tag:dreamwidth.org,2010-12-22:681610Child of Elrosgallinggallagallinggalla2010-12-26T14:24:35Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2010-12-22:681610:292An open letter to my father2010-12-22T04:49:26Z2010-12-26T14:24:35Zpublic3[This was directly prompted by a conversation between me and my father that we had earlier today. But it was also indirectly prompted by Michael Moore's and Keith Olbermann's dismissive statements concerning the two Swedish woman who filed rape charges against Julian Assange, and the <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23Mooreandme">Twitter campaign</a> to hold MM and KO accountable for their actions.<br /><br /><em>Note:</em> This post has some Christian language.<br /><br /><strong>Trigger warning</strong> for rape and transphobic violence.]<br /><br />To my Dad, who I love dearly:<br /><br />After our discussion of this morning, you and I have come to the mutual conclusion that our worldviews are fundamentally different. I am once again left feeling inadequate, judged, and found wanting. It's time I speak out against that and put my stake in the ground as a person fully deserving of love, no matter my hurts or my real or perceived failings.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />You expressed my concern for my mood and depression and "lack of motivation", and asked me what I'm looking for in my life. I told you that I'm looking for someone to tell me that they love me unconditionally, exactly as I am – trans, queer, aspie, ADHD, depression, anxiety, and a bunch of other things left unsaid. You said that you don't think that it's possible for one person to love another unconditionally, indeed that you know that it's not possible, and implied that it's irrational to think otherwise, and why don't I just accept that and just get over it?<br /><br />And I told you that I cannot live that way. That the hope that I have that someone *will* love me unconditionally – and if not me, that someday, sometime in the future, that there will be someone who loves humans unconditionally, exactly as we are, that this is my only hope – this is the hope that keeps me alive.<br /><br />I am sorry, Dad, but I cannot live a life dictated by "rationality" and "realism" and whatever other terms you want to throw about. I am an emotional person and a spiritual person. I believe that the irrational, the spiritual, the deepest caverns of the subconscious that well up in parts of our minds, are just as legitimate as analytical rationality imposed by other parts of our minds. I am reclaiming the irrational, the subconscious, the intuitive. I tried living a life based on hard-edged rationality, and you know what? It doesn't work. When I do that, I slowly but surely die inside, because to me, that approach to life is bereft of hope.<br /><br />There is a part that I didn't tell you, because I know you're a dyed-in-the-wool atheist and don't want to hear God talk. But your belief that no one has ever and no one will ever love another human being unconditionally, exactly as they are, with all their hurts and faults? You're wrong. There is such a person, and that person is Christ. And because I can't talk about Christ with you, I can only give you a distorted and incomplete view of what I hope for. Because what my hope is that every human living in this world will realize that the Kingdom of God is right here, right now, and that we are all, every single one of us, turning away from it, in ways that we don't even recognize most of the time. My hope is that everybody living in this world will re-turn (Hebrew תשובה, teshuva) – toward the Kingdom of God and realise it to its fullest. I don't expect that this will happen in my lifetime. Maybe it won't happen in a million years. But it <em>will</em> happen; that is my faith, and that is my hope. <br /><br />Frankly I don't care if you judge that to be irrational. As a matter of fact, I agree with you – faith in One whose existence cannot be proven by science *is* irrational. Where you and I part company is the value that we each place on irrationality. I value irrationality as much as I value rationality, and I do not place any special value on the role of rational or scientific discourse in my life. I don't discount it, but I don't value it above emotional discourse, irrational discourse, the discourse of faith and belief and above all, TRUST – trust in the Holy Spirit which operates on a plane that cannot be accessed by scientific discourse, yet whom I know speaks to me.<br /><br />I don't hope for myself, Dad. I don't think I'm going to get much better. Maybe a little, but not much. I am not so selfish to think that Jesus will wave a magic wand and make my life better. If you think this is what my hope is, then I ask you to reconsider. All I can do at this point is contribute my small part in bringing the Kingdom of God to fruition.<br /><br />Another point I need to discuss is your belief, sometimes stated but more often implied, that my hurts happened in the past, and why can't I just say that the past is past and move on? I'm sorry, but it's not like falling off a bike, picking yourself up, brushing yourself off and getting back on your bike. It's as if you think that the things done to me are discrete events, and now they're done and of mere historical interest.<br /><br />But here's the reality, MY reality, and I'd really like you to accept that it is MY reality and to just listen. Because I'm going to be blunt: I'm mentally ill. Let's go down the list: Major depressive disorder with suicidal ideation, anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress syndrome, depersonalization disorder (a type of dissociative disorder where I feel disconnected from my body and from the world, as if I'm watching a movie and my body, my voice, are not mine). All of these conditions are quite resistant to treatment, especially given (1) the severity of my childhood trauma, (2) long-term sexual abuse by my former partner, (3) the fact that all of these mental disorders are very prevalent and more intractable amongst those with Asperger's syndrome and ADHD.<br /><br />From you, I hear an undertone of blame, that somehow I'm not doing the "right thing", that I'm not applying myself enough, that I'm wallowing in past hurts, etc. If these are your judgments, then you can have them, but I don't accept them. I do not accept that because I am in pain, and that pain is intractable, incurable, that that makes me somehow less worthy. I'm telling you point-blank right now: I am mentally ill, I have wounds that will never heal. No matter: <strong> <a href="http://bit.ly/90LCyl" title="little light: clamavi ad te @ Questioning Transphobia">I'm good exactly as I am right now, today.