Heidweasels

It really has NOT been the easiest few weeks. I mean, there was the boiler disaster, on top of the Shutdown From Hell at Work. Then I had to do CPR on my doorstep (LITERALLY on my doorstep).  It is fair to say that I have been struggling of late. A bit like either treading water when you cannot feel the bottom or a fish out of it.  Neither is pleasant. Also, Fluffy Minion Has had to have three teeth out, bust a stitch because Fluffy Minion does not do wet food, so now has another week of antibiotics and also is not feeling at all the thing with a sore mouth, human slave forcing said antibiotics down its chops twice a day. Fluffy Minion (and human slave) are unimpressed.

Also, the local disability shenanigans going on. And then there’s the antisemitism. I had to block two people (no loss actually) and now my imminent birthday plans might be cancelled at the last minute.

So colour me surprised when I just could not cope with the idea of the public meeting tonight. I’ve got a document to write for this campaign, plus a motion to write for the same thing, amongst other things. And more work crapola. I am back to feeling like my life is going to Hell in a hand basket and I don’t like feeling this out of control. So I decided to exercise some self care and come home once I dropped off my buckets (long story).

What does this mean? It means HELLO HEIDWEASELS!

Last week I had a Very Bad Time. As in I was actually planning to do something Very Unpleasant. As in planned a LOT of it, which is quite unusual in that I do not get to that point very often. Really, I don’t. Having been criticised for NOT sharing, I did and didn’t get a response from some busy folks.

That, dear friends, is like ringing the sodding dinner bell for the heidweasels. They have taken up residence and they appear to be settling in. Fuckers.

Heidweasels are the charming (not), negative messages I have going on in my head. They are there every day and some days they are over-powering. Seriously. I tell myself that they only feel this bad because the therapy I’ve been having *is* effective and tackling them. Yeah, right. Let me introduce them: In the first corner, we have Stop Bothering People, in the second there is You Don’t Deserve It and bringing up the rear is You’ll Fail Anyway, So Why Bother? The first two are the main offenders and feed into each other (sinister, tag team anyone?) and I’m pretty sure number three will be along any time now. By the way, there are more. Anything and everything negative I think about myself eventually comes back to this. All the anxiety I feel at everything etc etc etc. And I know who gave me those messages. It would have been her birthday last week.

What this means is that, along with the monthly inevitable (and yet another reminder I have to make a decision about *that* cancer preventing surgery), plus my birthday and the usual depression about not having children, all of the above means I am spending more energy than usual on trying to smack them down and it is really bloody hard. And exhausting. I’m tired, upset and fed up. So every little knock, every perception that I’m a horrible person, every small mistake and it escalates and magnifies pretty sodding quickly. EVERYONE tells me to share this, my therapist, my friends but people I know really do have a shit load going on and, guess what, I don’t want people to hate me or avoid me because of this AND because of message number one, i usually just STFU and get on with it, with the occasionally bonkers and self-loathing message getting out as a hint.   Also, I did share this but I think the person in question missed it. And also the guy I was last sort-of dating? Might be a narc. Yay.

In short, the Costumeer is pissed off with the world, worried about her job, paranoid she is saying the wrong things to people and seems to have an infestation of heidweasels. Which is not a good thing if it ends up with another depressive episode (what is it about me and Mid-May for sodding episodes of depression?)

On the plus side, there’s a new season of Grimm AND New Adventures Of Monkey on Twitter, I can now get Cully & Sully soup locally and my neighbour’s dog loves me. And I made it through 80% of a conference yesterday. So go me.

Please excuse me, the heidweasels are laughing at me. I need to go and hit them with chocolate and mindfulness.

PS my birthday plans might all suddenly go tits up too. One remains unamused and wants to win the lottery, please.

Difficult Days.

Take it from the nurse: You’re never quite prepared for certain events.

