Nostalgia

 For better or worse, I'm an older Millennial.  My childhood was filled with bright colours, wild 80's hair, awesome music, weird and sometimes dangerous toys (for example, I knew someone who broke her ankle using a Skip-It, and I myself incurred a number of minor injuries on my childhood best friend's Pogo Ball), and technology that was considerably less advanced than what we have today.  I could never have imagined that touching a spot on a screen would allow me to issue voice commands to my car, telling it what phone number to call or giving it an address for the GPS (on the rare occasion when I have Location Services enabled on my phone, anyway).  Being able to take a small-ish rectangular device out of my pocket to look up practically any bit of useful (or uselesss) information was unthinkable.  Portable computers technically existed—my father had one for work—but there is no way on Earth I'd ever have wanted that thing to be on my lap, because it was really, really heavy; I honestly think that it weighed more than my dog at the time, a big, goofy black Labrador Retriever.  Meanwhile, I'm fairly certain that my current laptop computer weighs only a little more than my violin in its case.  Times have changed.

Life, as they say, seemed simpler then.  But then, it always does to a child.  I'm sure today's kids will be saying much the same thing about our current world as I'm saying about the world as I experienced it in the 80's and 90's.

People love to roast my generation for being nostalgic, but I have to admit, I understand the urge to be nostalgic, even the urge to feel a bit smug about the things that we knew and remember, and the skills that we have, that young people today don't understand or have no reference for.  (I recently saw a post on Tumblr about a fanfic in which there was a DVD-style menu repeating on a VHS tape, which is impossible unless, for some unfathomable and/or trolling-related reason, somebody actually recorded a DVD menu onto a VHS tape.)  Because frankly, we've lived through a lot, and it's natural that many members of my generation—perhaps especially my segment of it, the older ones who are sometimes called "Xennials" or "the Oregon Trail generation"—should be looking back at that time in our lives with a certain amount of longing.  

We weren't expected to be available to anyone and everyone at all hours of the day or night.  Most of us were cared for reasonably well by our parents or other caregivers.  The predominant message about us was that we could change the world, our lives had worth and meaning, and if we worked hard enough, we would be rewarded for it.  And as anyone who hasn't been living as a hermit for the past quarter century or so would know, it hasn't exactly worked out that way.

My generation has gone from being told that we were the hopeful builders of a bright future to being convenient scapegoats for many of the ills of the present.  We're told now that we're the entitled and self-centred destroyers of multiple industries, too lazy to work hard enough to afford a basic home (including apartment rentals), too old to be worth a hand up when we have trouble finding work (many of the most helpful job-finding services and entry-level positions with even half-decent compensation are only available to recent college or university graduates under the age of 30), and overall, just a giant disappointment to the world.  Mental health issues run rampant among Millennials,  and have done so since we were in our 20s or so at least.  Small wonder that so many of us try to find joy where we can, including in silly slang and the memory of a time when we were told that we had value, that our dreams were worth having and chasing, and that if we worked hard enough, we could change the world for the better.

Life isn't easy for most people.  And the 80's and 90's weren't exactly a cakewalk either,  but it's easier to get sentimental about those decades because they're so temporally far away now.  And frankly, I find that it's nice to remember a time when I, and people like me, weren't being blamed for everything that's wrong with the world.  It's nice to remember hope.  Sometimes I'm foolish enough to still feel it.

So, yeah.  Cringe at Millennials for being nostalgic if you must.  (Given our general fondness for self-roasting humour, we may well be cringing right along with you.)  But don't be an asshole about it.  If nothing else, someday there'll be somebody poking fun at you for ridiculous generational stereotypes and nostalgia for the world as it was when you were young.

Potpourri

Last night, when I was talking with my Anglican-born best friend, who is now the music director at a Roman Catholic church (I consider it amusing that we've ended up doing music at churches in each other's denominations of origin), he mentioned that he thinks it's odd that the priest there doesn't believe that God specifically sent Jesus to die.  I laughed and told him, "Welcome to the Catholic mindset."  This might have been a bit of an overstatement, but not necessarily by much.  While what it officially says in the Catechism might be different—and I can't say for sure, since it's been a while since I read it—every bit of what I learned about being Catholic when I was growing up really does seem to include his sacrificial moment as a sort of afterthought.

Sin and hell and all of that were, of course, a part of my religious education as a child and adolescent, but they were never the focus of it.  Neither was what we're told happened at Calvary.  (Well, except for around Lent and Easter Sunday, but that's kind of different.)  The focus was always on what Jesus is supposed to have taught in life—and within that focus, the message was always, "This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you" (as a hymn we used to sing put it).  Even the form of the service seemed to put its emphasis on this: come in singing, hear a few scripture readings (and take part in the responsorial psalm), hear the weekly lecture about whatever the priest had decided was an appropriate topic, pray a bit, sing again, celebrate the Eucharist, sing a bit more, pray again, and go out singing. Even the celebration of the Eucharist seemed to be more of a memorial—"do this in memory of me"—than hammering in the idea of "CHRIST DIED FOR YOU, YOU HORRIBLE ROTTEN SINNER!!!!!"

We were taught to pray, to be kind, to give to the poor, to feed the hungry, to love God and each other, and to live a Christ-like life.  Whether we (or the Roman Catholic Church in general, for that matter) ever really managed to live up to those ideals is up for debate, of course, but that was what we were taught, and I still carry some of those lessons with me.

For all that it's a traditional Catholic belief that the bread and the wine literally become Jesus' body and blood through the miracle of transubstantiation, the sacrificial lamb aspect of the story of Jesus never really seemed to be as front-and-centre as I perceive it as being in many Protestant denominations.  Though admittedly, I could be wrong about the emphasis on Jesus' death.  Still, so much of my childhood religious education was focused on his life that I find the belief that the only reason for his life was to die a horrible death to be...difficult to understand, to say the least.

I guess that part of me will always be, for good or ill, ever-so-slightly Roman Catholic.

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Lately the Norse gods have been calling me.  I don't think that they will ever take me away from my beloved Celtic pantheon, but despite all the negative publicity that the Sons of Odin have been giving the Norse pantheon in recent years, I do believe that there is wisdom and knowledge to be gained there.  While the deity-focused part of my spiritual life is a bit difficult to pin down (to put it as simply as possible, I'm a bit agnostic; I believe that the Gods, if they do exist, reveal themselves to us in the ways that we're most able to understand and accept, and that even if they don't, their stories can still lead us to various real insights and truths), I am always drawn to Goddesses and Gods who are associated with the values of compassion, wisdom, and insight.  And as much as I have heritage that ties me to various Celtic deities and mythological figures, I also have Scandinavian ancestry that links me to the Norse pantheon.  I think that maybe it's time to learn a few things from and about them as well.

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I've also been thinking about the reasons why I turned to Paganism in the first place.

I first heard what I can only describe as the call of the Goddess when I was about thirteen years old, which confused me to no end because at the time I was a pretty devout Catholic.  But (as kids often do, which many adults seem to forget) I had a pretty good bullshit detector, and I couldn't stand hypocrisy.  At about that time, a local Catholic teacher was the defendant in a rather well-publicized trial relating to the sexual abuse of his students.  I had also read several news stories about Catholic priests who had committed similar offenses, and it led to

At about that time, my mother had bought a copy of The 21 Lessons of Merlyn (I know...Llewellyn hasn't got the best reputation as a publisher, and I understand why, but this book did in the end send me down an interesting and challenging path, so I'm thankful for that).  And I had always loved spending time outdoors; I grew up next to a surprisingly large forested area, and I took frequent walks out there, singing so that I wouldn't inadvertently surprise any wildlife that might, er, take exception to being startled by a human.  When I started reading about a kind of spirituality that was more Earth-centred, one that didn't tell me that people were supposed to "subdue the Earth" but instead respect it and be thankful for it...something clicked.  In time, I sought out information about spiritualities that weren't so male-centric and that affirmed that women weren't the vehicle through which sin had entered the world, but that we were every bit as worthy as men to be called by the Divine.

