Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Moving again.

I'll be moving again, and I might end up homeless for a while. That's what happens to the mentally ill offspring of working class parents who believe in 'bootstrapping'.

I'm not afraid of being homeless- I was, already, for a very brief period of time, and this time I won't be alone. I'm mostly just depressed and grimly determined. There are people here who have promised to help me find services in the area I'm moving to, so there's that. I'll make it somehow.

What all this means, of course, is another hiatus. Maybe. I might end up in a low income flat or on the streets, so who knows.

Wish me luck. Prayers and sympathy rituals are certainly also welcome.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Death is not lovelessness.

I've been thinking about death lately. Well, I have thought about death a good deal throughout my life. I've thought about death when I was so cornered and miserable that I would rather "gnaw my own foot off" than keep enduring my current situation, and I've thought about death when I've been scared of dying, and I've thought about my parents dying and my friends dying.

But now I have new thoughts about death.

For a child, loss of hir parents' love is interpreted as death. That can be quite literally true in the case of children who are abandoned in unlivable conditions or who are murdered by their own parents. The other type of loss of love commits a slow and torturous soul murder that results in psychic numbing and, later, either suicidal tendencies or abusive and violent behaviors.

So I have wondered if, perhaps, fear of loss of love as death is also true in the reverse- that we fear death because we interpret it in terms of our past, in terms of loss of love, in terms of soul murder.

If that's so, then the atheist who has found self-love need never fear oblivion.

Self-love is not just for people who choose not to rely on or believe in a higher power, however. It's for everyone. I think it is not only possible but extremely healthy to not only love yourself so much that you're not enmeshed with Satan, but to trust Satan enough that in either case, your soul will be accounted for when you die. That's where I stand as an agnostic-theistic Satanist. Right now- and I don't know if it will always be this way- I am not afraid of not existing. I am not afraid to die. If I cease to exist or if my god gathers me in his arms in the end are equally acceptable options to me. Eternal torment doesn't exist for me because it is essentially unjust and against the very basis of human love and compassion. Eternal torment exists only for those who have not yet found a way out of the maze of pain and into the light- or, for those of the left-hand path, into the soothing, cool shade.

This post ends abruptly!

Friday, June 10, 2011

My story: My history as a Satanist.

My first exposure to religion happened when I was about three or four years old. I remember sitting by my mother's bedside and listening to her read the bible. This was when she still had hopes and dreams about molding me into the type of daughter she wished she had been. We never made it past Genesis.

My parents, if anything, were consistently inconsistent. They would say Jesus Christ and Oh, God! Naturally, my brother and I picked up those habits. But if an exhuberant Oh my God! should slip from my mouth, I was immediately reprimanded to not say the Lord's name in vain. Often the message was cemented with a spoonful of dish soap shoved down my throat. I never noticed my parents feeding themselves dish soap any time they slipped up.

Eventually, that rule faded. By the time I was ten I was cussing about as much as folks do on daytime television.

I was always an introspective child. My mom frequently told me that as a baby I was quiet, inward turned, and could be left alone for hours without making a fuss. In hours of spirit-crushing boredom, forced to lie still on my bed because my mom wanted to take a nap, I would contemplate nonexistence. At four years old I decided that it was something like a camera that pans from perspective to perspective- when you die, it simply switches to someone else's perspective.

What was, perhaps, an aspect of my personality that saved my life, also became a curse. I would also lie in bed at night, undergoing mental torture. I would compulsively say the word 'God' in my head and then try as hard as I could to not mix it with a cuss word. Godfuck. God...zilla.
 My mother had always seemed to me to be omnipotent. It was as though she could see into my head. As a kid I was incapable of understanding that it was my expressions and body language she was reading. In a sensitive person, the ability to read other people's emotions can lead to empathy. And sometimes, it was empathy. But most often, it was used to cage me in and punish me and twist me up into knots.

If my parents could read my mind, then of course God could. I couldn't ever think any "bad" thoughts. I didn't know what kind of punishment to expect, when it would come, or what form it would take.

The fear of God turned into downright paranoia that lasted until I was at least twelve or thirteen years old.
But religion in my household was lax enough that I was also able to develop a healthy cynicism by the time I was well into my puberty (ten years old). I disdained church; resented it, in fact. It just seemed like a bunch of rigid customs and boring services listening to some stranger ramble. On a more personal level, I had begun to come to terms with the fact that no matter how hard I prayed to God, the blows kept coming, and the terror I felt at night, seemingly without origin, never abated.

