feminist blogs

I’ve always been a high achiever. One of the only people in my high school class to move farther than five hours away for college, I attended a top ten school then moved to New York to start my real-person life.

I’m simultaneously proud of what I’ve accomplished (woohoo! Go, me!) and frustrated about where I’m at in my life at this point (currently doing three unpaid (albeit amazing) internships, borrowing money to pay my rent, and praying that at least one of these turns into a job), because I know that I should be farther along. Frustratingly enough, I also know that throughout all of this my biggest obstacle has been (drumroll please)…me. I am a master of self-sabotage.

I’m not sure when this started exactly. I’ve always procrastinated more than normal. Case in point: My freshman year of college, I waited until the night before a 17-page research paper was due to even begin doing my research. I got an A+. (I didn’t even know you could get an A+ in college.) This trend continued throughout my college career; I always barely finished my work before the deadline, but even when I thought the finished product was sub-par, it received high marks.

I’ve got a few theories here. Maybe, the reason I always did this to myself was because if I waited until the last minute and ended up receiving low marks, I’d feel as if I had an excuse for my failure. Or maybe it was because the feeling of accomplishment was that much larger when I got a high grade AND pulled an all-nighter, completing huge amounts of work in record time.

The scary thing is, I’ve carried self-sabotage with me into post-collegiate life. I waited until the month I graduated to apply for jobs, and even then, I only applied to one. When I got to New York, I didn’t spend my time diligently hunting for employment. Instead, I sat on my ass (in the apartment my boyfriend at the time was paying most of the rent for) watching tv and feeling sorry for myself. This was probably the low point in my life. I let myself spiral into a depression so deep I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

Finally, I fell into a job. The temp agency found my resume online and called me. If they hadn’t, I might never have gotten my self-esteem back up to a respectable point; I might have continued to stew in my lack of confidence, putting my expensive education to use at Banana Republic. Thankfully, the job, while not a job I particularly liked, reassured me that I am smart, I have skills, and damn it, any organization would be lucky to have me as an employee. I worked there for eight months, until the position became full-time and (despite my stellar performance) they hired someone else.

At this point, I’d like to say that I had kicked self-sabotage’s ass. It certainly looked like it. Within a few short weeks, I secured two very different internships in a field I’m really excited about, something I couldn’t have managed to do a year beforehand because I was too busy stabbing myself in the back.

Unfortunately, I’m starting to realize that while things are much better, I haven’t stopped undermining my own success. I sit watching The Bachelorette instead of writing blog posts. I hit the snooze button so many times that being on time for work is no longer an option, even if I skip a shower and take a cab. I drink too much wine even though I know it is going to make me feel hung over, really hindering my ability to be an asset at work. I scrape by on the bare minimum, because I know I can.

And all of it makes me want to scream. “What the fuck, me?!?! Why are you doing this to yourself? Over and over? You have opportunities in front of you that many would die to have, and you’re going to fuck it up because you want to sleep fifteen more minutes?” (I curse at myself a lot.)

Just this morning, I sat here researching self-sabotage for this post instead of reading the notes that will prepare me for a meeting I’m hoping I’ll be asked to sit in on later this afternoon. (I DID take a break to read the notes.) But I’m back to research now and HOLY SHIT. I just found a list of questions about how to tell if you’re self-sabotaging, and it’s not even funny how many of the questions I answered “yes” to.

When will I stop being my own biggest enemy? My life is pretty incredible despite all of my own efforts to hold myself down, what might happen if I didn’t create obstacles to my own success? What might we all do if we could stop, take a deep breath, make a decision to stop getting in our own way, and then stick to it?

How do you get in your own way? How do you choose not to? I could really use some tips.

Last summer, I suffered the breakup of a relationship that I had thought would be permanent. Now, I’ve been through my share of break-ups, even of quite serious relationships, but nothing ever broke me like this one.

Since then, I’ve had sexual interactions of the orgasmic kind with 9 different people, none of which I was at any time in a committed relationship with.

I’m not telling you this to shock (though I am specifying the number because we all need to get over the whole “OMG! Be ashamed of your NUMBER! It’s either too big or too small!” thing). I’m telling you this because of something else that’s also true about me: I’d really like to be in a long-term, probably monogamous relationship. That’s right, folks, I’m a slut who craves a stable, loving, committed relationship. File me under “Lookin’ fer luv: ur doin it wrong.”

That’s the story we get sold, right? That women who sleep around are destroying their chances at True Love. Something to do with bonding hormones getting all used up? Or is it that we have so little self-esteem that no one could love us? Or maybe it’s that we’re all used candy wrappers or dirty masking tape. I can never remember.

Thing is: I’ve done it the other way. Until my mid-30s, I was largely a serial monogamist. Not for any grand ethical or philosophical reasons – it was just what felt comfortable to me. That’s not to say that I didn’t have some wild adventures in college, or never went to bed with someone on a first date – I did on occasion. It’s just that when I did, I’d often wake up the next day in a relationship. Let me tell you: not the best recipe for partnership bliss.

I’m thinking of one particular instance in which I had what was for me a very painful dry spell: a year and a half in which I barely got to kiss anyone, and didn’t get to do anything other than that at all, sexually speaking, with anyone. It… yeah. Didn’t feel too good. Made me feel like I would never be touched or loved again. Made me feel, in a word, desperate. You know what’s not a great emotional state for making important life decisions? Desperation.

To wit: after this year and a half of nothing, I went to bed with a woman I barely knew on our first date. Nothing wrong with that, we had a great time, and seriously, did I mention a year and a half? The problem came the next morning, when it became obvious that she was much more into me emotionally than I was at that point. Did I tell her that? And potentially get exiled back to my affectionless desert? I bet you know the answer. What followed was a two-year relationship in which we were unhappy for about the last year and a half.

Fast forward through a few more relationships to last fall. As I crawled out of the acute grief stage of my breakup and into the Land of Reboundia, I launched myself somewhat full-throttle into dating. It was comforting to me to find that there were other people I found appealing who felt similarly about me. But each person I’d meet, if there was any kind of a click at all, I’d throw myself at them whole-hog, wanting so badly for them to be The One that proved I wouldn’t have to do die alone with a shriveled-up vagina and no cats. (I’m allergic.) And then (sing this with me if you know the tune), when something would inevitably go wrong, however silly or minor, however nascent the connection was, it would feel overwhelming. Like I was dying. Like I was broken all over again.

And then a miracle occurred. Via the unlikeliest source of miracles ever: Craigslist Casual Encounters.

I had never thought of my self as a Casual Encounters kind of girl. I’d read them on occasion, sure, out of fascination, horror, horniness. I’d even, once in a long while, in lonely desperate moments, posted an ad, not with the intention of actually meeting anyone, but because sometimes knowing you have a bunch of bad options that you’re rejecting feels better than feeling like you have no options at all. And it was that exact state I found myself in one Friday night last fall, after having been blown apart yet again by some minor rejection that felt so huge it sent me to my bed. I hadn’t showered or shaved or left the house in days. And so, glass of wine in hand, wearing a robe and dirty sweatpants, I posted an ad just so I could watch the replies come in and feel like I had some kind of choice in the world. That somebody wanted me, even if they were gross and I’d never want them back.

And then B. responded. He was smart and charming. His picture looked cute. He seemed like a grown-up, and not like a psycho. He knew how to banter. He made a funny joke about punctuation. And, after a few emails were exchanged, he wanted to know if I’d like to meet him for a drink. That night. Then. And, to my great shock and terror and excitement, I found that I did. (What writer can resist a good punctuation joke?)

The next hour was a blur of furious grooming, during which I kept up the following internal monologue: I’m going to get axe murdered. I’m going to get axe murdered. You don’t have to do this, you can call it off. No, I want to. I can handle myself, I have good instincts and great training. Oh, god, I’m going to get axe murdered…

I’m telling you this because sluthood is scary. Because we’ve been taught to fear it all our lives, and that training doesn’t just go away because we understand the agenda behind it. And because there are real risks involved. Society likes to punish slutty women. And so do a lot of individual men, some of whom frequent Craigslist Casual Encounters.

I left my roommate a note telling her what I’d done and where I was going and to call me at 11 and if I didn’t answer to call the police. (What they were going to do about the fact that her 30-something roommate had gone on a CE date and wasn’t home after two hours I mercifully didn’t wonder at the time.) And then I went down to the local bar and met him.

You’ve probably already guessed that I didn’t get axe murdered. Instead, we spent a lovely hour chatting over a couple of glasses of wine, he used the phrase “male hegemony” critically in a sentence (entirely unprompted by me), and then he asked me if I wanted to go back to his place, which was nearby. And once again, to my shock and terror and excitement, I found that I did. Though not before asking him for his address, calling my roommate with it in front of him, and letting him know I had extensive self-defense training.

Reader, I fucked him. Three rounds worth that night. And it was awesome.

Driving home late that night, I was overcome with an uneasy feeling. What had I just done? What did it mean? What would my friends think? Was this who I wanted to be? I sat in my parked car, paralyzed, for ten minutes that felt like an hour. And then I climbed upstairs, slid into bed, and fell into a troubled sleep.

So much of what changes us in life is accidental. The split-second decision. The whim indulged or squelched. I woke up the next morning feeling unmoored. Like something inside me had been knocked loose, but I didn’t yet know if it was a part I needed, or something that had been in the way. At brunch with friends that day, I nervously let slip about my little adventure, and exhaled as they cheered and pumped me for details. Emboldened by their lack of judgment, I told a few more friends, found more wicked delight.

