Now we are getting somewhere. It was in many ways literally true that I had to let that department chair abuse me, which he did in the name of the Cajuns, to survive. And I needed to survive. I gave up a great deal for it, and the whole experience reproduced earlier trauma, and I am angry. I could be induced to think this problem is mine alone. But did anyone else survive? None who had to challenge him. And are there not very recent victims? There are. But it was a fight for life that I almost lost, and survival (not victory) was Pyrrhic. I want wholeness and victory, not over anyone but by myself or with anyone who will.
We have to think about my Reeducator, too, also a Cajun. He taught me to completely reject myself, and to see myself in an entirely new, negative light. To create a hated self and say that was the real self. It may have been him as well that I felt I was fighting the night of my panic attack.
This year I want to be grown up. An important part of being grown up is refusing to accept collective, political problems as individual, psychological problems. No, it is not I who must adjust, it is we who must evolve (or, I will evolve). Rather, it is a question of politics and what kind of world we want.
At the private level, it’s not just a question of “taking care of yourself,” it’s a question of saying certain kinds of behavior are not all right, or saying you “attracted” them, or anything along those lines. Yes, “taking care of yourself” works, but it’s superficial if it doesn’t include very basic things like not allowing abuse. I want to be a person.
All the discourse about how you have to think of others, how you must learn that not only you are important, is for over-pampered children and men. Turned on women who already contribute and sacrifice much, this is just gender policing.
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For instance, on the entitled and boundary-less behavior that seems to reign here, this is a simple example. If you are brought as a guest to someone’s house, and the host(ess), in this case, me, greets you and introduces herself, and you turn away, that’s rude. If you then, without permission, go through their CDs and put on music of your choice without asking, and pick up their guitar without asking, that is also rude. I think people should know this, even in Lafayette and even if they are poor/powerful Cajuns. My house isn’t a public house and I am a person. In the new year, I am going to have the rights of person and citizen, even here! I can say things like, please don’t go through my CDs without asking or even, please let us have a different soundtrack this evening. Even, please ask before taking up my guitar, even if you have been allowed to handle it before.
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So let’s keep going with the program for the new year, because I have had it with the old ways. I have this R&R (revise and resubmit) to do where I disagree with Reviewer 2 and feel condescended to by them. I have trouble working on it in Lafayette, because in order to do work on it, I need to feel like a full person, a person with rights, a person who can agree or disagree with Reviewer 2, or agree in part, and assert my view. The reason this is so hard for me here is that I’ve been taught that here, to get along, I must diminish myself, consider that others have more rights than I do, or that others are jealous and I, to appease them, should find ways to limit my powers. I’ve also been taught that I’m not safe here, and that half my energy needs to go to looking over my shoulder when I am here. All of this makes it hard to concentrate. But I need to work on this article here, all my materials for it are here, and I am here, and I need to create my own space here, and learn not to be afraid here.
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When visiting other countries, I was always taught to be respectful of customs, make sure to learn what is considered rude there and not do it, and not take offense at things that may seem rude because those things might not be rude there. But I think I took that too far in Lafayette and that that is why I finally just fell apart after years and years of excessive tolerance. I have been so complicit in my own mistreatment, what can I say. I wonder to what extent what I have been through has to do with something like moral injury and not just trauma.
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Also with my mother, back then. You had to agree with her, be her, because any slight divergence or difference was life-threatening to her. It was the perception of differences, of boundaries between persons, that brought her piercing tears. This is why I have the tendency to self-annihilate, to feel that the ultimate safety is ultimate self-destruction. You had to submit (It’s also why I can find mild submission erotic, as in look, this time it’s non-hostile, non-lethal, and only a game.)
Submit, submit, put yourself last, care for others, allow them to nip at you and take from you, try to make yourself small, try not to have needs, try not to cost money, try not to exist or have a sense of self at all. My parents would both submit, submit like this and periodically fly into rages over it, then submit, submit again. I want to stand up, instead. And I think this is what my brother also fears in us both, the cycle of submission, submission, and rebellion quickly suppressed as irrational and not as an opening to another way of living or another kind of life.
What would I do if I loved myself? What would I want if I said what I wanted, as opposed to what I know I should want? How do I do self-care out of self-love, as opposed to out of the need to look put together?
What would it have been like, what would it have felt like, not to be from earliest life someone who was said to have taken something from Mother, someone who had to prove they were an honest person and not a thief, someone who had to prove they were a person, someone who had understood they could not be loved and/but was struggling for respect (so that they had the self-respect that is needed to walk)?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 