Beer guzzlers and scrumpers from the Betelgeuse system

I was talking to one of my best friends just now, the one who saw the UFO/Wormhole thing with me (see October). She was telling me a story about someone who got abducted in a movie she saw based on a true story and was freaking me out. Then she asked where my mom was. I’d just heard my mom come in so I said “She was at work but she came home.” Then I heard her crack open a beer “She just cracked open a beer.”

“Are you sure it’s your mom?” She was really freaked out.

“Oh honestly, do you think aliens walk into the house, say hello to the dogs, and crack open a beer?”

“Just wait, now one’s going to show up in the basement and say ‘wazzup’!”

Really though, that is just being silly.

Once I had a strange conversation with a friend’s boyfriend about what would constitute illicit drugs for an extraterrestrial and he said “Maybe they go scrumping.” Would explain why there’s so many UFO sightings in Interior BC.

“Bisexual Straight Woman” and cold toes

For the record, let me say outright that I don’t believe in this term “bisexual straight woman.” I just found it on the After Ellen site in reference to a tortured discussion of bisexual celebrities. Oh man, my head practically exploded after reading it. To sum up, a bisexual straight woman either says she’s bisexual but hasn’t had a relationship with a woman as defined by, uh, I don’t know. But if they had sex with women but never a long term relationship, they were bisexual straight women. If they were settled in a long term relationship with a man, they were bisexual straight women unless they emphatically asserted that a future relationship with a woman was still possible. And if they were virgins with women, they were most definitely bisexual straight women.

I don’t know about you, but I think asking ANYONE in a long term relationship if they could ever love someone else is kind of fucked up, that’s like asking newlyweds who gets the cats when they divorce.

If you mean someone who’s straight who’s saying they’re bisexual for appearances, then the precise term is poseur. Although I don’t know that many bisexuals who are poseurs. I don’t think I know any actually. I do know bisexuals who swear off an entire gender because they had an icky experience, but I also know straight women who swear off men when they have an icky experience, likewise lesbians swearing off women. But generally those are more of fits of pique. And let’s not even get into gay men trying to swear off men, those are just Brokeback tragic.

If you mean someone who’s straight but doing an experiment (I can hear the test tubes rattling) then fucking be quiet, one of us could nail her! Seriously though, so what. Lesbians experiment with boys too.

So does that make them Bisexual Lesbians? Oddly enough, some would say yes. And I suppose some people might identify as Bisexual Straight women even, but it’s not for us to put a secondary sexual orientation qualifier on to someone else who has already clearly defined themselves. Especially if it’s just because they’re monogamous. I mean, if they weren’t monogamous then people would bitch about all bisexuals being promiscuous and unfaithful (although, again, someone can be promiscuous and unfaithful of any orientation. And sometimes they’ve set up poly relationships, which is a whole different thing and again not orientation specific.). Oh, so many pitfalls.

I’m not sure I’ve decided between the bisexual or lesbian label, or straight even because sometimes I’m a man who loves women. I am a queer without a category. So multiple categories ARE possible, but imposing them arbitrarily to diminish someone’s identity is rude.

On other news . . . I stood out in the freezing cold waiting for a bus for over an hour!!! I don’t even want to look at my toes, I’m worried they’re black as old bananas. No, they’re fine, just frozen. I did think about some things while I waited though, nice things. Shivery quivery delicious things. And some sad things. Personal stuff really, but it was nice to have the time to do that.

per request: Bi with a Boyfriend: The Latest Hollywood Trend?

One of Us, One of Us

I’ve been really getting into this book I’m currently reading, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen. Basically he discusses how humanity groups itself off and attacks those of other groups by denying the very human experience of plural identities. It’s quite a lovely book, right now I’m at the part where he talks about the plural identities in Muslim communities. For instance, he says that while algebra was invented by a Muslim, we don’t group it off and call it Jihadist mathematics. However we do that with certain other things originating with Muslim people.

