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Erika Hammerschmidt
Blogs from 2019
(Note: For some of these posts, earlier versions went up on my private or public social media around the dates indicated, but not here on my home page. In revamping my page I have chosen to include those posts here. Links are included when a public version is available.)
Reliable
2019/01/03
First posted here on Tumblr.
You know how employers interviewing you for a job will sometimes ask "Do you have reliable transportation?" and turn you down if you admit you don't have a car?
Well, here's more support for the fact that you should always just say "Yes, I have reliable transportation" and not specify further, even if you're without a car at the moment.
Today I got in to work. On time. There was about a foot of snow-- deeper, maybe knee-deep, in the drifts, which covered the sidewalks and much of the road. My husband's car couldn't get out of the driveway. Same with many of my coworkers' cars. Some called in, some arrived late.
But I was there on time. I had to wade through knee-deep snow part of the way, between buses, but I did it.
If you don't have a car, and you do have a bus route from home to work, you can get to work. With some exceptions, like crappy bus routes that only run once or twice a day, but if you have a decent, regularly running bus, you can get there. Even if you miss a bus, you can catch the next one. You'll be late, but you'll be there.
But if you do have a car, and don't have a bus route, then if your car fails, you are completely out of luck. Your only option is to take a cab, which, depending on the job and the location, can cost more than you earn in a day of work, and defeat the whole purpose of going.
A bus is MORE reliable transportation than a car. If you can take the bus, you have reliable transportation.
Horse Names
2019/01/11
First posted here on Tumblr.
"Pegasus" is an individual creature's name, not a species.
The winged horse called "Pegasus" was named after... well, it's unclear, but maybe the pegai of Okeanos, where he was born, or the word pihassas , meaning "lightning," indicating that the horse was the bringer of thunderbolts to Zeus.
We should not call every winged horse a Pegasus, any more than we should call every vampire a Dracula.
(Which is good, because it avoids the dilemma of how to pluralize "Pegasus"!)
A winged horse should, instead, be named after either its birthplace or its job-- or, if possible, ambiguously both/either.
For example: I'm a Minnesotan-born pharmacy tech.
So, my winged horse name would be Midicaeta
because historians could variously interpret it as a corruption of either the place name "Minnesota," or the job title "medicator."
depression is arguing with historical figures in my head
2019/01/17
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren't fit to live
ME: oh shit. i haven't. i guess i'm not fit to live. ...ok, gonna go die then
MLK: congratulations! you ARE fit to live now, because you have just found something you are willing to die for! it was your own worthlessness! your own unfitness to live! it was inside you all along!
ME: but wait. If I've found it, that means I AM fit to live now.
ME: So, being fit to live, I've lost the reason I was willing to die.
ME: So then I am unfit to live, again
ME: It's a paradox
ME: like the girl who's having the song sung to her that goes "you don't know you're beautiful, that's what makes you beautiful"
Name Day
2019/05/17
So tomorrow is my name day. That means it's the day that the Catholic Church decided to celebrate a particular saint-- in this case, the one who shares my first name.
In Austria, where my parents like to pretend we live, a name day is celebrated maybe as much as a birthday.
But the problem is: There is not, technically, a saint named Erika. People who don't have an actual saint's name? We have to make do with the closest one.
The closest is St Eric, who was a super jerk. One of those "spread Christianity by the sword" super jerks. Which goes against my entire world view, particularly the parts of my world view that say:
- I don't really think there's a God
- You shouldn't pressure people to join a religion
- People are not actually able to choose what to believe... so if you force someone to practice Christianity, you are only making them fake it
- Based on this world's evidence I am pretty sure that, even if there is a God, he does not want to be believed in.
- But even if he does, he'd probably rather have sincere belief than "pretend to believe so they don't kill me"
At least Eric got his head chopped off eventually. And not in a real martyr way, because he was a king and it was done by a rival for the throne. It supposedly happened on May 18th, hence the date. But it was not a real saintly way to go.
So, I have decided I will not celebrate St Eric on my name day.
The date still has some sentimental value to me, but I am looking into other people with my name who are more worth celebrating.
Not saints. I don't care what the Catholic Church thinks of them. But people who did things I actually find cool. And who also maybe have MY ACTUAL NAME and not just something close.
