It's coming up on the 35th anniversary of my dad's death

He was dying. I knew he was dying. His doctor, when I was finally able to corner him to ask for answers he made it clear that  1. my dad didn't deserve a liver transplant because he was an alcoholic, 2. that dad's organs were in the process of dying as a result of the cirrhosis, and 3. that he was not going to use any "heroic" measures when my dad's organs failed. 

For a few weeks my dad's cognitive function had been declining. He would wander the halls at the hospital, so the nurses would lock him in what amounted to an adult high chair, and asked me to be there whenever I wasn't in class to baby sit him because they were busy. An acquaintance once mentioned the cute little old man who sat in the high chair in the hallway on the floor where her mom was recovering from surgery, "yeah, that's my dad."

For weeks he hadn't been coherent. He was either unconscious, or he was conscious but essentially unaware of who he was or where he was. My last coherent conversation with him before his brain became so pickled by ammonia he had said the heart breaking words, "If I could have one wish...(in the long pause I filled in the sentence 'I'd get the ranch back', 'I'd spend more time with you', 'I never would have drank'...)...it would be that I could drink the way I used to." Grace-2025 understands the power of addiction, but writing those words still rips a little hole in my heart. 

But those weren't the very last words, and of course I didn't know his last words would be his last words. I went to visit him before my evening class. It was the first time he'd been "awake" in several days. He whimpered about needing to pee so I helped him with his urinal, then he was thirsty and I helped him drink a can of juice. "I'm scared. I don't want to die," he told me. "It's ok dad, you're not going to die." I didn't know what else to say. I was a 20 year old, emotional mess, who'd been taking care of their dad for the last year alone. I didn't have the emotional fortitude for anything else, so even though I had some time to spare, I slipped out of the room with my last words to him, "I'll be back after class." 

I really didn't think he would die that night, not after having woken up, spoken, and drank something. But half way through my class the campus security came to find me to tell me that the hospital was trying to reach me. I drove straight over to the hospital and ran up to his room to find it empty. I knew but didn't want to believe he was dead. I paced the hallway looking for someone to confirm. A few moments later a chaplain that I'd only met in passing apologized for not being in the room when I'd gotten there, and confirmed that my dad had died earlier that evening. She asked if I wanted to see him, but I wasn't ready to see his dead body, and I wasn't ready to cry in front of this stranger. After my sharp "no" to her question, she asked if I'd not been close to my father. "What a stupid fucking thing to ask" I thought to myself, "just because I'm not blubbering like a fool." I would not let myself cry. I hadn't planned on letting myself cry until the funeral, but I couldn't hold it in when I went to the viewing. And I thought that after the funeral my grieving would be over. One big cry and done- that's how cowboys did it, right? But no, here I am 35 years later and I'm still grieving. 

Grieving the loss of the dad that he was, grieving the loss of the dad that could have been, grieving for the milestones and achievements he never go to be there for, grieving for not having the right words, grieving for not just being able to say "I love you" because we both had to be 'tough cowboys.'

Our relationship was complicated, but I know my dad loved  me and was proud of me- I didn't always realize that latter part, but I can look at my memories now and see in the ways he showed up that he was proud of me. I hope he knew that in spite of my irritable nature, I too loved him very much. 

Before he went in to the hospital the last time we went to look at mules because he'd always dreamed of looking for the Dutchman's Gold. I still dream of doing the same just to honor him, although I'd be content just have the "mools". 

Sometimes I forget that my personality, and who I am as a person isn't just the sum of reactions to trauma, that I was also shaped by love, not just of my beloved grandmother, but also the love my father showed me those last few years I lived with him, even if we were never able to say the words. 

I love you dad. I wish you could have been here to see the person I became. And I wish we would have had the chance to take those pack mules on that epic adventure together.

Reclamation: Art and art

I was emailing with my friend Jane, and she mentioned "reclaiming" parts of ourselves as we were talking about me starting to paint again. There are a few layers of this reclamation. First is the part where after my last BIG concussion in 2015 my visual processing, and hand eye coordination were greatly affected, as well as my sense of color (back in my college days I could mix a color for a perfect match...once I punched a wall and had to do a color match after I patched the hole!...yeah, wasn't one of my better moments). And granted, I was rusty anyway cuz after my graduation back in 95 I had done very little art.

