Letting Go

This is pretty much all personal, no political, but so it goes.

For someone who thinks as much as I do about language, I’m amazed sometimes at how I can miss blatantly obvious elements in the meanings of common expressions.

I’ve been working a lot on “letting go” – by “working”, I’m referring mostly to meditation and stuff like that, but also to the kind of overthinking that characterizes the exact polar opposite of “letting things go”, a counterproductivity of which I am not unaware. When I think about it, I focus on what it is I’m trying to control, events or relationships onto which I’m projecting expectations, outcomes, attachments and wants mistaken for needs. I concentrate on acceptance, finding peace within situations that are less than calm, making peace with a past that has been less than calm.

What surprises me is that I’ve never connected this kind of letting go, the kind that people mean when they say “let it go” as they try to comfort you and get you past that anger and rage (whether productively or not), to the kind of “letting go” that involves letting yourself display emotion with another person, or even letting yourself have emotion and admit it to yourself. The kind that people mean when they talk about letting down walls or just giving yourself permission to feel/be less than perfect.

I’ve known, obviously, that I need to do both, but it somehow past me by, in all the times I said the words referring to one or the other of these concepts, that they’re the same thing. I make the mistake of thinking that peace and acceptance are the antithesis of pain, sorrow, hurt or grief, and because I feel pain, sorrow, hurt and grief over things – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot – I assume it must be because I haven’t “let go”, so I re-erect walls and barriers, I go back to expressing nothing but anger, I go back to trying desperately to force myself into a nice, controllable little box. And because I can’t control it all, because the pain, sorrow, hurt and grief still exists, the impossibility of that control, my refusal to let go and just accept its existence, proves yet again that whatever it is that I refuse to admit to, whatever it is that I just can’t bring into consciousness, whatever it is that I must be better than is the one thing that is going to come to control me.

Nearly two years after my separation, my divorce becomes final on Saturday. After nearly two years of separation, and nearly two years of knowing with absolute certainty and progressively less hostility or resentment that it was the only possible way toward progress, I figured this should/would feel like just a formality. I accepted the outcome here a long time ago. But I still need to let it go.

How Did You Know?

I say this a lot, but it bears repeating – as cynical as I may appear, I can still be incredibly naive and optimistic about people. I’ve come to actually be proud of that, because it’s not a naiveté borne out of not having bothered to live or open my eyes, and certainly not one borne out of having been sheltered or lucky (though I know that, in many ways, I am).

Sometimes, my illusions get shattered, in small ways as well as big ones.

Relatively speaking, I’m extremely open with people about my experiences of rape. I don’t generally go into detail, but I often reveal that I’ve been raped and revictimized several times, by different individuals, all of whom were known to me. I was talking to a woman yesterday who I’ve known for about six months, and I alluded again to those experiences (unemotionally, just as a statement of fact in contextually understanding other things that had happened to me and the timelines of my autobiography).

She interjected to say “I can’t believe you’ve been raped so many times.” I sort of shrugged and nodded. She said “And they were all strangers?” I responded “Oh no, all of them were acquaintances, people I trusted at least on a basic level.” And then she asked my illusion-shattering question “But…if you knew them, how did you know it was rape?”

I stayed calm and think I actually managed to avoid showing just how shocked I was to be asked this question by a 29 year old, intelligent, well-educated woman (she just graduated from teacher’s college, so she’s going to be passing that education along to the next generation shortly), but I shattered some illusions back with some gentle force.

(trigger warning behind the cut)

Personal Rant: Lack of Empathy

In comments to this post, Jay and I got to talking about what it is I (we) really don’t understand about many of the people with whom we find ourselves in difficult conversations (to put it diplomatically). In sum, I can understand and appreciate and respect disagreement. What I don’t get is the complete lack of empathy for another person’s basic humanity.

It’s not just an inability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it’s a complete unwillingness to recognize that this someone else is speaking from a place of very real and very personal emotion. For the sake of remaining concise, let’s limit this to my own experiences as a feminist talking about sexual violence. I acknowledge fairly publicly that I’ve been raped on multiple occasions. I acknowledge that I’ve been abused in other ways that are less easily named. I talk about the ways these abuses and assaults continue to affect me in my day to day interactions. I talk about fear, anger, grief, loss, attempts to enter into new relationships, what it means to trust again, and plenty more. I talk about the fact that practically every aspect, every event, every relationship that has taken place during the second half of my 28 years on this earth has been affected by one event that probably lasted, in and of itself, no more than twenty minutes. I talk about the later assaults, including about how some of them were facilitated by the use of alcohol. I’ve been working for weeks on one post about trust and love and connection in this context–for weeks because I start to write it, then have to stop because I realize I’m just complaining in circles for no productive communicative purpose, and only making myself more miserable, or because I start digging up emotions I’m not quite prepared to recognize yet, either publicly or privately.

And these people laugh. They will flat-out say “Wow, you’re really funny, getting all worked up about this stuff that doesn’t bother me at all”. If they’re slightly more savvy about it, there’s just a general tone of condescension and mockery to their dismissals of your opinions and conclusions. More than anything else, there’s the definite message that they want to defeat you in this conversation. This is not about cooperation. They know that they are right, you are wrong, and they would enjoy seeing you cave.

