It's So Hard to Watch Activism Get Lost in the Weeds

Anyone who knows me knows that I care about a lot of different things and that I follow a lot of different causes and that I work hard to fight oppression in whatever ways I can. In doing so, I am watching some trends and repeated failures that seem so easy to overcome if we just worked a little harder to put aside differences, and to find our common ground. Some of us are never going to be able to do this, I get it and I love you anyway, but from an often outside observer, I do not think that you all see how close you are to working towards the same goal, but forgetting the bigger due to small arguments and perceived transgressions.

It feels to me anymore that if I want to work toward ending any type of oppression, I have to hand in my own list of experiences and ways that I "deserve" to be a part of the process. I am tired of saying to a group or a leader, I am here, I have energy and talents, I have access to power structures that (fair or unfair) you may not have...USE ME, only to be told that I am too straight or too Caucasian, or too financially comfortable to really be helpful. Or maybe I am too radical or not radical enough, or I mess up and use the wrong language, and it goes on and on and on.

My suspicion is that I am probably not the only person out there feeling this way, and it amounts to a ton of lost resources. It is as if we have lost the ability to identify that there is a root cause to the problems that we are all talking about and wanting to change. I taught my little about pulling weeds this summer, he found it easier of course to just break the weed off at ground level and to be done with it. And if you are a gardener, you know that this can be tempting. I mean, at least for a short time we do not see the problem. However, with any experience we also know that although the roots of weeds are stubborn and deep, if we do not get them out of there, the weed will come back in less than a week. Sometimes those weeds are prickly and painful to deal with, but if I want to harvest healthy vegetables in a few months, I have to make sure that obstacles to their growth are out of the way.

As I was putting together all of my swirling thoughts about this issue, I was reminded of my scientifically groundbreaking fifth grade science fair project. I built a maze box, and at the end I put a reward and then plopped a mouse in the other end and watched what happened.  I timed them, and changed the game now and again to see how they would react, and it sort of seems like that is what is going on with all of the groups that are fighting against powerful ingrained systems that make us feel weak and oppressed.  There are people in power in this world, and if we are honest with ourselves there are not a whole lot of them. They have the wealth and the privilege and the authority and the weapons and the cruelty that keep all of these other groups of people down. And I think that they learned long ago to put us in the maze individually, and if we ever get close to the goal, they change the game.  The unfortunate thing is that we keep behaving in ways that probably amuse them and empower them even more.

Maybe what we need to do is agree to enter the maze together. Some of us might have a good sense of smell so we know where the cheese is, but our sense of direction sucks so we do not know how to get there. Maybe some of us have great leaping abilities and can not be stopped by walls, while others keep bumping into the same obstacle over and over again. I think that what we really need to remember is that none of us wins entirely if we do not all eventually get to the goal. It does not feel good to me at least to enjoy a reward or privilege if I know that there are still folks in the maze that cannot find their way. I want them to succeed too.

Dichotomies seem to be the biggest problem that I am seeing us face. It is all male vs. female, people of color vs. white, gay vs. straight, left vs. right, rich vs. poor, able vs. disabled, old vs. young and so on. And the really painful thing to see is that within each of those dichotomies we further break down the positions of privilege and power.  Most of the active movements that I see are so narrowly focused on one little branch of the problem that they refuse to dig out the root. I am not going to even try to list these types of issues, because they are strong in their multitudes. We just need to wake up to the strings on our backs, and realize that none of the rest of us are pulling them. It is really at its root in my opinion power and authority vs. absolute powerlessness. We can fool ourselves into the seductive temptation of grabbing for little bits of power and privilege because at least it's something, right? But until we are willing to accept that having little nibbles of the cheese is not acceptable when what we really need for the whole community is ALL of the cheese.