Kurt Vonnegut says that George W. Bush hates Muslims because they invented algebra! Ha, what a hoot! Maybe he’s right.

But back to this idea of plural identities, as someone with a cornicopia of identity politics I have often gotten into trouble with various factions wanting me to renounce everything except whatever particular singular cause they’re advancing. And causes are good things, but renouncing one’s own internal diversity in order to fit into a cause is highly problematic. I did once have someone ask me “But really, who do you REALLY align yourself with.” At the time I said Aboriginals, but mostly because the person asking the question was Aboriginal as well and I didn’t want her to hit me. Also because I hadn’t chewed on this idea enough. But it does become a game of “Which identity needs the most support and has the most discrimination? I’ll go with that identity for now and forsake the rest.” Bleh. I’m giving up on that.

But I’m also trying to departition my mind. The other day I was watching Angelina Jolie’s interview on Inside The Actor’s Studio (if you really want to know what the stars are like, this is probably the most insightful programme). She mentioned being part Iroquois, and I though “Oh, that’s why she’s so sexy, she’s native.” And then I back tracked “But lots of other races are sexy.” And then I thought “But what is wrong with saying aboriginal people are sexy when so many people assume that we’re ugly?” And then I thought “She is sexy, and she is mixed race like me, and possibly being native has something to do with her sexuality, but that doesn’t mean ONLY natives are sexy.” Fucking hell it’s hard being politically aware.

Still I don’t think it’s appropriate to deny that her mixed race heritage has nothing to do with who she is. In fact, I’m surprised I didn’t know that myself. TONS of “white” people aren’t in fact white, they are mixed race, but people assume skin tone determines racial seperations, and that is problematic. Some native people try to kick me out of the club because I’m such a pale chickie, even though I have clearly defined Native facial features, including a Mongolian halo in my eyes (I have brown rimmed with green). And then white people, well, sometimes they try to claim all of me only because of my intelligence, and encourage me to refute my Cree background.

In the immortal words of James Dean “You’re tearing me apart!”

Same with lesbians. I get into deep shit for loving bisexuals, and I also get into shit for being trans, and I’m sure I’ll get into more shit if I also mention I like cocksucking. Jeezie Chreezie! I don’t think I fit in anywhere. I have kind of revoked my lesbian membership card though, I used to say it because I only fall in love with women, but there are some other complicating factors. Queers have so many goddamned categories. Butch femme soft butch soft femme butchy-femme femmy-butch, gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, intersexed, leather folks, vanilla folks, drag queens, transvestites, transsexuals, FTM’s, MTF’s, FTF’s, MTM’s, oh man! And this plurality isn’t a problem at all, except that there are border guards who get all pissy when someone is a variety of any of the above categories. Even among bisexuals there’s always huge entangled semantic wars about what bisexuality means and who is bisexual and so on. Gives me a headache. Fucking hell.

On the other hand when someone says “Don’t label me” I have a tendency to roll my eyes, just because then it seems to be almost closet case behaviour. But that is me.

I remember when I was finally coming out as a sadomasochist I had some tortured conversation with an older friend who had been in the BDSM community for quite some time. I was trying to reconcile being a submissive with being a person of colour and ALSO with a tendency to date white women, and I was all hung up on the politics of submitting to a white woman and she said “Jeezie Chreezie Thirza!” (She didn’t say Jeezie Chreezie, I just like that particular blasphemy right now) “Jeezie Chreezie, don’t take politics into the bedroom, just leave it behind.” And I was so freaking liberated. It wasn’t about a person of colour submitting to a white person for fun and games, it was just two HUMANS doing erotic powerplay, and fuck the rest.

The irony of course is that now I’m submissive to someone with a similar racial background as me.

