[Minor Profanity Warning]
I have been taught a form of shamanism — or perhaps it’s just a crazy dude’s interpretation of reality — since I was seven years old. Native American shamanism. I do not know what tribe it comes from, but I know there are more than three tribes in me. The ones I have been told were Wyandotte, Sioux, and Navajo. I do not know how likely it is for these three tribes to become mixed or if it’s real because my father is insane. Maybe I am, too.
I always questioned my reality. I accept The Truth(TM) as told to me by others to the best of my ability, but their truth is not always The Truth(TM). Since my self-perception in early childhood was weak or completely negative, I came to rely on others giving me unsolicited and meaningful compliments in order to develop a compass, a sense of life, a sense of reality. In order to love myself instead of loathe myself.
My reality as a child was that I was an unwanted and unnecessary part of the family. I was overlooked. I was ignored. I was physically abused. I was raped. And then, when my elder sister came to live with us, I was verbally and emotionally abused. Emotionally twisted up. Injected with venom as strong as puffer fish. It poisoned me thoroughly because I believed her. I believed her that I was an animal. “Were you born in a barn? SHUT THE DOOR!” I was never told that as a child before she appeared. My parents would just shut the door behind me if they wanted the door shut. There was no rational discussion about the importance of keeping the cool air in during the summer time, just yelling. Anger. Discord. It hurt me to hear these things, especially when it was so different from the rest of my upbringing. At least that abuse didn’t include venom.
Being autistic, the yelling affected me deeply. It disturbed my equilibrium. Even when it wasn’t directed at me and ‘the adults’ were fighting each other (or the other children). I wanted to get away from all the verbal hatred. I wanted to be invisible. I wanted it to cease. This led to hiding in my room, staying away from everyone else to the best of my ability. In the days without portable electronics, this left very few things to do: reading, writing, music composition (well, a baby step in the direction of that), listening to the radio and singing along, and… practicing shamanism.
I had friends sporadically but they always did something to make me feel like an alien. They never really explained what I’d done. Maybe I have a learning disability. I know I was an embarrassment because I was raised like an animal. It was more than being called an animal… I was raised like one. I was left to my own devices to figure out what to do with my period, for instance. This was terrible… if I’d know a period came approximately every 28 days, I could have been prepared. “Witchy woman magic” was foreign to me most of my life. It led to a very embarrassing dark time in my life where I was nicknamed Period Stain by my peers and harassed relentlessly.
I know the girl who called me Period Stain to my face was just hurting inside. The ones who must’ve been thinking it and wouldn’t say it to me are assholes for not telling me. To that one girl who informed me kindly that I started my period in school: THANK YOU. You were the only kind person about that and I appreciate your maturity and your openness and how inclusive you were about it and I love you for that. Thank you. You were the only one to tell me all throughout middle school that I’d started it during classes. It seemed to me it always started during the middle of the day, too. It was so embarrassing.
It turns out shamanism has no advice on the trials and tribulations of a woman’s body going through puberty. There is no guidance from the Great Spirit to tell me how being female works. And my mother? Heh. She knew I struggled. If she ever explained anything to me, I have no recollection of it. If she ever tried to tell me how to use a maxi pad — always maxi pads because tampons were for rich people — I don’t recall it. I remember staying at a friend’s house once and I was all covered in blood and she tried to help me and I declined out of extreme shame. I was ashamed. I didn’t know what to do, nobody told me how to figure it out, and accepting help seemed like weakness then. My ‘parents’ made it seem like such a chore whenever I asked for help, so I was left to simply ‘figure it out.’ People hedge around the bush all the time around me, saying things that you have to build a bridge in order to understand what they mean. I regret declining my friend’s help, it probably put a rift between us. It probably hurt our relationship completely that I didn’t just ask to borrow a skirt or pants for the night. It was the epitome of self-loathing. And I did loathe myself. Completely. Thanks to my bitch sister, no less.
I’m pretty sure feeling like I need to build bridges between what is said and what is meant is the autism part of this equation. I literally don’t know what people mean most of the time unless they are blunt. And even when I do know what they mean, I tend to only respond to the literal translation of what they said because every time I freely interpret what is said, I’m wrong. Ever since my critical thinking course in tech school, where I wrote a ten minute speech on Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), I’d internalized a quote attributed to him, though it’s unlikely to be his: “Say what you mean and mean what you say. Those that matter don’t mind and those that mind don’t matter.” But people don’t say what they mean. Sometimes, they don’t mean what they say, either. In fact, most of the time, they don’t mean what they say. Half the time, they’re lying to themselves and then by proxy they lie to me. It’s because they can’t handle the truth. They haven’t matured enough to accept their part in the equation.