I’m telling you this because sluthood requires support. Because any woman who indulges these urges carries with her a lifetime of censure and threat. That’s a loud chorus to overcome. A slut needs a posse who finds her exploits almost as delicious as she finds them herself, who cares about her safety and her stories and her happiness but not one whit about her virtue. A slut alone is a slut in difficulty, possibly in danger.

Slowly, I realized. A picture came in to focus. I had the fierce love of my friends. I now knew how to find a lover. And knowing those, I admitted what everyone around me already knew: I wasn’t ready for a new relationship. I couldn’t handle the vulnerability required. It was hurting me too much, too often. But suddenly, it was OK. Suddenly I saw that I didn’t have to keep trying. There were other options.

Of course, things are never as simple as you want them to be. I went back to the CL well trying to find more men like B. with little success. He was, perhaps, a needle in a haystack that I never thought would contain a needle in the first place. There were bushels of disgusting replies, some other flirty email exchanges, a few dates that didn’t make it past the first cocktail, and a scant handful of sexual encounters, only one of which, aside from B., was worth repeating. And even that one fizzled out after a while.

But it didn’t really matter. Because sluthood isn’t an action, it’s a state of mind.

I’m telling you this because sluthood saved me. Sluthood gave me the time and space to nurse a shattered heart. It gave me a place where I could exist in pieces, some of me craving touch, some of me still too tender to even expose to the light. Sluthood healed the part of me that felt my body and my desires were grotesque after two years in a libido-mismatched partnership. Now I felt hot, wanted, powerful. My desire and enthusiasm was an asset, not an unintended weapon. Even now, with more time passed, now, when I am actually ready for and wanting a more emotional connection, sluthood keeps me centered. It keeps me from confusing desire and affection with something deeper. It means I have another choice besides celibacy and settling. It means I won’t enter another committed relationship just to satisfy my basic need for sex and affection. It gives me more choices, it makes room for relationships to evolve organically, to take the shape they will before anyone defines them.

I’m telling you this because, as scary and dangerous as my sluthood is, it’s built on privilege. My paid work will never be in jeopardy because my sluthood is exposed. My work also means I have a lot of practice with direct sexual communication. I’m old enough to be fluent in my own desires and limits, and also old enough that no one expects me to be virginal anyhow, so the risk of stigma is less. I’m cisgender and able-bodied and relatively mentally heathly for now, which makes these assignations a lot easier to mange on multiple levels, I would imagine. I have extensive self-defense training, which assures me I can stay in control of my own safety even in most situations. As a survivor of sexual violence, I’ve been privileged to have access to good long-term therapy and other resources that helped me heal at a deep level. I’m also white, which means that no one expects my behavior to represent my entire race.

I’ve also had some obstacles to overcome. Fat girls don’t have the same pick of partners that smaller women seem to, though I’ve been pleasantly surprised and moved that there are more people out there who are attracted to me than I’d thought. Being a woman who’s “pushing 40” doesn’t exactly expand the pool either. My trauma history means I still have triggers to manage, so I’m a stickler for people who respond respectfully and immediately to direct communication – that rules out many more people than I wish it did, and my instincts on that front are quite good, but not perfect.

In other ways, too, sluthood isn’t always pretty, and I’m not always good at it. Whether from years of habit or something more intrinsic to my personality, my heart seems to want to attach, and after a couple months of playing together casually, and having long, rangey talks naked in bed together between rolls in the hay, it started to with B. Neither of us handled it particularly well. There were tears; there were accusations. But even that was an education: somehow, the conflict that erupted demonstrated so clearly the ways we wouldn’t work together in a more serious arrangement, leaving us free to pick up where we’d left off as lovers. A thread in a needle in a haystack, I suppose.

Meanwhile, via CL and other sources, I’ve had emails and dates and crushes and flings, and one thing that looked like it might get serious and then quite abruptly disappeared. I’ve explored some sexual experiences I’d only fantasized about, and learned which ones are better as fantasies and which ones I want to explore even more. I’ve remembered how much I like pleasure, and how much of it there is in the world. I’ve had to learn how to reject people nicely but clearly, and learn how to appreciate a generous rejection when it’s aimed at me. I’m building my emotional muscles again, and I’m starting to think I could eventually wind up stronger than ever. At the moment, I’ve got another connection simmering over a low flame; not sure yet what it’ll boil down to.

