Art Appreciation

On Saturday I attended an Artist Reception for a show I had two pieces in. This is the first time I've showed my paintings since about 1996. If you haven't been keeping up with me on social media, this is also the first time I've seriously painted since about 1996. Why I stopped and started painting are for another day because what I really want to talk about is how my community showed up for me, and what a contrast that was to my former life.

And I'm not going to lie, I was worried that not many folks were going to show up- I'd had several folks text me to tell me they weren't going to make it, so I was prepared for a light showing. But instead I had a room full of support, and a room full of love (I wish I would have gotten a photo with my whole crowd!). I was humbled by how many people showed up to support me that night. 

The morning after I was exchanging Marco Polos with a friend who had been out of town that weekend, and started to tell her about the contrast of that night in comparison to the opening for my senior show for my BA. And, granted I have very different relationships with people than I did back then, but I sent out a lot of post cards for that show. And still there weren't a lot of folks who showed up...including on that list of not showing up was my mother. But what broke me when I was talking about the night of my senior show was who did show up. 

My neighbor Sally. My disabled, in a wheel chair, elderly neighbor had her son pack her up in the truck, drive the 80 miles into town, at night, in a snow storm to be there for me for the opening of my senior show. And unlike so many, she didn't ask me why I didn't paint "pictures of buffalo, or the badlands", or tell me, "uh, that's, uh...interesting." Instead she told me how talented I was, and how proud she was of me. 

And as I look back over the important milestones in my life, there were 2 people who were showing up for me. Whether graduations, art shows, kick boxing matches- my brother Gary and my sister-in-law Michelle were there. And they have never missed a birthday.

It's way too easy for me to remember the times people didn't show up for me, and when I do that the narrative in my head tips in the directions of thinking that I don't deserve to have people show up for me. That I'm not worthy. And certainly that I don't have enough value (or talent) to have people show up for me. Not to mention, I am dismissing the gift of the people who DO show up for me.

***

I didn't win any awards at the recent show, but the indignation of my friends was worth more than any of their awards. I know my work isn't the kind of art most people are going to want to put on their walls. My work makes the viewer uncomfortable, it challenges the viewer. I do not make pretty pictures. That is not my gift to the world. And the people who showed up for me were able to appreciate the art that I bring into the world.

And for that, I am very grateful. 

On another note, I am trying out Substack for my blogging, so go check me out there if you care to follow along with my journey. You can find me here: https://substack.com/@thepaganinquestion

The Last Day of Our Aquaintance

A couple days ago a Memory from I believe 12 years ago came up of my visit to surprise my mom for her birthday. While I was there I also saw my family including my brother Jim. My brother was a goof ball, as evidenced by the included picture. 

There is quite an age gap between my siblings and I, and my closest sister in age I will just leave at, I went no contact with her before there was a name of "no contact". Jim was 2nd closest in age (10 years older), and more importantly, I saw him as my Protector, especially from my sister when she was extra unhinged. 

My brother himself wasn't exactly a kind and loving kinda guy, but he always seemed to have a soft spot for me. Just for the sake of painting a picture of his personality, my other brother recently stated that "all Jimmy ever talks about is the son-of-a-bitch he beat up, or the son-of-a-bitch he's going to beat up", and sadly, that is not an exaggeration. 

Not terribly long after this photo was taken my brother posted a meme on FB. "America, where you're free unless your white, straight, male, Christian, Southern, or a gun owner." I happened to take issue with this. And I know my brother's ego is pretty fragile, so I had to put on kid gloves if I was going to get him to hear the issue with his belief in this meme and maybe, just maybe, consider that maybe he was full of shit, but I definitely wasn't going to let it slide. The result was that my brother blocked me and my wife on FB, his Philippian) wife blocked me, and we haven't spoken since. Thus, referring to him in the past tense because I do not have a brother any more. 

And I had to do a lot of therapy around this loss, and I also had to realize that he stopped being a "protector" when I was a child. I had to realize that he had done a lot of stuff prior to this that was not something a protector would do. And supporting homophobia and misogyny are definitely not the acts of a protector. 

And, I also had to come to terms with the fact that he is not my only family member who blatantly supports politicians and policies that directly hurt me. When one can't see beyond their own nose to the things that hurt the people who they claim to love, then that is not the kind of "love" I need in my life. 

And, you know, I don't hate them. In fact, I wish them well. I hope they all find the healing they need on their time on earth, but I'm done having relationships with people who can't see me, who aren't willing to put work into our relationship, and who don't really care about me or my safety.