Dr. Seuss is a legend in my world. He wrote silly stories that were touching… to me, anyway. Maybe I let the art speak to my soul more than the silly rhymes. I saw his imagination before me as a small child and I was enticed. Do you know his goal was to teach ~55 words per book to children? He challenged himself to do it because someone else’s record was lower (maybe 25? I can’t remember now, it’s been a long time since I researched him… perhaps I’ll do it again) and then he broke the record, just like that, with One Fish, Two Fish. His books had a goal, despite being silly and fun to read and hear.
I admire Mr. Geisel greatly, as you can see. He had a serious mission. And his drawings were bizarre because he couldn’t draw, people! Truffela Trees are just badly drawn palm trees, my friends. He made up words to rhyme with things that don’t really have words that rhyme with them. He also made up words in order to psyche out the reader. Whatever you expected to be next is not what came next. It helped me develop a lack of expectation for what came next because he was always left field. (I mean, what were Sneetches based upon? I’m sure a real animal is at the heart of that one…)
There is something to be said about rhymes. It’s how we passed down oral traditions more easily in the past, before the written word. There were no rhymes when it came to passing down shaman rites. There was barely any instruction, really. And I was instructed by a man who wanted to control every aspect of my life to satisfy his own schizophrenia paranoia. I mean, I’m not a psychology professional, but I’ve read over 100 psychology texts and I did live with him for twenty odd years. As for shamanism, I only remember receiving a handful of lessons. The most prevalent one was how to hold Power.
Is it real or is it fake? Is what I was told actuality? Is what I feel true? I sense things in the metaphysical aspect of this universe ever since I learned to hold Power. I’ve long thought I was empathic and that I could sense the feelings of others from afar. But only after I’d successfully put mine into a jar. A jar that was then put on a shelf and ignored forevermore. That is, until it fell and shattered into a million pieces. Pieces I’m still picking up. Being able to sense the feelings (or at least think that I do) of others has been a massive help in getting along with humanity at large. I think it is a gift the entire human race ought to develop.
I was taught to ignore Self. I was taught a lot of things, including Going Silent, which is to suppress active thoughts and just be. I was taught to just keep moving, never looking back at what had happened. Looking back at what happened in the past meant missing opportunities of some sort in the present. It meant pain. It meant remembering how much I was hated, despised, ridiculed, and told that I was nothing. I was not beloved in any sense of the word to anyone in this world. If I am, they did not tell me in a way that I understand. If they told me and I did understand, they then betrayed that understanding with deception or abuse. I thought something was wrong with me. I was flawed to the core and completely unlovable.
I’ve tried my hand at love nine times. I’ve given up on finding it, essentially. I shot my last shot in early 2021. I proposed to a man out of the blue and he never responded. My own mental illness from nearly dying of malnutrition led me to believe we had been speaking to each other via telepathy for six months. I wrote him one million words to explain our entire 15 year friendship and nothing happened. I created a marriage proposal video and delivered it on Valentine’s day. Not a word was returned. I made epic playlists (I thought) and delivered them. I drew my story out for him to see and I showed friends to make sure I explained things properly before I delivered them. Not a peep.
Everyone told me that he had to be with someone else, but I didn’t believe it because just before that he had asked me if I wanted kids or not. That was about a year before the proposal took place. Maybe people move on quicker than I thought was possible from something so immense. Maybe I mistook this as flirting and it’s not at all like I think it is. I was dying at the time, so I forgive myself for mistaking his comments for flirting. I was dying all year, really. He also said the most bizarre thing some time four months prior to that proposal. Something about portion sizes in America being awesome but the food tasting better in England. I told him I didn’t want to be anywhere but I failed to tell him why: because I was actively starving to death and it wasn’t of my own volition (this time.) Later, I realized this was most likely his way of asking if we were meeting on his soil or mine. I wish him peace now; I let go of it all.
I always told myself if I was going to suicide, it’d be through starvation, because it took the absolute most dedication. If I wanted to die that badly, I had to mean it. I almost succeeded, this time. And then, when I was staring death in the face, I decided to live instead. How fickle I am! How troublesome this all is! October 2020, when he asked indirectly about food here or there, I couldn’t eat. I shoveled food in twice a week, popping supplements in between to stay alive. I wanted to eat but it hurt to digest anything but perfectly ripe apples and pears. If I’d thought about it, I would have cooked them to be soft, but there was next to no thought in my stupid brain, I’ll tell you that.