The Costumeer has been quiet for a bit, mainly because I haven’t had the words to post about the kerfuffle I have experienced in relation to Gender Wars, or all the other things in relation to Certain People On The Left Of Politics saying really unpleasant stuff about the holocaust (newsflash: members of my family were gassed in Auschwitz).

I have had a trying few days with my new boiler going in and other associated works, so I wasn’t looking forwards to the engineer coming in today.

Intercom buzzed. I opened my door and then all hell broke loose.

No, the plumbing is (mostly) fine, but someone else isn’t. I cannot say more than that just now, but suffice to say I’ve had a pretty ghastly week on annual leave and this morning just took the biscuit. I’m off out for a spot of lunch (and to use a functioning loo).

Pip pip. I intend to post controversial stuff very soon.

On The Abortion Act

Today is the 50th Anniversary of the Abortion Act in the U.K. At a time when women’s reproductive rights are under attack globally, with women facing imprisonment for having a miscarriage, where women have died in Ireland, because the doctors had their hands tied by the law and in America, where Abortion rights are increasingly restricted and people have their rights to use the Pill under attack.

In 1967, women in the U.K. could die or be left sterile at the hands of backstreet abortionists. Some of them were very good, but many were not. Desperate women, who couldn’t afford to seek treatment in private clinics abroad, had few options: disgrace and a mother’s home, where their child would probably be adopted, forced into marriage or a backstreet abortion. This was before the days of oral contraception being widely available. 

My mother was a young solicitor, working for the civil service and she was asked to join the drafting team. My mother was an incredibly intelligent woman, who could look at all the evidence and make a reasonable decision. She knew that this Act was the right thing to do and worked on it. For her, it wasn’t about killing babies, a claim the pro-life crowd often make, it was about saving the lives of pregnant women. Remember, one of the criteria relating to abortion is about the mental health of the mother? I often wonder what stories they heard or experiences she and the rest of their team had to put that consideration in.

Abortion isn’t about getting rid of unwanted pregnancies for convenience or a form of contraception. As someone who has nursed people, I know the reactions they have and I don’t judge them at all. Every individual in this situation has made the decision they have for a reason and it is their right to do so. I don’t have the right to decide what is right for anyone else. I mean, gender selective abortion, using it as a form of contraception because nothing else has been used - well, yes, I have a problem with that. I don’t believe in abortion personally myself, but I am pro-choice and I will defend any person’s right to safe abortion with my life, because I do not have the right to force my beliefs on others. I am a supporter of Daisy Chain - an organisation who offer support to women having to walk past protestors for appointments at clinics. Pro-life groups harass already vulnerable people and I think it is appalling. I’d like to see them excluded from hospital premises and put under a minimum 100m ban from approaching. Their right to free speech is interfering with medical treatment and they have no right to badger anyone about why they are going anywhere for any procedure. 

In many cases, people choose abortion, sometimes for their own health. For some, it’s related to serious genetic and other conditions that have shown up on prenatal testing. These are all difficult decisions for people.

I once asked my mother about what she thought about the Abortion Act, given she had five children and refused a termination for her fifth child, even when told she would probably die at birth or the baby would die (for the record, she had her fifth section and my sibling was just fine). She had a lot of people, including her own retired GP father telling her to have a termination. She told me quite simply that it was about the numbers of women who were dying, contracting infections, becoming unable to have babies in future. She was shocked at the figures she was seeing. That was why she supported the Act and it’s drafting. She then told me that within a year of it becoming law they knew it had worked.

The numbers of women dying dropped. The new law had saved lives.

So today, I will be thinking about my mother, who, for all her faults in parenting me, made such a massive contribution to women’s reproductive rights in this country. 

Thanks Mum.

Me, too

This is going to be a difficult post for me. I’ve not been as forthcoming as I could have been on social media, mainly because I struggle a huge deal with my self esteem and confidence and the ASD has resulted in my not forming any relationship where intimacy has resulted. Due to resultant control issues (partly down to abuse I endured as a child, partly because of the ASD), I have more than a passing interest in BDSM and, around ten years ago, I was exploring that, non-sexually, and making friends who understood and did not judge me for having ideas and being inquisitive about things that other people thought made me “a freak” or simply completely got the wrong end of the stick.  I am not a freak. I am an individual.