I think I needed that.  And I knew from pretty early on—though for a few years I would deny it—that my path didn't lie solely in Christianity or Paganism, but in some strange mix of both.  It's been more difficult than choosing one or the other would have been.  I won't deny that.  And there are people on both sides of the fence upon which I walk who would say that because I am both, I'm not worthy to be a part of either group—Christians would say that because I experience the Divine as a sort of multifaceted entity (which treads pretty close to a couple of heresies relating to the Holy Trinity, actually) that is One at its centre, but shows many faces to teach many lessons, and many Pagans would say that I don't belong to them either because somehow it's okay to worship Gods from most pantheons, but that it's a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE THING HOW DARE YOU to include Jesus of Nazareth (and of course God the Father and God the Holy Ghost) in worship because Christianity automatically equals evil.

For people who are supposedly free-thinking, there can be a lot of black-and-white thought where anything even remotely Christian is concerned.  I can understand it to a certain extent; I used to think I was superior, too, because I had Broken the Chains of Monotheism and Reached a Higher Consciousness and all that stuff.  I'd learned very quickly to equate Christianity with hypocrisy and hate and jealousy and all sorts of nasty things, especially after the death of Tempest Smith in 2001.

Smith, who was twelve years old when she committed suicide, was the victim of religious-based bullying; she had been bullied for years by her classmates, but eventually the bullying got worse when they learned that she was a Wiccan.  Her bullies used Christianity as a weapon, and eventually she hanged herself in her bedroom.

While I had never been subject to anything even remotely similar to that kind of bullying, I felt that this reflected very badly on Christians in general.  (I was eighteen at the time.)  And then, later that year, the infamous September 11 terrorist attacks happened, and I heard so many Christians blaming all Muslims for the actions of a hate-filled few.  Even my own father did; at the time, he was a big fan of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other hateful conspiracy mongers of their ilk.  In my disgust, I turned even more determinedly towards Paganism, developing some rather bitter feelings towards Christianity as a whole.  It took years, and the invitation of a friend to join the Anglican church choir he directs, to really start resolving those.  And in the past year, since my best friend became the musical director at a Catholic church, I've attended Mass a handful of times and plan to do so again.  It has proven to be extremely thought-provoking.  And though I don't think I can ever completely go back, as I said earlier on, some part of me will always be Roman Catholic.

I think that in the past year, I've come closer to being the Christo-Pagan I've always claimed to be, rather than a Pagan who regularly attends Anglican church services.

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I killed a forest tent caterpillar while I was writing this.  It fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing my mug of tea.  Almost reflexively, I squished it.  I'm not sure how it even got in the house.  As much as I know that in large numbers, they're really bad for the trees (as in they can kill them if the trees are defoliated too many times in a year), I actually feel bad for having done that.

Funny, that.  I have no problem with swatting mosquitoes or blackflies, but squishing a caterpillar evokes feelings of guilt.  Maybe it's because the caterpillar, on its own, presented no danger to me or even to any of the houseplants.  Mosquitoes can spread disease, and their bites are painful and, later, painfully itchy.  Blackflies can spread disease as well, and their bites are every bit as itchy and annoying.  But caterpillars...they're relatively harmless unless they show up in long-term infestations.

And just before my mug came down on top of the caterpillar, it looked at me.  That freaks me out a little.

At least I gave it a quick death.  Still, conscience can strike at the weirdest times.  This may not exactly be a major moral quandary, but it's got me thinking all the same.

Aliens are found, and known, and named...

Somewhat ironically, there are few times when I feel more Pagan than when the minister at my church says something that reminds me that views that I hold are fundamentally non-Christian in nature.  In a recent homily, he spoke of cycles: the seasons, the great cycle of life, and the concept of the turning of the wheels of fate and the saying that "what goes around comes around."  And he reminded us that this is fundamentally not a Christian way of thinking, and spoke (in a way that I'm sure he meant to be comforting, because I know him well enough to know that he is a kind person who means well) of God's plan not depending on the arbitrary turning of the wheels of Fate.

Of course, I found that to be, er, less than comforting.

After all, to me, as a Pagan who lives in the Northern Hemisphere, the Wheel of the Year as it's traditionally presented makes sense more often than not, and even the Christian calendar has a great deal in common with it, even if the end of the Christian year (I'm talking about the beginning of Advent, not the beginning of a new numbered year) comes about a month late by our reckoning.  I've seen demonstrations of "what goes around comes around," and even the Christians have sayings that come from their Bible that work out to basically the same thing.

Do not be decieved; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.  (Galatians 6:7)

You shall love your neighbour as yourself.  (Mark 12:31)

And besides, I never really took to the idea of our lives being guided and shaped by God.  I was always a firm believer in free will, even before I knew what it was called, and if I have any belief at all, it's that the Gods give us the clay, but it's up to us to shape it, though because some things do depend on luck, or at least on the decisions of other people, which really can be arbitrary at times, other hands can and do interfere with our work.

And ultimately, I also felt he was ignoring the very cycle that even now the Church, however half-heartedly, still demonstrates in the life-death-rebirth narrative of Jesus that so closely resembles the Pagan Wheel of the Year, thanks to a good deal of appropriation on both sides.  So I could not accept most of what he said in his homily that day as truth.  And it's times like these that remind me that in some ways, despite my four wonderful years as part of my church choir, and despite the place that I have in my church's community (if only because I've only ever told one person who was associated with that choir that I am a Christo-Pagan, and he's an Agnostic who eventually ended up playing the organ at another Anglican church in our city, which, to people who know him, really isn't as strange as it sounds) I am still in some ways very much an outsider.

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On a vaguely related note, recently it was also brought home to me that as much as I still sometimes feel like an ousider in the church of my choosing, I am also very much an outsider in the church of my baptism.  A couple of weeks ago, I provided some music for a Roman Catholic funeral.  The service was pretty standard, though I found out on the day that there was no Eucharist involved.  (This came as a relief; although I knew what to expect, having been raised Catholic, I didn't want to be put in the slightly uncomfortable place of being a visble part of the proceedings, being obviously familiar with Catholic ritual, and yet also being unwilling to take communion.  After all, in Catholicism, being a heretic is grounds for automatic excommunication; so is being a schismatic.  Because of the way the Roman Catholic Church defines these things, I'm technically both in more than one way, and I'm unrepentantly so as well.)  As startling as it was that the once-familiar responses to things said by the priest (who I remember as a priest-in-training who celebrated his first Mass when I was ten years old; how time flies) came so easily to my lips even after over a decade of absence from the Roman Catholic Church, it was even more startling to realize how foreign Catholicism now seems.

I don't regret leaving.  I can't support a church that condemns same-sex marriage and the ordination of women while concealing generations of child abuse by its priests.  I can't support an organization that views me as a lesser being just because I was born with ovaries rather than testicles, and would eagerly condemn me to Hell for being a woman with the capacity to be sexually and romantically attracted to women as well as men.  I can't support people who would rather see me die than allow me to have an abortion should it prove to be necessary to preserve my life, which is what happened to Savita Halappanavar late last month as a direct result of the Roman Catholics' total opposition to abortion under any circumstances.  There is much good in many individual Catholics, of course, but having left the church, I find that I cannot go back.  Not while these injustices are permitted to stand.

There are some things that I miss, of course.  For example, during the consecration of the bread and the wine, there are things written into the service that I find to be almost, well, Pagan.

Priest: Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation.  Through your goodness, we have this bread to offer, which Earth has given and human hands have made.  It will become for us the bread of life.


Congregation: Blessed be God forever.

Priest: Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation.  Through your goodness, we have this wine to offer: fruit of the vine and work of human hands.  It will become our spiritual drink.

Congregation: Blessed be God forever.

I miss this acknowledgement of how the bread and wine came to be.  I miss the acknowledgement that whatever the story behind this ritual that after all these years still seems rather cannibalistic, the actual bread and wine that are to be consumed came from the Earth and were made the way that they are by human beings.  These few little lines always made me feel like the whole thing was more natural, and perhaps a little less creepy (despite the Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation, that is) than the Anglican phrasing of the consecration of the bread and wine, particularly in the Book of Common Prayer.

However—these are small things.  And although the words and the ritual of that funeral service were almost as familiar to me as the sight of my own face in the mirror, I felt oddly disconnected from them.  I was a stranger there.  Perhaps it's a mark of how far my journey has taken me from the church of my childhood.