</a> My trans queer genderqueer female aspie ADHD depressed anxious dissociated not fully connected with reality multiple people in my head all talking at once crying weeping fucked up exactly as I ever was am now and will be forever self</strong>. I am good, period. I will no longer allow myself to fall into the trap of pretending otherwise, of covering up my moods or my pain or the hurt that I feel at the state of the world. If you are uncomfortable with that, that's your problem.<br /><br />What it comes down to is that I'm tired of being down on myself for being down. I'm tired of judging myself as something less because I'm crazy. And I'm not going to let myself feel put upon by your premise that I'm wallowing, that I'm not trying hard enough, that I'm not "motivated" enough. I'm through with that.<br /><br />This is a necessary step for be to begin to heal. It's the first step, knowing that I am a good person, worthy of unconditional love, <em>no matter how fucked up I am</em>, no matter how many mistakes I make. Because only when I can clear the shame away from being crazy, only when I can reclaim being crazy as being just as worthy as being sane (whatever that is), will I then be able to address those issues that are causing pain and either deal with them or accept that there's not much I can do about them, in this life anyway.<br /><br />I have been on more antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs than I can remember. I've been on anti-psychotics. These medicines have saved and continue to my life. But no medicine can tell me that I am worthy of unconditional love.<br /><br />I have been in therapy since I was three. Nearly half a century of therapy has not helped me not one iota. It doesn't matter the technique – cognitive, gestalt, Freudian, this mishmash or that mishmash of theory. Because not one therapist has ever told me that I am worthy of unconditional love. They couldn't, because they didn't believe that about themselves. They always viewed me as broken, a thing to be "fixed" to make me a more productive member of capitalist, consumerist society. So all that therapy has done is to pathologize me further, to convince me further that I'm not worthy of love.<br /><br />You see, Dad, you have not lived my life. I'm sure you were pained to witness what I was going through in school, and I know that you and Mom fought like the dickens to get the schools to come to my defense. But *you* didn't have books smashed over your head, *I* did. *You* weren't spit on twice a week, *I* was. *You* weren't chased down the halls, you weren't pushed into windows, you weren't whipped with wet towels in the locker room, you weren't tripped in the cafeteria, *you* didn't have rocks thrown at your head, *you* weren't called "faggot" and "queer" and "freak" 5, 10, 20 times a day, *you* didn't have your self-worth smashed to such little bits that you considered suicide. *I* did.<br /><br />You were not raped twice a month for 16 years; I was. You have no idea what that's even like, how deeply that cuts in to you, how worthless it makes you feel to be raped over and over again, to be controlled by your partner using your fear as a weapon against you. Wounds from that kind of sexual abuse don't heal. It really hurts when you minimize the trauma that happened to me, and put it on my back that there's something wrong with me that I'm not putting this all behind me – as if that were ever possible.<br /><br />Dad, I'm afraid that when it comes to issues of privilege and oppression, you've got blinders on. You have no conception of what it is to deal with those small aggressions that happen to me – the slurs (face-to-face and online), the men following me down the street, the sexual harassment from random men, the people telling me that I can't be raped because I'm trans, the women telling me I'm not a woman because only women use tampons, the PennDOT employees convinced that I'm defrauding them when I go to change my name on my license, the utter heart-pounding fear as a roommate outs me as trans and a user of injected hormones to the cops, the slight eye-rolls and change in tone when potential employers discover I'm trans, the constant barrage of statements from right-wingers literally calling for gay, lesbian, and trans folk to die, the constant small little messages from society that tell me that I am unworthy of respectful treatment. The knowledge that should I need emergency medical care, I have a 9 in 10 chance of being mocked, disrespected, shoved aside in a hallway, denied care by emergency staff who just can't deal with trans folk. The knowledge that should I be arrested, I have a virtually 100% chance of being abused by the police because I am trans. The knowledge that I am twelve times as likely to be murdered as people who are not trans. The knowledge that the unemployment rate amongst trans people is 60%, that most of the trans folk I know are living in desperate poverty and cannot get any kind of medical care at all. The memory of one trans woman who I was friendly with, who was murdered for being trans and the knowledge that police refused to file charges despite there being multiple witnesses to her murder (the murderer ran over her with his car, repeatedly, while shouting transphobic slurs at her). I never have a day where I'm not reminded in how low regard society holds me and those like me. Even if these things aren't happening directly to me in the moment, they create a background of fear, tension, mistrust, and self-hatred within me. This is how oppression works, Dad. It's not *just* the trans woman who got bashed on the street. It's also the message to *all* trans women, including myself, that we can never relax, that we never know when we're next, that we dare not be out, that we dare not think of ourselves as good people.<br /><br />So, no, this isn't stuff that happened "in the past". There's nothing to "put away and move past" because it's happening right here right now. Women are being raped, and Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore are laughing about it. Trans women are being murdered at an appalling rate. Poor people, people of color, immigrants, disabled people, queer people are under assault by the wealthy. The US is becoming a police state and continues to brutally oppress people throughout the Global South.<br /><br />There's a lot of hate in the world, there's a lot of suffering and oppression, and it makes me hurt. I'm not going to put my hurt aside, because it's not a theoretical thing for me. I <em>cannot</em> just say "well, that's just too bad, but what can I do?", because the pain is happening right here, right now, to me and to the communities that I'm a part of.<br /><br />I will keep my pain front and center. I will do so because God stands with those of us who are in pain, who are oppressed, who express their sorrow over that oppression and use our sorrow and pain as drivers to work for social justice.<br /><br />I love you, and I will be there for you when you need me.<br /><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=gallinggalla&ditemid=292" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments