Trauma Ward

So I'd like to wean myself off fluoxetine but maybe not yet. My doctorless Blond Companion suggests making an appointment with the doctor I'm lucky to have, but I don't like to take up his time needed by others with more pressing medical issues. I know he's feeling enormous stress himself, given the shitkicking Ford Nation is giving our healthcare system while it sells off our prime agricultural land to its mobster bosses, one of whom has already flipped their take to China.😷

Not to worry, though. Ford Nation is mad, folks, and gonna buy it back with our money, albeit not for us. At least our mobbed up OPP had the decency to hand off the investigation to our RCMP.💩

Prediction? Ford Nation will get away with it.👮

Unrelated prediction? Donald Trump won't. We don't bring mobsters to justice. The US does.👮

I unfriended a Facebook friend yesterday and will likely unfriend more as time goes on. I don't want condescending men in my life anymore and he had too much of a Richard Dawkins thing going on for my liberal feminist taste.👸

I grow old.👵

The other evening CBC had an item about unhoused citizens coping with trauma by self-medicating in the Byward Market because they have nowhere private to be (my phrasing, not CBC's). And if that isn't bad enough for Byward Market tourism, Xi Jingping is punishing us for calling out his interference in our elections/bullying of our citizens, by ordering his citizens to boycott travel to Canada.👮

Yeah well maybe it's time we did a cost/benefit analysis of the tourism industry, anyway, because it seems to me billions of middle-class bucket lists getting ticked off before billions more of us shuffle off this burning mortal coil, taking entire species and sherpa guides with us, isn't as sustainable as we want to pretend it is.🙅

By the way, there's no such thing as an eco-tourist. Just leave the Galapagos to the turtles, ffs.💔

But that's not what this post is about because this post is about letting go past resentments to make room for new ones.😀

Obviously, I'm kidding (sort of). What I mean is, no more blaming mom. Or you. Or your mom. And especially no more blaming myself. I don't know how to transform a culture of competition and entitlement to one of cooperation and caring but I can work on my own behaviour to be "more good/less bad" as My Blond Companion once put what we all want out of life. And I can ally myself with others already hard at it because Gord knows it takes knowhow I don't have to get there. Cripes, I only just made the connection between eating because hungry and feeling better because full. That's how traumatized it turns out I am and I've had a very privileged middle-class life.👸

I suppose I should thank the Freedom Convoy for amping my emotional dysregulation to 11, resulting in the debilitating panic attacks that led me to medication, therapy and hours spent reading about trauma and its effects on the body. We live in a world created and run by traumatized people who would rather die than show vulnerability. I grew up surrounded by adults numbing themselves in one way or another and labelling kids critical of the unfairness we witnessed day after day after day as overly sensitive pains in the ass.👶

Interesting choice of words, eh? Think about it. Do you know any old people who had therapy? I don't. My mother preferred death to vulnerability, ffs. There was nothing more terrifying to her than being vulnerable. Why? I can only imagine. Grew up poor during the Depression, went through a world war, was widowed with 4 children in the early 60s. I grew up surrounded by The Greatest Generation priding itself on sucking it up and swallowing it down, stiffening upper lips and straightening spines, no pain a good stiff drink couldn't cure and if it couldn't, well, life's tough but guess who cares about your problems more than you? That's right, nobody.💀

And if not these traumatized products of The Greatest Generation calling all our shots it was buggered and buggering bullies mad at mommy, grown up private schoolboys, Boomers and GenXers pretending to have fun burning hundred dollar bills in front of unhoused citizens coping with trauma by self-medicating in public because they have nowhere private to be. Cripes, name a family more fucked up than the Fords. Meanwhile, one brother was mayor of Toronto and the other's Premier of Ontario. Why? The Fords all need therapy, not power.❤

Like the therapists say, it's not our fault, but it is our responsibility, so that's where I'm going to put my energy going forward, which is the only direction we can go, anyway.💁

A Middle-Class Life

I've become pretty good at muting CBC ads targeting gullible seniors, new car/truck suckers and sports gambling addicts but every once in a while I forget, and the other news hour there was one for the lottery, the jackpot at $55 million.👀

For some reason, after decades of not even considering buying a ticket, I suddenly found myself thinking maybe I should. But before doing so I decided to consult with My Blond Companion about it, there being no point in buying a lottery ticket without the expectation of winning, and $55 million is a lot of money.💃

Relationship + money = discussion.💁

Well, no sooner did we start discussing the possibilities, his positive, mine negative, when I realized I didn't want to win $55 million after all, and we resumed watching the news.👵

