I took a psychology course while I was in tech school. I loved it, too. I think my teacher’s name was Mr. Hayes. He was hilarious! He said once in class he took a hair dryer and sat in his car, in a parked position, and just stuck it out the window. Everyone on the roadway who saw him slowed down in response to this action.
And this is how I learned being an imp isn’t all terrible.
Being a psychological scientist has its ups and downs. In order to avoid psychopathy, one has to also embrace spirituality and understand that we each have a higher self, a template we are born with. Our nature.
Then we are nurtured on top of that template.
There are three templates we identified, though I’m going to posit the possibility we are merely projecting parents onto infants. Easy-going, slow-to-warm-up, and bold. In other words: introverted, shy, and extroverted. In that order.
My mother’s only complaint about me as an infant was that I liked looking at everything all the time. I have evidence that I’m a literal genius of some sort, in so much that my first words were an entire sentence.
“I love you, daddy.”
I must have practiced that in my head for eons, as I do most things, until I was confident I could control the muscles correctly to say it. When you stare at someone saying “I love you,” you can see the way their tongue moves and guess how to do it.
That’s me, in a nutshell.
Autistic, in another word.
I have no conscious memory before age five. I think I have one as a four year old. It is of my parents’ friends’ daughter being attacked by a vicious girl who ripped her seashell necklace straight off of her. So I helped her pick up the pieces, telling her not to cry because it can be put back together. Boy, did she cry. I wanted to heal her, to stop the crying, to make her whole again.
She was raped.
All viciousness, all attack, all war is rape. Murder is rape. Do you see it yet? Can you let yourself see it for what it is? Crossing boundaries with force is rape. Rape hurts everyone, even the rapist.
Tough love is the only solution for rape. Turning a blind eye only makes it worse.
I wish I’d felt comfortable enough at age 19 to do something differently than what I did in that psych class. There came a day when we were asked questions based on gender norms and if I’d had enough time to really, truly think about it, I would have broken my teacher for a moment with an answer to a question. I knew him well enough to know he’d turn pink with embarrassment for the basic assumption that all women were attracted to men and vice versa.
Mr. Hayes surveyed the classroom. Of the womenfolk, he asked us all if we wanted a successful lawyer or a handsome bartender. Of the menfolk, he asked if they wanted a successful lawyer or a beautiful waitress.
I absolutely wish I had thought to say I wanted the beautiful waitress. Not because I am bi-sexual or gay, but to support the idea that some people are gay. IF they are made that way, it is through rape. I do not know if it’s nurture or nature and I don’t care. Even if it is a choice they made, it’s their choice, not mine. It’s not hurting me in any way, shape, or form. I can tell you right now that plenty of animals engage in same-gender sex, so it’s probably nature. Dolphins are about as promiscuous as human beings, for instance, and opportunist. They don’t really give a shit about gender.
And they get to stay naked all day, too, someone thinks randomly.
My neighbor in that class, also a handsome lad, turns to me and asks me which one I’d pick before it’s my turn to answer. Now, another woman might have thought, “Oh, this boy is flirting with me.” Not me. Nope. Autism! I totally missed the entire concept that a man could be flirting with me. Why would any man flirt with me?
I said to him, “The lawyer; I can’t stand handsome men.”
But, in all honesty, I think the most interesting kind of person on that white board was the beautiful waitress. Lawyers sound boring, to be honest. A waitress, on the other hand, sounded like someone I might like to hear the thoughts of. And, to be honest, I was 19 — I had never met a bartender yet, or a lawyer, or a waitress, actually. As an adult, I’d choose the bartender, handsome or not. He (or she) has people skills, can read the room, understands undercurrents of emotions… in short, he’s an applied psychologist and literally a therapist for drunken wrecks, if you believe the movies. [I’ve never been in a bar after dark, so I have no idea.] I assume since it’s in basically every movie, it has a grain of truth feeling to it, though. And this is how I learned all about humanity, actually, without ever leaving home.
I don’t know if my neighbor caught it. I don’t know if he extrapolated. I don’t know… but I actually wasn’t trying to dismiss him. What I mean to say is that, most men who know how attractive they are have personality traits that I cannot abide to witness. I am a spiritual creature and I was put firmly in my place as an ugly, undesirable, fat bitch that had to rise to overcome her ugliness because that’s only for ugly people to do. Everything I said was a burn or a put-down rather than simple observation of the truth. I hated that, so I stopped putting forth my observation of the truth.
Pretty people get whatever the fuck they want while the rest of us struggle to fit in, changing ourselves to suit others like others change their clothes before their first date.
I rejected all things pretty that had a human face. I still do. I want to see your soul. I want to see you shine. I want to fall in love with who you are, not what you look like. I can help you shine but it’s up to you; I will not rape you to get what I need out of a man. I will not force you to change yourself. I will tell you what is hurting me — for anything not hurting me (or anyone else) is not wrong — and I will ask you to adjust your conduct accordingly.
I thought about this deeply for a long time and I decided that the things that do not hurt anyone — no matter how weird they are — are not wrong. To walk around clapping in a random rhythm is just an expression of life. It’s not wrong. It’s just weird. Don’t judge people for expressing themselves, because they’ll stop. That’s rape. You encourage them to subvert their true nature to “fit in” and avoid ridicule. I hate each and every one of you that does this, interjects GOD HERSELF.
