Some sentences make me happy

My school readings are so precious to me. They make me feel known and understood.

This morning I read about subjective omnipotence and objective reality. Subjective omnipotence is what a baby experiences: It has a need, cries, and then, as if by magic, the mother’s breast appears. The baby feels as if it is making the breast appear with its omnipotence: A wish makes things happen. Objective reality is when you grow up and realize that you depend on others’ wills to fulfill your needs. What happens in between these two forms of experience is the transitional experience.

My book Freud and Beyond says:

“The person who lives completely in objective reality is a false self without a subjective center, completely oriented toward the expectations of others, toward external stimuli.”

“In experience organized according to objective reality, the child feels she has to find the desired object out in the world; she is acutely aware of the separateness and distinctness of the object and her lack of control over it.”

“What is crucial in good-enough parenting with respect to transitional experience is that the parent does not challenge its ambiguity. The specialness of the teddy bear is accepted.”

After I read this, I felt good. I held on to my book like a treasure for it holds a truth that is helping to change my reality.

Seriously

I asked my brother if he noticed any change in me since the last time he saw me about a year ago, and he said “You’re not as serious.”

I win!

Maui playlist

I just spent four days on Maui with my brother and some of his friends. They were all here for a tech conference, and I joined them afterwards for a few more days of laziness on the beach. My favorite part was last night when it was just my brother and I in our room, and I played some music for him on my phone. These are the songs I played, all new favorites from within the last year or so:

Led Er Est – Plants
Led Er Est – Port Isabel
Proem – When Frailty Fails
oOoOO – Burnout Eyess
The Soft Moon – When It’s Over

IUD, Part II

So about three years ago I got an IUD. It afforded me birth control I didn’t have to think about.

Earlier this year I somehow inserted (parts of?) a tampon applicator and ended up having to dig for pieces of soggy cardboard hours later and pull them out. I found one particularly stubborn “piece of cardboard” really high up there and I couldn’t get a good enough grip on it to pull it out. After trying to yank it out about four or five times, I realized oh shit. That’s not a piece of tampon applicator. That’s the string of my IUD. I decided to stop pulling immediately because that needed to stay there.

I did some research to see if it was possible to accidentally pull the IUD out or cause any other kind of damage by pulling on the string, but it was inconclusive and all I really left with was the idea to have the IUD checked at my next OB-GYN appointment. I didn’t worry too much about it because every time I reached up there, all I could feel was the strings, so clearly I hadn’t pulled it out. Right?

Another thing I had noticed over the last few months was some pressure on my left ovary. I wondered if I had a cyst there. Or maybe even cervical cancer. The pressure came and went over the course of my cycle; sometimes it was really noticeable, sometimes barely there. I wondered if it had something to do with me having pulled on the IUD string but I didn’t really know how. Nevertheless, I decided to have that checked out at my next OB-GYN appointment as well.

That appointment was today. My doctor said that an ultrasound would be able to verify both of those things: The location of my IUD and the existence of a cyst. The ultrasound clearly showed that there was no cyst: My ovaries were empty like a virgin’s. But then she said “You know your body well.” The IUD had indeed been moved from its desired location. From what I understood, it was sitting too low and thus not as effective at preventing a pregnancy. She said that she was not able to simply move it; instead she would have to pull it out and insert a new one.

I was scared because there had been some complications the last time. My cervix had been very uptight. And this time there was no boyfriend to hold my hand or pet my head. But the doctor seemed almost excited to perform this procedure, so I got kind of excited too. I thought, why not give it a try. Maybe my cervix has lightened up a bit.

Since my doctor knew about my uptight cervix, she decided to not even try a dry run but immediately go for the injection to numb it. I’m pretty sure she injected me about two or three times but once again, I barely felt it. And I love that each time she poked my cervix with a needle she said “Here is some numbing medicine.”

And then she tried to get the old IUD out. The numbing medicine takes effect almost immediately so any pulling, prying and popping she did just felt like mild annoyances. One time she almost pulled me off the table. Yes, me, as in the entire person. “Is it just really stuck up there?” I asked, making small-talk. “Yeah,” she said. Then she turned to the nurse and said “Would you get me the, you know, the really long–?” And the nurse said “Yes, certainly.” I have no idea what these really long things were, but I do know that my doctor stuck them up my cervix. And then, I think, she kind of fumbled in the dark with them. She said “I’m sorry, I’m just looking everywhere in your uterus for the IUD.” “Oh, sure, no problem,” I said. I felt this section of my uterine wall being poked, then that. She said “Let me know if you need me to take a break.” I said “It’s okay. It feels weird but it’s not unbearable.” It’s true. I was sufficiently numbed so that it only felt like mild cramps.

