Stress and Moodiness

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.

A Few Changes

I'm supposed to be writing an essay, so instead I am going back and forth between this blog and facebook. Very useful of me.*

Moving and meeting up with old school friends (how is that the people I first met at fourteen have now known me more than half of my life?) has pushed me into thinking a bit more carefully about what I'm doing with my life. That's not quite accurate - I am quite happy about what I am doing this year and most of next. It's more that I have been confronted with my own and, what's stranger, other people's memories of what used to be my priorities. I'm now asking myself, and asking rather urgently, why I gave up so much that I loved.

I don't yet know whether this is just the common or garden variety of nearly thirty-ish angst that will slide back in to general content without much fuss or whether this is a prompting into a more genuine inquiry as to what exactly has happened in the past six years.

I have been worried about talking about myself too much on this blog and I have been attempting to write about what happens in my life in a generalised and universalisable manner. How well I have succeeded in that is questionable. That is really neither here nor there; my point is that I am going to stop doing it as a general rule because it feels false. I'm tired of falseness. I don't want to force myself into omission and elision. I'm not sure whether I want to continue with a pseudonym. I would never have done that in the past. I've been infected with fear of consequences and a desire for what will only ever be a rather spurious kind of respectability. After all, how respectable can one really be if one is periodically mad?

All this inner turmoil has prompted me to change things around a little here. I was planning to wait until the one year anniversary of this blog came around to make changes but I've done it now because I wanted to. I've changed my picture so that I'm now identifiable to anyone who knows me. That's as close as I'm going to come to getting rid of the pseudonym for the moment - that's as close as is comfortable right now.

I had to get rid of the green. It is my favourite colour but it needed to go. There was so much green in my old apartment and it made sense there but there is nothing green in my new one. I decided to do something different and go modern or, as I have dubbed it, 'plebian moderne'.** I had the cheap but older and pretty arts and crafts period furniture that one can so easily find down south. Here I've gone a little closer to derivative Bauhaus. This is not to imply that my blog ought to match my flat: I'm just tired of looking at green things and have been purging them.

So, yes. I am just going to go ahead and write and not be so paranoid about rogue identifying details. I'm not going to worry about being egocentric because the way I have been writing about things has come to feel very stilted and I can't keep it up. If I sound self-involved, so be it. It would be better than the didactic, sing-song tone that leaks in so often. As I tell myself frequently, there is no point in doing things other than the way in which I would do them. I've hated myself for so long that I still don't believe that doing things the way that I would do them will ever be anything but a disaster, however trivial the act in question. I still don't believe that it's ever right to do what I actually want to do. I've been trying to trick myself into thinking otherwise for more than a year now with notably uneven results. I haven't given up.***

The idea of being honest and not pretending that I have greater equanimity than I actually do and that I am not as much of a mess as I actually am scares me. Nonetheless, here I go.
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*I do have a draft and two more days to finish it - I'm not always as useless as I make out.

**Yes, I am the kind of person who would come up with a name like that - unbelievable, isn't it? I am very prone to that slangy manner of talking about art, clothes and furniture. It's like a game for me. Scoring points with obscure references and that.+ Rather obnoxious, isn't it? Especially when one hasn't been drinking.

***And in writing about myself I may yet, like Charlotte Bartlett, reveal 'depths of strangeness, if not of meaning'. It is strange to worry about whether one is being selfish if one is the only person wanting to get off at one's home bus stop and to be daily relieved when somebody else rings the bell first. That's something I do, every single day.
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+Speaking of which, nota bene the quotation in footnote three.

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.

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?

De Delicte

Well, I should have given in at 9.00 when I was yawning and gone to bed. Now I'm up too late and as I was trying to fall asleep I became very aware of my upstairs neighbors enjoying themselves in their bedroom, which is directly above mine. So, feeling a bit uncomfortable at how well I was beginning to know them, I decided to come out to the living room and make a new post instead.

I'm going to delve into the realm of the self-indulgent, so bear with me if you like or go investigate the blogs of my followers: they're worth looking at. (My followers - saying that makes me feel as though I were some sort of sage or prophet when I am actually someone sitting next to her cat in her badly mended pajamas tapping away on a laptop in the middle of the night.)

After splitting up with the girlfriend in July, I have now come to the end of the obligatory six month celibacy. It is own-made obligatory but I began to impose it years ago because it seemed fair neither to myself nor to others for me to engage in any kind of dating so soon after. It never seems to really be six months, though. That is, it is always at least six months but once it turned into four years and usually it ends up being ten months or more.

At this point I feel like I have gone far into a relationship too often and that it would be better to lay off, perhaps altogether. I'm tired of the normal pattern and if espousal of some permutation were not the mutually desired end of the relationship, I can't quite see the point. Espousal is my own neologism to avoid both the weakness of the terms 'partnership' and 'commitment ceremony' (ugh) and yet avoid offending the sensibilities of those who would object to calling it marriage. Those objectors come from both sides, by the way. Those who take a conservative view of the idea of marriage may not realize it but there are many gay people who are also against marriage for gay people. So I have happily settled on espousal as my term of choice, which can also eliminate the "who is the bride, can I call her my wife, or is she really my husband or what" related confusion by tossing those terms out and replacing them with spouse.

And so I ramble. I did have something like a point. Ah yes, espousing. For me it is a question of it being one of the Sacraments of the Church and that is that as far as I am concerned. If I'm going to be committed to someone, then I would like the church to have a hand in it, just as I go to confession and would want to receive the Last Rites.

This makes it very hard for me to find anyone to date. The heavy handed way in which the Church has dealt with homosexuality has driven most of us screaming away. I myself was a conscientious objector to church attendance until Gene Robinson was made a bishop. Now I delight in going and doing the flowers and singing in the choir and leading the rosary and working with the social justice committee and the prison mission. But most church-going gay people are some sort of very wishy-washy protestant: Unitarians and non-denominational semi-Christians. Dear me, that's very judgmental. At the same time, if Buddhist meditation comprises part of your Sunday service...well...I'm glad people are going to Sunday services but without most of the Sacraments and the Eucharist, I do feel that they are missing out. I wish they hadn't, some of them, been made to feel that they deserved to miss out.

My point, to drag myself back to it, is that it is hard to find a church-going young woman who shares my proclivities and is also not on the far side of protestantism; harder still to find someone who isn't Low Church. I want to be espoused/married but it is so difficult to find anyone who is willing even to consider it, especially if it involves church.

I think that I would rather not be in a relationship at all if religion will create constant tension and half of the relationship has a principled stand against espousal/marriage for gay people or against church marriage in general. Of course, technically I can't be married in the Church (or the civil state for that matter) but only have a blessing. That is enough, though, for now.


And there I went on another klonopin induced ramble around but not to my point. My point is that I would like to fall in love but it seems impossible. I would like to embrace celibacy but I fear that I do not have the strength nor the temperament. Having been in love (still quietly pining after seven years) I understand how wonderful it can be: there is no substitute for requited love.

Now, with the bipolar disorder, I also feel at times unworthy of love, that I am damaged goods. It is a lot to ask of someone, yet I know from my own experience of looking after people whom I love that there is no resentment if the love is true. Ubi caritas.

Hearing my upstairs neighbors put me in mind of what seems unlikely to be a part of my life. How happy many people are to be able to choose a husband or wife and have social and sacerdotal approbation or to make a free choice to forgo it. How happy am I, too, to live now when though I might be damaged goods, something can be done to help repair and though I might face many obstacles to finding a spouse/wife, I'm at least no longer an outlaw.


To my Catholic readers who have stuck it out this far, thank you. Same to the atheists and agnostics among you.