I've been sort-of hard at work on my dissertation this week and last; sort-of hard at the socialising, too. We have a draft due on Friday and I'm having a hard time getting the words onto paper.
Unfortunately, I often have writer's block when it comes to submitting work to be graded. This is still a relatively new problem for me. In 2006, I had what can only be called (pathetic as this sounds) a traumatic grading experience. It was the final paper for a class I had been doing very well in. The professor who had previously been quite supportive and quite enthusiastic about the work I had done really did not like my final paper. I, on the assumption that she would like it as much as the rest of my work, was careless about picking up the draft from her in a timely fashion. It was the end of the semester, which is always a very busy time, and so I didn't get it back from her until about six hours before our exam period, during which she had decided we would present and discuss our papers instead of sitting an exam. Clearly, this was not the best decision on my part but I do think that I was reasonably justified in expecting that, on the whole, any comments would be largely positive. What I got instead was a barrage of mixed justified criticism and emotional hogwash. It's not on to accuse someone of being species-ist in a ten page paper; it is acceptable to say that soemthing is too much of an assertion and not enough of an argument.
The difficulty for me was that the argument and the idea behind the paper are objectively good. I have had many good discussions about it, I have even had that very same paper accepted for a conference. That class was the first class I had ever had with that particular professor and over the years I learned more about her. I learned that she (being an arch second-wave feminist) really hates logic and thinks that it can only ever be used to oppress people. My paper was based around a deductive logical argument and contained the word logic in the title. I have learned, particularly from hearing more of her own work, that she is very invested in essential notions about sex and gender and really believes that women (have to) do philosophy in a significantly different way because they are women. My paper was intended to be critical and possibly destructive about essentialist notions of sex and gender. Knowing more about the way she looks at the world, I can see that she must have experienced that paper as a personal attack, designed to oppress her, written by a female student who obviously was a sex traitor for using logic and saying that women are not necessarily different from men. From that point of view, it would have been philosophically coherent for her to react emotionally to my paper, rather than to try to argue against it or be objective about the merits of its content.
I am quite logically convinced that she is in the wrong, that the paper - while far from perfect - is not the fundamentally flawed piece of drivel she tried to make it out to be. However, I only know this and it is hard to convince myself that she was wrong on the level of psychological belief or felt truth. Thus, I continue to have writer's block and it continues to make life hard for me from time to time. Whatever the merits of my paper, it was wrong and unprofessional of her to attack me in that way; I understand now that she felt that I had attacked her and that she was responding in kind BUT I didn't attack her, I attacked an idea and she knows it. She just reacted in an ideological way to what I was saying. She reacted in a way that I believe is a betrayal of the social contract between a teacher and a student, and a way that is an unhelpful disruption of the norms, ethos and mores of a university. If she's that committed to that particular variety of second-wave feminism, then what is she doing teaching at a university? They're definitely and demonstrably tools of male oppression in much the same way as logic! She has a right to her beliefs about the world and the right to act on them and I have a corresponding duty to respect that; however, I have a right to my beliefs about the world and a right to act on them and she has a corresponding duty to respect that!
The whole experience has had some benefit. It really deepened my understanding of how to practise philosophy and how to read another person's work and how to disagree and why philosophers disagree with one another in the way that they do (i.e. respectfully). I am still having a hard time, however, with the writer's block. It has gotten much, much better over the years - so much better. I'm sure it will continue to get easier. It is not, however, gone. When a deadline gets close, I experience a lot of negative stress. It's the kind of stress that comes tinged with self-loathing and self-harm ideation and this makes it very hard for me to work.
On a year to year basis (though not necessarily on a day to day one), I have been on an upward trajectory since I was in hospital a little more than three years ago. Having an accurate diagnosis has helped me to understand what to look for symptom-wise and all that looking has helped me become increasingly familiar and accurate in understanding what's going on with me by what I'm thinking and what I feel, both emotionally and physiologically. This familiarity in turn has given me an increased ability to look after myself well and effectively. I have learned some ways to help myself get over or past various psychological stumbling blocks and how to deal with the stubborn symptoms that are really not under my control. I'm far from perfect at it - the logical possibility of my ever being perfect at it is close to zero - but I'm much better than random and much better than I used to be. This writer's block seems to be one of those things that I have some control over - limited control but susceptible to improvement.
This week, the stress of writing through the self-loathing is pushing me towards the serious kind of moodiness. It will be okay - it will be over soon and then it will be as though it never happened, or so I keep telling myself. Nevertheless, I'll get to go through it again but a bit worse at the end of next month when the final paper is due and I'm going to be job hunting between now and then, which is usually a stressful and rather discouraging activity. I'm also going back to visit the family for a week and this means long haul flying and jet lag which has, historically, set me off mood-wise. That's an unusual number of risk factors and it worries me a bit.
Anyhow, I'm really curious as to what other people do to cope with things like this, especially writer's block. I would really like to get rid of it. Even if it isn't something you've done but rather something that happened, I would be very appreciative if you'd tell me about it. What I've been able to do so far specifically for the writer's block is to just carry on writing through the teeth of it, look back on and analyse what happened and what it was that upset me and why it might have happened, seeking other people's opinions on the work (e.g. entering it for and presenting it at a conference) and letting time pass. And I started this blog - really. It seemed like having another reason to write and a different audience might help, as it has indeed done.
This isn't the best post I've ever written - in fact, I suspect it's a bit boring; sorry about that - but this is a subject much on my mind at the moment. Back to the word-arranging grind, now.
Showing posts with label anxiety. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anxiety. Show all posts
21 July 2010
29 January 2010
Third Post I've Written This Week But The First Time I've Published Instead of Deleting
It is almost undoubtedly a wanton display of hubris to say this but I think I am getting better at having bipolar disorder. And what do I mean by that? I'm not quite sure.
I think a large part of what I mean is that I don't experience so much conflict about it anymore. Instead of forcing other people or my own actions or external circumstances into awkward positions in order to have an explanation for feeling a certain way. Instead, I'm now able to say to myself that while it is true that I don't like X (and Y and Z), X (even combined with Y and Z) is probably not sufficient cause to make me feel this bad for this long; that it's probably a mood that has descended. It doesn't mean that X or Y or Z isn't actually bothering me - it's a recognition that X and Y and Z are not sufficient.* If I can tell the difference (and I seem to be getting better at it) then I save a lot of energy and a lot of time and a lot of discouragement.
It drives me absolutely up the wall when I feel miserable and the poor people who are kind enough to undertake to talk to me about it shower me with platitudes about tomorrow being another day and that everything will be okay and that this too shall pass and that I'll feel better soon. For a little while this became a bad problem when I would talk to my mother. She wants me to feel better and she says these things in order to be soothing and in order to make me feel better and she needs to be able to say something encouraging. I understand all this but (and again I'm going to blame philosophy) because neither she nor anyone else on earth has any strong or valid knowledge that I (or anyone else) will be all right in the future or feel better at any point (whatever 'better' is supposed to mean in that context), it only makes me more upset when people say these things to me because they aren't grounded in any kind of logic and if I feel that bad, any optimism I might have had has disappeared anyway. My reaction to such statements had, though, gotten to the point of being unfair to my mother, whose intent was certainly never to upset me, so I sat down and tried to think of something to be substituted that would allow her to express her wish to comfort me and would not offend my (overly honed for ordinary conversation) sense of logic. In the end, I came up with 'it won't always feel exactly like this'.
This alternative platitude has worked out well, largely because I can believe it. I might not feel better next week or next month (and I might not feel worse) but I know and can believe that I will not feel exactly the same. The intensity of whatever I'm feeling will alter, its emphasis will shift, my intrusive thoughts will develop variations. I will experience these changes as being better or worse and it is extraordinarily unlikely that I will not experience variation. Internalising this has actually helped. On the nights when it's 3.00am and I haven't been able to sleep and I'm lying in bed feeling horrendously guilty all out of proportion to anything I might have done or failed to do and everything seems completely hopeless and on the verge of falling apart I can tell myself that I'm not going to feel exactly as horribly suffocated by all the wrongness in myself and in the world forever. That perspective is not the new reality of life.
Hopefully that all makes some sort of sense. It's the way I have found out of the totalising meta-narrative that a depressed mood (or a manic mood) imposes. It's a way out that doesn't invalidate the emotional content of my moods - instead of saying that I don't really feel that way, it's a disease, I can say I do really feel that way, it's just not the way I am always going to feel nor is the totality of what I feel.
Anyhow, it has gotten me through the past six weeks, much of which I have spent fairly depressed, relatively unscathed. It helped stop me freaking out and flailing in all directions. It stopped me taking things out unfairly on others and stopped me chucking away things that I value in the long term but temporarily didn't know what to do with. I woke up this morning feel better with my life still intact and I'm happy about that and now I've written a post that I'm not going to immediately delete and I'm reasonably confident that I'll be asleep before three - hurray.
_______________________________________________
*I apologise: I go to a university where they make us read analytic philosophy all the time and then I talk to my fellow students who also read analytic philosophy all the time and at this point, we seem all to have started talking as though we were dictating analytic philosophy. My mind attempts metaphor but all that comes out are more variables.
This is what analytic philosophy looks like:
My writing style isn't quite as bad as all that yet but I imagine it's only a matter of time.
I think a large part of what I mean is that I don't experience so much conflict about it anymore. Instead of forcing other people or my own actions or external circumstances into awkward positions in order to have an explanation for feeling a certain way. Instead, I'm now able to say to myself that while it is true that I don't like X (and Y and Z), X (even combined with Y and Z) is probably not sufficient cause to make me feel this bad for this long; that it's probably a mood that has descended. It doesn't mean that X or Y or Z isn't actually bothering me - it's a recognition that X and Y and Z are not sufficient.* If I can tell the difference (and I seem to be getting better at it) then I save a lot of energy and a lot of time and a lot of discouragement.
It drives me absolutely up the wall when I feel miserable and the poor people who are kind enough to undertake to talk to me about it shower me with platitudes about tomorrow being another day and that everything will be okay and that this too shall pass and that I'll feel better soon. For a little while this became a bad problem when I would talk to my mother. She wants me to feel better and she says these things in order to be soothing and in order to make me feel better and she needs to be able to say something encouraging. I understand all this but (and again I'm going to blame philosophy) because neither she nor anyone else on earth has any strong or valid knowledge that I (or anyone else) will be all right in the future or feel better at any point (whatever 'better' is supposed to mean in that context), it only makes me more upset when people say these things to me because they aren't grounded in any kind of logic and if I feel that bad, any optimism I might have had has disappeared anyway. My reaction to such statements had, though, gotten to the point of being unfair to my mother, whose intent was certainly never to upset me, so I sat down and tried to think of something to be substituted that would allow her to express her wish to comfort me and would not offend my (overly honed for ordinary conversation) sense of logic. In the end, I came up with 'it won't always feel exactly like this'.
