Protests and Pink Hats and Safety Pins...Oh, My!

Given the events of the past few days, I suppose that it's entirely understandable that I'm thinking about various Women's Marches and the reasons for them.  I'm also thinking a bit about something that may seem a bit frivolous at first look—those pink "pussy hats" that so many people have been creating and wearing as a form of sartorial protest.

I've been reading a fair amount of criticism directed at those hats lately, just as there was criticism directed at the wearers of safety pins a few months ago (Can it really be that long?) when they were adopted as a sign that the wearer is a safe person for people who belong to marginalized groups to be around.  The general thought seems to be that visual signs and symbols like this are useless and perhaps even a bit insulting, since there's no guarantee that the people who make use of them are sincere; also, these symbols seem to take up too much space, physically and mentally, without actually giving a direct reference to the things that they're supposed to signify (especially when the people who adopt them most widely tend to be white and therefore they put people of my race front-and-centre when perhaps we shouldn't be).  And of course there's the risk that the visual references will overshadow the very things that they're supposed to represent, which is counterproductive and also kind of horrible.

I admit that these are valid criticisms, but I also have to think...what if the safety pins and the pink hats and the more theatrical aspects of peaceful protests can also serve a useful purpose?

When I see someone wearing a safety pin or a pink "pussy hat," or when I see people getting involved in a march or singing songs or chanting protest slogans with or without a drum circle, I see someone whose ideology is most likely at least compatible with mine, though we may well differ on the specifics.  It's the same when I see someone wearing a pentacle or a cross (or a crucifix—I do come from a Catholic background, after all) or a seven-pointed star.  There's value in that.  Seeing people openly wear a symbol of protest or safety gives me hope.  It reminds me that there are in fact quite a lot of people who disapprove of the direction that things have been going in lately, and I can see one of them standing right in front of me.  I know that regardless of any other differences we might have, we can support each other in this particular issue, at least.

While the symbol and any accompanying protest actions should by no means take the place of the things that people are trying to say and to accomplish in the first place, I do think that they have their uses.  They energize people; they remind us that things are not all inevitably going to be horrible.  They give a bit of hope to people who may be frantically trying to tell themselves, "it's pretty scary now, but maybe it will someday be okay."  They can help to fire up people's enthusiasm, sometimes more than solemn repetitions of the reasons why Things Are Disastrously Wrong can.

As anyone who's been reading this blog for long enough knows, I have had problems with depression and anxiety in the past.  (There is a point to referencing this, I promise.)  Sometimes my mental health can still be surprisingly shaky, and I have several friends to thank for the stability I do have, especially my best friend.  And frankly, it isn't very helpful to always be hearing a ceaseless commentary about the terrifying state of the world and the great evils that everyone must be willing to fight until we have no fight left in us.  Enough of that talk, and I become too discouraged and afraid even to leave my bed, never mind the house.  Since a lot of people think that the only real way to make a difference is to lead loud public protests, shove petitions into people's faces, and generally be a pain in the ass to the Powers That Be, that's...not useful, really.

I need some of that joy, some of that hope, some of that public group enthusiasm to remind me of precisely why we need change.  I need to see that there are like-minded people out there who are willing to do things—maybe not great and extremely visible things, perhaps just "small things with great love," and I'm sure that I'm going to be writing another rant about the way that activists assume that they're the only ones who work to make changes, but that's a topic for another day—to make this world less frightening and depressing.  And I'm sure that I'm hardly alone in that.  As long as these symbolic and fun things don't take over, and as long as they're not the only things that people do to accomplish what they say they believe in, that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

They shouldn't take over, of course, but they should have some kind of place.  Not everyone is able to keep things totally serious and solemn and perfect all the time.  Nor should they have to.

As for me?  I'm not an activist; I'm a subversive.  I do small things and hope that they can help in some way.  And after I'm finished crocheting my grandmother's birthday present (a bright pink blanket to help brighten up her new home), well, perhaps I'll have enough yarn left to make a cute pink hat of my own.  It's not really my colour, but I think I can deal with that.

After all, it's not the only thing I'm doing, and who knows?  Perhaps someone needing encouragement, perhaps someone who is of a more activist bent than I, may see me and be glad to know that they are not alone.  That somebody has their back.

There's value in that.

An Extra Reason to Care

When I was working on my teaching degree, I had to take a class on educational law. It was an interesting subject, if a bit dry, and I always looked forward to that class.

 The room was set up with a number of round tables, likely in order to facilitate discussions (and there were many). This was helpful during group work, of course, but if you were unlucky enough to have to sit with your back to the front of the room, it could be a bit of a pain during lectures!  At my usual table, I normally sat with two other women who happened to come from the other two Abrahamic religions.  Looking back, it seems almost like the setup for a joke.  ("A Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim sit down at a table...")  But the three of us got along extremely well, and I suspect that if we'd been able to spend more time together, we would have become very good friends.  As it is, I think of M. And V. often, even now, and I hope they're well.

Especially V., these days, because she was the one of the three of us who was Muslim.  And since the attacks in Paris a couple of weeks ago, all the things I've heard of happening to Muslims, especially women—I hope that she will not be targeted for abuse.  In my years of postsecondary education, and in the years since my formal studies ended, I have met many people who are Muslims, or who at least come from Muslim families.  And every single one of them is a reason why I care about the discrimination which they face, and why I'm fairly vocal (elsewhere, not necessarily on this blog, if only because I've been neglecting it in recent years) about saying that Muslims are not the enemy: hate and fear are.

But let's get one thing straight here: I would still care about what's happening if I had never met these people.  I suspect that there's a lot of that behind other people saying, "Of course I care!  I know someone who's [insert marginalized identity here]!" as well.