I had been raped before: my second sexual experience was being raped, in my own bed, aged 18, by someone my flatmate had invited back to our flat. He would not take no for an answer. I experienced first hand the instinctive blame put on the victim by friends of the perpetrator. It took me a decade to go to the police and by that time, they couldn’t track me down. But they did listen.

When I was training in a city away from home, I started to explore my different interests within the community down there. I felt a real sense of freedom and release at being able to express myself to the fullest sense possible of my identity. I am what is known as a switch and I am also poly in direction too. I am both dominant and submissive. I like men and women, although it is more of a thing that I simply find things about people attractive and I don’t define myself as one thing or another. That’s a conversation for another time.

Then I met someone I thought I could trust to explore these things with on a sexual level. We talked a lot about various things and I felt I knew him. There is, in this kind of thing, situations where you have a mentor and also partners. I knew he was seeing other people. I assumed I was being invited into that collective. I assumed he would take precautions. That assumption has haunted me for ten years.

The circumstances of what occurred meant I would never even have been able to pursue charges being laid. Suffice to say, I was very clear about what was OK and not OK and I was ignored. At the time, I was not in a position to be able to do anything about it. My trust, which in this case is paramount, was utterly betrayed. I had said no, I had used my safe word and he had refused to stop. That’s rape.That is all I am saying about it. The next morning I went home and later that evening discovered from him that all he had wanted was one night of sex. I felt humiliated, betrayed, deeply upset, utterly vulnerable. I stepped back from the community for a while, to lick my wounds and be more careful.

Except that this wasn’t the end of it.

Two months later I had to report to the GUM clinic, because of symptoms I had been having. I discovered that I had Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, bilaterally. For those of you who know about this, you’ll know that’s not good. I was examined and asked for the (male) student not to be in the room. I was ignored. I was handed two lots of strong antibiotics for a significant period, which made me feel very unwell and on the advent of my 33rd birthday was told, possibly incorrectly (I have since discovered the clinic has a habit of mixing up notes) that while I hadn’t contracted any kind of blood-borne disease and while it wasn’t Gonorhhea, Syphilis etc, the damage that had occured meant it was highly improbable I would ever have children. 

Let that sink in.

As a responsible adult, I contacted the dickhead who did this to me to inform him which is when he told me that one of his partners had had a UTI and they’d had unprotected sex. He casually informed me that it could be transmitted through sex. Eye-opening. I was devastated.

I decided, realising the legal route wasn’t an option, with the support of some friends, I told our de facto community leader what had happened, because of safety concerns for others. The result was that while he continued to be a respected member of the community, I was ostracised. I no longer felt safe going to events or clubs, let alone exploring anything with my friends. And i was developing quite the skill with a bullwhip. I still support the community. I still want friends in the community, but I will never again want to be active in that way. This event destroyed that - and sex generally for me - I thought permanently. I have not trusted close male friends for a decade. Until two weeks ago, I had not even kissed someone in seven years. I have met someone quite wonderful who I am having an unconventional friendship with, but it is slow going. I’m going to have to tell him the above, in far more detail: I am not looking forwards to it. 

Sex was always something where people just wanted the physical act from me. Even in an 18 month relationship, they had no interest in intimacy. My sexual history has been occasionally falling into bed with someone and a crippling lack of confidence and self esteem to approach people I liked, along with sheer terror of my emotional responses. On top of that, one delightful horror, jealous at my “getting to someone first”, got that partner drunk, got him to tell her everything I had asked him to do in bed and then, I kid you not, told all of our mutual acquaintances. And this guy? The first person I had trusted to sleep with after the first rape. Some 18 months later. It was another 18 months before I went there again and in typical questionable judgement, that guy knew how vulnerable I was in so many ways, yet not only split up with his girlfriend for a week to sleep with me, guilt free, but also then threatened me with that if I ever told anyone about it, he would just say I was crazy, making it up and people would believe him, not me. Unfortunately for him, he we overheard saying that. This guy had been someone I trusted implicitly. It was devastating.

