Bears Or Conservatives?

I have no idea where the question making the rounds on social media as to whether a woman alone in the woods would rather run into a bear or a man came from, but of course it caused the usual suspects to lose their shit when women chose bears.

My brother and I almost got shot by a hunter once when we were playing in the woods, on our own property, and I've been nervous of them ever since. When I worked a summer out in Banff I went to parties in the woods with groups of young people but I was nervous a bear might show up too.

Northern Ontario's black bears are one thing, and apparently they're all over the Sault now, but grizzlies are a whole 'nother level of bear.

Anyway, I read an essay the other day addressing the tempest. It's by Laura Killingbeck, a solo biker, hiker and backwoodser, and it reminded me of my younger days when I wanted to be just like her after reading "The Dove" and "Walking Davis", books by young men who solo travelled.

Bear Or Man

I don't think the problem of being female had occurred to me yet and although I did a lot of single gal adventuring, including heading out to Banff for work - and hitchhiking to Jasper a couple of times, which included getting dropped off at that damned ice field at least once (do NOT tell my children about this) - it was to have fun with other young people, not be alone in the wilds.

The internet is more polarized than the real world, of course, but just to prove it, in case you've forgotten about the real world, a man of my intimate acquaintance said, "I think I'd rather run into a bear than another man alone in the woods, too."

He saw Deliverance.

I'll just say I'd rather run into another woman alone in the woods than either a man or a bear, preferably Laura Killingbeck. In fact, I'd welcome it, and I imagine a lot of those men online scoffing at our fear of men, as if they don't share it, would, too.

It could be something he says. Maybe he makes a comment about my body or my appearance. Or he asks if I’m carrying a weapon and then presses for details about where I’m camping that night. Sometimes, it’s a shift in his tone, a leer, the way he puts his body in my space. But, usually, it’s a combination of things, a totality of behaviors that add up to a singular reality: this man is either not aware that he’s making me uncomfortable, or he doesn’t care. Either way, this is the danger zone. Even if he has no intention of harming me, the outcome of that intention is no longer possible for me to assess or predict. 

In this moment, my mind snaps into a single, crystalline point of focus. My intuition rises to the surface of my skin. I become a creature of exquisite perception. The world is a matrix of emotional data: visceral, clear, direct. 

I need to get away from the man. But I need to do it in a way that doesn’t anger him. This is the tricky bit. Men who lack social awareness or empathy often also lack other skills in emotional management. And usually, what men in these situations actually want is closeness. They’re trying to get closer to me, physically or emotionally, in the only way they know how. That combination of poor emotional skillsets and a desire to get closer is exactly what puts me in danger.

I've been in this situation with a man, even while surrounded by other people, but also alone, and it doesn't matter what their intent is, once the <ding ding ding> goes off in my head it drowns out the learned desire to please, no small feat that, and extricating myself from the situation without being raped and murdered is the priority.

Women are set up from birth to not say "NO!", to not offend, to not make a scene, at the same time we're set up to take responsibility for male choices, including their physical violence against us, and blame ourselves for our own choices, including staying past the time our instincts told us we should leave.

I was raised by a widowed Feminist of her time, have a university degree. I've never known what it's like to not have options. And yet, there was a time when I'd have chosen the bear, not while out alone in the woods, but - in my own home alone with a man we both believed loved me. Certainly alone with him in our car, because I didn't just imagine him giving me every indication he might deliberately take us both out in a fiery crash, rather than lose me to another man, he was making me very much aware of it.

Would he have done? Who knows? Like I say, I didn't imagine my fear that he would. And I didn't imagine him wanting me to be afraid he would either.

I took over the driving, at least, and I didn't imagine his relief that I did, either.

Later he said something about being afraid I was laughing at him, and I thought of that Margaret Atwood line about men being afraid women might laugh at them, while women are afraid men might kill us.

We've come a long way, women have, and damn it, we brought men along with us, some of them kicking and screaming, and it's all worth it. Thanks to us, Canadian men have more choices in life than ever before in the history of the world. And as difficult as divorce is on children, who really just want their parents to stay together, there's benefit in their knowing, too, women can leave men.

Anybody can leave anybody.

It's a life lesson as good for our sons to learn as it is for our daughters. Nobody has to stay in a relationship that isn't working out for them. We all have the choice to leave now. Perhaps it's what's even behind the rise in adult child estrangement from their parents, their siblings, their families.

Freedom to live as we want.