Then she pulled really hard, almost pulling me off the table again, and then she said “Oh, thank God.” And she took some gigantic tongues and plucked something from right outside my vaginal opening. She held it up, and it was my bloody IUD. She said “I was starting to get so depressed because I wasn’t sure if I was going to get it out.” I said “It was just really lost in there, huh?” She said “Yeah, I’m thinking it was partially embedded.” PARTIALLY EMBEDDED? Holy shit, those are some gnarly words. I’m glad she didn’t use those words until after it was already over. I think if I had known earlier that my IUD was PARTIALLY EMBEDDED in what, my uterine wall? I would have freaked out. She told me that the string had broken off. She also said that “this” might explain the pressure I had been feeling on my ovary. It makes sense to me: Maybe the IUD had been partially embedded on the left side, creating the pressure there.

So now she still had to insert the new IUD. After what I had already been through, this seemed like a footnote. She asked the nurse to bring the ultrasound machine in again, so that she could watch the IUD on the monitor as it went into me, to ensure that it was in the right place. The nurse held the ultrasound dildo firmly against my belly, and the doctor inserted the IUD while they both watched the monitor. The nurse said that was the coolest thing she had seen and she wanted to do that all the time from now on. Then I went downstairs to have some blood drawn for STD tests. I was such a trooper today!

That was about six hours ago. It hurts down there, but not nearly as badly as it did last time. I’m having intermittent cramps, and I especially feel a pain on the left side. I imagine that’s the wound that was left when the PARTIALLY EMBEDDED IUD was dislodged from my flesh. I’ll be curious to see if the pressure subsides on the left side now that the old IUD is out.

God, I love writing about medical procedures!

Happy soulstice

I went into meditative ritual mode at 12:34pm today and stayed there until after dark. A Mary candle in my room had been burning all night and continued to burn all day. I did some domestic chores and put up a new string of fairy lights. Now I think it wasn’t a coincidence that I had left the lights sitting for a couple of weeks after buying them: they wanted to be put up today. I listened to Solstice by Björk on repeat, in my room and on my headphones, for a total of 64 times. I went for a walk to Holly Park because I hadn’t been there in years, and it had been calling me. I wore a black and white skirt, a black T-shirt with white polka dots, a black coat and a white hood, a black bra and white panties. Black and white, dark and light, good and bad, right and wrong, happy and sad. Accepting the cycles and rhythms. Or trying to.

I came home and lit my new amber-scented candle and meditated. I lit another Mary candle outside to be burnt down as it wants to. Then I did Christine Arylo’s winter solstice meditation and loved it. I painted my nails. Then I opened three packages that had come in the mail, all Christmas presents from my mom. Books and candy. Today is the real festival of light.

My New Year’s resolution for 2012: To let myself be. That is all. 2012 is my year. The year of the dragon.

Oh shit!

I was just singing a little song to myself, and then I imagined myself singing that song to a lover, and that felt pretty good, and then I thought about how grateful I am that I finally have enough confidence to sing a song to someone, and then I imagined myself singing a song to my teenage child, and that didn’t feel so good because I imagined my teenage child getting embarrassed and scornful and wanting me to stop, and then I thought well, maybe I was right in holding back my song all these years, but then I thought wait. If the teenager doesn’t like my song, that’s probably just because the teenager doesn’t like herself very much. That’s why it’s so easy to sing songs to children because they like themselves and so they like your song. So if the teenager doesn’t like my song, that’s her problem, not mine. And then I thought about all those times teenagers are dicks to their parents and how that says a lot more about how the teenagers feel about themselves than it says about the parents. And then I thought about all those times my parents were dicks to me and how that said a lot more about how they felt about themselves than it said about me, and then I was like shit. That’s awesome. I’m going to sing as much as I want!

T-group

I have been wanting to write about T-group but I was afraid of not being able to do it justice. T-group is kind of like Burning Man in that you have to experience it to really get it. No amount of explanations or mental snapshots will be able to convey what it was like or why it was so valuable to me.

But I will try. This semester one of my classes was Group Dynamics. And this class was “a T-group.” I say was because this class didn’t last all semester and is already over. We met for a total of about 36 hours spread over the week-long retreat in August and over two more weekends in September and October, usually in 6-hour sessions with breaks.

The T in T-group stands for sensitivity training. T-groups are designed for people such as therapists who will be faced with other people’s feelings directed towards them and who need to be able to handle these feelings compassionately. As a therapist, clients might hate you or they might love you. They might tell you how incompetent you are or they might tell you they are in love with you. The thing is that everyone has other people’s feelings directed at them all the time, not just therapists! That’s why this experience was so valuable to me not just as a future therapist but also, and more importantly, as a human being.