Sometimes this all happens for obviously selfish reasons like monetary gain, or notoriety, or even that pervasive need to just be right. But it also happens for lots of smaller unnamed reasons. It is easy as activists to think in lofty platitudes of selflessly working for the greater good. None of us is ever being selfless in what we are doing. Each and every one of us is gaining in some way through what we are doing or we just would not do it. It's okay to own selfishness and is delusional not to. For myself, it just makes me feel good on the most basic level, and on a deeper level, I do recognize that I have privileges that I did nothing to deserve and it serves my needs to pay something back to people who do not have those same privileges. In real reflection though, the most selfish thing about my actions is this overwhelming feeling I have that I need to pave the way to make things better for the little. He is white, but he may grow to love a person of color and perhaps my actions today will benefit my future grandchildren. He has not indicated to me one way or another at this point to what his sexual or gender orientation might be, but when he does, I want to make sure that his rights will be protected. He may grow up to make choices that are destructive or dangerous and I want to make sure that by the time that would happen, there is not such corruption in law enforcement that his white skin no longer protects him. It also serves me to serve others because it is the best way I know to show him what our family's values are, and to develop those values in him.  Mostly, I just want to be the kind of person that he already thinks I am.

A little more self-reflection of that nature would go a long way. But no self-reflection is any damn good if we do not do something with it. A little less talking and a little more listening would be a good place to start. I was so overwhelmed with emotions watching things unfold in Ferguson that I did not know what to do with those feelings, and I ran into dealing with white people who either had no clue or actively wanted to avoid the topic to dealing with a host of other folks telling me that I did not have the proper credentials to care.  And that spiraled me into even more anger and frustration and I am human, and I lashed out in a lot of ways. But I really have been trying to put that in check. I took a step back, and tried to listen to the pain and lived experience of the all to often "frightening other". This did not diminish my own pain, and rage, and confusion, it actually clarified a lot of things for me. I learned so much that I did not know before. And it was all because I listened, was brave enough to ask questions, and shared my own frustrations with people who look and speak and act differently than I do. It has tempered some of my anger, and increased some of my anger. But it has offered a bit of clarity about what is really going on.

My final analogy has to do with the last time that I worked at the local soup kitchen. While the group of folks I was working with could have debated about the nutrition content, or the organic nature of, or the sourcing of the food we were serving or how it should be cooked and who should do it, in that moment of urgency of needing to produce for lines of people who just really needed to not be hungry, we worked together and fed all of them. All of those other arguments became so trivial, because a mama with a baby crying from the pain of an empty belly does not care where the tomato came from or how it was raised. Her need to resolve a crisis overcame our need to always intellectualize and tear everything down to its least common denominator. It is a well worn bit of philosophy, but one that bears repeating, the whole is in fact greater than the sum of its parts.

So please fellow activists and people who give a damn, can we please gaze together at the bigger picture and see it for the mosaic that it is. We can all fight for our favorite issue in concert with others fighting for theirs and if we combine resources and stop replicating and re-creating a wheel that has already been working, we really can accomplish phenomenal things. And we need to bring the people living the pain into the conversation. We are often complicit in making things so much worse for them. Because we make promises and show them that they deserve more and that we are going to help them get there. But when energy flags, and things get complicated or ugly, or we do not think that they are accepting our help in the right way, we throw up our hands and move on to the next more attractive project, and that is a tragedy.

If you have managed to read this far, and I appreciate it if you did, please dialogue with me about your thoughts, your fears, your needs, your experiences. Access each other and lift each other up. I would like to humbly repeat to you what I said before, and realize that I mean it with sincerity that you cannot begin to imagine... I am here, I have energy and talents, I have access to power structures that (fair or unfair) you may not have...USE ME.

Love and light my friends.

White Privilege is Not About Guilt

I do not feel guilty about my whiteness. I am not a self-hating white girl. However, in the past 10 days, I have been told this time and again. I have been following the story of Mike Brown for eight days. Only eight days because until Sunday, there was not a lot of coverage about the shooting of this young man. Even at that time, a majority of the reports were coming from independent reporters and citizens on the ground in Ferguson, Missouri.

It is not the first time that I have been questioned for my mentions of the term "white privilege". It seems from my experience that my being white and acknowledging that I benefit from this in this country makes other white folks uncomfortable, angry and all about retaliation. People seem to think that their comments and anger are going to intimidate or silence me.

