Bloodless Coup

Sins of Omission

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 02:39:00 +0000

If I'm honest

I'd have to admit

that some part of me felt shame

at loving you

a woman

Afraid of what it would mean

to be seen as something other than

a standard bearing girl

As though the omission

of a phallus was an unthinkable abdication

of my desiring to be desired

As if I had not been raised

on the fantasy of being a woman lifted

in the arms of a larger man who

made me feel small and

could carry me easily off to bed

dutifully ignoring the threat

inherent in the dichotomy

And how as I allowed myself

to fall for you I only knew to mimic

what I thought you wanted in a man

taking pleasure in play acting

the other side but failing to see

it was the same unequal script

And how I know now

we were resplendent in our softness

with nothing missing but

the expectations we had swallowed

that omitted the truths

of our irresistable love

Fog

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sat, 14 Sep 2019 14:51:00 +0000

The alarms embedded in my body

are going off again

My nervous system once went to war and

I've been nervous ever since

It's a challenge not to fight

when all feels like survival

I tell myself to stand down

I want to be seen

I want to be invisible

Eyes that see sit above mouths full of teeth

in the heads of hungry people

I am always trying to preserve

the unpreserved after the fact

In crowded rooms

sometimes I find a peace

if I close my eyes and breathe

with my back against a wall

for a moment I soften

So much effort spent keeping things out

and I want to let someone in

Freedom Fighting

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sat, 29 Jun 2019 14:48:00 +0000

Born in the land of the free

and I’m still working to get there

gonna be working forever unless I catch a break

have to guard against my government

exploiting fears to grab up liberties

while the President grabs whatever he pleases

Willed over so many freedoms

in the name of a small god that promised

my submissions would fulfill me but

he just left me on my knees

wondering what I wasn’t doing right

So now I am digging in the dirt

of my mind, pulling out the weeds

of others’ authority choking out my own

learning to author my own story

for the very first time

‘None free til we’re all free’

the freedom fighters say

and I wholeheartedly agree

as I make an offering of the keys

I am finding buried at the roots

of all the lies that have been robbing me

In Defense of Roe v Wade

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 20:04:00 +0000

It is possible that my most unhinged moment came the one and only time I had a serious pregnancy scare. I say possibly because, to be honest, there are several in the running for the title of 'most unhinged moment,' but there was only one pregnancy scare because of how desperately I wished not to be pregnant. I took the pill religiously, and when I missed, I made my partner use a condom for the seven to ten days prescribed by my birth control for a single day's missed pill. Even when I had no missed days of taking the pill, I would often ask my partner to not finish inside me, due to my fear of becoming pregnant, and god bless him for being willing to accommodate me in that request. I am sure doing so sometimes denied him pleasure he deserved.

Why was being pregnant such a terrifying thought for me? I am a woman with childhood sexual trauma in her history, although the memories of that trauma were suppressed until about ten years ago, when I was thirty-five, and I am just now beginning to navigate those truths with a modicum of steadiness now that I am forty-five. Prior to my remembering, I experienced deep panic at the thought of being a mother. I knew myself to be barely capable of taking care of me, and the thought of being responsible for another human life seemed beyond my ability. And underneath that fear, sat a bigger fear. Even though I was oblivious to my memories, I had the sense that something was really wrong with me and I was afraid that I would unwittingly hurt my child. I know it is a widely accepted fact that most survivors of sexual abuse do not go on to become abusers themselves, and I tend to agree with that statement. But I am not sure there has been much study on the outcomes of sexual trauma survivors who have memory loss. I remember reading a passage in a memoir, where the author recounts the experience of a friend who confessed remembering their own trauma only after repeating an act while bathing their baby; they literally began to remember as they found themselves in the middle of an inappropriate act. Forgetting trauma is a coping mechanism that is difficult to overcome. I believe that many of us never remember and that some of us remember through subconscious repetition of acts, whether that be mimicking what was done to us or recreating our own victimization in a stream of unhealthy relationships that we may or may not ever be able to transcend. In the cases where people with memory loss mimic damaging behaviors, I believe they often can't even remember the abusive acts they commit, as that would force them to remember their own traumatic experience, which they are too damaged to do. Now this semi-functional person bears the added trauma of being righteously condemnable by a society that doesn't have the first clue of what justice truly looks like. How do we heal something about which we cannot even speak, whether because we cannot remember it or because we will be damned if we do? All of this combines to seemingly perpetuate damage and trauma for all time.

I share all of this to say that had I become pregnant, abortion is an option I would have wrestled with deeply, for reasons that I find extremely moral. Like many if not most Americans, I was raised in an ostensibly Christian home that claimed abortion was an evil barely rivaled by anything in this world, so I can't really say what I would have done. But I can unequivocally say that I believe abortion to be a right, and a moral right at that. In my case, it would have been responsible for me to abort rather than to continue a pattern of abuse, whether that be the continuation of sexual inappropriateness or an inability to provide a safe psychological space in which my child could grow up.

This, of course, is where the self-righteous chorus of voices chimes in to say that I should carry my baby to term and give it up for adoption, as there are so many couples who want babies they themselves cannot have. I have nothing but compassion for those couples, but their difficulty does not deserve precedence over my own difficulty; no one besides me has the moral authority to say what I should or shouldn't do with my own DNA. The choice to procreate is a monumental one, not to be taken lightly or dictated on us by another. It is also worth mentioning that very few adoptions occur where the baby is born and is immediately paired with suitable parents. Our foster care system is rife with abuses of all kinds, be that sexual, psychological or physical, so my choosing to give up my child to adoption is still no guarantee that my child wouldn't suffer the traumas I so desperately would want them to be free of.

Something else in this equation that doesn't get enough discussion is the fact that survivors of abuse often have body issues that center around control, as we had no control over what happened to our bodies in the past. I can think of few things more invasive or indicative of a loss of bodily control than being pregnant. I honestly don't think I could have tolerated pregnancy without a psychological breakdown, which would have endangered the life inside me, and I believe, passed on my trauma as my growing child would have experienced my breakdown with me. Add to this the fact that these United States have the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, and ask yourself why you feel you have the right to force any woman to give birth against her will, much less one with trauma issues.

