphs, vampires, or even demons, there are ways to fight all of those. Even though you might not have much of a chance, there's still some chance. Besides, demons generally don't blow out their victim's brain.
The Lights of Zetar can travel faster than light speed, pass through the hull of a starship, and most of the time, they fry their victim's brain. It's like a supermassive extraterrestrial cerebrovascular accident (CVA). I did not have knowledge of the term CVA when I was ten years old. All I knew was that The Lights of Zetar terrified me.
Fan Fiction and Beyond
I always wanted to create a back-story for The Lights of Zetar, but wouldn't end up doing so until more than 40 years after I saw the original episode.
Thanks to my obsession with an almost universally panned episode of a decades-old television series, I can now tell you all what would scare the thing that scares me.
Qweh, tyrant king of West Zecor (I believe the image is of a mage from Skyrim)
Serab, a lowly Ahprizite hybrid thief (This image is from deviantart. The artist's information is in the watermark.)
Yadira, high priestess of the Outer Gods and daughter of Nyarlathotep This is a very impressive prosthetic makeup created by Daniele Tinzani
Zecor is the sixth planet orbiting the binary Zetar star system. East Zecor was a peaceful, almost Utopian society. West Zecor was ruled over by King Qweh, a sadistic tyrant who relished physically torturing and having his sociopathic scientists experiment upon his hapless subjects.
Qweh enjoyed psychologically torturing his insubordinate younger sister, Princess Ondina, by turning his victims over to her and challenging her to use her empathic healing abilities on these usually fatally wounded unfortunates.
One day, Princess Ondina's bodyguard managed to enrage King Qweh and wound up dead. Qweh rounded up his posse and went searching for his daily quota of victims. The group happened upon Serab, a destitute thief. Serab was nimble and adept at escaping from impossible situations, but he was badly outnumbered and taken into captivity.
The ruling race on Zecor tended to be very tall. Princess Ondina was around six feet tall and King Qweh stood at around seven feet four inches. Serab was an Ahprizite hybrid. The Ahprizite were a diminutive race of humanoids. Serab was only five feet three inches tall and slightly built.
King Qweh thought it a great joke to present his sister with the tiny Serab as a replacement for her slain bodyguard, but Ondina did not react with the scorn that the king had hoped for. She instead saw Serab's potential and took him on as her bodyguard and assistant.
The affection between Ondina and Serab quickly became romantic, and, although they tried to present their relationship as being purely one of mutual respect, their true feelings were impossible to hide. Qweh was enraged at the way his sister was conducting herself with a common thief right under his nose.
Qweh had an adviser named Baroness Yadira, who was not only a powerful sorceress but the daughter and high priestess of Nyarlathotep. Yadira taught Qweh and his followers the indomitable magic of the Mythos of the Outer Gods.
Qweh was meant to use this magic to subjugate other races and turn them into cultists serving the Outer Gods. However, he was an inept bumbler and, on one drunken night, attempted to exert his newfound power over the Zetar system's small sun. The small sun reacted by cannibalizing the large sun, causing itself to go nova, and flooding the planets with deadly gamma radiation.
Qweh used the magic Yadira had given him to turn himself and his sycophants into a powerful noncorporeal hive entity, the manifestation which came to be known as The Lights of Zetar. Prior to vacating his doomed body, Qweh murdered Serab and admonished Ondina that he would destroy the unfortunate thief in any future lifetime where she attempted to reunite with him.
Ondina responded by dispatching Serab's departing spirit to The Realm of the Yellow Sun (Earth's solar system.) She spent many lifetimes distancing herself from him so as not to bring down Qweh's wrath upon him. However, Serab's love for Ondina was undying, and he spent as many lifetimes trying to draw her back to him.
Finally, in Earth's twentieth century, Serab was reborn as Gerold Lyon Clifford on 12 December 1951 at 6 P.M. in Glasgow, Scotland. Ondina was reborn as Pepper Baiij on 12 October 1967 in Lawrence, Kansas.