I’m so angry with myself, to be honest. I did that to my body. I ripped up and shredded my digestive tract with relentless dairy consumption. Dairy is not my friend; it is my enemy. I am allergic to it, or the bacteria in it is a problem, or something. I have gone to doctors and gotten a run-around on it because I can’t possibly know what’s wrong with me to isolate it down to a single test I know I need. (Has that happened to you? What the hell is wrong with caregivers today?)
I might be celiac, too. I really don’t care other than it means being more regimented. Checking every single label for the allergen content of ‘Wheat.’ However, since so many people are gluten-free, I don’t know why they don’t just put ‘Gluten’ on the label of things with gluten in them. Because gluten appears in more than just wheat, my friends. And it’s a cross-contaminant. If it doesn’t say it’s certified gluten-free, it’s got gluten in it. It might be so minuscule you don’t notice it immediately, but for someone with a serious problem with gluten, even just a tiny bit is enough to wreak havoc.
While I struggled to live, I turned to Udemy.com to learn Usui Reiki from Melissa Crowhurst. First of all: Thank you, Ms. Crowhurst. You helped save my life. First, I want to tell you that your foundation videos/teaching in Section 2 validated my existence. Shamanism, as it turned out, is another form of reiki. I was already strong in the shaman sense but I only knew how to collect energy for myself, not how to direct it to heal. In fact, my father thought he could do the opposite, but now I know better. I also know being an enormous battery of sorts is no use if it never powers anything and merely collects energy relentlessly. In fact, I was overcharged at that point in my life and I had to discharge it into objects to start feeling sane once more.
I used Usui reiki to long distance heal the man I proposed to on V-Day 2021 as an experiment in the summer of 2020. The healing event was right before I understood how dire my body’s state had become, or I’d have just focused on myself alone. He’d slept funny the night before and complained of it… the kind of pain that persists pretty much all day from a muscle knot in the mid-back or shoulder area, something that causes consistent annoying tension throughout the upper spine and, ultimately, the nerves along the scalp. Nothing serious, of course, but completely annoying as you already know if you’ve experienced this.
I used a combination of shamanism and Usui reiki that day to heal him. I didn’t know what I was doing wasn’t just Usui reiki at that moment in time. I’ve developed something I call spirit walking, where my metaphysical self can travel places. It’s not like astral projection; people say their consciousness goes somewhere during that. I don’t believe in astral projection, actually. (Please forgive me, hippie friends who do believe in it. I’ve never done it, so I cannot verify it to validate you.) My consciousness stays at home, thank you.
I projected my imagination, if you will, until I found a representation of that man in my mind’s eye. And when I found him, I saw something that looked like a tangled up ball of yarn or string that went from his temple to his collarbone. It was complex and I couldn’t tell where it all began, really. I could see where it ended, but not where it began. I know in reiki, you merely direct the energy of the cosmos at someone, but I did something a little different.
First and foremost, I have to say now: I acquired his permission to heal him. I had waited for him to complain of something and then offered to heal him. I do not suggest trying this with an unwilling victim. You will be violating them if you do. You should never speak to a person’s soul without their permission. And if you ever try to speak to mine without my permission, I will retaliate. I will hurt you. You are now warned.
I saw that tangled up knot and I asked him in the metaphysical, again, for permission to heal. He agreed a second time in the metaphysical. I used my metaphysical ‘hands’ to try to tease the knot out. I put them around his head as gently as possible, positioning my fingers around the start of that knot at the back of his head, and then I just wiggled my fingertips in very slow and purposeful movements until I began to cry. When I cry, I know I succeed in healing. I doubt everyone cries when they heal, but I do. I discovered that prior to that day with a few normal Usui reiki sessions. The knot came undone and I pulled the string out of him, very carefully and slowly.
Forty five minutes later, I asked the man how he was doing in the real world. Through the internet. Through text. He told me, ‘I feel pretty much normal… wait a minute! I never recover that quickly!’ I think he also asked me what I did. I told him I healed him. I didn’t really elaborate yet because I had an experience I couldn’t put into words. Once I could, that was included in those million words for him.
That image haunted me for ages, the knotted string in his head. It was August (or maybe even as early as July) in 2020 and it didn’t leave my head until I decided to draw it in December of 2020. While I was drawing it on December 20th of 2020, I realized I’d told that man years prior that I’d meet him for Christmas. I’d completely forgotten it during my struggle to stay alive, sadly. I missed it. That statement about food in October had to be some sort of, ‘Are we meeting there or here?’ If only he’d put a question mark on it, I would have understood. I mean, why else would he try to talk to me about food in both countries at the same time?
We had bonded over food for over a decade. I’d told him several times that year I’d been having trouble eating, but I never really painted the picture properly to anyone. I never told anyone exactly how I struggled; I just kept being less and less present. I’m not really one for complaining. It doesn’t solve my problems to bitch about them. It certainly didn’t help me eat more food to lament over not eating food. Nay, the 66 supplements I took every day helped with that, ultimately.
He talked to me about food (and I guess also meeting?) in the month I thought I was going to die of starvation. I missed it. I fucking missed it. I loved this man for more than a decade and I missed his cue. The one and only time he tried to reach out to me.
December 23rd, 2020, I realized all of this. My world crumbled.
I drew like a demon. I skipped out on work an hour here and there to draw, making up the time later. I was possessed to tell him how I felt. I’d screwed up yet again and I was miserable for it. I had no one to blame but myself, I thought. [Turns out, I can blame my DOCTOR for never taking me seriously about how much pain I was in as he actively killed me with the diet he prescribed to me.] And then I delivered my drawing.
It wasn’t really for him to begin with… it was for me. It was meant to let me get that image of his face distorted out of my head. When I saw him at first, it looked like his spiritual head was out of alignment with his body, like he had two heads and one was turned to the right by 45 degrees. Like a trippy acid-induced image from the 70s. For nearly six months, I’d been plagued by this visual and finally I was doing something constructive. I decided to turn it into fine art. I decided to do the best I could do to make it flat out amazing. And then I delivered it to him on Christmas day and told him Merry Christmas.
It probably was not the correct thing to do, but it was the only thing I could do after missing my cue. It was the only thing I could think of while my guts and brains were riddled with holes like Swiss cheese and I was hanging on by the barest thread just because I loved him. I lost a ton of my memories from this nearly dying fiasco; my brain is still not the same as it used to be. And then I typed at him for an age the following day, crying and miserably upset. I kept typing until… something made me stop. I didn’t want to be alive without him anymore. I guess he never felt the same way. I should have realized I was barking up the wrong tree all along, I guess. I wish I’d just died, now, instead of striving to tell him how I felt.
I thought I’d reached him in the metaphysical, from a distance, and my empath ability had kicked in as I typed on December 26th. I was crying and crying and kept explaining myself to his absence and suddenly I stopped crying, so I also stopped typing. I can feel the feelings of others if I make mine quiet enough and I perceived him to be a mountain of energy, so surely his feelings would be monumental in my world if I ever felt them. He was too steady to feel anything negative over all that time. I thought he was like me, able to achieve internal quietude. Peace. Zen.
I make my emotions quiet by communicating them to other people and then letting go of the feelings. I said my piece, now it’s their turn, you know? I don’t want to harbor things and keep them in. This love feeling had to get out or most assuredly I would die; I had kept how I felt to myself for ten long years and all it ever did was build up into something bigger and bigger. I approached him in the metaphysical after I tried to tell him my feelings and I knew he was angry with me. I do not know why anyone would be mad that they are loved. Why? I still don’t know. I do know I absolutely feel others’ feelings at least sometimes, though, because I make endless inquiries to find out if it’s true, and on hundreds of occasions, I was right as to what they were feeling. It’s science, at that point. The empirical evidence is as follows: a person can feel someone else’s feelings, like a glimmer. You can sense what other people feel, whether it’s based on interpreting their language appropriately or purely metaphysical sensation, I don’t know, but you can do it. I can do it, so I know you can do it, too. We are the same, at the end of the day, you and I.
That’s what made me so upset. I didn’t want to make him angry. I wanted him to feel my love. So I started explaining it in drawing after drawing, how everywhere I went through life, people battered me. They bullied me, abused me, said cruel things to me, as if I’m some vapid and shallow show pony that never understood how they were vile. They used me as a punching bag to make themselves feel better. They did whatever they wanted to, justifying their intentional cruelty with whatever it is they say to themselves to justify it.