So, to the Erika page on Wikipedia!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_(given_name)
As an aside, I really don't like the Nordic roots of my name! Meaning either "sole ruler" or "eternal ruler," it's got an autocratic flavor that creeps me out.
I prefer what the syllables mean in Japanese, which is... "favour pear fragrance"? Yum.
https://www.behindthename.com/name/erika/submitted
But, on to the people with my name.
Since name saints tend to be from long ago, I'm gonna focus on the oldest ones.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Mann
Born 1905. Not much going for her except she's the daughter of Thomas Mann. And her last name means "man," and in the Wikipedia picture she looks like a man. A cute man, though.
She also fought the Nazis or at least criticized them. Yay, I guess. 6/10.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Liebman
Swedish poet, born 1738. Dates of birth and death unknown.
Not much info on her, but maybe she was cool? I can't read Swedish, so I can't read her poetry. ?/10.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs
Born 1906, last name literally means "fox" in German. She translated Disney comics for a living. Not a fan of Disney myself, but I majored in two languages in hopes of being a translator, and now my dream includes making comics, so yay? Also, I love the way she added clever literary and historical references that weren't in the English originals, and I love how the "Erikativ" is named after her. 9/10.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Cremer
Physicist, born 1900, on May 20th. Kinda close to my name day! Developed gas chromatography. Friggin awesome! I know nothing about gas chromatography, but I sure admire people who do. Lady physicists that long ago? My utmost respect. 9/10.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_von_Brockdorff
Resistance fighter in Nazi Germany, born 1911. Died by guillotine, executed by the Nazis. Genuine martyr for what she believed in, not like Eric the Incidentally Headless. Also, it happened May 13th. See, this date is in the middle of some meaningful stuff! 9/10.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Wendt
Born 1917, also a WWII resistance fighter (anti Nazi spy). What she did is much more exciting than what von Brockdorff did, though her death is much less exciting and much later. Glad she got to live a long life, anyway. 7/10.
My Erika peeps like to fight Nazis.
Kinda funny, since the first hit that comes up on Google for "Erika" is a Nazi marching song featuring that name.
Though, to be fair, the lyrics of the song don't actually have anything to do with Nazis or war, and I'm not sure if the guy who wrote it even intended for it to be a Nazi marching song.
Erika from the song: honorable mention, 5/10.
I dunno. I'm torn between the top three.
Erika Fuchs has the most in common with me, despite the part where Disney is really not my thing. She doesn't have any important dates around my name day, but she's all about my passions. Art! Language! Humor! Creativity! Adding silly details and obscure allusions when you're supposed to be professionally transcribing someone else's words! Getting colloquial uses of German verbs named after you!
Erika Cremer is that dream I admire but could never be, since I just don't have the right kind of mind to understand physics. Birthday is close to name day. Respect is great, but from a distance, since I couldn't aspire to her greatness.
Erika von Brockdorff is the most like an actual saint, martyrdom and all, plus the date almost matches. What she did probably doesn't make a good movie... she basically just sheltered resistance fighters in her home... But then again, having a home to shelter people in during times of crisis is another dream of mine, and she cared about that so much she died for it.
Go Erika! I'm gonna close with her dying quote, which is more my style than I expected:
"Lachend will ich mein Leben beschliessen, so wie ich das Leben lachend am meisten liebte und noch liebe." ("I want to end my life laughing, laughing the way I loved and still love life.")
disturbing dream
2019/07/20
Oh my god this was weird.
In my dream last night, I was watching an episode of Star Trek TOS. The episode where the female Romulan commander tries to seduce Spock. Except the scene wasn't how I remembered it. The Romulan commander was... pole dancing, or something. With a snake.
OK, maybe hotter than I remembered it? But-- no. Yikes. It wasn't the commander dancing, it was some other woman, and she wasn't dancing, the snake was strangling her, and it had eaten her eyes, and there were actually multiple people this was happening to...
And then suddenly I realized it was actually an episode of TNG. And now the crew was... investigating a case of child molesting? Which was somehow related to the strangling snakes? (yikes, poor kid?) I think they were questioning some young girl who may or may not have been a witness...
And they're in... a shopping mall or something. At least, it looks like she's trying on skirts.
