While I was in the bathroom this morning, my roommate started calling out for me. All I heard was my name so I had no idea what he wanted. Once I was out, I noticed there were other people in the house. I wasn't too surprised by this because the internet people were supposed to be here to fix our internet. Hah.
You know, I'm still not sure on ALL the details of what happened. I know that somehow, the internet service got downgraded to what amounts to a crawl and I think it is possible we're being charged for digital cable. Possibly. I'm still not sure about that part.
Anyway, all together, my roommate, my landlord, and I have been on the phone with the internet company about ten times this morning. I have my speed back up, a modem has been replaced, the digital cable box that we didn't want/need/or ask for has been returned, and everyone is as exhausted and annoyed as they can be.
Really, I'm exasperated at this point. I think everyone is. The cable company is probably still charging us too much and I'm going to be looking for any possible alternative I can find. I'm just not sure what that will be at the moment.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
School Daze: 4th Grade and Love
She needs you like she needs her tranqs
To tell her that the world is clean
To promise her a definition
Tell her where the rain will fall
Tell her where the sun shines bright
And tell her she can have it all
Today. Today.
"Alice" Sisters of Mercy
As much as I love the story of Labyrinth, for all of its David-Bowie-as-the-Goblin-King goodness, I really truly loathe the message of it. There is nothing that pisses me off that the 'oh little kid with the great imagination who lives in this great fantasy world needs to grow up and stop living in dream land.' Yeah, fuck you. For some of us, the world in our heads where the safest places. For some of us, they were how we survived.
In the identity post, I talked about how this is the age when I began to really define who I wanted to be and how I wanted my life to go. Hah. I also found that there were a lot of obstacles to this. However, I will always say the most important thing about fourth grade is that it is the time when I began to understand what I loved.
I'd always loved books and stories. I'd always liked fantasy and scifi stuff, but this is when I really began to love it as something that was a part of me. I would read as much of it as I could, devouring books like food, letting characters and places and magic legends fill me. They regenerated parts of me that I had lost during the years before, recreating my spirit and strength and whatever other intangible bits of me had died.
I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't see this as ideal. As I said, there is a whole fiction trope about how people shouldn't stay in fantasy land. Hmph. I think people who write that kind of thing are those darling creatures who never had to seek refuge in a foreign fictional land. The world around them must have been a nicer place than the ones in their heads. Awesome for them.
As I stumbled along through my fourth grade year, I most often did so in my head. I would talk to my friends, but I didn't get that close to any of them because I knew I would be leaving at the end of the year. I would interact with the adults when I had to. Most of the time though, I was off some where in my mind, completely detached from the world around me. I conspired with Morgan Le Fay (who was really the protagonist of the story) and wandered through the lost cites left by the Elves when they left this world.
This is how I survived, how I really found some joy. The other things I did, the moments of shutting down and the Secret Eating, that was all about just functioning from one moment to the next. It soothed me, but it didn't make me happy. But reading and drawing and writing, these things kept me happy. Books and music made all the difference in my life. And to this day, they are the two aspects of my life that have never hurt me, never drained me, and never betrayed me. Even now, they keep me hanging on.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
School Daze: 4th Grade and Broken Houses
As a hard and fast rule of life, this is how you should decide if someone stays around you. 1. Is this person a pleasure to be around. 2. If the answer to #1 is 'no,' then is this person useful?
If the answer to both questions is no, get rid of said person. No one should have to be around unpleasant people who serve no purpose.
My Second Stepfather (who will now very appropriately be called the SS)) was neither consistently pleasant nor useful. In fact, he is probably one of the least useful humans I have ever been around. The meager good qualities that I mentioned before were diminishing at a fast pace.
At the end of the first semester of school during my 4th grade year, I brought home grades that were all over the place. Some A's, a couple of B's a D, and the F in book reports. In no way did the bad grades reflect my intelligence. Actually, let's face it, grades NEVER reflect intelligence or even mastery of a subject. Grades reflect a student's ability to perform the required tasks that the teacher decided to use to measure the grades. That is ALL they reflect.
In this case, my teacher only marginally liked to give tests. She was far more concerned with homework assignments. For every subject during the day, we were given assignments to complete at home.
I could NOT work in the house. The atmosphere was just too toxic. My usual tactic for getting around this was to stop on my walk home and do the work. Sometimes I would sit on a rock fence, homework balanced on my Trapperkeeper. Sometimes I would stop at one of the small parks and work on assignments as I sat on a bench or in one of the swings.
On other occasions, I would go into a public restroom and hide in one of the stalls. I sit there for a couple of hours and work on my homework, trying to do my best to make sure no one noticed me, or at least that no one realized I was staying in there for so long.
I think if it had just been assignments I could do this way, I would have been okay. But my fourth grade teacher was into projects. She wanted us to bring things from home or build things or other bullshit and quite often that was just as damned impossible as trying to collect moon rocks or something.
For our social studies class, we were given an assignment to build a type of building from the past. I knew I needed to really knock this out of the park, because most of my 'projects had received less than favorable grades. I had a plan though and I knew it would be awesome.
I went to my convenience store and bought a bunch of boxes of sugar cubes and Elmer's Glue. I took an old flat piece of wood and began to build my castle. I knew the trick was just using small amounts of glue as to not melt the sugar. I did this, working on levels, doing my best to secure them.
Even though I hated working at home, I knew I had no choice with this project. So every night I would spend the better part of a couple of hours gluing my castle together. I even finished several days before it was due, which was good because it gave me time to let it dry. All of this, of course, was the easy part.
I remember the project was due on a Tuesday of the following week. I thought about how to approach this for several days before hand, almost asking quite a few times, but losing my nerve at the last moment. This is one of those things that really exemplifies how my life was. Here I was, a little kid, who needed something only the adults could provide. I felt so resented and unwanted in my situation that I was terrified to ask.
This was a big project though. The BIGGEST project of this first semester of school, so I had to ask. I remember walking into the living room where they were both watching TV. The SS was sprawled out on the couch and Mom was sitting in a chair near him. They didn't act like the noticed me and for a while, I just stood there, hoping they would. This continued for a while, until finally there was a commercial.
"Um . . ."
"What do you want?" The SS didn't even bother looking at me as he asked. As usual, my mother tended to not speak to us first, even though she was the real parent and she should have.
I shifted on my feet. "I have the castle and I need a ride to school on Tuesday."
"Your mother is working on Tuesday."
"Yeah, I know, but I was wondering . . .because we have the other car if maybe you could drive me on Tuesday?"
A minute or so passed by with no answer. I felt so horribly unwelcome that I almost just left. I worked so hard though, so I asked again. "I need a ride."
"You're supposed to walk to school because it will help you get over being so fay and lazy, " said the fattest, laziest man I had thusfar met in my life.
"I have to carry my castle and I don't think I can make it."
"Take the bus."
"I don't think I can get on the bus with the castle." I remember I was squirming so badly at this point I needed to urinate.
"You should have done something easier to carry." This was from my mother, who finally felt it was time for her to speak. Her voice had that nervous, angry edge to it that it always had when she felt like I was taking up too much . . . well, just too much anything. "Why didn't you THINK about that. You never THINK."
At this point, I started to cry. I had worked so hard on that project. I spent hours on it. I planned it out and I did my paper over it and glued and glued and glued for so many days. It looked good too and I knew it would be the best one. Why couldn't they see that? Why were they suddenly angry over this?
"Quit crying," the SS ordered. "I'll drive you on Tuesday."
"Yon don't HAVE TO," my mother said, because of course she would.
"No, no. It's FINE. Someone has to take her. and you will be at work."
"I could be late." I swear my mother had this perverse need to insure her husbands did as LITTLE in their lives as possible. It was almost like she believed if one of them actually put out effort, her hair would come out in clumps or something. "I'll just get her up early and drive her over to the school. She can wait there for a while." My mother had to be at work by seven and she lived an hour away. What she was suggesting involved me being at school two hours longer than needed. Remember it was starting to get cold by this point.
"Nope, that's okay. I'll take her." It was settled. I felt relieved about the whole thing, even though I also felt emotionally strung out by the process. I went to my room and actually relaxed for the rest of the weekend. I was even pretty calm on Monday.
Tuesday morning, my mom woke me up as she was leaving for work, as she always did. I took my bath and got ready. I fixed myself some cereal and waited for the SS to come waddling into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee.
It never happened. I watched the clock, waiting for him to get up. He needed to be up soon so he could drive me. My fear grew by the second. After a while, I walked to their bedroom and sat down in the floor in front of the door, hoping he would hear me or at least that I could hear him awake. All I could hear was snoring. By this point, I was on the verge of tears again.
One of the first rules of the new living situation was that no one was allowed to wake the SS. He could sleep as long as he wished. While he was asleep, no one was allowed to make noise. No music, no TV, no screaming. IF you woke him, things would get very bad for you.
The project won over though. I stood and tapped on the door. I called out his name in a very small voice and told him we needed to go soon. The snoring stopped abruptly and I heard him curse. The bed creaked as he pulled himself off of it. I could hear him stomping across the room and considered running away, but then he flung the door open. His face was red with fury . . . and also red with the fact that it was always red because of his fatness.
"So you don't trust me?"
"I what?"
He yelled it this time, in that sarcastic, mildly amused at his own cruelty kind of way, "You don't trust me. YOU didn't think I was going to get up. I was awake. I was already awake."
"Okay . . ." He certainly was not awake. However, one of the many lessons kids in my situation learn is that you don't question the fucked up claims of reality from the adults.
"You just don't trust me. Well . . . fine. You walk to school."
"NO!"
He walked out of the room and pushed me against the wall. "Did you just tell me no? Did you say no to me?"
It was terrifying to have him so close to me. "I have to get to school. I have the castle and you promised."
He shook his head. "You need to learn respect. You're on your own. And you better hurry. It's a long walk to school."
He let me go and walked back into his room, slamming the door on the way. I stood there for a second in pure shock. I couldn't stand too long though. I had to walk to school and it was getting dangerously close to 8.
By the time I made it there, I was late. My project, unwieldy and too heavy for me to carry easily, was broken into pieces. I tried to tell my teacher it was "ruins" of a castle, but she wasn't buying it. I was told it was too destroyed for her to give it a grade, so that part of my assignment would be a 0. It sucked too, because my written part got an A. The project as a whole was a large part of our grade for that section.
One ride to school, one half hour of someone NOT being a complete asshole, and it could have made all the difference.
If the answer to both questions is no, get rid of said person. No one should have to be around unpleasant people who serve no purpose.
My Second Stepfather (who will now very appropriately be called the SS)) was neither consistently pleasant nor useful. In fact, he is probably one of the least useful humans I have ever been around. The meager good qualities that I mentioned before were diminishing at a fast pace.
At the end of the first semester of school during my 4th grade year, I brought home grades that were all over the place. Some A's, a couple of B's a D, and the F in book reports. In no way did the bad grades reflect my intelligence. Actually, let's face it, grades NEVER reflect intelligence or even mastery of a subject. Grades reflect a student's ability to perform the required tasks that the teacher decided to use to measure the grades. That is ALL they reflect.