I have news for you, O world I live in: if you justify an action, it is morally and reprehensibly wrong. And I justified telling him my feelings even though I knew he was angry with me. I was wrong. I was so ducking wrong to do this. I should have known better. I should have taken his lack of reply as non-consent and stopped. The only thing I can say for myself now is at least I gave him a choice not to read it. I wrote the majority of it in my diary and linked him to the entries. It was his choice if he read all 1,000,000 words I wrote him. It was his choice if he looked at the videos to show my story and my proposal. It was his choice to go down the rabbit hole.
I thought it’d work out, you know? If we treated each other so well for over a decade and a half as friends, we could make it as more than friends forever. That’s what I thought. I thought if he could live with my bare minimum self, and I’ve lived with his bare minimum self, then we could make magic. Maybe we could have, but we will never know. I have decided to give myself the necessary therapy to move on completely and eradicate whatever it is that I felt for that man. It is much better to love someone with reciprocation.
I realized I needed to let him go around mid 2021. He never answered me. After months of telling him and hoping, I had to deal with the fact he was never coming to save me. You see, I was begging him to come feed me once or twice a day to help me get better, to help me live. I would have paid for everything. I needed help so badly. I needed support. He lived in another country, so that complicated things. I had asked other friends for help, but they all ran away from me. I presume my psycho ex turned them away while I wasn’t looking. The ones who weren’t attending to their own family units while I was in the middle of my escapade. Either that, or I have a split personality and I am unaware of things I do from time to time and I did something really terrible.
So I begged him for his aid. I proposed to him because putting me back together was work for a husband, not a boyfriend. I knew I wouldn’t want to keep my hands to myself if he was next to me because I never wanted to keep my hands to myself with him. I was a gentlewoman because I respect boundaries. He gave me a boundary when we first met and it deterred me completely. He told me he would never date an American again. I took that to heart and decided, ‘Okay, we’ll be friends.’ Secretly, what he could never know, is I have the same sentiment in reverse: I’d never date a Brit again. If I proposed and he accepted, we skip all the dating, you see. Then it’s not true: I never dated a Brit again. I merely married one. (And this is the crazy logic that gets me into trouble from time to time, you see.)
I wasn’t the greatest friend to him, I know that. I am never the greatest friend, no matter how hard I fucking try. Eventually, I get the signals to back off and the signals to be buddy-buddy never come back. I see the signs clearly and I leave. There is no reason to subject anyone to my presence who isn’t willing to be an active participant in a friendship. I never got those distancing signals from Dick. If I did, I failed to understand. I’m opting for the latter here because clearly we are not friends now and we will never be friends again.
I feel like he led me on for an entire decade just to push me around and beat me up for never following through on a promise to visit him years ago. Something he never held me accountable for, not once, in the entirety of the time we knew each other. I know I failed to communicate properly but that does not excuse him for his improper communication in return. He never even told me he liked me, but he told me he’d fuck me. That’s why I never followed through. If emotions were supposed to be implied, I failed to see it. Even as an empath, I failed to know. It’s not real until it’s verbalized or put into text, until it’s in the real world. So I backed off and went another direction because what I decided that was I suspected was true was, in fact, FALSE.
I took reality and updated how I perceived reality accordingly. The reality is that he never, ever said he wanted to hold my hand, kiss me, or that he liked me. He never said he wanted to spend time with me. I was shooting in the dark in 2012 when I asked him if we could meet. He said yes. I asked him if there would be sex. He said, ‘Sure.’ (I might not have his quote spot-on, you’ll forgive me for forgetting after a decade of life happening in the meanwhile, I hope.) Does that sound like a man who wants to be with the lady??? It doesn’t, to me. It sounds like an opportunist. I’d already spent $2,000.00 once to go to Britain in 2004 and get raped not once or twice but three times by the ‘man of my dreams.’ There is no way I was doing it again. That’s insanity. I know now that I’m deeply traumatized by that trip to Mr. Burr. I would go back in time and undo it if I could. I would have found another way to escape my abusive home life.
It’s really hard for me to understand most people. They say the opposite of what they do. They do the opposite of what they say. They’re hypocrites full of lies and deceits. I figured out once upon a time that the lies are for the people who tell them most of all. They’re usually not actively trying to hurt me with their lies or delusions, they’re trying to keep themselves from being hurt. They’re avoiding the pain of looking at the problem head on and realizing they play a part in the problem. They want to blame outside sources for inside issues. You are part of a massive problem seeded deeply inside the human race.