And when I had the psych diagnosis, people often made the erroneous assumption that Craziness precludes high intelligence, so suddenly I wasn’t just crazy, I was also unbelievably stupid. And this was compounded with the fact that my treatment entailed utilizing cognitively disabling medication. So I’d be really struggling to show my intelligence and people often dismissed whatever factual things I mentioned as the ravings of a mad woman. I can’t even begin to list off the things I told Normals which they dismissed out of hand based on my identity. I knew a SHITLOAD of stuff about psychiatry and how it worked, and they kept pooh poohing me as a paranoid freakazoid because they had read a VERY informative article on manic depression in Reader’s Digest. Fucking Normals!!! I’m still amazed at the vast assumptions people make about madness.

Salvador Dali once asked Freud if he could psychoanalyze him using a new treatment Dali had invented called the “Paranoid Critic” method. Obviously Freud turned him down, since he was a paranoid critic. Freud that is, not Dali, Dali was just having a laugh.

One of us, one of us. Gooba gaba.

Mixed race, sadomasochist, bisexual, humanitarian, actress, director, mother, pilot, UN Ambassador superstar Angelina Jolie

Addendum: Being Iroquois could also relate to her humanitarian work, since the Iroquois Confederacy forms the basis of democratic government.

Jeezie Chreezie!

I glanced at some research papers on Depakote (AKA Epival, which I have stopped taking after four years). You would not believe the shit it can do to your body. Diabetes II, death, liver faliure, pancreas damage, birth defects, cognitive dysfunction, anorexia, visual disturbances, psychosis, depression, restless legs, etc etc etc. No wonder I’ve been seriously fucked up for four years. AND two other relatives on Epival do have diabetes II now. I’m . . . not as shocked as I thought I would be. I thought Zyprexa was evil, but Depakote is just as evil, as are the SSRI’s. Fucking hell.

Take your meds indeed. Take this and stick it up your ass, wanker!

A description of the Capitalist marketplace of the Pharmaceutical Industry

Wonder Drug Inspires Deep, Unwavering Love Of Pharmaceutical Companies
A little giggle from The Onion.

Who Am I?

I’ve been so seriously overmedicated for four years that I don’t even remember who I am anymore. It’s really strange. I’m reading everything I can find on gifted adults, there tends to be more literature about gifted children than adults, but I’m still finding out some fascinating stuff. One is that a high number of highly gifted people need either significantly LESS sleep than average and some need significantly MORE. I thought I was someone who needed more, but I’m realizing that had more to do with my medication. In fact, I’ve been doing really decently on four hours of sleep, which isn’t entirely uncommon in the highly gifted population. And when I think back to when I was a kid, I was the same way. I went to bed at around 10:00, but I lay awake in the dark until 3:00 am usually. And yes, I was busy entertaining myself during those hours, but that’s probably TMI. It was strange at first, I got a bit freaked out by it because all those psych pathologies started going through my head about mania and no sleep blah blah blah. But I go to sleep at around 2:00am generally and wake up pretty much automatically at 6:00am. WEIRD!!! I lay in bed for the required 8 hours though, just because I like the physical rest even if I’m not sleeping.

What other weird things have I noticed? Oh yeah, sensual overexcitability. Well, since most literature on gifteds is around children, they tend to talk about more neutral things like being irritated by sock wrinkles and tags in clothing (it’s true, tags will drive me spare!). But sexually it’s like being on low grade ecstacy, it’s fuckin’ intense!! Lovely intense obviously, it makes everything so exquisite. I found out that it makes my experience of sex quite different from the experience someone without sensual OE would have, and I guess I never knew that. For instance, people with sensual OE often experience sex in more spiritual terms, and I suppose I never understood why so many people didn’t feel the same way. It’s a religious experience man!! It makes sense though when I think about times in my life I really did do ecstacy, and it seemed to hit me far more strongly than my friends. I’d be laying on a couch wiggling my toes for an hour in total bliss and unable to walk around, and meanwhile they’d be dancing and fucking and generally being busy bodies. And I’d be like “Oh, I can only move my toes, well that is still nice.” And it turns out that early sexual development happens in gifted children, which explains a lot about me.