In this case, my teacher only marginally liked to give tests. She was far more concerned with homework assignments. For every subject during the day, we were given assignments to complete at home.
I could NOT work in the house. The atmosphere was just too toxic. My usual tactic for getting around this was to stop on my walk home and do the work. Sometimes I would sit on a rock fence, homework balanced on my Trapperkeeper. Sometimes I would stop at one of the small parks and work on assignments as I sat on a bench or in one of the swings.
On other occasions, I would go into a public restroom and hide in one of the stalls. I sit there for a couple of hours and work on my homework, trying to do my best to make sure no one noticed me, or at least that no one realized I was staying in there for so long.
I think if it had just been assignments I could do this way, I would have been okay. But my fourth grade teacher was into projects. She wanted us to bring things from home or build things or other bullshit and quite often that was just as damned impossible as trying to collect moon rocks or something.
For our social studies class, we were given an assignment to build a type of building from the past. I knew I needed to really knock this out of the park, because most of my 'projects had received less than favorable grades. I had a plan though and I knew it would be awesome.
I went to my convenience store and bought a bunch of boxes of sugar cubes and Elmer's Glue. I took an old flat piece of wood and began to build my castle. I knew the trick was just using small amounts of glue as to not melt the sugar. I did this, working on levels, doing my best to secure them.
Even though I hated working at home, I knew I had no choice with this project. So every night I would spend the better part of a couple of hours gluing my castle together. I even finished several days before it was due, which was good because it gave me time to let it dry. All of this, of course, was the easy part.
I remember the project was due on a Tuesday of the following week. I thought about how to approach this for several days before hand, almost asking quite a few times, but losing my nerve at the last moment. This is one of those things that really exemplifies how my life was. Here I was, a little kid, who needed something only the adults could provide. I felt so resented and unwanted in my situation that I was terrified to ask.
This was a big project though. The BIGGEST project of this first semester of school, so I had to ask. I remember walking into the living room where they were both watching TV. The SS was sprawled out on the couch and Mom was sitting in a chair near him. They didn't act like the noticed me and for a while, I just stood there, hoping they would. This continued for a while, until finally there was a commercial.
"Um . . ."
"What do you want?" The SS didn't even bother looking at me as he asked. As usual, my mother tended to not speak to us first, even though she was the real parent and she should have.
I shifted on my feet. "I have the castle and I need a ride to school on Tuesday."
"Your mother is working on Tuesday."
"Yeah, I know, but I was wondering . . .because we have the other car if maybe you could drive me on Tuesday?"
A minute or so passed by with no answer. I felt so horribly unwelcome that I almost just left. I worked so hard though, so I asked again. "I need a ride."
"You're supposed to walk to school because it will help you get over being so fay and lazy, " said the fattest, laziest man I had thusfar met in my life.
"I have to carry my castle and I don't think I can make it."
"Take the bus."
"I don't think I can get on the bus with the castle." I remember I was squirming so badly at this point I needed to urinate.
"You should have done something easier to carry." This was from my mother, who finally felt it was time for her to speak. Her voice had that nervous, angry edge to it that it always had when she felt like I was taking up too much . . . well, just too much anything. "Why didn't you THINK about that. You never THINK."
At this point, I started to cry. I had worked so hard on that project. I spent hours on it. I planned it out and I did my paper over it and glued and glued and glued for so many days. It looked good too and I knew it would be the best one. Why couldn't they see that? Why were they suddenly angry over this?
"Quit crying," the SS ordered. "I'll drive you on Tuesday."
"Yon don't HAVE TO," my mother said, because of course she would.
"No, no. It's FINE. Someone has to take her. and you will be at work."
"I could be late." I swear my mother had this perverse need to insure her husbands did as LITTLE in their lives as possible. It was almost like she believed if one of them actually put out effort, her hair would come out in clumps or something. "I'll just get her up early and drive her over to the school. She can wait there for a while." My mother had to be at work by seven and she lived an hour away. What she was suggesting involved me being at school two hours longer than needed. Remember it was starting to get cold by this point.
"Nope, that's okay. I'll take her." It was settled. I felt relieved about the whole thing, even though I also felt emotionally strung out by the process. I went to my room and actually relaxed for the rest of the weekend. I was even pretty calm on Monday.
Tuesday morning, my mom woke me up as she was leaving for work, as she always did. I took my bath and got ready. I fixed myself some cereal and waited for the SS to come waddling into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee.
It never happened. I watched the clock, waiting for him to get up. He needed to be up soon so he could drive me. My fear grew by the second. After a while, I walked to their bedroom and sat down in the floor in front of the door, hoping he would hear me or at least that I could hear him awake. All I could hear was snoring. By this point, I was on the verge of tears again.
One of the first rules of the new living situation was that no one was allowed to wake the SS. He could sleep as long as he wished. While he was asleep, no one was allowed to make noise. No music, no TV, no screaming. IF you woke him, things would get very bad for you.
The project won over though. I stood and tapped on the door. I called out his name in a very small voice and told him we needed to go soon. The snoring stopped abruptly and I heard him curse. The bed creaked as he pulled himself off of it. I could hear him stomping across the room and considered running away, but then he flung the door open. His face was red with fury . . . and also red with the fact that it was always red because of his fatness.
"So you don't trust me?"
"I what?"
He yelled it this time, in that sarcastic, mildly amused at his own cruelty kind of way, "You don't trust me. YOU didn't think I was going to get up. I was awake. I was already awake."