Being a Christo-Pagan puts me into an odd place; I don't entirely belong to Christianity or Neopaganism, and there are people who would argue that in trying to be both, I am truly neither.  But then, if I had let other people define my path for me, I would still be a practising Roman Catholic.  Instead, I'm constructing my own path, and although it isn't a perfect one, at least it ensures that I always remember that compassion is priceless, that it is necessary to take care of the Earth, and that people whose beliefs differ from my own are not necessarily my enemies.  There's value in that, I think.

Out of the Void

Today, a friend re-blogged something on her Tumblr blog that hit very close to home for me.  I'll paste it at the end of this post, but for now, I'd like to say a few things.  (Probably at length, as usual.)

I used to be depressed.  The person described in the Tumblr thing isn't me anymore, but for the most part, it used to be.  I never became actively suicidal, though I would be lying if I said that the thought of just disappearing into the wilderness and letting myself die of exposure didn't look awfully appealing from time to time when I was at my worst.  And I did function to some extent in the rest of the world, though it took a tremendous amount of effort.  In fact, I was only able to function at all for two reasons.  First, the only other member of my household was (physically, at least) in worse shape than I was at the time, and she was mentally about as bad, so if I let my depression take me over, she'd have nobody to take care of her.  So although I was entirely convinced of my own worthlessness, the hate that I felt for myself at the time actually drove me to make myself useful to her because I felt that I'd be even more worthless if I let my issues get in the way of her recovery.  Second, I was still singing with my community choir, which helped me immensely because it forced me into some badly-needed social interaction with people who like me, and which was (and still is) directed by a kind person with an excellent sense of humour.  In cases like mine, laughter really was some of the best medicine I could have asked to receive.

Depression stole valuable things from me: time and ambition.  I can't do anything about the years I lost to it, but my ambition has largely come back, though it brings some of its own frustrations with it.  Foremost among them is the fact that although I'm making progress, I still haven't managed to build myself the kind of life that I'd like to have.  And this is because that awful void, the feeling that nothing really matters and that the world would be better off without me, took me far too long to escape.  (No doubt this was exacerbated by the fact that I never sought treatment for it; I didn't want to be medicated, especially as I was reasonably sure that my depression wasn't the result of any sort of chemical imbalance, and I'm still young enough that I might want to or have to change my health insurance plan at least once in my life.  Even in Canada, a pre-existing condition like depression, even when a full recovery has been made, can be a bad thing to have on one's insurance record.)  In fact, I still occasionally feel its pull, especially when something goes more than usually wrong.

 And sometimes it threatens to send me back.  A little over a month ago, I had what I now think might have been a minor relapse, though I denied it at the time; I felt very gloomy for about a week, and I had several reasons.  I'd been worried about a couple of my friends; one has two daughters-in-law who have been diagnosed with cancer, and another was at the time facing some difficult circumstances that were not of her own making.  Then, I started worrying about my future; I've been out of teacher's college for several years now, and although I am working in a classroom now, I don't get paid for it.  True, I wasn't exactly free to leave for a couple of years (and it wouldn't have been a good idea anyway, given my mental state at the time), but I do sometimes worry that I've managed to screw myself over by not seriously looking for work outside of my district for most of the time since I earned my Bachelor of Education degree.  (I've started actively looking for teaching jobs elsewhere again since then, though, so this is less of a concern now.)  Overall, I was feeling pretty awful.

And to top it all off, for various reasons, the venue for my community choir's spring concert this year was bringing back some pretty seriously painful memories, some of which involved the man of whom I wrote in this post about two years ago.  Since then, I've completely moved on; I stopped missing him quite some time ago, and although I'll never forget him, I've put him quite firmly in my past.  Still, I've recently had a number of reasons to realize that he hurt me in ways that I hadn't even known about at the time, and while I have friends who are helping me to deal with them (often without even realizing it), sometimes the damage that he did becomes more apparent.  And while I'm not quite sure why it happened so strongly near the beginning of May (though I certainly have my suspicions), this, on top of everything else, left me feeling rather shaken.  All in all, I was feeling pretty vulnerable, and in past years, all of those things put together might have been enough to tip me back into a full-blown episode of depression.

But they didn't.

The difference was that I now have friends whom I trust with these things; I don't just know that they won't abandon me, even when I'm feeling rotten and do something stupid like start to isolate myself.  I believe it.  I trust them with my vulnerabilities, and they've trusted me with some of theirs.  Between them, they've helped me to develop the tools that I needed to fix something in me that I hadn't even realized was still broken.  When I get gloomy, they don't let me stay that way.  One of them has even inspired tears of relief and release with little more than a few well-chosen words that reminded me that there really is hope and that I'm not as awful a person as I'm still sometimes afraid that I am.  Knowing that these people care, and that I can trust them, is incredibly powerful.  Without them, I would probably not have gotten through that as well as I did, and that horrible week that I recently had would certainly have sent me back into the mental state that I was in when my depression was at its worst.

I can say with absolute certainty that what the following description says is true.  I've been there.  So many kind, compassionate, funny, intelligent, unusual, talented, and caring people have helped me to stay away from that territory; some of them even have first-hand or second-hand experience with depression themselves.  So if you ever feel inclined to dismiss depression as something insignificant, the sign of a whiny and lazy individual, think again.  It takes a tremendous amount of strength to uphold the fiction that everything is OK; it takes even more to admit that it isn't and to ask for support from loved ones and seek out the help of trained professionals.

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Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.

 It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.

(Source: sherunsfromdarkness)

What a week...

It's been a deeply emotional week, and I actually feel rather exhausted because of it.

Last week, I did something that, from what I've heard since then, may have led to some undesirable consequences for someone who was, up to that point, a close friend (and for one or two of her friends as well).  It was unintentional, and if it hadn't been for the written equivalent of a slip of the tongue, I might not have caused any damage at all.  But I did make that mistake, and I still feel terrible for it, though I'm no longer in the state of self-loathing that consumed me for several days after I was informed that I'd made a severe and potentially harmful misstep.  I did what I could to fix the mistake, and I apologized as much as I dared to, given how upset my friend was, and knowing that I was quite possibly the very last person she'd want to hear from at the time.

I've consciously kept away from her—and to a certain extent, our mutual friends as well—since then; I'm terrified that she's still angry with me and I'm afraid that I've done our friendship irreparable harm both by doing what I did and then keeping such a low profile afterward.  But for a few days I was in absolutely no shape to talk to anyone if it wasn't totally necessary.  Experience has taught me that when I'm that upset, it's best to shut off my more social inclinations for awhile.  I ultimately end up truly hurting fewer people that way.  The person I am when I'm depressed, or even when I'm just somewhere on the outside edges of depression territory (as I was last week), is not a particularly pleasant person to be around; I don't become cruel, but I do become very gloomy, and people tend not to appreciate the company of someone who is that negative.

And then, a few days ago I heard from another good friend, a person upon whom I've come to depend perhaps a little more than I ought to, that he had the opportunity to leave our mutual hometown to work somewhere else.  There were several reasons why going elsewhere would probably have been a good decision, as well as several reasons why it might have been a mistake, but it's not my story to tell, so I can't say much more than this.  But I can say that I encouraged him to go; as much as I'd have missed him, I truly believed that he'd be most content with the decision to leave.  However, he eventually decided that he'd be staying here for a while yet after all; he says that he's at peace with that decision, and as for me...well, it was quite possibly the first good news I'd had in a week.

That these things happened more or less all at once was an interesting coincidence, if not an easy one to deal with.  And it's got me thinking about the importance of social interaction.  You see, although the friend whom I accidentally hurt last week is someone I've known for somewhere between eight and ten years (we had a couple of classes together in university), and one of our mutual friends is also an old university classmate of mine, the other people I've come to think of as particularly good friends are of a much more recent acquaintance. I met two of them last May, and the other late last September.

Given that it's usually very difficult to earn my trust, it's rather remarkable that I let all of these people become so close to me, most in a fairly short period of time.  Because of them, I've become more social in the past year than I had been in years.  And it's changed me.  Although I still maintain that nobody can make other people happy, and that looking for another person to complete oneself is foolish at best, because of these friends I feel more more alive than I did at this time last year.  Because of them, my mind and my heart are more full than they were, more engaged, and even healed from some of the more significant hurts in my past.  My life is better because of them, and I hope that I've been able to be at least a little helpful to them as well in some way, in spite of the problems I might have caused last week.

