June 25, 2011

NY4M

So a friend's sister lives in NYC and happily attended the celebration in her neighborhood this morning. Her local politician is an out, older, gay man and he gave a heart-warming speech. She thought the whole thing was just wonderful. She also had her small child with her and at one point, she leaned over to explain to the toddler what the whole celebration was about.

"You see, most of the time boys want to marry girls, but some boys like other boys. And so this means that boys can marry boys and girls can marry girls if they want to. So you can grow up and marry anyone you want."

Everyone standing around was cooing and smiling at the scene, when the kid lets off with the somewhat predictable, "But I'm going to marry YOU, mommy!" And of course he sealed it with a kiss. And of course, everyone who'd been listening just laughed and grinned and cooed even harder.

And that, folks, is how you "explain things" to a little guy.

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:03 PM | Comments (1) | Blog | Struggles | Stumble

February 3, 2011

Wrong Planet

Interesting. I'm seeing a lot of these "I am enough" and "Me is {more than} enough" posts recently.

Maybe it's because the winter introspective season has really begun, but I know this is where my brain has been recently as well. So I guess I should explain the last few posts a little bit - they've been fairly deep for someone who has seemingly taken a vacation from this blog.

Many of my stories start the same way: I was a weird kid. I was a weirdly logical kid. I was an outsider.

I love starting stories about me this way. I have always reveled in the fact that I am different and have always been considered different. I have never been one to do or say something just to fit in with the crowd. When I say never, I am fairly certain that is not an exaggeration. It has bit me on the ass more times than I care to remember, but it hasn't changed my belief that changing my core self just to fit in is a mistake.

My mother knew this about me from very early on and so, when Austin looked like it was going to force de-segregation via busing, I was moved out of public school to private school. Mom feared that I would see words exchanged or fists thrown and feel a need to step in. It wouldn't matter if it was a commonplace disagreement or a racially motivated fight - nor what colours the combatants were - I would step in and try to make peace. Or at least make sure the underdog didn't get whomped. She was correct in that. I could no more stay out of a fight or an injustice than I could stop breathing.

It was that particular move from public elementary school to a Catholic school for second grade where I came to realize just how different I was. I related better to the adults than to the kids. I don't think I made a single friend my age during that year. I walked the edges of the schoolyard during recess singing a little song to myself that I was too old to play now ... and I kind of admired and marveled at the other kids and their ability to still play. In retrospect, it wasn't that I was too old to play and I didn't really feel that ... but it was the only way I could articulate what I was going through - I couldn't make friends. I had no idea how to read my peers and react appropriately.

I was hyper-logical where the other second graders were roiling masses of constantly shifting emotions that I couldn't read. And they changed so very quickly from one to the next. Being around that was not just confusing to me, it was physically painful. So I held myself out on the edges.

When it became obvious there was a personality conflict between myself and my homeroom teacher, I asked to see the principal. It was the logical thing to do. Why make either Mrs. Rowan or myself suffer through a personality conflict. Other kids didn't hate her, but it was obvious she and I just weren't compatible and were driving each other nuts. She didn't know how to respond to such a logical little kid who was most emphatically not like the other kids. The principal was wonderful about the meeting - met me where I was and gave me logical reasons for not moving me to another homeroom teacher ... and she was quite kind about the whole thing.

The next year, I was back to my beloved public school and I thought my year of being amongst the oddly emotional children was over. This school tossed any 30 or so kids into one class and you stayed there all day (the Catholic school was tracked and you moved from classroom to classroom for various subjects). Upon my return, I was put in a class which had only one of the kids I'd known prior to my Catholic school experience. And I realized it wasn't just the Catholic school kids who were unreadable maelstroms of emotion.

I was still an outsider.

Even my teacher noticed it and became concerned - she called a conference with my mother and noted that I seemed to not be bonding with any of the children despite the fact that I interacted so well with the adults.