A friend put up a post a couple of days ago about what happened to her at the festival and the response of people around her to it. There has been some backlash. I sort of understand their reaction, but I deeply understand hers, too. Which is why I am writing this post, now. In some ways, I a, disappointed in some of our mutual friends. I am not sure they are truly taking the time to understand and respect her experience and what effect it has had on her. 

I have alluded to some of this on a comment on that post. I’m not sure of what will happen. What I will say is that it has taken me ten years to start exploring intimacy and challenge these - and other associated - demons. 

This isn’t the only occasion something awful happened to me. I do hope it was the last.

#metoo

Tricky Emotions

I know, I know - it has been a while.

It has been one of those things where life has got in the way of blogging. Significantly. I am now back at work, however the work issue continues and I am off to speak to a completely different area about a job they have going next week. Whatever people are saying to outsiders where I am now, that's not what they are saying to me. I am about done. Then there is work itself. Sigh. Cannot talk about it because of the nature of what I do. I do have outlets though.

Much to the surprise of many who know me, I have been seeing someone I met through a dating app that will remain nameless. I knew what I was getting into when I met him - nothing long term, nothing exclusive, mainly friendship - and I have seen him a few times and we have been chatting over various media. He is very nice, we get along extremely well and I do find him attractive. Primarily we are friends and we had a good chat about this last night about where we both stand. It was honest and open. Believe me, I am not about to screw up what is turning out to be a very good friendship that gets me out of the house. Then, as we were saying goodnight, I felt a very strong urge that I wanted to kiss him. I haven't felt that for a long time.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have been celibate for nearly ten years. It's in relation to an incident that happened just before my mother died and I was left to face repercussions. Then the information I was given at the time I found out a year ago may not have been accurate. I haven't kissed anyone in seven years and I haven't tried anything else in the same amount of time. I had an appalling flashback. I should also say that because of my childhood, I am very much touch-starved and deprived. The autism makes managing touch difficult. I have had two relatively short term relationships with men and the rest of my limited experience has been alcohol-fuelled, scratching an itch, my getting the wrong end of the stick (see: autism) or being lied to. Then there's the extreme lack of self esteem and confidence, the issues I have processing emotions and the social rules processing and understanding thing that I also have. To say that some appalling specimens of humanity have been involved in making me the woman I am today is an understatement. Then there were two assaults. Yes, you read that right: in conclusion, I lack the ability to trust, I cannot read normal social cues and I struggle with my own emotions and feelings around developing relationships and attraction. Normally I try and ignore it. But here's the thing: I like the physical. I am not asexual. I don't follow or think I should have to conform to social norms of relationships. I am open to non-exclusivity and non-binary - I just expect openness, honestly and clear intentions. A one night stand is not something I want to be a part of. I need respect.

But today I find myself struggling with my own sense of lack of attractiveness. I am overweight and don't consider myself the most attractive of people. I am told this is nonsense but the truth of the matter is that either I haven't recognised someone wants to be with me, my pickiness and wariness has held me back exploring things (even asking for coffee) and my terror of rejection (because, hey, that's all I know) is actually crippling. A lovely guy I want to be friends with more than anything else basically told me that he likes spending time with me as friends, but he's pretty much not that into me. This is not his fault, it is how I am reading this and how it is feeding into that self-destructive part of my nature and I do recognise that. What I am not succeeding with here is processing it well. So far today I have cleaned my flat like a maniac and am sitting here writing this post. Neither of these things are taking the time to process how I am feeling and getting to the root cause. At least I recognise that though, that's a good thing.

I see my therapist in about 45 minutes and this is top of the agenda. These feelings are a huge part of something I need to get to grips with.

