Small Town Wren

Every year I’m surprised by how much I’m not a fan of Thanksgiving. I’m not really excited by standard Thanksgiving fare (turkey is not my strong suit). I’m kind of nonplussed by the “working vacation” aspect that school always assigns the holiday. I tend to get into fights with everyone I encounter, too. I’m not really sure why, but I’m particularly prone to snapping at people in mid-late November.

It just messes with my groove in a way that no two-day holiday ever should. School work becomes even less appealing but, as is the case now, it is more imperative to get it done. Somehow all of my final papers and such are due by Friday this week. But let’s not talk about that. I don’t even want to think about that.

Perhaps it’s the for-real break preview aspect. There’s just enough time off to get me thinking about free time and reading a book for, you know, fun, but then WHAM!, it’s back to the grind. Only the grind is a million times worse. And it’s a sprint to winter holidays and real rest time. Time that I want now, dammit!

Here’s a steampunk turkey!

Almost three years in the making, I finally finished The Beauty Myth in the wee hours of the morning. It’s just a shame that the most dated part of the book is the last chapter. It is an artifact of a past that already seems like ancient history.

The Beauty Myth was originally published in 1991, when I was four. The vast majority of my life has been spent in a world where Naomi Wolf’s rallying cry had already been heard. I think I’m much better off for it, too. The way my mother approaches her body and the way I approach mine are in two completely different categories. The biggest feature of note is that my mother flat out refuses to leave the house without any makeup on; it’s an odd day when I leave the house with makeup on.

I never bought into it. I was always part of the rebellious crowd, but somehow the parts of the myth that latched on to my sister and my peers never found its way to me. I don’t know if it’s because I never wanted to feel like anyone but myself, or if it’s because I’ve spent half of my life with some form of overt baldness. It’s hard to feel shame for your looks when all of your shame and self-consciousness is rooted squarely in your hair.

Or maybe it is because I was blessed with a naturally slim figure and a rightly colored face. It was a running joke at my boarding school: I’d devour six plates of food at dinner and the health services ladies would still think I was anorexic. They weighed me constantly, and lectured me on how eating is good for you, thinness isn’t everything. They had no idea I held the candy arsenal in my dormitory or that I routinely won eating contests against the burliest of the burly men on campus.

This isn’t to say weight hasn’t been a big part of my life. My mother had to defend herself when my elementary school thought I wasn’t being fed due to being so underweight. I ate ice cream every night and was part of that dreaded “Clean Plate Club” at dinner. When I shot up to 5′7″, girls began poking at my sides in the locker room and asking me how I did it. I didn’t know. I still don’t know.

A lot of it has to do with my mood. When I am happiest, I tend to weigh more. Depression makes me drop the pounds as if they were nothing. I started this past summer out at 145 pounds. Depression clubbed me over the head in September and by mid October I was hovering at 123. While the sadness has eased its grip again, the new medications I’m on are of the sort that make you lose weight. I’ve lost two more pounds in the past week. I haven’t seen 120 since I was 16.

It frightens me. I don’t like being this skinny. Once you are of a certain thinness, the pressure is on to keep it. People tend to leave you alone though if you’re even 5 pounds heavier than that thin. I’m not anymore, though. My skinny jeans are just straight legs now, and I have to belt them in so tight to keep them up. I eat, but the weight keeps falling.

My buddy and his mother presented these to me today. They baked them together this morning. It was such a sweet gesture and he held them out to me with such pride. I don’t know how I’m supposed to go without seeing his smiling face for a whole nine days. Let’s not even think about Christmas.

This comes courtesy of my wonderful friend John. He listens to this so often that I cannot think about Carl Sagan without thinking about him.

I have finished a book, and granted it wasn’t the book I planned on finishing next, but I finished a book no less. This one I had the pleasure to read for class, but that doesn’t mean reading Greta Nagel’s The Tao of Teaching was boorish work. The fact that I read it in two days–two busy days–is endorsement enough.

Part of my enjoyment came from the fact that I have had a long standing interest in Taoism. I had the pleasure of having the Tao Te Ching introduced to me by a very proficient scholar while in high school. I recall being 16 and reading aloud with gusto in my dormitory’s lobby. It was total revelation.

In an adaptation of her thesis, Nagel relates the 81 “main” ideas of Taoism to their application in the classroom and attitudes of teachers. It is interesting as my wise scholar mentioned earlier often espoused that Taoism was knowledge without knowledge, knowing without knowing. To transpose it to the structure that by definition deals with knowledge is such a wonderful idea, and also intrinsically Taoist.

Of course, one does not have to be a scholar of Tao to appreciate Nagel’s writing. Admittedly, my own studies have been lacking in the past year or so. She makes everything accessible, which is one of her strengths. She encourages the very intuition that bureaucrats have fought hard to kill in teachers of late. That intuition is the very thing that makes good teachers excellent.

I love alternative views of the traditional classroom, likely because my experiences as a public school student were often full of woe. A major premise of anthropology is that diversity is far more advantageous than homogeny. The standardization of the contemporary classroom is the downfall of education. We should embrace the examples Nagel uses, even the ones that have been legislated out of existence.

The December issue of Harper’s has a great piece on health care reform in their Notebook section.  Luke Mitchell’s Understanding Obamacare looks at the more subtle aspects behind the politics of reform.  As some of you know, health care reform is very near and dear to my heart because I am one of the millions of Americans who are uninsurable in the individual policy market.

Mitchell points out that it’s not really about “red” vs. “blue” America. Instead it is about keeping privilege, power, and wealth with those who already have it and keeping it from those who don’t. You don’t have to be one side or the other to carry favor and advantage.