So here's what I don't understand, the backlash against women, by men, for choices that benefit all of us, them every bit as much as us. More so, even, because they still get to men, free to wander out in the world on their own without the social conditioning from birth that they're responsible, not just for the happiness of other men, but for their violence should they fail in that responsibility to make them happy.

Female Liberals are leaving politics, afraid for their lives, because of Conservative male harassment online and off. And in spite of Michelle Rempel Garner's "both sides" at Committee the other day, it isn't both sides. I live in an Ottawa neighbourhood where Freedom Convoy thugs roar around in trucks waving Fuck Trudeau flags like the worst of America's MAGA cult.

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre wears a sweatshirt with POILIEVRE emblazoned on it at his son's soccer practices in the same neighbourhood and my Liberal neighbours just nod politely at him. I would ignore him. But none of us would even consider for even a moment harrassing him.

Nor would we even for a moment consider running for the Liberals in this neighbourhood. We're afraid even to put up a Liberal sign or a PRIDE flag, ffs.

I have all the respect in the world for female Liberal politicians, so the least I can do is a bit of singing their praises online - and voting for them. Maybe even be brave and risk a rock through the window by putting up a Liberal sign. Braver still and hanging a PRIDE flag.

I want to show support for, not hatred of, even though Conservatives publicly declared themselves our enemies, unless you're a fascist, when they joined forces with our attackers, the Freedom Convoy, in February 2022, while Liberals just want to govern in the interests of more of us than not.

To be clear, the point of the violence and intimidation being perpetrated by Conservatives against the rest of us is to make Canada a one party state, Conservatives in charge from coast to coast to coast.

Why anyone would vote for that is beyond me.

I choose the bears, thanks.

Beardy Nonsense Kicker

I've been trying to blog about Beardy Nonsense Kicker's lecture to the female graduates of Benedictine College without making it personal but it's been tricky.

I was a homemaker. It was my choice, a choice that went against the advice of every older, wiser woman I knew at the time, all of whom advised me to keep at least one foot in the world of paid work.

No one has ever been able to tell me anything. I've always done whatever it was I wanted to do.

Radical responsibility, radical responsibility, radical responsibility.

No regrets (kidding, I've got a million of 'em). But taking radical responsibility for my choices in life has freed me up, not just from blaming others, but from blaming myself.

Who knew?

A wild and crazy guy in a purple suit on YouTube.

The problem with homemaking in straight marriages is that straight marriage is already to the advantage of young men, who don't always handle it with grace and equanimity. Add in children and the power imbalance becomes even more pronounced, a power imbalance young women don't realize has always been there until it's too late and we're stuck living in it.

"Only women bleed." (Alice Cooper)

Here's the thing about homemaking: it's isolating, comes with zero social status, there's no money in it, and, in my experience, young husbands aren't mature enough to appreciate the sacrifice young wives make when we give up our money-grubbing ways - even when it's our choice - so they can climb the money-grubbing ladder and be heroes of their own story, a live in cook, housekeeper and babysitter running interference for them back at the old homestead.

Cripes I wasn't mature enough to appreciate it until blogging the paragraph above. I can practically feel my blood pressure rising as I realize how ripped off I was in divorce.

Oh boy was I ripped off in divorce.

Oops. Radical responsibility, radical responsibility, radical responsibility.

I chose to leave the married life, homemaking, to become the hero of my story, not a bit character in his, and I guess not my children's either.

Because here's the other problem with homemaking: half of marriages don't last. That's a lot of marriages. And we marry, many of us, because time invested, clock's a tickin', and so we rope one off from the herd to get down to the business of procreating.

More often than not, I swear to Gord, we don't even like each other by the time we say "I do".

There's nothing quite like growing up a young Feminist in Northern Ontario and ending up a homemaker in a different city every couple of years, married to a young man who used to make much less money than yourself, who believes he deserves better now that you don't make any at all (and who in this capitalist Patriarchal hellscape constantly trying to alpha dog our liberal Feminist democracy can blame him?) and who takes your existence for granted such that marriage begins to feel more like a practical joke you've played on yourself, a colicky trap, instead of the partnership of mutual respect and shared finances you had imagined it would be.

Oops. Radical responsibility, radical responsibility, radical responsibility.

Good Gord magical thinking is a cunt of a thing.

I've watched a lot of Gabor Mate YouTubes over the past couple of years, trying to get a handle on the panic attacks I suspect were triggered by the Christo-Fascist Freedom Convoy's occupation of downtown Ottawa in February 2022, but enough already. I've got my wild and crazy guy in a purple suit now.

