Safe Sex 7 – Find Freedom

Explicit but not graphic content.

Part of what helps to make sex emotionally safer is freedom. Most of us have a whole host of beliefs about sex that limit, bind, and cause us pain. We live in cages in our minds about sex, partly because of terrible experiences and partly because of cultural myths. There’s a lot of ideas that limit us – from the simplest linking of the experiences of sex and pain – experiences that one always leads to the other; to more complex constructs that bind and confuse us.

I was in a conversation once where someone expressed discouragement about differences between what they and their partner liked. Their idea was that keeping things ‘fair’ meant that both partners got exactly the same experiences during sex. So, if I got a massage so I have to give my partner one. This tit-for-tat system is an unnecessary burden. The goal is intimacy and pleasure for both! If what each partner likes is different there’s no benefit in inflicting something on the one who doesn’t like it! If I love a foot rub but my partner has madly ticklish feet then it’s just silly to feel obligated to give them a foot rub back. It’s not just okay to like different things, it’s quite common! And to like different things at different times – tonight I don’t feel like this, I’d prefer that, and so on. It doesn’t really matter what form sex takes or how different you both are in what makes you feel pleasure and closeness, as long as you are both feeling it.

Another example of freedom being important to emotionally safer sex; I was talking about sexuality and was surprised when a woman told me that she found women attractive and appealing but couldn’t be a ‘genuine’ lesbian because the idea of oral sex with a woman disturbed her. I do not believe this is the case. Sexuality is about who you want to have sex with, it doesn’t say anything about what you do and don’t like during sex. Misconceptions like this create cages that bind people. Our culture weaves different ideas in together to create a big knotted mess that people get tangled in. Lots of lesbians like oral sex. That doesn’t mean you have to, to be a lesbian! Some gay men are brilliant in the kitchen, that doesn’t mean all little boys with an interest in cooking are going to be gay. It’s fun to look at the clusters of experiences that commonly occur – gay men and fashion! But it’s harmful when these become the ‘norm’ and all other experiences get overshadowed. As a young person I knew a kid who was bullied a lot because he was the only straight guy in his drama troupe. Clusters become stereotypes, and people get trapped by them whether inside them or outside them.

The politics of sexuality is highly charged for many people. The language around sexual orientation, gender identity, the politics of sex and morality are relatively new to mainstream Western culture, and in many places are used as distinct categories rather than descriptive language. Language as a general rule can be very helpful as a shorthand way of explaining who we are and perhaps most importantly, if someone might be interested in you. 😉 Categories, where people get stuck in boxes and stereotyped, are often very destructive. There’s a cute ‘Gingerbread Person’ poster where Sam Killerman has worked to untangle these categories back into descriptive language – it’s not perfect, but I do love it as a starting point for seeing gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation and so on as separate concepts that differ from person to person!

People can become scared of ‘what things mean’ about sex; if I like this does it mean I’m gay/straight/kinky/whatever? It can often help to realise that you are allowed to define yourself. Liking or not liking certain sexual acts does not determine what people or genders you like to do them with! Sometimes the political fighting about rights can chew up vulnerable people who are in the middle in a way that disturbs me. Nobody should be forcing or coercing you to publicly identify or privately see yourself in a way you find distressing, with the exception of holding people to account for ethical behaviour. This is incredibly important to me! On a personal scale this push to put people into boxes limits people’s ability to engage and accept their own sexual desires and lives because of fear of what it might all mean for them. On a public scale, bullying, isolation, and intense distress can result from our tendency to categorize people and assume that we know better than they do what is going on inside them. It’s a form of diagnosis and holds about as much water for me in social settings as it does in mental health.

In Dead Boys Can’t Dance , Dorais and Lajeunesse explore issues of homosexuality, stigma, and suicide. What I was most interested by is that the group of boys at highest risk of suicide is those who were straight, but designated as gay by their peers. These boys suffer all the stigma, rejection, and isolation of being seen as gay, and do not identify with the gay resources and communities who might provide some refuge from these experiences. The process of mis-identifying each other might be less distressing if such stigma were not attached to some of the labels, but I’d still argue that not being seen for who we believe we are, not being believed about who we believe we are hurt us. If there’s anything we’ve learned from the past 100 years of the gay rights movement surely it’s that this harms people?

Another area in which freedom can help us to make sex emotionally safer, is freedom from the cultural beliefs of what it is to love another person. We tend to value our relationships in terms of duration. Only those romantic partnerships that last until the death of one partner are ‘true love’. Only sex between partners in love can be ‘good sex’. Or alternatively – marriage (or monogamy) kills sex, and good sex can only be had between strangers, or casual partners. Many communities that prefer and normalise particular kinds of relationships and sex consider that only their kind of sex is ‘good sex’. (think of the sexual norms of polygamous Mormon communities, and those of the BDSM communities). People are highly diverse! Good sex for one person is another persons dullest evening ever, or even a nightmare. Relationships that had great sex still may not last forever, because life is challenging and people grow and change, and relationships need lots of skills as well as love to thrive. We don’t have to take on these ideas ourselves. Sexual plasticity is an amazing idea the scientific community is exploring. (see The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge) Briefly put, plasticity refers to our malleability, the way we change over time. Sexual plasticity is why we can find our partner deeply attractive at 20, and still deeply attractive at 50 even though they look rather different. We are to some extent, wired to change. Sometimes this works for us, sometimes we find it frightening or stressful.

Freedom from limiting cultural myths around beauty, about the superiority of youth, the way we de-sexualise people with disabilities or illness. Many mature people love to have sex, and do not deserve to be seen as ‘creeps’ or weird. (See blog and book Better Than I Ever Expected) Emotionally safer sex doesn’t just happen between the individuals involved, it’s a cultural and community concern. How to create aged care resources that respect sexual and gender diversity, and support romantic and sexual relationships? How to support ethical sexual behaviour for people with intellectual disabilities, or at least foster the recognition that many of us, whatever our other challenges, are sexual beings. How to break out of limiting ideas that great sex only happens between the ‘beautiful people’ as if ripped abs means someone will be a generous and wonderful lover?

There are so many areas in which freedom can support us having emotionally safer, and better sex. Sexual morality is a tricky one, in that engaging sex (and life) ethically is a responsibility of all of us. Determining what ethical sex is can be challenging. Many of us draw from our faith communities to help us decide moral sexual behaviour, and this can be deeply rewarding. But for some of us, their moral frameworks around sex are a painfully poor fit, leaving us trapped in self rejection or hypocrisy. Some of us have no faith community and are relieved by the sexual freedoms of Western culture, but also wrestling with our sense that sex should be engaged ethically and trying to find non religious frameworks for that. There’s more than one way of looking at sex. You do not have to be trapped between moral frameworks that are hurting you, and immoral sexual choices that also hurt you (and other people). Go looking at the ways other people and other communities frame ethical sex. This isn’t an easy road, and people’s deeply held beliefs about morality are sometimes nowhere more intense than around sex. For some of us, rejection and revulsion would be the cost of living more authentically to our own beliefs.

