Reclaiming my voice

This post has been a long time coming, I know.  It was never my intention to abandon this blog; but for a time, I believe I lost my voice. 

Not my physical one, of course.  But written?  Absolutely.  It was a gradual process, and one that I think I believed I deserved in some twisted way.  Several years ago, I became involved with a feminist group on Facebook (I know, I know...) that was, at the time, a vibrant and active community, as supportive of all of its members as it could be, and one in which people new to various feminist concepts could learn and ask questions and make mistakes.  It wasn't perfect, because the people involved weren't perfect, but it didn't need it to be.

And then, as progressive communities so often do these days, it went toxic.  I'm not going to go into the details here, but suffice it to say that the group's creator and a number of the moderators left, a new crowd took over, and suddenly things weren't so good anymore.

The group's death throes were painful to witness, particularly when I saw people who I knew to be kind and gentle being called out as toxic trash because they'd accidentally misused words that were new to them or had simply stepped on the wrong nerve at the wrong time.  People who had every right to be mad were summarily kicked out of the group for pointing out that more than one marginalized group of people in the group had been hurt.  Apologies were blasted as "making somebody else's pain all about you" and those who made them were also heavily encouraged to leave.  If someone in the "in crowd" called out someone who wasn't as educated/informed about the group's new focus as they were, and that person responded with confusion and expressions of hurt, that person would be told to sit down and shut up and listen while the real marginalized people had their say.

I learned, gradually, that voices like mine were not wanted or needed, even in attempts to encourage people and especially in attempts to learn anything at all.  (It always came down to "shut up, too many people like you are talking already and marginalized people are not your educational opportunity.")  I learned that because of certain demographics that I fall into, I need to just sit down and shut up and let the important people do the talking.  Doing otherwise meant that I was being a hateful oppressor and I was allowing my voice to drown out the ones that really needed to be heard.

Eventually, as these things do, application of that lesson gradually ceased to be exclusive to that Facebook group.  It bled through to this blog and my (friend-locked and under another name) LiveJournal as well.  I stopped writing fan fiction.  I stopped writing original fiction.  I stopped writing poetry.  I stopped writing, period.

And so I lost my voice.

Reclaiming it isn't going to be easy.  I still halfway believe that I don't deserve to be heard.  That the colour of my skin means that I need to sit down and shut up because the world is already too full of white women with opinions.  I've been complicit in my own silencing for so long that it feels as comforting as it is restrictive.  But there are things that I need to say, and this is my own space; who am I oppressing if I speak here?  I don't get many pageviews anymore, it's been years since I regularly updated, and anyway, I'm not exactly forcing anybody to read what I'm writing here.

So here I am.  I'm still alive, still bisexual (though that is still a serious oversimplification of terms), still Christo-Pagan, still a little bit silly, still perhaps more than a little bit smart, and still perpetually surprised by life and all the wonderful, horrible, and downright bizarre things that it has to offer.  And as I go through the process of reclaiming and refining my voice, I hope that I can offer anyone who reads this something to think about, even if you don't necessarily agree with me.

The Importance of Words

I've been thinking a lot lately about the importance of words.

There are a lot of words with which I tend to be very careful.  For one thing, I don't tend to swear a lot.  Part of this, of course, is due to the fact that I work with children.  (I've always thought that it was rather interesting that these words are considered to be actively harmful to kids, and I've always rather preferred the idea of teaching them how to use these words responsibly.  Still, I'm not a parent myself—nor do I ever intend to be—so, particularly in the interests of keeping my job and obtaining better work in the future, I think I'll defer to society's conventions in this case.)  But it's also largely because I feel that overusing swear words causes them to lose their power, both therapeutically speaking and for the kind of emphasis that sometimes only a really taboo word can provide.  Being careless with swearing might be an easy habit to get into, but I don't think that I'd ever really benefit from it, even if words like that coming from a face that looks as innocent as mine sometimes does have a certain amount of inherent comic value.