Both Gerry and Pepper had strong psychic abilities. They also had a millenniums-old enemy tracking them. When Gerry was twenty years old, he celebrated a record deal by dropping a tab of acid. While standing on a balcony smoking a cigarette, he was attacked by the Lights of Zetar entity, which hoped to use him as a host to enact Qweh's undying hope to become ruler over the cosmos.
Gerry, however, had unusually strong latent magical abilities, which enabled him to banish the entity from Earth. His physical vehicle was unable to endure the constant struggle to keep the planet safe, and, over time, his physical brain started to erode. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease on 20 December 2007 and committed to the Candlelight Ridge Residential Care Facility on 19 November 2013.
As Gerry's physical brain deteriorated, his vulnerable spirit was targeted by Yadira, now known as Yadira Root, who assumed the guise of a kindly volunteer at Candlelight Ridge. In reality, the sorceress was seeking souls to become part of her own personally crafted hive entity, intended to counter the narcissistic and overall ineffective entity comprised of Qweh and his toadies.
Yadira's intent is to eradicate Qweh and his Lights of Zetar and to finally make her father, Nyarlathotep, proud by conquering worlds with the help of the entity which she has been carefully creating over the course of many centuries. Like other Great Old Ones, Nyarlathotep is patient. He knows that all will transpire when The Stars Are Right.
Thus, to make a long story long:
The Lights of Zetar are proven to be frightfully inept though nonetheless incredibly dangerous and exceedingly terrifying.
The thing that most frightens King Qweh, the commanding component in this psychokinetic salad of a giant spacefaring brain, is an ancient and pissed-off sorceress who wants him erased or enslaved, and she doesn't care much which.
Although he would never admit it, the mighty King Qweh is also tremendously threatened by Serab, a small and humble being with a stalwart spirit. As well, Qweh was always quite keen to keep Ondina subjugated, for it was obvious from the time of her birth that her innate powers easily exceeded his own.
In conclusion:
Mighty you may seem
In truth, you are a blowhard
Felled by a small thing
Created by:
The Real Cie
with essential help from
Gem Moondreamer
Lady Eddie
and
Rose LeMort
Notes:
This piece was started at donut and coffee time. I hoped to have it finished by lunchtime, but it was not completed until dinnertime. I suck at deadlines.
Nyarlathotep and the Outer Gods are the creations of H.P. Lovecraft
The Lights of Zetar is a (thankfully) fictional extraterrestrial being which appeared on the original Star Trek series in 1969. This entity is the creation of the late Jeremy Tarcher and the late Shari Lewis.
Shari Lewis' involvement in this creepy episode tends to come as a surprise to people, as she was famous for her work with the cuddly Lamb Chop puppet, not for writing about horrific entities from space which scare grouchy and curmudgeonly horror harridans for a lifetime.
My mood is a rundown motel room. It’s dull, it’s dingy, and the view from the window is equally hopeless. Maybe there are some things in the room that used to be beautiful, but they are long faded. Hope left town a long time ago.
When there is no more
To hope for I wonder why
Does life continue
~Cie~
Note:
I am NOT looking to be told to "seek counseling" or "try meds" or any of those other things I've heard a million times before. I'm looking to express myself. Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft told me that I could express myself through dark poetry. I don't want to make liars out of my longtime heroes by having to waste my time explaining to people that I am nearly 54 years old, I know my options, and I choose to lay it down in poetic form.
I just can't get poetic with today's prompt. I may end up attempting to tie things up by making it into a Haibun, but I make no promises there either. This is one of those that's going to be real, raw, and only lightly edited, so buckle up, Bitches, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
By the way, if you have issues with profanity, with subject matter that is on the opposite end of the spectrum from sweetness and light, with mental illness, the black dog, and suicide ideation, you'll probably want to give this post a miss.
Also, please remember these guidelines:
If I may add a couple:
"Have you tried meds?"
I will be 54 years old in February and have lifelong mental health issues. What do you think? The Wonder Drugs don't work the way they're advertised, they make things worse by a long shot. So, please, don't patronize me with that crap.
"Have you tried church?"