And that’s what makes living with a schizophrenic like my ‘father’ incredibly difficult. They think everything that happens around them involves them. They think the entire world they perceive is centered on them. That nobody has anything better to do than laugh at them, mock them, be mean to them, and obsessively think about them in a negative manner. This is what I grew up with. It hurt my relationships everywhere since. It has hurt everyone, everywhere. It’s not just localized to my thread in the tapestry of life. There are millions (if not billions) of people with mental illnesses — especially schizophrenia — out there, projecting their illness at other people. They’re treating other people based on that mental illness making them unhappy rather than the facts in front of their face.
What if I told you that you can beat schizophrenia? You don’t need medicine to do it. (If you’re on medicine and you feel fine, don’t stop without a professional helping you. You need that medicine. It will hurt you to stop the medicine without doing it the right way. STAY ON YOUR MEDS UNTIL A PROFESSIONAL HELPS YOU OFF THEM. I do not want to hear one soul say, ‘I stopped taking my medication because Sansara said I could!’ BULLSHIT. I’m telling you right now it’s a justification because you want to hate yourself more for failing to uphold internal promises to Self.) Those of you who are not on medication or don’t think there’s an illness to attend to… listen closely and be advised: you are making everyone around you miserable.
Every single person on planet Earth should assume they have a mental illness, whether they do or not. It is that common. It is subtle and minor in most of us and in tons of people it’s enormous. Red flags everywhere! Anyone who knows a bit of psychology has probably already seen how pretty much everything, everywhere, is a little bit messed up. Anyone who really knows psychology knows that we have a society built to mess it up.
So how do we fix it?
The answer is: together.
There is a way. It’s not short or easy. There are no easy answers here. But it is possible. I know this because I have been able to train my schizophrenic father to re-route his schizophrenia from paranoia and self-attack into curiousity. Curiousity is the way to destroy fear and fear is the root of all evil.
The very first thing I’m going to tell you, as the founder of Universal Reiki, is that you do not cease to exist after you die. No matter what mistakes you make in your life today, they will follow you for a very long time, whether you are alive or dead. It is better to figure out how to fix your mistakes, or at least become a better person so you stop making them. It takes a lot of persistence and effort and mindfulness, but you can do it.
I believe in you.
The reason I know that you do not cease at death is that I can see the spirits of animals that have died from time to time. Most of the time it’s fresh roadkill, but once in a while I see a pet that’s been gone for years. Something flickers in the corner of my eye and I freak out a little bit, or I did at first, and then I realize there is a presence of something rather friendly nearby. In fact, most deceased entities are friendly in nature. I doubt they understand they’re dead. They seem to no longer feel physical pain, at least, so their suffering is less. However, to each and every pet owner that feels like their animals are still present after death: they are. Don’t you let anyone tell you they aren’t. They’re not alkaline enough to detect them, that’s it. And they probably invalidate themselves on the regular any time anything ‘spooky’ happens around them. They lie to themselves because they can’t handle the truth.
There is no such thing as a poltergeist or possession, by the way. There are no demons. If there were, I’d have sensed one by now. There are no angels, either, not like we think… immaculate beings with soft fluffy wings to carry them to and fro. Just animals and plants. (I classify human as a type of animal since mammals are animals and we are classified as mammals. Forgive your hubris and ego if you got angry reading how you are an animal.) There might be life in outer space but I don’t care about that right now. We have bigger fish to fry right here.
We are killing this planet. Whether you like it or not, it will not sustain us for much longer because we are constantly poisoning everything. Instead of composting, turning to biodegradable ‘plastics,’ and recycling absolutely everything, we continue to toss poison and perfectly good resources into the land fills. We know we’re all doing it and we’re all wrong, but what’s one time? What’s wrong with throwing batteries away one time?
Every battery you throw in the garbage poisons something alive.
It might be ants or dung beetles or some other insect, but it still does it. It could be a mouse, a rat, or a raccoon. It doesn’t matter how big or small that life is. You are a murderer for throwing batteries away. Solution: MAKE BATTERY RECYCLING EASIER. If you could take batteries to any public place, such as a department store, pharmacy, or grocery store, you would never throw them in the garbage. If there was a battery pickup within two miles of your home, that would make it so easy we would no longer have an excuse not to. We are all in this together and we need to step up and demand our local venues to have this option. The grocery stores already have bag recycling, why not CD and battery recycling? Why is it that I still have to toss #6 in the black bag instead of putting it into my single-stream clear plastic bag? (Why are both bags made of plastic that never dies?)