And suddenly she throws this one skirt on the floor and screams, "There's your f'ing child violation."
And everyone looks at the skirt like "... ok, maybe it is too short for a kid your age?"
And she keeps screaming. And suddenly the perspective shifts, and I'm this girl, and I'm ranting like crazy:
"Nobody should f'ing wear a skirt that shows their knees. Because nobody f'ing WANTS to show their knees. No one likes how their knees look. Anyone who thinks they want to show their knees has been brainwashed by some sadistic abuser who wants to make them suffer by showing their knees. No one wants to show their f'ing knees, nobody likes how their knees look, knees look f'ing awful..."
I do not know why this kid was so angry about knees. Wow.
Another Star Trek dream
2019/07/21
OK, this morning I dreamed I was playing Data in some new reboot of TNG.
In the dream I looked the same as I do in real life, and Data looked the same as he does in regular TNG. Apparently I wore a lot of makeup.
I was... filling out some questionnaire, as my character. At some kind of... psychological evaluation? I was answering questions as my version of Data would answer them.
And he was making a lot of weird social mistakes. Like, drawing really offensive hate symbols on the cover of the form and not realizing that humans would find them upsetting. WTF, Data.
The doctor running the evaluation did not know I was the actor playing Data. She asked me questions. I explained, gradually, that I was an actor who played an android. She asked more questions, got me to admit it was Data.
She didn't express a reaction to this, but I got a sense of two reactions: 1. judging me for the way I portrayed Data and 2. surprise that Data was being played by a female actress.
And then I woke up, and my sweetheart suddenly decided to show me a trailer for the new Picard show.
With a reference to Data's (apparent) death in that other movie, and the introduction of a mysterious woman who "does not know what she is."
If she turns out to be an android with Data's consciousness in her, I am gonna be MAD at my dream for spoiling it.
screw you, dream.
Ask Culture and Guess Culture
2019/10/03
Some thoughts about Ask Culture and Guess Culture.
I grew up in Minnesota, which is overwhelmingly Guess Culture. That is, society discourages you from asking for anything outright. You are expected to hint at what you want, and hope that someone picks up on your hints and offers it to you.
John grew up in Hawaii, which is much more of an Ask Culture. He expects to be free to ask for whatever he wants. And to get an honest answer.
He gets annoyed at Guess Culture behaviors, like my tendency to describe a problem and wait for offers of help, instead of asking outright.
"I don't know how I'm going to get home."
"Oh, do you need me to come pick you up?"
"Yeah, could you please?"
"Sure! But, you know, you could have just asked."
And I try to use Ask Culture around him, but it is so hard for me.
You might think that Ask Culture would be the easiest thing for a person on the autism spectrum. It's clear, honest and straightforward, and doesn't involve trying to interpret unspoken communication.
But autistics are not all the same. Some of us adapted to our social challenges by becoming obsessively afraid of conflict, and doing anything and everything to avoid it.
That often involved becoming hyper-aware of other people's perspectives. Becoming more invested in empathy and theory of mind than the average neurotypical person.
In every culture I've experienced, people don't like being denied things they ask for. If someone asks for something and you say "no," they will ask why. And if your answer doesn't satisfy them, they keep asking questions until they find a way to get you to say "yes."
Not everyone does this, but it's the reaction I most expect when I say "no" to a request. It's the one that all my preparations center around. And since it's a form of conflict, I fear it very deeply.
Some people, like John, just got very good at sticking to their position. Good at reiterating their answer even when it faced argument.
Other people, like me, learned to compromise and often just give up.
When someone asks me to do something I don't want to do, conflict is the last resort in my mind. I hate arguing so much, I will agree to many things I don't want, just because it's preferable to the argument that my refusal would bring.
So when I look at it from another person's perspective, Ask Culture seems abusive.
To John, it feels manipulative and passive-aggressive when I mention not having a ride home in hopes that someone will offer me one. But to me, it feels like the only way NOT to be manipulative.
In my mind, if I hint at needing a ride home, other people are free. Free to miss my hint, with no loss of face to themselves.
But if I outright ask someone for a ride, I am placing them in a position where they have no freedom. A place where they HAVE to either give me what I want, or say "no" and initiate a conflict with me.