I can hear some of you saying, 'but what about the rights of the father? Isn't it his DNA as well?' Yes, it most certainly is his DNA, but the father lacks the biological ability to gestate his DNA into a fetus, let alone a baby, and every man knows this. That means that if a man desires to procreate, it is his biological imperative to cultivate a consensual contract with a woman who can gestate his DNA into a fetus. This is the only honorable option available to him. Conversely, women have a responsibility to form consensual contracts with men when it comes to procreation. I don't want anyone dictating to me what I can do with my own DNA and I have no wish to force a child on an unwilling man. That is also dishonorable. This country and this world are in desperate need of comprehensive, science based sex education to address these and many more issues of morality as it relates to procreating.

Now to the address the 'pro-life' canard that life begins at conception and that God deems it murder to abort a fetus. First of all, none of us can speak for God or even prove that God exists, so therefore none of us can say what God actually thinks about the beginning of life or about abortion. But I can tell you this, any 'God' that deems a life that cannot exist without a host as inherently more valuable than the life that already unequivocally does exist is not a god to be trusted. This world has shown me time and time again that as a woman, my life has less value than a man's and that's a lie too. Then again, the 'God' that is against abortion is modeled as a man, so it's all beginning to make more sense. The pro-life argument is nothing more than a disingenuous power play intended to prop up patriarchy, when the truth is, there would literally be no men without the existence of women.

So much of this debate revolves around 'respect for life.' I am asking that we expand our definition of respect for life to include quality of life, and rather than just insisting that people give birth in obeisance to 'respect for life,' we shift our focus to implementing policies that bring about a better experience of life for all of us. What would that look like, you ask? I don't have all the answers but it would definitely include an overhaul of our justice system so that it is restorative rather than punitive. I would venture to say that very little about our present healthcare is more respectful of life than a dollar, so we would have to address that as well. A compassionate and functioning mental health service would immeasurably improve our shared quality of life by reducing the amount of trauma that gets passed on endlessly and needlessly. And for the love of all that is holy, we would offer science based, age appropriate sex ed that begins in grade school, where abstinence is offered as only one available and largely unrealistic option.

Impossible, you say, these reforms will never happen. Well, it's certainly much easier to continue on screaming about life beginning at conception and making abortion illegal, and while I should and would respect your right to that opinion, I feel zero compunction to respect your intellectually bankrupt opinion in action. I am reminded of the maxim to not be so spiritually minded that we are of no earthly good, but that is exactly what the pro-life movement does; it holds a specious religious conviction above the value of the lives of women and the children we bring into this world, which is about as disrespectful of life as it gets. In my opinion, the truest way to respect life is to work towards a world that is as free of trauma as possible, and until we accomplish that, abortion is one tool that can be used responsibly to help us get there.

well-traveled

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sun, 17 Feb 2019 19:36:00 +0000

My mother taught me to travel well

tho she hardly made it

any of the places she dreamt to go

settling for the subversion

of a National Geographic subscription

in a household intent on

separation from the world

She showed me the value of moving things

not related to the reason you were going

if doing so got them closer

to where they needed to be

to see that each small move made

is part of the whole of getting it done

so that a pile of clean clothes walked

from the basket I was passing

to the stairs by the door I was exiting

was half the work of restoring them to my room

And I am just now learning

how to harness that power of making each step I take

move me simultaneously in multiple directions or

shift me into synchronicity with people and things around me,

the life-multiplying power of living moments fully invested

experienced as a self-sustaining fuel

My mother taught me to travel

well past points she had instilled

when she left and birthed me again

into freedoms I hope she has since found

she did not travel most but

she traveled beyond

and walked me with her to stand comfortably

past the threshold of the unknowable

copy what

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 18:30:00 +0000

trauma, especially the kind that gets passed down

is like being a member of a club you think is exclusive

but may more actually be universal

speaking of it may get you excommunicated

from all your social groups

much more admirable to soldier on silently

like every generation before

trauma alters cells, they say

and we pass it on

whether we speak of it or not

so speak, I say

call it out

clear its register from the body

and halt this chain of replication

Game

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 14:54:00 +0000

Born into a system of subjugation

Some of us became lethal players of the game

And they worshipped our untouchableness

With groans and more desire

Some of us opted out

Evolving and becoming something other

Something not on the menu, we hoped

Others of us went underground in our own minds

And we are barely even here, even when you are inside us

Our grandmothers terrified us with their traumas

Hoping that fear would keep us safe

They had accepted that this was how it was

Their minds fit for survival, not this revolution

But we are their daughters’ daughters

And we say it is time for a new game

This is one we will no longer play

Chamber

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 17:47:00 +0000

We were two grown girls in love

With swagger and sleights to share

We were both of us wrecked

Well on our way to ruin

One of us needed to be healed

The other needed

Never to admit to the wound

It tore us apart

But there is a chamber in my heart

That holds only your name

& my dream of us together

marrow

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Thu, 18 May 2017 21:41:00 +0000

You’ve hit a new low

The one where you ask the underage kid for help with

Getting your fix because they have more access than you do

And you hate that your need to escape has brought you both here

But it’s not stopping you as you sit blearily with your morning after shame

Of crashing someone else’s stage at that bar you love

But will never have the guts to return to

After exposing your most private pain outrageously

As if it took all those witnesses with their eyes on you

For you to finally call it by its right name

To believe the story your body tells

Whispered up from the insides of your bones

The denial isn’t working and you can’t keep breaking down

You try not to think of all the time lost and all the things you’ve yet to be

You imagine yourself pristine still

Walking in some parallel space unmolested

And wonder if that girl would have had babies

Or had her life together by now

And just then the rush hits in its mercy and raises you to the ether

Where you look down to see your body standing

Over the corpse you’ve been carrying

So you name it to its rotten face and watch its teeth all fall out

Its power to hurt you lost with the lie you told to keep yourself sane

You will bury it properly this time just as soon as you get back

To My First Love Whom I Let Down

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 21:10:00 +0000

To my first love

Whom I let down

You were a stand-in

For those other men

Who should never have been inside me

So you didn’t stand a chance

I had punishment to mete

You were close enough

Believed myself your superior

So I could allow your body to

Teach mine to

Submit to feeling good

But you were never going to touch

What you most desired of me

I didn’t possess it yet to give

Ally Ally Oops

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 01:04:00 +0000

Stating out loud that you are an ally is a sure-fire way to make yourself look like a complete hypocrite. If you are anything like me, at some point in your allyship, you will make a terrible mistake, possibly publicly, that will make it look like you are not an ally at all, and truthfully in that moment we really aren’t. We will have to be bigger than that moment. We will have to own it and learn from it and realize that it is all a part of the process of making life in this world more equitable for all.

