Inadequacies and Judgments

You know what will make the sanest, most even-keeled person go a little bit insane? Sexual insecurity. Serious. Imagine this, for a moment: you're floating along with someone, hanging out, making out, having a good time, enjoying each other's company. You start to think, "Wow, this is really nice. Maybe I can trust this person!" And so you do, and the two of you have sex, and a week later you're getting the "I'm just not really available for any kind of relationship right now" line.

Punch. To the goddamn. Gut.

If you're reading this, and you know how to handle that kind of thing without going completely off the rails for a few days or a few weeks, please let me in on your secrets. I've never been able to deal other than being an ugly walking anger ball for a while, and I *really* don't like being an ugly walking anger ball, even if it's only for a few days.

The thing that makes sexually-based rejection so much harder to take than rejection based on other criteria is the specter of all the other issues raised by a rejection that is, at heart, physical.

I’m not right for you because I talk too much? Ok, well, I do shut up sometimes, but that’s cool, I’m just a talker and I probably always will be and if it really bothers you that much, well, then.

I’m not right for you because I’m a bleeding-heart? Fine. I can understand how it might be difficult to integrate orphan’s Christmas and an ever-shifting array of household guests into your life, but I’m not going to give up those things, so let’s part ways.

I’m not right for you because you don’t like how I have a tendency to put my life and my feelings out there for the world to read? Sigh. Yes, I get it. I can try like hell to respect your privacy and leave you unidentified, but I’m always going to want to write and say things and try to communicate, and if you’re really uncomfortable with that, then we’re not right. I don’t want to hurt you.

All of those things hurt. They do. Any rejection stings. But rejection based on some kind personal characteristic, no matter how much it stings, can be gotten over so long as you hold true to your conception of yourself.

But, “You’re bad in bed; I’m out” is so much more hurtful. For me, at least, it raises all my unsettled intellectual insecurities. To be rejected for something physical means that what is most important is my physical being. It means my value to this person lies in my body, not my mind. It turns me into arm candy. Or, that’s what it feels like, and that’s what makes me crazy. The idea that I decided to trust someone who doesn’t give a flying fart what’s between my ears, only between my legs, and that that’s not even good enough, makes me question my judgment. And questioning my judgment makes me de-value my intelligence even further on my own until I arrive, finally, at the rock bottom conclusion that I am, in fact, nothing but arm candy and spend a few days crying silently, afraid to raise my voice or my head.

I’m not the most even-keeled person to begin with, please keep that in mind.

After I’ve hit that point, I usually rebound enough to think at least marginally critically about the whole thing. Often it turns out that I’ve been basing the whole assumption of rejection based on sexual inadequacy on something specious, and there are (in fact) myriad possible reasons for the rejection. Because there usually are. Hurt makes us jump to conclusions that are insupportable in the calm light of reason. Passion is a beautiful thing, it really is, but like any beautiful thing it can blind you if you stare at it too long. Then it’s a matter of talking myself through the other rejection-scenario and pep talking myself up to a point where I’m more or less functioning again, although fragility remains, always, a little more brittle, a little less able to withstand.

Rejection always, always hurts. There’s no way around that. Or at least, no way that I’ve found that leaves my basic empathy responses intact. There’s no way to feel for the world without feeling the world, and that means that you are going to get hurt.

Alternatively, I manage to work myself into a state of righteous indignation long enough to cut the person loose because it really *is* true that they only think of me as arm candy and I don’t need people like that in my life.

That’s a cop-out on my part, if you didn’t notice the hypocrisy I just exposed. When it comes down to it, everyone has the right to be happy and it would be awesome if we did that without hurting anyone else ever but that’s a pipe dream. And if the sex really doesn’t work for you, that’s as valid a reason for ending a relationship as any other. I recommend giving it more than one shot, but hey, some people make decisions quickly, who am I to judge. Saying that appearances don’t matter is naïve; denying that the physical self has as much reality as the mind is ignorant. We aren’t just brains. We’re bodies, too, and our bodies matter. Someday I’ll have to get as comfortable being judged for mine as I am with being judged for my ideas.