They have no way of knowing that I wouldn't argue with them, or even silently consider them a jerk for saying no. They have every right to fear those things. So I can't trust any consent they give under those circumstances.
To me, putting someone in that position feels like abusive manipulation. I would rather walk home or call a cab than do that to someone.
And this all becomes even more fraught when it comes to issues of dating and sex. Because we prioritize people's consent in those areas of life most of all.
The whole concept of flirting is Guess Culture.
People looking for a date don't want to be bluntly rejected, because that hurts. And if they're decent people, they also don't want someone to say "yes" out of fear. Fear of conflict, awkwardness, hurting their feelings, or even physical violence.
And when you outright ask someone for sex or a date, there is a very high chance that you will get that kind of coerced "yes." Especially if you're a man asking a woman. We have a lot of reasons to be afraid to say no, even if you seem really nice.
So it can feel like there's no way to be sure someone's consent is genuine. Flirting is supposed to be a gentle way of getting this information. But it's not a perfect solution either, because it relies on being able to read nonverbal cues.
Some people will very convincingly pretend that they're OK with something when they're really not. I know. I've done it myself, out of fear of conflict. And I've projected a fear that others are doing it with me. Not just in dating, but in everything.
Some of us go our whole lives being undemanding, and still suspecting that everyone's only being nice to us out of obligation. Others make everyone feel obligated and then spend their lives thinking everyone likes doing things for them.
I like to think I'm in that first group, but who knows? Maybe my guess-culture hints are still making people feel obligated, maybe no one really likes me. It's a fear that won't really go away.
There's not a perfect solution. I mean, you can say things like "Just be honest, and if other people aren't honest to you that's on them." And I don't blame anyone who genuinely takes another person at their word and it then turns out the other person was pretending to be OK with something they weren't.
But I also don't feel like I can blame people who pretend to be OK with things they're not. I KNOW the kind of anxieties and bad experiences that can cause you to feel like you need to do that. I know how sometimes society drills it into you that saying "no" is not a safe option.
What I'm saying is that conflicts between people don't always have a fault. If I'm not at fault for something that happened between me and you, that doesn't mean you're at fault. It doesn't mean anyone is.
And "no one's at fault" does NOT mean no one's allowed to feel angry. Anger's an emotional response, not a choice. The question of whether it's rational to feel anger is kind of a meaningless question. Like asking whether it's rational to feel pain. You feel pain, and anger, even if the injury you experienced wasn't anyone's fault. That's just how it is.
And I don't want to lay blame on either Ask or Guess culture.
I mean, "never say no" isn't exactly healthy, but neither is "interrogate anyone who says no until they say yes." Both come from deeply problematic aspects of one's upbringing.
A system like "say what you mean and be honest, and accept other people's answers without fighting" MIGHT work, but only if EVERYONE lived by it. If any subset of people stopped taking no for an answer, or stopped saying no when they meant no, the rest of the population couldn't expect others to follow the system anymore, and would change their behavior accordingly.
People's actions affect each other.
People like me wouldn't have so much trouble asking for things outright, if we didn't know that there are other people like me who are easily coerced into saying yes against their will.
And those people wouldn't have so much trouble saying no if there weren't other people who give you drama if you say no.
I bet those people wouldn't even be so persistent, if people like me didn't give in when they persisted.
It's a cycle.
Why does he do that? Not always the right question.
2019/10/04
I've been thinking about some images that have been going around the internet. They're images of pages, or screenshot text, from the book "Why Does He Do That?" by Lundy Bancroft.
This book (written by someone who counsels abusers and then tries to teach them better behavior) offers a view into what's going on in the minds of men who control and hurt their partners.
And two particular passages from it are shared very frequently on the internet.
And I've seen them both pop up on Tumblr and Twitter hundreds of times.
So here's one:
When a client of mine tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn't do something even worse. For example, I might say, "You called her a f-cking wh-re, you grabbed the phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet, where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were 'totally out of control' at that time, but you didn't kick her. What stopped you?" And the client can always give me a reason. Here are some common explanations:
"I wouldn't want to cause her a serious injury."
"I realized one of the children was watching."
"I was afraid someone would call the police."
"I could kill her if I did that."
"The fight was getting loud, and I was afraid neighbors would hear."
And the most frequent response of all:
"Jesus, I wouldn't do that. I would never do something like that to her."