There is no right way of dealing with this. Each of us has to decide for ourselves what prices we are willing to pay to be connected with our communities. For some of us the much lauded ‘coming out’ would cost us everything, and we would be at very high risks of suffering violence or suicide. For others, anything but coming out is a slow death. We do not have to walk each others roads. But freedom can mean at the very least, freedom inside ourselves from ideas that make us hate ourselves. Freedom from being trapped into choices between a morality we do not believe, and abusive sexual acting out. Freedom can mean simply the freedom to know who we are and make our choices willingly, bear our burdens with love and not hypocrisy, and seek to help our communities grow into safer and more accepting spaces.

Perhaps one of the greatest freedoms we need to make sex emotionally safer, is freedom from shame. Brene Brown is a brilliant resource in this area, she writes about shame, courage, and imperfection. Here’s a link to a couple of her great TED talks about connection and shame, or watch it below:

Freedom is a key human need, and it’s not as easy as it sounds. It can come at great costs, and expose us to awful risks. It can be painfully vulnerable. It can ask us to deeply wrestle with our beliefs about love, morality, and relationships. It can also be healing, liberating, and deeply peaceful. I hope you are able to find freedom from ideas that are hurting you, to make peace with yourself as a sexual (or asexual) person, and to engage in sex and support others to engage in sex in ways that are ethical, loving, and emotionally safer.

This article is part of a series about emotionally safer sex. Try also reading

5 hours after an assault

Rose and I were unfortunate enough to recently have to exercise all our ‘how to support someone after trauma‘ skills. We’ve talked about it and decided that it may be a useful story to share, in the hopes of helping other people better support their friends and family.

My lovely girlfriend Rose accompanied me to Melbourne recently for the International Hearing Voices Congress. I was given a full three day subsidized access to the congress, but we could only afford to pay for one day for Rose. So, on the Wednesday while I was having my mind blown in amazing talks, Rose was off roaming the city and seeing the attractions.

Rose and I are both passionate about social justice. Neither of us have had easy lives, we’ve both experienced abuse, homelessness, and poverty. We’ve both had PTSD. Rose was first homeless as a 13 year kid, and we both have a particular place in our hearts for other people who find themselves in that place. So, when she came across a guy who was living rough, she bought him a cup of coffee. She sat nearby to share a drink and a chat. And then things went bad. He grabbed her, manhandled her, and tried to kiss her as she struggled and then froze. It seemed like a long time before she was able to break out of being frozen and run away. She was alone in a city she doesn’t know very well, with almost no phone battery left, having a major trauma reaction as many other far more horrific memories and experiences suddenly flooded her.

This is not a nice story to tell, because it touches on prejudices and misconceptions. I want to name some of them. Firstly, the idea that homeless people are dangerous. Like people with mental illnesses (and the two populations have a massive overlap), people who are homeless, and especially those who are roofless are often treated with fear and revulsion. They become invisible, and can go days or weeks without another human being making eye contact, smiling at them, or touching them kindly, even when they live in crowded cities. This fear reaction can trigger exactly what people want to avoid – because being dehumanised alienates people. And alienated people often feel little empathy and a great deal of anger at communities that have rejected them. Homeless people are not more likely to be violent. It could have been the well dressed guy waiting at a bus stop, it could have been someone Rose thought of as friend. The latter is harder to imagine but statistically far more likely. Rose was doing exactly the right thing – treating a guy who was down on his luck like a person, and sharing a little of her good fortune with him. Things going wrong does not always mean you have done something wrong. And sadly, doing the right thing does not shield you from things going bad at times.

The other misconception people often have about an incident like this is around the freeze response. There’s a lot of complex science, neurology, psychology, and outright conjecture about the freeze response that I won’t go into here. Suffice to say, it’s pretty common in both animals and people. If you want to read some more about it, try the blog Understanding Dissociation by Paul F. Dell and look for the term ‘tonic immobility’. I’d also suggest the works of Peter A. Levine. Here’s a quick overview of what I’ve found useful – there are (at least) five basic responses people have to a major life threatening event – Fight or Flight, Freeze, Fold, and the Tend-and-Befriend. Fight we all understand and usually people who fight in the face of something like an assault are applauded and appreciated. Sometimes if their fight response is intense or seen as disproportionate, they are instead lynched. The flight response is also pretty self explanatory and again, there’s usually a pretty warm reception to people who have been able to escape something awful by running – and even those who tried but didn’t make it. After that, things get less clear. Tend and Befriend is about the intense bonding and banding together for survival that people can do when faced with severe threat. It’s often an overlooked response to threat, and not often framed in the more ‘heroic’ light of the fight or flight.

Lastly, we come to freeze and fold. These are the two responses that culturally carry the most baggage. People are rarely applauded for having these reactions, and sometimes the reaction itself is viewed as evidence the trauma was not particularly bad, or even the fault of the victim. Freeze is an extremely common response to threat. It’s difficult to predict, and even people who have previously never frozen in response to a threat can be surprised to find themselves doing so. Freezing often predicts a much rougher time after a trauma (by which I mean a higher incidence of PTSD), which personally I suspect is at least partly the result of the cultural shaming around the freeze response. Freezing can be life saving in some situations. Some animals escape predators that leave them unattended, thinking they are dead. Animals who have frozen are often numb; unafraid and unresponsive to pain. If an animal cannot escape, this is a merciful state. For some people in some terrible situations, the same dynamics apply. Freezing is a powerful, involuntary response of intense immobility. For some people it may be triggered when no other threat response seems like it will work. For others, freezing may be the result of both the fight and flight responses being triggered at the same time.

Where the freeze response immobilises, the fold response is a complete collapse of independent will. This threat response is about extreme submission and compliance. In the short term it can be life saving. It can also (like all of these threat responses) be catastrophic if used in the wrong situation. In the long term it may unfold as stockholm syndrome.

So, in response to a threat, Rose froze. At some point, she then ran. Fortunately, she was able to then stop and think about where would be safest to go. She decided to find the conference. When I found her in a quiet room at the conference, she told me what had happened. She was reluctant to tell me and already feeling a deep sense of shame about the assault. She was also highly stressed and dissociative and in a very traumatised state.

The conference was about an hour by public transport away from where we were staying in Melbourne. We also had bought tickets that night for a ‘Mad Hatter’s Party’ which was being held at a hotel across the city. My first impulse was to cancel the party and get us both home. When I suggested this, Rose was extremely distressed. To buy ourselves time to settle and talk about the evening’s plans, we instead walked to a nearby restaurant. This was a plan she liked. I knew that if I could help Rose to eat and drink, this would reduce her dissociation and help her to communicate what she needed.