Sometime in my "tween" stage, I started to explore other religions. I don't remember where I got the book, but I ended up with Silver Ravenwolf's "To Ride a Silver Broomstick". I tried out being Wiccan for a while. My older friend bought me a pentagram necklace that I proudly wore to school, much to the detriment of my social life.

But Wicca was not enough. Its focus on peace, forgiveness, the Threehold law, and the idea that anything we think can be real, did not appeal to me. I didn't feel vindicated by the things I learned about Wicca. And the idea that anything I thought would be real simply scared me. I had seldom been able to get a peaceful night's rest without being plagued by fear of unknown terrors- of ghosts, of demons, of murderers, a fear that was exacerbated when I saw the Exorcist when I was nine years old. If what I thought was lurking in my closet was real, then there was no hope.

My brother, four years my senior and already in high school, had begun his own step toward individuality. He had started wearing black, and had a copy of La Vey's Satanic bible. At this time I was also starting to wear black, and reading Gothic comic books. My brother showed me his bible, and when he was away from the house I would borrow it and read it for myself.

I liked La Vey's unforgiving attitude toward Christian dishonesty. I finally felt vindicated.

But there were also messages within his book that triggered the guilt that had been my heritage, as well as other emotions, emotions belonging to a reality that was locked up in the dank closet at the back of my mind.
When I was about twelve, my parents finally got the internet for our house. Before the internet, I was already lonely, "unsocialized". I was too honest to hide the things about myself that are considered disgusting and contemptuous, and too needy and fucked up to gain anyone's sympathy for long. A friend I had had in grade school got tired of me by sixth grade and stopped answering my calls, especially because I had no interests outside of the house and no other friends to talk to on the phone. My world was tiny, it didn't go beyond my room, my books, and my sketches.

The internet opened up my world. It also gave me a limited amount of control of how other people perceived me. Nobody could look at me and see the fat, bespectacled, unattractive little girl I was. A certain amount of honesty and disgustingness is a privilege belonging to people who get higher regard than fat little kids in this world. Since no one could tell either way, they could only judge me for my words. I was still considered "weird", though. A friend later admitted to me that when she had first met me, I scared the shit out of her. I couldn't hide what I was and wasn't very aware of other people's feelings and thoughts to begin with. I didn't really have empathy for anyone, although I tried as hard as I could to be a good friend.

I eventually found my way to Joy of Satan, probably via a Google search for 'Satanism'. I learned a good deal of interesting information, but it just triggered my guilt more and twisted the knots in my head even tighter. I got all kinds of messages from it- about requisite loyalty and service to Satan when, by then, my avolition was rapidly developing into total paralysis of the will, admonishments to "not be afraid" when experimenting with meditation and self-hypnosis, when I knew very well that I had much to be cautious about. This was before my diagnosis, but I knew on a visceral level that I could fuck myself up pretty bad by messing with self-hypnosis.

Around this time, I had started cutting myself. Puberty awakened long repressed emotions and I sought everywhere for a witness, someone to hear me, to empathize with me. I was met with derision, disgust, contempt, silencing. "What the fuck is wrong with you? My childhood was way worse and you don't see me complaining." One is exonerated to sainthood by never speaking of their troubles, and yet it is considered healthy and sane to unleash one's negative emotions on the helpless.

I ended up in a mental institution, needless to say. All I had needed was someone to listen to me. And then I was put in a place where everyone reinforced the same damaging messages. I remember talking about how I wanted independent studies, because the amount of bullying I underwent at school had risen to a level that I couldn't handle anymore, especially because when I told any of the adults in my life, they told me it was my fault for alienating myself from others. That is what I have been consistently told; that I alienate myself from others. When the truth is, no one ever did anything to make me feel welcome.

Anyway, a fellow inpatient snapped at me that everyone gets bullied and just deal with it. It cut deep. The staff were controlling and verbally abusive. One of the staff members matter-of-factly explained to us how it "didn't make sense" to cut yourself. "That's like slapping yourself because someone slapped you," he said.

Exactly.
Still naive and honest, I talked about my religion to any who would listen. I'm not quite sure how the staff responded to that, but I ended up on Haldol.

