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shadowkatTaking a break from my DVD/TV veg fest, to do a bit of writing. Actually it wasn't that much of a fest, I watched two films, fell asleep during the first one, ate dinner during the second. This morning was devoted to Xmas shopping for Dad, and groceries (no food). Dad got two books: Karen Armstrong's The History of God, and the new biography of Magellan's Circumnavigation of the Globe. While there, I saw a book that I lusted after but could not afford yet - "The Annotated Grimm's Fairy Tales". Oh it's just lovely and so cool. Now, I've seen the Annotated Alice, Wizard of Oz, and Sherlock Holmes, and none of them grabbed me, but this baby? OOOOH Shiny. I want it. Badly. It not only the old tales, but it captures the sections of the old tales that were deleted over time as being unsuitable for children. Complete with mythological and psychoanalytical references. For anyone who has ever studied/analyzed fairy tales or folklore - this is a must have. But, alas, too expensive. So I bought, somewhat guiltily, The Princess Bride by William Goldman and
George RR Martin's A Game of Thorns, which has been recommended to me by three people on my flist. Now, I have not read an epic fantasy in ages, so we'll see if I like it. And it may be a while until I get to it - have to read The Dogs of Babel first for my tiny book club. It has shrunk to three women now.
Watched JL Unlimited, Wake the Dead. Interesting episode. The episode was about a former teammate of the Justice League, Shiara, HawkGirl, who had once cruelly hurt and betrayed them, coming back and helping them - but to do so, she had to kill someone who had become her friend, Solomon Grundy the Zombie. Someone who no longer had control over their mental capabilities and was filled with pain and rage, lashing out at everything around them. No one liked this person, but this woman. And it was this woman who had to kill him.
The episode was an interesting take on an old theme - putting down the old rabid dog and how we deal with someone who has hurt us, deeply. First off, it makes me very angry when people excuse horrible actions based on insanity. Almost as if what the person did was okay because well they are mentally ill. BTVS dealt with this concept a lot. Angelus' killing of Jenny Calendar wasn't Angel's fault, because he was insane, he wasn't Angel. You see? I disagree. I do not think the fact that he was insane at the time takes him off the hook. Which is why I liked the series Angel, because unlike BTVS, it did not let him off the hook. I didn't always feel this way. When I first watched the episode in 1998, I saw it differently. But that was before I was on the recieving end of abuse from a mentally disturbed individual. The individual in question came very close to giving me a nervous breakdown and there was nothing I could do about it. That individual is still hurting people. The individual is bi-polar. He went off lithium the year he went after me. I still bear the scars. He was in a way like Solomon Grundy. Destroying everything in his path. Insane. In my life, I've apparently had two run-ins with individuals who are manic-depressive and at the time I dealt with them, in full lash-out mode. I was unfortunately on the receiving end of the lashing both times. For reasons I still don't completely understand. I blame myself for putting myself there - the second time. And for not seeing what was happening until it was too late the first time. And I did not reacte very well. Since I was not emotionally strong at the time myself - I was suffering post-traumatic stress due to experiences surrounding 9/11. The second round, I was coming off of well the first experience, and in a depression that just kept circling downwards. Both were nasty affairs and I am not proud of how I handled either. And I learned after the fact, way after the fact - months after the fact - that the individual had gone off his meds, was in fact manic-depressive and it was not their fault. Now, I've met other manic-depressives who aren't like this. Who didn't hurt me or anyone I knew about. So this is not a necessary symptom of this disease.
Circling back to Solomon Grundy. Solomon has been driven insane. He is no longer responsible for his actions. The others couldn't deal with him - he hurt them. Superman, Green Latern, Vixen, The Egyptian Dude (no clue what his name is), Aguaman - they just want to kill him. But Hawkgirl cared for him, because he had saved her life once. Reference in the episode is made to Old Yeller - who was a rabid dog that became rabid saving his owner's life. And it is heart-breaking that she has to kill him. Before she does so, she tells him to close his eyes, just as Buffy told Angel. And what do I feel? Sympathy?
Kind-hearted fuzzies? No. Anger. It did not work for me emotionally.
At any rate, I have a question for anyone reading this to ponder. How would you react if you found out that someone who had hurt you, really hurt you, was in fact mentally unbalanced at the time and struggling with mental illness? That they had no control. Would this change your feelings towards them? What if you had no way of knowing they were ill at the time? What would you do? Does it make me a bad person that I can't feel sympathy for my own personal Solomon Grundy?
The Grimm's Fairy Tales talk about witches and curses. In the Disneyfied version, there's a handsome prince, the curse comes undone, all's well in the end. In the original, darker version - it's not so black and white. The curse doesn't just break. And the heroine comes out of the briar patch scarred and bloody, but still alive. We kill the witch in the fairy tale as a way of dealing with that inner demon, yet in the older versions, she doesn't die so easily or the way she is portrayed is far less in the favor of the heroine.