However, I do not think that I even really understood the term until the past week. What has opened my eyes? A little research, a little listening, and a little reflection. I have never in my life considered myself to be a racist, and I still do not. But that does not change the fact that I have certain "unalienable rights" that other people in America do not enjoy. And it is time for us all to acknowledge this. Until we do, things in this country are not going to change.

So what does white privilege mean in my world?

-It means that not one time in my life have I been pulled over, frisked, or shot at based solely on the way I look.

-It means that during the three demonstrations I have participated in this year, it never worried me that I would be gassed, hit by a beanbag or rubber bullet, or beaten with a baton.

-It means that I can wear a hooded sweatshirt on the street after dark without being killed by one of my neighbors.

-It means that I can get credit, rent an apartment or get a job without worrying that my name is going to make an impact.

- It means that I am not questioned about my hairstyle or the way I wear my clothing

-It means that I can believe in the American Dream. I never have to question whether hard work and a good education will lead to some level of prosperity.

-It means that at no time when I was growing up was there a question about whether or not I would go to college. It was expected.

-It means that I can question those in positions of power without fearing for my life.

-It means that if my son is shot and killed under questionable circumstances, he will first be seen as a victim and not a thug even if he has a criminal record.

I could go on and on with this list, but I should not have to. Every white person could come up with their own list if they wanted to be honest. I have watched social media critically in the past week and I have taken the time to record some of the disturbing comments under the #ferguson hashtag. Trust me when I tell you that these are a very small sampling of what I have seen.

The only thing keeping black society from killing itself is white police officers. You Niggers in #Ferguson should be thankful.

We whites are showing you blacks how powerless you really are. We had to remind y'all once again & there's nothing y'all can do #Ferguson

Wonder how long the Niggers in #Ferguson would last if the white police let them alone? Criminals like #MikeBrown need white discipline

ok "protestors" time to go home and get to bed. You all have work tomorrow. Right? O wait. I almost forgot. You bums don't work.

Rodney king was a junky on pcp resisting arrest and driving 120 mph. He deserved it just like the shit in #ferguson was deserved

Every 2 bit ghetto philosopher claims #Ferguson is the start of something. Eh, wait till they run out of crack! Nighty night.

They're looting the liquor stores and hair salons? No surprises there. I bet the libraries are safe tho.

If Darren Wilson was racist why did it take him 6 years to kill a black man?

Those are blatant right? The more subtle arguments are still about the race problem that exists in America. A popular one is the response from a lot of white folks bringing up black on black crime. Or some folks point out that Mike Brown robbed a store prior to the shooting. My favorite is the outcry that ignores the original fact and focuses on the looting that has happened out of anger and frustration about the state of things. A majority of the comments made by black folks on this situation are being attacked by white folks who think that they can silence those speaking out.

There have been four unarmed black men killed by police in the past month. That is a fact. One of them was selling cigarettes illegally, one of them was carrying a BB gun in a Wal-mart, and one of them robbed a store and allegedly resisted arrest. If any of these men had been given a chance to go to trial for their alleged crimes, would they have received the death penalty? Certainly not.

So what does all of this mean? It means that even though we ignore the problems, they still exist. If you have not already, I suggest that you do your own research about police officers killing black people. In a search of Google with the term "unarmed whites killed by police", I did not find one example after 10 pages of results. And it goes beyond Ferguson, or LA, or New York City. Segregation is still a fact, substandard inner city education is still a fact, the disproportionate number of black people in prison for non-violent crimes is still a fact. We can bury our heads in the sand, or we can be allies and do something. Because another part of having white privilege is that our voices generally matter more to policy makers, and those in authority. Speak up, stand up and listen to the people who are living with these realities. Saying that it does not happen, does not change the lived experience of oppressed people.

---Please note that comments on this blog are moderated, so if all you want to do is post inflammatory responses, they are not likely to be published. Move along.

Pro-life vs. Pro-birth

I believe it is safe to say that I am irritated this week by a lot of things surrounding the notorious Hobby Lobby Supreme Court Ruling. I am irritated for at least ten reasons, but for the purposes of this particular posting I am only going to address the simple, glaring and most uninformed and misunderstood problem with this decision. Yelling from the rooftops that this is a pro-life victory is a myth. This may be a pro-birth victory, and it is certainly a victory toward further controlling and making life more difficult for women, but it is anti-child, anti-family and certainly has nothing to do with being pro-life.

I truly believe that there are people who call themselves pro-life who really are just that. They are convicted to the belief that life starts with conception, and they are concerned not just with forcing a woman to carry through with a pregnancy under any and all circumstances, but also are concerned with what happens to that child while in utero and beyond. However, they are a very small minority from everything that I can ascertain. I do not call myself pro-life but am quite sure that I am more pro-life than some of that movements loudest voices. Why? Because I am more concerned with what actually happens in a child's life while they are developing in the womb and in the years following their birth.

I have worked in social work for 15 years, I have lots of years of training and education and I have worked with lots of kids who have probably been victims of blind devotion to pro-birth stances. How do I define the pro-birth folks? Mostly, I see them as the folks who only care about winning the battle of keeping contraceptive devices out of the hands of the women who need and want them under some deluded idea that it kills babies. An egg and sperm meeting up may or may not be a baby. Not going to argue that here. Not really important to this opinion. After fertilization a whole bunch of things have to go right in order for a woman to get pregnant. Many times that does not happen.

What pro-birth folks then do is turn their backs in every other way to the needs of women and children.  Fertilized egg=baby and abortion is wrong. They fight against every form of birth control that they see as even close to being abortion whether they understand the process or not. In many cases they are the same people who believe welfare needs reform, food stamps and WIC should be cut, and so forth. They chant and hold signs that shame women and tell women that there are plenty of people who want to adopt. This is also a myth.

Lots of people want to adopt healthy, strong, white, non-drug addicted, under the age of one babies but the bottom line is that those are like the elusive Chupacabra. What pro-birthers have managed to do is increase the number of kids who are languishing in the system because their mothers did not have access to contraception, went through with pregnancies they did not want/could not handle, and raised kids for a year or two in situations of abuse, neglect, and horror that no child should have to endure. This translates to kids who become undesirable through no fault of their own because they are born malnourished, premature, with drug or alcohol addiction or behavior difficulties that no one really wants to deal with. They then get put in foster homes who cannot handle them and just shuffle them to the next home which does even further damage. Ten years down the road you may have a kid who has never been in a loving home, who is so damaged that they may never really be able to recover, and those pro-birthers are nowhere to be found.

Is it a problem with our society? Most definitely. Is it a problem of poverty? Sure. But it is also a problem that goes far beyond that. Rich white women have unwanted pregnancies too. Those kids may suffer but the problems might look different. Who do we blame? And does it really matter?  No. It does not matter. The bottom line is that cheap and easy access to contraception is the best way to address this in the immediate future. Are there kids who overcome even all of these obstacles? Sure.  But the overwhelming majority are left to suffer, and even the resilient ones who the pro-birthers rally behind as examples of why abortion is wrong suffered for years as powerless children at some point.

So, if you are truly pro-life, more power to you. But do not ever think that I am fooled by the rhetoric. I can see the hypocrisy a mile away.  Pro-birthers also tend to think that marriage equality is wrong and that same sex couples cannot be good parents. However, same sex couples are often the ones taking in these languishing kids because no one else will. We travel overseas to adopt kids from other countries while ignoring the babies in our own who need homes and love more than ever. And for good measure, many pro-birthers are so fundamental in their beliefs that they also want to tell women how and when to feed those babies that they want them to have under any and all circumstances.

It is ludicrous, and I am over it.

Wow, just wow.

Yup, yup, it has been an exceptionally emotional 24 hour period, and much like trying to adequately capture the panoramic view of the coastline of Maine with my SLR or my smartphone, trying to adequately express the happenings, feelings, and reflections of this day is frustrating at best. In my haste and my burning desire to commit things to the written word lest I myself forget, I have tried to give snapshots of my day in a hope that the jumbled collage could in some way represent the experience of the whole for me.