I must admit, it annoys me a little when people accuse others of not caring enough because they've stated that they care about any given issue because they personally know someone who's affected by it.  Or saying that these people's caring is selfish or superficial or just an attempt to avoid examining privilege by hiding behind a marginalized friend, acquaintance, or family member.  And maybe sometimes it is.  I won't pretend that I think everyone's motivations are always perfectly progressive or altruistic all the time.  That would just be hopelessly naïve.  But I am willing to entertain the idea that knowing people who are marginalized in some way gives people who do not share that experience an extra reason to care, or maybe that initial impulse to do so in the first place.

It's a very human thing, I think, to be more engaged in a cause, or to be more open to certain ideas, when you know someone who's personally affected by it if you aren't part of that population yourself.  People need connections.  And that's not purely selfish; it helps with understanding to be able to put a human face on something that, to you, might have once been a far more abstract concept than it is to someone who has to live it.

So when I hear about discrimination against Muslims, I think of V.  And because she was one of the first Muslims I ever got to know particularly well, she is one of the reasons I care.  But she's not the only one, and I don't believe that the personal connection makes my caring less valid.  As long as I don't try to pass myself off as some kind of expert or authority just because I know people who answer a particular description, how is that personal connection a bad thing?

Thanks, I Think: Reflections on Aging and Changing

Yesterday was a dear friend's birthday.  The celebration, which is always fun, this year involved dinner at a local sushi restaurant and, once we'd all gone to her home, a game of Cards Against Humanity.  Photography ensued, of course, and this morning, she posted some of the results on Facebook and tagged people in the photos in which we appeared.

A couple of people I haven't seen in years, one of whom was a fairly good friend in high school (though we've drifted apart in the past dozen years), remarked that in their estimation, I haven't changed a bit since we graduated from high school in 2001.  I thought that was a rather odd thing to say; after all, I've been able to see the changes in myself as they've gradually happened.  Surely they should be easier to notice for people who haven't seen me face-to-face in several years.

Granted, the people in my family don't tend to age particularly quickly, and even when I was in my mid-twenties, people (usually older than me, but sometimes also people who were about my age) occasionally used to ask me what high school I went to, and they were genuinely stunned when I revealed my actual age—the looks on their faces were usually rather amusing. :)  But I really have changed.  On a purely aesthetic level, I see the places near my eyes where wrinkles are starting to form.  I see the small changes in my figure—I've gained weight and then lost (most of) it again when I consistently resumed the eating and activity patterns that I tend to fall into when I'm not depressed.  My hair's a bit redder, and because it has more of a tendency to curl now than it used to, it's still as long as it was twelve years ago, but it doesn't always look like it is.  I've been known to wear a bit of lipstick and nail polish on occasion, which I never did in high school, and I had my ears pierced when I was in my second year of university.  I'm even a couple of centimetres taller than I was in 2001.

Mentally, the changes are a bit more dramatic.  I've developed my mind in ways that I couldn't possibly have anticipated back then.  I'm better at analysis.  I'm becoming a competent teacher, thanks to my volunteer work.  My spiritual life has changed—for the better, I might add.  The way that I live it now has allowed me to heal some old wounds, and although I do still find it a bit frustrating at times to be both Pagan and Christian, the resulting mental gymnastics have been worth performing, because they force me to figure out precisely what matters the most.  I have fallen in love three times—once with someone who proved not to be worth it, and his effect on my life was devastating, but it also helped me to stop myself making a horrible mistake.  I have fallen deeply into depression, and developed a particularly stubborn form of eating-disordered behaviour, and then gradually come out of them, particularly over the course of the past couple of years, though I do still have relapses of both from time to time.  My sense of humour has gotten better, my fondness for diverse forms of music has really blossomed, my love of literature has waned and then been rekindled in a big way, and my writing skills have dramatically improved.  I've picked up a fondness for The X-Files, The Vicar of Dibley, The Big Bang Theory, and the recently-cancelled Touch.  I am every bit as stubborn as I used to be, but I now have the confidence and the intelligence to make better assessments and decisions than I had when I was eighteen.

So, yes, I've definitely changed since high school.  And while my acquaintances may have meant for their words to be compliments—after all, it's quite common for people to believe that getting older is something horrible that is to be feared and avoided—I have to admit that my first instinct was not to perceive them as such.  Change is good, and just like everyone else, I've been through a lot of changes in the past twelve years.  And as painful as some of those changes have been, there is precious little that I would actually do differently, given the chance.

Feel-Good Almost-Wisdom

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine shared the following picture on Facebook.



Not too long ago, I'd have absolutely loved it.  I still kind of like it, but I have to admit that my thoughts about it are really rather mixed.  On one hand, I do believe that the words that we say, and the things that we think, do affect the way that we live our lives—and by extension, they also have some power to affect the way that people treat us (largely because of the way that our thoughts and words cause us to behave) and the things that happen to us as a result.  And I believe that it's not at all a bad idea to encourage ourselves to achieve our goals, or to believe (and reinforce the belief) that we are capable of achieving these goals.  As it was put in one of my favourite movies, "If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything."

That said, I have a couple of issues with this picture.

First of all, there's the way that intellect is conflated with IQ.  They're not the same thing.  IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, is simply one's score on any number of tests designed to measure one's intelligence—tests that are often heavily dependent on cultural expectations and that put a disproportionate amount of emphasis on mathematical and spatial abilities.  Intelligence is so much more than this.  It encompasses many aspects of cognitive ability—not just mathematical or spatial intelligence, but linguistic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and kinesthetic intelligence as well.  IQ tests don't typically assess the creativity or problem-solving abilities of the person taking them, and people with learning disabilities (which are not in themselves indications of low intelligence) are frequently at a disadvantage when taking an IQ test.  Overall, IQ tests are not a particularly reliable means of determining how intelligent a person is, and to say that IQ and intelligence itself are the same thing seriously undermines the point that the person who put this picture together apparently meant to make.