I don't use the word "friend" lightly.  And my faith in myself was severely shaken by the mistake that I made; I felt that I could not be trusted and that I wasn't fit for human company.  I'm out of that initial shock of self-loathing now, but the results of my mistake last week are still somewhat unclear to me.  Perhaps in a few more days I'll be able to muster the courage to ask my friend if she's still upset with me, but for now, I remain a coward.  Perhaps it's for the best; if what happened after my mistake did happen as a result of it, I suspect that I might still not be the most welcome person in her life at the moment.

So, yeah.  This has all been fairly exhausting, and I hope that the week ahead doesn't hold any more unpleasant surprises.  I still need some time to catch my breath from the ones I've already had!

"Let the music heal your soul..."

(Today's post title taken from a song by the "Bravo Allstars," a pop supergroup composed of acts like the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and The Moffats.)

I've been thinking lately of the role that music played in my gradual adoption of a Christo-Pagan spirituality.

When I was a child, the thing I loved best about all those mandatory school Masses was all the singing we got to do. If I had to, I could still sing the tunes, at least, of the hymns that came up most often. "Peace is Flowing Like a River." "Though the Mountains May Fall." "Like a Shepherd." "Companions on the Journey." (We sang this one so often that even now, nearly sixteen years after I graduated from elementary school, I can still sing it perfectly.) "Abba, Father." "Sing to the Mountains." "Service." "Hail Mary/Gentle Woman." "Bloom Where You're Planted." "I Believe in the Sun." "My Shepherd is the Lord."

And so on.

When I got to high school, I joined the school choir. (Actually, that's not entirely accurate; there were usually so few regular singers that we called ourselves a "music group" rather than a choir most of the time.)  Most of what we did was sing the hymns and service music for the school Masses.  Even though I probably shouldn't have, I stayed on with them even after I decided that Christianity wasn't working out very well for me.  What mattered most to me at the time was that I got to sing—it rankled, of course, that the songs I was singing were all religious in nature, but then, I went to a Catholic school, so that sort of thing obviously went with the territory.  And even as I went through my "Pagan persecution complex" phase, I gradually found that singing, even singing songs of a religion I no longer really felt connected to, was becoming a deeply spiritual experience for me.  It was at about that time, I think, when I started making that distinction between religion and spirituality that still persists in my mind: the idea that religion is one way of experiencing the spiritual, but that it is by no means the only one.  Around that time, I realized that (for me, anyway) spiritual experiences don't have to be religious in nature, and that religious experiences aren't always spiritual in nature.

Part of the way through my high school years, I joined a community choir.  Our repertoire, even back then, was a bit of a mixed bag; we had show tunes mixed in with jazz standards, folk songs, one very strange medley of tunes called "Much Ado About Nothings" (I remember the words for the first one particularly well: "I love the evening, I adore the night, but most of all, but most of all, I think I'm allergic to morning!"), and, of course, a hefty dose of liturgical music.  Again, the fact that I had to sing Christian music did rankle a little, but at least in this case, I had a choice: I didn't have to keep going to rehearsal.  I was there entirely of my own volition.

Eventually, we planned a couple of trips to England to sing Evensong in a couple of cathedrals there: Winchester in 2002, and Lincoln in 2005.  I had a few personal reservations about making the trips, but I didn't want to miss out, either, and in retrospect, I'm very glad that I went.  We went to Winchester when I was nineteen years old; I'd been out of the Catholic school system for a year by then, and forced involvement in Christian religious celebrations had come to an end.  In preparation for the trip, we'd done a few Evensongs at the church where I now sing every week, but again, I didn't mind the religious service because I was there by choice, because Evensong is significantly different from anything I'd experienced as a Catholic, and because there was a minimum of preaching.  (Very little during Evensong is actually spoken.  There are a few scripture readings and a few prayers, but most of what happens is actually sung.  It occurred to me in Edinburgh back in August that, from a certain perspective, the liturgy could be seen as simply an excuse to have the music.)  The simplicity of the service, when mixed with the music we sang and the sheer presence of Winchester Cathedral, showed me that I actually could feel connected to Christian worship after all.

Actually, one of my favourite memories is of singing something while at Winchester Cathedral.  It was the Thursday evening that we were there; the sky was clear and there was sunlight filtering in through the Cathedral's windows.  Our choir's director had told us not to slip back into our street clothes immediately after the service was done; after the final procession, he led us to the retrochoir, where St. Swithun's tomb is marked.  We gathered around the place where the tomb is marked and he told us to take out the music for that ubiquitous piece of Anglican church music, Tallis' "If Ye Love Me" (which I'd absolutely fallen in love with the first time we practiced it), and there, in the sunlight in the retrochoir, we sang it.  And as we sang, I felt a feeling of peace and contentment that I hadn't known for a long time.  It was a thoroughly beautiful way to end our choral duties for the day.

After the trip, I continued with my personal religious and spiritual practices as I had been doing, but gradually other things, like adapting some prayers so that I could say the rosary again (something that I always found would clear my head in my Catholic days), began to creep in.  By the time I was twenty-five, I'd done another week of Evensongs in Lincoln, and I'd decided that although I couldn't give up the Pagan part of my spirituality—by that time, it was too deeply ingrained, and it inspired me to be a better person in ways that Christianity had never done, especially in regards to environmentalism and feminism—I should probably admit, if only to myself, that I couldn't entirely ignore the religion of my childhood.  Like it or not, it was part of me, and if I continued to ignore that, I would be doing myself a disservice.  Even if I couldn't go back to Catholicism, and even now I don't think I ever will, at least I had to acknowledge to myself that I had in fact become a Christo-Pagan.

And music had been a big part of that.

Even so, it was a bit of a strange decision for me to join my church choir back in 2008.  I had a number of reservations about the idea, actually, especially considering that my personal beliefs and practices are not entirely Christian.  (That's the same reason why I feel a bit conflicted about receiving communion as I do every week.)  But in the end, I decided I'd give it a try, and now, just over three years later, I don't regret it.

In Memory Of A Friend

I apologize for the fact that my most recent posts here haven't been particularly uplifting.  This, I'm afraid, will be more of the same.  I wish it didn't have to be.  But unfortunately, I woke up to some sad news today.  One of the altos from my church choir died sometime yesterday.  It wasn't really surprising—she had been suffering from heart problems for years, and they'd gotten worse in the past year, even leading up to a lengthy hospital stay not long before our church choir's trip to Scotland and Ireland this August—but it was unwelcome news nonetheless.

I first remember meeting Ruth about ten years ago, when she joined my community choir for the first of our two trips to England.  I was nineteen at the time, and at that point my spiritual life was as Pagan as it could possibly be, considering that I had only graduated from my Catholic high school at the end of the previous school year, and I don't think that I had fully realized yet the real meaning of preparing Anglican church music to sing in a very large, very old Anglican church that used to be a very large, very old Catholic church.  Because she sings alto, and I'm a soprano, we didn't really speak much before the trip; it's not that there's any kind of snobbery inherent in that statement, but my community choir is fairly large, and even at the time there were close to fifty singers, especially since we had several people who our director had asked to join us for the trip.  There wasn't much of a chance for us all to socialize with each other at rehearsal, either.  But then, when the trip itself got underway in August 2002, Ruth and I did end up talking several times.  Over the years, as another trip to England took place and I joined the church choir, I gradually came to think of her as a friend, though not a close one.

Ruth was raised Baptist, though she eventually converted to Anglicanism.  In the time that I knew her, her faith and her belief in God were absolutely unshakeable.  They were her favourite topic of conversation, in fact; rarely would a chat with her not end up touching on at least one or two theological points.  She didn't get preachy, exactly, or particularly self-righteous; it was more that her faith was the most important thing in her life, and she gave it a lot of credit for sustaining her in some of her most difficult times, both in her personal life and with her health.  Suffice it to say that she and I didn't always see eye-to-eye.  But anyone could see the tremendous love that she had for other people as well as for God; for as long as I knew her, she was never one to act as if her faith made her better than anyone who didn't believe as she did, and her kindness and generosity were always freely given.