"Okay . . ." He certainly was not awake. However, one of the many lessons kids in my situation learn is that you don't question the fucked up claims of reality from the adults.
"You just don't trust me. Well . . . fine. You walk to school."
"NO!"
He walked out of the room and pushed me against the wall. "Did you just tell me no? Did you say no to me?"
It was terrifying to have him so close to me. "I have to get to school. I have the castle and you promised."
He shook his head. "You need to learn respect. You're on your own. And you better hurry. It's a long walk to school."
He let me go and walked back into his room, slamming the door on the way. I stood there for a second in pure shock. I couldn't stand too long though. I had to walk to school and it was getting dangerously close to 8.
By the time I made it there, I was late. My project, unwieldy and too heavy for me to carry easily, was broken into pieces. I tried to tell my teacher it was "ruins" of a castle, but she wasn't buying it. I was told it was too destroyed for her to give it a grade, so that part of my assignment would be a 0. It sucked too, because my written part got an A. The project as a whole was a large part of our grade for that section.
One ride to school, one half hour of someone NOT being a complete asshole, and it could have made all the difference.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
A Weekend Break
I've been hitting the Memory Lane stuff pretty hard and I thought I'd take a day or so away from it. Remembering my childhood can be rough. Sometimes when I finish one of those posts, I just feel like I ripped off all my skin and handed it to people.
At the same time, I feel like I'm learning so much about myself. I'm considering angles of how events came together and reexamining how all of this led to the person I am now. Our pain adds up and begins to grow deeper and deeper until it's like this vast marsh inside of us. We know we can sink in it if we wade too deep. We know that if we let it overwhelm us, it might just kill us.
I kind of see what I'm doing now with the childhood posts as a way to dig out some of the emotional muck. I'm kind of on the outside of it now, on somewhat firmer ground. Honestly, the best place to be where your pain is concerned is outside of it.
Heh! I just realized I wrote "pan" for pain in absolutely every instance. I'm glad I caught that or this post would have made absolutely no sense.
Anyway, the weather has cooled down and I'm able to get some sleep. You have no idea how awesome this is for me. I hope you're having a good weekend. Sleep well.
At the same time, I feel like I'm learning so much about myself. I'm considering angles of how events came together and reexamining how all of this led to the person I am now. Our pain adds up and begins to grow deeper and deeper until it's like this vast marsh inside of us. We know we can sink in it if we wade too deep. We know that if we let it overwhelm us, it might just kill us.
I kind of see what I'm doing now with the childhood posts as a way to dig out some of the emotional muck. I'm kind of on the outside of it now, on somewhat firmer ground. Honestly, the best place to be where your pain is concerned is outside of it.
Heh! I just realized I wrote "pan" for pain in absolutely every instance. I'm glad I caught that or this post would have made absolutely no sense.
Anyway, the weather has cooled down and I'm able to get some sleep. You have no idea how awesome this is for me. I hope you're having a good weekend. Sleep well.
Friday, August 17, 2012
School Daze: 4th Grade C. Frozen
As destructive as the secret eating could (and would) be, it was unfortunately not the only manifestation of my PTSD. Actually, it was only a small part of it, though there were characteristics of it that bled over into the other areas. The basic nature of the secret eating allowed me to enter a state of Shut Down. Emotionally and intellectually, I was not THERE. The extent to which I was an aware individual went away for a while and I just existed.
There were other areas in my life where this Shut Down began to happen that, quite frankly, baffled me. As a kid, I lacked the understanding of what was happening to me and had no idea how to stop it. The adults around me, guardians and teachers, did not find it needful to look for the root of why I was Shutting Down. Instead, they just opted to punish it.
I think the best example of this has to do with book reports. When we began the year, book reports weren't a part of how our grades were calculated. About the second six weeks of the first semester, however, our teacher decided that we would not only do book reports but that they would be a separate part of our grade. Her grade sheets were typed up already, so she just wrote 'book reports' at the bottom of the page in blue ink and would assign a grade accordingly.
I failed the book report line. I failed it because I could not bring myself to do them. Not WOULD NOT do them. I COULD NOT do them.
To this day, I am baffled by this. I was an avid reader. In fact, my stepfather had made the huge and very 1980s mistake of joining Science Fiction Book Club and I was pouring through books. When I would finish my work in class, I would pull out my book and read on it. Sometimes I would read through recess.
My teacher remarked on this one day. I was in the classroom before the bell rang, my book on my desk as I read. She watched me for a while and then sighed. I looked up a her and asked her what was wrong.
"I just don't GET you, Lilly," she said. "You are reading all the time. I know you understand what you are reading."
"Yes, I love reading."
"Then why won't you do the book report sheets? When you finish one of your books, you just need to fill out the book report sheet and you will pass this requirement. How can you be so lazy that you can't do that?"
Of course, she answered her own question . . . at least to the extent that she wished to consider it. She believed and my mother and stepfather believed . . . and therefore, I believed . . . that I was just too lazy to do the book reports. Just too lazy, as all fat children are lazy, to fill out a piece of paper talking about the book I read.
I started so many of those book reports. I would get the little form as had to fill out. I still remember them because they were photocopied sideways on a legal sized sheet of paper. I would begin to fill them out and I would feel so happy that I was making this effort to do them and that I wouldn't fail and . . .
And nothing. I would stop. Every time I tried to fill one out, I would Shut Down, stop, and never finish it.
I have no idea why.
Over the many years since then, I'm thought about this specific Shut Down and tried to figure out why it happened. My current theory kind of runs like this: at this point in my young life, I was so fucked up over chaotic situations and random bullshit that my mind, in order to protect me, would seek out structure and hold on for dear life.