Also, he and his son are currently focusing on adult child estrangement, "adult child" pretty much saying it all if you really stop and think about it, with petulant thirty-somethings berating their bewildered helicopter parents for failing to fly them to making better choices in their lives.

I've too much of my own mother in me to prostrate myself in abject apology to another adult for the 101 ways in which I failed them. The role of wife was not for me. The role of mother is impossible to perform as well as any of us hope to, but blaming mom - and who among us, etc etc - is no way to be grown up.

Radical responsibility, radical responsibility, radical responsibility.

So while I can appreciate Gabor's lament about our society not being particularly nurturing, I suspect how children used to be raised, in our long ago hunter/gatherer tribes, is a lot closer to community childcare centres than lonely young wives trying to be the best mothers ever in the history of the world, stuck at home with no money or support network, and dealing with increasingly disrespectful husbands pointing out how the beautiful young colleagues they're mentoring at the office manage to work and have children.

Oops. Radical responsibility, radical responsibility, radical responsibility.

But okay, sure, a straight couple wants one parent to stay at home to make life easier for the other.

LET THE HUSBAND HALF BE THE HOMEMAKER THEN.

Whether we want to admit it or not, I assure you, the Patriarchy is still the social construct we live in and if we want to tear it down - and we do because therein lies the freedom we all want to live as we are, not who society tells us we are - young men taking their turn at doing the free labour of homemaking and childcare so they can better understand and appreciate the sacrifice it entails, seems like as good a start as any to this former homemaker who only just worked her way halfway back to where she left off before marriage, thank you very much, and good enough because life is just fine, so yay radical responsibility.

Because, of course, young men have no idea how unfair it all is out there in the world for young women who, in many parts of it, have no rights at all. And it's not like we here in our liberal Feminist democracy/capitalist Patriarchal hellscape don't live every day with awareness of that fact, how lucky we are to live where Feminism can and does battle every day against the Patriarchy, which is still trying to alpha dog us all. And never mind the devolution in parts of the US where male impregnators have all the rights of procreation now and the female impregnated none, and young people are being indoctrinated by a Conservative Christian cult to believe that's how life is supposed to be, that female people are born to be birth vessels for the state.

So sayeth the beardy lord.

Not to mention we live knowing elsewhere in the world female children are being sold off to old men in sexual slavery every second of every day, which men here are only too happy to point out, as if we should be grateful to them for not being the Taliban.

That's our real world, the one we all live in, our big ol' Patriarchal construct of a global village.

But enough about me and my real life experience as a homemaker, much romanticized by men who have no idea what they're talking about, and don't care to inform themselves, because my life, the lives of all women, are about them and their narcissistic, entirely ego-driven cult that pretends (white) Conservative Christian men are the REAL chosen people, designated by their made up beardy god in the sky to rule over the lives of girls and women.

And I'm sorry to say this, fellas, but the only reason they're getting away with it is because not enough of you can be arsed to HELP US. Women are people. When we lose rights, you lose rights. Period. End of.

Your vote for your local Conservative candidate, maybe even NDP or Liberal candidate if it just helps elect a Conservative, is a vote against liberal Feminist democracy. So bully for you. Just don't pretend to me you give a shit about the lives of girls and women because you really don't or you'd HELP US BY NOT ELECTING CONSERVATIVES.

By the way, Beardy Nonsense Kicker didn't say anything the young women of Benedictine College haven't heard all their lives. He's just as indoctrinated as they are as, and whichever cult leader invited him to speak knew that fully well. It's why he was invited to speak ffs. No one was more surprised than... nobody graduating from Benedictine College by what he said. That's because Benedictine College isn't a REAL educational institution. It's Christo-Fascism. The worst cult going these days. And it's exactly what the Conservative Party of Canada, under the leadership of the misogynistic case of arrested development (and phoney baloney living a lie), Pierre Poilievre, wants for our children.

And I say children because we have to stop framing this as a problem just for our beleaguered daughters to deal with because it's every bit as much a problem for our sons, because, just in case you don't get it yet, our sons are the real prey.

They. Are. Building. An. Army.

So I don't care if you think Trudeau's a bit of a douche bro (although come the fuck on, he's clearly matured in office, even letting a little grey show now in the ol sideburns), hasn't come through for you on this or that line item, or you can't stand his speaking voice for another "uh".

Get in line.