The response that I almost never heard-- I remember hearing it twice in fifteen years-- was: "I don't know."
These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients' loss-of-control excuse. While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: "Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could I get hurt myself? Am I doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?"
A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients: An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers morally unacceptable. He may hide what he does because he thinks other people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. I can't remember a client ever having said to me: "There's no way I can defend what I did. It was just totally wrong." He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short, an abuser's core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong.
Now, on the surface of it, I agree with that passage.
Because I have little to no sympathy for abusers. I find it very probable that most abusers-- at least those for whom the problem gets bad enough that someone reports the abuse-- DO really believe they have a right to do what they do.
But the passage, taken out of context and shared on the internet as it usually is, gives the impression that you can reliably, accurately draw that conclusion from that type of evidence. (No matter what person and what action you're dealing with).
And that thought process is highly dangerous.
Not dangerous to those morally twisted abusers who see abuse as their god-given right. But dangerous to vulnerable people with mental illness, disabilities and brain injuries, whose motives are judged by a thought process inspired by words like these.
And I'll explain why.
First, another one of those passages:
Many years ago, I was interviewing a woman named Sheila by telephone. She was describing the rages that my client Michael would periodically have: "He just goes absolutely berserk, and you never know when he's going to go off like that. He'll just start grabbing whatever is around and throwing it. He heaves stuff everywhere, against the walls, on the floor-- it's just a mess. And he smashes stuff, important things sometimes. Then it's like the storm just passes; he calms down; and he leaves for a while. Later he seems kind of ashamed of himself."
I asked Sheila two questions. The first was, when things got broken, were they Michael's, or hers, or things that belonged to both of them? She left a considerable silence while she thought. Then she said, "You know what? I'm amazed that I've never thought of this, but he only breaks my stuff. I can't think of one thing he's smashed that belonged to him."
Next, I asked her who cleans up the mess. She answered that she does.
I commented, "See, Michael's behavior isn't nearly as berserk as it looks. And if he really felt so remorseful, he'd help clean up."
That's a similar thought process. And just as dangerous, when taken without any other context.
So, let's talk a bit about what loss of control is.
What does it mean, exactly, when people genuinely lose control of their actions due to a mental disability?
Well, our minds are constantly generating impulses, then deciding which ones to act on, and squashing down the rest.
Even if you have good impulse control, it is likely that you've had times when you got angry at someone and felt an urge to punch them, or break something belonging to them. Probably, your good impulse control identified that urge as an incorrect one and repressed it.
But if the part of your brain that makes that call was impaired, you might not have been able to stop the urge from turning into an action. This is often the case for people with certain disorders and certain types of brain injury.
And it's the case for all of us, in childhood, before our brains mature-- and this is why children aren't considered fully responsible for their actions.
But this does not necessarily have ANY effect on what urge you felt in the first place. Even in people with impaired impulse control, the original impulses usually follow a certain sort of pattern:
-Impulsive angry behavior tends to have an intensity that corresponds to the intensity of the anger.
In other words: If you're angry at someone for insulting you, you may feel an urge to slap them, or to insult them back, but probably not an urge to murder them.
-Impulsive angry behavior also tends to be directed at the same target as the anger.
In other words: If you're angry at someone, you may feel an urge to break their possessions, but probably not an urge to break your own possessions.
And if your impulse control is impaired, the urges you feel are the urges you will act on. So, no matter how little control you have over your own actions, you're never going to do something you don't feel an initial urge to do.
But this book passage seems to assume that a genuine loss of control would result in totally random behavior, unrelated to the urges a person might be expected to feel.
However, this is just not true.
Now, I do agree that many of the answers in the first example are revealing. Many of them do seem to show that the abuser's primary worry was being caught, which indicates that the action was under more control than he admits.
But, the author implies that the only good answer-- the only answer that would indicate a genuine loss of control-- would be "I don't know."
And this is not the case. A person who truly had an impairment in impulse control might give any answer that explained why he didn't feel an initial impulse to commit worse violence. The final answer in the example -- which the author says is the most common-- would fall in that category.
"Jesus, I wouldn't do that. I would never do something like that to her."