We were fortunate in that a nearby restaurant had a fire lit. Rose was extremely cold, which is a common trauma reaction – basically she was in shock. The nearest table to the fire already had people sitting at it, the lovely Lewis Mehl-Madrona and his gracious wife, resting after a big day at the conference. In an unusual step for me, I asked if we could join them so I could sit Rose as close as possible to the fire. We found a risotto on the menu she felt she could stomach in her upset state (digestion shuts down when you are very anxious), and ordered drinks with bitters in them so the strong flavour would help to ground us. I sat next to Rose and kept an eye behind her to make sure that no one came up to her without her seeing them approach. Literally having someone’s back like this is very important at this point. New tiny shocks after a big trauma can embed the sense of terror more deeply, because the reaction to the little shocks is overblown and involuntary. Where people start off distressed and feeling helpless due to the trauma, they move on to feeling distressed and helpless to prevent the ongoing trauma reaction they are having. We both knew this, and as much as possible made it normal that Rose was agitated and hypervigilent. Rose did not wish for the others sharing the table to know what was going on so we did not disclose it.

Food, warmth, company, and drink all helped to ease some of Rose’s dissociation and distress. We started to talk about our plans for that evening. Rose was adamant about not missing the Mad Hatter’s Party, and also very concerned about not being able to cope with it. It was tempting for me to overrule her and refuse to attend. I was very mindful of her need to be heard and to restore some control over events so I tried to work with her instead. She was anxious about the assault making me miss out on something important I had been looking forward to. The thought of this was increasing her shame, guilt, and self loathing where she was blaming herself for the assault, blaming herself for freezing, blaming herself for telling me about it (and ‘ruining my time at the conference’) and blaming herself for having a trauma reaction to it afterwards. I could see that doing the ‘right’ thing and cancelling was actually going to make her distress much worse. So instead I attempted to reduce the intensity of the dilemma. I agreed to go to the party, on a relaxed, let’s-see-how-it-goes approach, with no shame or blame if either of us decided it was a stressful kind of event and wanted to go home early. I made the call that we would catch a private taxi instead of public transport to get home. Rose agreed to leave the party if it was intolerably stressful, and accepted the offer of a taxi with only a token protest about expense. I had no desire to deal with buses myself at that point either.

So, we trekked across Melbourne and found our way to the party. It was loud, cramped, and possibly the least trauma-friendly environment we could have gone to! But Rose was determined, so we found a good seat – from the point of view of not too far from the exit, back to the wall, able to see everyone. Rose ate nibbles as they came around. I bought a jug of lemonade. We shared half an alcoholic drink to take the edge off. (one drink can help, more is generally not a good idea) I couldn’t eat much as my adrenaline was too high.

I put all my own feelings about the assault in a mental box and ignored them. This is a pretty important skill when you’re trying to support someone else. I had a genuinely good time, made some friends, gave out some business cards, danced, had a laugh. I checked back in with Rose frequently. She was happy we had made it but stressed about the crowding and the really loud music. Eventually we decided to call it a night. We held hands tightly as we walked into the night and found a taxi. I didn’t let her hand go until we were both in the car, and then I held it all through the drive ‘home’.

Home that night we gently piled into bed and unpacked our feelings a bit more. I held her hand as Rose bravely opened up about a number of fears and areas of shame that were turning up for her about the assault. We discussed and countered them together. Was it her fault? No. Had she asked for it? No. Could she have seen it coming? Well – maybe, that’s a hard call. If on reflection she thinks she could have been more alert, that’s okay. It still doesn’t mean she didn’t anything wrong and certainly doesn’t make it her fault. Do I still find her attractive? Hell yes! Will I be upset or angry if she doesn’t want to be touched? Not at all. What about if she doesn’t want to be touched again ever? It will be okay. We’ll still be friends, even if we are never romantic partners again. Touch will only happen if and when and how she wants it.

We keep talking and crying. I share how sad I am for her, how angry I feel about it – but not with a lot of emotional intensity. The crucial thing is to be present but allow how Rose is feeling to be paramount. She should know I feel things too, but not be comforting me. My voice and words are sad and gentle but also express quiet confidence that she knows she needs to manage this and will get through it okay. She shares a little about some of the other memories that have been stirred up for her. I listen. She talks about the freeze response, and talks about other responses she’s had to threat. I emphasize that a freeze reaction is involuntary and does not mean she ‘asked for it’ or ‘wanted it’. She finds this helpful and the sense of shame diminishes. We turn the memories over together, the upsides and downsides of different reactions in different situations. It’s always tempting to bury everything in platitudes and reassurance, but this questioning is necessary. Rose, like most of us, needs someone to gently engage with her about the complex moral questions these kind of situations raise.

After a while she asks me to touch her back. I run my hands over her t-shirt. She asks me to go under her shirt and touch her skin. I stroke her back gently, checking that the pressure, pace, and type of touch are what she wants. She shakes and cries a little. I want to hold her tightly but restrain myself. I cry a little too. We lay close and hold hands. After a while she cuddles up under my arm and lays her head on my chest. I can feel my heart beating, like a big sad drum. I hold her close, we tell each other how much we love each other. We go to sleep.

If you’re reading this hoping for suggestions on how to manage with your own partner, I’d suggest reading Intimacy After Abuse, and my series about emotionally safer sex which starts with Safe Sex 1: Checking in.

I’ve always been a creative person… Lady Gaga

Irregardless of your musical tastes, I find this inspiring. She’s not the first artist of whom I’ve thought – if they had turned up in the mental health system at 16, we would have lost them. They found art instead, where it’s okay to be mad! It’s not just okay – it’s perfectly acceptable to not only suffer from madness, but also to use it to every advantage you possibly can. These are the stories I think of as a peer worker when I feel that the script I’ve been given is “Don’t be afraid, reach out for help, get a diagnosis, learn about your condition, you can recover” – and what I actually want to say is “RUN. Never walk into a room you are not sure you’ll be able to walk out of. Learn, but do it secretly, in libraries, online. Don’t let anyone tell you what’s wrong with you, and don’t let anyone save you. Find your tribe.”

recoverynetwork:Toronto's avatarrecovery network: Toronto

Lady Gaga talking on The Graham Norton Show about how she harnesses her voices to inspire her creativity…

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Short Clip [45sec]

Full episode [37min]

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Goals for SA

I’ve gone off to the World Hearing Voices Congress as a burned-out and overwhelmed peer worker. I’ve come home as an activist. It’s an amazing transformation.

Sarah K Reece's avatarThe Dissociative Initiative

I (Sarah) am back from the World Hearing Voices Congress in Melbourne, with some new goals, ideas, and supportive people on board. One of the most important of these is a number of people keen to support the development of a Voice Hearing network here in South Australia. Obviously I’m passionate about our DI aims and resources also, which complement the VH network but are also distinct. We are going to have discussions about what we can do and the best format for a new, better supported local network – and how it might be part of many other national and international communities who are also doing work around dissociation, the mad pride movement, alternative paradigms for supporting mental health, social justice, and community development.