Do you want to continue to be a murderer or will you speak up for change?
We all ought to be composting our uncooked food waste. We should feed cooked food waste to the wild animals outside if there are leftovers, basically. I eat six pounds of vegetables on a great day now that I’m recovering. I throw about two pounds of vegetable matter into the trash every day (if not more!) These are the ends of brussels sprouts, the stems of cauliflower and broccoli, the ends of carrots. It would be best if I ate it myself, but I don’t. I’ve got a compost bin on my to-do list so I don’t have to throw pounds of food away daily. I can also add my coffee grounds to balance it out. There is an ant colony in my house that I feed with these odds and ends right now. Partly because someone told me once that ants were the baseline for what is and is not edible in this world. If an ant won’t eat it, it’s not food. [What do you say regarding the fact that they don’t eat cheese, Julie?]
In fact, they have to eat something we don’t eat. I know this because I’ve found them clustering in my bathroom to eat or perhaps to drink water after I shower. However, seeing about five hundred of them in a cluster within 15 minutes isn’t a casually reactive behavior, they were already there and I didn’t notice them or I disrupted them. I know this because when I feed them on purpose at the side of the sink, it takes them two days to send the army forth for the offerings. So what do they eat?
Turns out, Google has an answer:
Why are ants around my shower?
Certain species of ants have a very strong sense of smell and are attracted by the scent of hair and skin cells. Of course, your shower is a prime location for skin and hair cells, and this attracts ants to your shower. You can combat this by scrubbing the shower weekly and pulling the stopper to remove hair balls. [Source]
Side note: AWW! LOOK AT THOSE CUTE LITTLE ANTENNAE IN THE PICTURE!
The funny thing about this is that the ants don’t actually like getting on me that much. They do it because I have to do the dishes, which disrupts their daily active scavenging and deposits them on me. They scurry whenever they realize the giantess is here to destroy them all! Some of them scurry right onto me. When they scurry onto me, I try to gently blow them off onto another surface because I don’t want to kill my ants. I named them George. All of them. The whole colony. (Can you tell one ant from another? Can you come up with thousands of names and remember them? I can’t.)
It’s funny, they have been adapting to things over time. I saw an ant strategically fall one day after routinely blowing them back onto the sink’s edge to get them off of me. They like to cling now when I blow on them, which hurts like a tiny bite. So we’ve compromised: if I put them near the surface they came from, they leave now. They’re smart and diligent, really. I know — how is an ant smart? I’ll tell you.
First of all, they know who is near the sink. If it’s someone other than me, they play dead. They stop moving. They hope this is going to save their lives as the assholes I live with do not try to live life around the ants. (Who in their right mind would, really? I’ve been insane forever, as it turns out.) I call them ‘nature’s little clean-up crew.’ Any time I drop something like a spot of gravy, they clean it up within 48 hours, honestly. I’m not proud of being so sick I just left gravy on the floor, but it happened.
I got to thinking when that happened: what if I’m their only source of food? What if I’m the only person on planet Earth that feeds the wild ants?
Anyway, they don’t try to play dead for me. They did briefly, but they gave that up because I will make vibrations through the sink to try to make them scurry. To stop and desist in their food scavenging and GO HOME. Once they’ve started to scurry, I turn the water on. They know that sound, let me tell you. They go nuts. But they don’t try that hard to get out of the way… not until I murdered plenty of them for failure to do so. I can only wait so long before I realize I’m losing 2 gallons per minute from that faucet if it’s on a full flow. I’m wasting water and water is precious, you know. Plus, I don’t like drowning them, but to kill them quickly and mercifully is for the best. I believe watching them go down the drain is less of a trauma to them than putting them in the dishwasher. R.I.P., George. I love you. Every single one of you. I wish I didn’t have to do anything but feed you. You could work on being more efficient, perhaps, so that my plates and bowls get clean before it’s time to do dishes. (Or I can work harder on rinsing things off. I’ll try to do that to minimize your deaths, but so far I stink at it. I’m so sorry, my friends.)
To be clear: I try to save every ant’s life that I can. I probably save about as many as I kill incidentally. The colony is extremely healthy and they are evolving from our interactions. There must be thousands of them because they are not only in the kitchen. They are everywhere. They have scouts in every single room of this house. Can you blame them? I live with slobs. If they never found food in any rooms but the kitchen and the dining room, they wouldn’t leave those two rooms. Alas, I have pets and pet food is great nutrition for the ants, as it turns out. They love it as much as my cats do.