This alternative platitude has worked out well, largely because I can believe it. I might not feel better next week or next month (and I might not feel worse) but I know and can believe that I will not feel exactly the same. The intensity of whatever I'm feeling will alter, its emphasis will shift, my intrusive thoughts will develop variations. I will experience these changes as being better or worse and it is extraordinarily unlikely that I will not experience variation. Internalising this has actually helped. On the nights when it's 3.00am and I haven't been able to sleep and I'm lying in bed feeling horrendously guilty all out of proportion to anything I might have done or failed to do and everything seems completely hopeless and on the verge of falling apart I can tell myself that I'm not going to feel exactly as horribly suffocated by all the wrongness in myself and in the world forever. That perspective is not the new reality of life.
Hopefully that all makes some sort of sense. It's the way I have found out of the totalising meta-narrative that a depressed mood (or a manic mood) imposes. It's a way out that doesn't invalidate the emotional content of my moods - instead of saying that I don't really feel that way, it's a disease, I can say I do really feel that way, it's just not the way I am always going to feel nor is the totality of what I feel.
Anyhow, it has gotten me through the past six weeks, much of which I have spent fairly depressed, relatively unscathed. It helped stop me freaking out and flailing in all directions. It stopped me taking things out unfairly on others and stopped me chucking away things that I value in the long term but temporarily didn't know what to do with. I woke up this morning feel better with my life still intact and I'm happy about that and now I've written a post that I'm not going to immediately delete and I'm reasonably confident that I'll be asleep before three - hurray.
_______________________________________________
*I apologise: I go to a university where they make us read analytic philosophy all the time and then I talk to my fellow students who also read analytic philosophy all the time and at this point, we seem all to have started talking as though we were dictating analytic philosophy. My mind attempts metaphor but all that comes out are more variables.
This is what analytic philosophy looks like:
My writing style isn't quite as bad as all that yet but I imagine it's only a matter of time.
08 December 2009
Fear
First off, thank you everyone for the supportive comments on the last post. I have been woefully slow to respond to them. I must now beg your forgiveness for that and also for the prolix tone that I fear has arrived as a result of my having taken a sleeping pill tonight with the aim of curing the sleep pattern brutally disrupted on Saturday night.
That Saturday night was a very good Saturday night. Weeks 7, 8 and 9 were bearish weeks and I had been swept into a stress dumb-striking. My mind deserted conversations in the common room and at the pub to creep into a squelched, folded place nearer the occipital lobe, leaving my mouth empty and eyes blank; my forehead wincing enough to be repeatedly commented on - in concern - by the conversational group. One of those times when the sternum makes a press for the heart.
Sweaty and vaguely asthmatic I would force my clothes upon myself in the morning and march - no, that is a lie, it was much closer to swirling than marching, this swirling of picking up books and the phone and the wallet and the keys and my shoes off the floor - swirl my way out of the door, into the newsagent's for the paper, out again for the bus, wherein I would perch and clutch my knees together and try to keep my eyes on the floor, which is hard when one is sitting straight up and sucked in. Off the bus and along the pavement to the station, heels clipping along briskly and my head up, oyster card at the ready, clipping down the stairs, around dawdlers and straight the way down the end of the platform for the Underground. Once there, things would fall apart. The wind would takeover my hair and my paper, I would put my paper away and turn this way and that to keep the wind in a more favourable relation to my hair and with my hand on top of my head, grope out my mp3 player and clutch it to my chest over my heart and shake out the long cord of headphones.
Into the cramped Central line train permeated by stockbroker Tudorbethan commuter air that the train exhales on its short passage through shabbier abodes, refreshed by a new infusion at Liverpool Street and becoming crisp with our arrival at Bank and sanctified and sanctimonious at St. Paul's and Chancery Lane and all this time myself crushed and crushed again and damp with the rain that drizzles East London, wound into myself with my music - Advent carols, the relevant parts of the Messiah, Magnificat this time of year - trying to stop myself breaking away in clammy globs under the feet of my fellows. Always with cold hands and feet, cold hands that would squirm at the heat of my coffee cup and fumble my cigarettes out, feet that would give way on cobblestones.
I was a choke heart wretch by the time I made my way from Holborn station to the door of the Lakatos building. Then an hour and a half's seminar that I would wrench my mind along to follow up with dumbness of spirit during the group coffee break that follows. Trenchant opinions on Kant's teleology are hard to summon in the most level-headed of times and my mind contained on these mornings only a penny or two, dusty lint and hesitance. That is what I have been dredging essays from these last turgid few weeks.
Deterioration was complete each night after the train journey home with my arms clutched across my chest, bent over, to climb the stairs and form a lump on the couch in front of the telly and the laptop and eat or fail to eat, depending.
It was not a promising state from which to set out early on a Saturday to spend the day here and there with a friend and the exhaustion of changing to the Waterloo and City line was enormous, only to be followed by the disorientation of trying to remember my way, mapless, around the Southbank Centre after a six years' absence during which they removed all of the little brass pointers that direct one from the sure landmark of the Festival Hall to the hidden and unforeseeable entrances to the rest of Britain's cultural showcases.
After two much needed black coffees and with student day tickets for the National in hand, I began to be able to act as a human. Then came an extended perusal of the bookstalls, conversational literary criticism in tow and brunch in Borough Market and more coffee. An adjournment and I took the long, tops of buses way home and tidied up the house with Women's Hour Weekend on Radio Four on in the background and dragged myself less heavily back into town for dinner and mulled wine and theatre in front row seats where we were covered in stray chicken feather particulate by the time the interval came round. It was a Brecht play and long. By the time it ended and the male members of our evening's party drifted away to pursue their own ends, we two went for drinks at a jazz bar and by the time I realised that I would indeed miss the last train, I had relaxed and even become a little careless and daring in conversation. A journey on the night bus is a small price to pay for that.
This was the pleasant origin of my broken sleep that I am lazily remedying by means of pills instead of daytime constitutionals. Only two more seminars, a departmental party and an essay between me and the Christmas holidays when I can work and work and bake and go to church.
What has been bothering me, though? I've spent the day ruminating half-assedly instead of writing my essay and in the bath I concluded that it was fear. It would be easy and incidentally true to say it was a mild depressive episode following a mild manic episode. This was, however, an episode full of content and the content is real enough whatever the underlying physiology might be. This is not always the case for me - mostly these things just come upon me with a moth eaten jumble of bog standard thoughts that do not feel internal. And it is the case that I am afraid.
Whence this fear? I imagine it has something to do with the heartbreak of this summer; rejection, longing, hopelessness, abrupt interruption and eruption of dreams and anger. I imagine it has something to do with the now ingrained cautiousness over my health. I imagine it has something to do with the way none of my clothes fit me at the moment and money and debt and missing the people who used to spend acres of time sitting on my porch.
What is it I fear? Failure, for one. The external part of my life hangs fairly heavily on what I do this year and the knowledge of that makes it hard for me to write essays because I become anxious. I fear rejection, which makes it hard to venture anything - friends, essays, clothing, talking, dating, saying no, saying yes, declarative sentences - because it feels as though everyone is waiting for me to make a tiny slip so that they can criticise me in a devastating way. I fear, in a way that is unfamiliar to me, my own sexuality. In some ways it is a fear of vulnerability and obviously connected to fear of rejection but it is not solely that, and the other part is the part that is unfamiliar. What the other part is I am not sure I know how to say. It, along with the difficulty I am having with writing essays, what preoccupies me the most at the moment. I am not having difficulty with writing in general, which I don't quite understand because usually if I am confident about my writing, which I usually am, then I am fully confident of all my writing. I need the space of the Christmas holidays to investigate my essay problems but the weirdness of this sexuality fear is more invasive and more complex and more unknown and thus more obsessing.
Part of it is the voracious character it has lately taken on. I have not previously experienced it so directly and so immediately. I have looked at other women before but never like this - unremitting distraction - and never before has lust so quickly and constantly followed on. I'm distressed by it: it is pleasant and enjoyable and yet simultaneously it suggests parts to myself that I didn't know were there and which I'm not sure I like, entirely. It seems that being gay is more deeply seated in me than I realised and I hope that the reason I am partly uncomfortable with it is because it is new and not because I have struck upon a new seam of self-loathing. I feel that I have lost some measure of control over it.
This unexpected part of my sexuality has formed a locus around a new friend of mine. I cannot sit next to her without shivering with attraction. That is not unusual in itself. What is unusual is that it is not accompanied by an at least somewhat idealising crush. It is more like a fascination. The other strange thing about it is that I still haven't made up my mind what to do about it. Even in high school when I was more shy and much, much more inexperienced I had an easier time figuring out what to do or not do. It, this fascination, this urge, has nothing to do with incipient or inchoate love, which is not to say that it feels as though that couldn't follow but just that it is not now present.
It feels more naked, somehow. What does that mean? By naked, I mean that I don't feel that I must or should become a more perfect version of myself. Surely that's meant to be a Good Thing? That I feel I need be only myself? Perhaps that's what's scaring me so badly. By naked, I mean that desire has the prominent place and for once I have no other conspicuous emotion to cloak it in nor pair it with; neither affection (though it is there) nor admiration (though it is not absent) nor anything else. Then, for various reasons of personality and shared background, there is a quality of affinity that really scares me because it is so drunken. Is that quite the word? What does it mean to feel that - to feel an affinity - and yet at the same time experience the other person as an opaque and truly and finally separate being? It is a contradiction.
The whole of this weird attraction has no surface and has no exclusivity to it. No surface? No exclusivity? Do I mean that it is immanent, rather than transcendent? It feels dangerous, dangerous and explosive. It feels like life. Again, an almost non-sentence. Feels like life? Am I sentimentalising? Or am I referencing intensity? Or salvation?
What is it? Why am I so scared? How do I move on from it, from here?
That Saturday night was a very good Saturday night. Weeks 7, 8 and 9 were bearish weeks and I had been swept into a stress dumb-striking. My mind deserted conversations in the common room and at the pub to creep into a squelched, folded place nearer the occipital lobe, leaving my mouth empty and eyes blank; my forehead wincing enough to be repeatedly commented on - in concern - by the conversational group. One of those times when the sternum makes a press for the heart.
Sweaty and vaguely asthmatic I would force my clothes upon myself in the morning and march - no, that is a lie, it was much closer to swirling than marching, this swirling of picking up books and the phone and the wallet and the keys and my shoes off the floor - swirl my way out of the door, into the newsagent's for the paper, out again for the bus, wherein I would perch and clutch my knees together and try to keep my eyes on the floor, which is hard when one is sitting straight up and sucked in. Off the bus and along the pavement to the station, heels clipping along briskly and my head up, oyster card at the ready, clipping down the stairs, around dawdlers and straight the way down the end of the platform for the Underground. Once there, things would fall apart. The wind would takeover my hair and my paper, I would put my paper away and turn this way and that to keep the wind in a more favourable relation to my hair and with my hand on top of my head, grope out my mp3 player and clutch it to my chest over my heart and shake out the long cord of headphones.