Some of the nicest people I've met have been religious.
Conversely, some of the most truly horrible and destructive people I've met have been religious.
If religion helps you, that's great. I don't like organized religion. It did me a lot more harm than good.
But neither of those things are what I came here to talk about.
I came here to talk about the day that the nuke dropped on my life.
Oh, hey, here's a Haiga I made last year. So, there's the poetry part of this assignment. This Haiga has little nuclear clouds in the background.
I'm a lifelong proponent of nuclear disarmament. I grew up during the cold war. When I was a child, I feared that I would die in a nuclear exchange. As a teenager, I figured I might as well party as hard as possible because I didn't know if I had a future. As an adult, I still have nuke dreams, but they're allegorical, just like the nuke that dropped on my life closing in on two years ago now.
I've mentioned before that I was fired from my job as a nurse back in March of 2017. I was really sick at the time I got fired, with both a chronic illness that had become significantly worse and an acute illness that made my lungs and sinuses feel like they were full of Slime.
Yeah, that stuff. When I was twelve, my brother and I got the kind with worms. It came in a little plastic trash can. We loved it.
I miss the fun I had with my brother when we were kids. He's too overworked and miserable and also in constant pain to have much fun now. It breaks my heart.
Anyway, the days playing with Slime and believing that Really Cool Stuff was going to happen were long in the past. I was working when I knew I shouldn't be working. Like I said, I was really, really sick.
I was working as a home care nurse. I had this really pushy coordinator who, when I mentioned that I was sick, said that the family really needed me to be there and it would be okay because I had contracted the illness from that patient, so it's not like he could catch it from me. Besides, this coordinator kept talking about how they were going to replace the nurse who had the four-night week with me (I was working three twelve-hour night shifts with this family and one twelve-hour night shift with another family) because that nurse had lupus and often had to miss work because of it. Great! Not like I can mention that my diabetes had gotten worse and was causing me problems when presented with that, right?
Yeah, I could have, but it has been a lifelong struggle for me to assert myself. I was afraid I'd lose my position. So I buckled down and went in. I had been dozing off during the shift during the past couple of weeks, but I always woke up. Still, it was worrying me, but I didn't feel like there was anyone I could tell.
On this particular night, I didn't just doze. I fell into a dark, dead, dreamless sleep. I'm fairly certain that I had a small stroke because there were certain changes to my cognition following that incident. Judging by the clock, I was out for about twenty minutes. I woke to the patient's father sitting at the end of the bed, glowering at me.
I apologized profusely, gathered my belongings, and left. I knew that I would be fired, which I was.
I felt horrible about the incident and about myself. I very seriously considered suicide. I've dealt with suicide ideation my entire life, but at this point, I was wondering if there was any reason for me to go on living. I was the worst of fuckups. Was I redeemable in any way? I hardly thought so.
At first, the financial hit wasn't as bad as it could have been. I was working part-time for another agency, picking up shifts once every couple of weeks with another patient. I was able to get full-time hours with them although the hourly salary was less. But then, that patient's condition worsened, he was hospitalized and ended up requiring more extensive care than we could provide. The agency never found me another case.
I drifted for a while, delivering food for Uber Eats and eventually trying to drive for Lyft and Uber. This lasted about two weeks, and some dumb stoner kid backed into the rental car I was driving. The rental company did not prorate me for the lost days, and Lyft took close to a month to reinstate me, even though the accident was not my fault. I said, "fuck it." I really didn't like driving passengers anyway.
I tried going back to work in long-term care, but the activity intolerance caused by my diabetes combined with the slight cognitive impairment experienced after the night which led to my being fired from the home care agency made this impossible. You never stop when you are working in a long-term care institution. There is no time to rest or even eat. My blood sugar tanked. Plus, as I discovered, I was no longer the whiz with passing meds that I had been when I did my nursing internship in 2011.
I understood each of the components of passing meds. This patient needs this med in this dose at this time. I understood what each of the meds did. But for the life of me, I could not prioritize which patient to give medication to first. I called my son halfway through the shift and told him I didn't think I could do the job. I emailed my letter of resignation to the staff director the next morning.
I took a job with an all-night grocery delivery service and ended up with a permanent nerve injury to my left arm. I spent half of November in terrible pain, unable to sit up for more than about 45 minutes at a time before I had to lie on the arm to try and numb the pain. I again considered suicide, this time not out of self-loathing but because the pain was nearly unbearable. I had to wait for two weeks for Medicaid to kick in before I could start physical therapy. I hadn't been able to afford insurance before that and was making too much with the delivery service to have Medicaid. It is one fucked-up system we have going, and there is nothing anyone could say to make me believe otherwise. It is straight-up fuckery, plain and simple.
At this point, the arm pretty much feels like a lump of clay. Sometimes a tingly lump of clay. But I'll take that over a hideous pain that induces suicidal feelings. Before anyone gives a person desperate for pain relief grief, think of the worst pain you have ever felt in your life. Now, ponder on the idea that you could not stop that pain. Bitch, you aren't going to just grin and bear it. You're going to do whatever the hell you have to do. I can't stand people who get sanctimonious about folks who become addicted to pain medications. Nobody wants to be in pain. End of story.
After a couple of weeks of physical therapy, I was able to drive again and ended up at my current job: delivering food. This is the sort of job that people have been taught to look down their nose at. To them I say, well, Motherfucker, I have your fucking food here, which you did not have to cook or pick up. You're better than me just because you work in an office? I say no. This kind of shit "master and servant" attitude does no-one any good. Rich people aren't better than poor people. In fact, to para-quote Bob Marley, some of them are so poor that all they have is money. Some of them are terrible people, and I would find it torturous to be in their presence for one minute.
Case in point, and ain't it the truth.
I went through more than a year of thinking "if I'm not able to be a nurse anymore, what value do I have?" I'm no longer in a "helper" profession. I'm no longer able to do the kind of work that said "helper" profession requires. I not only have a psychological disability or three, but I am also now physically disabled as well.
This society behaves as if people with disabilities deserve to live in poverty. I never believed that, but I kept feeling as if I'd done "something to deserve this."
I can't remember exactly when the breakthrough happened, but one day I got really pissed off and realized that no, I damn well did not do anything to deserve to be pushed into poverty. I lose Medicaid if I make a dime more than $1100 a month, but who the fuck can live on $1100 a month? I don't qualify for SNAP because I have a 401K from the job I held for close to 11 years and I don't want to take an $18,000 hit by liquidating it. I want that whole fucker to go to my son when I go tits up. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
As for being a nurse, the truth is, I never wanted to go into that profession. I was encouraged to go into it by my family because my mother had been a nurse. While I had some nice moments with the kids, and while I had some nice moments with my co-workers and the residents at the retirement community when I was working there, I was done. I was burned out. I really didn't want to do it anymore, and I felt extremely guilty about that. What kind of person doesn't want to help other people?
It isn't that I don't want to help other people, but I think it's long past time that I acknowledged that I need help too, that I deserve to have help, that I'm not garbage because I'm disabled. No disabled person is garbage. We need to stop this shit attitude in our society, and we need to stop it yesterday.
My disability doesn't really make me angry. Sometimes I wish I could still run and jump like I could when I was a kid. But I like to walk, and I hope I'll be able to walk for the rest of my life. Maybe the time will come when I need a scooter or power chair. If I do, I won't be bitter. Bodies age, shit happens. It is what it is. However, I have to be brutally honest. If I deteriorate to the point where I need to spend the rest of my life in a long-term care center, or if I'm diagnosed with dementia, that's the time I pull the plug. Those are two situations that I find absolutely intolerable. I won't do it to myself, and I won't do it to my son.
By the way, inasmuch as we need to acknowledge that depression is a very real illness, as real as any physical malady, we also need to acknowledge that sometimes depression isn't a brain-based issue. Our world is very fucked right now, and anyone who looks around and doesn't see terrible problems that should have been fixed a long time ago is shutting their eyes, sticking their fingers in their ears, and yelling "lalala, can't hear you."
It isn't going to get better by ignoring it, People.
"So then I artistically blurred my photo to give a sense of moving back through time."
Nah. I moved my hand while the photo was being taken.
"But why would you want to use a photo like that? Any photographer worth their salt would delete it forthwith!"
I don't really consider myself a photographer. I'm a person who takes pictures because I enjoy it.
This blurry photo isn't without its merits. It inspired me to create this Haiga of questionable quality.
Nobody is ever going to consider this to be a high-fallutin' work of art to rival the classics. But it is fun, and it illustrates the idea that you can make your mistakes work for you.
I have been battling perfectionism all my life. Embracing my mistakes is helpful for me. Perfectionism is an extremely destructive quality. I would like to share the ways in which it has harmed me from various perspectives.
In this post, I would like to share how physical perfectionism has caused untold harm to me and many others. Some of what I share involves my own perfectionism, and some of it involves the unrealistic standards which society imposes upon people.
On a physical level, we live in a society which demands that Number Twelve Looks Just Like You. We are supposed to aspire to a certain standard of beauty and fitness, and, if we fail to achieve such, we are deemed failures not worthy of even basic decency in the way we are treated by others.
However, rather than inspiring everyone to become super duper supermen and women, this attitude has a tendency to backfire. You end up with people who do not trust doctors because doctors continually shame them for their physical appearance or failure to be compliant with regimens that it may be impossible or intolerable for them.
So, instead of engaging in a program of regular visits to the doctor for preventative care and maintenance of chronic health issues, people avoid going to the doctor until they experience a critical problem. This helps no-one.
When my current doctor addressed my slightly elevated triglycerides (a common issue for diabetics) with "have you been indulging in treats?" I snapped. I said "I make twelve thousand dollars a year and generally eat only one or two meals a day. I eat what I can afford to purchase. I do not 'indulge.'"
In spite of the fact that this doctor is by far the most effective doctor that I have ever seen, I am considering going back to the guy who was burned out and had no fucks to give, because my current doctor has given me ample reason to mistrust her. The 'indulging in treats' bit is mere sprinkles on the body-shaming cake.
This doctor presented herself as offering a 'safe space' for larger people, and, during my first visit, appeared to live up to her promise. Thereafter, she suggested weight loss surgery and blamed my abnormal endometrial thickening on "obesity."
If you want your larger patients to believe for a second that you have any respect for them, you need to ditch the "o" word. "Obesity" is "other." "Obesity" is a pariah. "Obesity" is shit. "Obesity" is always said with a sanctimonious sneer. If you use that word, I do not trust you.
Abnormal endometrial thickening is correlated with a larger body type, but correlation is not causation. It is also correlated with being over fifty (guess I need to step into an age-regression machine), white (guess I'd better start tanning), and diabetic.
A larger body type is also correlated with type 2 diabetes. Again, correlation is not causation. I am inclined to think that abnormal pancreatic function is a strong contributing factor in both the tendency to gain weight and the endometrial hyperplasia. There may be a third factor which causes all of my endocrine issues. A heavy body type is correlated with endocrine issues, but it did not cause these issues. In fact, the reverse is true. None of my endocrine system works properly. It would be highly unlikely for me to have a thin body unless I were to become deathly ill, regardless of how little I eat or how much I exercise.
So, having a bench in your waiting room rather than just chairs with arms does not constitute offering a "safe space" for people of all sizes. I don't trust you, and that makes for an ineffective doctor/patient relationship, regardless of your ability to diagnose and possibly treat health problems.
People are not inclined to take care of things they hate, and that includes their bodies. While cleaning out my storage unit, I found numerous artifacts from the many years I spent trying to hate myself thin. Looking over the awful things I wrote about myself, thinking about all the money I spent playing a game that almost nobody wins, realizing that I caused wear and tear to my body equivalent to the harm done to it by the many years I spent working long hours at physically punishing jobs, thinking back on the times when I was sometimes spending five hours at the gym when I should have been spending that time with my son, I became extremely depressed.
To top it all off, none of this shit brought me to the goal of Magical Thinness, which would have won me the Handsome Prince with the Exactly Correct Body Fat Percentage, a billion dollars for every pound I lost during my incredibly successful "weight loss journey," fame and adoration of the masses, or anything but a far thinner wallet and a soul filled with self-loathing.
Thinspo is crap. Fitspo is crap. Dieting is crap. It's all harmful. None of it will bring you happiness, and it won't even bring you health. It will bring you self-loathing and turn you into an awful person that nobody likes.
Dieting is not about health. It is about perfectionism. The pressure to be perfect is purely for profit. Stop paying into a system that doesn't give a damn about you and thrives on your failure.
"In the long term, dieting is a spectacular waste of time for everyone except statistical unicorns." --Louise Adams
Text by The Real Cie. House of Cards and its characters are the creation and property of Netflix.
I was inspired to create this Haiga while binge-watching House of Cards instead of sleeping. I noticed the parallel between the over-the-top drama involving House of Cards' main character, Frank Underwood, and Kevin Spacey, the actor who plays the part. Frank Underwood describes his father as having been a violent alcoholic. Spacey has stated that his father was both physically and sexually abusive as well as a racist.
While I feel that the inner turmoil from his childhood abuse combined with shame over his sexual orientation may have prompted Kevin Spacey to behave in inappropriate and ill-advised ways with young men, and while I feel compassion for his struggles, I do not think that his behavior is acceptable. It is a shame that it resulted in his being terminated from House of Cards because he is a superlative actor. Of course, it is also unfortunate that the young men subjected to his behavior suffered psychological repercussions.
This piece falls into the categories of fan art, art imitating life, human failings, tragedy, and irony.
I loathe this laptop with the fiery passion of a thousand supernovas. I will be glad to have my desktop back in action this week.
Click the above photos to enlarge them.
It appears that Rick from 19 Planets (19planets.wordpress.com) is not doing Haiga prompts this year. It has become a tradition for me to do Haiga in September so I will continue that tradition. The Haiga may occasionally be mixed with other prompts.
If I miss a day, I will try to double up on another day, but I'm not going to be a strict disciplinarian with this. I'm not in school and this isn't homework. It's supposed to be enjoyable. Life is far and away stressful enough without my adding to the stress by beating up on myself for not having my Haiga done on a strict schedule.
My Haiga this month will probably become Haibun more often than not, as this one has done.
I will be using more of my own photos than I have in the past. The above photo, with and without the Haiga, is mine. You are welcome to use and share it, but please credit me back. You can link to this blog, but at least provide a copyright credit to Cara Hartley or The Real Cie. You are welcome to alter the original photo, i.e., to make your own Haiga or use for a photo prompt, but, again, credit me for the original photo. I'm pretty easygoing about the use of my work as long as I'm credited for it.
In other news, my financial situation is still awful, and my son suggested that I move in with him. I would never have asked him to let me do this, and I was surprised and grateful for the offer. He has grown up a lot, and it shows in the fact that he saw the way I was struggling and offered this solution. I think it shows that I have made a few positive changes as well.
One change that has come in the past year is my reaction to acknowledgment (or lack thereof) of my work. In the past, it has been very upsetting to me that I do not generally receive comments on my creations. This has tended to have a negative effect on my work. At this point, I seem to have taken enough Fukitol that I really don't give any fucks whether people comment on my work or not.
I also don't care if people are offended by my liberal use of profanity. I'm assuming we're all adults here. I cannot possibly be the first person you've encountered who has a tendency to drop f-bombs. I used to post warnings all over the place and apologize any time that I typed a post full of swears. Fuck that shit. If you have a problem with profanity, this is your notice that I'm not someone whose work you want to read. Full stop.
I will not apologize for being politically liberal, being horrified by the reptilian aliens who have taken over the United States Government (I don't actually think they're reptilian aliens, this is an example of hyperbole), my tendency to be hyperbolic, my being agnostic with a tendency to metaphysical beliefs, my tattoos, my mental health issues, my physical issues, the size of my body, my dead libido, or my outrage at the state of the world.
I will not apologize for the fact that in spite of the financial upheaval my physical decline has wrought, I am greatly relieved to never have to work in healthcare again. Although there could be a sense of accomplishment, I realize that I was extremely stressed out and more often than not miserable doing this kind of work. The physically and emotionally difficult jobs I worked in the past took a toll on my body, and I'm not sorry to be done with them.
I will not apologize for working a low-paid job as a delivery driver for a restaurant. I should not have to apologize for that.
I will not apologize for needing to receive Medicaid. I will say that it's bullshit that I should have to make sure that I don't earn over $1100 a month because if I earn one cent more than that, I lose Medicaid. Everybody in the U.S. should have Medicaid. Full fucking stop, no fucking apologies.
I will not apologize for writing gloomy poetry.
I will not apologize for writing Haiku.
I will not apologize for being an outlier. I used to beat myself up for not being able to belong to any group, including so-called "writer support groups." These groups tend to only be supportive if you are a very select type of person. I am not a very select type of person. Whether accidentally or on purpose, the Universe broke the mold after it made me. I think the Deities probably said, "holy shit, we can't have another of those running around!"
So, here we are, my first Haibun of 2018. I think. I may have done another somewhere along the way, but, as far as I know, this is the first one.
I may make a virtual chapbook of this year's NaHaiWriMo. (I'm pretty sure I stole that term from the aforementioned Rick.) All proceeds will go to helping me pay my plethora of back bills. Stay tuned for more!
I generally have the borderline aspect of my incredibly fucked-up psyche under much better control than I used to. However, stress can trigger this aspect. Although the manifestation is less destructive overall because I have more capacity for reasoning things out than I did when I was younger, my anxiety levels still fly right off the scale, and I feel like my heart and head are going to fucking explode.
There you go.
I don't know if it's just me, but it seems that people these days are incapable of disagreeing without becoming violently disagreeable, at least verbally. I've never particularly enjoyed debating, I find it stressful. However, I was always taught to be civil. These days, people feel entitled to go on the attack anytime someone disagrees with them even a little.
Politically, I lean way to the left. However, I find the the far left equally as troubling as the far right. If you don't adhere to their exact thought patterns, you get accused of all kinds of things. Last night, I made the mistake of leaving what I thought was an innocent comment agreeing with an author who stated that he felt a jackass comment made by a right-wing pundit was inappropriate but it wasn't sexual harassment. I stated that I felt it was important to make the distinction between hyperbolic posturing such as this and actual sexual harassment, and I got piled on. If you want to see the article in question, it's here. I'm not going back there.
The first person vehemently accused me of not believing that zir rape was rape, and it devolved from there. One person felt the need to explain to me that forced anal penetration was rape. Well, no shit, Sherlock. I am aware of this. Another demanded to know if I broadcast my off-the-cuff hyperbole on television. Obviously not, Shithead. I told him that I generally use a bullhorn.
I attempted to voice my disagreements in a reasonable fashion, but they were having none of it. Callout culture and groupthink have made it impossible to have a non-toxic debate. I fucked off, allowing the screaming meemies to think they won teh internetz!!!1!!
I try to avoid this kind of environment, because I find it extremely (I hate to use this badly overused word) triggering. I honestly didn't think there was potential for this sort of backlash as I thought I was dealing with adults. I expected disagreement, but I expected it to be rational in presentation. Man, was I wrong!
I was already under a lot of stress, and now I feel like my body is full of stinging insects. It's one of those days where I'd like to just take a low dose edible and take a load off, but I have too much to do.
For me, the edibles work a lot better than benzodiazepenes. There is no rebound effect (most benzos), no mind-numbing dullness (Valium), no extreme sedation. I wish I could just do that. But, nooo. So here we are.
I feel like the current call-out culture has given people permission to behave in an odious, entitled manner and to have no manners.
As it is, I sometimes have trouble even checking my comments for fear that I will be attacked.
I really don't belong on this planet.
Damn. That was the shittiest Haibun I ever wrote. Sorry.
