Month: September 2011

  • Better Birthdays

    As a wee girl, I was conditioned very early to love birthdays, even though I almost always got sick from overindulgence in cake and ice cream.  Eating ’til I puked was a common occurrence in my childhood.  I hated throwing up, and never learned to like it any better, but even so, my memories of early birthdays are mostly happy.

    All that changed when I was raped, rejected and thrown out on my sixteenth birthday.  I’ve been raped three times in my life, two of them on birthdays.  Seven years after the first I lived through a violent gang rape by outlaw bikers on my twenty-third birthday.  After that, all my birthdays have been better.

    The pattern of eating myself sick continued into my fifties, with several attempts to kick the sugar addiction.  I’ve had more success at that since I learned that wheat was also an addiction.  Poly-addictions reinforce each other, y’know?  Kicking wheat gluten and dairy casein has made it easier to abstain from sugar, too, but I can still taste, in memory, that chocolate cake batter I scraped out of the mixing bowl 64 years ago.

     

  • Trust

    My friends and I are a diverse bunch.  Labels that have been stuck on some of us include sociopath, pervert, leech, whore, heretic, robber, fraud, rapist, killer, junkie, and traitor–and that’s all in this current lifetime.   We’ve been called other things, too – names like hero, genius, paragon and mentor.  Some of us have been declared sick, with diagnoses all over the map:  dissociative identity disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, narcissistic personality disorder, schizotypal, bipolar… the list goes on and on.  We’ve called each other such things, too.  Which person gets what label usually depends more on who’s calling the names than on the one being labeled.

    With friends like this, who needs enemies?  I certainly don’t, which is why I don’t have any.  Maybe there are some people who consider me their enemy and who feel enmity toward me, but I feel enmity toward nobody: stranger, neighbor, acquaintance or family member.  I can’t say that everyone in the world is my friend, because it would be a big semantic faux pas and social gaffe to impose friendship on a total stranger, but my acquaintances, in real life and online, become friends very quickly, often before they even know it. 

    It has not always been this way with me.  It’s a relatively recent development.  I was an only child who had difficulty making friends.  As recently as the turn of the millennium or even a bit later, I was ready to lay judgments on attitudes and behaviors I disapproved, such as racism and spousal abuse, and hatch a brood of enmity.  It was the way I’d been taught and acculturated.  However, I never felt comfortable that way, so I quit.

    Another change in my attitudes developed along with that one.  I stopped trusting people.  Trust was my default setting, probably because my parents loved me.  I’d trust someone until they did something that caused me pain or loss, then I’d feel betrayed.  I got a lot of disappointment out of that mindset.  Then I heard some wise words that led me to rethink the whole idea of trust:  “No expectations, no disappointments.”  Trust is an expectation.  The type of expectations vary case by case and from person to person, but trust always involves some kind of expectation.  Never having liked to be disappointed, it just made sense to stop setting myself up for it.

    You might think that giving up trusting people would mean I’d become more suspicious and wary, but it is just the opposite.  For example, since I deliberately avoid trusting anyone, I don’t think about whether a hitchhiker along the road might be trustworthy.  I just stop and pick him up.

    I have not perfected this new attitude.  Humans seem hardwired to think that repetitive patterns will go on repeating indefinitely.  In most cases, it works out that way, and it would be very hard to get around in the world without, for example, the expectation that a yellow traffic light is on its way to red.  On the other hand, not expecting other drivers on the road to stop when the light is yellow can be a life saver.

    I’ve been focusing primarily on human behavior, and particularly on my friends and family, in my efforts to live in the now without expectations.   I more or less expect politicians to lie and paramedics to show up if I call 911, and I can forgive myself for that.  I don’t expect my friends not to lie or my family to remember my birthday, so whatever they actually do, there will be nothing for me to need to forgive.  And, of course, I don’t expect my friendship, or my lack of expectations, to be reciprocated.

    This would not, of course, work for everyone.  I can get away with it because I am neither an employer nor an employee, not wealthy or in a position of power.  I don’t need to be able to trust people to guard my body or safeguard my valuables, because I own very little of any monetary value and can handle my own personal security.  I live outside society, in a place where there’s more real danger from bears or moose than from humans, and I am armed.  I am, in other words, at liberty to live without trust.