Into the cramped Central line train permeated by stockbroker Tudorbethan commuter air that the train exhales on its short passage through shabbier abodes, refreshed by a new infusion at Liverpool Street and becoming crisp with our arrival at Bank and sanctified and sanctimonious at St. Paul's and Chancery Lane and all this time myself crushed and crushed again and damp with the rain that drizzles East London, wound into myself with my music - Advent carols, the relevant parts of the Messiah, Magnificat this time of year - trying to stop myself breaking away in clammy globs under the feet of my fellows. Always with cold hands and feet, cold hands that would squirm at the heat of my coffee cup and fumble my cigarettes out, feet that would give way on cobblestones.
I was a choke heart wretch by the time I made my way from Holborn station to the door of the Lakatos building. Then an hour and a half's seminar that I would wrench my mind along to follow up with dumbness of spirit during the group coffee break that follows. Trenchant opinions on Kant's teleology are hard to summon in the most level-headed of times and my mind contained on these mornings only a penny or two, dusty lint and hesitance. That is what I have been dredging essays from these last turgid few weeks.
Deterioration was complete each night after the train journey home with my arms clutched across my chest, bent over, to climb the stairs and form a lump on the couch in front of the telly and the laptop and eat or fail to eat, depending.
It was not a promising state from which to set out early on a Saturday to spend the day here and there with a friend and the exhaustion of changing to the Waterloo and City line was enormous, only to be followed by the disorientation of trying to remember my way, mapless, around the Southbank Centre after a six years' absence during which they removed all of the little brass pointers that direct one from the sure landmark of the Festival Hall to the hidden and unforeseeable entrances to the rest of Britain's cultural showcases.
After two much needed black coffees and with student day tickets for the National in hand, I began to be able to act as a human. Then came an extended perusal of the bookstalls, conversational literary criticism in tow and brunch in Borough Market and more coffee. An adjournment and I took the long, tops of buses way home and tidied up the house with Women's Hour Weekend on Radio Four on in the background and dragged myself less heavily back into town for dinner and mulled wine and theatre in front row seats where we were covered in stray chicken feather particulate by the time the interval came round. It was a Brecht play and long. By the time it ended and the male members of our evening's party drifted away to pursue their own ends, we two went for drinks at a jazz bar and by the time I realised that I would indeed miss the last train, I had relaxed and even become a little careless and daring in conversation. A journey on the night bus is a small price to pay for that.
This was the pleasant origin of my broken sleep that I am lazily remedying by means of pills instead of daytime constitutionals. Only two more seminars, a departmental party and an essay between me and the Christmas holidays when I can work and work and bake and go to church.
What has been bothering me, though? I've spent the day ruminating half-assedly instead of writing my essay and in the bath I concluded that it was fear. It would be easy and incidentally true to say it was a mild depressive episode following a mild manic episode. This was, however, an episode full of content and the content is real enough whatever the underlying physiology might be. This is not always the case for me - mostly these things just come upon me with a moth eaten jumble of bog standard thoughts that do not feel internal. And it is the case that I am afraid.
Whence this fear? I imagine it has something to do with the heartbreak of this summer; rejection, longing, hopelessness, abrupt interruption and eruption of dreams and anger. I imagine it has something to do with the now ingrained cautiousness over my health. I imagine it has something to do with the way none of my clothes fit me at the moment and money and debt and missing the people who used to spend acres of time sitting on my porch.
What is it I fear? Failure, for one. The external part of my life hangs fairly heavily on what I do this year and the knowledge of that makes it hard for me to write essays because I become anxious. I fear rejection, which makes it hard to venture anything - friends, essays, clothing, talking, dating, saying no, saying yes, declarative sentences - because it feels as though everyone is waiting for me to make a tiny slip so that they can criticise me in a devastating way. I fear, in a way that is unfamiliar to me, my own sexuality. In some ways it is a fear of vulnerability and obviously connected to fear of rejection but it is not solely that, and the other part is the part that is unfamiliar. What the other part is I am not sure I know how to say. It, along with the difficulty I am having with writing essays, what preoccupies me the most at the moment. I am not having difficulty with writing in general, which I don't quite understand because usually if I am confident about my writing, which I usually am, then I am fully confident of all my writing. I need the space of the Christmas holidays to investigate my essay problems but the weirdness of this sexuality fear is more invasive and more complex and more unknown and thus more obsessing.
Part of it is the voracious character it has lately taken on. I have not previously experienced it so directly and so immediately. I have looked at other women before but never like this - unremitting distraction - and never before has lust so quickly and constantly followed on. I'm distressed by it: it is pleasant and enjoyable and yet simultaneously it suggests parts to myself that I didn't know were there and which I'm not sure I like, entirely. It seems that being gay is more deeply seated in me than I realised and I hope that the reason I am partly uncomfortable with it is because it is new and not because I have struck upon a new seam of self-loathing. I feel that I have lost some measure of control over it.
This unexpected part of my sexuality has formed a locus around a new friend of mine. I cannot sit next to her without shivering with attraction. That is not unusual in itself. What is unusual is that it is not accompanied by an at least somewhat idealising crush. It is more like a fascination. The other strange thing about it is that I still haven't made up my mind what to do about it. Even in high school when I was more shy and much, much more inexperienced I had an easier time figuring out what to do or not do. It, this fascination, this urge, has nothing to do with incipient or inchoate love, which is not to say that it feels as though that couldn't follow but just that it is not now present.
It feels more naked, somehow. What does that mean? By naked, I mean that I don't feel that I must or should become a more perfect version of myself. Surely that's meant to be a Good Thing? That I feel I need be only myself? Perhaps that's what's scaring me so badly. By naked, I mean that desire has the prominent place and for once I have no other conspicuous emotion to cloak it in nor pair it with; neither affection (though it is there) nor admiration (though it is not absent) nor anything else. Then, for various reasons of personality and shared background, there is a quality of affinity that really scares me because it is so drunken. Is that quite the word? What does it mean to feel that - to feel an affinity - and yet at the same time experience the other person as an opaque and truly and finally separate being? It is a contradiction.
The whole of this weird attraction has no surface and has no exclusivity to it. No surface? No exclusivity? Do I mean that it is immanent, rather than transcendent? It feels dangerous, dangerous and explosive. It feels like life. Again, an almost non-sentence. Feels like life? Am I sentimentalising? Or am I referencing intensity? Or salvation?
What is it? Why am I so scared? How do I move on from it, from here?
21 November 2009
The Benthamite Utility Monster is Eating My Claims About Art: Help!
Last night I went to the ROH for the first time since moving back here, which was a thrill. I have missed it! It was only to go the Linbury Studio Theatre but any disappointment I might have felt at not getting in to see the main house was more than mitigated by the fact that I was there to see an old school friend of mine who had had some of his work commissioned for the ROH Firsts 09 season. The programme was a mixed bag but that's what happens with series like that.
Unbelievably, I have not even made it to the Tate Modern (easy enough walking distance from university) nor the National Gallery (ten minutes walk, if that far) since I got back here. No art, when that was one of the things I had most looked forward to having back. I have been just a little bit busy for some reason...but still.
I feel a lot better today than I have for a couple of weeks and I blame that entirely on my theatre excursion. I have for years realised that studying ballet was what got me through all the depression I had in high school, and that singing at church and working at the gallery have been a mainstay for me over the past few years. Nevertheless, I was genuinely surprised at how much better I felt last night. Art, it seems, is actively good for me. At the moment, I would say that it helps as much as klonopin does, though I wouldn't vouch for that being true if I were really in the depths.
I have generally been against the idea that art has or ought to have a utility value on the grounds that art works are not fungible in any meaningful way and utility values function off of a notion of exchangibility, which implies price and thus that art should be wholly a means rather than an end in itself*, so I worry about making a medicinal utility claim about it. However, I don't think that such a claim harms the dignity of an individual art work if I restrict the claim to art as a species of human activity and the end to which I make a claim that art is a means is an occultly achieved human end that art can achieve as a generality. I don't know; that's still a bit Benthamite. However, I do not make this claim universally: I imagine that there are others for whom the football or foreign language study or collecting match boxes achieves much the same end when art would not do the same. Actually, though, that is Benthamite ('pushpin is equal to poetry'). Oh dear. The dangers of making any claim to utility!
I need to have a think about this, but for now I shall just say hurrah for Art and hurrah for feeling better. At least for today, that has priority to philosophy.
*This is part of the good remains of the time I spent as a devout deontologist and secular humanist.
Unbelievably, I have not even made it to the Tate Modern (easy enough walking distance from university) nor the National Gallery (ten minutes walk, if that far) since I got back here. No art, when that was one of the things I had most looked forward to having back. I have been just a little bit busy for some reason...but still.
I feel a lot better today than I have for a couple of weeks and I blame that entirely on my theatre excursion. I have for years realised that studying ballet was what got me through all the depression I had in high school, and that singing at church and working at the gallery have been a mainstay for me over the past few years. Nevertheless, I was genuinely surprised at how much better I felt last night. Art, it seems, is actively good for me. At the moment, I would say that it helps as much as klonopin does, though I wouldn't vouch for that being true if I were really in the depths.
I have generally been against the idea that art has or ought to have a utility value on the grounds that art works are not fungible in any meaningful way and utility values function off of a notion of exchangibility, which implies price and thus that art should be wholly a means rather than an end in itself*, so I worry about making a medicinal utility claim about it. However, I don't think that such a claim harms the dignity of an individual art work if I restrict the claim to art as a species of human activity and the end to which I make a claim that art is a means is an occultly achieved human end that art can achieve as a generality. I don't know; that's still a bit Benthamite. However, I do not make this claim universally: I imagine that there are others for whom the football or foreign language study or collecting match boxes achieves much the same end when art would not do the same. Actually, though, that is Benthamite ('pushpin is equal to poetry'). Oh dear. The dangers of making any claim to utility!
I need to have a think about this, but for now I shall just say hurrah for Art and hurrah for feeling better. At least for today, that has priority to philosophy.
*This is part of the good remains of the time I spent as a devout deontologist and secular humanist.
16 November 2009
Eyargh! : Or, the Demented Battle Cry of a Lunatick Philosopher
I came home early today, nominally because this is the third week in a row when I've had some sort of a virus or other and I am very tired.
Why am I so tired? Because I stayed out far too late on Saturday night. The night bus let me off in front of my door at 3.07am. Where did I go? A rather insipid student night not at my own university but at the rival one across the road. Why would I go to such a place, I who firmly dislike not only loud music but also nights out that involve dancing? Because I have an idiotic crush on a girl that isn't even a proper crush because she's not someone I would date in real life, though I'm not tremendously sure of what real life, my real life, is at the moment because everything seems to have been upended and I've had a cold for three weeks which does not make for clarity of mind and I really thought I had broken my habit of getting crushes on younger women but I guess not and I don't know whether to be distressed, indifferent or amused about it, not that she's that young but still.