It just now dawned on me that I am the only one who personally experienced altogether the events and the resulting internal workings of my mind, and the resulting external responses of my body. It is in fact possible to feel too much, to talk too much, to write too much.  So the only point of this particular post is to bookmark for me that it has been a roller coaster in the very non-traditional sense. All of today's feelings were real, and they were mostly taken on the whole as joyous.  But in all things, they were tempered by other types of emotions that are maybe more negative. However, each negative as it was had a positive side. I recognize that is almost never the case.

So at one point I am riding a high that I may not come off of for days. At the other point, I maybe should not leave my house, because certainly a day as fabulous as the last one cannot be repeated any time soon, and any sort of terrible thing is probably waiting right outside to smack me back down. I jest of course, but I certainly do not want to forget.

equality
perspective
miracles
love
hope
resilience
connection

I hope that the three folks who read this did not get too excited before beginning, and that they are having half the day that I had yesterday.

Love and Light

Because I am a woman

The first half of this post was written a couple of weeks ago. I just wrote the rest today. But I thought that they sort of went together, so I combined them. Thanks for reading.

There is so much going in the world and I am overwhelmed by it.  I sometimes think that my life would be so much easier if I just did not know about all of the atrocities that are going on.  In the past week, we learned about the nightmare in Nigeria when in April, over 200 girls were taken by a militant group from their school, their families, their community.  And I am so very happy that the story is being covered and that there is momentum around recovering those children. I have followed the story, and I have watched the social media adopt this as the cause of the week.  This is not a criticism, but it has encouraged me to think a bit more critically about where we really are.

We need a cause, and it helps if it comes in nice tidy chunks, if we can make a sound byte out of it, if we can #hashtag it, and even sometimes if we can address it at arm's length.  The experience of those children in Nigeria is heartwrenching, and watching their mothers plead for help and awareness tears me to pieces.  But what happens if they are not found?  What happens if they are found?  What happens next?  I would predict that no matter what happens, in a month we will have forgotten about it and we will have moved on.  That's just the habit that we have gotten into, and I think that we can do better.

The bottom line is that while hundreds of missing girls in one Nigerian community is an atrocity, it is only a snapshot, of a much larger problem in that country, on that continent, and around the world.  There are children abducted and abused and exploited in every corner of this planet.  Human trafficking is a business fueled by the fact that there is a demand (apparently a growing demand) for it.  Let us make no mistake, this is not something that is only happening across the ocean, it is rampant in our own country as well. But we largely ignore it.  And we ignore it not because we do not care, but because individually we feel powerless to do anything about it.

We have been lulled into complacency by news networks that focus more on the minutiae of the lives of celebrities and politicians, on petty arguments about whether or not climate change is "real", and by a complete lack of hardcore journalism.  And we could blame them and stop there, but they are certainly catering to the demand, so we are all complicit in this degradation of the information that we do get.

Continued a couple of weeks later...

Since starting to write this post, and stashing it in my drafts folder, there has been a mass shooting by a coward who felt bad for himself because for some reason women were not attracted to him, and he was jealous of the men around him who were dating women so he stabbed and shot a bunch of people. In response to that, the internet has blown up with speculation about why he did what he did, and women have rallied around an idea on twitter to get together to talk about their shared experiences. And I cannot stop watching it. I am not going to mention the hashtag because the woman who started it is receiving death and rape threats (which speaks volumes to the problem at hand), but most of you reading this will know what I am talking about.

I am continuing the blog post here because it goes right along with it.  I was leading up to the fact that we live in a world where everything is consumable, and this is especially true of women. Pornography, the sex trade, ads, rape and prostitution all exist because somewhere someone is paying for it. Young brides are the norm in other countries, and in this country children are exploited sexually in a number of ways. It's disgraceful. I have followed the hashtag, and it is heartwrenching to hear the stories of women from all walks of life, and to see the negative responses that some of them are getting. I have shared some of my own stories. Some of them personal, and some that I know from being a social worker for so many years. In fact, reading and connecting with these other women has caused me to remember some things that I think that I had forgotten on purpose.

