Oh brother...

I've made allusions to some drama in my personal life over the last few weeks. I've had a falling out with my brother, which has taken me some time to process.

At first I was in shock at the confrontation, and was very hurt by it.

To preface this exchange, my father (who passed when I was 13) was in federal law enforcement, as is my brother currently.

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Then, as it settled in, I became deeply insulted, angry and disappointed.

Immediately after this exchange, I forwarded it to many of my girlfriends, wanting to know their opinions and their reading of the situation. I was overwhelmed. I needed help processing.

At the time I felt like a piece of shit, and they were quick to reinforce my underlying knowledge that I am in fact, not a piece of shit. I am the opposite. I'm pretty kind, and considerate and am trying to do my best.

The intentions my brother assigned to me were hurtful and disrespectful.

Here are some of my friends' reactions - which will allow me to address certain issues.

Calisse, c'est tellement disturbing. I'm sure you are really upset with this. If you want to talk about it, I'm here. It's such a violent interaction.

This little bit includes some French-Canadian swearing. I put this in Blue. It loosely translated to, "Holy shit, this is so disturbing." Her response to me validated my feelings of being attacked, and of his anger and seeming rage were palpable and unwarranted (in my opinion). Even if I was really angry, I would never be so hostile and mean-spirited.

whoa. i am really sorry. this clearly really triggered something for your brother. he obviously does not share the same world view as you about the prison system, and is basing his comments on his own lived experience and probably does not have emotional space (as a protection mechanism from what he experiences at work/has to put up walls to do what he does) to see your perspective.

i wonder if he will ever see your perspective given his own experiences and what he needs to get through his work day. 

he is clearly really upset and in the heat of the moment. it might be best to leave the situation alone for a bit for him to cool down.

I'm sorry that he is bringing your dad into it. that is not cool and he is clearly leveraging that as a way to guilt you into the action he wants. which is super shitty. I'm sorry. 

you are a good person and doing something that you believe in. unfortunately, your family might not believe in it, but that is their shit, not yours. in situation like this with my family i choose to not engage as a form of self preservation. 

i love you lots and am here for you.

I do not negate the fact that I know nothing of my brothers' experience. My main concern, above all else, is how approached me (assuming the worse), his language, and his general tone.

In the case of my above friend, she has a family that's not great. So I know where she comes from with her "not engaging" comment. Most of the initial comments I got were to let it cool off and take some time.

I think in most cases, my friends being really smart and well trained in people and intervention, in empathy and social justice, means we shared similar perspectives. Having said that, I don't know that I'm the participant in this altercation that needed the most help in processing this. Nevertheless, it's my nature.

It took several days and several conversations with friends to help me process it. I also spoke to my mom about it at different times. When it was fresh, and  days later when I had had some time to think about it.

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This was the conversation of the night of. Certain friends I spoke to first, knowing their familiarity with me and my family, or specifically of me.

When I re-read these texts, I can see my willingness to work things out in my head. Part of the subsequent conversations with my mother have been about my brother, how he handles stress and confrontation (poorly) and if he's at able to discuss what happened in a way that would be reflective and helpful to him. I don't know that he's able to do that.

We fall into excusing his behavior, "he's bad with his emotions," "he was too aggressive but he was really upset," and having now stepped back, I reject that. He's a grown ass man. He's my brother, and he shouldn't have come at me like that.

The crux of my disappointment is that he also didn't approach me with curiosity or a willingness to understand, he just attacked me. He could have disagreed with me, or even criticize my choices in a more respectful way.

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The lowest blow of all is referencing my father, more than once. He couldn't own his own anger so he dug up my dad to project shame and disappointment onto a bigger target. This is clearly his lashing out to hurt me.

I also made a point of saying I thought he was wrong. My father instilled in me a type of humanist philosophy. He challenged me and gave my philosophy books. I remember a conversation with him about the Oka Crisis, once that left me thinking he was sympathetic to the indigenous position and that he felt they had every right to their land and their protest.

My father was capable of nuance. He was able to hold two thoughts at once, and he nurtured and encouraged my pre-disposition to question everything.

My father is dead. He stopped growing and changing in October of 1997. I would like to think that had he lived, he would have been able to keep learning and growing, the way I aim to. If that were the case, his opinions and methods would have been subject to change.

I would like to think the same of my brother - but do not. Not today. He doesn't seem eager to better himself spiritually or intellectually. He doesn't seem to desire challenging himself in any way. He has his life, he has his priorities. And I have mine.

This fight also punctuated thoughts and fears I've had about him but have supressed. Namely his racism and sexism, and the way he speaks to his partner and children.

He no doubt has a lot of opinions about me and how I choose to live my life.

We're very different, and I don't entirely know how to move on from here. For now, it's been space. We haven't communicated.

I don't see my views or my personal moral code changing anytime soon. I still do not think I did anything wrong. I do not think I have anything to apologize for.

The disappointment that I feel in my brother about his assumptions about me and his approach to our discussion also extends to how I feel he's handled the days since.

We're in very different places, and other than my mother, I don't know what links us right now.

He doesn't feel like a brother, he feels like an antagonist.

Lidia Yuknavitch's The Small Backs of Children.

Where are the borders of art? 

Where are the borders of a woman's body?
How unimaginable is one without the other?
When we think of violence, are we not aware, as women, of our place within the world of men?
The borders of our body, of our safe spaces, of hostile spaces?

I just finished reading The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch and I am re-committed to my impression of her as a fluid, visceral representation of what it is to write of art, trauma, violence and living a woman's experience.

I was floored when I read her memoir, The Chronology of Water. It's lead me here, to her novel, which kept me as enamored.

It's a novel, yes, but I feel as though the narrative of people and places is secondary to the passages that describe life so astutely. This book features a group of friends, all artists and creators, juxtaposed to a young girl in eastern Europe, orphaned by war and surviving through art, grit, and the persistence of young blood.

There are segments of her book that discuss art and experience, art as expression, as language, as reference point, as both anchor and catalyst. These sections created in me more questions. An infinite amount. Sometimes they fuse with and of the body, and gender and sexuality pour into her writing. Violence as commonplace, as a masculine language and threat. She has a similar juncture in violence, trauma, and women's bodies. One intrinsically stomped onto the other.

Our blood is all over this world.

Our greatest threat is so linked to us.

And of trauma, of death and loss and surviving the horrific, does our tongue split, now able to speak two languages? As if at different frequencies, two languages in parallel.

Yes I understand your desire for me to print this document, to do this grocery shopping, to celebrate this holiday, but do you understand that feeling, the deep rumble that comes from prolonged, wretched pain, where you become diluted by the incessancy of it, and become convinced your threshold makes you the undead, untouchable. Have you known that pain? No? Then we do not speak the same language. But yes, I do enjoy coffee. And yes, the weather has improved.

From page 69:

Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or life up and away from self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might  be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive?

This actually heavily links to the conversations I've been having with my best friend S regarding HBO's Westworld. There is an awful lot to unpack regarding the nature of trauma. If you have not watched Westworld - do not read anything about it! I went in blind and was able to discover and discuss things as I went and it's been very interesting!

Are our trauma's our cornerstones? 

I'd read something recently about the way in which trauma can root certain pathways in the brain, making it more difficult to adapt or change habits. Isn't this a scientific explanation for what we already know? How our wounds remind us, how old habits die hard? Aren't we creatures of narrative, of story? Isn't the story we hear most often our own?

Yuknavitch also has these really bodied moments, that represent those abstract experiences of being alive and sentient but not fully present in our culture and context. Detached. From page 93:

Then he thinks: love is an abstract word coming from a face hole.

I guess the only alienating bit to Lidia's novel is how it's populated by successful artists. Confident in their art. Monied. That's my alien experience. My unknown. Where art is a work, a calling, and not a form of communication and a way of being, of purging that is necessary.

Pet peeves and random loves.

Look, I know this is crazy - to start an official list of my pet peeves - but sometimes one comes up and then I think about their being others and I can never really name them.

So, it's educational-ish.

Also, I'm not including the straight forward stuff. If you're a sexist jackass, that's beyond being a pet peeve that's just like - you're a terrible person and need to work on yourself.


Pet peeves!

• When someone mispronounces a name on purpose. It's usually continually, and it's usually because the person is of another culture or language group.


• Other people's mouth noises. Especially the sucking of teeth. Or the wet chewing of gum. Or people who give super wet kisses. It makes my shoulders crunch and makes me swat my ears.


• Someone cutting their finger nails anywhere but at home or in a salon. This includes at work, at your desk, and also on the subway or bus. You frigan animals.


• When people act uppity with service staff. Oooof. Hard one for me. Say please and thank you. Be polite. Giving someone shit because you can (which seems like a real thing for some people) is infuriating to watch. Especially young girls/teens in service jobs. I feel like certain men love making things hard for them (because nobody wanted to touch their dicks in high school). I also, love love love stepping in. The 16 year-old Tim Horton's cashier can't call you off because she's trying to keep her job, but I fucking can.
  