The debate in Washington this fall ought to have been about why the United States has the worst health-care system in the developed world, why Americans pay twice the Western average to maintain that system, and what fundamental changes are needed to make the system better serve us. But Democrats rendered those questions academic when they decided the first principle of reform would be, as Barack Obama has so often explained, that “nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.”

This is what I find so frustrating. Our system is fundamentally broken. By refusing to rebuild it from the ground up, it keeps that fundamental sickness in the administration. As someone who has taken a lot of antibiotics knows, you don’t stop taking the pills when you start to feel better. Doing so is dangerous because it can breed resistant strains.

We are at a turning point where we as a nation can take a stand on profit vs. ethics. Unfortunately, it seems we are taking the route of profit, even when we know better. The universal mandate without a public option simply delivers 47 million new customers to a system that doesn’t actually do anything. The health insurance companies don’t actually provide a necessary service. They don’t help sick people. They are bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake. One could argue a public option would be more of the same, but at least it wouldn’t be a for-profit bureaucracy.

This is unethical. The health insurance system is unethical because it is privately profitable. When you mix profit with human life the only outcome is violence. We are all victims of that violence, even if we don’t recognize it readily. I, for one, am ready for a less violent system yesterday. Denying sick people the care they need is a violent act. It’s disgusting that our manipulated sympathies with corporate entities has made that immediately unrecognizable.

We need change, and this is one case where we need to change everything. If we let any portion of the old system survive, the inherent violence in it is going to fester and one day we will be back to where we are today. We should be working to end this violence against our citizenry, to end private profit on human life at the expense of the individual. We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking about individual needs as academic questions while corporate needs are economic. This is, on the most basic level, backwards.

Lately I’ve felt like a Mom-Away-from-Mom to my special buddy. He’s started vying for my attention in the ways I’ve seen him do with his mom. I’m not his mom, and that is not my role in any way, shape, or form. It’s hard because I do care about him and want him to succeed. And it is hard because I don’t have my own children, so I am having to learn in many ways how to be a parent…where to draw the line with helping, with enabling, with coddling. And it’s a hard thing because the impulse is always to comfort.

But comforting isn’t helping. Letting him get away with less than he can do isn’t helping. That’s not why I’m there. I’m there to help him grow, help him succeed.

And that means pushing him away. It means separating myself, because he and I are not a unit. In some ways we are, but this is his time to be in school and my time to work.

I walked away from him today. I’ve had to do it more often lately, and it’s never easy. It’s never easy to ignore a child who wants your attention desperately. Sometimes, however, it’s good for him.

He didn’t want to participate in P.E. today because getting attention from me is more fun. I had to walk away. It’s weird to walk away from the child you’re supposed to be working with: not everyone understands that, in the long run, it’s what is best.

I left him lying on the floor of the gym. And he pouted real hard when I walked away and sat down far, far away. He rolled around and stamped his feet. But after a few minutes, he began watching the class. And then he stood up. And then he walked around them and looked at them some more. And just before class ended, he walked over and joined.

The rest of the kids shouted his name and cheered. They begged the teacher to pick him to run under the parachute. They were so excited he was joining. He was, too.

Not too long ago, I started writing love letters to those who have wronged me. I did not intend to share any of them. However, a few people asked me how I could possibly write a love letter to my rapist. It was actually two letters to different people, but they relate. Seeing as I have never spoken to any of these people since then, this is probably the closest I will ever get to confronting them.

Dear Edward —

It’s been a long time. Do you remember me? Of course you do. I “took” your virginity. That’s not the right words, though, is it? You made me take it; no wasn’t an option.

How has that been working out for you? I mean, not very many people spend their entire sexual lives as rapists. Is every encounter rape? I hope not because no one gave me the opportunity to stop you. I genuinely hope you are doing better.

I’m not writing you to berate you. Quite opposite. I love you. Our chance encounter at summer camp changed my life forever. I was angry for a long time, but I cannot live my life ruled by it and, by extension, you. In so many ways I’m glad it was me. It didn’t ruin me and it was never the worst thing that happened to me. Yes, it changed me, but I’m glad it wasn’t someone who would have been destroyed.

And I do love you, because without you, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I wouldn’t know how strong I am. I wouldn’t know how to refuse to be a victim. I wouldn’t have been able to care for my friends as I did when their own traumas surfaced.

You made me a better person. You made me a worse person, but I cannot ignore how good you made me. Without you I don’t know where I would be, or who I would be. I know I relate to others better than I did. I know my compassion and ability to forgive is nearly endless. You taught me these things.

I am the woman I am today because of you. Thank you for letting me become myself.

All my love,
Wren

I have never named him publicly before. I have never named these guys publicly either:

Dear Jakub, Dan, Chadd, and the Others Whose Names I No Longer Know —

Good evening, gentlemen. I doubt you know why I am writing you after all these years. Rape was pretty funny to you boys at 17 so I doubt you committed your crimes to memory.

This is not about that, though. I do not wish to judge you. This is my time now.

Thank you for teaching me that I need to be more self-reliant. When situations get sticky, I now know that I must be able to handle it myself. People will often not do the obvious right thing.

And I love you for showing just how important doing the right thing is. You laughed when my rapist told you his plans. You laughed and did nothing. Well, you laughed behind my back when I walked by, and avoided my gaze when you found me crying afterward. Because of you, I always do the right thing. Even when it is hard or inconvenient. I am a good person because I have learned from your mistakes.

I love you, even though you are a bunch of douchebags.

Love,
Wren

This is what accountability and release looks like.

The bug has hit me again. I found myself pouring through Duotrope this morning, pondering submissions. Which is naturally silly as I don’t have any material I would consider suitable for submission.

The good thing, though, is that I feel that need, that hunger again. That need to succeed will drive me to start writing again. Writing for myself isn’t something I have done in quite some time. I began writing poetry again on and off about a year ago. We’ll see if the fiction comes back, too.