There have been over one million tweets to date using that tag and it has been less than a week. It seems silly and useless to some, but it feels a bit different from some of the other things that people tweet about. It has been powerful to say the least. The media response has been interesting, and I have been especially intrigued by other women who are attacking women who are speaking up. Yes, we live in a country with many freedoms, and due to the women who have come before us, we have more rights than we once did. However, it is obvious that there is still a long journey ahead of us. We should not expect any less in our demand for equality due to the fact that at least we do not have it as bad as _____. It is not a contest. Every woman should have equal rights, and the right to feel safe wherever they live, but I should not feel guilty for telling my truth because someone else has it worse.

It is my hope that women can find a way to harness some of this energy and momentum to change the world. I am raising a little boy, and I want for him to grow up in a world where women are not objectified, attacked and exploited. He will learn to respect women in our home, but he at this point will be bombarded by messages that he is less than if he shows respect for and stands up for women.  And that is a shame.

Call me crazy, apparently that is still okay

So, my education is in psychology probably because understanding people is something that has always been interesting to me.  I have found that the internet is a great way for me to study my favorite subject.  Recently, I have thought a lot about conversations about acceptance and rights for all groups of people.  There is a group of marginalized people often left out of this conversation because let's be honest, we have to have some group to make fun of.  I am a part of this group, so perhaps I am hyper-vigilant about the language that gets used.  This is not a post about poor me, your words hurt me, because I generally let words just be words.  However, I hope it does serve as some food for thought.

I am a person who is living with Bipolar Disorder sprinkled with a good dab of crippling anxiety here and there.  This is not a badge I wear, it is just a fact, and I try to be as honest and vocal about it as seems appropriate because most people think that I am pretty "normal", and I want the stigma to go away.  That's where we get into trouble though.  You see, I wear the normal mask well.  I've done it most of my life, and I have good coping skills (with a healthy dose of pills), that keep me in the mainstream.  So people do not filter themselves around me.  People who know me know my story, but it is not how I introduce myself to new folks.  So I hear a lot of ignorant stuff.  

I have two lives that I have lived.  The first is pre-diagnosis, the second is post-diagnosis.  So in theory I am five years old in this second existence.  And being in a group of THEM is interesting.  I get ouchy about these words, attitudes, and general misunderstanding not for myself, but for my fellow mental health sufferers who do not have support systems in place, are homeless, are embarrassed, feel worthless, and do not know that it is okay for us to advocate for ourselves.  There are millions of people with mental health issues who are not managing as well as I am.  Perhaps my education in Psychology has helped me, perhaps I am more resilient, I do not know, and I guess that it is not all that important.  So I sometimes feel compelled to speak for the ones without a voice.  And so here is what all you "normal" folks should know.

• Referring to someone as nuts or crazy or schizophrenic or bipolar is really not okay.  I mean you could call me Bipolar I guess because that is part of who I am.  But your boss having a mood swing does not make her bipolar.  Stop it.
• If you are going to throw out a diagnosis for someone because of their behavior and because your degree in physics clearly makes you that type of expert, at least have a basic understanding of the diagnosis.  Schizophrenia does not really mean what you think it means.  Do some research.
• You do not want anyone to use the word gay or retard or any of the words that we use to disparage another on racial identity, but crazy?  Go for it.  
• Remember that mental illness is largely a silent disease.  Most people do not go around advertising it, so watch what you say to anyone in this regard.  You know not to tell a racist joke in certain circles because a person's skin color is usually pretty obvious.  Mental illness is trickier than that.  And the truth is, your boss may really be bipolar, and when she hears that you were joking about it, it could get uncomfortable.
• Know that there are 10 million people in this country struggling with what the National Institute of Mental Health calls "serious mental illness".  I would argue that most MI is pretty serious, but I will not get into an argument of semantics here.  In any case, this designation means that the mental illness causes a severe impairment in the ability to "do life" the way that others expect us to get it done.
• The above statistic refers to those cases that are known.  My experience would lead me to believe that is a lower number than the realily. Probably because so many people are scared to get help or seek treatment because it really does change the way the world looks at us.