I’ll take any tips you got that on that, too.

Doubt

I have been struck by a terrifying thought: How much of my morality is simply gender-socialization?

I can talk quite prettily about how love will save the world, about the need to build communities that care about each other by building individual connections between people who care about each other, about learning to care for your neighbor and your neighbor's neighbor and on and on and on. And all of that is without a doubt the basis of my moral understanding. Everyone is a human being, and simply by virtue of being a human being they are deserving of dignity and respect.

But the real world is messy, and real human beings are complicated, and you can't love someone punitively. Therefore the other underlying tenet of my moral understanding is a well of infinite forgiveness, side-by-side and co-mingled with that bottomless well of compassion I try to cultivate. Without question this is influenced by my Catholic upbrining; people make jokes about "Catholic guilt" because of confession and a whole host of other things, but what is missing from those pithy understandings of Catholicism is that the guilt is not the point. The point is forgiveness. God is infinitely forgiving if we are sincerely contrite, and He will go on forgiving no matter how many times we screw something up.

The process of institutionalization took this incredibly noble ideal and turned it into the doctrine of dispensation, which was the straw that broke Martin Luther's back. And we all know where that went. On the whole, the Lutherans and the Calvinists and their doctrinal brethren are far, far more into guilt than Catholics ever were, but that's neither here nor there.

The point is: Forgiveness. You cannot love punitively. You cannot love and fail to forgive. If you want to teach someone that they matter as a human being, love and forgiveness, not guilt and shame, is the way to go. Jesus was down with this. He spent most of his time wallowing in the gutter with all those poor people that broke all kinds of social and even legal conventions, because: forgiveness.

But the practical effects of my understanding of these moral imperatives have the interesting, terrifying side effect of making me sometimes indistinguishable from that most perfect feminine form, the doormat.

I can rant and rave and rail against instutionalized misogyny (and I do) but when it comes to individuals, I have a hard time condemning. Because, forgiveness.

I can talk a big game about the need for personal responsibility in relationships, but I have a hard time implementing it because my moral understanding always, always leads me to undervalue my own needs and desires and over-emphasize someone else's. Like any good helpmeet, I'm quite willing to submerse myself in someone else's goals. The Quiverfull people could probably brainwash me in about two days flat.

There's no answer. Now that I've come face-to-face with the realization, I am always going to be living in the tension between my desire to be recognized as a full human being despite my gender and my belief that it is my duty to recognize everyone else as such. As long as there are people willing to take advantage of others, I will be a ripe target. And worse than the gullible fool with the wool pulled over their eyes, I know what I'm walking into, at least some of the time. But if I don't walk into it, the guilt of having failed torments me. Rock, meet hard place. Let someone else hurt me, or inflict an equally painful wound on myself.

I wonder if men that have similar conceptions of moral good feel emmasculated? Or effeminate.

Worst of all, the tension makes me question my beliefs. It makes me wonder if I'm not just creating an elaborate rationalization for behaving in exactly those ways that society expects me to behave. Maybe I should just shut up and sit down and look pretty, too. I do that pretty often, anyway, because you can't change anyone's minds by yelling at them or forcing them to confront things they're not ready to confront. So why, exactly, am I bothering with anything, again?

I've been unable to abandon either my moral principles or my belief that I can make a difference, so I guess living in the tension is working out. But it's stressful, and I am full to bursting with doubt that's spilling out over every decision I make. I doubt everything these days, myself most of all.

Practice Radical Compassion

I've been listening to people ask the question, "What now?" a lot.

"What now?"
"What next?"
"Where do we go?"
"Where do we start?"

Everyone I know has been inspired by big things -- myself included! make no mistake! -- and all those big things have been happening fast and piled on top of each other. Protests, recalls, elections, occupy, marches, even one brave girl standing against her culture: it's all one giant source of motivation and strength for anyone with an eye on changing the future.

And those moments, those big moments, are important. It's important to know that you're not utterly alone in wanting a different world, and it's important to know what it feels like to stand with 100 or 10,000 or 100,000 of your fellow human beings, voices raised together. It's important to know what that feels like, for an individual, and it's important for the world at large to know that there are so very many individuals working in concert.