I had to give up Dawn and Palm Olive because there’s something in those detergents that hurts my hands. I’ve gotten some Seventh Generation soap with lavender, which does not seem to hurt George like Dawn and Palm Olive did. Before I switched, they stayed away from the sink altogether, which makes me think it’s poisonous to the poor little guys. Ants do not carry diseases but they can carry bacteria and fungus around. I have been trying my best to naturally disinfect all surfaces to reduce the bacterial growths, but that is difficult when living with the animals that raised me to be an animal myself. They have zero self-respect. That seems to be their base issue.
Self-respect is so important. There are tons of psychological factors that go into it. Not the least of which is your attire. The way you dress informs those around you whether or not you respect yourself. When you wear clothes with holes in them — by design or by happenstance — you are saying you don’t care who sees you partially undressed. You are giving them permission to see you in a state of not-quite-dressed. Fishnets aren’t the same; I mean holes in pants/trousers specifically. You are also giving them a visual of sorts, either to imagine you ripping said clothes yourself, or ripping them right off you.
The implication that you can just rip the rest of the hole-riddled clothing right off a person and have your wicked way with them. Ragged, torn edges as opposed to purposefully created holes are a trigger in bestial-minded humans. Especially anything torn above the knee. Below the knee, the tears would happen naturally from extended use of the product with someone who is athletically inclined or even accident prone. The unexpectedly exposed flesh just below the tear is inviting a touch. Observe your reaction when someone wears fishnets underneath their holy jeans. Suddenly, they’re fully clothed again. There is a barrier between your fingers and their legs. It’s not even a complete barrier, it’s negotiable, but it creates distance between the idea of being in bed and the reality of passing by in the street.
Even men are starting to wear clothes with unpredictable rents and tears, each new style getting more daring. What’s next? Will we stop wearing clothes altogether? That sounds too cold and bold for me. I’ll keep my clothes, thanks. But that brings me to the next topic. Nudity is not sexual by default. I lived with someone who thought it was and he raped me. More than once. He hurt me so many times and failed to pay attention to the words I used to tell him so that I changed myself to stop him. One thing I changed was that I began to wear pajamas to bed religiously, even though I’d been comfortable with nudity being next to meaningless due to my parents’ lack of shame when caught in the buff on accident. I’d slept naked for more than a decade and now? I don’t go to bed without clothing anymore. Sleeping in the nude is a freedom that I had come to enjoy but no longer. Perhaps it is more civilized to wear clothing all the time.
I even told that stupid asshole that nudity is not sexual in nature. We are born without clothes on. It’s just the nature of it. It’s like saying a cat stretching out over there is a sex act, but really they’re just stretching and they happen to be ‘nude.’ I still cannot believe how stupid that guy was, honestly. Or how stupid I was to stay. I hate myself for that and I hope he goes to Hell in a hand basket.
I shouldn’t have to say it more than once. NUDITY IS NOT AN INVITATION FOR SEX. I told him more than three times and he still didn’t listen. I did not say it as bluntly as I could, I did say there were times it could be sexual, but he could not tell the nuances thereof at all. I suppose that’s my fault. TRIGGER WARNING: Go to the next paragraph to avoid being triggered. I should have just stuck with FUCK OFF, I DON’T WANT YOUR COCK JUST BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE CLOTHES ON.
Why are people so dense? Why does anyone have to say, ‘Don’t rape me’? Especially more than once? What is your problem, humanity? My problem is that you don’t listen to what I’m saying. I usually don’t mince my words, but something tells me I did when it came to psycho. Something tells me that somehow I did something that gave him the wrong impression or idea. Something tells me that being trauma bound to a rapist is the problem.
Another description of it. (Click the link to read it.)
To quote Self-Love Rainbow: Trauma Bonding: A cycle of physical or emotional abuse that creates a strong attachment between an abused person and their abuser. Reinforced by periods of love and affection and then periods of devaluation and emotional abuse.
Another definition of trauma bonding is that when two people go through the same or similar experiences, they bond over it.
“When you’re in a trauma-bond, it slowly erodes who you are.” — Self-Love Rainbow
In fact, I’m going to stop here. Just read their amazing article.
XO XO
Sansara signing off!
Angel-Sansara 