Oh hell, I could go on and on, but I want to make sure that you finish reading this and you get the gist.  In January of 2009, my entire world turned on its ear.  I had a job that I rocked at most of the time, I had a one year old baby boy, I had a great relationship.  And then it all changed in the matter of a 24 hour period.  Everyone wants to know when I first suspected that I was crazy...can I steal the LGBTQ answer that I was born this way?  Because here is the thing.  If mental illness was due to life experiences like abuse or drug use, or any of the other ways the uninformed seem to think that mental illness happens, then I would not have one.  Now we could argue all day about genetics and why am I sick and my brother is not, but no one really knows.  I like to think of it as a time bomb.  Like it was always there...I was always a little nervous, I always worried more than most kids.  But when I track my symptoms, I generally think of my college years.  I went to an academically rigorous institution.  It was really stressful.  Sometimes I think that I had the stuff needed in my brain to make it happen, and stress was the lighter of the fuse.

I did lots of self medicating over the years to deal with all of the stuff my brain was doing to me.  And I learned to wear the mask. I worked in the field for crying out loud...allowing myself to admit a problem would have been calamitous both internally and externally.  Because the truth is that admitting to yourself or to others openly that you have a mental health issue makes a difference.  People lose jobs, lose respect, are questioned about their parenting ability, and so on.  I am not trying to argue that MI is in some way comparable or as bad as being in some other marginalized group.  But it still totally sucks.  And it sucks a lot worse for people who are not hooked up with quality treatment.

Mental illness often looks like drug addiction, or homelessness, wrecklessness and a host of other behaviors that make our friends and family mad.  We get told all sorts of ridiculous stuff about exercising more, thinking happy thoughts, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps etc.  Yeah that's helpful.  I get that people do not know the "right" thing to say when I mention my illness.  So just judiciously keep your mouth shut, hug me, love me, offer to babysit my kid for a few hours.  But do not tell me oh yeah, my great uncle on my mother's side committed suicide.  That's horrible for you, but has nothing to do with my experience.  

I am asking you to do your part to change the culture so that it becomes okay for mentally ill folks to ask for help.  Educate yourself some so that you might be able to recognize when a friend or family member are screaming silently for help.  According to the website here there is a death by suicide somewhere on the globe every 40 seconds.  Almost 2% of deaths internationally are suicides.  That's some sobering shit.  My guess is that there are many reading this who know someone no matter how distantly who has committed suicide.  And the terrible thing is that it is 100% preventable.  

It is a systematic problem that is not going to be solved quickly, I get that.  But when we consciously change our language, we begin to think about individuals and when we think about individuals we think about their problems.  When we think about their problems, some of us feel compelled to do something about it.  That's all I am going for here.  Educate yourself.  Choose reliable websites.  I find that .org and .edu are good places to start.  I cannot be explained on Wikipedia.  Don't look there.  

When we use "crazy" words to describe behaviors that we find annoying, offensive or out there, the message is sent that mental illness is still not okay.  It is a weakness, it is the fault of the ill, we chose this for ourselves.  Our brains are attacking us on a minute by minute basis.  It is exhausting.  Be gentle, be understanding, it's not like we want to be out of the ordinary, it just is.

Some Helpful Links:

Good articles and online support group for the mentally ill and their caregivers

National Alliance on mental illness

National Institutes of Mental Health

Managing Diversity

I have been wrestling with issues surrounding diversity for a while now.  I long for diversity in my life because I can see the value of it, but it is lacking in my world.  Or so I thought.  What I am finding is that diversity is not about skin color, sex, or sexual orientation solely.  Diversity is all around me in the attitudes and opinions of the people I associate with every day.  Sometimes diversity is very subtle and can easily be missed and if I want to broaden my horizons, I need to broaden the way that I look at diversity.