(Lest you think that my obvious dislike of IQ tests is because of a history of low scores, I should assure you that it isn't; in fact, the lowest I've ever scored is 118, and that was on a particularly bad day.  My scores are normally in the 130-140 range, which I understand is not terribly high, but a bit above average nonetheless.)

I also find it rather disturbing that the creator of this picture states that good things inevitably follow these affirmations.  This is a feel-good message on the surface, but this kind of thinking tends to place a lot of blame on people for whom things have not satisfactorily worked out.  You can think all the good things that you want, and act in as positive a way as it's possible for you to act, and things will still go wrong from time to time.  That's life.  And blaming people for bad luck, saying that it wouldn't have happened if only they'd thought positively enough, is just not cool.  It's not particularly enlightened, either.

As for the way it dismisses the concept of trying—this also isn't a great idea.  "I'm trying" isn't inherently a block or a means of holding oneself back.  It's not pessimistic or a premature admission of defeat.  At its best, "I'm trying" means "I'm doing, and I admit that it's difficult, but I'm doing this anyway because I believe that I can."  At its worst, it means "I'm in trouble here, and I could really use some help."  Either way, it means that effort is being put towards a goal, and that should never be de-valued the way that it is here.  Success is not always a given, and it's not self-defeating to acknowledge that when you're having a particularly difficult time with what you're doing.

And I particularly take issue with the idea that "I'm a skeptic" inherently keeps people from learning.  Because I am a skeptic.  That's how I learn.  I am always questioning things—perhaps especially my strongest beliefs and the information that I'm most inclined to think of as the truest truth, regardless of whether it actually is.  If I were to abandon my skepticism, it would have to entail an abandonment of independent thought and an acceptance of whatever I'm told.  That's not learning, that's gullibility.  For me, at least, skepticism is not a complete refusal to believe anything—it means that before I'll believe it, although I may consider accepting an idea, I need to see convincing proof of its validity.  The fact that I require proof does not prevent me from learning.  And although I'm technically a member of the Millennial generation (albeit one of its older members), and many of us were encouraged to think of ourselves as special little snowflakes who are entirely unique, I hardly think that I'm the only person who learns this way.

As much as the creator of this picture gets wrong, though, I do believe that it's a good idea to watch out for our own negative attitudes and beliefs and consider that we may be tripping ourselves up when we're having a particularly difficult time with a task or a goal.  To the best of my knowledge, I've never met anyone who hasn't ever made a mistake.  Human beings, it seems, are phenomenally good at undermining ourselves, especially when we believe, deep down, that we don't deserve to have something good.  But that doesn't mean that we're the only thing that's holding us back.  It certainly doesn't mean that we need to be told that we're not being positive enough.  Thinking and saying and doing positive things—that's incredibly helpful.  Even more, I think, when people we trust are encouraging us and reinforcing the positivity that we're trying to feel and to project.

But as powerful as this can be, it's only part of the puzzle.  I often wish that sometimes more people who are seeking enlightenment, or who are convinced that they have achieved it, would remember this.  After all, telling people that the only possible reason why they haven't succeeded is that they're not [INSERT CONDITION HERE] enough is neither positive nor helpful.

Quick PSA

If one's sexual orientation were a choice, it would still be wrong to condemn people for not being heterosexual.

If one's gender identity were a choice, it would still be wrong to threaten and assault people who feel that they were born with the wrong type of body.

If one's race were a choice, it would still be wrong to hate non-white people for not being white.

If having a disability were a choice, it would still be wrong to pick on people whose bodies don't work the way that we're told that they're supposed to.

If poverty were a choice, it would still be wrong to make the lives of poor people even harder than they already are by gutting the social assistance programs that make it possible for them to survive and sometimes even give them a chance to escape poverty.

If body size were a choice, it would still be wrong to bully people whose body size falls outside of the relatively narrow range of sizes that is currently considered to be "normal," whether their body is thinner or fatter than the current ideal.

Do you see the pattern here?

All of these characteristics are things that are not necessarily under the control of the people who possess them.  All of these things are things that people use as excuses to harass, bully, intimidate, and abuse other people.  None of them are good enough.  There is no justification for such behaviour.  Not even if you think that they chose these conditions.

That is all.

The Importance of Words

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

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

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

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

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

Love.

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

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

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

For the record...

I've been looking at my stats page again.  While I'm a little amused because my blog apparently showed up in two different sets of search results in response to two separate queries about interviews conducted by Jian Ghomeshi (probably because of this post), I also saw a search term that started me thinking again:

"what does christo pagan say about homosexuality"

I don't know about other Christo-Pagans, but once again, this Christo-Pagan is going to go on the record as saying that as far as I'm concerned, there is nothing wrong with homosexuality.  Furthermore, I'm bisexual (though I prefer the term "heteroflexible"), I have a cousin who is gay, and I have friends who variously identify as bisexual, heteroflexible, lesbian, and queer.  So this matters to me because homophobia has the potential to affect me and it does affect some of the people I love.  Homosexuality is not wrong.  It's a natural variation on the theme of human sexuality—and sexuality in general, in fact.  Homosexual behaviour has been documented in hundreds of other species.  And regardless of anything that any translation of the Bible might say, I cannot believe that it is any more evil for two women or two men to be sexually attracted to each other and act on it than it is for a woman and a man to do the same.

Not everybody thinks, acts, or loves in the same way, and it's about damn time that society in general accepted that as long as nobody is genuinely being hurt or exploited, this is a perfectly normal, natural, and right thing.

The evils of religion?

Of all the things that one might have expected me to be contemplating on Easter Sunday, somehow I doubt that atheism would be among them.

Not that I'm thinking of becoming an atheist, mind you.  Regardless of whether the Gods exist, my mind doesn't seem to have the wiring for atheism.  As I am now, the closest thing I could probably get to total non-belief is a sort of curious agnosticism.  And despite normally being a logic-oriented person, I do not consider this to be a problem in any respect.  My belief-and-skepticism system works for me; it inspires me to be a better person.  It reminds me that it's possible to be a thoroughly flawed human being and still manage to do a bit of good in the world.  It reminds me that prayer is all very well, but you've got to help people in practical ways as well.  (I can say this no better than it's already said in my favourite passage from the first letter of John: "Little children, let us love, not in word and speech, but in truth and action.")  It even keeps me from taking myself too seriously.

The thing is, I've been noticing, and hearing about, a lot more highly vocal atheists lately.  And usually they've been the obnoxious ones.  The ones who, being so angry at the idea that anybody else dares to think something that they don't think, might fit in well with certain groups of rigid fundamentalist Christians if it weren't for the fact that atheists believe that the whole God thing is bullshit.  The ones who believe that there has never been anything good whatsoever that came from religion of any type.  The ones who believe that all the world's evils come from religion in general and Christianity in particular, and that we'd live in a perfect world if no human being had ever come up with the concept of one or more Gods.  The ones who look down their noses at people of any religious persuasion, calling us stupid and superstitious.  The ones who speak of us all as if we were somehow simultaneously childlike in our naïveté and hyper-dangerous psychopaths who are just a few social conventions away from reinstating the Spanish Inquisition and shamelessly persecuting and brutally murdering anyone who doesn't agree with us.

Believe it or not, atheism itself doesn't actually bother me.  We've all got to make up our own minds about what we will and will not believe, and I understand that there are people whose lives, and whose treatment of other people, become better once they discard any concept of religion.  We all need to have our own freedom of conscience.  And to a certain extent, I must concede that they have a point or two, even though I doubt I'll ever entirely subscribe to their point of view.  But the common assertion that religion, and especially Christianity, is the root of all evil bothers me on a level that I can't quite articulate.

The thing is, I deeply suspect that even if religion hadn't ever existed, most of the evil things that religion has been used as the excuse for would still have happened.  Religious or not, that seems to be an aspect of certain people's human nature; given great power, and the desire for something that's already possessed by someone else, some people will only need the right excuse to become genocidal.  If it wasn't religion, it might be some other custom.  It might be language or skin colour or some theme in the other group's art or music that the aggressors consider to be unwholesome.  It might be patriotism or some form of insult, imagined or otherwise.  I can't think of a single religious war, even the Crusades, that couldn't also have been fought for other reasons.  Religion made a damn convincing excuse, but as long as there was something else to be gained—valuable territory, access to certain commodities, greater political power, and similar—then religion was nonetheless still little but an excuse.  In its absence, another one would surely have been used.

I will never accept the idea that religion is itself evil; I will certainly never again accept the idea that Christianity is inherently evil.  It's been used as an excuse for evil things, and there are people who use it as a weapon even today.  That, I believe, is evil.  But not religion itself.

If there's evil in the equation at all, it's in the people who use their beliefs to harm other people.

"Love and Freindship"

(The spelling error in today's post title is intentional; it is the name of a short story by Jane Austen, epistolary in form, written when she was about fifteen years old. Despite her youth, she'd already acquired her disdain for conventional romantic sensibilities by the time she wrote "Love and Freindship," and she was already developing the sharp wit for which her work is so well-known.)

In the wake of Valentine's Day, I've been thinking about the way that we privilege certain types of relationships—particularly romantic ones, though to some extent, biological family as well—over other ones, no matter how close we may be to people who are neither part of our direct family tree, nor our romantic partners. And we'd better only have one of those at a time, or we're dirty, rotten cheaters, because apparently healthy polyamorous relationships don't exist. And that means that despite all evidence to the contrary, two of my dearest friends are just figments of my imagination—which would probably come as a bit of a shock to them, and to everyone else who knows them. ;)

Oh, and by the way, what's with all this de-valuing friendship by saying that you're "just friends" with someone when someone else asks (or assumes) that you're involved with them?  At its best, friendship is a wonderful kind of relationship that should not be dismissed like this.  Friends or not, just because you're not bonking someone else (regardless of whether you actually ever do want to have sex with them), it doesn't mean that you don't love them in one way or another.  But no matter how close we are to our friends, no matter how mutually supportive or downright affectionate these relationships are, they're often thought of as less-than.  It's like a relationship doesn't really matter unless you're sleeping together or you have a lot of recent ancestors in common.

And the pressure to really only love one person who will somehow magically be able to perfectly meet all our needs, and whose needs we're expected to be able to perfectly meet, is also frighteningly strong, and getting stronger all the time.  It's as if while Western society in general is slowly becoming more accustomed to the idea of LGBTQI (etc.) people's relationships being as valid as straight people's—though I must stress that I do not in any way mean to imply that relationship equality exists, as I know damn well that it doesn't—there's some kind of push to re-establish monogamous heterosexual relationships between two cisgendered individuals as the standard to which everyone, despite individual preferences and realities, should aspire.  And the pedestal that these relationships are put on is so limiting that, frankly, it's a wonder that any of them lasts, when even a casual friendship with a member of the opposite sex can easily be construed as "cheating" and when, once you're in that marriage with only one cisgendered opposite-sex partner, it's assumed that this partner is the only person with whom you should ever even think of having any sort of relationship that goes deeper than having occasional superficial chats about the weather.  And Heaven forbid that a married person should have a decent conversation with a single person of whatever sex the married person happens to be attracted to, because single people are dangerous, and spousal jealousy seems an inevitable consequence of such interaction.