Here are the plans for the next weeks and months:

  • Rest, recover, catch up on sleep, look after myself (ongoing!)
  • Write up an article about…

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The Cape and the Dishes

I’m home now, my brain woke me up after a ridiculously short amount of sleep because it’s trying to kill me, clearly. I had a whole stack of thoughts and ideas about the possibility of a new branch of the Hearing Voices movement here in SA, about the DI Inc, about Bridges and organisations and boards and corporations and how the system works and the nature of all systems and… you get the picture. I scrawled notes in my journal and tried to convince myself to get more sleep. I so rarely win those fights with my brain. I wound up on the phone having an excitable conversation about changing the world and making great art. Super hero cape mode engaged.

Then I got up and remembered the bathroom desperately needs cleaning, the dishes need doing, I have a weeks worth of clothes that need cleaning, and a pile of mail and admin. Back down to earth with a bump.

The post conference crash is upon me. I’ve gone from 600 like minded people in a big, overwhelming, huggy mass, to tonight on my own in my unit. All the connections and friendships I’ve just made feel like balloon strings pulling through my fingers and floating far away. A powerful memory of being lonely and lost with no one to call upon in the world comes back to me.

I know this place. It’s not real anymore, it’s memories and ghosts. I’ll endure.
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In the meantime, I have books brought back from Melbourne to contemplate. It’s good to have our researcher part back again, reading and learning and thinking about things. More sleep would be appreciated however. Looking forward to starting to write up our notes from the congress soon too. Trying to keep my footing back in my day to day life.

Road Trip

Rose and I are home from Melbourne! We spent nearly 12 hours on the road today and I feel like I could sleep for a month. Sadly I have work in the Barossa tomorrow at noon, which makes me want to chew my own arm off! Still, it will help with the big dent the trip has made in my wallet.

The driving was easier than I expected, we spelled each other in roughly two hour shifts. Our rule was the driver gets to choose the music, volume, and temperature of the car. This worked really well. We also brought a bag of easy to eat snacks, wet wipes and tissues to keep fingers clean, lots of drinks, and plenty of caffeinated options.

The conference was incredible. In fact the whole week was incredible. I have never had so many profound conversations, new relationships, massive paradigm shifts, offers of support, and amazing opportunities in my life. I am so glad I did so much work before I got there to be able to take it all in. My head is still together although I am exhausted. I can recall a lot of the conference and I’ve got pretty extensive notes to help me too. (I plan to do my usual write up on all the talks I went to with links to the speakers for all of you amazing people who couldn’t attend) I feel like I have been eating entire planets and now need down time to rest and digest. The world is a very different place for me than it was a week ago, in so many ways.

How prophetic my dream was, that I still have so much to learn. I have learned so much, and yet that process continues, the more I discover the more horizon I find yet stretching out before me. The world is an amazing place. There is so much hope in my heart. I think I have found new ways forward for myself as an artist, as a peer worker and activist for social change, and as a part of a massive movement on behalf of all of us who suffer and struggle due to dissociation and all the other things so crudely termed ‘mental illness’. I’m not alone with my passion, I have people behind me who care deeply about these things too. And with them behind me, I can suddenly do so many things I could not find the strength for alone. Things are going to change around here!

But first – rest, sleep, dreams, and mulling. First the sitting around in small groups and speaking with people I love and respect, chewing things over, spinning it all into threads we can weave with. I am in love with my life.

World Hearing Voices Congress 2013

The conference is incredible. I’ve ranted, wept, hugged, frantically scribbled notes, sat and thought, connected, and learned so much. I promise I will share things with you when I can. For now – Rose was assaulted while exploring Melbourne, she is physically not harmed but was very distressed. We have managed the situation well and fortunately she’s booked to come in to the congress tomorrow with me. I have my talk ready to go for tomorrow and have done a major re write of the Dissociative Initiative website and added all the notes people may want for the talk. I’m exhilarated, sad, tired, and grateful.

Sarah K Reece's avatarThe Dissociative Initiative

Day one of the Congress is over and it has been an amazing experience with deep conversations about identity, meaning, madness, power, community, and diversity. Dissociation and multiplicity are both featured topics which is exciting and wonderfully inclusive. If you are interested in following the congress as it unfolds, Sarah is sharing quotes and thoughts on twitter @sarahkreece. We will be writing more about the conference once it is over.

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Blissfully happy in Melbourne

Rose and I drove through the night to Melbourne last night. We drove through banks of fog, through fields and scrub, we saw the sun rise, the dawn chorus, the Grampians. It was shattering and magnificent.

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We arrived this afternoon, we’ve booked a room in a family home instead of a hostel. I’m thrilled with this decision and feel utterly at home.

We unpacked the car, showered and crashed for some sleep. In the evening Rose woke us to go and find dinner. Our kind hosts directed is to a local Vietnamese restaurant which was just perfect for my fragile state.

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This evening has been utter bliss. I love Melbourne. Every time I visit I fall more in love with it. We went for a walk and found beautiful second hand book shops. I couldn’t restrain myself from buying a beautiful book on neuropsychology. The shops are quirky, there are hand made art and items every where.  Rose and I find a coffee shop and order chai lattes with honey.  A live jazz band is playing, with a pretty woman in a red cotton dress leading on trumpet.  The tables have lamps that cast soft light onto the yellow plaster walls.  The toilets have long scrawled graffiti conversations all over the walls.  I feel deeply relaxed and at home.

We buy eggs and bread and wine and maple syrup ice cream and come home.  A day ago I was frantically re writing the DI website and preparing my resources for this conference.  I packed into a manic 48 hours about 2 weeks of work.  Much more unusual is that I’ve been able to come down off that manic high so quickly.  We’re switching constructively,  easing the build up of tension before muscles seize,  being able to be entirely in the present moment.  It’s magic.

It’s also been wonderful to have a conference to write for again,  to have the researcher out again,  reading,  thinking,  hungry for material and gnawing big ideas down to small concepts that can be shared.  It felt so good to walk into a bookshop again and want to buy all the books!  We’ve been burned out this year,  we’ve read almost no non-fiction.  Tonight we’ve read more than we have in months.  I’m so deeply looking forward to touching base with my community.  I need this. Seeing all the wild creativity around also woke those longings in me,  to go home and find my paint and ink.  To be liberated from those destructive notions of what art should be,  must be,  how it must be created,  what an artist is,  and to be able to play. 

I feel renewed. Tonight I am utterly content with my world. 