Failure To Launch

Another title would be Arrested Development. Also, this is the second attempt to write this and I just lost 600 words *glares at Blogger*.

If you live with any long term condition, you expend a disproportionate amount of additional energy trying to keep up. Whether it's planning and management of normal, daily activities (like commuting and work), reflecting on how other people react to you or whatever, the average person like me (or other different people) probably spends around four hours plus using up additional mental energy managing situations or even reminding themselves of normal social behaviour that "normal" people just don't use. It is exhausting. I'll shout out here too to my friends who are exhausted living and trying to manage their conditions and are lucky if they can manage normal activities, like dressing. I have periods like this from time to time and it is a shitty, shitty state of being, let me tell you.

Do you have to consider access situations, availability of toilets when considering going out to the pub, cinema or theatre? The train? Whether or not it will be loud and bright or the numbers of people there? Do you spend hours trying to calm yourself down because someone has discriminated against you, made some unfeeling comments or you know you did something off and are beating yourself up about it? No? Then you're not using up additional energy. 

What is probably worse about this whole thing, is that many of us are frustrated. For people on the autistic spectrum, only about 15% of us are in full time employment. If you are lucky, you're somewhere with an understanding employer and robust HR. I know from friends' stories that this sometimes isn't the case. Most people in employment with a long term condition will speak to you about the constant extended effort to keep up - or to go above and beyond - to "prove" you, the disabled person, belong somewhere. I live with a constant worry over my sick leave. Using additional energy means that you experience more stress (and I suffer extreme stress already). This has a knock on effect on emotional health and your immune system. As I have a couple of conditions that I can wake up with having something go click in a bad way, I perpetually worry about if I will be OK tomorrow. Occupational Health and I discussed a year ago if I should drop down to 30 hours a week on these grounds, but most employers aren't really keen on that. Plus one is dealing with misconceptions and discrimination all the time. It is.... frustrating.

I do also feel a sense of frustrated potential. I am not a stupid person, however I have had to recognise that I have limits. I am trying to put my foot down and stop myself from over-extending myself. That is very frustrating. During my twenties and thirties, at the time I was studying for my two degrees, I had my mental health take a nose-dive. On top of this, I had some long term physical complaints kick off as well. Throw in some particularly stressful family events for good measure. I passed both my degrees. Possibly, I could have done better. Frankly, I'm amazed I managed to pass at all sometimes. The rest of the time, I feel like I was psychologically, emotionally and continually treading water, in perpetual motion, all the time. All of which, you guessed it, uses up energy. Life, for me, feels like an uphill battle all the time. Work and all that goes with it, is exhausting. Trying to deal with my ongoing health issues takes up a lot of energy. I have rediscovered my fire with politics, which is good. But I am also constantly angry about the uphill battles we different people face every single day from the second we open our eyes. Bear in mind a lot of us are also challenging misconceptions every day too. Guess what? Tiring.

I saw a video recently, that likens the autistic daily experience to putting in everything you got into the performance of a lifetime. Every day. I think that's probably a good analogy for us, as well as other with difference. 

Careerwise, there's lots I would have liked to do. I would like to have become a journalist and I still hold out hope of being a writer, dyslexia and everything else be damned. There are other things I would like to have considered too. However a lot of this requires a CV that has exceptional volunteer and community experience, as well as a top-notch degree. I just didn't have the energy beyond keeping my head above water. And that is how it was and how it is. I have come to terms with that. I probably would have done some things differently and I do try not to dwell on a lot of this too much. Academically, a late diagnosis of dyslexia also didn't help (with an English degree).

That is what I mean by Failure to Launch: the missed opportunities, the chances missed, the having to turn things down because otherwise I'll spread myself too thin and have to deal with the consequences.  Learning to accept that has been a challenge in itself. 

However, I also remind myself that I am capable of picking myself up in difficult times and starting over. That, despite everything, every day, I am still here and that, in itself, is an achievement. I own my own home, I have a career of sorts. I say I'm winning. 

On Faith and Paranoia

Yes, two posts in one day!