Last Wednesday night I didn't sleep but a couple of hours and yet had no trouble being awake and alert on Thursday and I have been talking back to the newspaper, out loud, while on the train in the morning and distractedly twitching at noises from the street while reading in the common room and forgetting to eat and having alternating flashes of panic and rage in the morning while trying to find the right books to take with me for the day and trying to weave through the people who meander dazedly down the tube platform in the morning when really they should be trying to get away from the crowded part and get down to the very end where there are only five or six people standing and 8.00am is really not so early as to make dazed meandering really necessary. I have been staring at people generally which I have largely explained to myself as being the result of moving to a place where there are more than 1,000 times as many people as the last place I lived, to a city whose population is almost as large as that of the entire state of North Carolina, which is almost as large in area as the entirety of England and Wales put together so that, as you can see, the people were a great deal more spread out and therefore not as easily stared at but then that falls apart when one considers the subset of all that staring which is a new-found involuntary tendency to gawk - let's not mince words - at other women, which is not very polite and has the added detraction of making me feel like I've turned into an adolescent boy: I've had 'staring issues' before but not like this.
And the real reason I came home early is that I was worried I would do something weird and aggressive because I am having the harsh tail end of a hypomanic blip and I am extremely uncomfortable and I don't quite know what to do with myself and and and...
And too many things are happening on top of one another and sometimes simultaneously in the wrong order and I can't calm down and writing this has helped some and I thought it would but (eyargh!) why have I had colds for three weeks and why do I have to choke on the dregs of mania?
Why am I so tired? Because I stayed out far too late on Saturday night. The night bus let me off in front of my door at 3.07am. Where did I go? A rather insipid student night not at my own university but at the rival one across the road. Why would I go to such a place, I who firmly dislike not only loud music but also nights out that involve dancing? Because I have an idiotic crush on a girl that isn't even a proper crush because she's not someone I would date in real life, though I'm not tremendously sure of what real life, my real life, is at the moment because everything seems to have been upended and I've had a cold for three weeks which does not make for clarity of mind and I really thought I had broken my habit of getting crushes on younger women but I guess not and I don't know whether to be distressed, indifferent or amused about it, not that she's that young but still.
Last Wednesday night I didn't sleep but a couple of hours and yet had no trouble being awake and alert on Thursday and I have been talking back to the newspaper, out loud, while on the train in the morning and distractedly twitching at noises from the street while reading in the common room and forgetting to eat and having alternating flashes of panic and rage in the morning while trying to find the right books to take with me for the day and trying to weave through the people who meander dazedly down the tube platform in the morning when really they should be trying to get away from the crowded part and get down to the very end where there are only five or six people standing and 8.00am is really not so early as to make dazed meandering really necessary. I have been staring at people generally which I have largely explained to myself as being the result of moving to a place where there are more than 1,000 times as many people as the last place I lived, to a city whose population is almost as large as that of the entire state of North Carolina, which is almost as large in area as the entirety of England and Wales put together so that, as you can see, the people were a great deal more spread out and therefore not as easily stared at but then that falls apart when one considers the subset of all that staring which is a new-found involuntary tendency to gawk - let's not mince words - at other women, which is not very polite and has the added detraction of making me feel like I've turned into an adolescent boy: I've had 'staring issues' before but not like this.
And the real reason I came home early is that I was worried I would do something weird and aggressive because I am having the harsh tail end of a hypomanic blip and I am extremely uncomfortable and I don't quite know what to do with myself and and and...
And too many things are happening on top of one another and sometimes simultaneously in the wrong order and I can't calm down and writing this has helped some and I thought it would but (eyargh!) why have I had colds for three weeks and why do I have to choke on the dregs of mania?
28 October 2009
Overwhelmed and Omphaloskeptic
There are too many things going on! I'm not sure that's really a complaint, as I quite like most of the things. However, they are myriad.
On the things I quite like side are parties; Monday night philosophy drinking; my new armchair that I lugged home in the box from Ikea over one bus route, the Overground and the Underground*, which was a rather painful thing to do but more than compensated for by having someplace to sit that isn't the floor or my bed; a new addition to my collection of favorite philosophy quips**; reading Tristram Shandy and its heroic 18th century punctuation - can't think why I haven't read it before nor why we no longer punctuate like that; all the arguments I've been able to make about infinite regress and infinites by addition; being back in London; the shocking - to me - way I've made friends so quickly and effortlessly; the general thrill of studying interesting things; seeing old friends that I haven't seen for years; reading the Guardian; my new shoes; having a clothes rail and hangers and my newsagent.
On the things that are not things that I like side very much are plumbing faults; owing medium to large amounts of money to various institutions; not having very much money to pay said institutions with and also buy food; that it takes four to six weeks for overseas cheques to clear and mine has been sitting in the bank for four weeks and still hasn't cleared; the reaction of various Anglicans to the Pope's recent announcement; the fact that somehow Rousseau's concept of the general will has gotten stuck in my head in the manner of an annoying song***; the fact that there is so much going on that I seem to miss at least half of it; that my feet hurt so much and so often and with such minimal provocation; the way this overwhelmed-ness makes my head too swimmy to concentrate and think properly; Boris Johnson; the way my hair hasn't gotten used to the hard water yet and sticks up in strange and disturbing ways in the morning; being tired all the time still and a very annoying virus/cold/cough thing that has been plaguing me for a week without actually making me properly ill or allowing me to be properly well****.
Things that I may or may not like (just not sure yet) side are the post-lecture drinking with the professors on Wednesdays because it makes me very nervous but the conversation is good; my inability to feel any emotion, positive or negative, about the ex-girlfriend which is a relief but does not bode well; the amount of Hackney Marshes closed off for development for the Olympics, which development may or may not be a good thing in the end*****; a weird crush I've developed on a new-friend girl at university that is not really a crush but something in between (and therefore not holy, see fourth footnote) that makes me uneasy and implies subtle and delicately strange things about myself and my ethical convictions; the unpredictable bursts of high-burning glittering bliss that might be the early warnings of hypomania - enjoyable when they occur but worrying afterwords and the way this post has footnotes with footnotes.
The world is all the things that are the case, and so it follows that this is the world I'm in for now******.
____________________________________________________________________
*I feel very boring though to be buying furniture from the Ikea. Why did I lug it home? Please see paragraph three, thing I don't like number four.
** "That's not a counter-example, it's a monster." Imre Lakatos
***I wouldn't have thought that philosophical concepts were capable of this but it seems to have happened anyway.
****This virus is a thing partway between being and not being and is therefore not holy (Please see De divina omnipotentia++, a letter written by St. Peter Damian to Pope Gregory. Peter Damian was also in charge of reforming cannon law and is responsible for the formalisation of the law concerning priestly celibacy {somehow, the Catholic Church made it through 1,000 years without actually requiring it} and the regularisation of cannon law concerning homosexual behavior {I know we think of it as identity and not act now generally but it would be inaccurate to say that Damian condemned homosexuality itself rather than homosexual acts} that has led to the modern Catholic condemnation of homosexuality via Aquinas' natural law theory and thus forward to the present day to one of the things I dislike in paragraph three. These later accomplishments and the reasons behind them are discussed in Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus, which is a very interesting read. Impressing pagans is part of the reasoning behind the celibacy dogma and the restriction of the priesthood to men and priestly duties with regard to hearing confession are behind the condemnation of homosexual acts.
*****It was a great thing for my childhood stomping ground, Atlanta, but then look at Calgary - hard to predict.
******Blatantly stolen from the beginning of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
____________________________________________________________________
++ De divina is found in vol. 6 of Damian's Opera Omnia, if memory serves. It's definitely in the Opera Omnia but it might not be vol. 6.
On the things I quite like side are parties; Monday night philosophy drinking; my new armchair that I lugged home in the box from Ikea over one bus route, the Overground and the Underground*, which was a rather painful thing to do but more than compensated for by having someplace to sit that isn't the floor or my bed; a new addition to my collection of favorite philosophy quips**; reading Tristram Shandy and its heroic 18th century punctuation - can't think why I haven't read it before nor why we no longer punctuate like that; all the arguments I've been able to make about infinite regress and infinites by addition; being back in London; the shocking - to me - way I've made friends so quickly and effortlessly; the general thrill of studying interesting things; seeing old friends that I haven't seen for years; reading the Guardian; my new shoes; having a clothes rail and hangers and my newsagent.
On the things that are not things that I like side very much are plumbing faults; owing medium to large amounts of money to various institutions; not having very much money to pay said institutions with and also buy food; that it takes four to six weeks for overseas cheques to clear and mine has been sitting in the bank for four weeks and still hasn't cleared; the reaction of various Anglicans to the Pope's recent announcement; the fact that somehow Rousseau's concept of the general will has gotten stuck in my head in the manner of an annoying song***; the fact that there is so much going on that I seem to miss at least half of it; that my feet hurt so much and so often and with such minimal provocation; the way this overwhelmed-ness makes my head too swimmy to concentrate and think properly; Boris Johnson; the way my hair hasn't gotten used to the hard water yet and sticks up in strange and disturbing ways in the morning; being tired all the time still and a very annoying virus/cold/cough thing that has been plaguing me for a week without actually making me properly ill or allowing me to be properly well****.
Things that I may or may not like (just not sure yet) side are the post-lecture drinking with the professors on Wednesdays because it makes me very nervous but the conversation is good; my inability to feel any emotion, positive or negative, about the ex-girlfriend which is a relief but does not bode well; the amount of Hackney Marshes closed off for development for the Olympics, which development may or may not be a good thing in the end*****; a weird crush I've developed on a new-friend girl at university that is not really a crush but something in between (and therefore not holy, see fourth footnote) that makes me uneasy and implies subtle and delicately strange things about myself and my ethical convictions; the unpredictable bursts of high-burning glittering bliss that might be the early warnings of hypomania - enjoyable when they occur but worrying afterwords and the way this post has footnotes with footnotes.
The world is all the things that are the case, and so it follows that this is the world I'm in for now******.
____________________________________________________________________
*I feel very boring though to be buying furniture from the Ikea. Why did I lug it home? Please see paragraph three, thing I don't like number four.
** "That's not a counter-example, it's a monster." Imre Lakatos
***I wouldn't have thought that philosophical concepts were capable of this but it seems to have happened anyway.
****This virus is a thing partway between being and not being and is therefore not holy (Please see De divina omnipotentia++, a letter written by St. Peter Damian to Pope Gregory. Peter Damian was also in charge of reforming cannon law and is responsible for the formalisation of the law concerning priestly celibacy {somehow, the Catholic Church made it through 1,000 years without actually requiring it} and the regularisation of cannon law concerning homosexual behavior {I know we think of it as identity and not act now generally but it would be inaccurate to say that Damian condemned homosexuality itself rather than homosexual acts} that has led to the modern Catholic condemnation of homosexuality via Aquinas' natural law theory and thus forward to the present day to one of the things I dislike in paragraph three. These later accomplishments and the reasons behind them are discussed in Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus, which is a very interesting read. Impressing pagans is part of the reasoning behind the celibacy dogma and the restriction of the priesthood to men and priestly duties with regard to hearing confession are behind the condemnation of homosexual acts.
*****It was a great thing for my childhood stomping ground, Atlanta, but then look at Calgary - hard to predict.
******Blatantly stolen from the beginning of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
____________________________________________________________________
++ De divina is found in vol. 6 of Damian's Opera Omnia, if memory serves. It's definitely in the Opera Omnia but it might not be vol. 6.