Vote Liberal anyway because there's a reason his name is on all the Christo-Fascist hate flags. It's because he's all that stands between us and the current crop of Conservatives here who are no different from their Republican cousins south of the world's longest unprotected border - where male gun violence in a capitalist Patriarchal hellscape rools and liberal Feminist democracy drools - and who've been indoctrinated into a cult - because that's what Conservative Christianity is, a cult - IN THE MILLIONS - to believe their beardy god in the sky has decreed female people exist to be birth vessels for their state.

Not yours, not ours, theirs. Their state.

So pay attention, please, because the Christo-Fascists are closer than you think. Stornoway, to be precise.

Nothing Personal, Just Enough

So I think I've got a handful of them down now, therapy tricks to feeling better.

What on earth did they do back in the day when life went seriously sideways?

I know, I know, rope, chair, barn. Rocks, pockets, sea. Shotgun, walk, woods.

This was never that. Just random attacks of nausea. Emotional dysregulation.

Anyway, recently, way back behind all the frantically firing synapses of my brain, Mother Mary came to me, whispered words of wisdom, "let it be".

Let it be.

One of the most helpful free therapy videos I watched was an unlikely woman who managed to hammer it home to me, finally, that almost all of life is out of my control - but I can still love.

Let it be. Love.

Then there was "give up your personal history" from Dr. Wayne Dyer. Also "there are no justified resentments". And "change how you look at life and life changes".

Let it be. Love. Let it go.

Still, my favourite, the man in a purple suit imploring me to take radical responsibility. It's all your fault. You made each and every choice along the way. Stop blaming others. Own your choices, your life.

Own it. Let it be. Love. Let it go.

I thought I wasn't ready to be older, and I wonder now if that's why the panic attacks, but it's not true. I am ready, just as I was ready to be a mother, ready to leave a marriage, ready to stop working - ready for it, now, to NOT be about me.

Because there's the rub. Growing up, hearing middle-aged people talk non-stop of living like irresponsible children with money to burn when they're old, we earned it, we'll burn it, and on and on and on it went and still so often goes.

Me, me, me.

And that's okay, to each their own. Those middle-aged adults then and many now didn't grow older with the privileges I did, but their older age is not for me. It was never going to be or I wouldn't have stayed home with children, left a marriage, stopped working for money when I did - two years ago now.

Imagine. And I think of myself as a money first person. Thought, I should say. I thought of myself as a money first person. Another story I told myself that turned out to be not true.

Own it. Let it be. Love. Let it go.

But live my life, not somebody else's, and certainly not the one and only advertised on television. We laugh at the Globe and Mail's advice to wealthy young couples on how to save for older age but we still fall for it. How can we have enough in a culture based on more?

Counter-culture, I guess. Find where all the old hippies are hanging out. Join the gang giving back to get what we need.

Own it. Let it be. Love. Let it go. Enough.

Thanks for reading.

Safe and Secure

Yesterday, out walking Bernie (resident hound/lab/beagle/?) I ran into a woman I know from our wait for the bus to work.

Just another person in the 'hood I can count on to be a fellow traveller.

That's mostly the case, of course, but we do have Freedom Convoyers in our midst, including an unvaccinated neighbour and former nurse I talk to on the regular, avoiding the obvious for the sake of neighbourliness, but keeping my physical distance just the same.

Anyway, my bus stop acquaintance was out for a walk during her public service work day, her lunch hour, and we got to talking about how it is in government these days.

Crazy. Way too much work. Complaints from the public over the top. Everybody at their rope's end. Not enough staff. People off on stress leave, sick, retiring.

So, same old, same old, just that much worse. And, speaking of, I know pretty much for a fact, from the horse's mouth, if the Liberals put hate speech back in Canadian human rights legislation, there's no way staff will be able to keep up with complaints.

They can't keep up now, not by a long shot, it's already an impossible workload.

Canadians complain about everything. The Commission deals with an assembly line of whinging. And if that's not bad enough, Conservatives regularly spam the complaints system with claims their human rights are being abused by Justin Trudeau. Gun regulations, trans rights, abortion decriminalization, and on and on and on it goes, white Christian Conservative males are being pummelled, they tells us - pummelled.

It's criminal, really, because their brattishness delays the processing of legitimate human rights claims, which certainly do exist, but that's how Conservatives behave nowadays.

For a long time, actually. Decades. Since the Reform Party gave an official voice to the fascist assholes. Alberta Conservatives, for instance, are why the original gun registry costs were so high, the gun registry later destroyed by Stephen Harper after his party cheated its way to a majority, which it did thanks to its current leader, Pierre Poilievre.