There are other words that I'm careful with.  Faith.  Truth.  Holiness.  Freedom.  All of these words have been misused in many ways.  Faith is used as an excuse to stop thinking, or for preventing other people from thinking.  Truth—as I understand the term, anyway—is rarely absolute, frequently subject to interpretation, and claimed by so many people, all of whom hold beliefs that contradict the beliefs of somebody else who claims with equal fervency that they are the ones who know the truth, and of course they can all back up their opinions with proof, some of which is convincing, some of which is not, and most of which could really be interpreted in more than one way.  Holiness has been used as an excuse to kill other people, ostensibly because of their beliefs (which is bad enough in and of itself, of course), but, perhaps more importantly, because they had resources or access to valuable trade routes that the aggressors wanted to claim for their own.  Freedom as a concept has been used as a reason to take people's actual freedom away (witness the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks).  The misuse of words has the potential to do real harm.

Evil and hate are also words with which I prefer to be careful.  I don't call anyone evil; that word makes it too easy to forget that they're human, too.  I have no problem with calling people's actions evil.  But calling people themselves evil makes it too easy to dehumanize them and to risk becoming as bad as I believe that their actions are.  And I don't hate anybody.  It's too exhausting; it takes too much energy to hate, and I'd rather be using my energy to do things that help rather than harm.  In the end, hate isn't worth it.

But the word with which I am perhaps the most careful is one of the most over-used and misused words in the English language.  It's a big word, for all that it only has four letters.  It means so many things.  It affects so many people.  And at certain times, and in certain places, it can even hold the power of life and death.

Love.

I use it colloquially, of course.  I don't really love the internet, or my second-generation iPod Touch, or my favourite skirt, or any of my jewellery.  Actually loving things or concepts is an alien idea to me.  Things are things.  They're useful for a while and then they're recycled or thrown away.  (You can probably guess my preference in this matter; Pagans often tend to be environmentalists to varying degrees, and I'm no exception, even if I can't always make the choices that I'd prefer to make—for example, composting is great, but it's not necessarily a wise thing to do when you live in an area with a decent-sized bear population.)  Loving things holds you back.

But in a truer sense, I almost never use the word "love."  I've written at length about this subject before, but just to recap: this is partly because I perceive loving and falling in love to be very different things—perhaps now more than ever.  To me, love isn't just a feeling—it's an action, too; it's felt and it's shown.  And there are as many kinds of love as there are ways to show it.  This wider view of what the word "love" means is good, of course, and it works for me, but it also complicates things.  There are some people in my life to whom I would very much like to say "I love you," but a certain fear of misunderstandng holds me back.  When the only forms of love that are widely acknowledged are familial love and romantic love, and when the person to whom I would like to say "I love you" isn't a known relative (besides being a member of the same species, of course), it would be easy for them to assume that I mean the emotional and hormonal mix that we refer to as "falling in love."  Only one of them would be right, and that person would assume—quite incorrectly—that I wanted to act on it though I know full well that those feelings are exceedingly unlikely to be returned.  That's not what I want.  In circumstances like this, a solid friendship with somebody I trust is wonderful enough.

Being careful with words can be difficult.  It can be maddening, especially because I don't actually think with words, and translating the concept that I'm thinking of to the most accurate word I know sometimes leads me to make odd word choices, do strange things to my spoken grammar, and even occasionally use the wrong word because it looks, sounds, or feels like the one that I really mean to say.  (I sometimes feel like at any moment, somebody will quote Inigo Montoya at me.)  But I believe that it's worth it.  After all, words have power, and they have more power than people often give them credit for.

1924-2010

My paternal grandfather died just a bit over a week ago; his funeral was a week ago today.

He'd been in the hospital for about three months, at first just for something that could be treated; he was diabetic, though not insulin-dependent, and he developed gangrene in one of his toes. Unfortunately, even after the toe was removed he developed gangrene in his lower leg; it was amputated below the knee and all seemed to be going well with his recovery and physical therapy, though most of us couldn't visit him for most of that because someone in his ward had a MRSA infection. He and Grandma were trying to figure out where they'd be living when he was discharged as their actual home is in a small town about an hour's drive away from here, though a few years ago they started renting a tiny apartment in the city for overnight stays. Neither place is really equipped to accommodate someone in a wheelchair full-time, and at the time we never would have thought that he wouldn't actually be going back.