30 August 2009
It's a bit boring to say but I'm afraid that I am just plain slipping. Lots of disorganised thinking, the parapetetics, avoiding and avoiding and avoiding. I am tempted to just put on my sturdiest pair of shoes and walk out into the woods with a shawl over my head, and keep walking until the shoes wear out and then be a decalcite friar, but female. Then if I'm going to be a mad person, I will at least be a religious mad person in the woods. Much more interesting than a mad person hiding from her parents because she feels like an unexploded land mine and makes only brief sorties when she feels able to prop up a rational facade or needs food.
Oh, the egotism.
I have been complete rubbish at replying to comments and I apologise. I will do better tomorrow.
Oh, the egotism.
I have been complete rubbish at replying to comments and I apologise. I will do better tomorrow.
17 August 2009
The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project
The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project is something I have had in mind for a while. At the moment of starting, I am stuck in omphaloskepsitis (navel-gazing-itis) and I am glad to have thought of something to offer up that's more in tune with the original purpose of this blog.
I am asking all of you who read to save up and share any and all references you come across in literature, journalism, blogs, television, magazines, movies, day to day conversation, scholarly articles, academically dubious articles and sources: in short, anything that reflects a popular conception of the nature of mental illness and especially the perceived nature or character of those who are mentally interesting, negative or positive. I would also welcome more selective contributions from older (pre-1970) psychiatric and psychological texts.
My aim is to build up a database of popular references to mental illness so that, in true pragmatist philosophy mode, I can gain a fuller idea of what exists in the minds of the living, the influences that shapes these perceptions and the historical discursive context of current understandings of mental illness in the popular social dialectic. With this understanding, I hope to be better able to address mentalisms philosophically in a more relevant way.
If you're not sure whether a reference you have come across is relevant to this project, just go ahead and stick it up anyway. I need your help and I welcome and appreciate any and all contributions.
When posting a reference, please try to give sufficient citation in whatever form. Sufficient citation for anything in print would consist of the date of publication, author, publisher, page number and title. For blogs, as much as can be gathered of the publication citation plus a link would be great. For conversational references, date, time, local and a brief description of the relationship between the participants (e.g. psychiatrist to patient, parent to child who is mentally interesting) would be appreciated. Names and personal details are not requested or necessary. If you do not have all of the information requested, don't worry, just give as much as you are able.
I am particularly interested in anything that strikes you as a recurring conception and particularly interested in anything that strikes you as unusual.
With your help, I hope to make a useful contribution to political philosophy and, eventually, public policy for the greater good of the mentally interesting and the benefit of greater understanding to the non-mentally interesting. Thank you in advance and know that I will faithfully give due credit to any aid you can afford me in this project.
I am asking all of you who read to save up and share any and all references you come across in literature, journalism, blogs, television, magazines, movies, day to day conversation, scholarly articles, academically dubious articles and sources: in short, anything that reflects a popular conception of the nature of mental illness and especially the perceived nature or character of those who are mentally interesting, negative or positive. I would also welcome more selective contributions from older (pre-1970) psychiatric and psychological texts.
My aim is to build up a database of popular references to mental illness so that, in true pragmatist philosophy mode, I can gain a fuller idea of what exists in the minds of the living, the influences that shapes these perceptions and the historical discursive context of current understandings of mental illness in the popular social dialectic. With this understanding, I hope to be better able to address mentalisms philosophically in a more relevant way.
If you're not sure whether a reference you have come across is relevant to this project, just go ahead and stick it up anyway. I need your help and I welcome and appreciate any and all contributions.
When posting a reference, please try to give sufficient citation in whatever form. Sufficient citation for anything in print would consist of the date of publication, author, publisher, page number and title. For blogs, as much as can be gathered of the publication citation plus a link would be great. For conversational references, date, time, local and a brief description of the relationship between the participants (e.g. psychiatrist to patient, parent to child who is mentally interesting) would be appreciated. Names and personal details are not requested or necessary. If you do not have all of the information requested, don't worry, just give as much as you are able.
I am particularly interested in anything that strikes you as a recurring conception and particularly interested in anything that strikes you as unusual.
With your help, I hope to make a useful contribution to political philosophy and, eventually, public policy for the greater good of the mentally interesting and the benefit of greater understanding to the non-mentally interesting. Thank you in advance and know that I will faithfully give due credit to any aid you can afford me in this project.
16 August 2009
Maria Assumpta Est In Coelum, Angeli Gaudent
I said goodbye to my church today. It was our patronal feast day and we started down on the street corner and carried St. Mary on her litter under the canopy back into the church. For the anthem we had Arcadelt's Ave Maria and then some of my favorite hymns, including 278 (Sing we of the joys of Mary). Our last choir director wrote a descant for it specially for our choir that is very fun to sing; lots of high notes.
During announcements, our rector made me come downstairs to be bid farewell and gave me a blessing for my studies next year, which was nice but embarrassing. On top of that, our choir director asked me to sing the prayers, which is also nice and embarrassing; I sing just fine to be a choir member but my voice isn't really strong enough for me to sing by myself, at least, not in front of people. I can never quite make it, breathwise, to the end of 'Father we pray for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world'. The other versicles are easier because they are shorter.
Anyhow, it is strange to be leaving Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, as it is nicknamed. I was confirmed there and have been going to church there for five and a half years - I've been there longer than the current rector, I've been a choir member longer than anyone else who is currently in the choir, longer than our current choir director and organist, longer than any of the other 'young people'. We broke ground today for the new parish hall - I'm glad I was there to see it - but I'm sorry that I won't be around to see what happens next.
When I first started going to Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, there were five people under the age of forty, an interim priest who was doing things he ought not to have been doing*, no children and a rather paltry community life. As of today, our congregation has increased from around 100 active members to 150, we have enough children of varying ages that we have child altar servers, around twenty young people, gay, straight, single and married, and the median age of the parish has dropped from 54 to 39.
All of this is nice and it has been wonderful to participate in the growth of the parish but I'm going to miss my church most because it is where I discovered the mystery that is Christianity. When my then roommate and good friend dragged me off to church with her one Sunday morning, I was entirely unprepared by my lukewarm Presbyterian upbringing for the beauty and holiness of the liturgy. I spent the entire service in anxiety; on the one hand, I was enchanted by everything that was going on, on the other hand, I didn't know what to make of the statues and procession and the singing of the Regina Caeli at the end of the service. It seemed to be a good that I was going to church but was I not then guilty of idolatry? Church attendance felt like an occasion of sin. But I couldn't keep myself away the next Sunday, nor the Sunday after that, despite my initial quandary.
Confirmation didn't make the impression on me that I had hoped for - it seems to have been one of those rituals of life that comes here too early, there too late, as Forster puts it - but I will never forget the awe of God's presence that overcame me the first time I went to Benediction, nor the solemnity of my first Holy Week (Presbyterians don't really do Holy Week, at least not in my experience).
A building does not make a church, but those four walls are especially dear to me for having housed so much revelation and love. I'm heartsore at leaving my congregation and all the friends I have therein. And the choir! Will I ever again have the chance to sing Palestrina and Arcadelt and Tallis and Clemens non Papa and de Victoria again? (I do suspect myself of making a false idol of the music sometimes, hopefully not being in choir will help me get past it although I doubt I would ever be able to make my peace with a guitar led mass).
More than anything else that has happened so far this summer, leaving my church is the one thing that has made me feel, rather than know, that this part of my life is over, whether I want it to be or not. I'm scared, both of what might happen and what I might miss. When I was still studying ballet very seriously, it was a comfort to me that wherever I went, ballet class would always follow the same structure and that no matter what country I was in, I would be able to follow what was going on. Now, the structure of the mass gives me the same comfort. Even when I have been to mass in a country whose language I do not speak, I have been able to follow (excepting the sermon, of course) and say the prayers and creed and sanctus and so on quietly in English or in Latin. That will always be there, both in a church and in my heart, and ever my strength and shield.
Okay. My prose is getting a little out of control, so I should probably stop.
Everything here is over now.
* He was trying to switch the church from being part of the Episcopal church to being part of the Anglican Church in America - much more conservative and against the wishes of most of the congregation but not necessarily those of the vestry, two of whom were very wealthy and tried to throw their influence around that way and who scared off all of the candidates for the new rector by pretending that their viewpoint was the majority viewpoint over a two year period before the bishop intervened, dissolved the search committee, froze the vestry and more or less appointed our current rector - happily, I had no idea this was going on at the time or I wouldn't still be there - for something that almost split the congregation and did drive many people away, there was very little gossip.
During announcements, our rector made me come downstairs to be bid farewell and gave me a blessing for my studies next year, which was nice but embarrassing. On top of that, our choir director asked me to sing the prayers, which is also nice and embarrassing; I sing just fine to be a choir member but my voice isn't really strong enough for me to sing by myself, at least, not in front of people. I can never quite make it, breathwise, to the end of 'Father we pray for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world'. The other versicles are easier because they are shorter.
Anyhow, it is strange to be leaving Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, as it is nicknamed. I was confirmed there and have been going to church there for five and a half years - I've been there longer than the current rector, I've been a choir member longer than anyone else who is currently in the choir, longer than our current choir director and organist, longer than any of the other 'young people'. We broke ground today for the new parish hall - I'm glad I was there to see it - but I'm sorry that I won't be around to see what happens next.
When I first started going to Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, there were five people under the age of forty, an interim priest who was doing things he ought not to have been doing*, no children and a rather paltry community life. As of today, our congregation has increased from around 100 active members to 150, we have enough children of varying ages that we have child altar servers, around twenty young people, gay, straight, single and married, and the median age of the parish has dropped from 54 to 39.
All of this is nice and it has been wonderful to participate in the growth of the parish but I'm going to miss my church most because it is where I discovered the mystery that is Christianity. When my then roommate and good friend dragged me off to church with her one Sunday morning, I was entirely unprepared by my lukewarm Presbyterian upbringing for the beauty and holiness of the liturgy. I spent the entire service in anxiety; on the one hand, I was enchanted by everything that was going on, on the other hand, I didn't know what to make of the statues and procession and the singing of the Regina Caeli at the end of the service. It seemed to be a good that I was going to church but was I not then guilty of idolatry? Church attendance felt like an occasion of sin. But I couldn't keep myself away the next Sunday, nor the Sunday after that, despite my initial quandary.
Confirmation didn't make the impression on me that I had hoped for - it seems to have been one of those rituals of life that comes here too early, there too late, as Forster puts it - but I will never forget the awe of God's presence that overcame me the first time I went to Benediction, nor the solemnity of my first Holy Week (Presbyterians don't really do Holy Week, at least not in my experience).
A building does not make a church, but those four walls are especially dear to me for having housed so much revelation and love. I'm heartsore at leaving my congregation and all the friends I have therein. And the choir! Will I ever again have the chance to sing Palestrina and Arcadelt and Tallis and Clemens non Papa and de Victoria again? (I do suspect myself of making a false idol of the music sometimes, hopefully not being in choir will help me get past it although I doubt I would ever be able to make my peace with a guitar led mass).