Six weeks later, we moved four hour north and I was on my third elementary school and it was just October of my third grade year. And I was still an outsider who got along wonderfully with almost all of the teachers, but really didn't fit in with the other kids. I was the weirdo. The one everyone loved making fun of ... until they realized that not only did I often not get that they were making fun of me, but I didn't particularly care, either.

My nickname, when anyone actually bothered to think about me, was the fetus. To this day, I have no idea why. I just remember the look of hatred? disgust? meanness and somehow a desperation for this barb to land on Greg Frisina's face as he told me my nickname was fetus.

And I remember my confusion and dismissal of it.

I was a stranger in a strange land. These people had social rituals that apparently you had to be born into in order to understand ... and I just didn't get it.

It was a strange place to be. So comfortable in my own skin, in my own world ... but still mindful of the fact that I never seemed to find a place or a group where I fit in for very long. It was as if other kids could tolerate me for a few months and then my inherent strangeness just became too much for them. They were confused by my inability to pick up social cues. Sometimes I couldn't pick it up, sometimes it seemed that I was deliberately ignoring them.

Truth was, I just didn't understand most social cues. At all.

And, I was unwilling ... actually, I think I am incapable ... of not being me. My personality has always been so strong that I find it nearly impossible to "just fit in" by hiding some part of my self.

The first teacher who noticed it was my junior year Spanish teacher. Otherwise I was considered that weird honors kid who just doesn't ... get it.

This Spanish teacher took me aside one day. The other kids in the class had been making fun of me for something or another. This was a matter of course. I didn't even register it because it happened so frequently and because I didn't, once again, understand why they were picking on me. Meh. Whatever. She asked if they were bothering me and I know she found my confusion a little odd. It was nice to know that she saw it, too, though. Nice that she cared enough to ask about it. I let her know that I appreciated that.

I found out a couple of years later, that she was a licensed counselor and had left the high school to work with abused kids. I was unsurprised.

I've spent my whole life wondering why I'm so different. Not unhappy with myself. Not trying to change. Just trying to classify the difference and figure out why my brain works so very differently. I don't get emotions, most of the time. I don't understand a lot of other peoples' emotions. I don't understand why they react the way they do much of the time (although I can parse the reasons that film or book characters behave a certain way with an uncanny accuracy). I do not register faces and names, which I take it is a form of mild face-blindness.

I am the quintessential outsider.

Even online, the place where I thought my social skills were finally excelling instead of holding me back ... I realized this week that it was a false positive. Once again, I know many people who find me pleasant enough ... but have not actually made close friends. Seems no one on Twitter noticed I've been absent for three full days. (Save one person who also knows me IRL.) That skill of making friends seems destined to elude me forever.

So. I had put some hope in a diagnosis over the last several years as I read more and more about Asperger's. Liane Holliday Willey seemed to describe so very much of my life in Pretending to be Normal. Attwood's book on Asperger's - I could see so much of myself in there as well. And I thought, well, maybe here's a reason for my differences. Maybe here is something that explains why I don't fit in. Why I don't get things that seem to come so damned naturally for other people.

But, apparently, the search for an explanation continues for me.

A pastor once told me that I was a seeker.

I think she is quite right. I constantly seek explanations and knowledge and try to put everything into a pattern and get quite frustrated when I can't find or recognize that pattern.

And so, while I am quite content with who I am ...

... I am still seeking why I am the way that I am.

The pattern that explains the differences.

Seeking....

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:17 AM | Comments (1) | Blog | Struggles | Stumble

January 26, 2011

Coming Out

So there's this rather well-known blogger who runs The Bloggess. She wrote a post Monday called "Coming Out" and it's not about being gay. It's about people coming out and publicly owning their mental frailties, illnesses, disruptions, whatever you want to call them. She decided to do this after a friend of hers lost her husband to suicide.

I do know that the speech she made at Tony’s funeral was something that you might need to hear.

Tony took care of everyone. All the time. He was so busy taking care of everyone else, he didn’t speak out when something was wrong.

