Just skip this
Some days it is hard to see through this fog.
I can try to drown my pain in alcohol, tranquilizers, obsessive video game playing, too much sleep. It works, actually. It numbs things down, makes it all easier to cope with. It distracts.
I don’t leave the house anymore unless I have to. I curl up in bed or sit here at the computer. The weight of everyone’s judgemental eyes became too much for me.
I feel like a failure. I read the things some of you write, so brave and bold and thought-provoking. I do not meet your standards for being an activist. I do not meet my own. I sit here in the house. I write. I try to tell the truth while not stepping on anyone’s toes only to discover this is impossible. I shut up. I question myself, find myself wanting.
I saw something the other day that reminded me of old wounds from the psychiatric establishment. Women who have been abused badly and display all the natural behavior of a human animal given the conjunction of cultural expectations of appropriate feminine behavior and their traumatic past have “Borderline Personality Disorder.” Men, in the same circumstances, have “Post traumatic Stress Disorder.” Mostly “BPD” sufferers are women, and “PTSD” sufferers are men. This is because we whiny womens have to understand that men suffer “real” traumas, like violence and war and stuff, and women just undergo silly traumas they make too much of, like being forced to suck our father’s cock repeatedly as a child (and besides our Oedipal complex made it so we really wanted to do it anyway.) With amazement some people write “it is interesting how many women with BPD have a history of childhood abuse!” or how often women with BPD also meet the definition of those with PTSD. Chicks with BPD are clingy and dangerous, undateable due to their hysterical fits and ridiculous clingy behavior. You can’t trust them. If you have BPD it is what you ARE, and if you have PTSD you are just an unfortunate victim of bad circumstances. Women with BPD are bad, crazy women who are self obsessed. Men with PTSD are brave soldiers who have undergone too much stress. See how that works?
Never mind that the diagnostic criteria are virtually inseparable. At least someone finally got a clue.
But aside from all that. Some days I question it even being a “disorder”. For example. One classic “symptom” of PTSD is “distrust of those in positions of authority”. Really? I see that, myself, as a mark of clear-eyed vision of the world. Why the fuck should I trust any authority? Just because someone is put in a position of authority doesn’t mean they are smarter or more moral than I am. For fuck’s sake, look at who we have in charge and what they do. Why the hell would you trust them? Then there is “hypervigilance”. Being easily alarmed and always on the lookout for danger. Women are raped by the hundreds of millions, beaten, stalked, discriminated against, sexually harassed almost ubiquitously. Being aware of this and taking steps THE WAY WE WE ARE TOLD, especially after having been victimized in the first place, is a symptom of “illness” now, and certainly not a way to cope with a world that HATES US. Going back to BPD, women’s behavior in relationships is under intense scrutiny. Never mind that heterosexual relationships and the way they are “supposed” to go are severely stacked against women so that virtually everything she does will be considered wrong. Women are called “clingy” when they fear abandoment while our society teaches that women are nothing without a man. Are women with “BPD” just acting out fully what our culture expects of women – a passive, whiny, irrational victim – and then being blamed for being what she is told she should be?
When I was 18 they said I had BPD. Later they said I had PTSD. In both cases I have been drugged because my behavior and thought patterns are perceived to be MY PROBLEM. Never was it suggested to me by any psychiatrist that the problem was perhaps patriarchal society – how it feeds and encourages child abuse and abuse of women – how it encourages women to be dependent and then infantilizes them and mocks them for being infantilized – how the virtual assurance that my abusers would never receive any punishment because no one cares if someone abuses their own family members might be the cause of a very righteous rage on my part – how my reaction to my being shunned by my entire family for telling the truth might be actual grief and the subsequent fears of abandonment are actual perfectly reasonable given that I have been deliberately isolated and cast out – how there is NO ASSURANCE WHATSOEVER in society as it exists now that I might not someday be randomly victimized again. Also no one suggested in any psychiatric establishment that working to change society might help me feel more “empowered” again. No, I’m supposed to work on “myself”. It’s *my* illness, *my* problem, something is clearly wrong with *me* if I can’t just “get over” all of this and forgive and forget. It’s not as much of a problem to them that violent pigs rape and beat their own helpless family members and never get punished for it, in numbers so high people deny it routinely because they simply can’t fathom that CHILD ABUSE IS THE ORDINARY WAY OF LIFE UNDER THE PATRIARCHY.
And of course in spite of the ubiquity of woman beating and woman abuse in the world, if I should happen to date some violent motherfucker in the future who pretends to be a nice guy at first and then shows his true colors one day when he determines he has gotten me dependent on him in some fashion, like knocking me up, then it is my fault for “being attracted to abusers” and a sign of my mental disease for revictimizing myself. YES they actually say this. “the loss of a sense of safety, trust, and self-worth, as well as the tendency to be revictimized”. These are the hallmarks of “disease” – the loss of a FALSE sense of safety (what woman is ever safe?) the loss of trust (in men, on presumes) AND a “tendency to be revictimized.” But wait didn’t you just say I wasn’t trusting enough? If I’m not trusting of men how am I being revictimized? If I am “being revictimized” doesn’t that mean SOMEONE ELSE IS VICTIMIZING ME? How is what SOMEONE ELSE DOES a mark of MY MENTAL ILLNESS?
It’s just a game of blame the victim, over and over and over again.
And I can’t cope with that. Is my failure to cope and my willingness to do almost anything to numb the pain of the truth I can’t avoid knowing mental illness, or is it a sort of battle weariness? Is my not wanting to go outside where I can be vilified or at least stared at with hostility for daring to be a non-skinny woman in this fat hating world good common sense or agoraphobia? Is my avoidance of social events because I have “social anxiety disorder” or is it that my ex turned everyone in the local, trendy polyamorous sci-fi pagan BDSM community against me so that I can hardly expect to go there without getting the cold shoulder? Or that he goes to all of these events with his new girlfriend? And spent weeks before he dumped me on a covert campaign to tell everyone all the horrors I supposedly put him through in our relationship (which consisted of being a ‘nagging bitch’ about wanting him to do a fair share of housework and get a fucking job already)?
Gah.