Empathy Meter

Over the holidays I've got hit with a little bit of grief over the estrangement of some folks in my life. Some recent, some for several years. And I was thinking about one person in particular, and the reason for the estrangement. I'm very vocal on social media about how voting for certain people, supporting certain talking heads literally puts me in danger. And 1. some people don't seem to get it (your actions/support causes me REAL harm), 2. some people get very upset when I set boundaries like "if you support this person, you are not my friend so please 'unfriend' me."

Anyway, going back to my ponderings of this one person, I had a realization. I have a great deal of empathy, and I assume that others do as well. But they don't. Empathy is somewhat like intelligence in that we all have different levels of it- most of us have enough to function, more or less, as adults in the world, but there is a broad spectrum of levels. And this person, I assumed had the same as me due to similarities in our backgrounds, but when I thought about it, this person has shown me over the years how little empathy they have, at least for me. According to our friend Oxford, empathy is the "ability to understand and share the feeling of another", and I will expand that to "experiences" of another.

So, I made an assumption that this person was capable of understanding how hurt, and how in danger I was when I talked about my experience. And it hurt when they didn't get it. But when I reviewed old conversations, there wasn't really a time where they did, unless it happened to be an experience they spoke of and I was able to interject a "me too", but even when I tried to share with them about some of my personal experiences, they were quick to interrupt with, "well, you didn't have it as bad as me." How would you know friend when you've never let me tell you MY stories?

I know this person loves me as best they can. I have no, "but" to sum things up with and round off with a silver lining, at least for today. I wish them well. And I will put my emotional energy into those who are capable of empathy, cuz damn, these days I don't have a lot of emotional or mental energy to spare.

taking up space

Recently a friend posted about taking up space. About the conscious decision to take up space as a woman, to not make herself small for the convenience of men. 

I've been thinking about that a lot. How many ways I make myself small. How I learned from a young age not to take up space. It's been a message not only for how I take up space in the world in regards to men, but also my mother made it very clear that she didn't have the emotional capacity for me to take up space with wants or needs. 

Key things I learned about (not) taking up space when I  was growing up:
    1. Don't be an inconvenience.
    2. Don't make other people uncomfortable with your Truth. 
    3. Don't have needs (no matter how bad things are).
    4. Don't ask for help (no matter how bad things are).

Something that has been really sitting heavy with me is how we aren't allowed to take up space as victims/survivors. How many times have we heard "protective" men boast about how the will k*ll anyone if they ever sexually assaulted one of their loved ones, but when the latest headline of one their stans SAing someone comes out they just brush it off as "no big deal" or some how do the mental gymnastics to make it the victims fault. And these same fellas wonder why victims don't report, or report sooner. 

If we tell our story we are shamed, if we don't report we are shamed, if we wait too long we are shamed, if we disclose we are shamed. And Gods forbid if women disclose about abuse by a famous person, it's always "she's just trying to get money (and/or fame)".We can never win. No one wants to hear it. Shame on us for telling our stories, shame on us for not tell sooner.

I think about how there is shame and stigma associated with being a victim of sexual abuse/assault, but not so much with the offenders (case in point: a man credibly accused of sexual assault multiple times, including by multiple Epstein survivors still managed to get elected president). 

What would it be like instead of victims carrying the shame, the actual predators carried the shame? What if we got to take up space as victims/survivors? I know I tell a lot of hair-raising stories in my blogs, and social media, but I don't tell the "bad" shit- the shit that has had me in therapy for over 30 years, the shit that keeps me awake at night, that crawls under my skin (although my last post published since starting this post starts to delve a little deeper into that particular pit of snakes). What if ALL of me got to take up space, even those horrible things that have made me try to make myself small so no one will ever know, so no one will notice me and do those things to me again?

***Although I'm only publishing this today, the meat of this blog has been in my head for a couple weeks. The combination of my friends "taking up space blog" along with my wife telling me about Virginia Roberts Giuffre's memoir really got me thinking about how we (victims of SA) are supposed to keep quite, keep the secret, protect the men, protect the peace, protect the reputation of the family/institution/church/etc, and in doing so make ourselves so small that our soul eats itself. The fact that our truth and experience is continually dismissed, and denied- the recent memes say it so well: "The fact that people need a dead man's files to believe to believe thousands of women tells you what you need to know about whose voices they value". 