Art at the beach

I’m frantically working, trying to catch up from being sick all week. Managed to pull off my gig yesterday painting for 5 hours at the beach, then put in another 6 hours of work on a poster for the Hearing Voices Congress. I’m tired and a bit frazzled and still not brilliantly well. Tomorrow is going to be hot and my car air conditioning isn’t fixed yet, so I’m looking at driving over with Rose tonight instead in the cool. I’m wired and hyped and not sleeping anyway, so as long as I get someone chilled and level headed out to drive (which means ice coffee and good music and boots) that should work. In the meantime I’m working on my talk and packing and fixing up the DI website. So here, have some photos of art. 🙂

Sarah K Reece's avatarSarah K Reece

Today I was offering free at at Henley Beach, provided by the Dept of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure who were asking people’s thoughts about some new ideas for trams and bike lanes and the such. It was a stunning day, sunny but not hot, water flat, blue, and perfect. My office was under sails directly looking out on the ocean. Days like today I’m the luckiest artist in the world. 🙂 On the downside I’m slightly sun burned, but it was worth it!

Here’s a couple of photos from today, I was offering face or arm paint, and glitter tattoos.

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Beautiful dreams

I was sick all yesterday and getting worse by evening. I crept home from Rose’s house last night, expecting to have a bad night of gastro. Somehow instead I slept peacefully, woke feeling fragile but better, and dreamed beautiful poignant dreams. What a blessing unexpected relief is.

One of my dreams was based a little I think on the Celtic notion of some times or places being connection points between worlds. In my dream, those moments in our lives where we’ve been the happiest change the place where it happened, so that it becomes a link to another world. I was going back through my life searching for all those happy moments, visiting the places I’d been when I felt loved, or at peace, moments of hope, kisses in rain, and falling through into another world. It was beautiful. All those memories so vivid. They are not intrusive the way trauma memories are, they take thought to reclaim them from the deeps. A nights spent looking for them was deeply restorative.

In another dream, a woman was sick with mental illness, suicidal and heavy with dark thoughts. I was apprenticed to a healer and learning from them how to help. This woman they sat and talked with for hours, just listening and learning about her. Then they went away and contemplated. Once they were satisfied they understood the nature of her need, they prepared a remedy for her themselves. Then they met with her again and they took her to a potters studio. It was underground, cool and dim. There was stained glass in the windows that turned the light that fell into the studio into many colours. Many potters were working quietly at their wheels, there were people all around but busy with their own art, the murmur of voices.

In one corner was a wheel, by a window, where the light was gold and red. By the wheel was a deep round wooden stool with an embroidered pillow and a little bench. They showed her that she must put her shoes on the bench and sit on the stool with her bare feet on the earth floor. Sitting around a wheel means hugging it between your knees, it’s an open posture, very different to the fetal position the body moves to when depressed or afraid. They told her to sit here and be, to feel the wood of the stool beneath her hands, the old embroidery under her fingers. To worry the tassels. The earth under her bare feet was cool, and the red and gold light that fell into her lap was warm. They said to her, this is your place of healing. When she was ready, when she had drawn all her thoughts inwards and counted them and was ready to speak, then she could create.

When she was ready to touch the clay the healers set up a screen between her and the clay and she formed her pots blind. She began to make these most beautiful, tall, strange pots. After she had formed them, she was offered paints and glazes. She painted them with amazing multicoloured designs, like the light that came through the windows but in the forms of birds and dogs and plants.

The healers said to her, whenever your heart is heavy, come here. And she did, and needed no other treatment. The task of the healers was to listen to the needs of the heart of the person. And in the dream i was amazed and said to myself that I have so much to learn.

So, inspired by a night sweetly tossed in my own mind, memories and dreams falling like light onto my hands, I’m going to work today on my talk for the Hearing Voices Congress next week. There’s a gentle breeze through my window and birdsong on the air. It’s good to be alive.

Hanging out with a 3 year old

The other day I was hanging out with Rose, her mate, and her nephew. The nephew is 3, I’m going to call him Rocketman. We went off on a long drive and Rose was teaching him how to figure out what words rhyme. Tunnel and funnel, dog and frog. My favourite was necklace and fishface. The endless string of questions that kids of this age ask start to be presented in rhyme which is a weird twist. I like turning the questions around on him, especially when it feels like he’s asking for the sake for asking ‘But WHY, Sarah?’… ‘Why do you think?’ Sometimes you get great answers.

Sometimes the questions are too damn good to answer. Rocketman asks ‘Does wee pee kill zombies?’ Aw man. I hope so, kid. That would make surviving the apocalypse a whole lot more manageable. It’s all down to finding a drink.

I’m still sick. Hope your week is going better.

Zoe helps with admin

I’m feeling ill still and doing admin at home today. The plan is to get everything ready to drive over to Melbourne for the congress with Rose on the weekend. Tonks is gradually improving, she has started eating again and moving around the place on her own. Zoe helped out with the admin but sleeping in amusing formations on the couch.
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Fear of the dark

So another sinus infection stakes it’s claim on my face. The locum reckons it’s going bacterial but my enthusiasm to take antibiotics again is negligible. I’m run down and tired and already have thrush so thanks but no thanks! I’ve cancelled work for the next few days as I’m developing signs of a chest infection too. Have to be well enough to drive to Melbourne for the hearing voices congress next week!

Rose has also been sick with gastro, mercifully brief but horribly unpleasant, so we’ve been unhappy comrades in arms for a few days. She’s also been under a lot of badly timed job stress. Yesterday I spent half of it winning medals for being the most useful and supportive girlfriend, and the second half winning medals for being the most overwrought and unhelpful girlfriend. Dammit. Oddly enough when I crashed she rallied in that funky little see-saw turn taking thing couples can do. Thankfully!

My life only tends to work out in small windows before the next really bad thing happens. This makes me pretty anxious and reactive to a whole bunch of triggers suggesting a new crash is about to happen. I once went to see a shrink for help to make new friends. I knew I had DID but wasn’t out about it to anyone, rather was deeply deeply afraid of anyone finding out. I talked with this shrink about how lonely and emotionally unstable I was. We talked about a common painful dynamic for me at the time – having a moment of really good connection with someone, perhaps a new acquaintance, and going home feeling like things are looking up! Excited about my future, really happy with how the conversation went, reassured that I would make new friends. And then the dawning realisation over the next days of weeks that this wasn’t the case. The wonderful day was not the start of a new life, not a sign of good things to come. It was an exception. That friend would be busy for the rest of the year. The acquaintance wouldn’t come back to uni. The compliment from the boss didn’t mean I was going to be rostered on for more shifts.

The shrink advised me to live entirely in the moment. To take everything at face value only and stop hoping that life would get better. It’s the hope that makes you unstable she advised me. Stop thinking about the future. She was right, of course. Her solution was a bit drastic. At the time, without hope that life would get better, I would have killed myself. The instability was painful but worth it for me.

Narrative therapy is a fascinating field I’d love to know more about. A kernel of an idea about it is this : the stories we tell about our lives and who we are are profoundly powerful. In my life two stores compete for my attention. One is a story of hope and acceptance. That how others have hurt me is not my fault. That it is not a failure to be poor, or sick, or hurting. That life can and does get better after awful things have happened, that scars and hearts heal and love and joy live alongside anguish.

The other sorry is darker. That I am broken. Fatally flawed. Doomed. That nothing I can do, not my best efforts, all my strength, all my love, can stop the dark. That nothing works out for me. Life requires risks and my risks send me tumbling into ravines.

This story has weight for me, a lot of evidence behind it. It becomes something I watch for, signs my world is ending again. A dark foreboding. A quiet despair in my heart. So I make plans, wonderful plans for my life. And I have nightmares, where Rose dies, where our child is terminally ill, or abused, where we both end up homeless with little kids in the back seat of the car. The dark eats my dreams. A little voice inside says if you’re thinking of having kids soon, you’ve got a shrinking window in which to kill yourself before you leave them with the burden of a dead mother.

This is horrible and people are often horrified when I talk about it. They try and reassure me that life is better now. But once bad things have happened to you, you know in your bones, they can again. It haunts me. In a weird way it’s a relief when they do happen and I can stop waiting for them, stop being encouraged to believe in an ideology about good things happening to deserving people that I know is mostly an illusion.

That relief reminds of the cycle of domestic violence. You get the slow building tension, then the rage/abuse/violence, then the honeymoon period where everything is wonderful. Then the tension builds again. People get so stressed and exhausted by the tension building stage, the paranoia it inspires, the knowledge that violence is inevitable, that they sometimes deliberately act to trigger it.

So, I’m in a DV cycle with the universe? (Is that what the crisis driven aspect of Borderline Personality Disorder is about?)

Last night, sobbing hysterically as Rose sang to me and rubbed my back, I understood how hard I work to keep believing in hope. Not a pollyana hope, a darker kind of hope. That my life, even with pain, will have meaning. That choices I make count. That I have some power to bring light into my life. That I can build a philosophy that understands loss, death, and failure, so that they wound but do not destroy me. That I can live in today, and dream, and if the sky falls tomorrow I can howl then. Keep building the ideas of failure and tragedy into my world, into my hope, into my love. Keep chasing freedom when the trap closes about me. Get help to hold back the dark. Someone to hold me when the nightmares come.

Tonks has also had a rough day. We took him to the vet this morning to be desexed only to discover that he is a she. She’s now sleeping on a shelf in my studio with her fancy new cone. Poor love.
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Bringing me back to myself

Last night, Rose was sick and I was coming down with another sinus infection – oh joy! So instead of roaming around Pride March with most of our friends, we stayed home and walked TV. Rose admitted to being a captive audience so I put on one of my favourite movies, Cyrano de Bergerac – the version with Gerard Depardieu. I love it so much, it’s been a couple of years since I watched it. It’s part of my ‘cannon’ of books, films, and poetry that I usually revisit about annually. I wept and wept through it. I know parts of it by heart and yet it still moved me deeply.

It got me thinking about this ‘cannon’ collection and what they mean to me. After Cyrano, I couldn’t help but take up my pen and write a poem about it, about remembering that for me, poetry is the meaning of life. It is how I live and feel and breathe and experience the world! I don’t mean the act of writing, or the ability to turn a pretty phrase. I mean something else – passion, frailty, beauty, something more bohemian. It’s about speaking from your heart, living life large, stargazing, nakedness, joy, grief. I’ve gone too far away from these values. I kept trying to fit myself into a world I will never fit. I miss my pen, my ink, my heart.

So I wrote and remembered what it was to write, I thought about the philosophy of Cyrano that so speaks to me – him admonishing a character who won by secrecy and deception – that he had not won but rather “gave up the honor of being a target”. His pride, his enthusiasm for struggle, his understanding of the emptiness of success and the great courage it takes to love. “Winning’s not the point. The fight is better when it is in vain!” These ideas I cherish. They strengthen me. They bring me back to my own heart, my own ideals. I weep and am restored. I remember what I have been fighting for and why.

This is what my canon of art does for me: it brings me back to myself. I spend my life in a world that does not think or believe or desire what I do. I am small, I lose my way. I imbibe, like poison, ideas that would kill me, would grind me into the dust. Ideas about life and poverty and value. My canon are my defense, they restore me to my own beliefs. They wake passion and courage within me. They remind me that all the ideas of the world are only that, ideas. Little prisons made by the small thoughts of little people. Whereas my dreams, they open up my world. They inoculate me, rejuvenate me, restore my heart to the place where it soars.

This is the difference between believing I am ‘white trash’ when living in a caravan park, and feeling lucky for my gypsy life. I open up my heart and all the world floods in, all life blows through my soul, with such pain and such untempered joy.

So I come back to them, over and over, to heal myself from the wounds of a world that does not live like this or understand it. It is about being deeply alive. It is a way of living that I treasure.

Beautiful Cyrano, who failed in so many ways, and was yet true to himself, lived gloriously. To live a life like his I would be doing well indeed. We measure our lives by standards that mean less than nothing to me. Worse – we get only so little time, so few Autumns, which are eaten by lethal ideas like – death is something that happens to other people, like – I’ll have time to do that next year, like – I must achieve to have worth. We get so little time and it is so easily devoured by the philosophies of the empty and deranged.

In poetry I find my meaning and my hope. It is a philosophy I cherish and must nurture more. It takes me beyond the pain of failure, the prison of sickness, the wounds of deep loss. Beyond nightmares and despair, the pit, the black sea, the place where all the world becomes blood. It is breathing far under that water, it is staring into the face of the nightmare, it is a scream that becomes a song. It is joy at the edge of death. A flower worn close to my heart. Sunlight on my skin, rain on my mouth, lover in my arms. All things, embraced, the cup drunk deeply from. Authenticity over positivity. Honesty over comfort. Passion over an easy life. I have not failed, I have lived. For someone fractured by dissociation, who once walked as the living dead, left numb, deaf, blind by it – this belief in life, this desire to be alive and to experience it is the antidote to my private hell. Learning how to protect it, how to run from buildings on fire, from lovers who carry cages, from hands that trap and bind, that is my task. Burning brightly, I walk in shadow unconcerned. I speak of hope to other hearts. I can remind people that pain does not destroy life, it is a dark thread in a tapestry. That even our tears have beauty.

Always coming home, then, a dance – back out into the world, home again to these keepers of my heart – Cyrano, Bradbury, McKillip. The artists who whisper truths in my ear and keep my heart from cages. How I love them. Bless them all.

Working on my talk about dissociative crisis

I’ve got 20 minutes to talk at the World Hearing Voices Congress about supporting someone through a dissociative crisis. It’s happening in a couple of weeks so I’ve been working on it recently. I met up with Bridges co-facilitator Ben, and we nutted through some ideas until it coalesced into a coherent framework. I love that process. I tend to need to bounce off someone else to think clearly and plan something like this. There’s such a sense of satisfaction about taking the amorphous and ephemeral and being able to find some kind of underlying theme or order to them.

