yes all women | Evening Light

I have some amazing friends. I spent time with one of them last night, after an incredibly difficult and emotional therapy appointment. We didn’t talk about therapy. We didn’t talk about ‘my issues’. We got caught up on ‘things in general’ and shared some laughs, some compassion, and some connected time. It was exactly what I needed. Awareness. Support. Affection. Openness.

Things in therapy are headed for deeper waters these days. This is the first time therapy has ever held real promise of reaching emotional wellness… I try not to get my hopes up, and simply be present, and continue to practice what is working now.

Strange stuff in the news; a lot of articles seem more ‘emotional‘ than I recall news tending to be. It’s probably ‘just me’; like anyone else, I read the news in the context of my own experience, and of late it has been an emotional experience. I’m not running from that. I am learning to value my emotional experience, make room for it, and allow it to speak to me. I am choosing to spend less time with people who are not in a place where they can also respect my emotional experience. They have their own path, I’ll let them walk it without interference from me; we are each having our own experience.

Each having our own experience, walking our own path, and making our own choices.

Much of the afternoon yesterday I felt raw, exposed, vulnerable, and on the edge of panic. I don’t waste any time during my one-hour session with my therapist, we dive into the rough stuff straight away, these days. I walk away feeling certain the effort – and progress – are worth the money. It’s still hard to be near ‘my fellow man’ for hours afterward, and the idle chatter of people who don’t share my experiences grates on my raw nerves. It’s okay; hanging out with a friend is a salve for raw nerves, every time.

Some metaphor about blooming in shadows, or perspective, or… hey, it’s a flower. Flowers are lovely.

The world isn’t seeming a very nice place lately, and it’s not for any lack of loveliness; there are flowers and birdsong aplenty, children’s laughter is still commonplace, and there’s no shortage of sunny summer days. People can be so mean to each other, though, so cruel, so callous. ‘Political rhetoric’ is sometimes so vicious, so lacking in compassion, that it hardly seems that anyone is still aware that the outcome of the things being discussed effect people. Real people. Human beings. Has everyone forgotten? It’s not actually ‘about’ ideology – none of it. It’s all about people, and most everything we do and choose ultimately is.

Please be kind to people. Crazy people, sad people, angry people, frustrated people, people whose ideas are not your own, people who are famous, people who have been overlooked; it costs nothing to be kind, and it can change the world. Please be kind to women people, men people, children people. Please just be kind – there isn’t room on this planet for even one more jerk. Please be kind to people you just don’t understand, and to people you understand only to well, and dislike completely; kindness can change hearts, and open minds. Please be kind to yourself, too; you won’t find yourself being any kinder to others than you are capable of being for yourself. Please be kind to sick people, and to people struggling to be well on limited resources. Please be kind to people who are suffering, even when you are suffering, too. Please just take a moment to be kinder than you knew you could, and to understand that each time you do, you prepare yourself for a better world by helping to create it. I’ll do it, too.

Today is a good day to choose kindness. Today is a good day to reach out to a far away friend. Today is a good day to look ahead to better days, and make the choices that create them. Today is a good day to change the world.

This morning I am sitting here in the quiet of dawn, and contemplating this sweet chill moment of satisfaction and contentment; I want for nothing. At least right now, this very specific and limited immediate moment of now, I am not experiencing desire, hunger, craving, yearning, or any urgent sense of need. It’s lovely.

It got me thinking, though, of recent tragedies, and lives lost to the dark side of desire: entitlement, jealousy, possessiveness, attachment, and yes, craving, yearning, wanting, ‘needing’ – those urgent hard-to-resist feelings that say there is something amiss in the world when some object, experience, or person is not available for ownership, possession, or purchase. I doubt it is the desire itself that is the challenge. My own experiences tell me that the difficulties (and horrors) develop when a person is overcome by the conviction that some outcome is their due. Expectation. Demand. Entitlement.

I’ve struggled with it, too. It’s very human to want something or someone so badly that it takes over reason and good sense, destroys compassion and consideration, impedes respect, or seems to justify bad behavior; it isn’t appropriate to take action on those feelings in any way that encroaches on someone else’s will, personal liberty, control of their own body, sense of safety, or freedom to withhold consent. Rapists are a problem, and the lack of consent is the defining thing, and even in the face of the obviousness of it there manages to be discussion about it, as if there is some permissible amount of non-consensual conduct that is acceptable. (There isn’t.)

It took me a long time to get here. I have been wading through a lot of wreckage, and looking back on me over the years, I owe a number of very good-hearted people apologies of one sort or another; damage doesn’t truly excuse being a shitty human being. I have struggled with myself, and I still do, figuring out the consent piece, for myself, as I find my way in the world. I wasn’t exactly brought up to respect my own boundaries, to expect that my consent – or lack of it – would be respected, or even to say no and mean it in clear, explicit terms. The result? I sometimes didn’t treat other rape survivors well; I treated them as badly as I treated myself. I didn’t understand the nature of consent, or that the word ‘no’ had any power to change events. My own experiences didn’t support that. I didn’t understand it is my right to choose, to say yes or no, and to have those choices be accepted and honored. I spent years as an unwitting accomplice to rape culture; the survivor-apologist, so busy being ‘accountable for my own actions’ that I was willing to excuse my violation. Getting past that and building a healthy understanding of the sanctity of my consent has been a complicated battle.

[Are you listening? It isn’t too late to show yourself compassion, to respect your own pain, to stand on your values and say ‘no’. It’s okay, too, to feel shame at the damage you’ve done as a tool in your own destruction – and to choose another path, now. You said it would matter if just one woman, one survivor, would say “I’m sorry I made things worse.” I’m here. I’m one woman. I’m sorry.]

So… here we all are… talking about the issues more openly, more insistently, more frankly. That, in spite of the pain and the circumstances, is an important step forward.

In the midst of pain, there is still beauty.

Today is a good day to talk about difficult subjects honestly. Today is a good day to be compassionate and concerned. Today is a good day to respect myself, and others. Today is a good day to change the world.

The Ups, The Downs, the Friendships

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The Ups, The Downs, the Friendships

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The Dark Side of Desire

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