feminism

Purposeless

~ KJ ~ 6 Comments

Stability outside, chaos inside. That is what my life is right now. And saying stability outside may even be a bit of a stretch. But I guess for those who don’t really know me (and even some who do), I appear stable.

I’m not at all stable. I barely know what day of the week it is anymore. I haven’t paid any of my bills this month. I don’t even know why. It’s not like I have a legitimate excuse. I’m not even working. I’m just existing.

I am useless, and not for lack of trying. I tried to get my regular doctor to write a note for me to return to work. Bad idea. It took an hour for me to even get her to consider writing me a prescription for an antiobiotic. An antibiotic. Not a narcotic. I’m just asking for some penicillin, because I clearly have an infection in my lungs that was not going away with steroids alone. And she even agreed. That’s the best part. She knew I needed medication, but told me in fancier words that I was too complicated to treat, between the COPD and my heart condition. I was lucky I got a Z-Pak; getting a note would have clearly just been too much.

So I told myself I’d wait. Just another week, and I can see my cardiologist and she’ll write me that note, she’ll clear me for work. And then I get a call four days before my appointment, with a voicemail that said my cardiologist has resigned and my appointment has been cancelled. The woman on the phone said it like it was no big deal. Even added in the have a nice day. This cardiologist performed my surgery. My cardiac monitor is subscribed to her name. She was a specialist. She was the first one to legitimize my concerns. What in the fuck am I supposed to do now?

I called the office back. I told them I was out of work. I told them I had been in the hospital several times since my surgery and needed to be seen. She told me I could see my old cardiologist, the one that always assumed my heart issues were really just the aftereffects of cocaine abuse and a possible seizure disorder, completely dismissive of anything cardiac despite everyone else telling me my heart is not beating right. Fine. I have no other choice. I’ll take him.

Great. Now let’s get an appointment. Well, he doesn’t have any openings until next month. Are you fucking kidding me? My surgery was in May and I haven’t even had a post-op appointment yet. I have stitches hanging out of my chest that I have tried my hardest not to pull out myself. I am out of work because, understandably, who the fuck wants to be liable for someone working who passes out consistently. But let’s just give it another month. Fine. Because I really have no other choice.

It’s frustrating. I want to scream and cry, but instead all I do is bury it down and put on a smile. I’m good at that. Hide the anger, hide the pain. I hide my tears, too, until I can’t hold them in anymore. Then I run. Out of the house. A few blocks away. And I sit on a bench and cry. And I smoke a cigarette until the pain goes away. I tell myself I’ll smoke just one more, and then it’ll all be fine. That’s what I’ve done my whole life. Just one more line, just one more drink, just one more pill. But it’s never fine. It’s not now, and it never was in the past. Yet I still keep trying. It’s how I ended up on a bench in the middle of a thunderstorm, soaking wet, with an empty pack of cigarettes, wondering why I couldn’t breathe.

I am a mess. Not wanting to die, but not caring if I exist. Because I feel purposeless.

People tell me my intelligence, my grad school work gives me purpose, but it doesn’t to me. I just finished a year of graduate school and maintained a 4.0 GPA, but it just doesn’t matter to me. I didn’t put forth any effort. I didn’t study. Hell, I took my last final drunk and started and finished my final project in the hour before it was due, and I still managed to pull 100s. That is not effort. That is not purpose. That just is.

My intelligence does not give me purpose. If anything, it only causes me more pain. Knowledge hurts. Because I know how to fix the damage in others, yet I can’t seem to fix the brokenness within myself. If I didn’t know any better, it wouldn’t bother me as much. I’d just be broken.

How can I plan for a future when I don’t even know what’s happening now? There are things I’ve accepted. I won’t have a family. I won’t live as long as planned. I am sick, and I will be sick for the rest of my life. But how can I plan around that?

I dreamed of being a therapist because I wanted to help people in ways I wished people helped me, I wanted to make a difference. But that dream isn’t realistic now. I can’t be a therapist with DID. I know they exist, but they have to exist in hiding. Because the world will never accept them.

I don’t know how to make a difference outside of that. I can’t stop every child abuser. I can’t make people understand that mothers abuse their children, too. I can’t get people to open their eyes to truths they don’t want to see. So what is my purpose?