And this is what you can do for me, for Tony, when you leave here today. All you men, you big men. When you walk away from here, you speak. If something is wrong, if something hurts, then you talk about. Tony was so busy taking care of everyone else, he didn’t care take of himself. So after this, you speak.

This speaks to me for so many reasons. One, because I'm the person who takes care of everything and I mean *everything* and have since I was about seven or so. Maybe earlier. Two, I have never lived in a home without someone with a mental illness.

I have counted myself lucky that I do not have depression - I've had a couple of situational-induced bouts to be sure - but ongoing, clinical depression is not me.

I have friends with depression. With panic disorders. With anxiety. OCD. I have one friend who was horrifically abused who truly has multiple personality disorder (or borderline personality disorder, or whatever they've renamed it this week).

My mother's family was shaped by a narcissist and an alcoholic. Mine was as well, although my mother's took the form of a martyr complex.

A friend, in signing my sixth grade "autograph book," called me an egomaniac. After looking up the word to make sure it meant what I was afraid it meant, I vowed to think of others more. I was always looking for ways to improve, to "do life right."

With all the problems I saw around me, I vowed to be the perfect human ... which for some reason, in my head, despite really hating Star Trek because of William Shatner, I thought meant Spock. Emotions were simply useless things that got in the way. They confused and bewildered me. (And I mean that not in an emotional sense but as the inverse to a state of logic and comprehension of patterns.)

It wasn't until I read Elizabeth Moon's excellent book The Speed of Dark in August of 2005, that I began to have an inkling there might be something ... off ... with me. That perhaps my constant state of "outsider" was not due to everyone else but to my own brain construction or chemistry.

I'd had ADHD testing done in 2001 because after chemo, things I'd been able to control previously were out of control. I was having problems with motivation and organization, something that had not really been a problem before. But the doctor who did the testing did the absolutely bare minimum (and not really even that) and then left me to my GP who prescribed meds. Meds that I don't think did much of anything and so eventually I stopped taking them and really doubted the diagnosis itself.

But reading first Moon's Speed of Dark and then seeing some books talking about connections/similarities between ADHD and autism, I began to see a better picture emerge.

While Hans Asperger had noticed a set of behaviours back in 1944, his research didn't really become known in English-speaking countries until the early 1990s - after I had already graduated from high school. What is now called Asperger's is a form of high-functioning autism. And the more I've read, the more I've suspected this might explain why I was always so very different.

There's really no meds for Asperger's - instead, treatment is behavioural therapy. I read more and more about it, but didn't bother talking to a doctor. What was the point? I kept hearing story after story of insurance not paying for the therapies and that they were expensive. I was getting by - why go through the bother of a label? I would simply work on the less good traits on my own.

Except my wife was getting a little fed up. She didn't like this self-diagnosis business. Hmph. I was coping.

She didn't think I was.

And then an issue came up where all of this kind of came to a head. I'm missing too many social cues.

So, I've gone in for testing. I don't get to talk to the doc until Monday, so I don't know if I have Asperger's or not. Maybe it really is ADHD causing my issues - the doc tested for that as well. Hell, maybe it's both.

But the thing is, I'm taking positive action. And I am owning whatever the hell it is that makes me different.

Because no matter how different I am, there are others out there who are different like me.

And they need to know that being different is okay. It's okay to ask for help.

Hell, it's okay to revel in your differentness. I do. I'm PROUD of the fact that I am not like other people, that I am myself.

But you also have to coexist with other people. And if you're different, sometimes that means you need help learning how to be yourself, allow others to be themselves and coexist in a healthy and happy way.

Lori, I wish you never, ever had to go through what you've been through. There are no words.

But your words at Tony's funeral have been heard all the way around the globe. Loudly.

Tony took care of everyone. All the time. He was so busy taking care of everyone else, he didn’t speak out when something was wrong.