I think we all have personal demons. Some of us have names for them. Some of us don't. And everything we do for good or ill affects everyone else in the universe. In our journals, it's all about me. My pain. My ills. My issues.
My art. My creativity. My likes. My strengths. My friends. And I wonder if in all the me-ness and the us-ness we don't inadvertently exclude or circumnavigate around those who don't quite click with us on first glance?
I admit to having a bit of social anxiety. Fear of awkward silences. Which leads to word vomit. There are times, like today, that I fear people. Their judgements, their thoughts, their scorn. While other times, like maybe yesterday, that I don't. I envy those that I perceive don't have these fears, yet I wonder, perhaps they do?
A year ago I vaguely remember having a somewhat emotional and rather heated discussion about forgiveness. At the time I told the person that forgiving was beneficial for the soul, that you do it for yourself not the other person, or some such silly platitude. Now, over a year later, I wonder if it's so easy?
Yes we forget the pains and traumas we go through, but our body doesn't. It
wears them like scars. Sort of like the character Illyria in ATS holds the memories of Fred, like scars on her cortex - shimmering glimmers of light, touch, sense memory that she can't quite understand. I wonder if an emotional scar is not unlike a physical one? The pain is gone. But the nerves remember?
I have a deep scar on my left arm where a biospy was once done ages ago,
it still aches at times. No reason why it should but it does. So yes we move on. The pain fades. We rise above it. Yet, inside...there's still that whisper of remembered pain.
I wonder if the pain is there to remind us not to hurt others? Not to lash out at them. Just because we are incensed or in pain, to somehow pull back, retreat from the world until we are much better. But is that good?
Isn't it better to be with people who can help? Perhaps the way is honesty and responsbility? I'm sorry should count for something. Yet it doesn't anymore.
No one seems to take those words seriously. I say them quite a bit. So much that anom gave me a button to tell me to quit apologizing. It's almost my mantra now. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Because if I say it enough maybe somehow it will resonate. Somehow I can forgive myself for not being strong enough to forgive those who hurt me once upon a time in ways small and large, though oddly the small petty rejections bugged me more. To forgive myself for not being a good enough friend. To forgive myself for not being smart enough
or wise enough to communicate how I feel without bite.
As I continue to push my way through this year, each day getting easier.
I wonder, am I a better person than before? Or just a different one? And where is this road I've stumbled upon leading to? What choices should I make?
And how do those choices affect what leads next? It is a bit like a Grimm's Fairy tale - our lives, I think, we are in the forest, meeting all sorts of fairy tale creatures. Witches that turn into enchanted princesses. Charmed frogs. And little old ladies who eat little children for breakfast. Yet we are also in the glade and the village, each choice twisting and turning us out onto a new and different path. Who we meet on the path and how we relate to them may have a lot to do with who we are at that point on the path in their perspective and who they are in theirs. Are we the witch? The enchanted princess? The cursed bear? The stumbling dwarf? The souled vampire? The chipped vampire? The scarecrow? The pumpkin head? Dorothy? or all of the above?
By the way, in the muppet version of the Wizard of Oz, Miss Piggy is playing all the witches - a stroke of genious, I think, since in reality they are all just facets on the same one. I'm wondering if that's it. Depending on who we are with, we are the Witch of the North, the Witch of the West, the Witch of the East, and the Witch of the South. Wicked. Good. Not so Wicked. Not so Good.
Complicated.
Okay, I hope that made sense. Unedited ramble from my brain.
George RR Martin's A Game of Thorns, which has been recommended to me by three people on my flist. Now, I have not read an epic fantasy in ages, so we'll see if I like it. And it may be a while until I get to it - have to read The Dogs of Babel first for my tiny book club. It has shrunk to three women now.
Watched JL Unlimited, Wake the Dead. Interesting episode. The episode was about a former teammate of the Justice League, Shiara, HawkGirl, who had once cruelly hurt and betrayed them, coming back and helping them - but to do so, she had to kill someone who had become her friend, Solomon Grundy the Zombie. Someone who no longer had control over their mental capabilities and was filled with pain and rage, lashing out at everything around them. No one liked this person, but this woman. And it was this woman who had to kill him.