We talk about the statistics of how many victims there are of SA, but we don't talk about how many predators there are. We talk about how women can stop attack, but not about how men can stop being sexual predators. Discussions of consent get turned into jokes. And at the end of the day, it's always the victims fault for being vulnerable, for being pretty, for being too "masculine" (thus challenging his fragile sense of masculinity), for being drunk, for being at the wrong place, for not fighting hard enough, for smiling, for not smiling, for being nice, for being a bitch, for saying the "wrong" thing, for not saying "no" the right way, for not reporting, for reporting, for waiting to report...for existing. And if everything is your fault because you simply exist, then you better make yourself small, but even that doesn't protect you.

What a mighty revolution it would be if so many of us told our truth unabashedly that the tables turned and the predators, and the rape-apologists were forced to carry the shame, and the predators actually faced appropriate consequences?

I'm giving this little scrapper full permission to take up space unabashedly.

Old memories, old terror, new realization (TW: vague discussion of SA)

Last Thursday I was getting a massage and this memory popped into my head as my therapist was working on my chest: When I was 17 I had this job for part of the summer as a fencer. It was just me and this other guy who co-owned the company. The draw where we were doing this fencing job had an an old, abandoned white, Colonial style house, complete with columns slowly being swallowed up by trees, and vivid green prairie grass. Was again I was drawn into musing about just how odd it was to see that style of house in juxtaposition to "out in the middle of nowhere", nowhere-rural-Grassy Butte, ND. And I was thinking about that house, and how I'd wanted to go inside and see what it looked like (and my disappointment that I never did) when this other memory from that place popped up. 

Joe, my boss, and I were taking our lunch break. I was ready to get back to work, but he pointed out that he was the boss and we didn't have to rush back to work, and in fact he wanted to lie down for a bit. So we were lying in the midsummer sun on the pile of loose, dark brown soil piled up next to the trench it had come from. Just me and Joe, miles from another human. Joe, over 20 years my senior. Joe, stroking my back, then asking if I wanted to make out. 

In spite of the multiple times adult men had made advances, or just tried to assault me I was naïve. I thought I was safe with Joe, I thought he was a nice guy.

Cue terror. My "go to" when I'm terrified is to freeze. And freeze I did, pretending to be asleep.

The interesting thing about this particular memory popping up on this day is that earlier in the day I had been seeing my (mental health) therapist. We've been grinding through an old memory for a few months now in which, after trying to redirect another man 20+ years my senior (coincidentally, this man is the person who got me the fencing job with Joe) from assaulting me, and failing I eventually froze. That particular day in therapy I was lamenting about how there is a part of me that continually goes into freeze-mode when its a sexual assault situation, whereas if someone just tried to fight me I'd go full-on scrapper-mode, and so I feel like a failure, like I failed myself whenever I froze. 

Back to my moment of terror, "freezing" seemed to work that time. Maybe he felt me tense when he asked, maybe he knew I was faking sleep; regardless he didn't ask again, he didn't force the issue (or force himself on me). I was lucky that time. Lucky enough that I didn't have to dedicate months or years of therapy to Joe. Lucky that it was a memory that I hadn't thought about in years. Lucky, that this adult man who decided to ask a 17 year old to make out decided to respect my boundary.

Looking back I think "holy shit, that could have gone SOOOO bad". However; seventeen year old me thought he was one of the "good" ones because he stopped...but how fucking "good" was he? we were out in the middle of nowhere, I was 17, he was old enough to be my father, and he had to fucking sexualize me. And because nothing happened, I was lucky.

Over the weekend I started having really intense anxiety, and I was perseverating on all the things I potentially had said wrong the previous day. And as I was dialoguing with myself about why the hell I was feeling so life-and-death terrified about these different interactions the puzzle piece clicked into place. When I was a kid I was unsafe, period. There were no adults in my life keeping my safe, and so I took on the full responsibility for keeping myself safe, and if I failed to do so, it WAS my fault. There were so many encounters in which I wasn't as lucky as I was with Joe, encounters where I was not saying/doing the right thing to stop a man from assaulting me-thus it was my fault. In addition to the list of men, there were so many times that I physically (let alone emotionally) wasn't safe with my sister. Times my mother was completely unhinged either "because" I'd said the wrong thing or I took on the responsibility for not saying or doing the right thing to keep her from a psychotic break or an overdose of pills. Of course feeling like I've said the "wrong" thing makes me feel absolutely terrified.

Now, perhaps with a little luck, now that I've made that connection my nervous system will chill the hell out a little when it comes to thinking I'm going to die if I say the wrong thing. And, at least one time, freezing seemed to save me.

Top Surgery Anniversary

Today is the 1 year anniversary of my top surgery. 