She did have a tendency to speak about non-Christians as if they were slightly recalcitrant but still somewhat amusing children who would come to their senses eventually.  It wasn't out of malice, so I never took offense as I might have if almost anyone else had expressed those sentiments; rather, she believed that it was just common sense to believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and that it was more than a little silly to ignore the God whose presence she felt so strongly in her life.  In fact, at a time in my life when I was more than a little lost in regards to what to do about my spirituality, she gave me some very valuable advice.  Though I know that it led me down a path that she wouldn't really have approved of, I have never regretted listening.  And I know she was happy when she found out that I had joined the church choir three years ago.

Speaking of the choir, her dedication was admirable; she rarely missed a regular service, or an extra one, for that matter, unless she genuinely couldn't help it.  We will miss the strength of her voice as much as we will miss the woman herself.

She went into the hospital for the last time a few weeks ago, and then checked herself out against medical advice as soon as she was strong enough to do so.  I couldn't say for sure, but I think she knew this time that she was on her way out.  I'm thankful to have known her, and I'm glad that she was able to go on to whatever comes next in the comfortable surroundings of her own home, a place I know that she loved.

May she rest in peace.

The Spiritual Side of a Sad Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of my grandfather's death.  As much as I feel tempted to write about that at some length, and I'll probably do so in the pen-and-paper journal that I still keep, I find that my thoughts are turning every bit as much to my family's reactions to that terribly difficult time, not least because of the role that religion played, particularly in the last week and a half of Grandpa's life.

I was almost surprised, actually, though I suppose that I probably shouldn't have been.  While I was raised Roman Catholic, since my mother's family is/was Catholic, most of my relatives on my dad's side are Anglican, at least in name; most don't go to church very often, except for my aunt and uncle who live in Manitoba and my cousin who was living in England at the time.  But when Grandpa was in the hospital, and particularly when it became clear that he was dying, suddenly prayer became extremely important to my family.  I lost count of the number of times we said the Lord's Prayer.  Psalms 23 and 121 each made a couple of appearances.  Particularly in the last few days of his life, we'd gather around his bed and one of my aunts would lead us in prayer at least once a day, and often twice.  I've often wondered since then exactly what was going through his head at the time.  (He was still demonstrably conscious, and did his best to communicate with us, but he'd lost the power of speech by then, so it was, at best, difficult.)  I know that he had his faith, so there's hope that this was at least marginally comforting to him, but there's really no way of knowing for sure.

As for what I thought...even a year later, I'm still trying to sort it out, really.  Because of the rather unique nature of my spiritual life, I have to admit that I felt a little uneasy.  Just to be clear: it had nothing to do with this sudden explosion of devotion among my relatives; I believe that everyone has the right to believe—or not believe, for that matter—as they choose, and to act upon that as they wish, provided that it doesn't hurt them or anyone else.  (All things considered, it would be highly hypocritical of me to believe otherwise.)  It's more that every time we gathered around Grandpa's bed to pray, I couldn't help but wonder: was I part of those prayer sessions to help comfort my family, or was I just there because I was expected to be?

I did pray.  I spent a lot of time during those long days and nights at the hospital praying that his suffering would be over soon.  But my prayers were silent.  Sometimes they happened while I was crocheting; then, I'd often revert to some of the prayers I learned when I was still Catholic.  ("Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee..."  "Hail, Holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope..."  "Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided..."  I could probably write an entire other post on the possible reasons why I chose these prayers, and will probably do so at some point in the future.)  Other times, especially late in the night when I sat holding my grandfather's hand, the room as quiet as a place in a hospital could possibly be, I simply felt what I wanted to say, and for all that I didn't direct those prayers in any specific direction, they were no less prayers than the ones I thought, or whispered, as I crocheted, or the ones I actually said along with my family.

It was never going to be anything but a thoroughly difficult time for all of us.  I have no idea how helpful all that praying may have been for Grandpa or for anyone else in my family, but if it brought any comfort whatsoever, then I find that I can't be upset about having participated in it, personal reservations about the prayer sessions quite aside.

Yarn Therapy

It's no secret that I like to crochet.  Wherever I go, I generally have my current project with me, and I pick it up and work on it every chance I get.  And it took over a year, but I finally finished my first lap blanket tonight. I could've finished it a long time ago, but I held off, though I wasn't quite sure why.

The thing is, this particular project was one that I started shortly before my grandfather developed pneumonia while he was in the hospital last year. I eventually came to call it my "comfort yarn," since crocheting became a sort of escape for me when I was spending so much time down at the hospital with my family, after we were told that the best that could be done for him was to keep him as comfortable as possible, considering the circumstances. (I might've tried reading, but I learned long ago that to open a book in the presence of my relatives is to invite a lot of questions: "What are you reading?" "Who wrote it?" "How is it so far?" etc.) When I started to crochet at the hospital, I noticed that my family was far less likely to distract me while I was doing that, and I could still be part of the conversation if I chose to be. And to this day, when I look at some of the sections of the lap blanket that I completed during that time and shortly after, I can still remember what was going on around me while I was working on them.

When Grandpa died, crocheting became a central part of my grieving process; I don't like to cry anyway (just as well, because I rarely get the chance; practically every time I feel like I need a good cry, it turns out that something else needs my attention, so I don't have the time and I have to release that energy some other way), so whenever I felt particularly awful I'd pick up my yarn and start working again for a few minutes. Whenever I was interrupted at that, I was able to deal with the interruption and get back to my yarn immediately after; there was no need to get back into any particular mood. Whether I was working on that lap blanket or something else (including the inevitable scarf—it seems I can't entirely get away from making those things), my time spent with my yarn became almost therapeutic.

These days, I don't crochet out of grief anymore. I find it's a good way to occupy my hands while my mind goes off and does other things, and it also has the advantage of being something I can do while I'm talking to someone else without being rude. I often find that my mood and my concentration are better after I've been crocheting for awhile. So at least that's one good thing that came from an otherwise awful time.

So when I finished the blanket tonight, in a way I was also moving on from a stage of grief that I don't really need to experience anymore.  When I visited Grandpa's grave last month, I cried for a bit (one of the few times I didn't get interrupted, thank goodness, though I'd have been shocked if I had been as I was the only person at the cemetery at the time) and then sat beside the grave and crocheted for awhile.  After all that time spent with my yarn beside his hospital bed, it seemed right.

It's amazing, and downright wonderful, what can be accomplished simply by pulling loops of yarn through other loops of yarn, really.

The Genesis of Disorder

I've written before about the problems that I've had with my starvation-type eating-disordered behaviour.  I've talked about the health problems it's caused me; if I've been restricting again, I even experience rumination syndrome for a few days afterwards, no matter how little I eat, though I find that it does subside after awhile.  I've talked about the possible reasons behind my tendency to ignore my body's hunger cues.  I've been an advocate, as much as a small-time blogger possibly can be, of the concepts that fat bodies are not necessarily diseased, that health is not a moral imperative, that fat people don't deserve to be treated badly, and that eating disorders, even if they're cleverly disguised as diets, are as harmful to us as they are to thinner people.  But I don't think I've talked much about what kept me dieting long enough for it to become an actual problem for me.

The thing is, as awful as I felt, for the first week and a half or so of my doctor-induced state of starvation I felt as if I was accomplishing something.  I was acting grown-up; after all, adults go on diets all the time, don't they?  (I was about 21 years old at the time, and I'd already developed my distaste for alcohol—remember, the drinking age in Ontario is 19, so I'd been legal to drink alcohol for two years by then—and was unfortunately somewhat offended by anything to do with sex at the time, particularly after a not-exactly-stellar experience a couple of years before, so it may not be very surprising that I felt that dieting was a Very Grown Up Adult Thing To Do; it was practically the only Special Adult Thing that I could allow myself to experience without offending my tastebuds or my prudery.)  I was Taking Control Of My Health.  So as awful as I felt physically, and as afraid as I was to eat anything at all, there was still something activating the reward centre of my brain.  My doctor had constructed a doom-and-gloom picture of my future as it would inevitably be if I didn't drop approximately half my body weight as soon as possible, but she'd also promised redemption of a sort if I did my damndest to force my body into a thinner shape.

Dieting became, as much as anything I'd learned about in my Catholic school, an absolution of mortal sin, which in this case was, of course, fatness.  And as resolute as I was at the time that I'd never be swayed by organized religion again, I was completely taken in by the Cult of Dieting and Thinness.  And as short as my "conversion" lasted, it was years before I really realized how truly dangerous and harmful it had been to me.  Somehow that three weeks managed to rewire my mind to the point where my default behaviour, unless I continually remind myself of the necessity of good, nutritious fuel for my body, is to avoid ingesting anything but water or tea, which has led to a number of problems over the years.  And I suspect that the initial feeling of control and purpose that I had in that first week and a half was a major reason why this happened.

Dieting, restriction, and self-starvation can be awfully alluring because of what's promised to you if you faithfully keep on with them.  But in reality, their results seldom, if ever, include better physical or mental health.  Don't let what happened to me, what's still happening to me, happen to you.  I'm still discovering what the long-term consequences of these behaviours are for me, and so far none of them have been pleasant.

No matter what you look like, no matter what your size and shape are, you are worth more than this.  So am I...but even as I've acknowledged this on the conscious level, it has been, and it continues to be, ridiculously difficult to break the old starvation pattern that was set up for me seven years ago.

This is not respect for life.

Talk about a lack of compassion.

According to this article at Firedoglake, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has banned Catholic nursing homes and hospitals from "removing feeding tubes or ending palliative procedures of any kind, even when the individual has an advance directive to guide their end-of-life care."  Where there used to be some leeway for judgement about whether it would be more compassionate to let the patient go in individual cases for patients in Catholic hospitals who were terminally ill whose lives were being extended by some form of medical intervention, that leeway is now gone.  And as if it weren't already plainly obvious that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is very keen on maintaining people's suffering rather than alleviating it, "The Bishops' directive even notes that patient suffering is redemptive and brings the individual closer to Christ."

This is why the preserve-life-at-all-costs crowd infuriates me.  This sort of thing isn't even the preservation of life.  It's the prolonging of existence.  When my grandfather died last year, he went slowly and painfully, and he'd suffered a lot in the months leading up to his death already.  But what he went through, particularly in the last week and a half of his life, was truly horrifying.  He was constantly in pain, though sometimes it was worse than others, and even when he was comfortable enough to sleep, hearing him struggle for breath was absolutely heartbreaking.  The best anyone could do for him was give him pain medication and just enough water, transmitted via a small sponge, to keep his mouth from being uncomfortably dry; anything more would have added substantially to his distress because he had gradually lost the ability to swallow.

And every moment I sat there by his bedside, I prayed that the end would come soon.  It wasn't out of hate or disrespect.  It wasn't because I was in any hurry to say goodbye to him.  It was because I loved him and I couldn't bear to see him suffering like that.  He was dying; any fool could see it.  Even I saw it before his care officially became palliative rather than curative, and I'm a teacher, not a doctor or nurse.  Nothing on Earth was going to restore his health.  It was bad enough that we had to watch him die so slowly as it was.  If the hospital had insisted on prolonging his pain on the basis that life must be preserved no matter what, or because of that bullshit idea that suffering brings people closer to God, it would have been even more unbearable than it already was.  Extending life in circumstances like that isn't compassion.  It's cruelty of a most brutal and sadistic sort.  I would even call it evil.

If there was anything at all that I learned when my grandfather was dying, it was that sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do for a person who's dying is to let them go.  It's not creating or embracing a "culture of death" to do so.  It's acknowledging that because their life has worth, the person deserves better than the slow and torturous death that extending their days will give them.

A Day For Purple

In some ways, I was lucky.

I grew up without any real concept of sexual orientation.  When I was in Grade 2, it was briefly mentioned that some kids had two moms or two dads, and I believe it was in the context of remarriage after a divorce, but it was easy enough for my mind to come to the conclusion that some kids had two moms or two dads who lived in the same house.  It seemed like a strange concept to me, but nothing particularly bad, just different.  Everywhere I looked, the concept of the type of love that leads to marriage as only possible between pairs consisting of one woman and one man was being upheld, and yet even when I was seven years old, there was something in my mind that, however subconsciously, told me that this wasn't necessarily the case.  So maybe that's why it wasn't as big of a shock to me as it could have been when I developed a brief crush on another girl when I was thirteen—while I couldn't help wondering if something was wrong with me at the time, I recall that it was more shocking to me that I was having these feelings when I was already crushing pretty badly on a boy who had become a pretty good friend of mine several years earlier.  Nonetheless, as strong as my memories are of what was to me a fairly confusing time, the crush on that girl never actually made it into my journal.  I'd already internalized the idea of same-sex attractions being somehow wrong, though I couldn't have said why, and I thought of it as some kind of phase that would end at some point.  And although I'd long since changed my mind about same-sex relationships by the time I'd left high school, I was well into my twenties before I was able to admit to myself that although I wasn't a lesbian, I wasn't entirely heterosexual either.  I hesitate to use the phrase "coming to terms with my sexuality" to describe the process, because that implies that I thought that there was something wrong with it, but the fact is, it wasn't easy.  And even now, in my day-to-day life I'm only "out" to a few close friends who I trust not to hurt me because of the knowledge that I'm bisexual.

In retrospect, I was lucky because I was able to pass for straight at a time and place when it wasn't just unwise, but actually occasionally dangerous, to be anything that wasn't strictly heterosexual.  Although it was infrequent, guys at my (very Catholic) school who were rumoured to be gay were sometimes shoved around a bit or even beaten up; girls weren't subject to the same sort of violence, but teenage girls' capacity for cruelty to other teenage girls is legendary, and physical acts of bullying aren't necessary for bullies to make their victims' lives hell.  When the culprits were caught, the teachers and principal punished them as harshly as they could, but it could rarely be proven that they'd done it because of their victim's supposed or real sexual orientation.  Bullying for any reason wasn't tolerated, but that didn't stop the bullies; it only inspired them to be sneakier about what they were doing, especially when their attacks were motivated by homophobia.

Mind, I never really thought the term "homophobia" was strictly appropriate; whether or not fear is behind this hatred of same-sex couples, the expression of what we call "homophobia" is in the end a manifestation of hate.  Which brings me to the reason I've called this post "A Day For Purple."

Today, October 20, is known as Spirit Day.  On the LGBTQ (etc.) Rainbow Flag, purple stands for spirit, and we are encouraged to wear purple to honour the people, especially the young, who have been made to feel that their lives weren't worth living because of their sexual orientation.  If I'd been a little less straight-leaning, or a little less able to pass for straight, I might have been one of them.

I'm wearing purple today.  Are you?

Disappointment

Before I get on with this post, I should warn you that my depression has been kicking in again lately.  Right now, I just need to vent...

Anyway.

I started keeping a diary when I was eleven years old.  There were a couple of years when I would reserve the very last page in each book for a letter to myself at some future age; it was fun to imagine the type of life I might have back then.  I got the idea from a book by L.M. Montgomery (yes, the woman who wrote Anne of Green Gables); I think it was Emily's Quest.  When Emily was 14, she had written a letter to herself at age 24, asking herself about what her life was like now, and signed it:

Your Foolish,

Old Self

I did pretty much the same thing in my letters, right down to the signature.  And in case you're wondering what this has to do with anything, I should probably mention that one of the letters that I wrote to myself when I was fifteen was addressed to myself on a day that I'm now quite certain will never come: my wedding day.

I find it interesting, now, to think of the assumptions that I was still capable of making when I was fifteen.  I was so confident that eventually I'd have a job I loved, or liked at the very least, by some time earlier in my 20's.  (I'm 28 now, due to turn 29 in November.)  I thought that even though I wasn't exactly the prettiest girl in my grade at school, I would eventually start dating and find someone with whom I had enough mutual love, respect, and trust to marry them, and that they'd want to marry me.  Before I realized that for various reasons I'd be a terrible mother, and before I found out that there were a number of unpleasant genetic surprises in my family history, I did want children, though not very many; two at most.

The reality?  In spite of all the work that I put in at school, and continue to put into building up a résumé that might lead to a decent career, I have been unable to find a job since I graduated from teacher's college.  I have decided that I don't want children because I couldn't imagine it being even remotely ethical to have kids when I know that there's a good chance that they'll inherit something unpleasant from me, like a congenital heart defect (which I don't have, but because heart trouble runs in my family on both sides I am probably a carrier for it), and when I know that I couldn't possibly be a good mother: to put it bluntly, I'm too screwed up in the head.*  As for anything related to my love life, I dated a few times, but nothing ever really came of it.  I haven't had a date in ten years, actually, because in the past decade nobody I've been attracted to has been attracted to me.  I've been single so long that I don't really know how to be anything else.  Given my age and relative lack of experience, and given that every year that passes means that there's a greater likelihood that anyone who I could meet and be attracted to who was even remotely age-appropriate for me and not disgusted by the size of my body would already have formed a long-lasting relationship with someone else, I suspect that it's highly unlikely that I'll ever be anything else now.