Ooh! I also found out that really highly gifted people have a tendency towards androgeny, which is SO me. Fuck I confused everyone from when I was a baby until now and probably until I die. I know I used to drive FTM’s crazy because they thought I was just some kind of stubborn hold out, and then other people thought I was quite feminine and didn’t see the butchy side of me at all for some reason. I don’t know. I did seriously consider the hormone option, but I let it go when I decided I prefered negotiating my complex gender, which is sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes both, and sometimes neither, from this particular body. It’s too fluid for me to contain it into a specific gendered role, sometimes grasping my gender is just like trying to impose solidity on mercury. As soon as I try to say I’m a boy, I’ll do something so typically girly like write someone’s name in the margins of my paper and surround it with dozens of tiny hearts, and vice versa. Which is why I date bisexuals mainly. Once I did date a lesbian who was calling herself bisexual at the time and I remember we hit a wall when I wanted to be a boy with her and she suddenly had to admit she didn’t really like boys. Yeah, awkward!! But she was still terrified of being a lesbian. It was ridiculously bizarre. She couldn’t be seriously with me because I was a girl, but she also didn’t find me sexy the few times I was a boy. WTF?

Silly big breasted boy!

I’ve also realized I do background thinking, which is hard to describe. I process several things at once, but some things I am thinking about in kind of a quieter way at the back of my brain, and they’ll be a different thought in the forefront (and several in between) and suddenly the deep background thought will have a breakthrough and just pop up out of seemingly nowhere. I’ll be talking to someone about say, uh, Quaker oatmeal, and then suddenly from the back of my head I’ll switch to talking about ideas around translation and where meaning is lost, and people will just be baffled by it. I’ve compensated by tracing the conversation backwards to pull it back to what we were talking about before, but still somehow I’ll end up mixing Quaker oatmeal and translation together and SOMEHOW it will make sense. I’ve never had that specific conversation though, it’s just a random example.

I’ve also found that I’ve made myself less threatening to people by being ridiculously funny. I don’t know why, but people are more willing to grok an idea if I inflate it with Wildean wit, even if it’s quite a serious idea. I’ve even been able to ridicule people who are nasty in disarmingly charming ways, I don’t know if that’s good or not, but it’s something I’ve noticed. I try not to do it though because teasing can be really mean, and I don’t want to be mean. But I will do silly things to an idea just so people will follow me with it. I play a lot, and even thinking and reading serious heavy tomes is still quite a playful experience for me.

A side note about Oscar Wilde. I went to Pere Lachaise Cemetery when I was in Paris (to see Jim Morrison, among others) and I got to see Oscar Wilde’s grave. It has this huge granite masculine angel on it, but someone hacked the penis off and took it away. Who has Oscar Wilde’s guardian angel’s penis? Someone must repatriate it immediately.

And onto this idea of repatriation, I had the most humourous faux pas with a Wiccan friend the other day. I was trying to talk about how sad I was in the Wizard of Oz when the witch gets melted, and I said “That is a terrible thing to happen, even to a witch!” Oh fuck. I got the most nasty look directed at me, and for good reason, so I started qualifying in a ridiculous way. “Even for an evil witch.” Another nasty look. “It was a travesty of justice!” And now a weird look. “But it was an accident” because it was, she was just trying to put the scarecrow out, who was on fire, and the Wicked Witch got in the cross fire. But by then I had just done some very silly roundabout and so my friend just shook her head.

Really though, all the Wicked Witch was doing was repatriating the ruby slippers from a colonialist in a gingham dress. Is that a crime?