This is a hard thing to parse, because this type of failure is particularly hard on our egos, and because to successfully move on from this place, we will have to do some serious self-auditing, looking for thoughts that are our own, and thoughts that we have absorbed that we need to challenge, update, reprogram or altogether delete.

This world tries to possess us all, with its overbearing realities demanding our immediate attention, sweeping us along in a tide that leaves little room for questioning or objecting, but to be an ally of any kind requires questioning of the very fabric of life and civilization itself. It requires questioning systems, institutions, authorities, and most especially our own self-motivations.

Being an ally requires resilience. It means signing up for military service of a sort, with the knowledge that real lives are being tragically lost in the fight. All of that is more important than our pride that gets hurt as we trip on our own privileges and prejudices, and until we trip on them, we may remain unaware we have them, so at least now we know where we need to work to improve. We must accept that one moment of abject failure does not define the whole of our character. We must accept that we ourselves possess this pocket of ugliness, which empowers us to pull it out of ourselves and our modes of operation, and then we make consistency of character our goal in this point from here forward.

Being an ally isn’t about being perfect; it is about being honest and compassionate with ourselves and others, it is the actual hard work that we do to better ourselves so that we can co-create with others a world that welcomes and values our differences as the strengths that they are.

I only desire to wage virtual war. Real war accomplishes nothing that lasts, and the price paid is higher than anything we can repay.

Let's collectively grant ourselves the freedom to be exactly who we are, and accept no substitutions.

Safe

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 04:18:00 +0000

I awake

In a bloodfilled world

Bits and pieces cut off me

By opportunists who say

If it can be taken

I should lose it

Looking down I find

I hold a knife

Blood trails to

Multiple victims

Blows thrown with no awareness

Are all the easier to deny

Unnerved I drop my knife knowing

It may cost me my life

But I’m not really living am I

What I want most is to be safe

So I disarm, I disarm

I lay my offenses down

If I can stay alive in this state

Perhaps it can replicate

As I learn to flow and deflect

To take no boarders on

A world full of blood

Is a world full of madness

So I disarm, I disarm

I lay my defenses down

All I want is to be safe

In this world

And to be around

An Open Letter to My Friends Who Voted Trump

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 21:40:00 +0000

Dear friends and loved ones of mine,

If you voted for Donald Trump, we can still be friends, and I still love you. I understand that for many of you, the prevailing issues revolved around the loss of your livelihood or your insurance, or your distrust of Washington politics and a desire to shake it all up and see if some ‘outsider’ could remake government in the image you prefer. For others of you, this was a moral stance revolving around your interpretation of your faith, and a desire to secure a conservative majority in our judiciary branch that will uphold your belief system in our nations’ courts. Whatever your reason, it is your right as an American, and as a human being with free will, to vote as you choose and I honor that wholeheartedly.

However, the candidate you elected is a man of odious character, a man who has lived his life far removed from the lives of ordinary citizens for the whole of his existence. He may be an outsider to politics, but he is part and parcel of the ruling elite that has oppressed us all and hijacked our government, so I am charging you with holding him accountable to your will. You have given immense power to a man who has shown little respect for the interests of anyone but his own social class, of which you and I are not a part.

The candidate you elected is a bully and a cheat. He uses his wealth and status to break signed contracts made with honest business people with impunity, and yet you have entrusted him with championing the cause of the working class. It is true that he may lift regulations that will bring back jobs in the energy sector, but at what cost? Our climate is warming. You may want to believe that it is just the natural ebb and flow of our planet, but science has shown that the emissions of combusted petroleum has a direct and measurable effect on the temperature of Earth. It would be wise of us to not add to what is already happening, whatever the source. It would be truly great of us to be innovators and lead the world in the creation and adoption of new technologies that provide for our needs (including jobs) while also addressing the needs of our habitat.

The candidate you elected used derogatory and hateful speech to describe our immigrant citizens, and did not forcefully rebuke the white supremacists among us. If you are White and voted for this man but are not a bigot or a racist, I am going to need you to prove that beyond a statement that you aren’t. I need you to open yourself to the idea of institutionalized racism, and I implore you, in the privacy of your home and head, to explore the contents of your mind honestly. I ask you to please read essays and books like ‘The New Jim Crow’ by Michelle Alexander or ‘Between the World and Me’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and if you can’t commit to reading then please watch ‘13^th’, a documentary that is currently streaming on Netflix. Educate yourself about what being a person of color in this country has meant, please, and consider that the anger and frustration you feel at ten to fifteen years of instability in your workplace is a lifelong reality for POC in these United States. Try to imagine their desperation and empathize with it. If you are not a reader, then get involved with the Boys and Girls Club or some other entity invested in the fight for the equality of all our citizens, or donate some money to organizations that fight for the rights of people of color and immigrants. And above all, if you see or even hear an immigrant or POC being abused, then get your non-bigot self in that fight and stand up to whomever is doing it, because your credibility is now on the line.

