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

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

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

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

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

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

And now you know that part of my story.

Here are today's Inner Champion Workbook questions:

Wrong direction/action:

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

How it didn’t match my values or goals:

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

How I got myself back on track:

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

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

Wrong direction/action:

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

How it doesn’t match my values or goals:

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

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

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

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

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November PAD Chapbook Challenge Day 24: A Dialogue

you had my heart

I only wanted a hookup

you should have said so

you took the chance

you shouldn't lie

you should be more careful who you trust

you should be ashamed

but you're the one who is

how can you be so heartless?

it's your fault for thinking with your heart

why do you think cruel is cool?

I'm not the one sitting home crying

you're a miserable liar

you're the one who feels like dying

I did everything you wanted

and now I'll find someone else to do the same

you are the worst

but I won't take the blame

you are the lowest

but you carry the shame

~Cie~

Notes:

Today's November PAD Chapbook Challenge asked for a dialogue poem. I had this terrible conversation all too many times in my younger days when my self-esteem was at its worst and I let bad guys do terrible things to me in the vain hope that they would love me back. Being the cold-hearted bitch that I get accused of being when I rebuff the advances of jerks who think I should consider myself lucky that they're paying attention to me is far better than being broken-hearted and feeling used.

Fat Friday #14: The Prejudice that Fat Folk Face Every Day of our Lives

When you're fat the world gives you ample reason to hate yourself simply for existing.

Everyone has the right to exist in peace and to become their best self.

When you're fat, you have to do that even though everyone is telling you that you don't have a right to exist as you are.

Even though everyone is telling you that you deserve to have only the worst things happen to you.

You have to learn to accept yourself even though no-one else accepts you.

Not everyone is able to do so.

Prejudice kills.

Carpe Diem Little Ones: Sedoka: In the Mirror

Image by Michael Gaida from Pixabay

Face in the mirror

Painting its cheeks with color

While painting its heart with lies

Painted-on pretty

Never healed a single wound

I was lying to myself

~Cie~

Notes:

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

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

The Cheese Grates It: Me Too

Image copyright Andrea Arroyo

This is a response to a post by Juliet James on Medium

Honestly, Noah sounds like a horrible human being.

I have plenty of these stories myself. There was a guy named Shawn who I went to junior high and high school with. The girls all called him Scummy Shawn. He was always grabbing our breasts and buttocks. When we would go to an adult about it, we were brushed off as being overly sensitive. Boys will be boys. Just tell him to stop it.

One day Shawn was with a guy named Charlie. Charlie was a bit of a doofus, but he was harmless. Shawn grabbed my buttocks and told Charlie "grab her tits, dude." 

Charlie blushed and said no, he didn't think that would be cool.

Shawn grabbed my breast, and I wheeled around and kicked him in the marbles. He doubled over and groaned that I was being childish. I told him I'd become downright infantile if he ever touched me again. He never did.

I wish I hadn't had to resort to that, but I'm not sorry I did it.

A couple of years later, I ended up in the mental hospital after a half-assed suicide attempt. There were a lot of things that led to this. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had type 2 bipolar disorder, which didn't help. The factors leading to this incident were the fact that my aunt and my two cousins had moved in with me, and the cousin who was my age picked on me constantly. I was bullied at school, and my boyfriend, who was two years older than me, coerced me into letting him take my virginity. He then dumped me.

I was treated abominably at the mental hospital and promised myself that I would die before I ever ended up in one of those places again. I have kept that promise.

Looking back on it, the majority of sexual experiences in my life have been coercive. The guy who ended up raping me after I broke up with him used the come-on line "you don't want to be celibate for the rest of your life, do you?"

In fact, I would have been fine with being celibate for the rest of my life. I don't like sex very much. However, I have a very low self-esteem and still carried in my mind the idea that a woman without a man was somehow not a complete person. This is an extremely toxic idea and leads to women remaining in abusive relationships, but many of us have been fed this idea from a very young age.

It is distressing to me that there are enough people in this country who think a woman being assaulted matters so little that we now have "President" Pussy-Grabber in the highest office.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

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

A response to a post on "The Mighty."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~