When I asked other people about what they find helpful or not helpful when they have been in a dissociative crisis, I got exactly the answers I was expecting – which is to say, a very high level of contradictory responses. At first this seems hopeless – it’s so much easier to be able to give a straightforward answer – if A, do B. This is the medical model – if infection, give antibiotics. The nature of what helps with dissociative crisis is highly individual, so much so that what will be of great help to one person will make another drastically worse.

But it isn’t hopeless. Many people who have these kinds of experiences are able to be very articulate about what will and won’t work for them. One of the simplest things you can do is just to ask and invite information. If the person is a stranger to you and not able to give you any of that information, there are still many things you can try, within a framework of useful principles such as those of Trauma Informed Care. Having a broad understanding of the kinds of things that people may find useful gives you a bit of focus for a trial-and-error approach with someone in crisis, so I’ll be going into those.

I’m giving this talk free here in SA next week for everyone who can’t attend the conference. Here’s a link to the flyer with all the details. Feel free to share it around, it’s aimed at everyone, staff, people with dissociation, family and friends. You’re welcome to come along. 🙂

Edit: Update, this talk has been postponed due to illness – new dates will be provided soon.

Photos of Henna at the Blackwood Uniting Church Fair

I’m offering another form of body art now…

Sarah K Reece's avatarSarah K Reece

In very exciting news, I am now offering henna to the public as part of my temporary body art collection! I recently created henna art for people at the Blackwood Uniting Church Fair to support the local community services work, which was very well received. I’m not the best henna artist around, if you’re looking for henna for your traditional Indian wedding, I’m happy to refer you! But for festivals and parties I can certainly deliver. I’ve been trained in henna application and I mix my own henna so I have a good understanding of safety and how it all works.

Unlike every other form of temporary body art I offer, henna cannot easily be removed before it naturally wears off over 1-3 weeks. This means you need to give a little more thought about what and where you choose to have your henna, particularly if school, work, or an…

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Cupcakes with chocolate ganache

Tonight was the third of four cupcake classes I’ve been holding at the local Women’s Community Centre. I’ve really enjoyed this work, it’s very different from face painting, but the process of helping people build skills is one I find very rewarding. Today we covered making and whipping chocolate ganache, filling cupcakes (we used raspberry jam or nutella), and make edible sugared decorations. They turned out really well.

It was too hot a day for me though, I’m tired, have a tummy ache, not looking forward to even hotter weather tomorrow. 😦 The car is going in to the mechanic this week, hopefully I will soon have air conditioning working in it again! 🙂

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Gather everything you need

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Make the cupcakes and let them cool

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Make chocolate ganache by pouring hot cream over chocolate bits, and whisking until smooth. Allow to cool and then whip.

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Cut cones into cupcakes and fill them with something yum 🙂

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Pipe on whipped ganache and add something pretty to top.

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Sugared rose petals

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Sugared pansies

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Sugared mint leaves

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New business area in my home

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My Mum visited yesterday and put up shelves for me, so now I have a single place to store all my face painting, henna, glitter tattoo and so on products and resources. I’m very excited about it! Today has been dedicated to admin and housework. And booking in new gigs. Hurrah for me! 🙂

Got so busy with it all I almost missed a shrink appointment, now sitting in the waiting room feeling annoyed that I’m paying to be here when I’d rather be finishing my to do list!

Moving at a slower pace

My gig yesterday was canceled so I took the day off and Rose and I went up to Hahndorf to wander around, like we’ve been talking about doing for about the last year. It was blissful. Is very unusual for us both to have a day off in the weekend that days and I really enjoyed being able to amble around. That evening I was going to a friend’s pirate themed birthday party, and I want going home beforehand so I wound up meandering around Hahndorf dressed as a pirate. As you do. I had pistachio and rose ice cream.
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Today, I painted a lot of small children at a birthday party, which went well. My skills continue to improve which is gratifying. Every gig I get, I decide to focus on improving a particular skill or design. I’ve been working on my sponging skills lately and learning how to load a sponge with just the right amount of paint, because that can be tricky. I’m making progress.

Reflecting this morning with Rose that all my anxieties about the future come down to a very simple task: make today good. It’s all I have and all I can control. With enough good today’s, I’ll built exactly what I’m hoping for.

I’ve also finally realised that the stress I’ve been under due to housing choices is not my fault. It’s not fair that our public housing system is so clogged up that abusive people maintain housing while neighbours are driven out. It’s not fair that it takes so long to be allocated a house that wanting to try living with my lovely girlfriend is a massive risk. I didn’t do anything wrong, and the risks shouldn’t be this high. It should be okay to test out different housing arrangements, to pursue love, to need extra support for a time, to follow your heart, without risking homelessness and chronic housing stress. I vividly recall watching the lives of the women who were allocated housing from the domestic violence shelter I was once in. All were ecstatic at first. Most lost their housing over time. They went from group housing to being terribly lonely, struggling with neighbours, break ins, and wanting to move in with lovers. Many wound up back on the streets and in shelters again. I swore to myself I would not be one of them. They were treated as stupid, unable to look after themselves, probably borderline. I wanted to be different. But life is not static. I’m not raising a child next to my neighbor. I want to be safe, but I also want to pursue love. The system sucks. That’s not my fault. I can let myself of the hook for being stressed by it. It doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong. It means life is complicated and the supports for someone like me are inadequate. So, what else is new. Today is good. I’ve made kids happy, I’ve hung out with my gorgeous girlfriend. I’ve eaten good food. I’m tired but proud of myself. Later I’m going to shoot things in game. I’ve been promised ice cream. Today is good.

Funding for the Hearing Voices Congress!

I’ve just had great news! I have been offered a subsidy for entrance to the World Hearing Voices Congress at the end of this month, at which I’ll be giving a talk ‘Supporting someone through a dissociative crisis’. The plan is to drive over together with Rose, and use budget accommodation, or mump off someone else with a spare room there. 🙂 I’m so excited! For all the people here in SA who can’t get there, I’m working on plans with MIFSA to offer the same talk here in the near future. 🙂 Stay tuned!

Fibro hangovers

Days like this are blah. I feel like I was up most of the night drinking and dancing. I was in fact, painting kids faces at Adelaide Zoo, then hanging around with some friends in my dragon onesie. Not a drop of alcohol has been imbibed by me this week, yet this morning I wake with dry mouth, furry tongue, headache, heavy limbs, and bad body pain. Fibromyalgia can give you hangovers for parties you didn’t go to. I feel awful and I have admin already overdue that needs attending to. On the upside, with some ibuprofen, time in bed, and lots of water I’ll bounce back okay. Looking forward to a celebratory dinner tonight with family and friends. Dimly aware that the rest of the world is off doing things and being productive. It’s a beautiful day out there, I wish I had a bed in the yard still I could lie on and nap in the sunshine. I’m drugged with phenergan and drowsy with bad dreams. Sometimes the kitten comes and sleeps next to me.  Life will just have to go on without me for a bit. I’ll catch up soon.