Which brings us to the part where I pretty much stopped doing art after I graduated. Pre-college I always had a sketch book handy. Always. If I was staying somewhere other than my house, a sketch book was just as important as a clean change of underwear. But then I went to college. And there were a couple of things that happened to rob me of the joy, and pleasure of making art...the making art because I couldn't not make art. One of those factors was that my primary instructor, Trina, insisted that all of my Art had to be "ripping your heart out and throwing it on the canvas." For her, Art always had to be a capital "A"...art wasn't for fun, it was for making a statement. After a time that becomes rather emotionally exhausting, and definitely robs one of the fun of making art. 

Ah, that reminds me of the time in one of her classes that the assignment was to "just have fun" with the linocut as the purpose was to "get used to using the medium", "don't worry about making Art". Just have fun. So, going back to my favorite style of humor I carved out an outhouse with a starry sky in the background. And she flipped out. In front of the entire class she was crying, and yelling at me, "How could you Lu!" (I still can't fucking stand it when people call me "Lu") "I can't believe this Lu!" "How could you do this TRITE bullshit, why didn't you add a WINDMILL in the background to make it even more TRITE!" On and on it went. What happened to "just have fun"? Even as I write this I feel my traps contracting, pulling my shoulders to my ears.

The other part of that experience was that my first relationship was with her (sure I'd gotten drunk and made out with boys a few times, some of them more than once, but I was never in anything one would consider a relationship), and she was the first woman I was ever with. And that relationship consisted of secrecy (think small ND town in the 90s), and a whole lot of power and control fuckery. I got in trouble if I spent any time with friends, if I wasn't at home with her, I was to be at the studio making Art. If I did happen to go with friends (because out the other side of her mouth I was supposed to hang out with my friends so people wouldn't suspect we were in a relationship), and I didn't invite her I was an asshole who didn't love her. And if I did happen to spend time with friends rather than the studio I would literally be told I was going to get a C or a D for my A work because I wasn't making Art when not with her. Then there was all the yelling and screaming, and being blamed for everything wrong in her life. 

So, anyway, art and Art became a chore. And it became a constant rehashing of trauma so I could make Art instead of art as per Trina's edict. At one point I did start therapy, but my therapist instead of helping me work through/process my trauma just shamed me for shutting down when I got overwhelmed by my trauma and couldn't speak, or would say helpful things like "I don't think you know what a flashback is" when I would bring it up. So for 5 years I dug deep into my trauma without the support I needed, thus re-traumatizing myself over and over again, and forgetting what it was like to just enjoy line work, color play, and and shapes. Forgetting the joy of creating something from a blank canvas and an assortment of colors. Forgetting how to just let the creativity flow, and let Art come out of me because it needed to, not because I had to to make the grade.

Two years ago yesterday (as per fb) I pulled my oil paints and pallet out after having had a conversation with my barber
about painting (particularly about how I had stopped after college even though oil painting was my favorite medium), and how I needed to reclaim (yes, that very word) Art/art from Trina. That bitch stole it, and it was time for me to take it back. I started by just doing some random color play on the canvas-nothing particularly...well, anything but color play. And I picked up acrylics (just cuz its less messy and toxic for indoor painting) and tried to do some (terrible) self-portraits. After those in particular, I knew I wouldn't be making any of the pieces that I actually was proud of during my college days. But then as I approached my last gender affirming surgery I started feeling true inspiration, something I hadn't experienced since the mid 90s. And then I started painting and what came out surprised me. So much of what I thought I had lost skill wise was coming back. As I reclaim (or perhaps just claim) my body, I am finding myself reclaiming my skills, and my inspiration...and my joy in making A/art.