OK, that may be overstating it a bit...but, all things considered, I'm probably not overstating it by much.

It's very human to crave connections with other people, and a wedding ring, even one that symbolizes a heterosexual marriage that's intended to be completely monogamous, doesn't automatically destroy one's capacity to be attracted (emotionally, sexually, romantically, etc.) to people other than one's own spouse.  Furthermore, even within the context of a monogamous relationship, friendships, even with people who happen to have the same type of genitalia as your partner, do not have to threaten your relationship as a couple.  And denying this, or refusing to admit that for those who are so inclined, polyamory really can work as a relationship model, isn't just harmful in the sense that it stigmatizes this kind of relationship.  It has the potential to hurt almost everybody because suddenly opposite-sex friendships, or same-sex friendships if the couple in question is same-sex, are suddenly considered to have a power to harm the couple's relationship just because at least one half of that couple has the capacity to be sexually attracted to that friend.  And I'm sure that border guard from a few months ago would agree—after all, when I encountered him again early last month, he asked (again, with a sneer) whether I intended to spend the night with my friend.

It's such a terrible, restrictive way of looking at human relationships.  I rejected it a long time ago.  (Just as well, I suppose, for reasons that I'm not quite able to adequately articulate here at the moment, though I've had a relevant post in the works for quite some time now; I just haven't quite managed to get the wording quite right.)  Even so, I find that I tend to avoid getting particularly friendly with most married men.  After all, I'm 29, and though I'm not what most people would consider to be attractive enough to be "dangerous," I'm unmarried and likely to stay that way.  Yet, I have friends of varying sexes, sexual orientations, and marital statuses.  And yes, I love my friends, especially the ones I consider to be my closest friends, very much.  It bothers me very deeply that they're not supposed to mean as much to me as my biological family or the spouse I'm fairly certain is not in my future (not least because, despite a few notable exceptions, I do have trouble letting people truly get close to me).  And yes, it also bothers me that I'm supposed to be somewhat insignificant to my friends who are married.

Most people, it seems, need more than just one strong relationship with other human beings.  So why do we deny it?  And why do we de-value our friendships?

"Just friends," indeed.

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.

When All Else Fails...

It seems to me that the phrase "when all else fails, read the directions" isn't always a great piece of advice.  Sometimes the directions don't work, or are too vaguely outlined, or, in the worst cases, are set up so that only some people will ever really get the full benefits of whatever we're supposed to be reading the directions for.  Sometimes the best advice can be "when all else fails, completely disregard the directions" or even "when all else fails, forget that there were directions in the first place."

Today's semi-deep thought brought about, of all things, by my tendency to experiment when I'm cooking (or, it seems, deciding on a spiritual path).  Hey, I haven't ever blown up the kitchen, poisoned anybody, or caused a church or sacred grove to spontaneously implode, so I guess that's an optimistic sign. ;)

Reflections on the Death of Troy Davis

As I write this, there's a funeral going on that should not have been necessary.  I have the live stream of the celebration of Troy Davis' life on in the background, and this is what is going through my mind.

Since Davis was put to death on September 21, two other men have been executed in the USA, not counting Lawrence Brewer of Texas, who was also executed on September 21, a few hours before Davis' death.  Other executions were scheduled for this period of time, but most of them have been stayed.

I keep thinking that maybe the great amount of attention paid to Davis' case may have helped to send him to his death this time; it seems to me like the state of Georgia didn't want to be seen to be bowing to public pressure.  Certainly the people involved in the decision not to issue a stay of execution wanted to be seen as being "tough on crime" and if I had been a gambling woman, I'd have bet that at least some of them reasoned that he'd had twenty-two years to prove his innocence, and if any of them had any feelings of guilt about their decision to allow the state of Georgia to take this man's life, the fact that he was unable to prove his innocence in court must have assuaged them.  Never mind that the odds were stacked so overwhelmingly against him.  Never mind that he was a black man accused of murdering a white man, a situation which more often ends with capital punishment than white men accused of murdering black men.  (Though somewhat ironically, on the same night in which Davis died, Lawrence Brewer of Texas actually was executed a few hours earlier for having brutally murdered James Byrd, Jr., a black man.)  Never mind the fact that seven of the nine eyewitnesses whose testimony convicted Davis have since recanted or significantly changed their version of the events of that terrible night.  Never mind the allegations of police misconduct during the investigation of the case, in which some officers allegedly coerced some of these witnesses into identifying Davis as the perpetrator, including one person who signed a statement that he hadn't read because he is functionally illiterate.  Never mind that there was never any evidence found that actually linked Troy Davis to the scene of the murder.  Never mind that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.  And never mind that one of the people who didn't recant their testimony, Sylvester Coles, was also a suspect in the murder investigation and is alleged to have issued death threats to a person who claims to have heard him confess to murdering Mark MacPhail.

This has been a terrible injustice for so many reasons.  I believe that nobody has the right to take another human's life, except in cases of self-defence; the premeditated death of any other human being is a terrible thing, whether it's a murderer or a judicial system who's planning to kill someone.  A horrific crime, no matter how appalling, is not an excuse to perpetrate an equally horrific crime.  Capital punishment isn't justice.  It's vengeance thinly disguised as justice.  Justice will never be served by committing injustice.  All this can do is unleash yet another evil on the world.

I will always be in great awe of Martina Correia, Troy Davis' sister who so courageously and tirelessly fought for his life even while fighting cancer.  Her strength and her determination are so far beyond inspirational...that she was able to keep her brother alive for so long is a miracle, and a testament to what can be done with enough determination.