Greater Than Lesser Than

This is so weird. I keep cycling through two different feelings, and it’s not me being crazy, it’s just me trying to sort my head out. On one hand, I’m happy that I have a life which is really good, that in fact all of the things about me people thought were creepy and fucked up turns out to be healthy and normal and even better than normal because it means I have a larger potential than the majority. On the other hand, I’m realizing just HOW MUCH was taken from me by psychiatry, and that is really upsetting. Sometimes my body still has memories of violence that come into it, I have odd fear that shows up about being violated again. I’m realizing that the four hours of four point restraints was actually a sexual assault, and that’s scary. (Thought stream: I am a sadomasochist, I have some extreme submissive activities I enjoy and bondage was one of them, the restraints were non-consensual and punitive, I had wanted to use the phone which is why I was restrained, and in fact it did feel like rape, worse even. It was more force than the rape I had experienced beforehand.) I’m realizing that I have a lot of healing to do, and a lot of trauma in my body.

One really nice thing that happened this weekend is someone touched me in a loving way, for the first time since the hospital. I don’t know how to explain to you what it feels like to own a hated body for so many years and suddenly be touched in a gentle caring way (although I am a sadomasochist, so “gentle” is relative). It totally blew my mind. And I hadn’t even realized I could feel like that again, or ever. I’m really amazed, the experience brought my body back to life in a way I hadn’t expected. I had hoped that would happen, but feeling it is very different than just imagining it. Suddenly I don’t have a body that can feel only pain, and that’s really intense. Still, it makes me sad because I didn’t realize I had been carrying so much of my pain and so much of other’s hate in my flesh. I want to scream, or something. And I’m trying to hide the sad parts of me from people, because I don’t want them to hurt me again.

I don’t know how to trust people, except for a tiny few. And I’m also realizing that by being myself again, I will be confusing and odd to many, who might judge me for it. I don’t want to walk around with pamphletes on what geniuses are like, but at the same time I’m terrified I’ll end up having a friend or friends with a savior complex and this whole painful thing will happen to me again, and I’m not sure I could survive a second round of it. I feel vulnerable and defiant and sad and angry and just really fucking confused.

Mostly I’m sad that people must have hated me so much to do something so awful to me, and it makes me wonder why they hate me? Am I really so awful? That’s really hard. I talked to a friend who asked if I was going to see a counsellor for it and I was just like “Fuck no!” I don’t trust the mental health profession at all. And in a way that is sad, because it’s driven me away from certain resources. But in another way, I would rather be alive. I may see a counsellor at some point, but only if they know something about psychiatric survivors and gifted people.

I’ve decided I have to take my recovery into my own hands. I’m looking at thoughts that are in my head, trying to figure out what bad things I tell myself and learning how to deprogram and reprogram myself. That sounds kind of bad, but I’m doing it to myself, I’m not in a forced deprogramming situation. I’m going to be studying the Logical Fallacies and Neurolinguistic Programming and see if I can fix my head without drugs or someone’s outside opinion. I’m also going to be looking into how ritual abuse survivors recover, because I think that’s the most similar area of trauma to what happened to me. Basically I’m switching my research focus for a while to recovery, to getting myself out of this shit and not relying on anyone else, because I’m scared to death of everyone else.

The issue too, of course, is that I have emotional overexcitabilities, which makes this really intense. I think I can do it though. I have to, obviously I can’t depend on the traditional psych system to help me, not when they did this to me in the first place.

The funny thing is, the person I trust the most right now, besides Cuz Deanna, is someone I hadn’t expected at all. It’s actually really nice, it’s so unexpected that it gives me hope. I don’t know who my friends are going to be anymore, people got really used to me being The Crazy Lady that I don’t know how many can actually follow now that that label is gone.

And it’s ironic, when I think about this word Normal. Normal used to be something to aspire to, when I was crazy, it was the way I should be, the way I would be when I was fixed. And I was Less Than. Suddenly my diagnosis is wrong, I’m not crazy, I’m a genius, and acting like geniuses are supposed to act, with the same personal issues geniuses generally have. And suddenly Normal is Less Than.

I don’t think being Normal is a bad thing, unless you inflict it on others!! But it’s funny, when I said Normal and was coming from a psych patient perspective, people could feel good about themselves. Now when I say Normal it means the average population outside of Gifted people, and it makes people feel bad about themselves. What the fuck? That is a total mind fuck that is.