If a small child lost control of his temper and threw a toy at his sister, and you asked him why he didn't also grab a pair of scissors and stab her, he might have a response similar to that. So, would you then conclude that he was in full control of his actions and should be tried as an adult for assault?
Bancroft also makes assumptions about motivation in the second example. For example, we can't assume that when a man breaks things and doesn't help clean up, he "must not really be sorry."
Sometimes when I'm genuinely sorry about something I've done by mistake, I feel so ashamed that I can't stand to be near the people affected by it, or the place where it happened.
And sometimes I feel like I'm so incompetent that any attempt to help would just make it worse. Or I assume that the person I inadvertently harmed does not want to be around me either, and so I stay away, because I'm afraid my offers to help would just be seen as unwanted interaction.
Now, I'm not saying that the specific man in the example had those reasons. I mean, Bancroft does seem to know very well how abusers work-- particularly the ones who end up in abuse counseling, which is where this man was.
And there are plenty of other passages in the book that show their premeditating, calculating nature much better than these two.
So, I'm not so much troubled by the book in general; I am mainly troubled by the fact that these two passages, taken out of context, are by far the most widely-distributed parts of it.
The impression they give, out of context, is that you can deduce people's motivation, and people's level of self-control, from things like the fact that their behavior was not completely random. Or the fact that they were able to answer questions about their motives.
And, for people who genuinely do lack control over some aspects of their mental illness or disability-- people who are already constant victims of gaslighting and accusations of faking-- spreading these sorts of thoughts is deeply harmful.
To me, it feels frighteningly reminiscent of experiences I've had. Like being told, "You must have control over your obsessive fears, because there are times when you're not feeling them."
(So epileptic patients can control their seizures, and people with heart disease can control their heart attacks, because they're not having them a hundred percent of the time?)
Like those book passages, the gaslighting arguments I've faced are ones that make sense on the surface, to someone who's only thought about the problem for a few minutes. But to the person living with it, they're obviously flawed.
And it falls on us to put into words why they're flawed, and articulate it in ways that the layman who's only thought about it for a minute will understand. The responsibility for using better logic to fight worse logic is forced onto those of us who are often in a frame of mind that does not allow calm, rational reasoning.
This is unfair.
But it's not only people with disabilities who will suffer from the spread of those ideas. It also endangers the victims of those few abusers who do actually suffer from disabilities that impair self-control-- or those who fake it so convincingly that their victims are unable to believe otherwise.
Framing the argument as "He does it on purpose, so he doesn't deserve your sympathy" is dangerous to abuse victims, for a few reasons.
First of all, there are people who do commit violence due to a real loss of control. I personally believe that the reason Bancroft has not encountered many of them is because their violence is the least likely to be reported.
That's because those who witness the violence can often tell it is the result of a disability. So they don't contact the sort of authorities who would put the person in an abuse counseling program, like the one where Bancroft worked.
The victims of that sort of abuse are already, very often, living in the worldview these passages suggest. A worldview where the abuser's motivation is what matters, and no matter what he's doing, the question of whether you should stay with him is decided by whether he's "really losing control."
And then, reading these out-of-context passages is not going to help them. It will have one of two effects:
1: it might convince them that he's actually faking it, and cause them to treat him as they would treat a criminal
or 2: it will have no effect, because the victims are convinced, with good reason, that they know their abusers better than the author of any book, and these passages clearly do not apply in their case.
That second one will probably be a very common response-- even with abusers who are NOT actually out of control, and are just pretending to be, so convincingly that their victims cannot accept anyone else's interpretation.
I don't know. This isn't my field of expertise. And I haven't read the book in its entirety, and I really hope the author addresses the following point, somewhere in it.
But I feel that what abuse victims really need is a worldview that is not centered on the feelings of the abuser.
Instead, I think they need a worldview that is centered on their own needs first.
And that would mean accepting that, sometimes, "why does he do that" is not the question that matters.
Because sometimes it doesn't matter how much or how little control he has over his actions, or how he feels about them. What matters is whether YOU are okay living with those actions.
Now, of course leaving is not always a safe choice. A lot of murders happen when an abuse victim is trying to leave. Before you leave a dangerous relationship it's important to find ways to keep yourself safe during and after the leaving process.
And these two passages from the book, and most people sharing it online, seem to be focused not on HOW to leave, but on getting victims to take the first step of considering leaving as a valid option.