I couldn't have gotten here without all of the support I had. From my wife, from my community, friends, chosen family, oh-and my therapist. I really don't know what to say beyond that. It takes a village, and I got a village. 

I remember in my first semester of German class one of my classmates saying how she had dreamed in German. I took 3 semesters of German, but I never dreamed in German. My dreams are weird; when I dream about people I know they rarely look (or act) like they do in awake-world. Even when I dream of my own meat sack, it's not necessarily a 1:1 awake-to-dream match, but interestingly, a few months after my top surgery I started to have an awareness that my dream body was breast-less. It IS my body, and even my psyche knows it. 

When I look at pictures prior to my surgery, that body is foreign to me. I remember the shame, embarrassment, discomfort of those days, but when I see those photos I know that that is NOT my body, THIS is MY body. Since my surgery I have had several people comment that I seem more "myself" since surgery. Yes. I have returned. 

Perhaps I'll have more cohesive thoughts later. But for now, yeah, I finally get to inhabit a body that feels like...home.

Holding Grief

 It's funny, I've been talking with some of my patients about grief- about how it's not just about losing a person or pet to death, but also the loss of a home, independence, the ability to do the things we used to do due to declines of our body and/or senses. Funny because I'm having a lot of grief about my body.

My last post was about starting the process of tattoo removal so I can have my pecs tattooed with something more appropriate for where I am in my gender-journey. I had my first session, and my left pec has had terrible edema. To the point it looked like I was growing a breast back. I've been doing lymph massage, using compression, and taking some supplements but the edema is still pretty pronounced. And it brought up some huge emotions for me. Fear that after these 2 surgeries that were painful AF, that left me in a brain fog for months, that cost weeks of work, and weeks of strength training, that the surgeries would be undone. 

When I spoke, via his nurse, to my surgeon I felt pretty dismissed. Like this had nothing to do with the surgery. And this isn't the first time I've felt dismissed, and not heard by my surgeon. Case in point when we had our preop I corrected him about where my areas of dysphoria were, and when he was marking me up and spending so much time on the area that was NOT on my dysphoria area, I stopped him and stated "I don't really care about that area, my big concern is 'here'" and indicated the area. And guess what I woke up to? Not being listened to, not being heard. And that right there has been a huge source of grief that has had me in a tail spin since my last surgery. The part of my body that caused almost as much dysphoria as my chest did, was little more than an after thought for him when he did my surgery. And I was very fortunate in that my insurance covers torso masculization, but it was still $5000 out of pocket, and again the pain, and the effects on my brain. Not worth the calories as Pru would say, or not worth the pain and suffering in this case. I grieve for not being heard, and I grieve for the body I expected to wake up to, but didn't because I wasn't heard.

During that surgery I also had scar revision done on my top surgery scars, as well as him cleaning out the pockets where I'd had seromas (pockets of fluid) after my top surgery. Although the seromas were drained (3 seperate times), I was left with thickening under my pecs that took away from the definition of my pecs (which I have been working very hard to develop), and because of the roundness gave a bit of a "breast" shape to my pecs. Now that edema has settled into that same area on the left, and I don't know if it's going to go away or not...I'm in this place of "was it all for nothing?" Will my chest go back to what I've worked so hard for, and been through so much to create?

And going back to the whole "not being a listened to/heard"- oof, there are a lot of layers of trauma there. Not layers I will get into tonight, but know they are there, and this isn't just about my surgeon not hearing me when I said "here".

Another layer of grief goes back to the loss of the body I had before I took Buspar. I was strong, I was in pretty good shape (never "thin" and that's ok, but strong). Granted I had gained some weight like many of us during the early pandemic shut-down, but things got bad after Buspar. I gained about 20 pounds in the first couple months on it, then after I stopped it (to prevent myself from suiciding- oh yeah, there was another dr who was not listening when I was saying, "this is making shit worse", and I had to be the one to say "I can't take this anymore or I am going to die") my brain chemistry was so fucked up I could barely get out of bed for a year. Literally. And the weight packed on, and I barely moved. Even going upstairs to our bedroom I had to pull myself up on the rail because I was so out of shape. I've worked my ass off, struggled with injuries and disordered eating, but I've lost a lot of that weight, but the what has remained has been over in the areas that were already dysphoric areas for me, and now even more so because of the excess weight there that I can't seem to get rid of. And those areas are a reminder of how bad it got for me, and how, once again a doctor didn't listen to me when I said "I need help". 

A thought occurred to me this morning. What would it be like to let other people help me hold my grief?