Did you know that when a Sun dies it becomes a diamond? That image is so beautiful. I don’t want to be dead anymore, but I do want to be a diamond.

This is not the Church of my people!

Wow, that last post was the hardest post I’ve ever written!!!! But really, I don’t want to come across as little miss perfect smarty pants who got fucked over, even if that is true some of the time. People have faults, perfection is near impossible, but as long as we can learn to practice love then we just might survive this funny planet. And I am trying to love the people who hurt me, because some of them didn’t know they were being violent. That’s a terrible excuse though, but, ehhn! I just think cycles of abuse need to stop, and people need to accept differences. That’s not so radical is it?

But enough heavy things for today.

Schrodinger went to his birthday party yesterday and met his two sisters George and Alex again. I think we all wondered if they would remember each other at all. Nope. They huffed and hissed and ran away from each other. And then we all ate an unusual gourmet cake made of salmon and cous cous, which the cats ate too. It was very cute, even though Schrodinger ended up under a cabinet and the other cats ended up guarding their food cupboard. Kitties are funny.

As much as I’m talking about my past here these days, I’m actually thinking more about my future. When I saw this amazing psychic in January she told me I had, more than other people, the ability to create my own future the way I liked. And apparently good things are going to happen, although sometimes they will look near impossible. I keep hearing people run around talking about The Secret from Oprah, something about if you think positively good things will come. I don’t know, I think sometimes you have to get through a lot of negative before the positive thoughts start showing up. But maybe that is just my process. Not that I want negative things to happen to me.

I’m starting to get my sense of humour back, strangely enough, although it’s not coming through in my blog yet. I don’t really want to become super serious to the point that things aren’t funny anymore. Lots of things in this world are perfectly hilarious. Margaret Cho is serious AND hilarious, and so is Kurt Vonnegut. I remember reading some psychologist thought that humour is really just an avoidance technique and that laughing is some kind of denial mechanism. That’s really funny! I would hate to try and tell jokes to that psychologist.

Anyway, enough of me, here’s some humour to lighten your day.

Margaret Cho is reminded that she’s Asian

Eddie Izzard talks about the Church of England (Known in Canada as the Anglican Church, and oddly enough the one I attend at Christmas and Easter.)

A funny thing about the Anglican church is that some of my family are in that particular branch of Christianity and so it’s the one I got used to. I tried to find some gay christian groups in Vancouver to worship with but I ended up with some Baptists and I’m sad to say I didn’t appreciate the service. Why, I don’t know, I thought they were too damned happy for church! LOL.

But I believe in peace, bitch

I kind of threw out a creepy tidbit about my past way back when I talked about being gifted and in the regular school system for four months in Grade 8 in a little redneck town called Merritt, in the interior of British Columbia. For an example of how redneck Merritt is, that’s where a police officer is being charged with torture under the status of war crimes, a first in this country and hopefully not the last, because Canada has some goons in the police forces everywhere (like a lot of places).

So I had moved with my mom, she got a job out there. Merritt only has two high schools, one was huge and very violent, I had to leave after a week because I was getting shoved all the time, mostly because of my gender which is unknown at best. I ended up at the junior high, which was no less violent. I mean sexual assaults and harrassment and vicious fucking shit. I had three friends, of three races, and that was a big no no in Merritt. The school guidance counsellor told my mom I shouldn’t be friends with a girl from India because they had conservative beliefs and she was going to end up married off and out of school anyway. I may have mentioned I wasn’t good in math COMPARED to the other gifted people, but I still pulled in A averages. At the school in Merritt the math teacher decided since I was native my A’s in his tests were a fluke, and gave me a C because he thought it was more indicative of my ability.

I went to a very dark place internally. Not only was I being bullied for being transgender, I was also failing in my academics because none of my teachers believed an aboriginal could actually be smart. I became very withdrawn, and the only interesting thing I learned was how to shoot a gun. We actually had a whole class devoted to using firearms, and like everything else I picked up on it really fast. I could name all the parts, tell you how to use it, and eventually I actually did start going to the shooting range, where it turned out I was an excellent shot if I had a bit more practice.