When the school year started, my teacher explained how grades would be calculated and what was expected of us. My mind accepted this as the order and structure of things and felt a certain level of comfort. When she threw us this curve ball about book reports, it was OUTSIDE of the order and structure my brain had accepted. And, as school was one of the few places where I could find order, structure, and control, my brain basically refused to allow the changes to be made.
My mind would not accept the book reports because they were an alteration in the ordered reality. Because my brain would not accept them, my body could not do them. No matter how hard I tried to force myself to finish one of those reports, my mind would just shut me down, and I couldn't.
Of all the strange things in my life, I have to say that Shut Down mode is the most difficult for me to comprehend. It frightens me that my mind can do things like this to me. It also frightens me how unpredictable and destructive it can be. I almost screwed up college twice because I went into Shut Down about a couple of classes and wouldn't go to them, but wouldn't go drop them either. Like the book report thing, something in my mind triggered and past that, I couldn't force myself to make the physical motions needed to accomplish whatever it was. I simply COULD NOT do it.
Quite often, I hear people complaining about overzealous teachers who will call DHS on parents or people who will send kids to therapy over every little thing. It always kind of annoys me when they talk about how over-reactive these people are. It annoys me because when I think about my own childhood, I wonder how different things could have been had I been given a chance to have some serious therapy or if a teacher had noticed the signs of how truly damaged I was. Honestly, it could have made all the difference in the world.
Because when you are a teacher and you have a student sitting in front of you who is clearly bright and capable of doing the assignment and she isn't, it might be prudent for you to consider the why of this. If that teacher had paused for a moment past her conclusion of "must just be lazy" and started asking me questions about my home life, she might have saved me a lot of painful years.
There were other areas in my life where this Shut Down began to happen that, quite frankly, baffled me. As a kid, I lacked the understanding of what was happening to me and had no idea how to stop it. The adults around me, guardians and teachers, did not find it needful to look for the root of why I was Shutting Down. Instead, they just opted to punish it.
I think the best example of this has to do with book reports. When we began the year, book reports weren't a part of how our grades were calculated. About the second six weeks of the first semester, however, our teacher decided that we would not only do book reports but that they would be a separate part of our grade. Her grade sheets were typed up already, so she just wrote 'book reports' at the bottom of the page in blue ink and would assign a grade accordingly.
I failed the book report line. I failed it because I could not bring myself to do them. Not WOULD NOT do them. I COULD NOT do them.
To this day, I am baffled by this. I was an avid reader. In fact, my stepfather had made the huge and very 1980s mistake of joining Science Fiction Book Club and I was pouring through books. When I would finish my work in class, I would pull out my book and read on it. Sometimes I would read through recess.
My teacher remarked on this one day. I was in the classroom before the bell rang, my book on my desk as I read. She watched me for a while and then sighed. I looked up a her and asked her what was wrong.
"I just don't GET you, Lilly," she said. "You are reading all the time. I know you understand what you are reading."
"Yes, I love reading."
"Then why won't you do the book report sheets? When you finish one of your books, you just need to fill out the book report sheet and you will pass this requirement. How can you be so lazy that you can't do that?"
Of course, she answered her own question . . . at least to the extent that she wished to consider it. She believed and my mother and stepfather believed . . . and therefore, I believed . . . that I was just too lazy to do the book reports. Just too lazy, as all fat children are lazy, to fill out a piece of paper talking about the book I read.
I started so many of those book reports. I would get the little form as had to fill out. I still remember them because they were photocopied sideways on a legal sized sheet of paper. I would begin to fill them out and I would feel so happy that I was making this effort to do them and that I wouldn't fail and . . .
And nothing. I would stop. Every time I tried to fill one out, I would Shut Down, stop, and never finish it.
I have no idea why.
Over the many years since then, I'm thought about this specific Shut Down and tried to figure out why it happened. My current theory kind of runs like this: at this point in my young life, I was so fucked up over chaotic situations and random bullshit that my mind, in order to protect me, would seek out structure and hold on for dear life.
When the school year started, my teacher explained how grades would be calculated and what was expected of us. My mind accepted this as the order and structure of things and felt a certain level of comfort. When she threw us this curve ball about book reports, it was OUTSIDE of the order and structure my brain had accepted. And, as school was one of the few places where I could find order, structure, and control, my brain basically refused to allow the changes to be made.
My mind would not accept the book reports because they were an alteration in the ordered reality. Because my brain would not accept them, my body could not do them. No matter how hard I tried to force myself to finish one of those reports, my mind would just shut me down, and I couldn't.
Of all the strange things in my life, I have to say that Shut Down mode is the most difficult for me to comprehend. It frightens me that my mind can do things like this to me. It also frightens me how unpredictable and destructive it can be. I almost screwed up college twice because I went into Shut Down about a couple of classes and wouldn't go to them, but wouldn't go drop them either. Like the book report thing, something in my mind triggered and past that, I couldn't force myself to make the physical motions needed to accomplish whatever it was. I simply COULD NOT do it.
Quite often, I hear people complaining about overzealous teachers who will call DHS on parents or people who will send kids to therapy over every little thing. It always kind of annoys me when they talk about how over-reactive these people are. It annoys me because when I think about my own childhood, I wonder how different things could have been had I been given a chance to have some serious therapy or if a teacher had noticed the signs of how truly damaged I was. Honestly, it could have made all the difference in the world.