Well, my parents' efforts to control me seemed to have worked. I stopped cutting for years as my emotions became compartmentalized. I became like a snail which freezes in the winter and remains quite dead until thawed. The more I suppressed and repressed my emotions, the less energy I had left to simply function in school. I finally did get independent studies, but my attendance was inconsistent. I had absorbed so many messages about how bad and stupid I was and things I must never do or say or expressions I cannot make that it became almost impossible to leave the house. I was frozen in terror and didn't even know I was terrified. My emotional affect became blunted and even this became something to be remarked upon and tormented for. My brother, the laughing jackal of the family, who can find something hilarious about the way you breathe, would constantly tell me I looked like I was about to murder someone.

I took a break from Satanism for a while. The only other Satanists I had met were patronizing, although fairly tolerant, adult men who did nothing to help me unlearn my guilt and discover my right to set boundaries. My relationships with other people tended to be abusive and cold. Nobody ever dared to speak about anything of any emotional relevance beyond what books we liked and what we did that day. If anyone got emotional in our group, everyone would fall completely silent. We ignored each other's distress signals, thinking this was the polite thing to do, when in reality we were so repressed that strong emotions scared the fuck out of us, made us uncomfortable, made us angry.

For a while I just drifted through the internet, focusing on my hobbies and conducting a self-imposed and informal education where I looked up anything that struck my fancy. For a while I became engrossed in the online crime library.

Around the age of fourteen, I discovered my first book by Alice Miller, For Your Own Good. It awakened sleeping emotions, and while I ended up in self-destructive clashes against my mother and brother, it released me from most of my guilt feelings, self-hatred, and anxiety.

I was not "cured", but I knew how to find pathways to things that could validate the things I felt. I eventually found my way into a feminist community, where I found out that all the things I observed around me and reacted so strongly to were not only real, they were part of a worldwide pattern. From feminism I branched out to other areas of social justice. I learned about ableism, racism, LGBQTIAA*, trans theory. My passion for justice had been awakened.

Feeling more confident, I renewed my interest in Satanism. I had been reading Diane Vera's website as well as Joy of Satan, and it was a haven I could return to- I was never made to feel guilty or like there was a prescribed way of being a Satanist. I had always stayed with Satan out of loyalty, now and then feeling vague guilt feelings about never observing his personal day or engaging in meditative prayer, and I felt ready once more to pick up my education where it left off and form a more personal relationship with my god. I also wanted to become involved with other Satanists again.

And that's where I am today.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Expanding on the previous post.

So it isn't Friday yet, but I'm posting anyway. Friday is my posting day because it's at the end of the week, therefore if I have to handle anything stressful online- such as trollish comments on my blog, or simply just mustering the concentration to write a post- I can go home and recover from it during the weekend.

Right now I'm stabilized. For me that means I'm not having uncontrollable mood swings, no paranoid thoughts, and no delusions. (I'm not really given toward uncontrollable anything to begin with. I bottle everything up and release tension in writing.) HOWEVER, I still get confused easily. That's the main aspect of my disorder that I'm  handling right now. Being a fairly coherent and calm schizo for me means that the energy I exert toward getting along with others, toward being articulate, toward making sure I don't have "emotional outbursts" (for the people in my life right now, they consider a testy tone an "outburst") of any kind, leaves less energy to plan my weeks and organize myself.

I'm living in a room and board house, and the pressure to conform to their expectations has just been upped without notice. I had just gotten settled in, and thought I knew the rules, and now, seemingly out of the blue, the house manager is "helicoptering" over me.  I  don't understand where this sudden distrust has come from, considering that the previous week had been a fairly good one. I had been able to leave the house at least four times a week to go to my program (I work with a program geared toward getting people with disabilities "on their feet" and self-sufficient), and I had been washing my own dishes and not only doing my assigned chores, but double my assigned chores (by accident).

But now the house manager is behaving as though she can't trust me to follow the rules unless she is constantly and mercilessly on my case about them, and I already have my plate full as it is, without feeling like I can't even go out into the dining room to eat my dinner in peace without someone jumping out of the woodwork to harass me over a stray crumb I leave behind. I've talked to her about this as reasonably and calmly as I can. I told her I'm under a lot of stress right now and I can't handle learning new rules every day, at every turn, especially because I had only just mastered some of the more basic ones. And her response was, "But if I don't tell you right away, you'll never do it."

I have no idea what makes her think that, considering I have not once failed to respond positively to being informed of my mistakes. The whole situation itself might be a set-up having nothing to do with me- because now that I've asked her, however nicely, to please leave me alone for a while, she's free to interpret it as "Calypso doesn't want to follow the rules!"