On the night of the execution, when word came that Davis was dead, two hymns came to mind, both of which my church choir often sings when we've been asked to provide music for funerals.  One is actually a prayer known as the Nunc Dimittis: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people, to be a light to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of thy people Israel.  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen."  And the other, an Easter hymn, called "All Shall Be Well":

All shall be well!  For on our Easter skies,
See Christ the sun of righteousness arise.


All shall be well!  The sacrifice is made,
The sinner freed, the price of pardon paid.


All shall be well!  The cross and passion past,
Dark night is done, bright morning come at last.


All shall be well!  Lift every voice on high;
"Death has no more dominion, but shall die."


Jesus alive!  Rejoice and sing again:
All shall be well for evermore, Amen!


I suspect that "All Shall Be Well" will always remind me of Troy Davis from now on.  I pray for those who knew and loved him, that they may be comforted in this difficult time.  And I hope and pray for the day when the death penalty will be abolished once and for all across the world.  We should so be beyond this brutality by now.

"An eye for an eye, and the whole world goes blind."

For what is probably an extremely obvious reason, I've been thinking a lot about capital punishment today.

I've never lived in a country where there is a death penalty; the last execution in Canada was carried out twenty years before I was born, and the practice was entirely abolished here six years before I was born.  But according to a relatively recent poll, a fair number of Canadians support capital punishment in theory, though less than half of us would actually like to see the measure reinstated here.  Personally, I hope I never see it reinstated.

There is no true justice in taking a life for a life.  There is nothing but bloodthirst and a hunger for revenge that is only thinly disguised as justice, using excuses that have not stood up to true scrutiny.  It is not an effective deterrent to crime.  (The idea of it being so is utterly ludicrous; after all, how many criminals actually plan to get caught?)  And there is still too great a possibility of executing people who aren't guilty of the crimes for which they've been convicted.  And at the most basic level, this is nothing more than state-sanctioned murder using justice as a flimsy excuse.  It is as grave an injustice as the crimes for which these people have been convicted.  Taking another life rights no wrongs.  All it does is turn other people into murderers.

I don't know whether Davis is guilty or innocent of this murder.  I know that the evidence that convicted him is by no means solid, and I know that it's very reasonable to doubt that he did it.  With no DNA evidence, no murder weapon, and seven of the nine witnesses who identified him later recanting or casting significant doubt on their testimonies, and as I hear that another man has actually confessed to the murder, I know that it's highly likely that there has been a grave miscarriage of justice in this case.  And I also know that even if he truly is guilty of the murder, the death penalty is too much...it goes too far.  And to have dangled four execution dates over his head now, and to have granted three stays of execution and now a delay of execution (allegedly while the Supreme Court decides whether or not to grant a stay of execution) within minutes of the time at which he was supposed to die is tantamount to psychological torture.

This is wrong.  On every possible level, this is wrong.

Walking in Edinburgh...

This will probably be a fairly scattered collection of thoughts; a kind of mental potpourri, so to speak, so there won't be much structure...

The last time I was here, I was seventeen years old and not nearly as streetwise or as confident as I am now.  I wasn't quite a nervous wreck, but I did tend to stay close to my mother, and I spent most of our day in Edinburgh trying to assure her that, contrary to all expectation, we actually would be OK and we wouldn't be completely lost in a strange city without finding anyone else from our group ever again, or having a way to get back to where we were staying in Glasgow.  With that kind of memory to deal with, I'm not surprised that my experience with Edinburgh so far has been much more positive this time around.

I did a lot of walking yesterday.  So much, in fact, that when I traced the route I'd taken on Google Earth when I got back to the hotel, it told me that I'd very nearly walked ten kilometres.  I'd had a definite destination in mind, but my walk took me to some unexpected places (including Calton Hill, which I'd intended to see anyway), and I started thinking about how much had changed in my life since I'd last seen a number of the places that I saw yesterday.

When I was seventeen, I hadn't yet come to terms with the idea that one could be both Pagan and Christian; I was still very much an either/or type of person, and I'd chosen Paganism, even looking down on what I thought of as my Christian past, even as it still existed in my present.  I had self-defence skills, thanks to my years of judo class, but not the observation skills that are so valuable when you're in a big place with a lot of other people.

I was silly enough to forget my umbrella yesterday.  Naturally, the rain was absolutely pouring down.  A total stranger offered to lend me her umbrella for a few minutes; I declined, because there was no point in pretending that I wasn't already completely soaked, but I appreciated the gesture anyway.  We had a nice little chat, though, before we each went our separate ways.

This is my fourth trip to the UK, and my third trip here to sing Evensong, though it's my first with my church choir (the other two were with my community choir, which is directed by the same person as my church choir), and the first time we've sung in Scotland.  I know that it might seem that I should feel more casual about it; after all, I've done similar things before.  I've even been here, in Edinburgh, before, though it was only for a few hours and I didn't get to see much more of it than a tiny bit of Princes Street and the Royal Mile.  But every day I've been here so far has been full of new experiences and things to wonder at; in such a short time, I've come to know at least this small-ish section of the city very well, and I love it.  It's such a different type of big city than what we have at home; I have yet to see a single skyscraper, and there are trees everywhere.  I can't ignore the existence of poverty and inequality here, of course; as much as I've loved being here in Edinburgh, I have not deceived myself into thinking that this is some magical faerie city where nothing ever goes wrong and where nothing bad ever happens to anybody.  (I'm pretty sure that even a real magical faerie city probably wouldn't be like that, anyway.)  Even I'm not that naïve.  But I am very glad to be here, and the past few days have been wonderful.  I fully expect that when we return home after our time in Dublin next week, we'll be jet-lagged but mentally and spiritually refreshed, and we'll be better musicians for having spent so much time singing in unfamiliar spaces.