Because when you are a teacher and you have a student sitting in front of you who is clearly bright and capable of doing the assignment and she isn't, it might be prudent for you to consider the why of this. If that teacher had paused for a moment past her conclusion of "must just be lazy" and started asking me questions about my home life, she might have saved me a lot of painful years.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
School Daze: 4th Grade B. PTSD Corndogs
Even though I felt I had a new lease on life due to my very deliberate change in identity, there were some things I couldn't control. The last husband and all of the hell that happened because of him left me with a lot of emotional scarring. Over this next year, a lot of that would begin to manifest.
This happened played a deeply significant role in my future struggles with obesity. As I have mentioned before, one of the control/abuse tactics of my mother's second husband involved a strict list of things I was allowed to eat. I was a fat kid and he didn't think I was sexy enough for him, so he wanted me to slim down. My weight had been a big issue in their marriage and I suffered a lot because of it. When someone is abusing you and trying to control every bite that you put in your mouth, you can do two things . . . you can submit to them and lose your will completely . . . or you can bide your time and then rebel when at all possible.
When we moved to the new town, I soon discovered there were some drastic changes in my living situation. The new stepfather was a bastard, but he was also a deeply, deeply lazy bastard, so that curbed a lot of his shit. My mother was usually working, most often two jobs. When she wasn't at work, she was drinking or asleep. We had a woman living with us (kind of randomly) who tended to babysit my brother.
All of this factored into me having a strange level of personal freedom. So long as I didn't bother anyone and I was home by the time it was dark, I could roam around the town as much as I wanted.
Now part of this was just basic willful neglect on the part of the adults. We lived fairly far away from the elementary school, but close enough that I could walk without too much difficulty. There were buses, but in case I haven't mentioned it, I loathed school buses and wanted to avoid them if possible. The first few days of school, Mom walked with me. After that, well, I guess she had other things to do and I was on my own. And if I could walk to school by myself, they really couldn't justify letting me walk around the rest of the town.
This freedom was delicious to me. Because I had to share a room with my brother, I really had no personal private space in the house. The best way for me to get away from everyone was just to stay out of the place as much as possible. And I did. I would walk everywhere in that town. I would visit friends. I would play in the park. I would walk by the older houses and enjoy their architecture. These hours alone were rather joyful for me.
They were not, however, the best part of this new freedom. See, there was a convenience store a few blocks from my house. It sold the usual convenience store foods . . . corn dogs, burritos, pizza pockets, etc. These foods became, and I am not exaggerating here, THE BEST THING about my life.
See, after several years of my eating being a matter of pain and cruelty, I had developed a very real kind of Food Anarchy Complex. There was nothing more important or joyful to me that walking into that store, buying my dollar's worth of toxic food, and eating it in secret. To me, those high fat, horrible for you treats were the most delightful things I had ever tasted. I would buy them and then walk outside of the store, swing around to the alley, and eat them where no one could watch me.
The secrecy was a big part of the enjoyment. I felt like I was getting away with something, pulling some major coup on the universe, because I was eating this and no one knew. It was my food, my decision, and I was able to do it with no one hitting me or screaming at me or otherwise punishing me.
After I would eat the secret food, I would feel this rush of pure bliss coursing through my body. My mind, ever a strange little place, had chosen to reinforce the secret eating by rewarding me with happy brain chemicals. That, of course, became the best part.
And thus, I transcended from a little girl with a bit of a weight problem into a full-on food addict. When things would get too stressful or when I just needed to rearrange my brain chemistry, I would eat something in secret. It became my way of coping with the hell around me. The more unhappy I am in a situation or the more miserable I feel during the day, the more I will eat.
You know, even now, the biggest thing I struggle with is secret eating. I honestly worry more about that than I do about the number of calories or whatever I eat in a day. The calories can eventually be worked off. The fat can eventually be worked off. But the joy and elation I feel from secret eating is harder to shake, because, quite frankly, there is nothing else in my life that compares to it.
And if you're in my life, don't be offended by that statement. It isn't to say I don't love you. I do. It isn't to say I don't have fun with you. I do. And I've felt the rush of happy brain chemicals from other things as well. The first time I completed Nano I felt deep accomplishment. When I got my scholarships to college, I felt deep accomplishment. Hell, when I can pull myself up from a chair using muscles instead of my hands, I feel deep accomplishment. It's an awesome feeling.
I have to be honest though, it doesn't compare to the rush after secret eating. Love doesn't. Happiness doesn't. Nothing does. Secret eating is freedom and comfort and safety and sneakiness and pure out defiance and total happiness. There have been times that it was the savior of both my sanity and my life.
As I am in this place where I'm trying to carve out a healthy lifestyle, this is the hardest part of the struggle for me. Walking is painful. Doing steps is rough. But nothing is as difficult as forcing myself not to go get The Secret Piece of Pie or the Secret Expensive Ass Coffee. Every time I manage to resist it, I remind myself I am doing the right thing.
And every time I remind myself of this, a fourth grade version of me whispers back that "doing the right thing" is total bullshit.
This happened played a deeply significant role in my future struggles with obesity. As I have mentioned before, one of the control/abuse tactics of my mother's second husband involved a strict list of things I was allowed to eat. I was a fat kid and he didn't think I was sexy enough for him, so he wanted me to slim down. My weight had been a big issue in their marriage and I suffered a lot because of it. When someone is abusing you and trying to control every bite that you put in your mouth, you can do two things . . . you can submit to them and lose your will completely . . . or you can bide your time and then rebel when at all possible.
When we moved to the new town, I soon discovered there were some drastic changes in my living situation. The new stepfather was a bastard, but he was also a deeply, deeply lazy bastard, so that curbed a lot of his shit. My mother was usually working, most often two jobs. When she wasn't at work, she was drinking or asleep. We had a woman living with us (kind of randomly) who tended to babysit my brother.
All of this factored into me having a strange level of personal freedom. So long as I didn't bother anyone and I was home by the time it was dark, I could roam around the town as much as I wanted.
Now part of this was just basic willful neglect on the part of the adults. We lived fairly far away from the elementary school, but close enough that I could walk without too much difficulty. There were buses, but in case I haven't mentioned it, I loathed school buses and wanted to avoid them if possible. The first few days of school, Mom walked with me. After that, well, I guess she had other things to do and I was on my own. And if I could walk to school by myself, they really couldn't justify letting me walk around the rest of the town.
This freedom was delicious to me. Because I had to share a room with my brother, I really had no personal private space in the house. The best way for me to get away from everyone was just to stay out of the place as much as possible. And I did. I would walk everywhere in that town. I would visit friends. I would play in the park. I would walk by the older houses and enjoy their architecture. These hours alone were rather joyful for me.
They were not, however, the best part of this new freedom. See, there was a convenience store a few blocks from my house. It sold the usual convenience store foods . . . corn dogs, burritos, pizza pockets, etc. These foods became, and I am not exaggerating here, THE BEST THING about my life.
See, after several years of my eating being a matter of pain and cruelty, I had developed a very real kind of Food Anarchy Complex. There was nothing more important or joyful to me that walking into that store, buying my dollar's worth of toxic food, and eating it in secret. To me, those high fat, horrible for you treats were the most delightful things I had ever tasted. I would buy them and then walk outside of the store, swing around to the alley, and eat them where no one could watch me.
The secrecy was a big part of the enjoyment. I felt like I was getting away with something, pulling some major coup on the universe, because I was eating this and no one knew. It was my food, my decision, and I was able to do it with no one hitting me or screaming at me or otherwise punishing me.
After I would eat the secret food, I would feel this rush of pure bliss coursing through my body. My mind, ever a strange little place, had chosen to reinforce the secret eating by rewarding me with happy brain chemicals. That, of course, became the best part.
And thus, I transcended from a little girl with a bit of a weight problem into a full-on food addict. When things would get too stressful or when I just needed to rearrange my brain chemistry, I would eat something in secret. It became my way of coping with the hell around me. The more unhappy I am in a situation or the more miserable I feel during the day, the more I will eat.
You know, even now, the biggest thing I struggle with is secret eating. I honestly worry more about that than I do about the number of calories or whatever I eat in a day. The calories can eventually be worked off. The fat can eventually be worked off. But the joy and elation I feel from secret eating is harder to shake, because, quite frankly, there is nothing else in my life that compares to it.
And if you're in my life, don't be offended by that statement. It isn't to say I don't love you. I do. It isn't to say I don't have fun with you. I do. And I've felt the rush of happy brain chemicals from other things as well. The first time I completed Nano I felt deep accomplishment. When I got my scholarships to college, I felt deep accomplishment. Hell, when I can pull myself up from a chair using muscles instead of my hands, I feel deep accomplishment. It's an awesome feeling.
I have to be honest though, it doesn't compare to the rush after secret eating. Love doesn't. Happiness doesn't. Nothing does. Secret eating is freedom and comfort and safety and sneakiness and pure out defiance and total happiness. There have been times that it was the savior of both my sanity and my life.
As I am in this place where I'm trying to carve out a healthy lifestyle, this is the hardest part of the struggle for me. Walking is painful. Doing steps is rough. But nothing is as difficult as forcing myself not to go get The Secret Piece of Pie or the Secret Expensive Ass Coffee. Every time I manage to resist it, I remind myself I am doing the right thing.
And every time I remind myself of this, a fourth grade version of me whispers back that "doing the right thing" is total bullshit.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
School Daze: 4th Grade A. The First Identity Shift
I'm having to divide the next several years of school up into parts because a lot of stuff happened. This time period is very complex for me in terms of emotional and intellectual development. I really became ME during these years, which is kind of ironic considering I shifted who I was a couple of times.
My fourth grade year coincided with us moving to a new town on the other side of Oklahoma so that we could suffer as my mother's new husband failed at things. All of my mother's husbands possessed the trifecta of lazy, arrogant, and controlling. This seemed to be the qualities she looked for in men.
Her third husband was unique amongst her husbands for two very headfucking reasons. For one thing, he was smart and, when he wasn't being a totally cruel and sadistic bastard, rather fun to be around. He had good taste in music, books, movies, and comics. He encouraged my interests in these things, mostly so he had someone to talk to about the stuff. He encouraged my mother as well, and was probably the first of her husbands to recognize how intelligent she was. He wanted her to go to college (once he was finished) and bought her books over stuff that interested her.
Of course, this was all in the midst of the trifecta of horrible. He couldn't hold a job, but Mom worked. He never did anything at ALL around the house, but thought that we should. He felt he was in charge of everything and could use any means he deemed needed to make sure we fell into line. So yes, he was still a completely awful person . . . just one who happened to be likable at times, which only made it worse.
The other unique thing about this marriage was that he came with a family. Well, okay, my father came with a family too, but of all the stepfathers, he is the only one who brought family into the mix. When they married, we also got new grandparents, an aunt and uncle, a great-grandmother, and a bunch of great-aunts and great-uncles and tons of cousins.
The crappy thing is, I really LIKED these people. I think they really liked us. It's just that when things fell apart with this stepfather, they fell apart so badly that we just could NOT be around his family anymore. It hurt, but it was necessary. To this day, I still kind of regret it.