Imagine living so privileged a life the possibility of winning $55 million isn't worth the price of a ticket. Well, a walk to the convenience store, too, in front of which sits a very unstable resident of our 'hood who can neither be ignored nor greeted without incurring her wrath/my guilt at the wild disparity in our living conditions.💩

I still shop for groceries paying whatever it ends up costing, but I'm shopping for two adults eating a black bean based diet, and cook my own beans.💪

No fair judging me for avoiding the convenience store altogether, either. Just the other day I made the mistake of smiling at a woman I sat beside on a crowded unmasked bus and she immediately began to unload her made-up life story, a wealthy heiress cut off by her family, and so having to travel the country house sitting for strangers.👸

I'm as bad as anybody these days with the ages of others but she mentioned being in her 50s, so who knows how long she's been living this fantasy. It was my own fault. She looked normal.👵

Again, no fair judging me for judging a person by their looks, although you can judge me for smiling on the bus, which is totally asking for it.😇

No fair judging me for anything if you still own a car. Our country's on fire, ffs, and all I see while waiting for a bus is single occupancy fossil fuel burners driving by. Our landscape is littered with cars. The new mayor of Ottawa, a CFRA haircut named Mark Sutcliffe, is currently demanding a roadway given over to cyclists and pedestrians be returned to cars. We could've elected a really good mayor, too. Instead Catherine McKenney is trying to improve Ottawa from outside politics: Fix Your City

Pretty much every day for four months of the year I ride my bike through a prosperous middle-class neighbourhood to get to the pond for a swim. It's the life I wanted when I was 12 so how lucky am I to be living it at 64, eh? The neighbourhood brings to mind the childhood we all wanted, for ourselves and then for our kids, the one we lived in books and television shows and movies.👪

I think it should be a field trip for kids from all over. There's even an elementary school where during the school year I get to see kids playing outside same as they ever did. If I'm riding by at the right time I see parents and caregivers doing a drop off. Tire swings hanging from mature trees, basketball nets, adirondack chairs.🙈🙉🙊

One day I noticed a woman from my 'hood, a Qanon cultist, parked outside one of the houses, getting stuff out of her trunk. I know her to be well down the rabbit hole, and have seen her on tv clips disrupting local school board meetings, the Freedom Convoy she supports having moved on from harassing healthcare workers to harassing educators. It was jarring. But she appeared to be familiar with the house she was visiting so I figured she must be providing a service of some kind. Cleaning, most likely.💭

My mother was widowed with four children under the age of ten in the early 60s and still I grew up with Mrs. S. and when she retired Mrs. B. coming once a week to clean our house (and visit with Gram), that's how middle-class my childhood was, or how determined my mother was to live a middle-class life anyway.💁

Maybe it's all the compassionate inquiry videos I've been watching but, as harmful as the cult this woman is in has been and continues to be, because Christo-fascism is the entire why of it, seeing her in this context, non-threatening, widened that crack to let yet a little more light into my life.😇

Several weeks later I rode my bike down a different street than usual, but in the same 'hood, to avoid tree trimmers taking down some of those beautiful mature trees, necessary in the wake of derechos and ice storms, and I saw a very angry looking man stomping down the street, headed to the elementary school where there was a day camp in operation for the summer. At the same time a young boy exited a house with an upside down Canadian flag hanging from it. The man yelled, "Hurry up!" And the boy ran down the driveway to catch up to the man, I assume his father.👺

Sure enough, the boy was dropped off at the school, while the man stomped back to his house, an upside down Canadian flag defacing his million dollar property in a neighbourhood of my childhood dreams, a neighbourhood it's a privilege just to be able to ride my bike through every day on my way to swim in a fresh body of water he could walk to in a fraction of the time.👶

Well that crack I just mentioned widening to let yet a little more light into my life didn't narrow, but it didn't widen, either. Instead I felt the threat of an angry man, an irrational man, a bully convinced of his victimhood, and peddled away to avoid his street in future.😷

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is our wants seem to be in denial of our needs, such are our middle-class lives, with many of us believing we need more instead of knowing we already have too much (there's a reason the retirement course, i.e. taxes and financial planning around them, is the most popular one in government) while others of us sign up with anti-social cults promoting the violent overthrow of democracy.❤

Recalibrating and Famously Dead

So Tuesday I was all set to take My Blond Companion (MBC) in hand, get on a bus, and see the Barbie movie at a Cineplex.💃

I'd chosen my outfit carefully, complete with pink sweater, knowing it would be cold in the theatre, the usual over doing it with air conditioning, and remembered to put earplugs in my pockets.👸

The sound volume of movies is painful for me, which may be partly why I'm not much of a movie goer. Also where I sit matters. I need perspective on the screen so as not to feel overwhelmed by it.👵