Then, in the middle of November, he caught pneumonia.

When it was obvious that his situation was getting dire, he was moved to a private room on another floor and the whole family received permission to be at the hospital at any time. Like pretty much everyone else, until last Wednesday I'd been spending the major part of my time either at the hospital or in transit between home and the hospital. It was a mess of worry, sleep deprivation, occasional panic punctuated by small moments of humour (because everyone in my family has some form of sense of humour, and even when we're preparing ourselves for something like the death of someone we all love, we can't ever resist the temptation to make each other laugh). But as awful as most of that was, the very worst of it was seeing what Grandpa's illness was doing to him. I'll spare you the grisly details, but if you're really all that curious, look up pneumonia's Wikipedia entry and imagine someone you love experiencing the worst of it. It was utterly heartbreaking.

And yet, even as I hated to see him suffer so—I don't know how many times I prayed for Atropos to cut his thread just so he wouldn't have to keep going on the way he was—I learned an entirely new kind of respect for him. I had always respected him as a person, a grandparent, a veteran of World War II, and an extremely knowledgeable historian, but in his final days, even when he could hardly move and had mostly lost the power of speech, he fought to stay with us (the nurses were actually astonished at how long he managed to hang on) and he found other ways to communicate with us. And his sense of humour was certainly intact; when he could still talk, he joked that the weekend when he got pneumonia would have been a lot easier if he'd had a 40-ouncer behind his pillow. His strength and stubbornness, even when he was so ill, is nothing short of inspirational to me because he never gave up.

The last week has been pretty difficult. The wake was last Thursday night and his funeral a week ago today; I was one of the pallbearers. (My bagpipe-trained muscles came in handy; even as thin as he'd gotten with his illness, that casket was heavy.) I haven't slept well since Grandpa got pneumonia, and I've been terribly worried about my grandmother, my dad and my aunts and uncles. But as we adjust to a world in which we can't see Grandpa anymore, I suspect that it will be the small things that will hurt the most—hearing a joke he'd have enjoyed, reading a book about local history to which he contributed something, or even just looking in the mirror (I strongly resemble both him and my maternal grandmother) or driving past the hospital where he died. I feel like crying at the weirdest times lately, as well as some that aren't so weird, and even though I'm glad that he's not suffering anymore I do wish that his relief hadn't come at the cost of his life…even at nearly 87 years of age, he had so much he still wanted to do.

So if I write a little less frequently than I usually do, or if my musings sometimes seem a little more downbeat than usual, this will probably be why. I have my reasons—probably more than most people who believe this—for believing that death isn't really so much "the final goodbye" as "see you in another time and place", but even so, I'm still grieving and it will be awhile before I'm really back to being myself again.

"Never mind the whys and wherefores..."

(Title courtesy of Gilbert & Sullivan's "HMS Pinafore", which was the first musical I ever went to see. It contains some of what is still my favourite music after all these years.)

I'm posting this on the off-chance that I might ever need a FAQ page. Stranger things have happened, after all. :)

Why do I call myself a "Surprised Christo-Pagan?"

I call myself a Christo-Pagan because while I do involve myself in things like Goddess worship, divination (more as a means of seeing what's in my subconscious mind than what's in my future), Reiki, meditation and rituals I've constructed based on information gained in my "Wicca 101" days, I also find great comfort and spiritual benefit in things like saying the rosary and being involved in Christian worship. I can't turn my back on either system of belief because they are both a powerful part of who and what I am.

I spell it "Christo-Pagan" rather than "Christopagan" because I don't want to privilege one side of my path over the other.  (I could probably try to even them out by alternating the letters in "Pagan" and "Christian," therefore calling myself a "Pcahgrainstian" or a "Cphargiasntian," but that would be silly.)  And although I may use the term "Christo-Pagan" more often than "Pagan Christian", largely because it's not quite so cumbersome, I will probably use the terms interchangeably—much as I use the terms "violin" and "fiddle", which refer to the same instrument, depending on which kind of music it's used to play.