All things considered, I feel somewhat inadequate and (since I haven't been able to find a job) totally useless and unworthy of that kind of relationship anyway.  Unemployed people, especially the chronically unemployed, like me, have a reputation for being worthless and lazy slackers who just sponge off of everyone else.  I wonder if the degree to which I have internalized that stereotype has anything to do with my feelings of inadequacy.  Goodness knows I've spent enough time berating myself for my lack of work.  As it is, and as much as I'm trying my hardest to make good changes in my life, there are just some times when I feel extremely lonely and a little powerless because in the past ten years, my personal failures and some outside circumstances have tended to combine in just such a way that I almost get what I want, but in the end, I don't because somebody else who deserves it more gets it instead.  Or, in the case of certain jobs that would have been perfect for me, not even being able to apply for what I want because they're only open to people on Employment Insurance or who are under 29 and have recently graduated from college or university (and this second one is a type of stipulation I don't remember seeing until I'd been out of school for about three years).  Or because even though they're entry-level positions, the employers are asking only for people with at least six months' worth of relevant job experience.

I am thoroughly tired of this.  Tired of not being good enough, smart enough, attractive enough, or worthy enough.  For all the promise that I showed as a younger person, I have turned out to be a complete disappointment and I am ashamed of it.  There are some days when I feel like because of all of this, I'm a waste of time, space, and resources.  This is one of them.

And those letters I wrote to myself?  I've re-read them.  I'd laugh if it wasn't so overwhelmingly frustrating that practically nothing I hoped for when I wrote those letters has come to pass.

--,--'--@ --,--'--@ --,--'--@

*Edit for a slight clarification, Oct. 23 2011: it's not that I think it's my depression that makes it a bad idea for me to reproduce, or any other mental issues I may or may not have; I like kids and I generally tend to get along with them very well, which is particularly good because I am a teacher who is currently doing volunteer work in a primary-level classroom.  However, over the years my ability to trust other people has been severely hampered because of multiple extremely bad experiences with people I thought I could trust.  And as I know from experience, having had one parent whose inability to trust not only wrecked my parents' marriage but destroyed my ability to even trust myself for a very long time, a parent who cannot learn to trust their child's good judgement, no matter how well said child has demonstrated good judgement in the past, does a hell of a lot of damage to that child's self-esteem and ability to deal with the world.  I've struggled with the repercussions of that enough for myself; I would never want to inflict that kind of damage on another human being.  But because of that, and because of my serious doubts about whether I'd be even halfway competent as a mother, I believe that it would be a very bad idea indeed for me to have children.

Musings on the Day of a Former Friend's Wedding

This afternoon, someone I used to care very deeply for got married to his girlfriend of five years.

There was a time, about nine years ago now, when we were very good friends, and I cherished some hope of eventually being more than that, even as I berated myself for that hope.  He's tall and slender and looks a bit like Orlando Bloom; as much as I'm still trying to convince myself that I'm actually not completely unattractive, I was even more convinced back then that I was absolutely grotesquely ugly and that nobody could ever be attracted to me, especially since we'd gotten to a point in my first-year Psych class where we were learning about attraction and love, including a statistic that stated that people tended to date and marry people who were about as attractive as they were themselves.  (You can probably guess my immediate reaction to that little tidbit.)  Besides, at the time there was another female piper in the band; the two of us looked enough alike that strangers would often mistake us for sisters.  He called her hideous at least once in my hearing (though she herself was nowhere near at the time), and because she and I so closely resembled each other, I figured that he probably thought the same about me.

Yeah, I know.  Not a great moment for either of us, I think.

Somewhat ironically, I learned years later that he'd actually had a terrible crush on me at the time but, because I'm not at all a flirty person, he thought that the feelings were totally unrequited.  And even though I became a bit more confident in my own skin over the next few years, and despite the fact that we always seemed to default to an attraction to each other when he wasn't seeing anyone else and I wasn't falling for someone else, nothing ever came of it.  I suspect that our involvement in my old pipe and drum band might have been a factor; by that time we'd seen the trouble that could happen when couples who both played in a band broke up.  In any case, nothing significant ever happened (a bit of flirting here and there, and once in awhile we'd hug or he'd put his arm around me) and eventually we drifted apart when my depression and an injury to my hands made it impossible for me to continue with the pipe band.

I have to admit that in the past, I have sometimes wondered what might have happened if I hadn't been so dense, and/or he had actually told me in terms that I couldn't possibly misunderstand that he actually was attracted to me.  I've felt a little wistful; tactless remarks about the physical appeal of the pipe band's other girl quite aside, he's a very kind and loving person in general, and for the time that we were friends, I treasured his friendship.  But perhaps it's better this way.  On reflection, we'd probably have been good for each other for awhile, but because of some of the more difficult things that were still ahead of me at that time, I suspect that it might have ended badly.  My depression, illness (I developed bronchitis in late 2007, and it was nearly 2009 by the time I had fully recovered), hand injury, and persistent unemployment, added to the fact that I was trying to support my mother through her own depression and consequently overlooked my own mental and physical health, would all have taken their toll and I shudder to think of what they would have done to any relationship we might have had.

Regardless of what did or didn't happen, though, I am truly happy for my former friend and his wife.  As long as I can remember seeing the two of them together, they seemed to have built up a good relationship; they were friends first, years before they started dating, and there's a genuine respect for each other that I think bodes well for their future.  When I heard, a few months ago, that they were getting married (my dad is good friends with his dad), I couldn't keep the smile off my face; I'd seen this coming years ago, and I was glad for them.  They have always been good for each other, and I have hope that they will continue to be so.

May their life together be blessed.

Sorry About That, Chief...

I admit it: I'm a die-hard Get Smart fan.

The original series, that is, though I also enjoyed the movie that came out in 2008, in spite of its many problems with characterization and plot.  Get Smart is, and always has been, one of the inspirations for my funnier writing; as ridiculous as some of the plots may seem, the writers, cast, and crew of Get Smart told great stories that somehow managed to have heart and soul as well as hilarity.  Sure, the gadgets sometimes seem a bit extreme and/or unrealistic, the laugh track is annoying, and the foreign accents are often unbelievable (any time they had someone on the show who was supposed to be from England, the accents tended to be particularly awful) and KAOS' plots seemed a bit ridiculous, but those things are nothing to the sheer entertainment value of the show.  I've loved it since I first saw it in reruns on YTV sometime in the early 90's, and even though there are other shows that I've come to love (those who know me will not be surprised if I mention The X-Files, The Vicar of Dibley, The Red Green Show, and Are You Being Served? as some of my favourites), Get Smart was the first show of which I ever really considered myself a fan.

And boy, was I ever.  I'd wiggle the erasers off the ends of my new pencils and pretend that they were secret communication devices.  My brother and I would play "spy" almost every opportunity we got.  (It certainly didn't hurt that at the time, there was a popular line of kids' toys called "Spy Tech"; we had a lot of fun with that stuff.)  I even tried to take apart one of my dad's work shoes to see if there was a phone in it; fortunately I had the presence of mind to do that to a shoe from a pair he'd just replaced because they were wearing out!  In the world of Get Smart, I found a lot of inspiration (and a lot of laughs) that helped me to get through the worst of my childhood years.  It truly is one of my favourite shows, and it always will be.

And yet, now that I see it with adult (and very feminist) eyes, I realize how very problematic that show can be for a modern audience.  Women barely have a role; Agent 99, who is never given a name besides her number, is the only regular female character for most of the series; all the others are informers of one type or another, KAOS agents, 99's mother, and various minor characters who are mainly there as scenery.  Oh, and there are a couple of female CONTROL scientists who are dancers at what's occasionally implied to be a Burlesque house of some sort as their cover.  (And yes, there are a few jokes about that "cover" in the series.)  And even though the Chief frequently talks up 99's bravery and intelligence, we don't always actually get to see her show these attributes; most often, she's the one screaming "MAX!" when some disaster befalls her and her partner, only springing into action on her colleague's orders or remembering some small detail that helps him come to the conclusion that saves their lives.  And once she and Max get married, her IQ seems to take a nosedive in a lot of episodes.  Sure, Max is the main character of the show, but would it have been too much to ask to see 99 take more of a leading role once in awhile or at least not lose her head at the first sight of a KAOS gun?