Top to bottom: 1994, 2025, 2023

Suicide Prevention Month

 I've talked very openly about my struggles with suicidal ideation over the last several years on social media. I know there are those who feel like I'm "oversharing", or looking for attention, but my decision to speak openly about it starts in about 1995. In about 95 I came out publicly in my small college town after I heard about the suicide of an Out young gay man who had been an LGBT advocate in the more urban part of the state. I had admired this person from afar for their bravery, and it...I've sat here for several seconds trying to describe the blow to my soul when I found out. Whatever that feeling was, it lit a fire under introverted, shy, social-anxious me to do something so other people in my community wouldn't give in to the hate that was unrelentingly rained down upon them. So, I came out. I started a GSA at my campus, I spoke college classes, I unashamedly spoke up about who I was. And today I speak about my own struggles with suicidal ideation so that others, regardless of why they are struggling with finding a reason or motivation to hold on to this life know that they are not alone, and maybe, just maybe that will give them the courage to hold on one more, or to reach out for help.

For me, suicidality was never about my gayness. For me it was, and is about drug resistant major depression, and its about trauma/ptsd. I first started having obsessive thoughts after an upper classman at my HS had suicided. It simply hadn't occurred to me before this that that was an option, and I kinda felt guilty that it hadn't occurred to me sooner. Guilty, because if I had thought about it sooner, maybe I could have avoided going through some awful shit. Anyway, from that day forward it was constantly on my mind, all mixed in with the constant flashbacks that haunted me: a shit smoothie to keep my brain occupied and agitated every time I had a quiet moment.

And there were a few times that I got close. I'll save those stories for another day, but will leave it at I was blessed to find the tiniest spark of hope to cling to, or to have someone remind me at a crucial moment that there were indeed people who cared about me, and that I would be missed (and being a people pleaser I didn't want to upset anyone!).

I've been lucky enough to have been in therapy for most of my adult like. I wish I could be the person who just needs therapy intermittently, but my PTSD is such that I don't know if I'll ever get to the place where I "graduate" from therapy, but who knows? Through that therapy though, I've chipped away at the trauma, and I've gotten to a place where the flashbacks aren't a daily TARDIS trip back to the shittiest days of my life. And I'm also very lucky to have a therapist who understands that in order to work through suicidal thoughts and feelings her clients need to know that they can bring them up without having to worry about an automatic involuntary commitment. Unfortunately many therapists are so afraid of liability, or take on too much responsibility for the actions of their clients that as soon as the "S" word in brought up they wan their clients to go straight to the nearest mental health ER, do not pass go, do not collect $50. So, dear reader, if you have a therapist and you have ever struggled with suicidality, please chat with your therapist about how they deal with clients disclosing this issue with them. If you're not having suicidal thoughts now, talk to them now so when the time comes you know what kind of support you can expect. And maybe that is part of the conversation: If I have these feelings, THIS is what I need from you to get through it safely.

Most recently, during my early recovery from my Top Surgery, and torso "contouring" I was in a bad place. I was in a lot of pain, my brain chemistry was all fucked up from the anesthesia, and having gone through all that just to have results that I was not happy with...having gone to sleep excited about finally feeling comfortable in my body, and waking up and looking down to see that it was obvious that the surgeon and I had very different visions of where my dysphoria was, it was devastating. And all those things combined, I was thinking about "going hunting" which is the euphemism my wife and I came up with after my last battle. And fortunately my wife saw how fucked up I was even though I was trying to hide it from her, and we talked about it together with a therapist, and that part of me that was ready to give up, found the spark again, and I'm happy to report as we enter into Suicide Prevention month, that I am actually in a place of being grateful for my life. It isn't a perfect life, a perfect world, or a perfect body, but I am grateful for the love that surrounds me, and maybe more importantly, I am grateful for being AWARE of all the love that surrounds me.

May you be be surrounded by love, and feel it all!

Bad Enough? (TW: SA)

 There are a lot of old stories rattling around in my head these days. Things shoved into the folder labeled "not that bad". As it turns out, after working through some of the "yeah, it was that bad" folder contents, I've found that the "not that bad" scraps have exploded their way out of the filing cabinet and I find myself slipping on scraps of paper at the most inconvenient of times. 

Let me take you back in time to an evening my mom had my bus driver take me home until she and my dad got home. The bus driver sent me and her 3 sons down to the basement to play out of her way. As soon as we got down to the basement S, the oldest boy (6-7 years older than me) suggested we play strip poker. Being the naïve 7 year old that I was, I kinda knew what poker was (mom loved card games), but I didn't know what kind of poker strip-poker was. I asked multiple times and simply got "you know, STRIP poker". No, I didn't know. But they were going to show me.