What happened in T-group is that we sat around in a circle–12 of us, plus our instructor, a professor of psychology who had led many T-groups before. And the instruction was to talk about nothing but our feelings as a result of being in this particular group in this particular moment with these particular people. In the beginning we didn’t know each other at all. And you might think, “What kind of feelings are you going to have about complete strangers?” The answer is usually a lot. You might have prejudices, you might have admiration. You might feel repelled from some people and drawn to others. And that’s where you start. And as you express things such as “I really like you, and I have noticed that I have a strong desire for you to like me back,” feelings might come up in other people, such as jealousy or annoyance.

There is a saying that what happens in T-group stays in T-group. We weren’t even allowed to process what happened with each other outside of T-group. So I can’t talk in detail about some of the interactions that happened in our group–perhaps this is another reason why I have been hesitant to write about it–but I can talk about my own personal experience. And these are some of the things I got to face:

1) My fear of rejection from men. I noticed right away that I was not worried at all about connecting with the women in the group but felt insecure around the men, gay or straight.

2) My physical appearance: One day we talked quite a bit about how my piercings, black clothes, dark eyeliner, etc. affect others.

3) My discomfort with being German and having an accent: We touched on it a little but I want to go into it more in therapy.

Even though it might sound like it, T-group is not group therapy. It’s just about expressing feelings as they arise. It’s very focused on the present moment. We were asked to express our feelings as they related to a specific behavior by another person or event in the group. We even had a template for this:

“When you ____________, I felt ___________.”

The whole experience felt a little bit like Communicating Feelings 101. Maybe that’s why I got so much out of it: I had been lacking that in my life.

Dick

I made the best pun in therapy today. I said “I don’t want to be such a dick to myself anymore.” And what’s so great about that is that we were talking about my relationships to men, sex and penis-induced orgasms. You should have been there.

The cruel Midwest

I have a friend who shaves his head, is really tall and wears long skirts and platform boots to work. I also have a friend who has dreads past his butt and wears elaborate hoop earrings. Aside from their eccentric appearance, what these two friends have in common is that they are, at least in my experience, very comfortable with who they are. This is in contrast to many other freaks I know who have a certain insecurity about their freakish nature, who feel like outcasts. It just so happens that both of these confident friends grew up in small Midwestern towns, and the other day I talked about this to another freak from Oklahoma. He explained to me that when you grow up in an environment that is very hostile to freakishness, you develop a certain shell to the point that you don’t care anymore. The hostility just rolls right off of you. Then, when you come to a place like San Francisco which embraces freaks, you tend to feel very comfortable, like, “Oh hey, finally. There is all these other me’s running around here.” And I was like, well, I’m a freak from a small (not Midwestern but German) town, so why didn’t this happen to me? How did I grow up to be a freak with so much insecurity?

And I have two possible theories for this:

1) I didn’t get enough hostility and didn’t feel quite lonely enough as a youngster to develop the shell my friend spoke of: I always had friends and I never went through a period of being completely shunned by everyone in town due to my appearance. So maybe I just didn’t grow up in a black-and-white enough world to really feel the contrast when moving to San Francisco.

2) I was actually rejected by the freaks in my town, not by the “normal” people: There was a period as a teenager when I started dressing in a more freakish way but it was in line with a trend that many other teenagers were also embracing. And I ended up not getting along and feeling very intimidated by many of the very kids that dressed like me and liked the same music as me. Also, I don’t know if that actually counts as being a freak or if I was simply trying to fit in with the cool kids.

So maybe what happened to me is that I wasn’t actually a real freak and as a result I have felt insecure around people I perceive as real freaks. Maybe by the time I became a real freak, i.e. embodied my very own brand of eccentric, which was during my year as an exchange student in 1993/4, I had developed too much insecurity and not enough chip-off-my-shoulder confidence to feel comfortable among my own.

It wasn’t until I entered the darker communities in the Bay Area about five years ago that I felt truly embraced by a subculture that felt like my own. And now this comfort is expanding outwards to other communities. I think the reason it has been such a difficult and serpentine journey for me is that I felt rejected by my own subculture in Germany and instead of dealing with it, I ran away to America. At first America seemed like heaven with its kneesock-wearing thrift store whores, but my internal conflict soon caught up with me. Am I really a freak? Do freaks really like me? Yes and yes, I think.

The beginnings of a fashion sense

When I was about 9, I remember my 15-year-old neighbor wearing oversize wool sweaters that went almost down to her knees. I didn’t really understand why she wore those huge sweaters–I didn’t think they looked particularly good, and they also didn’t seem very practical. But I did understand that she was making a fashion statement. To me, she was sending the message that she was beautiful in her ugly sweaters, that she was subversive and rebellious, that she was expressing emotions through her clothing, and that she was in on a secret that I hadn’t yet discovered.