The candidate you elected has a recorded history of believing he has the right to sexually assault women if he finds them attractive and did nothing to censure the rampant misogyny displayed by many of his supporters on their shirts, buttons and bumper stickers, or in their chants which rang through his rallies in swells. If you cannot win your position without being abusive, then I lose respect for your position. I ask that you show your disapproval of your candidate’s treatment of women by opposing any moves he may make to dismantle Title IX or any other legislation our current administration passed on behalf of abused women in this country. I also ask that you be a part of the very important conversation surrounding consent that is happening right now so that we can build a world where everyone, men and women alike, knows exactly what constitutes rape and therefore doesn’t do it.

The candidate you elected has surrounded himself with extreme social conservatives with Fundamentalist religious beliefs that you may very well share. Once upon a time in my life, I too would have voted for this man, solely for this reason. I would have looked past all his unsavoriness and unfitness for this office so that I could participate in making God’s laws the law of the land. Today I believe that behavior to be a form of American theocracy, and I vehemently oppose such activity. Jesus’ followers begged him to be an earthly king, and he declined. Please consider that the repealing of the freedom of marriage act would only serve to alienate people from your mission. If you are accepting of LGTBQ people, even if you disapprove of their lifestyle, you will likely have to show that by protecting their rights, not stripping them away. All love is legitimate and deserves the protection of law. I suspect that Roe vs. Wade is also in your crosshairs, and since I was once indoctrinated against abortion, I feel I understand your resolve, and doubt you will be swayed by stories of women and girls who made one of the most difficult decisions of their lives, so I guess consider me your respectful yet determined opponent on this topic.

The very worst of our collective selves came out in this election and we are weary. It will take the very best of all of us to heal up from this harm, and prevent it from continuing. We will all need to reach beyond ourselves and our insulated bubbles to make it through together. I pledge to you, my friends on the other side of this chasm, to defend your right to vote as you please, and I will stand up against any abuse I see leveled against you for this choice. I pledge to hold myself to these same standards that I am asking of you. I will also do my best to understand and respect your beliefs and experiences, and will not assume that I know your character because I know the way that you voted. Things are seldom as simple as that, and people never are.

Above all, please know that I am available for conversation and remain grateful for your presence in my life.

Much love and hope-

Drea

Feral

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Thu, 04 Aug 2016 23:52:00 +0000

She was waking up to the fact that she had some kind of intellectual Stockholm Syndrome; she idolized men and she hated herself for being a woman, plain and simple. Counterproductive, hating oneself. She was determined to get to the bottom of this self-loathing, to rewire it into something that wasn’t so crippling. There was certainly an element of osmosis to it-she had been stewed in a vat of male perception from the very beginning. The predominant belief in her early world was that men were stronger, faster, steadier. Men ran the show because they were just better leaders, calmer and cooler under pressure, more equipped to withstand the traumas of the world. The logical flipside of these assumptions insinuated that women were the opposite of all this, that they were weaker and meeker and prone to excitable feelings that made them imbalanced and unfit to lead. She had heard it said many times over that women shouldn’t even attempt to lead, because men wouldn’t follow a woman; women were meant to run their households and men were meant to rule the world.

But there was more to it than simply soaking up the accepted truths of her generation, something murkier and deeper that drove her hate of her own body. She knew, instinctively, that there was a buried version of her childhood self that could provide some answers, but this was not a comforting thought. She has real difficulty getting in touch with that frozen little girl. First of all, the space in time in which the girl exists is challenging for her to enter as it’s full of all those feelings she’s done such a good job of not feeling for all these years. But it’s necessary, so she opens that internal door. She is flooded by a white-hot rage that is followed quickly by an ocean of sadness and a heavy sense of betrayal. There are no stories attached to these feelings, they just wash over her, leaving her momentarily immobilized and shaken.

She had fought mean as a child, she remembers. She had been feral, fighting over her head and beyond her experience, ruthless with words and body, if it came down to it. Back that child into a corner, guarantee you she would charge, not cower. There were too many times that furious child had come out in her adult self, she realizes, usually after drinking her way past any social appropriateness, leaving this unhinged creature free to stomp around and break delicate things. That child was still angry about something. She was livid, in fact. She didn’t have an off switch or a biofeedback mechanism that signaled her thinking brain to get off break and jump back in to referee, she just kept ramping up until she inevitably hit implosion and shut down into blackout. Her adult self feels this child could reduce the entire planet to a molten rock floating through the cold deadness of space, left unchecked. The kid scares her, if she’s honest. And that’s another thing, this little girl is also stone cold terrified, to the bottom of her aching bones. The internal pressure of her little body is high. She unconsciously braces her muscles and viscera in an attempt to be impenetrable. Whenever she had run as a youth, she would be wracked with full body pain and cramps as the expansion of her lungs warred against her tightly clenched steady state.

Actually, it’s this little girl who hates being a woman. She hates how vulnerable it makes her feel. She hates the softness of her adult breasts because they expose her, they give her away. No matter how hard she may attempt to make herself, she cannot escape their curvature or their sway, cannot get over the feeling that they mark her as prey.

There was something this little girl had done in response to a deep wound that prevents her from feeling that goodness exists as a part of her nature, that she herself could ever be good. Her adult self remains convinced of her own unworthiness. When she was in grade school, she had worried about spontaneous combustion, as if the fires of hell might not wait for her to die to reach them, but take her right where she stood with absolutely no warning.

So now what to do? Now that she was aware of this being hidden away in her ribcage, how could she integrate her two selves? She would have to trace all the cords from her feral self to her nervous system, cut the connections to her fight or flight centers and become aware of reactions that had become unconscious over time. She would have to be mother to herself and cradle that wrecked little girl until she felt safe enough to soften and grow into a woman who had survived whatever was back there and who didn’t hate herself for what she had become.

This whole world is traumatized, little one, she thought. We all have to disarm if we are going to make it.

Everything Is What We Make It

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Thu, 26 May 2016 20:20:00 +0000

Before I could think, I was owned. My parents prayed for me before I was ever conceived to grow into a true believer of God. When I was a baby, I was dedicated to a life of service to God in a rite of passage ceremony at my church. My name was intentionally picked by my father and translates as ‘woman of the Lord’, and I was given a name plaque that hung in my room to always remind me of my true purpose. All of these things were done without malice, but I look back now and see it as the beginning of an all-encompassing campaign for my abject commitment to church doctrine.