I got a stack of medical test results back recently which are mostly good expert that I’m running extremely low on iron and vit D, which my gp reckons explains the dizzy nausea episodes I was getting, and possibly some of the worsened joint and muscle pain too. Hopefully with some supplements and more red meat in my diet things will improve.

Ah well. I’ve been working hard lately. I’m proud of myself.

Sophie is my happy pill

Another wonderful evening with my god daughter Sophie. She is developing and growing so quickly, each week that goes by she is so different, blossoming more and more into her own person. I love her so much. Nights like tonight are precious. I cuddle her and all my fears and anxieties about being a mum disappear. She is utterly precious, an important part of the beautiful little community Rose and I are building around us.

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A couple of days ago I was really struggling. I painted for 6 hours on Sat and Sun, free to the public at big days at the zoo, flat out speed painting which left me with severe joint pain for days. Rose and I got home on the Sunday, only to immediately call an ambulance as Rose was experiencing chest pain on her left side, radiating into her left arm. An anxious overnight stay in the ER ensued, then a trip to her GP the next day. The end result was positive, a painful condition unrelated to her heart, which can be treated when attacks occur. I was now seriously sleep deprived and in pain. I got home to discover that I’d forgotten to empty the cat litter tray the night before. All the clean clothes in my room had cat pee on them, and clothes stacked in the dining room were covered in cat poo. When I went to turn on my computer to catch up on all the admin I’d been unable to get to so far that week, it died and refused to boot.

I sat in the backyard and wept, utterly overwhelmed by my life and the insane optimism of planning to have a child when I have a chronic pain condition and mental health problems, to raise a child on welfare, when I feel so inadequate to the task at times.

Today I am so far from that place. I cannot do this alone and I know that. I am finding the most amazing people, this incredible supportive community of other beautiful, at times also fragile and wounded people. There are days I can’t remember that I have friends now, and that they love me. Other days I realise that the lonely years are behind me. I have arrived. I have family, friends, love, hope for a beautiful future. A world in which it’s okay to be mentally ill, safe to be gay, accepted to have disabilities. When I hug Sophie and think how lucky I am to be her godmum, I think this is a good world to bring a child into. This child would be very, very loved.

First abusive, anonymous email

Well, it had to happen sometime. I’ve been writing this blog for over two years, and out about having DID and being bisexual, both of which potentially expose me to abuse, violence, or ridicule in various circles. I received this email recently, from someone calling themselves, of all things, Pig Wheeky:

“I know u. I know your secret. Fat stupid ugly girl-no friends-no one loves u-u cling to your fictitious difference-to prove u r not insignificant-dissociative, gay- what next-how can u look in the mirror-how can u pretend in the face of those who have suffered real trauma-kill yourself-your deceit-your lies r unforgivable -u ir sickening-always know that we see through u. U r harming people that have genuinely survived horror-u r unbelievable-i know u dont care-u r borderline and psychopathic-u cant even look after an animal without rspca on your back-i know u -loser-yes i know-and u know what u r-u would b surprised how many of us c through u-u r your own hell-and u will reap. :)”

What fun. There’s nothing quite like linking borderline personality disorder and psychopathy to really give yourself credibility, and the movement between the personal “I” and attempt to sound like an important majority by using “we”. It’s all a bit pathetic.

I’ve received hate mail before, although admittedly from people I’ve known. The internet opens up so many opportunities for people to behave appallingly and hide behind anonymity. This kind of bullying is the crap that people like me face. Being open about these kinds of things leave you vulnerable to people who fear and hate and who give themselves permission to be abusive to those they deem deserving and still feel like ‘good people’ themselves. Bullying in the form of instructions or requests that someone hurt or kill themselves is common and disgusting. It’s taken awhile for policies in schools and the like to catch up with how vulnerable people can be coerced into harming themselves, to the sadistic delight of abusers who don’t even have to get their hands dirty to inflict harm.

Anyone who uses tactics like this has no claim on the moral high ground, and certainly none whatsoever about how to best care for and support people who have experienced trauma. I don’t believe anyone is insignificant. All of us are unique, have our own stories and paths to walk, our own souls to care for. All of us have to wrestle with the task of how to navigate a complex, at times very painful life, and be as human as we can, to grow into the best we can be in values and character. Some of us grow kinder and gentler through the awful things we experience. Some of us grow colder and vicious. Those who become vile are to be treated with great caution, and regarded with deep sadness. Once they too were innocent. Corruption is always a terrible loss of who they could have and should have been, what they could have brought to the world. We who are abused by them are still, oddly, the lucky ones.

Having said that, we need love and care to survive and endure the cruelty and brutality of these kinds of assaults on ourselves. Every day people suffer due to bullying like this. People are made to feel alone, ugly, less then everyone else. The wounds can be deep, can even be fatal. Love heals. Anger cleanses. Hope brings life. In community and with connection we are restored.

Thankyou to all of the people who love and support me, to the community I’ve been so blessed to find. Remember all the people like me who don’t have this. Look for them, shield them from this kind of destructive hatred. Shelter each other. Help each other to be the best we can be.

Facilitating Cupcake Workshops!

I’ve been offering Cupcake Decorating workshops through the local Women’s Community Centre at Stepney, SA. This is the first time I’ve worked as a facilitator with this centre, so I was quite nervous at first, but I’m finding my feet. We decided to offer four classes for the cupcakes, also two for face painting, and one for glitter tattoos. So far I’ve facilitated two cupcake classes. In the first one, I demonstrated making American style buttercream icing with cream cheese, and royal icing. Everyone learned how to cut and set up an icing bag, and fill it. Then we practised using different tips to make icing swirls on upturned cups. Once people had the hang of them, they iced some real cupcakes and decorated them with food glitter. We also practiced lines, dots, and flowers with royal icing on biscuits.

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People made big improvements quickly with their handling of piping bags which was encouraging for everyone.

This week I brought in fondant and flower modelling paste. We learned how to colour fondant, and how to marble different colours together. We made fondant flowers with cutters, learned how to use different types of molds to shape fondant, how to hand shape roses, and how to cover cupcakes with buttercream and rolled fondant. We packed a lot in to two hours! I’m so impressed with what people came up with. Some things were much easier to pick up than others, but everyone went home with a basic understanding of how to work with fondant so they can further pursue whatever they enjoyed most and practice their skills. 🙂

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In the next two classes I’ll be showing how to fill cupcakes with yummy things like Nutella, how to make and pipe ganache, and how to make and hand paint flooded run out style cupcake toppers with royal icing. We’re gathering more participants with each class which is great, people seem to be enjoying then and going home with some useful new skills, not to mention some really pretty cupcakes. 🙂