Please don't think it's ever been easy to reconcile the two. I'm very much aware that I'm on very shaky theological ground here on at least one side of the equation—Christianity traditionally disapproves of pretty much everything I do as a Pagan; if it weren't for a core belief of mine, the belief that all deities are faces of a "God behind the Gods", I would be violating both the first of the Ten Commandments and rejecting the very statement of faith that I make every Sunday when I recite the Apostles' Creed (or the Nicene Creed on the Sundays when we use the Book of Common Prayer), and even so, I am quite arguably still doing those things because "All the Gods are one God" still isn't a Judeo-Christian belief, strictly speaking. I pray for guidance every time I take communion and every time I celebrate a Sabbat or an Esbat. I'm not picking up any signs of disapproval yet, but I'm aware that it could very well be because I'm not listening the right way and I'm still looking for a lot of answers.

Neopaganism may be more lenient (in theory, at least) because "Neopaganism" is really just an umbrella term for a collection of various modern faiths that have been influenced by what's known about pre-Christian religions (and in many cases, a heavy dose of Gerald Gardner), but from what I've seen online, a lot of Pagans must be allergic to Christians—I've lost track of the times when, while I've been looking at the news on Wren's Nest over at the Witches' Voice, I've seen an article relating to Christianity where people have left comments ranting about EVIL HYPOCRITICAL XTIANS BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA. Much as the GLBTQ community tends to look askance at bisexuals, even if they're part of the name, and much as the medical community apparently hates fat people, Pagans and Christians alike tend to look at those of us who try to blend the faiths as if we're unnatural and threatening freaks, fence-sitters who should just place ourselves on one side or the other. After all, two paths that are (ideally, at least) dedicated to compassion, love and making the world a better place are bound to be mortal enemies. *sigh*

I call myself a "surprised Christo-Pagan" because the world is full of surprises—and because I'm still very surprised that I've managed to make a spiritual life that's as complex and downright strange as mine has been actually work for me.

Why do I choose to talk about such a personal subject in public?

I've always found that I do my best thinking when I'm just writing my thoughts down. I figure that if I can benefit from muddling through like this, why couldn't my ramblings be helpful to other people as well? Should anyone chance to stumble upon this blog, I hope that even if they think I'm crazy/stupid/weird/going to Hell/anything else, I still hope that I'll give them something to think about.

Why do I call myself "Zillah"?

Because I may write about things here that I wouldn't necessarily want people in my daily life to know about, a pseudonym was obviously necessary. I chose "Zillah" not just because it's a fairly obscure Biblical name (Lamech's second wife, whose son Tubal-Cain was apparently good at making tools) but because of the first context in which I ever heard it—Zillah Grey was a character in Victoria Holt's "Snare of Serpents", and she was not what she initially seemed to be.

Now, human beings rarely are what we appear to be on the surface, so in that respect neither she nor I can really be said to buck the trend, but I feel that the name is an appropriate one for me to take for the purposes of this blog. The Zillah in that story had a past she wasn't proud of, and her actions caused years of suffering for someone she was close to, even to the point where that other person had to leave Scotland for South Africa for a time. On a strictly spiritual level, I also have a past I'm not proud of (see the bit on my "Wicca 101" phase in my first post) and although I haven't done anything that caused that much trouble for other people, I did end up with a significant split in my spiritual life for a number of years, almost like a split personality. I was in denial about it for a time—I think that's the main reason for my outpouring of vitriol towards Christianity in general, because although I thought I wasn't Christian anymore, I still felt a pull and I didn't like it. When I finally allowed myself to admit that the matter of my spiritual life wasn't as simple as being one thing or the other, I felt like the exiled part of myself was finally being allowed to come home, just as Zillah's step-daughter Davina Glentyre was.

Zillah dies near the end of the book, true, but then...eventually, we all do. If I recall correctly, Zillah made peace with herself and with Davina before the end. And in the end, that sort of thing is really what this blog is about—reconciling with myself and achieving a spiritual balance that will allow me to go forward and, for however long I'm going to be alive, help me to be the best person I'm capable of being.