  You've either worked your way through service jobs (like the majority of the population) and can empathise, or you haven't. If you haven't you're part of the 1% and can fuck right off.


• People who stare-down people who are speaking a "foreign" language. It's one thing to look out of curiosity, but some folks straight-up give stank face. Now, I live in Quebec, the Montreal area specifically, so there is a context here of language-based strife. Having said that, it's 2016, and people speak all sorts of languages, deal with it.
  
  This flips on its head when it's a small child though. I find that funny. It's happened many a time with friends. We'll be out for a meal at a restaurant and speaking English and a small person will just stare at us. English is alien to some, spoken only by Justin Bieber and other far-away pop culture icons!
  
  Also, I want to highlight that for ever negative reaction I've had, I've had more of older women and men saying they think it's lovely we're bilingual, or that they wish they spoke two languages, or that they wish they had taken the time to learn English so they could travel comfortably.
  
  S is one of my closest friends, and she and I speak both languages to each other, equally. She's francophone, I'm an anglophone, and we're both bilingual, so we'll switch back and forth. We were stopped once by a cashier who asked, "Wait, are you two speaking bilingual?" As if it itself is a language. Which it kind of is. It's so culturally specific. I digress!


• White people with dreadlocks.


• Dreams that refuse to obey any kind of logic. Like I have reoccurring zombie dreams where the zombies are too god damn fast or smart. Or that I shoot and they refuse to die. There is an established canon brain, don't be a fucking asshole. Then I wake up and think maybe my id is trying to teach me something about the inevitability of death and then I just get annoyed all over again. My brain is fucking exhausting you guys.

Random loves / favourites!

• Making a complete stranger laugh really hard. Once I was following a co-worker really closely while walking and he decided half-way through a busy intersection that he didn't have enough time and turned around. Instead of making any decisions for myself I just kind of did a physical-comedy silly run behind him and looked like I was a Japanimation fat eggplant freaking out. Once we were safely back on the side walk my co-worker and I laughed heartily and so did the car stopped at the red light in front of us. It was terribly cute.


• When you pull up to a red light and look over at the car next to you and there's a dog in the passenger seat. Ideally you make eye contact. Best is when the window is open and you can say hello. Tops tops tops is when the window is open, you say hello, their human notices, but you continue to ignore the human and speak only to the dog, but the human's into it.


• The sound of underwear snapping when I pull them over my butt cheeks. Love it.


• When a random neighbourhood cat comes up to your patio door and just looks into your house. I inevitably walk up to it to say hello, it freaks out and acts surprised, though the little guy was looking into my house.

Still defining depression.

There's an article over at The Atlantic today entitled Why Depression Needs A New Definition. The article peruses past and present namings of depression and their etymology.

In 1969, the American existential psychologist Rollo May wrote in his book Love and Will that “depression is the inability to construct a future,” while the cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis argued in 1987 that depression, unlike “appropriate sadness,” stemmed from “irrational beliefs”—“absolutistic, dogmatic shoulds, oughts, and musts,” he wrote—that left sufferers ill-equipped to deal with even mild setbacks.

I always find this interesting, because I'm driven to find language that aids the representation of suffering from depression. Context, and whom is defining depression (or any mental illness) is so important, and credibility (in my eyes) isn't necessarily based on a medical degree here. But, what is used by the medical community affects the legitimacy of my condition as well as the way I'm treated by the medical establishment.

The worry is that the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is still vague when it comes to depression. There still seems to be a lot missing, and varying degrees of depression and a cacophony of symptoms are all given the same weight. As Tom Insel from The National Institute for Mental Health is quoted as saying in the article:

Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.

Bruce Cuthburt (also from NIMH) adds:

Our current concept of depression is left over from times when we didn’t really understand it very much. We know so much more about it now—physically, genetically, neurochemically—and we should be using that.

It just seems like so much about mental illness is unknown. There is still so little fact regarding something I'm living with. I'm on meds - I'm on increasingly more meds. Will my generation be that who lived and died by depression the way people died flu's we now don't even think about? How much of what is being talked about as science and medicine is actually just the result of guess-work and lobbying?

"...The absence of exact information.”

Currently reading Men Explain Things to Me, a book I highly recommend. I was pulled into a section on Virginia Woolf and the limits of language:

“There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother’s, or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information.”

- Rebecca Solnit in Men Explain Things to Me, page 87.