Those of you who know me in real life know that my approach to converting to a particular religion is turning into more of a forty-years-roaming-the-wilderness as opposed to something that is recognisably structured and to the point.

Some of this has to do with my moving to a different city for six years and not getting on with the teacher and the rest is a complicated mix of health issues, rota clashes and an unhealthy dose of self-doubt and whether or not I'm a fake, desperate for persecution in some way, or undeserving. I'm trying to be kind to myself on this.

I have been trying to convert to Liberal Judaism for some years. Alongside this, I have been trying to learn Hebrew. The additional studies also include an understanding of Judaism, history of the people and some of the additional complexity, for example the Israel context.

Let me set something straight for people: I am a Zionist, in the sense that I believe in the ethos and context behind the need for the Jewish people to have a country in which they can determine their own future. I also believe in the right of Israel to exist.

What I will now elucidate for you are a few other points:

I do not believe that Israel should be only for Jews.
I take all religious writings from a socio-anthropomorphic viewpoint (I.e I see the stories as explanations of how the world came to be, rather than G-d-given)
I also take the view that religions can and should evolve with the times.
I believe that everyone living between the river and the sea are entitled to full citizenship, recognition, human and civil rights. The end.
I believe in calling out everyone who commits atrocities or imposes restrictions on civilians, regardless of which side they are on
I believe that you need to read widely on various viewpoints, because in the middle is the actual truth. I also know that everyone sees things differently. And believe we should listen to each other

Anyway, that's that. I'm now off the subject of Israel for the rest of this post.

Nothing brings home to you the fact that you have lost white privilege more than the first time you experience prfoiling, aka loss of your privilege. I experienced this when I was told, via a friend, that I was "Worse than [the] Jews, because I wanted to be one". This came from someone who had just converted to Islam. Do I take this as representative of Islam and Muslims in general? No I don't. I have good friends of all faiths and no faith. Then there was the time that when standing withy community and waiting to go on a march, we were approached by the SWP and handed leaflets relating to Israel (sorry), which we politely declined. The diatribe we were treated to was appalling. Why had we been approached? The sign we had clearly indicated we were a liberal jewish community.

Then there was the time I had death threats on Twitter, which I treated with the derision they deserved. I saw it as a right of passage.

But things piss me off. People who call me a genocidal, baby-killer. People who say Jews should have to swear allegiance to their country of citizenship. People, like on a Vice video, calling for the genocide of Jews. Or the charmers who stood across from a synagogue in Charlottesville on Saturday and intimidated the congregation to the point they evacuated, taking their Torah scrolls with them. The people who think Jews overplay the Holocaust and shouldn't be included, because we make it all about us. People who think we shouldn't commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day and have the nerve to insist there is onlya focus on Jewish dead of WW2. People who shut you out or shout you down because you don't agree, 100%, with them.

When you see police on the door of your High Holy Day services, or armed police outside synagogues aboard, or advised not to put up a mezuzah it is hard not to be cross. And sometimes, scared too. Hard not to be when someone rides their bike hard at you on the pavement and yells "Jew" at you when they see you wearing a Magen Dovid. I do feel a sense of paranoia every time I hear of another anti-Semitic incident, especially in the U.K.

 Yet people persist in insisting that anti-Zionism doesn't equate anti-Semitism. To those people I would suggest that they need to learn more about Zionism. Which, as a political movement, has more than one interpretation. Also that if you equate most of a country's population of Jews as "Zionist" without asking them if they think just that, then you're profiling, which is, ipso facto, anti-Semitism. SORRY.

My faith is my faith. I'm still learning about it. But I don't understand the hate. I'll call out assholes for being just that too.

By the way, I learned this year that members of my extended family (not blood relations) died in the Holocaust. And, but by grace of G-d, some of my beloved family members would not be here now if they hadn't made a different decision. That is a tough thing to take on board. And upsetting.

As in all things, learn more. Ask questions, but please avoid assumptions. Please.