More than anything else that has happened so far this summer, leaving my church is the one thing that has made me feel, rather than know, that this part of my life is over, whether I want it to be or not. I'm scared, both of what might happen and what I might miss. When I was still studying ballet very seriously, it was a comfort to me that wherever I went, ballet class would always follow the same structure and that no matter what country I was in, I would be able to follow what was going on. Now, the structure of the mass gives me the same comfort. Even when I have been to mass in a country whose language I do not speak, I have been able to follow (excepting the sermon, of course) and say the prayers and creed and sanctus and so on quietly in English or in Latin. That will always be there, both in a church and in my heart, and ever my strength and shield.
Okay. My prose is getting a little out of control, so I should probably stop.
Everything here is over now.
____________________________________________________________
* He was trying to switch the church from being part of the Episcopal church to being part of the Anglican Church in America - much more conservative and against the wishes of most of the congregation but not necessarily those of the vestry, two of whom were very wealthy and tried to throw their influence around that way and who scared off all of the candidates for the new rector by pretending that their viewpoint was the majority viewpoint over a two year period before the bishop intervened, dissolved the search committee, froze the vestry and more or less appointed our current rector - happily, I had no idea this was going on at the time or I wouldn't still be there - for something that almost split the congregation and did drive many people away, there was very little gossip.
09 August 2009
Greetings From Our Nation's Capital
I am up in DC where it will be around 37C tomorrow (100ish F) and humid as only a city built on a drained swamp can be. What can they have been thinking? Philadelphia (the original capital) has much nicer weather, if you ask me.
So far, I have not done much but drag myself out on walks in the heat, ducked into the National Gallery for the sculpture garden, gotten gravel in my shoes and blisters marching around the National Mall and made thick clouds of smoke in the guest room where I sit and worry for most of the day. The pleasant side effect of all this worrying is that it has driven me to reading novels with a speed and concentration I thought I had lost years ago. I'm glad to find I can still read like that, with total absorption.
So far I have made it through 'Mariana' (Monica Dickens), 'Someone At a Distance' (Dorothy Whipple), 'No Fond Return of Love' (Barbara Pym), something else too light for me to name without embarrassment - snobby of me, I acknowledge - and most of 'Persuasion' (Jane Austen). Next in the pile is 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding', which I bought on the strength of the fact that Virginia Woolf compared the author, Julia Strachey, to Katherine Mansfield.
I have been here four days.
Unfortunately, spending time with the parents has made me more muddled than less about what I ought to do with myself. They are very sweetly concerned about my health but with the result that I am more confused about what course I should follow in the immediate future. Between that and the long wait to hear about what funding I will have for next year, my anxiety, never very well moderated, is assuming operatic proportions. I wish, in my cowardice, that someone more competent could take over my life for the next few weeks, sort everything out and then hand it back over. However, I must do as E.M. Forster has recommended and face both the external and the internal situation bravely. I aim to do better than Lucy Honeychurch; I should like to do as well as Margaret Schlegel.
Tomorrow is church, which always makes me feel better. Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I do wish, though, that my mother's church's new organist would not play everything so slowly. I don't have the breath control to make whole notes (semibreves) last that long. 'Joy to the World' sounded like a dirge at Christmas midnight mass this last year and became slower and more grandiose with each verse. I was gasping by the end of it.
I never meant for this blog to become so personal but I cannot get my mind un-mired from from the Slough of Despond that has made up so much of this summer. We are past Midsummer Night now and it is a relief to think how soon it will be autumn, my favorite season, full of the smell of rotting leaves and gloomy skies.
So far, I have not done much but drag myself out on walks in the heat, ducked into the National Gallery for the sculpture garden, gotten gravel in my shoes and blisters marching around the National Mall and made thick clouds of smoke in the guest room where I sit and worry for most of the day. The pleasant side effect of all this worrying is that it has driven me to reading novels with a speed and concentration I thought I had lost years ago. I'm glad to find I can still read like that, with total absorption.
So far I have made it through 'Mariana' (Monica Dickens), 'Someone At a Distance' (Dorothy Whipple), 'No Fond Return of Love' (Barbara Pym), something else too light for me to name without embarrassment - snobby of me, I acknowledge - and most of 'Persuasion' (Jane Austen). Next in the pile is 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding', which I bought on the strength of the fact that Virginia Woolf compared the author, Julia Strachey, to Katherine Mansfield.
I have been here four days.
Unfortunately, spending time with the parents has made me more muddled than less about what I ought to do with myself. They are very sweetly concerned about my health but with the result that I am more confused about what course I should follow in the immediate future. Between that and the long wait to hear about what funding I will have for next year, my anxiety, never very well moderated, is assuming operatic proportions. I wish, in my cowardice, that someone more competent could take over my life for the next few weeks, sort everything out and then hand it back over. However, I must do as E.M. Forster has recommended and face both the external and the internal situation bravely. I aim to do better than Lucy Honeychurch; I should like to do as well as Margaret Schlegel.
Tomorrow is church, which always makes me feel better. Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I do wish, though, that my mother's church's new organist would not play everything so slowly. I don't have the breath control to make whole notes (semibreves) last that long. 'Joy to the World' sounded like a dirge at Christmas midnight mass this last year and became slower and more grandiose with each verse. I was gasping by the end of it.
I never meant for this blog to become so personal but I cannot get my mind un-mired from from the Slough of Despond that has made up so much of this summer. We are past Midsummer Night now and it is a relief to think how soon it will be autumn, my favorite season, full of the smell of rotting leaves and gloomy skies.
18 July 2009
Like Creeping Damp
As the day when I'll move to my parents and away from dear old urban Appalachia approaches I find that I am losing my mind. I wish I were saying that in the colloquial sense but I am not. Somehow, ending an important relationship, giving up my cat, the prospect of double moving (first to DC, then to London) and dealing with the federal student loan system has frayed my sanity around the edges. Fancy that.
It's rather disappointing. I've been doing so well. Now around 11am and 4pm every day, I find I have to stop whatever I'm doing and lie down for a bit. I'm not much of one for tears but I find myself weeping a little with the slightest provocation - like an emotional incontinence. I feel like a specimen of Victorian female frailty. Perhaps I should go somewhere for my nerves and take a rest-cure...
My mother is going to come down and give me a hand next week. I was hoping not to have to ask her and it worries me a little to ask her (after all, won't that make her secretly hate me?) but something has to give and I'd rather it not be my mind. I need the help. I keep saying out loud - to myself alone and not the cat, alas - 'Yes, if your mother comes to help you she will secretly hate you and take it out of you in other ways.' Put that way, it is risible. My mother never takes anything out on anyone, not even the mean-spirited, gossip-mongering faction of the hospitality committee at her church. If she can forbear them - I can't, it's not even my church and I still almost lost my temper with them - then she can easily bear with me.
It'll be all right once I get up to my parents. I'm just pretty thoroughly uncomfortable, for now.
It's rather disappointing. I've been doing so well. Now around 11am and 4pm every day, I find I have to stop whatever I'm doing and lie down for a bit. I'm not much of one for tears but I find myself weeping a little with the slightest provocation - like an emotional incontinence. I feel like a specimen of Victorian female frailty. Perhaps I should go somewhere for my nerves and take a rest-cure...
My mother is going to come down and give me a hand next week. I was hoping not to have to ask her and it worries me a little to ask her (after all, won't that make her secretly hate me?) but something has to give and I'd rather it not be my mind. I need the help. I keep saying out loud - to myself alone and not the cat, alas - 'Yes, if your mother comes to help you she will secretly hate you and take it out of you in other ways.' Put that way, it is risible. My mother never takes anything out on anyone, not even the mean-spirited, gossip-mongering faction of the hospitality committee at her church. If she can forbear them - I can't, it's not even my church and I still almost lost my temper with them - then she can easily bear with me.
It'll be all right once I get up to my parents. I'm just pretty thoroughly uncomfortable, for now.
22 April 2009
Happiness and Illness
What a funny, lovely year this has been so far. I feel as though I have landed in an alternate reality. For one, we have a president who keeps doing good things; for another, I am about to graduate from university. All the time life gets more and more stressful and I seem to be getting more and more well in response. I've gotten through nearly the entire semester without staying up all night or even late, really, and I've just finished my comprehensive exams and my thesis defense without even taking a klonopin.
As though all this, the wellness, the graduating, weren't enough, I seem to have fallen in love. It seems to soon to say that but it is nonetheless true. I see no sense in pretending to myself or anyone else that I feel otherwise. I have no idea what to do about it; certainly, this is going to upset my plans in some measure but I don't seem to mind about that. I'm just happy.
It is the happiness that makes me wonder whether the world I live in now can be the same as the world I lived in last spring. Nothing, no object nor word seems to have the same significance as it did. Even the colors seem different. I hope that I will not fall into the ranks of the healthy and chauvinistic, despising illness and unconvinced of its reality. When I remember - and it takes effort - I can see how overwhelming it was, how very real and very horrible it was. I wasn't ever being lazy or weak. I wish I had let myself be ill instead of twisting everything around and trying to convince myself that I wasn't really or that any rate I ought not to be, or ought not to take it into account. I wish that I had been able to say to myself, anyway, that I was ill and that it was wrong and unreasonable to expect myself to be able to do even the simple things as easily or as well as others. I think that it is probably inevitable that there will be people who would think me lazy or malingering and I doubt that I will ever live in such an ideal world that I would truly be allowed to be ill whilst ill and convalescent while convalescent but I hope that the next time I will be able to tell myself the truth, even if nobody else believes it. It was a cruelty to have done otherwise and I wish I had not felt it necessary to be so mean to myself: after all, isn't that what mental health professionals are for? I shouldn't try to do their job for them, especially if I'm not getting paid for it. Not that I'm cynical or anything...
As though all this, the wellness, the graduating, weren't enough, I seem to have fallen in love. It seems to soon to say that but it is nonetheless true. I see no sense in pretending to myself or anyone else that I feel otherwise. I have no idea what to do about it; certainly, this is going to upset my plans in some measure but I don't seem to mind about that. I'm just happy.
It is the happiness that makes me wonder whether the world I live in now can be the same as the world I lived in last spring. Nothing, no object nor word seems to have the same significance as it did. Even the colors seem different. I hope that I will not fall into the ranks of the healthy and chauvinistic, despising illness and unconvinced of its reality. When I remember - and it takes effort - I can see how overwhelming it was, how very real and very horrible it was. I wasn't ever being lazy or weak. I wish I had let myself be ill instead of twisting everything around and trying to convince myself that I wasn't really or that any rate I ought not to be, or ought not to take it into account. I wish that I had been able to say to myself, anyway, that I was ill and that it was wrong and unreasonable to expect myself to be able to do even the simple things as easily or as well as others. I think that it is probably inevitable that there will be people who would think me lazy or malingering and I doubt that I will ever live in such an ideal world that I would truly be allowed to be ill whilst ill and convalescent while convalescent but I hope that the next time I will be able to tell myself the truth, even if nobody else believes it. It was a cruelty to have done otherwise and I wish I had not felt it necessary to be so mean to myself: after all, isn't that what mental health professionals are for? I shouldn't try to do their job for them, especially if I'm not getting paid for it. Not that I'm cynical or anything...