Anyway, how all this factors into the school thing, aside from the fact that I would be starting a new school in a new town for the first time in my life, is that the stepfather and his family (mostly his family) were making plans to have him adopt my brother and me. It was decided to save the confusion of everyone later in the year that my brother and I would start using his last name instead of the one we currently had.
On the surface, changing your last name doesn't seem like much. You are still you, after all. You still have the same first name. However, and maybe this is why I will always believe Numerology has some validity, it does CHANGE things. You now have a new identity. I went from being this one girl who had been treated one way and suffered certain things to being this new blank person. This was completely liberating to me. And I decided that I was going to erase all the Bad that had happened before.
Because I deemed the so much of my life and past would no longer matter to me, I had to find new things to grasp onto. I dove headlong into music. It was the early 1980s, so it was a very good time to do this. My mother had an old stereo system in the dining room and I would spend almost all of my time in there. I would listen to music, dance, sing, write my own songs, and dance more. I loved it.
The New Me also was going to be a writer. Despite everything else I allowed to shed away from me, my love of books and writing did not go away. The New Me began to work on plays and stories. I started my old hobbies of drawing out characters and designing worlds. I read everything I could get my hands on.
When I went into the new school, I did so with the new foundation I had connected to the new name. Sure there were things I couldn't change. I was still a fat kid. I was still poor. But now I had more direction. I had a stronger voice and I knew that no matter what happened during this school year, my voice would not leave me. The old person with the old last name might have suffered under the teachers she had, but the new person would not.
Interestingly, even though I eventually returned to my father's last name (because I never got adopted thank fuck and yeah kinda spent like three years using a false name, heh . . .), I still retained everything that I built into my new identity. When I returned to the old name, I did not return to the old girl.
You know, years later, I'm a person who truly dislikes it when people change their name when they get married. I hate it because I feel like you're sublimating your identity to become this new married THING. But any time I start to get too critical of it, I remember how liberating it can be to change your identity. Sometimes it isn't about making a family or being traditional. Sometimes changing your name is about shedding your skin and seeing what lies underneath.
My fourth grade year coincided with us moving to a new town on the other side of Oklahoma so that we could suffer as my mother's new husband failed at things. All of my mother's husbands possessed the trifecta of lazy, arrogant, and controlling. This seemed to be the qualities she looked for in men.
Her third husband was unique amongst her husbands for two very headfucking reasons. For one thing, he was smart and, when he wasn't being a totally cruel and sadistic bastard, rather fun to be around. He had good taste in music, books, movies, and comics. He encouraged my interests in these things, mostly so he had someone to talk to about the stuff. He encouraged my mother as well, and was probably the first of her husbands to recognize how intelligent she was. He wanted her to go to college (once he was finished) and bought her books over stuff that interested her.
Of course, this was all in the midst of the trifecta of horrible. He couldn't hold a job, but Mom worked. He never did anything at ALL around the house, but thought that we should. He felt he was in charge of everything and could use any means he deemed needed to make sure we fell into line. So yes, he was still a completely awful person . . . just one who happened to be likable at times, which only made it worse.
The other unique thing about this marriage was that he came with a family. Well, okay, my father came with a family too, but of all the stepfathers, he is the only one who brought family into the mix. When they married, we also got new grandparents, an aunt and uncle, a great-grandmother, and a bunch of great-aunts and great-uncles and tons of cousins.
The crappy thing is, I really LIKED these people. I think they really liked us. It's just that when things fell apart with this stepfather, they fell apart so badly that we just could NOT be around his family anymore. It hurt, but it was necessary. To this day, I still kind of regret it.
Anyway, how all this factors into the school thing, aside from the fact that I would be starting a new school in a new town for the first time in my life, is that the stepfather and his family (mostly his family) were making plans to have him adopt my brother and me. It was decided to save the confusion of everyone later in the year that my brother and I would start using his last name instead of the one we currently had.
On the surface, changing your last name doesn't seem like much. You are still you, after all. You still have the same first name. However, and maybe this is why I will always believe Numerology has some validity, it does CHANGE things. You now have a new identity. I went from being this one girl who had been treated one way and suffered certain things to being this new blank person. This was completely liberating to me. And I decided that I was going to erase all the Bad that had happened before.
Because I deemed the so much of my life and past would no longer matter to me, I had to find new things to grasp onto. I dove headlong into music. It was the early 1980s, so it was a very good time to do this. My mother had an old stereo system in the dining room and I would spend almost all of my time in there. I would listen to music, dance, sing, write my own songs, and dance more. I loved it.
The New Me also was going to be a writer. Despite everything else I allowed to shed away from me, my love of books and writing did not go away. The New Me began to work on plays and stories. I started my old hobbies of drawing out characters and designing worlds. I read everything I could get my hands on.
When I went into the new school, I did so with the new foundation I had connected to the new name. Sure there were things I couldn't change. I was still a fat kid. I was still poor. But now I had more direction. I had a stronger voice and I knew that no matter what happened during this school year, my voice would not leave me. The old person with the old last name might have suffered under the teachers she had, but the new person would not.
Interestingly, even though I eventually returned to my father's last name (because I never got adopted thank fuck and yeah kinda spent like three years using a false name, heh . . .), I still retained everything that I built into my new identity. When I returned to the old name, I did not return to the old girl.
You know, years later, I'm a person who truly dislikes it when people change their name when they get married. I hate it because I feel like you're sublimating your identity to become this new married THING. But any time I start to get too critical of it, I remember how liberating it can be to change your identity. Sometimes it isn't about making a family or being traditional. Sometimes changing your name is about shedding your skin and seeing what lies underneath.
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