The episode was an interesting take on an old theme - putting down the old rabid dog and how we deal with someone who has hurt us, deeply. First off, it makes me very angry when people excuse horrible actions based on insanity. Almost as if what the person did was okay because well they are mentally ill. BTVS dealt with this concept a lot. Angelus' killing of Jenny Calendar wasn't Angel's fault, because he was insane, he wasn't Angel. You see? I disagree. I do not think the fact that he was insane at the time takes him off the hook. Which is why I liked the series Angel, because unlike BTVS, it did not let him off the hook. I didn't always feel this way. When I first watched the episode in 1998, I saw it differently. But that was before I was on the recieving end of abuse from a mentally disturbed individual. The individual in question came very close to giving me a nervous breakdown and there was nothing I could do about it. That individual is still hurting people. The individual is bi-polar. He went off lithium the year he went after me. I still bear the scars. He was in a way like Solomon Grundy. Destroying everything in his path. Insane. In my life, I've apparently had two run-ins with individuals who are manic-depressive and at the time I dealt with them, in full lash-out mode. I was unfortunately on the receiving end of the lashing both times. For reasons I still don't completely understand. I blame myself for putting myself there - the second time. And for not seeing what was happening until it was too late the first time. And I did not reacte very well. Since I was not emotionally strong at the time myself - I was suffering post-traumatic stress due to experiences surrounding 9/11. The second round, I was coming off of well the first experience, and in a depression that just kept circling downwards. Both were nasty affairs and I am not proud of how I handled either. And I learned after the fact, way after the fact - months after the fact - that the individual had gone off his meds, was in fact manic-depressive and it was not their fault. Now, I've met other manic-depressives who aren't like this. Who didn't hurt me or anyone I knew about. So this is not a necessary symptom of this disease.
Circling back to Solomon Grundy. Solomon has been driven insane. He is no longer responsible for his actions. The others couldn't deal with him - he hurt them. Superman, Green Latern, Vixen, The Egyptian Dude (no clue what his name is), Aguaman - they just want to kill him. But Hawkgirl cared for him, because he had saved her life once. Reference in the episode is made to Old Yeller - who was a rabid dog that became rabid saving his owner's life. And it is heart-breaking that she has to kill him. Before she does so, she tells him to close his eyes, just as Buffy told Angel. And what do I feel? Sympathy?
Kind-hearted fuzzies? No. Anger. It did not work for me emotionally.
At any rate, I have a question for anyone reading this to ponder. How would you react if you found out that someone who had hurt you, really hurt you, was in fact mentally unbalanced at the time and struggling with mental illness? That they had no control. Would this change your feelings towards them? What if you had no way of knowing they were ill at the time? What would you do? Does it make me a bad person that I can't feel sympathy for my own personal Solomon Grundy?
The Grimm's Fairy Tales talk about witches and curses. In the Disneyfied version, there's a handsome prince, the curse comes undone, all's well in the end. In the original, darker version - it's not so black and white. The curse doesn't just break. And the heroine comes out of the briar patch scarred and bloody, but still alive. We kill the witch in the fairy tale as a way of dealing with that inner demon, yet in the older versions, she doesn't die so easily or the way she is portrayed is far less in the favor of the heroine.
I think we all have personal demons. Some of us have names for them. Some of us don't. And everything we do for good or ill affects everyone else in the universe. In our journals, it's all about me. My pain. My ills. My issues.
My art. My creativity. My likes. My strengths. My friends. And I wonder if in all the me-ness and the us-ness we don't inadvertently exclude or circumnavigate around those who don't quite click with us on first glance?
I admit to having a bit of social anxiety. Fear of awkward silences. Which leads to word vomit. There are times, like today, that I fear people. Their judgements, their thoughts, their scorn. While other times, like maybe yesterday, that I don't. I envy those that I perceive don't have these fears, yet I wonder, perhaps they do?
A year ago I vaguely remember having a somewhat emotional and rather heated discussion about forgiveness. At the time I told the person that forgiving was beneficial for the soul, that you do it for yourself not the other person, or some such silly platitude. Now, over a year later, I wonder if it's so easy?
Yes we forget the pains and traumas we go through, but our body doesn't. It
wears them like scars. Sort of like the character Illyria in ATS holds the memories of Fred, like scars on her cortex - shimmering glimmers of light, touch, sense memory that she can't quite understand. I wonder if an emotional scar is not unlike a physical one? The pain is gone. But the nerves remember?
I have a deep scar on my left arm where a biospy was once done ages ago,
it still aches at times. No reason why it should but it does. So yes we move on. The pain fades. We rise above it. Yet, inside...there's still that whisper of remembered pain.
I wonder if the pain is there to remind us not to hurt others? Not to lash out at them. Just because we are incensed or in pain, to somehow pull back, retreat from the world until we are much better. But is that good?
Isn't it better to be with people who can help? Perhaps the way is honesty and responsbility? I'm sorry should count for something. Yet it doesn't anymore.
No one seems to take those words seriously. I say them quite a bit. So much that anom gave me a button to tell me to quit apologizing. It's almost my mantra now. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Because if I say it enough maybe somehow it will resonate. Somehow I can forgive myself for not being strong enough to forgive those who hurt me once upon a time in ways small and large, though oddly the small petty rejections bugged me more. To forgive myself for not being a good enough friend. To forgive myself for not being smart enough
or wise enough to communicate how I feel without bite.