When talking with people about my instilled religious experience, I have begun saying that I feel like I grew up in a cult. As Christian Fundamentalists, we had a narrow interpretation of the bible, accepting it as literally true and infallibly accurate, not to mention it being the ONLY true document of God’s words to humanity. All other texts and religions were inferior and could not save a person from the fires of hell. We focused on separating ourselves from ‘the world’ not just through our actions, but physically and ideologically separating from non-believers by creating our own schools which taught only our worldview and refuted any popularly held ideas that contradicted our beliefs, such as evolution and carbon dating. This schooling included college as well, so a person could conceivably go their entire life without ever seriously considering any alternate reality, having been inculcated by the church through the first twenty-some years of existence. Cults understand the power of driving all the narratives.

I don’t think I would have ever left my faith if my mother hadn’t succumbed to cancer when I was twenty-one, freeing me up to leave home and find myself outside of the confines of my church and school. I am certain I would be living out an entirely different life than the one I am consciously choosing for myself now, and this thought floods me with anger. My parents acted from a place of genuine belief and meant me no harm, but my mind was radically brainwashed and my free will was sorely abused nonetheless. Questioning was allowed, but there was only ever one right answer, which may be my biggest complaint about Fundamentalism: it is seriously confining. There is always more than one way to do anything, including relating to God or the Universe or Whatever is Bigger.

I am still working to claim and use my free will, having ‘willingly’ abdicated it to God for so long. It’s hard to explain how crippling being told to look almost exclusively outside of yourself for answers to questions about your own life can be. One can spend a lifetime praying to be told exactly what to do and never actually do anything at all. Trusting myself and my gut intuition has been a challenge, because I was taught that my nature was fallen and untrustworthy, that on my knees before God was my proper posture. These days I think about the parable of the talents and feel I was taught to bury mine in the ground. It becomes incredibly difficult to create anything of depth in this environment, whether it be good art or a fulfilling life, but that’s a whole other post. If I had to pick one word to best sum up the effect of all of this, it would be ‘stunted’ and I would apply it to my intellectual and social development, my creative voice and my ability to act with personal agency.

As violating as these things have been, everything is what we make it and there are some things I count as positives from my indoctrination. In choosing to believe the creation story over evolution, I gained the capacity for audacious belief in the face of overwhelming odds, i.e. all the collective weight of science and popular opinion. That means I now have the ability to believe the impossible is possible and I am learning to harness that power to pursue my dreams and create my own reality.

I believe in something bigger than myself, and that brings a lot of comfort to my reality. I am grateful to my upbringing for making me think about my eternal nature. I see meaning and cause and effect at work rather than randomness in the world, and I believe in the First Law of Thermodynamics which states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so I choose to believe that there is life after death and as many lives as it takes to become your authentic self, and that doing just that is what living is about. The core beliefs I still hold from my former faith are: love your neighbor as yourself, do unto others as you would have done unto you, and that grace and compassion are the face of God made human.

I believe that whatever is out there that’s bigger cannot even begin to be known in six to ten thousand years. Its truth cannot be contained in a single book that I as a semi finite human can hold in one hand. It would never condemn a single one of us to an eternal hell of suffering and separation because It would allow all the time in eternity for us to choose freely of our own volition to seek out and cultivate relationship, or not. Whatever is out there is so big that it needs the vastness of space and time and petri dishes and atomic particles and subparticles and hundreds of billions of years to be known. Whatever is out there is waiting for us to quit being small and to join it in co-creation.

Androgeny is Next to Godliness

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sat, 14 May 2016 20:04:00 +0000

Time to put some skin in the game and explain why I am such a vocal ally of our LGBTQI population.

I came by my male side growing up in an extremely patriarchal worldview. It quickly became apparent that I had been dealt the fuzzy end of the lollipop by being born cock and balless, just a fateful flip of a coin that had everything to do with what I was and wasn’t allowed to be or do, and by the way, this wasn’t the men making it this way, it was the way that God had ordained it. There was quite a bit of smug shrugging and vapid assurances that by embracing my own God given role of submission, I would find some kind of deep fulfillment as a godly woman. I have no beef with submission as a concept, but I do object to its performance being relegated to a particular gender. As a young girl, though, I learned how to be one of the boys and often hung out with groups of boys. I emulated and revered their hardness, physically, emotionally and mentally, and mostly lived in complete denial of my femininity, which is not to say that women cannot embody those traits, it just was not entirely acceptable for them to do so in the world of my youth. Additionally, I was often reminded that it was quite unsafe to be a woman in this world, as the ‘weaker vessel,’ so I learned to downplay my femininity in self-defense, hiding behind billowy clothes, glasses and unkempt hair. I was good at sports though, and that was the first space where I grudgingly made some kind of peace with my female form and found a way to feel physically safer through weight lifting and strength training.

It wasn’t until I fell in love with a man and became sexually active with him that I decided there may also be good things about being a woman. Our relationship was deeply healing to me on the levels of autonomy and self-expression, and while he was a very hard man in many ways (I couldn’t yet tolerate softness in a man), he was also the beginning of my reclaiming myself from years of programming that was untrue to my character. Being sexual with him allowed me to enjoy my womanhood, to feel pleasure in my femininity rather than fear and loathing. My spirit processed the fact that I was ‘living in sin,’ but experiencing wholeness and healing, so I chose to change my beliefs to match my reality; I started, finally, to be me, as well as comfortably female.

I didn’t fully embrace my womanhood though, until I fell in love with a woman. I loved her for many things, and quite a few of them were directly tied to her femininity. She could be a rough and tumble tomboy, but whenever she decided to pull out her woman card, she played it devastatingly well. The things I most hated about my body, my breasts and my hips, I found unspeakably beautiful about her. Loving her body allowed me to love my own in places I never had. Loving her afforded me the opportunity to be soft, unguarded in ways I truly couldn’t be yet with a man. Loving her allowed me to forgive myself for being born female in a world that didn’t appreciate powerful, autonomous women.

In some ways, I had a psychic split that revolved around my gender identity. I can viscerally relate to the feeling of being trapped in the wrong body, because I felt that for a long time. I wasn’t impressed with the roles my womanhood, as defined by my experiences growing up, pitched to me, and the constant sublimated fear of my womanly body’s supposed physical vulnerability also fed those feelings of gender dysphoria. My story has ended in a blissful hybridization of strong male and female traits, but when someone tells me they feel like they are living in the wrong body, I have a healthy and understanding respect for their experience. I accept that they are who they say they are, end of story.

The complaint I hear most from people who really feel strongly about the male/female gender binary dynamic, is that embracing a gender spectrum is unnatural, ungodly and will most likely lead to the destruction of morality and the world as we currently know it. And they are partially correct, the world will indeed change but it need not end entirely or become amoral--a gender spectrum still runs between two mostly fixed poles, after all. Cisgendered heterosexuality remains the mainstream norm, at present, and should not be threatened by less statistically represented expressions of human gender and sexuality. No one expression or experience is more valid or more inherently moral.

I’m here to ask: what is immoral about adaptation and growth? My body is female, by nature, but is also very male, by nurture. My personal experience of this dynamic, although traumatic in origin, is now one of my greatest strengths, and my life is vastly enriched by my gender hybridization. I would argue that the more people who are able to tap into their own androgeny, the more chance there is for mature, balanced and autonomous individuals who are less driven by needs and desires of completion in relationships outside of themselves, which in turn could lead to a more tolerant and stable society. Let’s also not forget, for my sacred text lovers out there, that we are said to be created in the image of God, who is neither male nor female, according to said text. It is in my nature to be both/and.

We exist in a living world that is constantly changing and rearranging. Our language is still alive, new words are added continuously to our lexicons. Our ability to compute and to observe on both the micro and the macro scales is increasing; we know more about our universe and our earth, with all its many organisms, than ever before. Adaptation is the key ingredient to the survival of life on this ever changing planet. It stands to reason that as our world expands and our ability to observe and quantify grows, so too should our definition of ourselves evolve.

How To Make a Martyr

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 03:06:00 +0000

I have been thinking a lot about the ways in which my Fundamentalist upbringing groomed me for martyrdom, both literally and figuratively, and also for warfare in general.

From an early age, I was exposed to graphic images of Christian martyrs from around the globe. There is one set of pictures in particular that has stayed with me, seared into my memory. It came from China, which interestingly enough opened the door to conversation about Communism and all of its inherent evils, most especially its rejection of Christianity. My church was extremely politically motivated and involved. We were often told from the pulpit which way to cast our vote. It was also made clear that part of our Christian duty was to ensure that the laws of our land reflected the Laws of God. We were told that God’s Law trumped man’s, so it became tacitly okay to disobey any law of the land that did not align with scripture, which may explain part of our present issue with Constitutional interpretation. Equally important, we were urged to always support the nation of Israel, as not doing so biblically ensured our nation’s destruction for rejecting God’s Chosen People. This is why we have so many Religious Freedom bills in circulation, as well as anti-LGBTQI and anti-abortion legislation making the rounds, and it is also the reasoning behind an unquestioning support, by some, of the policies of the nation of Israel. All of these measures are simply a means of publicly demonstrating a belief in and service to God, with a real fear that failing to do so might cost a person their soul for eternity.

The first picture of this particular series was of a Chinese Christian man who was to be killed for his abberant belief by being cooked alive in a stove, in a public square in front of a group of people gathered solely to watch it happen. Whether this congregation was voluntary is unknown. The man was standing, bound and subdued beside the oven as they were heating it up. His face was very stoic, revealing no emotion about his situation, and this was attributed by my mentors to his strong and unfailing faith, even as he faced a cruel death. This is how a young child begins to revere martyrdom, and internalizes an ‘us versus them’ mentality. This is also how the seeds of terror get planted in the belly of a child’s imagination and grow into unquestioning fealty to something they perceive as able to keep them safe.

I believe there was also a picture of him being loaded into the oven, horizontally, but the one that truly stuck in my head was of his lifeless body after they brought him back out. He was not exposed to flame, so there were no burns on him. He was literally baked like a pastry and died due to the cooking of his insides. His bloated yet fully intact body had a line of punctures from the top of his chest all the way down his abdomen, like you might do to the top crust of a pie, to allow for the release of heat without causing the insides to burst forth during the baking. His face was grotesquely swollen and became a nightmare that lived on the backs of my eyelids for years afterwards.

I was told that the world was violently opposed to our beliefs, and that I had to prepare myself for the possibility that I too may one day have to die for my faith; I was told to think about that situation, and to imagine how I would react. Would I stand firm and submit to death, thereby warranting eternity with our glorious God, or would I fall prey to my weak human nature and deny my faith and my God to save my pitiful life? I wonder how many hours I spent fantasizing about the possibility? I say ‘fantasizing’ purposely, as it took on an almost pleasurable aspect, after enough time spent there. I was somewhere between the ages of five and seven when I began this practice. This, I believe, is the mechanism that allows someone to put on a suicide vest and set out on a holy mission. Christians aren’t so much on board with that, however, Christians are in full support of our military forces dispensing an infinite amount of death and destruction against the horror of Daesh or anything else that appears to be at odds with the Judeo-Christian worldview. We did not sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ facetiously.

Sunday School classes in childhood were full of Old Testament stories about acts of contrition and blood sacrifice performed for the purpose of forgiveness of sins, which people inevitably committed, and also acts of genocide carried out against non-believers by God’s Chosen People with not only His full blessing, but His specific instruction as to how to go about it victoriously. Going to war was sometimes necessary, and could become a holy act. At the time, I found great comfort in these stories, as I believed myself to be in an extremely hostile and threatening world, and these events showed me how to stay on the good side of my All Powerful God, who would wipe out entire nations on my behalf, if need be.