The entire situation is not only stressful but humiliating, because I'm not a child, much less a "delinquent" one, and yet that's how I'm being treated. It's a sort of double-bind situation that occurs no matter where I go- if I don't ask for help, people assume I have things under control, and that they can expect more out of me. If I do ask for help, I'm "demanding" and need to be put in my place. If I'm "put in my place", my energy goes toward suppressing my anger and humiliation and staying out of everyone's way so that I don't blow up at someone, but people mistake that for "normalcy" and angrily wonder why I can't handle more rules and chores, since apparently I'm not suffering from any mood swings or hallucinations or split personalities or what the fuck ever they assume I have to deal with just because they use 'schizo' as a handy label instead of taking the time to understand it as a complex reality that I have to navigate every day, from within and without. Pressure gets piled on and on, and then if I snap, it's seen as an aspect of my disorder, instead of a justifiable reaction to real situations, and then people start asking nosy and infuriating questions about whether or not I'm taking my meds. There is literally no way for me to "win"- and by win I mean simply find some peace for myself, peace that I need in order to function in other areas of my life. Areas of my life that the manager of the house doesn't see because they take place outside of the house, or in the privacy of my room.

That's why posting is delegated to Friday, and that's also why I don't feel like I can take much part of "legitimate" activism, that is, being up to date on the news, and getting involved in discussions.

Right now, I'm working on moving from a room and board to a better place, one with more privacy and more room for me to do what I need to do to manage stress AND function outside of the house.

I'm talking to the people who are helping me at my program, and they've proven to be willing to help in any way they can, so that puts my mind at ease some more. When my mind is at ease I can focus and plan better.

I've started considering, lately, delegating topics not directly related to Satanism to a different blog.

Friday's post is supposed to be about a more in-depth exploration of how I found Satanism, and how it helped me, and why I remain on the dark path today. I'm also going to talk about my brother a bit, a former spiritual Satanist turned hardcore Christian. I'm going to have to review former posts to see how much I already covered this topic.

Until Friday, then. (For real this time.)

Friday, June 3, 2011

I've made a decision.

I've decided to be more open about the details of my life. That's because I feel that I have something to offer the communities for which I'm fighting by shining a personal light.

I believe that Satanism and neurodiversity are natural allies. I think Satanism, in a way, attracts the disenfranchised more than most religions, because mainstream Christianity is so virulently anti-EVERYTHING. Mainstream Christianity is ableist, characterizing those diagnosed with mental "disorders" as either being dangerous and evil (or "Satanists") or as being helpless, broken lambs in need of their special guidance. It is no wonder, then, that those of us whose traits are naturally "dark" (people who communicate or behave in ways considered "scary", "wrong," or "way too depressing", INCLUDING those of us given to critical thinking and analysis that shines what is often perceived as a bitter, cynical, and ultimately "dysfunctional" light on the "natural order of things"- the natural order of things being "sane", being Christian, being white, being heterosexual, being cisgendered, etc.) turn to Satanism, or Paganism, or other "dark", "wrong", "insane" religions.

So, I'm coming out of the closet. I'm schizoaffective. I don't hallucinate. I do get paranoid. I've never killed anyone, I've never tortured animals. I've done terrible things, and I've done wonderful things. And I've made a choice in my life to continue doing wonderful things and continue avoiding terrible things. My diagnosis is not my personality, but it is part of me. My diagnosis is not characterized by "bad" behaviors, but by different ways of processing and responding to stimuli in the world, that only become "bad" if the environment I'm in is abusive or I'm handling trauma in ways that become destructive. I'm both a product of an abusive family, an abusive culture, and "funny" biological wiring. I will never be "sane", but I can be healthy, and compassionate, and strong, and I can commit myself to justice anyway.

This blog, then, is going to be a bit me-centric, but only because I know that the political and the personal are inextricably interwoven. I'm going to examine intersectionality, and I'm going to challenge my own prejudiced and oppressive notions. Right now, keeping my finger on the pulse of current events isn't a great possibility for me, because I still find watching the news to be triggering, and I don't have unlimited or easily accessible internet. So until I can get to the news, and handle the news, I'm going to focus on what I know, from my own sphere of existence, and what I'm learning from the people I meet and the books I read.

I'm going to try to update this blog every Friday, because that's the best I feel like I can manage given my current situation.

'Til then, shadow readers!