This is what I really don’t understand about people who are so hostile towards feminism, people who dismiss us as exaggerating the problems of violence against women in order to further our cause. This image exists in their head of a cackling, witch-like, unfeeling feminist, and what they want is to see that woman broken, that horrible man-hating smirk wiped right off of her face.

So let me be perfectly clear: this causes me pain. Talking about this causes me pain. Talking about my own experiences causes me pain. Listening to friends tell me about their experiences causes me pain. Reading stories in the newspaper about this causes me pain. And hearing people laugh about the fact that this causes me pain causes me more pain than anything else. I have absolutely no desire to “win” anything in these conversations. I will argue, and I will cite statistics, and I will acknowledge that I think I’m right about what’s “true” in terms of these dynamics and that I would love to educate others on that truth. But the point of doing that is to increase cooperation and understanding and more than anything else, empathy.

Talking to someone who has absolutely no willingness to recognize that this causes me pain, that I feel no great sense of victory, and that this way is not, in fact, the “easy” way to live is the one thing that makes me feel completely hopeless. Because it’s not an inability to recognize that. Any number of people can say exactly what I’m saying here and have said exactly what I’m saying here, and anyone who understands English is capable of seeing what we’re talking about. Can they all “understand” what it means to feel this kind of pain, or experience this kind of violence, or whatever? Probably not, but the concept of “understanding” an emotion is an extremely abstract one and not what we’re talking about here, anyway. What they are capable of doing is seeing and believing that pain exists, and approaching the issue from the perspective of cooperation.

If they don’t, it’s because they’re not willing. If they’re not willing, it’s because they have a lack of empathy so deep it means they essentially don’t recognize that what we say comes from a real human being. And that is seriously fucked right up.

I was a 10-year-old proto-feminist

Okay, so I wasn’t. At all. But reading this post over at Shapely Prose reminded me of an experience of mine. I rarely write much about beauty standards, because I have a damn hard time keeping myself from saying “well, I look like this, and I feel…” and I never feel quite comfortable doing that.

I have, however, had countless arguments with my mother about my choices (or quase-choices) with respect to my personal appearance, from my lack of makeup to my weight (which has fluctuated significantly in the past few years due to periods of illness). And these arguments date right back to my childhood, which is why I was struck by that story in the linked post about a young girl being given growth hormones because it was what she wanted (said her parents).

My big flaw when I was a kid, apparently, was that I had ears that seriously stuck out. Like, seriously. Dumbo ears. That may not sound like a really big deal, but my parents (primarily my mom) decided that it was important enough for me to have surgery in order to correct the problem. So I, at ten years old, went under general anesthesia, spent three days in CHEO and wore bandages around my head for two weeks* in order to not have Dumbo ears. I still hate getting hair cuts because my ears don’t really move the way they should, so when hairdressers hit them with a brush, it hurts and I come out of there with a headache.

I actually said at the time that I didn’t want to do it–I remember already having the conscious thought that I shouldn’t be judged by what I looked like, though of course that was a completely substance free thought at the time. The point is, I was repeatedly told that I pretty much had to do it. The line was, over and over, “you’ll thank me when you’re 16″. The general assumption was that I would inevitably eventually care about beauty standards, so this surgery was saving me from myself.

The reason 16 was the age in the line was that, as I recall, this surgery was covered by OHIP for children up to the age of 16. That in itself strikes me as pretty messed up. Like somehow it’s not merely cosmetic if parents decide to do it on their children’s behalf, but it would be if I were older. Maybe there are other reasons for that, and additional medical conditions are associated with Dumbo ears that are not an issue beyond the age of 16, so there is some kind of logic to the Ontario government’s decisions as to what medical procedures are funded and for whom. I kind of doubt it, however.

I obviously wasn’t completely traumatized by this experience, and my residual anti-haircut feelings (while seriously annoying) are not on the level of what a kid who was put through growth hormones must experience, nor does this come with the insistence that I have to repeat the process (the way that kids/young teens pressured/forced into dieting would hear). But I think some of the elements raise some points that relate and/or piss me off. One is having decisions–big decisions–made for me on the assumption that I will/should want to conform to social norms of any kind later in life. I’m not sure a ten year old should be subjected to any kind of unnecessary surgery, because it’s scary and lonely and genuinely dangerous, but I wonder where we would draw the lines on that one–I mean, I also had braces, which were cosmetic, extremely expensive (not government-funded), and decided on my behalf by my parents, but I don’t tend to feel such a strong reaction when I think about that. And yes, I do know that ten year olds often genuinely don’t know what’s best for them, which is why we have parents, but this is pretty different, and what I find interesting about it is that the “you’ll thank me when you’re 16″ is the same kind of “appeal to future social normativity” argument that I still hear at (almost) 28. About how I’ll choose to wear makeup when I’m not already so young and smooth-skinned, among other things.

Apparently the “will conform to social beauty standards” by age 16 expiry date having past, we can just flip the date back.

*It’s interesting that the post at Shapely Prose is immediately preceded by spelling bee posts, because my big county spelling bee experience took place while I was wearing the aforementioned bandages…there are pictures of me with my spelling bee medal and taped-up head