Nobody liked me, no one understood me, and all my differences marked me out for hatred. So I hated back. I didn’t know how to explain what they were doing to me, because if I cried they jeered at me more. So finally I started thinking about the fact that they were violent towards me and it was slowly murdering me. I was going to kill myself, there was no doubt about it, but I was going to take as many of them with me as I could. They seemed incapable of feeling any kind of empathy, and to me that meant they weren’t human. So killing them wasn’t as bad as it should have been.

Obviously, it never happened, and thank fucking god. My mom realized something was seriously wrong with me, and we moved away before the end of the semester. I spent my last two months of grade eight back in the gifted program in Saskatoon, I think they knew something had seriously happened to me over there but I wasn’t talking. I ended up going to high school with some of my friends from that program, and I dressed in black and hid for half a year, until I came out of the closet and things actually started looking up for me again. But it still scares me, when I think how close I came to creating more evil in the world. That really scares me.

It’s easy to become a perpetrator, unfortunately, which is why I knew after Sept 11 that America was going to lash out in a really evil way. However, I have to say that healing from victimization is remarkably easier compared to healing from victimization and perpetuating the original abuse on someone else. I’ve observed survivors and survivor-perpetrators, and I can tell you that survivors bounce back a lot easier, while a perpetrator either carries immense guilt forever or shuts off all emotions in order to justify the bad things they have done. Because when you destroy someone, you are really destroying yourself. And in order to pretend that outward violence isn’t self destructive, people have to compartmentalize themselves from the things they have hurt and destroyed.

I know some people maybe think considered all the shit I’ve been through I should want revenge, and I won’t deny that the impulses are there. But you can acknowledge your own darkness without inflicting it on others. I know that school shootings are horrible things in the world, I don’t deny that at all. But where was the compassion when those shooters were being emotionally tortured? Why did teachers allow me to be bullied, instead of stopping it? I don’t know. That’s a darkness I don’t really want to understand, although I probably should if I want to stop it.

Really though, I have turned away from any ideas of violence. It’s not right. I do have a dark side, but I have non-destructive outlets for that. And I think it’s important we acknowledge that we do have capacities for violence, because otherwise shit just keeps happening. I can’t hurt people, it’s not in my nature. I can think about it, but thinking and doing are different things. I did want to hurt the people who helped put me in the hospital, but I’ve let it go now. They were uneducated, uninformed, and unable to understand. I know they wanted to, and I know they thought they were doing a good thing, and I know they might even hang on to that for the rest of their lives, but I really have no control over how they deal with it. And I’m glad I don’t, I don’t really want to run around forcing education on people the way normalcy was forced on me. If people want to practice empathy and understanding, thank goodness. But if not, I just hope they stay away from me.

I should also mention, before Merritt, and a year afterwards and ever since, I was/am a pacifist. I was born a pacifist. I marched in anti-nuke rallies, anti-war rallies, I cried when other people got hurt. I almost became like too many other people are, and I’m glad I didn’t. Even when some girls jumped me when I was a teenager, I never hit back. I knew they would hit harder if I did. I’m sure people thought I was a wuss, but I couldn’t hurt them, at all. I wanted to be better than them, even though one punched me in the eye so many times I have a cataract now.

Violence is fucked up yo! Sex is far better, and consensual s/m is even better! Okay, that last part is really just me.

In a nutshell

For those who don’t know my eight year psych history, or what the hell happened to get me from point A to point B, with stops at Z F and Q in between, here’s the summary (just for future reference):

I had a bipolar II diagnosis for four years which involved putting me on an antipsychotic, an antidepressant, and a mood stabilizer all at the same time. I started out my psych history by going to get antidepressants, which I took for four years. I was having some suicidal feelings, I felt out of place, I didn’t fit it, my childhood had a lot of abuse, basically I had existential depression. I could have been helped by talking through it, but my therapist didn’t know anything about gifteds and I didn’t know I was in a process of positive disintegration. I was unable to fit into the mainstream and it made me feel that there was something wrong with me. I had also been raped not long before my therapist encouraged me to either check into the hospital or get a prescription for antidepressants. I got a prescription for Paxil.