Of course, the original run of the show was from 1965 to 1970, so perhaps it would have been too much to ask, considering the time...

And then there's the treatment that marginalized racial groups get in the series.  The Chinese-born Hawaiian detective, Harry Hoo, who appears in two episodes is played by a blue-eyed white man.  (To be fair, he is a caricature of the ever-controversial Charlie Chan, who was also played by white men, most notably Warner Oland and Sidney Toler.  Somewhat parenthetically, the Chan films starring Toler are another of my guilty pleasures.)  Anyone who's supposed to be Latino/Latina or Hispanic has a strange sort of nearly Mexican accent, and they're nearly always KAOS agents or working with KAOS.  There's a highly stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans in an early episode (though Max makes a particularly good political point when, in an attempt to convince Chief Red Cloud not to launch "the second-biggest arrow I've ever seen" at the White House, he realizes that between the past abuses and persecutions of Native Americans by European settlers and the shoddy treatment that they were still receiving from the American government, Red Cloud actually does have a legitimate grievance and tells him to "Let 'er rip, Red Cloud").  Offhand, I can only remember one Black character, a highly stereotyped man who turns out to be a KAOS agent in disguise.  There are a handful of characters who are supposed to be from somewhere in the Middle East (apologies for the term; I don't know any better one for that region of the world, despite its problematic nature), and they're not all portrayed in negative ways (twice, they're actually princes who Max is supposed to protect), but again, they're highly stereotyped and rather obviously played by white Americans.  And, white or not, most characters with foreign accents of any kind will usually be KAOS agents.

Rather obviously, cisgender heterosexuality is the presumed norm in the series, though there are a couple of characters (most notably Charlie Watkins) who are played by women but supposed to really be men.  Occasionally there'll be a character who's implied to be gay by the use of a number of very tired stereotypes, and Max at one point protests that he's as normal as anybody else when someone refers to him as a "Homo sapiens".

So, while I love the show and I probably always will, the fact is that there are levels of privilege and other people's oppression (and even some of my own, considering the status of women in the Get Smart world) which shouldn't allow me to view the series as purely harmless entertainment.  And while I admit that there's no point in feeling guilt over liking Get Smart anyway, these things do bother me, and whenever I discuss the show I try to keep these things in mind.  But I can't help wondering sometimes if it's actually okay that I enjoy the show.

Whether or not it is, of course, is not for me to say.  But I suspect that even if allowances can't and shouldn't be made for the social climate at the time when it was made (after all, there's plenty of modern stuff that's just as bad and, in many cases, even worse on all of these grounds), it's not necessary to feel guilty for enjoying it or acknowledging its profound effect on my life.  Being aware of the problematic parts of the show, and being perfectly willing to criticise them and accept criticism of them, may be enough.

Provided, of course, that I don't let the privilege that allows me to enjoy the show to obscure the fact that these things are problematic and that they deserve to be spoken of as the problems that they are.

Transforming Attitudes

Ten years ago, spiritually speaking, I have to admit that I was a bit of a hypocrite.

By that point in time, I'd been a practicing Pagan for about four years.  I admit, I still wasn't quite out of that stage in my life when I was extremely disillusioned with the faith of my childhood.  I believed that most Christians were closed-minded anti-Pagan fanatics who wouldn't hesitate to persecute the Hell out of me in the most literal sort of way, should they possibly suspect what I was.  Furthermore, at the time I started hearing the first mentions that I can remember of sexual abuses perpetrated by some priests against some altar boys, and when I first heard about how the priests had simply been moved to other parishes and the whole thing had been swept under the rug, that cinched it—I was never going to be able to call myself a Roman Catholic again.  I won't say that I hated Christians, exactly, but I felt a real distrust of them and a disgust for the closed-mindedness, misogyny and hypocrisy that I perceived in every aspect of Christianity at the time.

Yet at the time I was still attending a Catholic school.  (I graduated from high school in 2001.  Until about 2003, most Ontario high school students could look forward to five years of high school, though they could elect to graduate after four years if they were going to college or straight into the workforce; as a teacher, I have to admit that I wish that the fifth year hadn't been eliminated for quite a lot of reasons.)  I was a member of the school choir, which meant that at least once a month, and sometimes twice, I actually had a fairly active role in the school's spiritual life, and—unlike a fair number of "real" Catholics in the student population, I might add—I never missed a school Mass.  Not seeing any way out of it, I also took communion every time it was offered, which I really shouldn't have done for several reasons which I think are probably pretty obvious—not the least of which is the fact that by then I was technically a heretic, even if I didn't talk much about it, and in Catholic doctrine, that's grounds for automatic excommunication.

Furthermore, even in my broader social circle (mostly within my community choir, I admit), I was well-acquainted with several committed Christians, and I had nothing but respect for them personally.  I even loved the church where we practiced when I first joined the choir, and occasionally even after we'd moved to another church if our usual practice space was unavailable.  (Incidentally, that church is the one in which one of my aunts was married when I was a child and in whose choir I ultimately ended up singing.  Odd coincidence, that...)  And of course, not long after there were the two choir trips in which we sang Evensong for a week at an English cathedral (Winchester the first time, and Lincoln the next), which—though we went at a time in my life when I was thoroughly Pagan and hadn't yet allowed that much of my Christian past to seep into my spiritual life—were a couple of the most overwhelmingly spiritual experiences I've ever had to date.

Suffice it to say that I am not particularly proud of that period in my life, spiritually speaking.

And yet I can still easily understand why I held such a poor attitude towards Christians in general.  Not a week goes by without my hearing about something that some Christians have done that casts such an awful light on so many others.  There's that pastor in the States who was going to burn copies of the Koran on September 11 last year, though he later decided not to.  There are those people who harrass women who go into and out of clinics which, among other things, perform abortions—sometimes even physically attacking those women.  There's that Baptist minister who refuses to baptize babies in the church if their mothers aren't married.  (Odd in itself, since Baptists usually don't baptize people until they're old enough to know what they're agreeing to.)  Every day, particulary of late, I hear about people, many of them presumably Christians, who want to take away a woman's power to choose whether she has an abortion—and of some who would even deny her that abortion if it was needed to save her life.  Recently a pharmacist refused to fill a prescription for a woman who needed a medication to stop excessive bleeding on the grounds that she "might" have had an abortion.  And hardly a fortnight goes by when I don't hear about something else that the Pope has done which underscores how truly out-of-touch he truly is with the times and even with Basic Humanity 101.  No denomination is immune.

This, I suspect, is largely because every group of people has a few loudmouthed (and unfortunately quite powerful) assholes no matter how well-intentioned the majority may be.  For a period of several years in my life, I let those assholes define how I saw a very large group of people.  As William Blake once said, "To generalize is to be an idiot..."  Though in this context Blake was utterly eviscerating Sir Joshua Reynolds' Seven Discourses on Art (and making a lot of good, and sometimes hilarious, points while he was at it), and he was making something of a generalization of his own in saying that, I do think that he was right.  I generalized.  I was an idiot.

Now, I'm not going to extol the many virtues of Christianity, or claim its superiority over all other spiritual paths, because that would just be wrong as well—and also hypocritical, because although I know that I don't speak nearly as much about the Pagan part of my spirituality (a habit I'm trying to break, by the way, though I'm not sure how, possibly because in my mind I don't actually compartmentalize my spiritual life even if it seems that way in my blog posts), it's very much a deeply-cherished part of my life.  But what I am saying is that it's not right to make sweeping generalizations about other groups of people, and that if you do, it just might come back to bite you in the butt one day.  And it likely won't be just a slight nibble.  I'm talking "big painful chomp" territory here.

Still...you know, especially since embracing Christo-Paganism, I have often thought that if more Christians—especially the loud ones—spent as much time acting like Jesus as they do talking about him, the world might be a very different place, maybe even a better one.

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.