As I continue to push my way through this year, each day getting easier.
I wonder, am I a better person than before? Or just a different one? And where is this road I've stumbled upon leading to? What choices should I make?
And how do those choices affect what leads next? It is a bit like a Grimm's Fairy tale - our lives, I think, we are in the forest, meeting all sorts of fairy tale creatures. Witches that turn into enchanted princesses. Charmed frogs. And little old ladies who eat little children for breakfast. Yet we are also in the glade and the village, each choice twisting and turning us out onto a new and different path. Who we meet on the path and how we relate to them may have a lot to do with who we are at that point on the path in their perspective and who they are in theirs. Are we the witch? The enchanted princess? The cursed bear? The stumbling dwarf? The souled vampire? The chipped vampire? The scarecrow? The pumpkin head? Dorothy? or all of the above?
By the way, in the muppet version of the Wizard of Oz, Miss Piggy is playing all the witches - a stroke of genious, I think, since in reality they are all just facets on the same one. I'm wondering if that's it. Depending on who we are with, we are the Witch of the North, the Witch of the West, the Witch of the East, and the Witch of the South. Wicked. Good. Not so Wicked. Not so Good.
Complicated.
Okay, I hope that made sense. Unedited ramble from my brain.
OT
Date: 2004-12-19 11:01 am (UTC)My husband addressed this very inadvertently recently. He has never read my lj despite repeated attempts on my part. What he said when I was discussing lj, how close I feel to some of you, partly since I keep up with lj much more than with rl friends and it is easier in lj since the interaction is daily, convenient. I said something about missing the real life interaction in lj, and he said that lj then, is friendship without the work, the daily real life interaction that makes friendship real. The real live trust we give to one another. This struck me on several levels, the main one being what you describe. The nature of this “trust”.
I guess it is partly that any of us could turn this off, walk away and never be heard from again. In friendship, we trust that won’t happen. Our emotional investment. In lj we have no control over that. There is this missing factor here. But then again, in real life people walk away all of the time.
I am not sure of the point I am making, but trust is more flexible and as you say, incomplete on lj and online because of the ability to disappear, to fake it or to vanish without a word. Or maybe with a word. We trust words on the screen and when this veil of words hurt us, the trust is gone. It is fragile enough to begin with, being so sheer on the screen. When we give of ourselves, we open ourselves to pain. But then again, that is true in rl and lj. Either place, trust always has to be earned.
Re: OT
Date: 2004-12-19 02:50 pm (UTC)Agreed.
On livejournal, you also have the communities - if you piss off or inadvertently offend one person - suddenly you get twenty people launching an attack at you. This happened a while ago on someone's journal - I think it was anniesj, who had someone report her to the feds as well as attack her.
We trust that we can say and discuss what bugs us in our own journals without others attacking us - yet, since our journals are on the internet and inter-active, we are bound to offend someone. And if it's a friend from online world? Shudder.
People on livejournal friend and defriend at will. I've limited my journal to 64, not because I don't like the people who've friended me in the past few months, but because I don't have time to read more posts on my journal - it's already unweildly. And I'd cut a few entries, but I don't want to offend anyone. So, I've picked a happy medium. I no longer lock my journal. I figure that everyone may as well have the choice to click on what I have to say. It also makes me a little more wary of what I say and a little more careful. The number of posts I've deleted for fear of reactions, are well, an example of that. And yes, I've considered leaving this odd insular world on more than one occassion. I'm not sure livejournal or the internet is a good place for someone who is mentally ill - since it plays with one's sanity. You establish a parasocial relationship with the people on it - one where you can hide behind a false face and that may or may not just cause more problems. But I'm no psychologist, so I could be wrong on that. And I do know that when I was feeling down and unhappy - it did help pull me out of it. On the other hand there are tales of people who have literally gotten divorces because one of the spouses has spent all of their time on livejournal and the internet, ignoring their family. We trust people on livejournal, sense we know them, but we forget how easy it is for someone to lie to us here, to not tell us everything. In a recent meme I asked if people trusted what others wrote here - most said yes.
Which is interesting, considering that outside of the few people you've met face to face, how do you know what or who these people are?
I honestly think any human interaction contains a certain layer of trust. And the internet with all it's viruses and odd issues of security - no less so.
Not sure that made sense. My responses seem somewhat off on this thread.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-20 02:12 am (UTC)I was once on the fringes of a real case of attention-seeking LJ fraud (someone, I don't think anyone you knew, made up a tale that they were bisexual and being violently queerbashed by fellow pupils at high school) and the anger and betrayal when the person confessed was not pretty.