And this is what you can do for me, for Tony, when you leave here today. All you men, you big men. When you walk away from here, you speak. If something is wrong, if something hurts, then you talk about. Tony was so busy taking care of everyone else, he didn’t care take of himself. So after this, you speak.

You speak.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:35 PM | Comments (5) | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | Struggles | Stumble

January 8, 2011

Why Couldn't This Have Been Friday?

I woke up and looked out the front window this morning and found this:

And then I looked out the backyard:

I would gleefully move back to Texas now.

I admit. It just might be funny to throw the miniature dachshunds out in that for 30 seconds. That is, if we could find them again within 30 seconds.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:26 AM | Comments (2) | Blog | Struggles | Vacations and Photos | Stumble

November 16, 2010

Terror and Safety

I have no lead-in to this post. No build up to ease you in.

Because there was no lead-in for me. No easing into it.

I was sexually assaulted from the time I was five until I moved out of the house. At times, photographed.

It's taken me years of hard work to come to terms with what happened, but I have and I'm at peace with it. It shaped who I am and how I see the world ... but maybe not in the ways you think.

What I learned is that no matter what you do, how many precautions you take, no one is guaranteed safety in this life. This could be a really sad statement, but it's not. It's not that no one is safe, exactly, it's that we're not guaranteed safety.

There is being smart.
There is being stupid.
And there is being so damn afraid that you are no longer living.

And NONE of those guarantees safety.

I choose to live.

There are times when I don't take enough risk. But I try to be smart about it. Make sure that I'm living my life with a reasonable attempt at safety and risk and life.

And that is why I'm calling out the TSA screenings for what they are. Total bullshit. Security theatre. All for show.

People who want to blow up planes or buildings or shoot each other ... they will find ways to do so.

But there is a balance between how we protect ourselves and how we live.

Using millimeter wave to "photograph" our nekkid bodies is not guaranteed to keep us safe. There are ways to take a plane down that could bypass these screenings.

Using an invasive pat-down is not guaranteed to keep us safe.

I, personally, will not submit to the extra radiation of the scanners. One, after all the cancer tests I've been through, I don't need any extra radiation if I can avoid it. Two, I don't care how grainy or "not personally identifiable" the "photographs" are - I've been photographed nude against my will before and I will not do it again.

And the "enhanced" pat-down? I'm done with flashbacks now. Finally. I'm living a pretty normal life. And I'll be damned if I allow some stranger to touch me there for no damned reason. Feeling trapped, like I have no choice, but have to be fondled?

I know that to keep me, personally, safe, I can't submit to either the scanner or the pat-down.

And, since I'm "randomly" selected for "special" screening every time I go on any plane bigger than a puddle-jumper, I know that I can not fly until this blows over.

Until we as a nation come to our senses and remember that there is being smart, there is being stupid, and there is living.

I aim to live.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:46 PM | Comments (5) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

November 14, 2010

Adversarial

Colour vs. colour. Race vs. race. Good vs. evil. Liberal vs. conservative. Man vs. woman.

Apathy vs. activism. Man vs. nature. God vs. Satan. God-fearing vs. heathen.

Nature vs. nurture. Science vs. faith.

You vs. me.

The story of humanity is encapsulated in just one word: adversarial.

We spend the bulk of our lives looking for connections. Trying to find similarities between the us and the them and connect. And yet so much of what we do and say without thought is actually us versus them.

Adversarial.

Judgement.

I wouldn't do that.

That behaviour is wrong.

Adversarial.

We tear others down as quickly as we try to build up our connections. And what this does is cause an ebb and flow of conflict and pain.

It is our adversarial nature which has caused all of the bullying and suicide in the news so recently. It results in loneliness and hurt and fear and finally despair.

All because we insist on division and punishing each other for our differences instead of celebrating them and being glad that we are variations on the same - different and similar all at once.

Adversarial.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know that I am.

I am the same as you.

For all our differences, I am the same as you.

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:31 PM | Comments (4) | Struggles | Stumble