The New Testament was where I met Jesus, the Son of God, who was Himself a martyred God granted a place at the right hand of the Father in Heaven as a reward for willfully laying down His life for the greater good. Jesus was a revolutionary with a message of Love as salvation and an end to blood sacrifice, but that story got heavily obscured under the weight of His crucified form. Fundamentalist tellings of Jesus’ death often play out like some kind of sadomasochistic word porn for ascetics. All of his wounds, and there were many, are described in exacting detail, which serves to solidify the sainthood of the martyr, while simultaneously making it clear how utterly wretched the rest of us fall short. Shame is too often the takeaway of fundamentalist Jesus, and it serves as the tinder for many a righteous conflagration.

Terrorism and fundamentalism go hand in hand because to be Fundamentalist is to live in a constant, sublimated state of absolute terror. Humans are not meant to live in terror, and the natural response to this brutal exposure is a deep and powerful rage paired with a side of nihilism. It is an extremely short trip from rage and nihilism to ‘give me a vest and seventy virgins’ or ‘send me to war, Sarge, and make me a hero.’

About These Bathroom Bills

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sun, 17 Apr 2016 02:10:00 +0000

Our country is currently in a heated debate over a slew of legislation that aims to dictate, once again, just who is and isn’t allowed to use the restroom in public. The brawl is brewing around our societal understanding of gender. These laws are primarily being written and supported by a segment of the population for whom gender is firmly binary, and who tend to view any other expressions of gender with extreme distrust and disgust. Some go so far as to call it ‘morally perverted’ to veer from what to them is an obvious and static descriptor about the human race.

These bills are purported to be about insuring the safety of the general population, who are supposedly at risk of sexual attack if forced to share a public bathroom with someone who presents as something ‘other than their birth gender,’ which is based solely on genitalia and not the person as a whole. There is no evidence presently available to support this supposition of bathroom sexual violence, however, and we have been peeing with Transgendered people for a while now, whether we knew it or not. I would go so far as to hypothesize that the actual number of sexually violent offenders amongst a random sample of Trans people would be much lower than the percentage of sexual offenders found in a similar sized sampling of Cisgendered people. My reasoning centers around the fact that Transgendered people are not in the habit of volunteering information about the composition of their genitals, and most actually find it incredibly rude when asked about them. The thought of publicly exposing said genitals in a public space would not be high on any Trans person’s list, much less forcing a sex act on someone with them.

Trans folk are terribly at risk of both sexual and bodily harm in public bathrooms, though, make no mistake about it, and this law, if enforced, would exponentially increase their risk of death or bodily injury by forcing them to out themselves in order to comply.

We are allowed to be deeply frightened or angered or both, but that does not mean that every action we implement in response to our emotion is warranted or inherently justifiable. In the end, what terrifies us may not bother another in the least, and then it becomes a numbers game, as to what is deemed socially appropriate and acceptable. It is all a matter of perspective, and everyone gets to have theirs. I hope we can agree though, that if our response endangers or adversely affects even a single fellow human, or, god-forbid, an entire segment of the population, that we owe it to ourselves and to society to freeze our actions and analyze our situation. Can we put into words why we feel the way we do, why we are afraid? Can we have a conversation about our fear without it devolving into shouting or violence? Have we ever met or spoken with someone whose identity or belief system triggers our fear? If we have, did we let them speak and could we hear them over our own fervently held belief?

Interestingly, this conversation is a non-issue with the majority of the younger generations, due largely I believe, to the fact that they have grown up with the internet and have been exposed to a multitude of diverse and very real stories shared by their peers and complete strangers alike. Story is absolutely magical in its power to unite us through shared experience. It is a very difficult thing to truly listen to the lived experience of a fellow human being and fail to find some place of connection and relatability.

How would you feel, in your fervently held belief, if someone came up to you and said that what you believe is evidence to them of a stunted intellect at best, and a mental illness at worst? You would understandably be angry and defensive, so why is okay to say to a Transgendered person that they are perverting a natural law by ‘messing’ with their gender and are suffering from some dysfunction? In truth, it is a supremely arrogant act to declare to another sentient, free-willed being that the way they are doing their life is wrong. We have the right to share our ideas and to ask questions of people whose ideas differ from our own, but it is never our right to tell another person what is proper for them.Transgendered people are simply PEOPLE with feelings, hopes and dreams, families, jobs, stresses and worries, just like each of us.

A good rule for genitals might be: if they don’t belong to us, our opinion about them doesn’t matter.

Deathbed

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sat, 16 Apr 2016 16:43:00 +0000

Sometimes I think about you on your deathbed and I wonder if I’ll want to be there. The part of me that wants to hear you say it is the most susceptible to wanting to be there, just in case, you know? The part of me that gets to decide whether to grant you forgiveness while still on this mortal coil, so you can take it with you to the gates of Heaven where it may or may not make a difference when deciding your fate, that part isn’t really sure if it wants to show up to be asked the question. That part, and the small, squirming part that still wants to be in love with you (I will NEVER again be in love with you) really want you to be a stand up person before then, before the Hail Mary brought on by your secret fear of death, and for you to simply say you are sorry. That you’d take it back if you could. That you understand there is no such thing as it not happening, but you know now how wrong you were and how much you hurt me.

But your shame won’t let you say it, your shame won’t even let you think it. You try your hardest NOT to think about it, but it is ALL that you think about.

I know, because I have struggled under the weight of my own shame, and I have been feral and drawn blood in my efforts to remain blind and innocent. But there is no escape from this truth, it will haunt you beyond your grave.

There is so much freedom in saying it out loud. Owning it and laying it down, taking the punishment and serving it out like a reformation. This is not all there is to you, your shame. But your refusal to graduate the lesson keeps you bound up in it, you’re choking on it, it’s the thing that makes you a lie, the thing that haunts your soul and keeps you from ever feeling rested.

All of me believes in the Hail Mary though, even if I don’t want necessarily to admit it to you. All of me believes in the power of a present moment to immediately change a lifetime of *truth*.