It is up to you to listen, to perceive, to understand, and to apply mastery.
To develop the habit of change in order to ease my pain is true love. You choose to do it. I didn’t make you do it, there is only one consequence of not doing it: you lose my love. If my love becomes important to you — and I assure you, it does, about ten years later for most men — then you will return. You will be ashamed you didn’t listen then. I will ask if you listen now. I will test you to see if you have changed.
If it feels like a test, then you are being tested. It may be only by your higher self, but it’s still a test. Life tests us all the time. We can make as many excuses as we want to in order to avoid stepping up to being a better Self, but at the end of the day it is the truth of our reality that matters, and the truth of our reality is a collection of our actions taken. If you continuously take actions that you yourself do not approve of, you will hate yourself. Break the cycle. Decide to try something new and novel. Decide to change. Break the habit.
It is arrogance that I hate. Not beautiful people. However, beautiful people are the most likely to be arrogant. They usually get their way simply because they are easy on your eyes. You fall for your initial nominal physical attraction for them and give them whatever they want. YOU TEACH THEM HOW TO RAPE AND GET AWAY WITH IT.
Habits can be difficult to break, I know that. I want to tell you something you don’t know, though: habits are why we feel either good or bad about ourselves. Instead of focusing on one bad or good action in our lifetime, we need to step back and view the pattern of our actions. Do they support freedom and justice for all? Do they support truth and prosperity? Or do they lead back to greed, the devil inside us all? You can break those habits pretty easily. I have a formula for you.
Disrupt the pattern once or twice consciously. It will be difficult to disrupt it, but I know you can do it. This goes back to neuro-linguistic programming, in fact. You have to create a full circuit of a good action in your neural pathways in order to start negating the bad actions or habits you have. The first time is the hardest. Once you do it one time, you have literally paved a road to do better. From there, it is about running that pathway more times. So, each time you are faced with cake or death, choose neither. [For me, cake is death.] Choose to do neither option that is clear to you. Go to the fucking grocery store and buy yourself some sugar-free, dairy-free ice cream and stick your middle finger up to this fascism you are faced with. And you can do it with bigger choices than that, it’s just a silly example I thought of while I remembered seeing Eddie Izzard at The Fox Theatre in St. Louis, Missouri, years ago.
And all of this is why Ms. Ani DiFranco is correct.
Some chick says
— Face up and Sing by Ani DiFranco
Thank you for saying all the things I never do
I say
The thanks I get is to take all the shit for you
It’s nice that you listen
It’d be nicer if you joined in
As long as you play their game girl
You’re never going to win
The thanks I get [for pointing out rape and rape culture] is to take all the shit for you.
Ani DiFranco is MY SAVIOR. The messiah’s savior. The savior of the savior. It’s almost like you don’t have to be the daughter of the universe to save somebody. Instead of just fighting it, she told her story to others who could help her fight it. By making ourselves known with the hash tag Me Too movement [I auto-convert to podcast, so I’m being phonetic for your sakes], we are empowering other women to speak up. To tell their story. To let them know they’re not alone. Someone is listening, even if it’s just you, listening to the savior, Ms. DiFranco.
Thank you, Ms. DiFranco, for saving me. You were there in every moment of my hour of need, crooning about the shit you took for me. The shit you take for everyone. The rape you fend off left and right. All because you’re a pretty girl, even though that’s not what you do. It saved the world, in a sense, your music.
I’m going to link you to the song where these lyrics occur, so don’t get antsy and go look it up. Listen to me very carefully here… Music is how we save each other. Books. Plays. Movies. Television. Snippets of skits online. We stopped teaching each other right from wrong in order to tell a story that’s cinematic in nature full of robots, explosions, and war. We stopped making the story good. We started making the bad guys win all the time. We remove empathy and sympathy. We focus on tragedy without feelings. Nobody wins when greed takes over.
We were given free will. Part of our nature is to be greedy, because it’s part of our survival instinct. To have enough food to last the winter is natural. Now, we are surrounded by true abundance and prosperity… at least, in most places. We are greedy about resource control because the idea of scarcity scares us. It could destroy us. We could starve to death. (Oh noes!)
People still starve to death, you just don’t watch them do it. Or you do, not realizing it’s happening in front of your face, even while they shovel something that looks like food into their mouths.
Yeah, yeah, stop preaching about fucking food and give us the link!
I need to tell you one more detail, the original one I meant to say: Ani DiFranco puts guitar noise to her songs. You have to listen to the lyrics and ignore the guitar part in order to enjoy the music. This is something you have to practice. It gets way, way easier with time and exposure.
I never knew about Ms. DiFranco before a friend of mine (FROM TECH SCHOOL) took me to see her live in a small theater in Pennsylvania. A woman I’m trying to reconnect with now, another survivor. She’s eating BELL PEPPERS, which AREN’T FOOD. Anyway, in the middle of DiFranco’s set, Ani stops and recites a political poem, and I fell in love with the woman’s words. They both became my heroes for saying exactly what I was thinking about everything. I realized in that moment, I hadn’t done any justice. I was just standing there, not enjoying the concert, until that very moment.
Thank you for listening. You can have the link now.
Angel-Sansara 