Before that sad day in our electoral history, Alberta Conservatives used tactics provided to them by the American NRA to sabotage development of the gun registry and run up its costs to a couple of billion buckaroos.

Fascist brats, as I keep pointing out on this blog, but enough of them.

My bus waiting friend didn't mention being upset by the return to work three days a week come September, by the way. I know it's easy for me to not care, currently not working, although who knows what the future will bring, but I do want to note here for the record that I ultimately preferred doing my job at the office. I didn't have a choice at the time, because I was at the level of mailroom clerk, and inmates can only make human rights complaints by mail, but once I was back I realized I hadn't liked having the government in my home.

Yuck.

(I also don't think the government should be run out of private residences, but that's a whole 'nother thing.)

What she did mention was the fact she'd really rather not be working anymore but she's nervous about being renovicted from the home she and her son have lived in for 20 years now, so she's still at it, as are a few of her co-workers who had thought they'd retire post-pandemic only to find themselves too insecure financially to do it.

We should all be thankful, really. We need all the burnt out public servants currently still at it. The hiring process - when there isn't a freeze - is so byzantine it can take forever to bring on board fresh recruits. And it's not like the work load is decreasing.

Cue temp agencies charging the government more while their temps make less than the going rate and go to work sick because otherwise they don't get paid at all.

Also, I know I complain about Conservative governments, a lot, but I have good reason. They're saboteurs, their goal once in government to further disable public services such that Canadians who can afford to pay out-of-pocket welcome their privatization.

But really, none of us can afford for this to happen, no matter how rich we think we are, and it will be a disaster when Pierre Poilievre is PM. He'll raid our CPP, which is all many of us have by way of a pension, but such is the way of Canada that we're none of us allowed to feel secure unless we were born into the lap of luxury like that bloviating old fascist, Conrad Black.

It's natural Canadians want to own a home, preferably single, detached, but would we feel the need to put all our money into bricks and mortar if renting was affordable, renovictions not a thing, 2 and 3-bdrms widely available, if we could feel as secure renting an apartment as owning a house?

If we ALL, every Canadian, had a guaranteed liveable annual income at least by age 65?

It's a crazy way to run a country, leaving so many of us on edge, not knowing how long we'll be able to live in the apartment we finally manage to secure for our family. Intolerable, really. But the only world Doug Ford knows is the one of single detached houses in the suburbs. He thinks it's what everybody who's anybody wants, too. And to be fair to Mr. Mobbed Up to the Gills, it IS what a lot of people think they want - indeed, need - because Canadians are still conditioned from birth to believe home ownership is the only real financial security there is.

It's 2024, ffs, our world is burning where it isn't flooding, and for Conservative politicians it's STILL all about cars and 2 car garage piles in the suburbs.

Well they're out of date and we're out of time.

Please, stop voting for them.

Thanks for reading.

Competing With Ourselves

Back when I was a kid I can remember my mother being on the phone with my aunt, long distance, for hours, drinking and arguing about politics.

A month later she'd complain about the bill.

Well, I may not get a bill, but for sure there's a toll, arguing about politics online. And I'm not making the world any better, wasting time and energy arguing politics either with people who want a very different world from the one I do, or fellow travellers who just support a different way of getting there.

Paying closer attention to my own behaviour, as opposed to that of others, is not only helping me get a grip, it's helping me gain perspective.

I posted something on Facebook yesterday morning which I shortly thereafter deleted. It was a partisan post with regard to foreign interference in our elections. But better people than me are trying to keep partisanship out of this problem, so I decided not to add to their load.

What do I know of foreign interference anyway?

Well, more than Michael Chong, I guess, who apparently had to be told post election that China had been trying to intimidate him.😀

I also put a "like" to a post by a friend with whom I'm not in agreement on a current topic, which I did instead of making a comment. I did that after noticing another friend, not in agreement with her either, give her a "like".

So instructive, his "like". Kindness in action. She needed it, he gave it to her, and so did I.

Back when I was on the parent council of my kids' elementary school I remember a certain parent being very agitated about what he perceived as a failure to make our kids compete with each other. He was worried they'd get run over in the workplace because they hadn't learned to compete with coworkers in our little JK-5 elementary school.

Later I was telling my brother about him and he said he'd finally asked one such parent, "Where do work that you have to compete with your coworkers?"