Once the cards were out, S explained the rules...not how to play poker, P would help me with that, but the part about taking clothes off. I immediately stated I didn't want any part of this game, but was told that I wasn't allowed to quit because I already said I would play. It was gross, and horrible, and scary. And it could have been a lot worse-I don't say that to minimize, but really, it could have been worse. Looking back at the whole situation...knowing now what that erect penis was and meant, it could have been so much worse.

I shut my eyes, and shut down, and I got through it. Eventually I was saved further humiliation when Bus Driver hollered at us to come up stairs. At that point none of the boys had touched me, but on the way up the stairs, S behind me slammed his hand so hard into my crotch that he knocked me off of my feet. As I struggled to regain my feet, he painfully groped me, then smelled his hand. And unfortunately, that was not the last time that it happened. Fortunately, I wasn't around him particularly often, but any time he and I happened to be on the stairs at the same time he took full advantage to repeat his disgusting behavior. The last time he did it was at school 5 years later with all his buddies watching (besides a stairway full of students heading to their next class), and then he and his homies laughed at me when I yelled "DON'T TOUCH ME!" into his face. These assaults were always humiliating, but to have a crowd of witnesses, especially ones who laughed...it just...I don't know, it was a reminder of how alone I was...how no one had my back. If I couldn't stop it, no one else was going to step in...and if I couldn't stop it, it must be my fault.

I've had a lot of shitty experiences. This is one that felt like his intention WAS to hurt me. Not just that he was oblivious, or apathetic to the pain he was causing me, but that he wanted to hurt me.

Maybe it was bad enough?

vi·o·lence

/ˈvī(ə)ləns/

noun

1. behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

Freezing is not Consent (TW: discussion of SA)

It's been awhile since I've posted. TikTok has been my place to post my thoughts, and process my crap for the last few years. But I'm feeling like going old school today, especially since I only have a few followers here, as opposed to 6k on TT. 

I looked at a couple old drafts before I started writing, and not surprisingly, there was a tidbit that applied to thoughts that are currently rattling around in my head (and which will hopefully find themselves on this page in a coherent order soon enough). So, here is the tidbit in question:  I'm flipping through the rolodex of memories, I remember all the adult men I had to navigate myself out of situations with AS A TEENAGER, and it was always our shame to carry (I say our because my friend L was dealing with the same shit, sometimes the same man during the same camping trip). The camping trip incident was my introduction to "it's my job to make sure that this adult male that I don't want anywhere near me doesn't force me to have sex" as someone old enough to know what sex was.

So here's where what I pasted from my old draft meets what's in my head right now. There's an event that I have yet to process, not just in therapy; anywhere. I haven't journaled about it, I haven't talked with friends or partners about it (beyond vague hints), I haven't even really let myself think too much about the details as it tends to flood me when I do. I've avoided processing this memory not because it was the worst thing that has happened to me, but because of shame brought on by self-blame. I've had all of these ideas in my head about why it was my fault, why I shouldn't feel so traumatized by it, why it wasn't that big of a deal. And it all comes down to that sense of responsibility-it's my job to prevent adult men from (raping) me, not adult men's job to not (rape) me. I used parentheses in the previous sentence because I have believed for these many decades that if I didn't do "enough: {whatever that means} to prevent it, then it was my fault, and if it's my fault it isn't rape (or whatever flavor of sexual assault it might be). Now, if we were talking about your story, dear reader, I would have no problem identifying your experience as rape/sexual assault, but for me, unhitching myself from the burden of blame has been a doozy. 

Just to clarify, the incident in question wasn't rape. Violation maybe? Assault? I'm still working that out. But the place I keep getting stuck at is the belief *I* should have prevented it. Especially since at this point I was a whole 18 years old. 

Another place where I get bogged down is the idea of violence. I had a reminder this weekend of an incident where my sister's boyfriend was about to beat the f*** out of her right in front of me when I was a kid. It was a terrifying situation, and he had beaten her to the point of needing to go to the ER previously, so I knew the level of damage he was capable. So, if something happens and my eyes aren't swollen shut from a beating, have I tried hard enough to stop it? Was it violent enough for me to call it an assault, or was it just a misunderstanding...that happens to be my fault? My therapist has been helping me redefine my idea of what assault, violence, and force are. 