08 April 2009
Nonsense
Well. Here I still am.
It's been a funny old week: I am unendingly behind on my schoolwork and happy because I'm dating a very sweet girl and very anxious that I won't be able to graduate because I am subconsciously convinced that I have screwed something up irremediably without realizing it. I am on the verge, I believe, of having an offer of a place at one of the MA programs I applied to and it snowed quite a bit yesterday but did not kill the flowers, thank God. I have a tension headache and yet keep finding myself singing because I'm happy.
So yes: my emotional life makes no sense at all right now.
It's Holy Week, too. Lots of church, which I like, with lots of music that I like. Time to get the house cleaned out on Good Friday, which is really a Jewish custom for Passover but which I have adopted because I like it. Really, what good is the church calendar if it can't occasionally tell you when to plant things and clean your house?
This is a fairly nonsensical post, which only makes sense given the circumstances, and really I just wanted to say 'hello, I am alive', anyway.
Hello. I am alive.
It's been a funny old week: I am unendingly behind on my schoolwork and happy because I'm dating a very sweet girl and very anxious that I won't be able to graduate because I am subconsciously convinced that I have screwed something up irremediably without realizing it. I am on the verge, I believe, of having an offer of a place at one of the MA programs I applied to and it snowed quite a bit yesterday but did not kill the flowers, thank God. I have a tension headache and yet keep finding myself singing because I'm happy.
So yes: my emotional life makes no sense at all right now.
It's Holy Week, too. Lots of church, which I like, with lots of music that I like. Time to get the house cleaned out on Good Friday, which is really a Jewish custom for Passover but which I have adopted because I like it. Really, what good is the church calendar if it can't occasionally tell you when to plant things and clean your house?
This is a fairly nonsensical post, which only makes sense given the circumstances, and really I just wanted to say 'hello, I am alive', anyway.
Hello. I am alive.
22 March 2009
This Is Not a Real Post
It is instead a Cretan paradox. (Ha ha...philosophy jokes are so deeply unfunny: classics jokes are much worse)
This is a link to one of the blogs I read: if you're looking for a patron saint of mentalisms besides St. Dymphna, have a look.
Look for a real post on Monday or Tuesday!
This is a link to one of the blogs I read: if you're looking for a patron saint of mentalisms besides St. Dymphna, have a look.
Look for a real post on Monday or Tuesday!
15 March 2009
I Fear That I Read Too Many Novels During an Impressionable Youth
I really wish that I didn't talk like someone out of an Austen novel when I get nervous. Who, I ask you, says 'if that would be amenable' when asking someone out? And then follows by saying 'I have so enjoyed your company this past week'? It's as well to be polite but it has to be said that this borders on the absurd. I know I'm laughing (nicely) at myself right now. Yikes.
01 March 2009
Sunday Snow and Biological Sex Dimorphism
I think that we will not have evensong tonight. It is snowing like mad and has been for hours. The roads were just starting to freeze while I was walking home. Perhaps we'll even have the day off school tomorrow. That would be a great help.
The weather has been very extreme lately: warmth and thunderstorms one day, snow and tornadoes at the same time the next, temperatures travelling from 14 F (-10C) in the early morning to 57F (14C) by 4.00pm. I didn't bother to take my coat with me yesterday, even though I was out late, but today I was bundled up in the coat, two scarves and a very ugly hat that was my mother's when she was at university. I love to wear the ugly hat, especially to church, because I get such odd looks. Anyhow, here is yesterday:
And here is today:
It has gotten even snowier since I took that picture. Crazy mountain weather, I tell you. I love it though. I just hope that the ex-girlfriend, who is travelling quite a distance to visit a university that has made her an offer for grad school, made it out of the mountains before the snow started.
Other things than weather have happened, of course. I'm no longer worried about my strangely acting friend because I understand the reasons why, now. (That sentence had very odd grammar.) I also found out yesterday that my paper has been accepted to an undergraduate conference. Hurray!
The paper is called "The Logical Invalidity of Biological Sex Dimorphism as an Exclusive Disjunction" and I had much fun writing it a year or so ago. It was for my philosophy of sex and gender class and my professor hated it. She doesn't believe in logic and thinks that it is only ever used to oppress people. I tend to think that that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to employ a cliche.
Anyhow, we read a fascinating book called 'Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex' by Alice Dreger*. Her explanation of the evolving scientific understanding of hermaphroditism/intersexed persons helped to delineate the categories of sex, sexuality and gender, which are now commonly separated but were once assumed to always hang together as either male or female but not both (which is an exclusive disjunction). The common contemporary medical practice dictates that at the birth of an intersex infant, that is, an infant with ambiguous genitalia, an emergency is declared and the infant is taken away before its parents can see it so that a group of doctors can evaluate and 'declare' the infant either male or female, determined nearly entirely on the formation of the genitals. The process is deeply phallocentric, with the main criterion being the formation of the penis. If it is hypospadic (the urethra located closer to the base of the penis rather than the tip), the infant is many times declared female because (and I am sadly not making this up) the infant, when older, would not be able to urinate standing up. The same declaration holds for penises that are deemed to be too small. Such genetalia are reclassified as clitorises. If a 'female' infant is born with a clitoris that is, in the eyes of a doctor, too long, it is often surgically altered in the first weeks of life to conform to a feminine appearance. There are no cases that I know of where a long clitoris has resulted in the sex assignment of male, as one might expect as the converse of the case of short penises.
If the genetalia are not ambiguous on the basis of gross anatomy as is the case in some forms of intersex, such as 5-alpha reductase, then further investigations are made later in life, often around the time of puberty. On occasion, the sex assignment is changed from female to male or, less commonly, male to female at this time. Sometimes the 'patient' is informed of the details of the intersexedness, sometimes not. Sometimes their testimony is taken into consideration, sometimes the doctors or parents or both make the decision. Fertility, unless it concerns the production of sperm, is rarely considered as a determinant of sex.
Now, having read about all the varieties of intersexedness and the way ambiguous sex is treated as a medical emergency, it seemed to me that it was impossible, even in the case of what are considered to be unambiguous genitalia, to declare that anyone was male or female exclusively. For instance, there is a great deal of freely acknowledged crossover between male and female secondary sex characteristics. Women may develop 'masculine' facial hair while men may develop 'breasts' that are female in contour (there is a technical name for this but I cannot call it to mind). This crossover of characteristics is also a locus of anxiety, though not an emergency. But I would contend that most women who develop dark hairs above their mouths would bleach them or pluck them. Would they not suffer a decrease of desirability and femininity if they did not?
Fertility is too capricious a condition to determine sex. (If it were used, would women not be women when menstruating? Before menarche? After menopause? Where could that line be drawn?) Sex is always declared, even if only implicitly, because there is no absolute characteristic or set of characteristics that is necessary and sufficient to serve as an indisputable marker of sex. So, even though I, personally, have an anatomy that is generally considered to be biologically female, and visually conform to the cultural conception of femaleness there is no way for me to prove that I am female or for anyone to prove that I am not male.
Having said that, none of this means that male and female are invalid categories. These two categories have meaning, positive and negative. If sex didn't in some sense truly exist, then no one could be transsexual or homosexual or bisexual. However, we are quite possibly making a mistake when we say that there are only two sexes and that no individual can be both male and female and that no individual can be neither male nor female. If we were to recombine sexuality and gender with anatomy in creative ways, we could decide as a culture that there were eight sexes, or five sexes or the the idea of a biological sex was altogether misbegotten. There have, in fact, been several cultures through the course of history, some that still exist today, that have three or four categories of sex. So much possibility so quashed, and quashed with so much violence. People are killed over it, raped over it, go through painful and not medically necessary surgery over it. It seems to me that it is worthwhile to re-evaluate or cultural notions of sex.
I'm surprised that it made it into the conference. So many philosophers think that the body is not an appropriate focus for philosophy and I had such a negative reaction from my professor over it. I'm glad it's in, though, and I can't wait to present it.
* Dreger, Alice Domurat. "Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
I wonder if this post will drive up my hits from google?
The weather has been very extreme lately: warmth and thunderstorms one day, snow and tornadoes at the same time the next, temperatures travelling from 14 F (-10C) in the early morning to 57F (14C) by 4.00pm. I didn't bother to take my coat with me yesterday, even though I was out late, but today I was bundled up in the coat, two scarves and a very ugly hat that was my mother's when she was at university. I love to wear the ugly hat, especially to church, because I get such odd looks. Anyhow, here is yesterday:
And here is today:
It has gotten even snowier since I took that picture. Crazy mountain weather, I tell you. I love it though. I just hope that the ex-girlfriend, who is travelling quite a distance to visit a university that has made her an offer for grad school, made it out of the mountains before the snow started.
Other things than weather have happened, of course. I'm no longer worried about my strangely acting friend because I understand the reasons why, now. (That sentence had very odd grammar.) I also found out yesterday that my paper has been accepted to an undergraduate conference. Hurray!
The paper is called "The Logical Invalidity of Biological Sex Dimorphism as an Exclusive Disjunction" and I had much fun writing it a year or so ago. It was for my philosophy of sex and gender class and my professor hated it. She doesn't believe in logic and thinks that it is only ever used to oppress people. I tend to think that that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to employ a cliche.
Anyhow, we read a fascinating book called 'Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex' by Alice Dreger*. Her explanation of the evolving scientific understanding of hermaphroditism/intersexed persons helped to delineate the categories of sex, sexuality and gender, which are now commonly separated but were once assumed to always hang together as either male or female but not both (which is an exclusive disjunction). The common contemporary medical practice dictates that at the birth of an intersex infant, that is, an infant with ambiguous genitalia, an emergency is declared and the infant is taken away before its parents can see it so that a group of doctors can evaluate and 'declare' the infant either male or female, determined nearly entirely on the formation of the genitals. The process is deeply phallocentric, with the main criterion being the formation of the penis. If it is hypospadic (the urethra located closer to the base of the penis rather than the tip), the infant is many times declared female because (and I am sadly not making this up) the infant, when older, would not be able to urinate standing up. The same declaration holds for penises that are deemed to be too small. Such genetalia are reclassified as clitorises. If a 'female' infant is born with a clitoris that is, in the eyes of a doctor, too long, it is often surgically altered in the first weeks of life to conform to a feminine appearance. There are no cases that I know of where a long clitoris has resulted in the sex assignment of male, as one might expect as the converse of the case of short penises.
If the genetalia are not ambiguous on the basis of gross anatomy as is the case in some forms of intersex, such as 5-alpha reductase, then further investigations are made later in life, often around the time of puberty. On occasion, the sex assignment is changed from female to male or, less commonly, male to female at this time. Sometimes the 'patient' is informed of the details of the intersexedness, sometimes not. Sometimes their testimony is taken into consideration, sometimes the doctors or parents or both make the decision. Fertility, unless it concerns the production of sperm, is rarely considered as a determinant of sex.