You know, I absolutely love Evensong.  There's very little preaching and a lot of singing.  But Evensong last night was particularly wonderful; there's a lot of room for enthusiastic and powerful singing in the Sumsion Mag and Nunc* in A, and our choirmaster was evidently having a lot of fun with it, signalling a lot of crescendos (crescendi?) and sudden bursts of high volume by mouthing "Come on!" at us. :D  I'm not sure about some of the other singers, but the Gloria from that particular Mag and Nunc (Sumsion used the same one for both, but many Mags and Nuncs have two different settings for the Gloria) was so much fun to sing that I almost felt like dancing for joy...which would not have been appropriate behaviour for a singer in an Anglican choir, alas.

And that's where my thoughts have been leading me today.  It's only a little after 10:00 AM over here, though, so there's plenty of time for more unusual lines of thought. :)

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

*Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis.  In brief, the "Magnificat" is that "My soul doth magnify the Lord" bit that Mary is supposed to have said after Gabriel told her that she was going to have God's baby, and the "Nunc Dimittis" is a prayer that starts with "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word."  They're both followed by the Gloria: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost..." etc.

"Natural"

We hear a lot about whether other people's choices about what to do with their bodies is "natural."

Two cis women, or two cis men, for that matter, who have sex with each other are held to be "unnatural" because they can't reproduce without scientific help and a donor of some kind.  Heterosexual couples who don't want children are called "unnatural" because apparently everyone should want to pass on their DNA regardless of whether it's actually a good idea for them to do so.  Women who like sex are "unnatural" because sex is really just for heterosexual couples and, in that context, it's just supposed to be all about men's satisfaction; women are just supposed to lie back and think of dinner or jewellery or marriage or whatever else it is that the man is supposed to have given them in payment for sex.  (Pardon the pun, but fuck that.)  People who are in polyamorous relationships are called "unnatural" because everyone knows that no normal human being has ever been able to love more than one person at one time.

And perhaps the most vitriolic rants about the "unnatural"-ness of people's desire and decisions to do as they please with their own bodies are levelled against people who, for one reason or another, don't stick to society's still-rigid ideas about what women and men should be.  Trans people, Genderqueer people, drag queens and kings, tomboys, girls who like science, boys who like the colour pink, and anyone who subverts the concept of gender or (as in the case of the child whose parents refuse to reveal hir gender to the rest of the world, many people in which seem to be disturbingly interested in knowing what kind of genitalia said child possesses) completely throws the concept out the window...all of them are dismissed and even attacked for being "unnatural."

As if being "natural" were the only yardstick by which we can measure whether it's right or wrong for a person to be doing something.

Being yourself to the best of your ability to do so is a hell of a lot more natural than playing golf, but I've never heard any big moral outcry against people who hit the links.  (Jokes about doctors who golf when they're supposed to be working don't count and are not welcome.)  Making music isn't natural.  Wearing clothes isn't natural (though it's a good idea when it's cold outside, and if you try not wearing clothes outside of your own home or a nudist colony, you normally run a very heavy risk of being arrested or otherwise punished in most societies).  Space exploration isn't natural.  Watching TV, driving cars or riding bikes, domesticating animals, agriculture, science, medicine, any concept of justice we've been able to form, pretty much all of the Arts and Humanities, playing sports, cooking our food, even (Dare I say it?  YES!) involvement in religious and/or spiritual activities...all completely not natural.  Granted, some similar behaviours to some of these things do exist in other species, but for the most part, these things (especially in combination) are things that only humans do.  We're unlike any other species that currently exists on this planet.

To be human, in short, is to be extremely unnatural.

So don't talk to me about whether someone else's choices regarding their own lives and bodies are "natural".  Unless you want to renounce everything that humans have made and done, which would include any and every luxury you've ever enjoyed in your life (even the most basic things like the clothing that replaces the fur we don't have and the languages that let us communicate with other humans), then as far as I'm concerned, you have no right to look down on other people for being "unnatural."

They may be unnatural...but as long as you're a human being, so are you.

Symbols

For the most part, I don't wear much jewellery.  I have some nice things; some are relatively expensive (these are mostly gifts from my parents for various milestone birthdays or achievements), but mostly what I've got is pairs of earrings of the sort that you can get as a three-for-ten-dollars deal at low-budget accessory shops.  Strange, offbeat earrings are one of my guilty pleasures, though I rarely indulge in a new pair.  But almost every day, I wear a chain necklace with a seven-pointed star on it.

I have two of these; one has a circle around the star, and the other is slightly smaller, bearing just the star itself.

The two pendants, side by side for a size comparison.

I wear the smaller one when I want to be more subtle about the fact that I'm wearing something that has immense symbolic value to me—for example, whenever I'm doing anything related to my church.  (Though the Pentacle is a better-known Pagan symbol than the Elven Star, there are obvious similarities, and wearing the circle-variety septegram would probably prompt the people at my church to ask me questions that I'm not sure I'll ever be ready to give them the answers to.)  In many ways, I think that the Elven Star is a great symbol for me, personally, as a Christo-Pagan, and this is why.

First, although some Pagan traditions do use the septegram as a religious symbol—Faerie Wicca and Blue Star Wicca are the first examples that come to my mind—it is by no means a commonly-known symbol, and if I'm wearing the pendant that doesn't have the circle, I can simply pass it off as a star-shape that I thought was pretty.  (That would be a heck of a lot more difficult with my pentacle, which is surrounded by representations of the phases of the moon, even if the top of it does also include a Christian cross.  Click this link if you'd like to see what it looks like—but I must note that the price given by this vendor may be a bit high as I bought mine for significantly less, though that could easily be because I bought mine offline at a local shop whose owners deal directly with the manufacturers of the goods they sell.)  Second, the number seven is a tremendously important number in the Christian tradition—stretching right back to Christianity's Jewish roots.  From God being said to create the world in seven days, to Jesus telling Peter to forgive people "seventy times seven" times to the many things in Revelations that come in sets of seven (just to name a very few), it's a highly important number.  And finally, if I stretch things just a little, I can even justify my use of the Elven Star through numerology; my birth path number, as determined by adding all the digits of the date of my birth together and then adding the digits of that result until there's only a single digit, is seven.