T    "So, was he just being affectionate?"

M   "Ugh, no!" 

T    "Did he block the entrance."

M    "Yes."

T    "Sounds like force to me."

T    "You tried to reason with him, and he didn't listen; you didn't consent. Freezing when he wouldn't listen to you in NOT consent."

I have a lot more work to do on this memory, but one thing I have been able to clarify is that he was not taking "no" for an answer, no matter how I phrased it. No he didn't beat me or threaten me, but he also crossed my physical boundaries, even after I gave him reason not to. He was a bull in a china shop, and was not going to be deterredunless maybe I hit him. I wish I could have hit him, but the layers of trauma from years of boundary violations shut me down. And that is hard for me- I was a little fucking scrapper...but I was too shut down, too up in my terror to move. "Freezing is not consent."

Bad therapy: Kathy W pt 1

With my latest therapist I have on a couple occasions started to delve into the re-traumatization (abuse?) by my first therapist. There are a lot of layers to it, and I think I've denied how deeply it has affected me, but here we are again, and now I'm giving it a little more sustained attention. I don't recall if I've written about Kathy W before, but here we go. 

I started seeing Kathy in 1993. I had known I needed therapy for a long time, but I was terrified of it because I was so terrified of the vulnerability of telling someone about my experiences, and specifically since I was a small child was very insecure about talking, and well, therapy does involve a lot of talking generally. By this time though, I was becoming so self destructive I was ready to try it.

Unfortunately, going in to it I thought a therapist would help me find a way to find my voice, would help me to feel safe, would perhaps give me a little validation. Unfortunately, I was assigned to a therapist who used confrontation as her main style. A therapist who, when my voice was smothered by my own shame and terror smugly told me to get out of her office because she had work to do, and I needed to come back when I was ready to talk. Unfortunately, when I tried to initiate the conversation about the original thing that I had identified as the issue I needed to work on by saying "I had a flashback about" the thing, her response with no further information than that statement was to tell me that she didn't think that I knew what a flashback was, and then she made me define a flashback. No further conversation about the flashback, or the material related to it. No questions, no "how did that make you feel", nothing. 

And as I was thinking about this earlier, I realized that it was 10 years and multiple therapists into my therapy journey before I finally found a therapist who patiently sat with me in the mire and muck of MY presenting issue. Ten years before I found a therapist who helped me to find a way to tell my story. Ten years before someone said, "that's fucked up, I'm so sorry you experienced that." Ten years of wasted time, ten years of therapists in new and interesting ways letting me know that it wasn't safe to share my story. And it all started with Kathy.

I didn't stop it

 Years upon years of therapy I've struggled to throw off the yoke of trauma, and shame. 

It is not a new thing that I believe that everything is my fault. During various events I knew in the moment it was my fault for not stopping whatever it was.

But yesterday I started talking about it specifically in context to shit that happened with adult men when I was a teenager...how anything that happened was my fault because I didn't stop it. About how I tried to figure out the dance of compliance: comply just enough to satisfy them and keep them from becoming angry and doing something way worse, and figuring out what my line is...how much can I tolerate, how much do I allow...how much is too much and then they think they can cross my line? And how terror kept me from just saying "no". How I didn't get to be traumatized because whatever did happen, I "allowed". And...how I'm not able to deny the trauma that pumps through my veins, and oozes out my pours anymore. 

And I also realized during that revelation that it isn't just in the context of perverts; it's also all of the shit with my mom (her nervous breakdowns, her half assed suicide attempts), and really anything that goes wrong. I'm now editing a few weeks later, and this last week at work I had a migraine and could do nothing but hide my head under a pillow and wait for death or my sumatriptan to kick in, and while I was down and other people were in charge of my little lady she fell. And my first thought was, "it's all my fault...if I just would have been there this wouldn't have happened. I didn't stop it. It's my fault." Fortunately I recognized it as an old pattern, and yet, the hook is still there.