Now, having read about all the varieties of intersexedness and the way ambiguous sex is treated as a medical emergency, it seemed to me that it was impossible, even in the case of what are considered to be unambiguous genitalia, to declare that anyone was male or female exclusively. For instance, there is a great deal of freely acknowledged crossover between male and female secondary sex characteristics. Women may develop 'masculine' facial hair while men may develop 'breasts' that are female in contour (there is a technical name for this but I cannot call it to mind). This crossover of characteristics is also a locus of anxiety, though not an emergency. But I would contend that most women who develop dark hairs above their mouths would bleach them or pluck them. Would they not suffer a decrease of desirability and femininity if they did not?
Fertility is too capricious a condition to determine sex. (If it were used, would women not be women when menstruating? Before menarche? After menopause? Where could that line be drawn?) Sex is always declared, even if only implicitly, because there is no absolute characteristic or set of characteristics that is necessary and sufficient to serve as an indisputable marker of sex. So, even though I, personally, have an anatomy that is generally considered to be biologically female, and visually conform to the cultural conception of femaleness there is no way for me to prove that I am female or for anyone to prove that I am not male.
Having said that, none of this means that male and female are invalid categories. These two categories have meaning, positive and negative. If sex didn't in some sense truly exist, then no one could be transsexual or homosexual or bisexual. However, we are quite possibly making a mistake when we say that there are only two sexes and that no individual can be both male and female and that no individual can be neither male nor female. If we were to recombine sexuality and gender with anatomy in creative ways, we could decide as a culture that there were eight sexes, or five sexes or the the idea of a biological sex was altogether misbegotten. There have, in fact, been several cultures through the course of history, some that still exist today, that have three or four categories of sex. So much possibility so quashed, and quashed with so much violence. People are killed over it, raped over it, go through painful and not medically necessary surgery over it. It seems to me that it is worthwhile to re-evaluate or cultural notions of sex.
I'm surprised that it made it into the conference. So many philosophers think that the body is not an appropriate focus for philosophy and I had such a negative reaction from my professor over it. I'm glad it's in, though, and I can't wait to present it.
* Dreger, Alice Domurat. "Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
I wonder if this post will drive up my hits from google?
28 February 2009
Music hath the charm to sooth the savage beast
I am having a rough couple of days because, even though I finished the thesis (hurray!), a good friend of mine is acting strangely and I'm worried about her and also, next week is classics awareness week and I'm about one more phone call away from strangling Imperator Nostri with my bare hands. (That's not his official title; I just enjoy thinking of him as one of those less than reasonable Roman emporers). I've tried reasoning with him but it seems to make no impression. I hope I can keep it together enough not to volunteer to do anything else for the rest of the semester. I'll show up, mind you; I just don't want to arrange anything else.
I am also supposed to be getting my grad school applications done this weekend. I have the GSIS (pronounced gee-sis): grad school inadequacy syndrome. I'm trying not to be unduly alarmed because I have yet to see anyone apply to grad school in any other state of mind. However, I'm still sick with dread and fear over it. I want to get out of here so badly.
How am I dealing with it all? I had a long walk, that helped. I'm about to go sort out my closet, that will help. But, I have decided that something I really want is new music to listen to. I think it will make me feel better. The only flaw in this plan is that I have no idea where to start looking. To resolve this, I respectfully implore all of you to suggest something to me and help me save my sanity.
I am also supposed to be getting my grad school applications done this weekend. I have the GSIS (pronounced gee-sis): grad school inadequacy syndrome. I'm trying not to be unduly alarmed because I have yet to see anyone apply to grad school in any other state of mind. However, I'm still sick with dread and fear over it. I want to get out of here so badly.
How am I dealing with it all? I had a long walk, that helped. I'm about to go sort out my closet, that will help. But, I have decided that something I really want is new music to listen to. I think it will make me feel better. The only flaw in this plan is that I have no idea where to start looking. To resolve this, I respectfully implore all of you to suggest something to me and help me save my sanity.
21 February 2009
And I Shall Sing as I Push the Rock Back Up the Hill
One thing that I had forgotten about feeling well is that one doesn't always feel well. I feel rather rotten most of the time, being stuck, as I am, in a corner of the world for which I am not suited among friends whom I love but with whom there is so much I cannot share.
This sounds like pretentious weltschmerz from the mouth of an ingrate but it isn't meant that way.
What I do mean is that I often feel almost as bad as I do when I'm depressed but the trick of it is that now I only feel that way for an hour or five minutes and not two months. I'll feel unbearably anxious but whenever the reason for the anxiety is removed, it fades away, quickly. It's amazing.
I have worried, as I know that others do, that the medication could only ever take away from me; that I would either be artificially happy and well or still miserable and sick with side effects. I thought that it could only be a compromise between how much depression I could stand and how much medication I could stand. There was, indeed, no reason for me to think otherwise. I had learnt from experience that medication would make me not-depressed, which is not at all the same as well. As it turns out, that's not what has happened this time.I've not turned into a smiling shell of myself. I'm not a morose lump either. I seem to have as complete a range of human emotion as I ever have had. I think that this is what it's like when the medication works.
Good job it finally did.
It only took twelve years, two hospitalizations, three depressive episodes so bad that I had to drop out of school, two so bad that I had to stop work, three pronounced periods of hypomania, years of insomnia, years of horrendous anxiety, and more than a decade of seeing various psychiatrists, psychologists and so on. It's only taken up the past seventeen years of my life.
I'm laughing though, it's absurd, but I'm laughing like Sisyphus. I'm glad something finally worked.
08 February 2009
Keeping My Hand In
I was doing so well at posting regularly and now...
My only excuse is having been busier than I have been in a year. This is not going to be much of a post; I'm just trying to keep my hand in and not get to far off the habit of posting.
It has been quite a week. After the disaster that was last weekend and Tuesday (panic attack, then hungover on klonopin, then waking up dizzy and ill for no apparent reason on Tuesday and missing classes) I realized that something had to go. I'm glad that I tried to do all of the things I was trying to do but I can't quite do them all. Wednesday night I sat down and tried to decide what to drop. I have to keep all my silly general education courses because otherwise I can't graduate. I'm not going to drop church choir because we're about to get into the Lent and then Easter time of year - the really interesting music time of year - and I wasn't willing to let go of Spanish and the social justice committee. I can't stop working at the gallery. Working there just about saved my life this summer and gave me enough confidence to go back to school; besides, I'm involved in so many worthwhile projects there that it feels immoral to walk away.
There remained only one option. I added up all the hours I spent on non-school things and all the hours I spent on Greek and found that while I spend approximately eleven hours on church and the gallery, I spend seven hours doing homework for Greek and three hours in the actual class. If I dropped Greek, I would cut the amount of time I spent on non-essential school things in half.
So now, sadly, I am no longer studying Homer. I am sorry about it but all of the sudden I felt a thousand times better and I know it was the right thing to do. No sense in running myself into the ground, even for Homer.
It's hard for me to make these decisions. I don't like to let people down so I usually postpone it until I can't do anything at all anymore so that I won't have to feel guilty about it. Of course, this is not the best way to handle things nor does it really stop me from feeling guilty. On the one hand, I have no problem admitting that I have bipolar disorder and that it stops me from being able to do things I want to do sometimes. On the other, I have a hard time accepting this in a day to day fashion. Discerning what it is that I'm doing now that will have a bad effect in the future and then following through by choosing not to carry on doing it anyway is not easy for me. I'm pleased that I've done it this time.
My only excuse is having been busier than I have been in a year. This is not going to be much of a post; I'm just trying to keep my hand in and not get to far off the habit of posting.
It has been quite a week. After the disaster that was last weekend and Tuesday (panic attack, then hungover on klonopin, then waking up dizzy and ill for no apparent reason on Tuesday and missing classes) I realized that something had to go. I'm glad that I tried to do all of the things I was trying to do but I can't quite do them all. Wednesday night I sat down and tried to decide what to drop. I have to keep all my silly general education courses because otherwise I can't graduate. I'm not going to drop church choir because we're about to get into the Lent and then Easter time of year - the really interesting music time of year - and I wasn't willing to let go of Spanish and the social justice committee. I can't stop working at the gallery. Working there just about saved my life this summer and gave me enough confidence to go back to school; besides, I'm involved in so many worthwhile projects there that it feels immoral to walk away.
There remained only one option. I added up all the hours I spent on non-school things and all the hours I spent on Greek and found that while I spend approximately eleven hours on church and the gallery, I spend seven hours doing homework for Greek and three hours in the actual class. If I dropped Greek, I would cut the amount of time I spent on non-essential school things in half.
So now, sadly, I am no longer studying Homer. I am sorry about it but all of the sudden I felt a thousand times better and I know it was the right thing to do. No sense in running myself into the ground, even for Homer.
It's hard for me to make these decisions. I don't like to let people down so I usually postpone it until I can't do anything at all anymore so that I won't have to feel guilty about it. Of course, this is not the best way to handle things nor does it really stop me from feeling guilty. On the one hand, I have no problem admitting that I have bipolar disorder and that it stops me from being able to do things I want to do sometimes. On the other, I have a hard time accepting this in a day to day fashion. Discerning what it is that I'm doing now that will have a bad effect in the future and then following through by choosing not to carry on doing it anyway is not easy for me. I'm pleased that I've done it this time.
04 February 2009
Snow Day
We have a snow day today, which is lovely. So far this semester we've had quite a bit of snow but we've only had late-start days, which are annoying on account of then no one can remember when classes start and end and so on. Everything runs late and bumps into whatever else you have to do: in my case, doctor's appointments and church. All the people with children, and we have quite a few students with children, have their difficulties multiplied as their children's school will have a snow day when we have a late start day and so on. You can imagine the chaos.I am enjoying mine by drinking many cups of tea and working on the conference paper and the senior thesis and memorizing the first seven lines of the Iliad.
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.*
(I'm really surprised it stayed in Greek)
As of Friday, I will already be a quarter of the way through the semester. I can hardly believe it. Soon it will be spring break and I'll get to drag out the sundresses from under the bed. By the time spring break comes, I'll be waiting for acceptance/rejection letters from grad schools. I will have finished my thesis and be preparing a presentation form of it. I'll be waiting to hear from two other conferences.
Thinking about this is nice but then my mind pops back to today and I think, how will I ever squeeze out enough time to do all that? It's a good question. I can't even find the energy or concentration to clean up the house.
Then again I can think back five weeks and remember how overwhelmed I was at the mere idea of going to school. I was sure I'd give up in the second week. I was very down from having been at my parents and couldn't keep up with some extremely basic things, too embarrassing to detail here. Now I am at least more or less on top of the day to day homework and I look presentable on a daily basis, something I would not have been able to forsee myself doing. Perhaps I'm in the same boat now, unable to see how I will do what I need to do but about to do it all the same.
I hope so.
*copied and pasted from the Perseus Project
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)