Unfortunately, we were raised in a competitive education system, not a cooperative one, so in spite of earnest professionals trying to teach our children a more evolved way of being in the world (although Gabor Mate would argue we were more evolved when we were living in cooperative, not competitive, hunter/gatherer tribes) we still imprinted a competitive streak onto our kids.

That's the real problem some Millennials are having. They aren't stuck because they got a ribbon in elementary school just for trying, they're stuck because they absorbed the wrong message, the one they got at home where influence is stronger. Instead of behaving cooperatively, so every body wins, they behave competitively, so winners and losers.

And everybody can't be a Bitcoin billionaire.

It's aggravating to me, particularly as a mother, that Pierre Poilievre, a rank and callow huckster, can get away with pretending to be the solution when he's in fact the problem. We need cooperation, not competition, more spreading of the wealth and more government investment in public services.

We need to help each other, particularly our lost young men, find meaningful ways to participate in and contribute to society.

Fun Times

The other night I watched a TED Talk on the importance of having fun. Well, tried to watch it.

I gave up.

To be fair, a TED Talk seems a tough fun sell.

But increasingly I've noticed I'm not the right audience for anything fun. Am I aging out of life? Already? I'm only in my 60s. What's it going to be like when I'm in my 70s? 80s? 90s?

100s?

Thank heavens for the smorgasbord of free therapy via YouTube. Oh and crosswords. Not only are crosswords fun, they've taught me to watch out for confirmation and/or cognitive bias and/or whatever that bias is when we believe to the very core of our being an answer is correct, the only possibility, until <voila> the actual answer emerges and we're able to solve a whole section of the grid.

Just writing that gave me a little frisson, as the French say, although they probably don't say it of solving a crossword clue.

But I'm the age now my mother was five years into retirement when, like a lot of men, but also women, because women are men, too, gender being nothing more than a patriarchal construct, she was kind of at sea. I don't have anywhere near her level of income security but I doubt I'll seek gainful employment anymore anyway.

I love not working.

Trading time for money was never my thing, but I undersold myself, too, and that's my own damned fault.

I'm also the age Gram was when she came to live with us, a divorced woman who owned nothing, collecting just a small old age pension she used to pay for bus and plane trips to stay with other relatives every now and then.

If I'd been paying more attention I'd have realized sooner Gram was pretty zen, and a fine example of keeping it simple, stupid.

Anyway, as I said, for fun I've been watching a lot of YouTubes on such topics as Radical Acceptance and I came across this man, and really, the look of him was what drew me in, he was just, so... unlikely a purveyor of wisdom.

Think a silver haired Will Arnott, except a silver haired Will Arnott in real estate, not acting, and wearing a purple suit.

I'm long story shorting here, maybe even completely misinterpreting what he said, anguished, rending of garments, but he seemed to take Radical Acceptance, mesh it with "it's not your fault but it IS your responsibility" to arrive at "Radical Responsibility because it IS your fault".

Oh. My. Gord. So freeing. Suddenly, everybody else was off the hook, it was all on me, and a wave of calm descended on my world. All this time, like Dorothy in Oz looking to everybody else for help, my good witch showed up, a silver haired fox in a purple suit, to implore me to see the truth staring me in the face: It has always been up to me. I am the problem. Not everybody else. Me.

You've probably long been in on it so indulge me here while I celebrate freeing myself from trying to change others, magical thinking, bitter recriminations, and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc, and take responsibility for every big and little choice I made along the way that has brought me here to this truly, madly, and deeply rarefied existence I enjoy in our nation's capital.

And that's not all, because no sooner had I accepted responsibility for myself, than I decided to rewatch an old favourite, and maybe you know this guy who's been around for decades, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who told me - one more time - to let go of my personal history.

Now, for quite a while, I've known myself, as you reading this likely have known of me, too, to be hauling around an anchor to the past, my life story as I've made it up to be in a thousand and one retellings, pretending it was a necessary burden in order to be a writer, that giving it up would leave me at sea, and I wouldn't know who I was anymore.

Well, it turns out I was just using that narrative to avoid taking responsibility for the choices I've been making since I was a kid, and knew right from wrong.

I've got a very good memory, too. That's a good six decades of avoidance, I'm embarrassed to admit.

Anyway, it's all of a piece, isn't it, because in not taking responsibility for my own choices, including the choice to not set boundaries for myself, I was taking responsibility for the choices of others, blaming myself, blaming them, feeling guilty, used, abused, and suffering health consequences as a result.

Well, as much wiser people than me would say, today is the first day of the rest of my life.

Thanks for reading.