So, because—like the pentacle, oddly enough, which was once used to signify the five wounds of Christ—the seven-pointed star could arguably be called a very valid symbol for a Christo-Pagan.  To me, the shape of this particular star even evokes the image of a cross, or even an angel.

But you know what?  Even if I didn't have these particular justifications for my adoption of the Elven Star, whether or not it's in a circle, I'd still use it.  The things it symbolizes to me personally—time, perspective, and truth, among other things—are justification enough.  Because that's the wonderful thing about symbols; they don't have to mean what you're told they mean.  We choose whether they have meaning for us.  We choose whether to accept the meanings we're given for them.  A pentacle doesn't have to signify Wicca—and for the many non-Wiccan Pagans who use the pentacle as a symbol for their spiritual paths, it doesn't.  An upside-down cross, while popularly linked with Satanism, is also a very Christian symbol; St. Peter, we are told, was crucified upside-down, insisting that he was not worthy to be crucified in the same position as his Lord had been; in this context, it's used as a symbol of humility.  And of course the swastika, now forever linked with the evil that was Hitler's rule over Germany (and a few other places later on), was once considered a symbol of luck and protection.  Consciously or not, we give our symbols the significance that they have.  The holiest symbol in the world to one person might just be a weird-looking shape to someone else.

As so many things do, symbols ultimately come down to the power of choice.  That's what I think is so wonderfully interesting about them.  That symbols can mean everything, or nothing, or something somewhere in between, to various people—just because they choose to interpret them as they do—it's an amazing thing, and that's something I think is worth thinking about.

"Dieting" vs. "Eating Disorder"

Oh, hello, Eating Disorder.  You've been behaving so well lately that I hoped you'd managed to starve yourself to death instead of trying to do it to me.  Foolish, I know...

I've written frequently here about my frequent urges to sink into that self-imposed state of semi-starvation that I believe is some form of eating disorder.  Social beliefs about fat people and our supposed constant gluttony being what they are, on the occasions when my problem has been in some way apparent in public it's usually been mistaken for dieting, which is (of course) one of the few socially-acceptable behaviours for anyone who's much above a Canadian/U.S. size six.  I'm praised for my supposed iron-clad self-control when I don't consume more than a single cup of tea at parties.  The "don't worry about me, I ate a couple of hours ago" line is so familiar that even I tend to believe it, even if I only ate an apple and the "couple of hours" was really closer to eight or nine or even twelve.  I can only recall one instance when someone picked up on what was really going on with me, and I later found out that the person who realized it was herself recovering from an eating disorder.

There really isn't that much of a difference between dieting and disordered eating, you know; the biggest difference is intent.  The intent behind dieting is usually just to lose weight, often for health-related reasons (though crash dieting can reduce life expectancy and that obesity in and of itself may not be as harmful as conventional wisdom says it is), and usually with a lot of appearance-related motivation as well.  I can understand the need to make changes for one's health—after all, I did that when I started to walk more, and since I took over the grocery shopping about eight years ago my mother has consistently complained that we don't have enough junk food in the house because I practically never buy the stuff.  And dieting can be mistaken for a healthy lifestyle choice, and can even occasionally be one—provided, of course, that you let yourself eat foods you like and that you actually give yourself enough nutrition for your body to function and thrive, which I've noticed that many dieters rarely do, and provided that your eating habits weren't healthy in the first place.

But the motivation behind an eating disorder can be a lot more complicated than that.

As far as I am aware, my particular ED-like behaviour is the result of several factors: a lifetime of insults because of my eternally much-less-than-perfect physical appearance, a feeling of lack of control over my life—even if I can't control anything else, I can control what I do or don't put into my mouth—and the need to assert what control I can, stress, worry, fear, shame caused by being so damn big when the ideal figure is just a little more than half my current size, a not-so-subconscious belief that I don't really need to eat anything because I already carry a reserve of energy with me at all times, guilt over being so fat when there are people here and in other places in the world who are obviously starving to death...all these things and more are things that can trigger my urge to starve myself.  

There is nothing healthy about an eating disorder, or even a sort of vaguely eating-disorder-ish form of behaviour of the sort that I all too often display.  When people succumb to an eating disorder like mine, health doesn't even come into the picture except maybe as an excuse for not eating in situations in which anyone might be expected to eat.  It isn't even health-motivated; health is quite possibly the furthest thing from my mind when I consciously make the decision to ignore my hunger pangs (and the other physical things that come after if I ignore them too long, like dizziness and headaches).

I know that it isn't healthy to do this to myself, but I keep doing it.  Sometimes it just feels like the most fitting punishment for being fat, and I hate that there's still a part of my mind that thinks like that, because I know it's so wrong and it's no help to me at all.

And this is what makes me think that sometimes, for some people, there isn't so much of a difference between dieting and eating disorders after all.

Quick Note

It occurred to me just now that I should probably say that I have not lost interest in—or inspiration for—this blog; more updates are coming.  However, I'm in the midst of a family emergency at the moment and between stress, mild malnutrition, lack of sleep and a feeling that I'm not that far from becoming a complete emotional and physical wreck, I haven't got a whole lot of energy or ambition.

More details will inevitably follow, but for now I just need to collapse for a bit and then get back to my family.

A poem that a lot of people should read. *sigh*

I found this poem when I was browsing through a poetry website the other day.  It's religiously-themed, but I think that anyone who's hopelessly self-righteous about anything, not just their religion, should be made to read it.