SSRI’s have various psychological side effects, including withdrawal symptoms which create auditory hallucinations, random electrical impulses shooting through your body (The Zaps), insomnia, and at the worst case, akathisia. That’s a fancy term for what is essentially mania. Jacked up on enough SSRI’s, you WILL go manic, and that’s what happened to me four years later. The initial high of SSRI’s had worn off, and I still felt badly. Not only that but I was having physiological symptoms in my body and was basically being tortured by the medication neurologically. The doctor kept deciding I could be happier, and the prescription went up to the top level that can be safely prescribed. I should also mention my doctor was a general practitioner, a common experience for people on SSRI’s. Eventually I snapped, I stopped eating, bathing, started ranting and raving and dressing weird. I was officially in psychosis. Some well intentioned but misguided friends took me to the psychiatric ward.

A French psychiatric ward. I don’t speak french, and most of the staff didn’t speak english. This was in Canada. There were english speaking psychiatric wards, but I wasn’t living in the proper jurisdiction to be allowed to go there.

The doctors never really took a history, I spent less than two hours with psychiatrists over the course of six weeks. My treatment was determined the day I went in, without a doctor actually talking to me. I was labeled Bipolar II, with possible Schizoaffective disorder. No one asked if I was gifted, and no one knew what that meant either, including myself. I was told that disagreeing with the diagnosis PROVED I was sick and lacked insight into my condition. Accepting the label was required before I was permitted to leave the hospital. Everything about me became wrong.

The medication I was put on cause me to have seizures, hear voices, get depressed, have painful energy in my body, gain 80 pounds, some people get diabetes from the drugs too. I had brain damage, my memory was shot completely, I couldn’t move much, I started sleeping all the time, and I was unable to hold down a job. I became disabled. I accepted this because I was crazy, and crazy people are disabled people. But as I wandered half dead through various outpatient service centres, I started meeting more politicized crazy people.

Over four years I researched psychiatry, the case studies of the medications I was on, psychiatric thoughts of madness, the history of psychiatry, and eventually the stories of other people who had been in the system and gotten out and off the drugs and recovered. Eventually I almost died twice because of my medication, one started having toxic blood levels, which was indicating liver damage. The other one caused a rash which can sometimes result in Steven-Johnsons Syndrome, basically your skin blisters and falls off, a lot of people die from it, the recovery rates are poor. I was getting off my medication and trying alternative treatments (homeopathy and supplements like Omega 3-6-9, and Iron, which it turns out I’m deficient in). That’s when I suddenly wondered if being gifted had anything to do with being “crazy.” And I read about positive disintegration and overexcitabilities.

I’m off medication now, and a lot of negative things I assumed was me being crazy turns out to have been related to the medication. For eight years I have tried to fit in with society and I almost died.

I think a lot of people with Bipolar II have been seriously misdiagnosed, there is little being done in psychiatry to find out if there is a reason someone feels crappy. So no, I don’t believe you can say there are real bipolars out there. I know we’re supposed to believe that, but I think a lot of people, given REAL care that is about them rather than the needs of the people around them, have a good chance of recovery. That sounds awful to some people, but believe me, I’ve done the research, not with a government grant, but I’ve read enough volumes to know whereof I speak. The drugs are actually called chemical lobotomies by the doctors who invented them.

And by the way, during my research I found out they cannot prove a brain chemical link to madness. Some psychiatric survivors involved in Mind Freedom challenged the APA to release their research proving conclusively a link, and the response was basically, no, we have no proof, BUT we know it’s true.

Woah

Sensual overexcitability fucking rules.