And that's a worthy goal. But it's the wrong approach to frame it as "he's bad, so he deserves to lose you."
That's because if you leave a partner who is behaving unacceptably, who is doing things you cannot tolerate living with-- that choice should be seen as self-preservation, not revenge.
You're not a possession to be confiscated as punishment. You're a person who needs safety and happiness, and you have a right to leave any relationship that's not giving you both those things, regardless of fault.
Besides, a partner who truly cared about your feelings wouldn't want you to stay if there was no way you could be happy with him.
If the partner committing intolerable acts is genuinely unable to stop those actions-- if he could not stop them no matter how hard he tried-- then there is no chance that you will ever stop having to live with them, so long as you live with him.
And isn't that even more reason to leave?
Silver and Bright
2019/10/05/
I think a lot about the value we assign to things and experiences. I think a lot about how we try and fail to reconcile things we find good and things we find bad, especially when they are connected through causality.
I started writing this a long time ago, and at first it was going to be a blog post in essay form, but somehow it turned into a poem.
I've been trying to get more comfortable with speaking on camera, so someday it's going to be a spoken word poem. When I am able to face the task of recording my weird facial expression and weird voice.
------
Silver and Bright
One thing it took me far too long to learn:
that sometimes an experience
that you already had
was not worth having.
it's okay.
Or maybe not okay at all
maybe that experience
has been the worst disaster
of your life
but that's my point
you have permission
to accept that's true
and all you need to know
is what you faced
and what you have to face
today, tomorrow
and no authority demands
you dig through yesterday
and find a silver lining
or a bright side
an excuse
to call it
good.
(although you likely can,
if you try hard enough
because of butterflies and hurricanes
and how each incident
has consequences
in the millions
of millions,
and sifting through them long enough,
statistically,
you're apt to see
a few that shine)
my point is that you have no duty
to decide
that any scrap of good that you unearth
is worth the bad that happened.
if you can't find sufficient fragments
of the silver or the bright
to pay the price of what was wrong
that won't increase the wrong that was,
nor will the cosmos confiscate
the scraps of good
for being not enough.
and you can hate
the war that drafted you
and love the friend you met
who shared your trench
and you can cherish certain memories
while still remembering
that you formed them
with a former friend you never ever
want to see again
and that's not contradiction.
You can be glad to have things
and not glad of how they came to you
and you don't have to dwell upon
what didn't happen
and the choices
that you would or should have made
in other universes
I mean,
of course,
the question will occur to us
we often can't resist
"if I had known all the bad
and all the good
that was to come of this,
would I have wanted it to happen?"
and over years I've learned to answer
"I don't have
to have an answer,
I never had that knowledge
or the chance to make that choice,
not in this world
I don't have
to have an answer,
I am not
some cosmic
information desk
for questions about alternate realities"
and maybe it is not my job to measure,
in the first place,
how much I hate a thing
or love another thing,
because, what kind of mathematics
can compare
the good of one thing
to the bad
of something else tied up
in that same causal web
when maybe you can't
even measure good and bad
in the same units,
maybe
it's like saying "what is more,
the weight of silver,
or the brightness
of the sun?"
oh crap I made a Disney headcanon
2019/10/30
(Screenshot of a Tumblr post: a group photo from a convention, with a bunch of people dressed as Disney villains. Comment below it by user "antipathetically-yours" explains that the man in flannel is "the guy who killed Bambi's mom." Reply by user "phoonty" calls him "the most evil one" and "the only one who ever killed anyone.")
Okay... you all know I hate Disney and that I resent every single bit of a Disney movie that takes up precious space in my brain.
But I could not stop the conversation in my head that happened after I saw that picture:
"didn't Gaston kill a ton of deer though?"
"Wait... Any proof Gaston DIDN'T kill Bambi's mom?"
"Bambi is set in America. Proof: there's a skunk, which is native to the Americas."
"Beauty and the Beast was set in France, but AFTER 1492. Gaston had guns and he would totally go on an intercontinental hunting trip."
"... crossover headcanon, plausible"
"...now to examine this scene for unmistakably American animals..."
"OKAY THAT IS A BIGHORN SHEEP"
"...F you, Gaston"
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