But the big moments are demonstration, not change.

Politics will never change the world. I'll say it again: Politics will never change the world. Part of this is the nature of politics as compromise. Perhaps we've all lost sight of this, so here's a reminder. Politics is the art of compromise through persuasion. But that means you are never going to get everything you want, and your opposition is never going to get everything they want. Even a majority must compromise with the minority in a representative, nominally democratic system.

(Side note to everyone involved in politics: Could you maybe start compromising? Just a little? It's your job, so do your job, please.)

But politics imposes a consensus compromise on people from the outside. To change the world, you have to change the people. The only way the world will get better is if we make humanity as a whole better. The only way to stop people from doing awful things to each other, either actively by waging war and murdering and raping, or passively by ignoring the hardships they suffer, is to make every person in the world acknowledge the humanity of every other person.

Overwhelming. It's an overwhelming thought. Are you overwhelmed?

Don't be.

No one, no one in the world, can alone effect change of that scale. No one. It's not possible.

Here's what you can do: you can change one person. You can reach out to one person and show them that you're human, and they're human, and that you respect their humanity. You can show one person the effects of the decisions they make. You can show one person that you respect them, that you love them, despite any and all differences, and you can hope that such a demonstration inspires them to change even a little.

Here's another thing you can do: live humanely. Live your life to the best of your ability such that you respect and care for other people. Think about how you define "people." Then think about how you define "people who deserve respect." Are these two definitions the same? Probably not. What can you do to make them the same?

Who are your neighbors? Do you know their names? Do you know what they value? Do you know what they dream of? Can you help them? Who are their neighbors? What do they dream of? Can you help them? Build a community based on personal relationships; the larger community will build itself, so long as you maintain the long view of respect for all people simply because they are people. Those people don't have to have the same values you do; they don't even have to agree with you on anything. Your job is to respect them anyway. Your job is to care about them anyway. Your job is to love them anyway. Lead by example. It's the only leadership that works.

Politics in America, and everywhere, has long been the art of defining "The Other" for one group or another. Most of human history, in fact, can be viewed through the lens of power pitting groups against each other to maintain power. Reject that history. Reject it forcefully. Refuse to think of anyone as The Other, as unlike yourself. Refuse to accept that you have to denigrate and degrade another person, no matter how far away and no matter how strange their life seems, just to make yourself feel better.

After all, you are the scary, frightening Other to someone else. What would you prefer they do, when you meet: kill you or listen to you? Don't conjecture about what is LIKELY to happen. Don't rationalize shooting first, or cutting someone off, because of what you think they will do, or even are likely to do, or what they've done in the past. Stick to this alone: which would you rather happen? Then you have to choose to do the thing that you would like to happen despite whatever fear, rational or irrational, you feel.

You want to be a radical? You want to be a revolutionary? Here's the ultimate radical act: Love the Other. Love them like you'd love your own child. Endure deprivation for them, live with the knowledge they might take advantage of you, forgive them when they do, and go right on loving. Love them until they cannot but recognize your humanity, and love you back. It takes courage, and forgiveness, and a deep sense of self, and a firm commitment to the worth of the future being built. But you can do it. And if you mess up, if you can't do it, if you're too scared or too dazzled by the world, forgive yourself, too: you're human.

And then, try again. Pick yourself up and try again. And again. As many times as it takes.
Love will change the world, and the world will change one human being at a time.

The Palm, the Willow, the Way Forward

When I was nine, I spent part of a summer with my paternal grandparents in South Carolina. My family's relationship with my father's family has always been complicated, so this trip was something of an anamoly in the firmament of my childhood. The experiment was a nearly unmitigated disaster; my grandmother and I fought like the pig-headed autocrats we both are inside. However, the pine forests of the Carolinas are beautiful, majestic, regal, and to this day I sometimes dream about how they smell and the quality of silence that's created by the muffling effect of years upon years of pine needles decomposing beneath your feet.

About halfway through the trip, my grandfather took me for a drive along the Carolina coast. This was 1993, as I recall, after Hurricane Andrew. There were palm trees along that drive that were growing crooked: gnarled and bent over and sticking out from the earth at a uniform impossible angle.

"Do you know why those trees are bent?" my grandfather asked me.

I shook my head.

"They bent in the hurricane's wind. They bent so that they would remain standing. The trees that didn't bend are gone now."

We spent the rest of the drive in silence. Even at nine, I knew what he was trying to tell me. And I was a little ashamed that he felt he had to impart this lesson to me, and I was little resentful that he wasn't trying to impart it to his wife instead, and I was about as thoughtful as a nine-year-old gets.

My grandfather died a few years ago; my grandmother is still alive in the Carolinas, and the last few times I've seen her, it's certainly seemed as if she's learned to bend in the wind.

The palm trees in the wind are the beginning of mystery. I am grateful to my grandfather, and the hurricane, and those trees, for giving me such a concrete lesson, but it's time to move on from the palm trees. The palms, you see, they bent in the wind so that they would survive. That's all. That's it. Acceptance so that survival.

I've been having trouble bending to the winds lately. I've been having trouble accepting merely to survive. My horizon is broadened, and mere survival seems small. I feel buffeted at every turn, everything and everyone seems hell-bent on knocking me over and leaving me small and broken on the ground. Events, yes, but also people. From elections to relationships, I cannot bend the way I ought. I have no acceptance because acceptance feels like defeat. I don't want to succumb; I want to thrive. I don't want to be a solitary palm tree, isolated and broken and just hanging on. I want so much more than that.

A few days ago, I randomly stumbled on a parable that I can no longer place, but it showed me where to go, how to continue to bend to the winds.

The willow shoot bends in the wind until it is a forest that can break the wind.

Time to grow into a forest.

Scott Walker, We Don't Want You No More

This is the text of Gwen Moore's amazing, lyrical, stirring, heart-pounding poem/stump speech, delivered at a Get-Out-The-Vote rally in Milwaukee on June 1, 2012. Bill Clinton appeared at the rally as well, but was (in my extremely humble opinion) utterly upstaged by Congresswoman Moore's way with words and passionate delivery. Transcribed from video by a dear, equally amazing friend. The recall election in Wisconsin goes down June 5; if you're in Wisconsin, please vote. Please. I beg of you.

Great scott, Scott Walker! You gotta go, baby -  

'cause we don't want you no more.

Walker, you're a slick talker, baby. Your jargon to cut spending

didn't mention that our right to bargain would be ending.

Though public employees agreed to pay more to help ensure the pension

you arrogantly proceeded with your labor negotiation suspension.

You gave tax debits to corporations and invested in your budget repairs

while you raised taxes on the poor and the elderly 

by gutting the earned income and homestead tax credits.

What were you thinking, baby?

When you cut funding from public education 

and curtailed municipalities from local resources allocation.

How can we maintain our skilled and professional workforces

by striking technical college and university courses

You want to create 250,000 jobs, you purport

But you declined over a billion dollars in federal support 

for job creation on behalf of Tea Party ideation.

Great scott, Scott Walker! You gotta go, baby -  

'cause we don't want you no more.

[missing section in video] 

You set back women's economic progress by repealing women's pay equality.

Your respect for women is a misconception and a mere deception 

to which we take exception.

Great scott, Scott Walker! You gotta go, baby!!  

'cause we don't want you no more!

Your rigid requirements for photo identification 

is a sleazy attempt at voter nullification

Your tactics have been met with disdain

and almost a million signatures to end your tyrannical reign

You know what? We tested you with a phone call from a phony rich man

where you revealed your plan 

with much aplomb

to destroy the middle class by dropping the bomb

Hey! We're not laughing. We don't think it's a joke

that you've coldly calculated that things go better with coke - 

The Koch Brothers, that is.

Not with us - the voters!

You've rebuked us, the people, for not being in tune

but we recall ALL of your sins, and we'll defeat you in June.

Great scott, Scott Walker! You gotta go, baby.