Hey, breakthrough - movies in theatres = sensory overload!😵

I've been watching a lot of videos about anxiety, etc, and Gabor Mate's talk on authenticity made me realize how inauthentic I am. It's due to a fear of abandonment, vulnerability, intimacy. As he also says, it's no one's fault, no one's to blame, but it's our responsibility to ourselves and others to work through it.😷

No more blaming mom.👶

Blame the Patriarchy.💩

Anyway, about an hour or so before we were planning to leave for an early afternoon showing (I don't go out in the evenings these days) MBC mused aloud that I may want to forego the popcorn, due to my temporary (but permanent) denture currently (and forever) disguising my hillbilly smile.👹

I assured him I'd be foregoing all offerings at movie theatres henceforth, thanks but no thanks.👸

People who don't have eating disorders with panic attacks on top really don't appreciate how fraught it all is for people who do, but good grief, I got queasy just hearing the word popcorn. How could I ever have eaten movie theatre food, and in a movie theatre? Well, I'll tell you how, by pretending to be an entirely different person than I am.👻

But speaking of queasy, there I was, one minute looking forward to seeing Barbie (I want to see it more than I've wanted to see any movie ever, save for The French Connection when I was 12) the next minute realizing I'd been slowly but surely starting to feel not so good.😰

I waited a bit, did some breathing exercises, then said to MBC, "We may have to leave, that's all. And we'll have to scout out the washrooms first. Oh and sit by the back near the exit so I can get out in a hurry if need be. Sorry, it may be a waste of time."😰

And he was fine with that, he's witnessed the panic attacks up until the lying on the bathroom floor part, but then I realized I was making myself do a thing I wasn't ready to do after all and called it off entirely.😎

He was fine with that, too, not feeling particularly driven to see the Barbie movie anyway, and I joined him on Bernie's walk, suddenly feeling perfectly fine. Great, actually.💪

MBC suggested I plan to see the Barbie movie every day, then cancel on myself, so I always end up feeling great.😀

Later MBC mentioned having lunch with a friend and his friend pointing out we haven't recovered from the pandemic, we just want to think we have so we can get back to normal, or what Gabor Mate refers to as our "myth of normal".💁

Add in the Freedom Convoy's attack on us here in Ottawa, which for me triggered a fight, flight, freeze response, on top of a problem with emotional dys-regulation, and voila - panic attacks.😷

As I've blogged before, I cried with relief when Angela Hewitt (yes, the concert pianist, the liberal elite, herself) during an interview on CBC Ottawa about the effect the Freedom Convoy was having on her life said, "We're being bullied."😖

I know now it would have triggered too many childhood feels: fear, vulnerability, abandonment, betrayal, not being seen, heard. Injustice was everywhere. It was. We were bullied and we bullied. Parenting wasn't a word, therapy unheard of in spite of the adults around us having lived through a depression, fought in world wars. Corporal punishment was meted out by the same principals and vice-principals - all men - and teachers who may also have been sexually abusing us. That was a fact at the ordinary public elementary school I attended. Public record. And I know for a fact it was worse at the ordinary Catholic elementary school Freddie next door attended because he told me all about it. And every day, dodging its bullies - just other even more terrified children - I thanked our Protestant God I wasn't born Catholic and didn't have to suffer the injustices they did at their school, believing ours paled in comparison.😇

Our grade eight teacher/vice-principal eventually, in the '90s, got sentenced to 12 years for the sexual assault of scores of girls over his 25 year career in the Sault. And 12 only because he refused to show remorse for any of it. This is fact. Also a miracle he was brought to justice at all, thanks only to his victims and no thanks to the many adults who let him get away with it.❤

Imagine, Sinead O'Connor was crucified in much of our media and politics for ripping up a picture at the end of her set on SNL of the CEO of our western world's most famously Patriarchal institution - which it is still - for his deliberate and ongoing complicity in covering up/denying the kidnapping, rape and murder of Irish children by his institution's employees. Why? I mean we know why he covered it up/denied it - $$$ - but what's with our media crucifying her for an entirely non-violent protest?😠

And still it goes on, reality fictionalized to suit Patriarchal ideology, blatant bullying witnessed by millions of us, Russians, with the blessing of their Russian Orthodox Church, spiritual leader of Putin and his Russian Mob, kidnapping, raping and murdering Ukrainian children, while much of our media blames everybody but the perpetrators.😠

It seems like small potatoes now, the Freedom Convoy's violence against us, championed by so much of our media, blatant propagandists for it still employed, churning out their lies, our politicians continuing to fuel the fascist fire it lit in downtown Ottawa a year and a half ago now.👵

But the question should be asked louder than ever - how do we sleep while our beds are burning?💔