Yes, I want colorful people in my child's life.  I want them in my life.  But if I am willing to dig a little past appearances, I can find what I am looking for.  The subtler forms of diversity can be difficult to manage because opinions and attitudes can be tricky.  We naturally gravitate toward people who share our beliefs, values and dreams right?  But I think that life can be so much richer when we have to think deeply, debate respectfully, and open our minds to the ideas of others.  How do we do this while still sticking strongly to our own values and attitudes?  I've decided that it does not go against my values to have conversations with people I don't agree with, in fact, I am evolving into the type of person who is beginning to value this.

I don't think that we have enough opportunity in daily life for critical thinking and that is what I am talking about.  I can remain true to myself while opening myself to the ideas of others.  Some of my best friends are people who I originally was afraid of, did not understand, or really did not like.  It is hard to forge a friendship with someone when you don't have strong feelings about them one way or the other, and how boring would my life be if I only associated with people who never challenged my ideas and attitudes.

I had a good conversation with a friend the other day about voter registration laws.  I would not call it a heated discussion per se, but we were definitely coming at it from different angles.  I like to think that we both came away from it with some new knowledge or ways of thinking about it.  The conclusion seemed to be that we did not know the answers, and decided that sometimes that has to be good enough.

So I am challenging myself, and whoever else may read this to open your mind and your circle a little bit.  Identify where diversity is lacking in your life, then seek to meet and associate with those people you don't understand or agree with.  I really think that it is a step toward peace that we don't often think about.

Living in a UU world

So, I do a lot of thinking, and I get lots of ideas about things and I do not always know what to do with them.  Instead of flooding my friends and family with all of this, and because I am not a disciplined journal writer, I decided that I would write a blog as a part of my spiritual practice and journey.

I cannot guarantee that everything I write about will be about my church or the faith tradition that I love, but I guess that I figure that I am beginning to define myself in certain ways and being a UU is a big one, so I imagine it will all be related.

UU stands for Unitarian Universalist, and is the faith I have found after years of searching that works best for me.  It is a covenantal faith tradition, meaning that we do not have a text like the Bible or the Koran that we follow, or a doctrine or creed that drives us in our worship and fellowship together.  We are guided instead by promises that we make to each other and by seven principles that we hold to be true.  Unitarian Universalist Principles can be found here.  Keep reading and I will link you to the children's version which in my opinion is cooler and easier to relate to.

I have grown up as a religious person for a good part of my life, and have been raised in a number of Protestant faiths as a child.  However, as an adult, I had a lot of questions that could not be answered, and were not really appreciated in many of those religions.  So I just stopped going.  A few years ago, my dear husband decided that we should go back to church and I was terrified.  I was not sure what I believed, but was sure I did not believe the way church people believed, and I dug in my heels.

I began to search online for a non-denominational religion that I felt I could at least sit through the service without feeling like a complete hypocrite.  Somehow, I ran across the UU church.  I had never heard of it, so I did not have many of the preconceived notions that are out there about what a UU church is.  There is a lot of misunderstanding, but I am sure that is true of any religion.  I will leave that for another blog post.

We went to the church a few times, and it was such a drastic change from what we were both used to that I think we got a little scared.  There was no Bible, many religions were discussed and honored, and it just felt a little loosey goosey to two people who grew up with much more religious structure.  So we went back to be unchurched for a couple of years, but I kept thinking about and researching the church, the faith and the organization.

Along came lil man, and then we started thinking about church again.  I kept thinking of the first principle of the worth and dignity of every person and the fact that all religious and spiritual beliefs are accepted (perhaps questioned and debated) and that he would learn about all of them and then be free to choose his own path when he was older.  So when he was old enough to participate in children's religious education we went back.  We have been going every since, and are so involved in the community now that I am not sure what I would do without it.

I enjoy the challenge of having to find my own spiritual path, and to be honest, I am not sure what it is.  I cannot define who I am or what I believe spiritually with the conviction of some of my fellow congregants.  I know that I believe in being kind, I believe in acceptance, and I believe that everyone has the right to believe or not believe however they wish.  And that's what I love about the fact that I have found this religious community to which I now proudly belong.

Oh yeah, the children's principles are here.