All of me believes in mercy, because there is no such thing as perfection, there’s just learning or not learning.

Everybody Loves Bacon

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sat, 16 Apr 2016 16:39:00 +0000

*caution* strong violence

The day it all came flooding back, the day I remembered, I indulged in a revenge fantasy. You'd have to know me to understand how great a departure that is from my regular, but it even caught me by surprise. 'The Day I Remembered' may be an overstatement, since in actuality it took many, many years of focused effort to recall it. Total recall. Hah. That's an inside joke on my present age and patriarchal upbringing. All you need to know about it is that I revered and emulated some horseshit ideals for entirely too long and for no other reason than that some serious brainwashing brushed itself up against my good natured nature to believe.

Anyway, imagine my surprise as I sat myself down and closed my eyes, all the better to set the scene, and what a horrific scene it was, my revenge.

You were tied to a chair uncomfortably under a naked light bulb. You were fully clothed though, this isn't erotic, this is deadly serious. The days of you being my hero and crush are finally, ok definitely NOW, behind me. And Goddamn you for inserting yourself into that hardwired primacy, you fucking motherfucker. Not your place or your call, but per the usual that's news to you.

Back to this story, though. You're in a chair, tied up and I decide that your face looks delicious. This is an odd thought for me to have, because I am a squeamish carnivore. I don't enjoy the thought of something dying, bleeding out, so that I can survive, but just at this moment I have to admit there is nothing in this entire world that I would rather eat than your face. So I walk up to you, and I remove your face with a knife. I am interrupted in my flow by this question: do I render you unconscious before I take your face or do I make you consciously endure the pain of its loss? I also hate loud noises, not just death, so I opt to knock you out with an uppercut that dislodges your atlas off of its axis before I take just the skin of your face, leaving all your facial muscles intact.

I've got a skillet warmed with some grease. I take the thin skin of your face to my cutting board and make strips, like bacon, like pork jowl. When the temperature is right, I fry your face but make sure to keep it tender in the middle, crispy on the edges, and guess what, it really does kind of smell like bacon. My stomach gives a growl, just in response to the stimulus of the odor.

You're still not conscious as I sit down across from you with my plate. Looks like we'll be testing out the theory then: can you remember something that happens to you while you are in a state of semi-consciousness?

I have a strip of your face bacon in my hand and I am about to eat it when another terrible idea interrupts my imagined vigilante court proceedings: in order to consummate this particular revenge, I will have to allow you, once again, into my body and then wait for you to exit my asshole as a turd.

This is intolerable, all my pleasure at these imagined dark deeds evaporates immediately and I open my eyes. You are not seated across from me, and I can only pray that you still have your face. I am suddenly swept up in a fierce heat wave, my whole body feels like it's run a marathon on the hottest day of the summer and I am sweating profusely. Next come the tears, from some mystery cavern I had hidden in my belly and they will not stop, in fact they're multiplying and I am afraid that all that will be left of me at the end of this is a dried out husk. At some point, the wondrous machine that is my body begins to retch. I just let it, I let it all go, I'm not even all here this is some kind of purging ritual that my body knows all about and I'm just hanging onto it, loosely.

God, bodies. They are so ridiculously messy, just look at all this. Where did it even come from? I mean, I look like a decent girl, most of the time, and this is some kind of nightmare sideshow thing. I have to remind myself to breathe.

After it all stops, after I am physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted, that's when I know for sure. I don't want to eat your face or torture you or make you hurt and bleed. I just want you to take responsibility and tell me you're sorry and mean it.

In lieu of that, I peel myself out of the muck and take myself to the shower. The rest I'll deal with later, no thanks to you.

breadcrumbs

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 00:02:00 +0000

You perpetrated an act and left the scene

status intact, theft covered over

leaving me to unbury the truth

with a trail of clues

the way my left foot curves inward

impotently shielding my weakened feminine

the way I always feel, deep inside,

that something only mine was

taken before I even knew I had it

my habit of giving myself away for free or very little,

a childish defense intended only to lessen what’s taken,

not realizing my power to make it stop

and

the fact I believe I deserve

to live lovelessly for acts I parroted in infantile rages,

desiring to destroy another as I had been destroyed

the myriad ways I self-sabotage

a self-prophesied, self-compromised almost ran

too often conquered by her fears

The body has a memory of things the mind can’t bear to see

mantra

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 07:25:00 +0000

when i was a girl
i learned to be a man
quickly as possible
for survival
only the strong survive
everyone knows that
but if surviving is just being alive
i may not be interested
as much as i once thought
failure to thrive
is nipping at my throat
hope i don’t choke
just keep breathing, breathing
a breath
a new beginning born
this time not of blood
just air
keep breathing,
love

fundamentalist blues

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 19:06:00 +0000

i watched you hold the severed head of a so very young girl
by her hair and scream into a camera your rage and contempt
but you also looked excited
by the carnage, the scent of blood in the air.
it gave you righteous indignation
and a reason to unleash your own destructions.
i wondered if you would treat the meat
of your son’s body in the same way
or if you would cloak and shield his hideousness
and hold him tenderly with deference.
a woman in your world may be a martyr
but will she ever have your respect

escape velocity

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 15:44:00 +0000

i am a spirit trapped in meat

my nature to transcend weighed down

by this vessel come from animals

the taste of blood still palatable on its tongue

i seek beauty to keep from rotting

the threat of decay held at bay by a quickened heartbeat

and the will to stand up against this gravity

it’s kill or be killed but i can’t swallow it

spend my time instead conjuring a dash of infinity

to temper this finite experience

something to escape the stench of excrement

even though i know ‘the best way out is always through’

to be inescapably true

einstein

noreply@blogger.com (Drea) — Sat, 27 Sep 2014 20:18:00 +0000

don’t try to tell me

what’s

possible

I won’t listen anyway

here in my world

‘impossible’

is the work of the day

speak your limitations elsewhere

if you must

but I’d rather you keep them

to yourself

or maybe just let

go of them

for good