Beyond housework, I am nothing right now. I keep busy as much as I can. I wash the dishes. I do the laundry. I sweep the floors, vacuum the rug, take care of the dogs. But in the moments where there’s no more laundry, there’s nothing left to clean, and the dogs are asleep…those are the moments that scare me. Those are the moments I hear my mother’s voice, telling me I am nothing, that I am a burden.

Those are the moments I sit and realize that I am purposeless.

Pardon me while I rant

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

There’s been a story going around on social media about a woman who makes her son take her out on a dinner date and pay as a way of showing her son how to treat a woman.

The story bothers me for a few reasons. One, I don’t think it’s right to impose expectations of sexuality on a young child. She is telling her son he has to grow up and take women out on proper dates. What if he doesn’t want to date women? What if he is gay, or even asexual? She’s not giving him that option; only that he must date women and treat them this certain way.

I could go on. But what bothers me the most about this story (and others) is that focus is centered on teaching boys how to respect women. We don’t teach girls how to respect men. Instead, we teach them what to expect from a man, as if they deserve something greater just for being female. Respect is not gender-specific. We should be teaching children to respect other people, regardless of their gender.

Most people ignore the fact that just as many women perpetrate domestic violence against men as men do against women. Or they say that men are stronger, so their violence is obviously much worse than what a woman could do.

This sentiment makes me want to put my head through a wall. Yes, I’ll agree that in general, men have the capacity to be physically stronger because they can develop more muscle mass. It doesn’t mean they all are. And it doesn’t mean that women are weak little creatures that couldn’t hurt a soul. I can easily overpower most of the men I come into contact with on a regular basis, and I (unfortunately) have before.

I watched my mother beat my father. I watched her hit my brother. I, too, was a target of her violence more times than I could count. It doesn’t take much strength to stab someone, to set them on fire, to beat them with a hammer, or to shoot them with a gun. My mother used her hands, paddles, pans, or even rolled up magazines if she was desperate (though those were mostly for beating the cats and the occasional whack to the face). She wasn’t gentle. She caused damage. My mother is not a fit person by any means. She hadn’t exercised in all the years I knew her. But she hurt. Just as badly as any man would hurt. Angry people like her find strength wherever they can pull it from. She didn’t need a penis.

Outside of my family, I’ve come to know many male victims of female-perpetrated violence. Very few of them ever admit in public what happened to them. Why? Because of that sentiment I mentioned earlier. Men are strong. You can take it. It was a woman. It couldn’t have been that bad. Suck it up. You’re just a wuss. Meanwhile they suffer in silence, not only from the physical damage, but from the psychological damage initially caused by the female attacker and perpetuated by society’s gender-biased views.

This exact sentiment and attitude pours over into female-perpetrated sexual abuse. It was a woman? It couldn’t have been that bad! I bet you enjoyed it! She was probably gentle. Women don’t do that. You just misunderstood. It couldn’t have hurt. You should feel lucky. I could go on, but I don’t have to. If you don’t get it by now, you won’t get it at all.

I can only speak of my own hurt from my experiences opening up about the abuse from my mother. Some therapists ignored it entirely. Other therapists outright denied my experiences as abuse. “She’s your mom and she cares about you, you’re just misunderstanding everything.” Yep. That’s it. I just misunderstood. All mothers should bathe their children into double digits and have special nighttime sessions. My bad. If I said it was a man doing it, or my father, EVERYONE would say “that’s abuse!” before I’d even finish my sentence. But for some reason, when a woman is involved, people automatically jump to the gentle, nurturing view of women and deny the legitimacy of the abuse. It was aggravating, disheartening, and saddening to have my reality denied by other people for years. I can’t even begin to imagine how others, including men, feel when their experiences are denied.

Woman continue to get away with domestic violence and abuse because of the attitude that women are weaker, more gentle, and less violent. I am telling you now that women are just as fucked up as men are. Stop letting women get away with crimes that any man would be imprisoned for years for. Stop making victims feel ashamed for being victims of :gasp: a woman. It happens. Let’s acknowledge it. Let’s deal with it accordingly. Because if we continue to teach girls what to expect from others, they will continue to feel entitled to things they don’t necessarily deserve. And if we don’t teach boys AND girls respect, women will continue to think they can get away with whatever they want to because they are a woman.

Perhaps I should have been a man, because women are going to hate me for this and see me as anti-woman. I am not. I am for equality.