And yes, I still want love. Make that Love. The brass ring. The whole enchilada. A partner in crime, a permanent teammate. A mutual admiration society of two. Someone who feels like home, and who feels the same about me. Someone to catalogue my wrinkles as they form. Whatever you want to call it. When I think about it, it involves monogamy, but who knows. Maybe I’ll find it with someone. Maybe I won’t. I can’t pretend I don’t care. But most days, sluthood helps me be patient. It keeps desperation at bay. It reminds me to enjoy the life I have now, instead of waiting for someone to come start it. It helps me know my heart better, and my libido. It makes me better at communicating about both of them, and much less likely to confuse the two. To my mind, far from ruining me for real love, sluthood is preparing me for it.

I’m not telling you because I think I’ve discovered something new – countless women have certainly known this before me. I’m telling you this because so many people still don’t seem to understand. I’m not telling you this because I think you’re a slut, or should be a slut. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you need, or what you have access to. I’m surely not telling you this out of a desire to expose my private life to the internet. Writing this here means facing the judgment of some members of my family, some colleagues, and other people whose opinion of me matters. It means my ex will probably read this. It means I’ve left this out here for people to find in the future, possibly hurting my life in ways I can’t predict. Surely some of you reading this now will mock me, or criticize me, or give me uninvited advice because you feel like you now know me, or take this as an invitation to hit on me. (Hint: IT’S NOT.)

I’m telling you this because juries still think women who even look like they might possibly be sluts are “asking for it.” I’m telling you this because some people still think it’s OK to drive a teenage girl to suicide because she was probably a slut. I’m telling you this because our policymakers would rather girls get sometimes-fatal diseases than be perceived as condoning sluthood. I’m telling you this because it’s important for everyone to understand: Sluthood isn’t a disease, or a wrong path, or a trend that’s ruining our youth. It isn’t just for detached, unemotional women who “fuck like men,” (as if that actually meant something), consequences be damned. It isn’t ever inevitable that sluthood should inspire violence or shame. Sluthood isn’t just a choice we should let women make because women should be free to make even “bad” choices. It’s a choice we should all have access to because it has the potential to be liberating. Healing. Soul-fulfilling. I’m telling you this because sluthood saved me, in a small but life-altering way, and I want it to be available to you if you ever think it could save you, too. Or if you want it for any other reason at all. And because even if you don’t ever want sluthood for yourself, you’re going to be called upon to support a slut. I’m telling you this because when that happens, I want you to say yes.

(Cross-posted at Yes Means Yes.)

[Trigger Warning: discussions of sexual assault and deadly State force.]

Love your enemies.

For feminists, is there any phrase more terrifyingly reactionary?

Love your enemies. Even the one who assaults you in private and reaps accolades as a brilliant community organizer in public. (One of my mom’s former boyfriends.)

Love your enemies. Even the ones who throw cherry bombs at you in the school bathrooms. (My dad’s fellow students at Yale, in the 1950s.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you women should be seamstresses, not lawyers. (Opa — my mom’s dad.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you, as a child, to bit down on your lower lip so it won’t grow too big. (Grandma — my dad’s mom.)

Love your enemies. Even the white police officer who shot and killed you while you were lying helpless, face-down on the ground with another officer’s knee on your neck. (Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black man killed Jan 1, 2009 in an Oakland subway station.)

Jury deliberations began yesterday for Johannes Mehserle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer who fatally shot Oscar Grant. All of Oakland awaits the verdict. Both police and non-profits are making preparations to quell the “violence” anticipated after this “deadly lightning rod” of a trial.

Deadly? Violence? According to CNN’s coverage, not one single person was seriously injured in the 2009 protests following Grant’s death. Nobody injured, let alone killed. Windows were broken; dumpsters set afire. Is this violence? Sounds more like property destruction to me.

Whatever happens, whether riots flare up or not, things will once again settle, and the ordinary state violence will resume as usual. After all, there’s only one individual on trial — not an entire racist police force armed with deadly weapons. Not an entire patriarchal, militaristic, anti-immigrant, plutocratic (ruled by wealth) law enforcement system. Not California, the US state running “the largest prison system in the Western world.” That won’t be standing trial anytime soon. So what are we supposed to do?

Love your enemies.

What an injunction, huh? Just how are we supposed to achieve this? And why?

The “how” I’ll leave aside for now. Let’s focus on the why.

Why should we love our enemies? Why not hate them? Or at least get angry?

Audre Lorde, one of my all-time favorite feminists, has one answer. With hatred we harm ourselves, and anger only takes us halfway to where we need to go. From “Eye To Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”:

And true, sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus on what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it – hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.

Thirty years after “The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding To Racism,” her keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Lorde’s questions about anger are just as relevant now as then. When and how is our anger useful? When and how is it harmful?

One of my best clues at the moment comes from the dhamma — the teachings of the historical Buddha. Dhamma does not condemn anger as wrong or sinful. Instead, it shows us how to look at our own anger objectively, and start breaking it down. See its useful, neutral, and harmful qualities.

Meditation, not cogitation (thinking) is really the key there. But on the intellectual tip, a very useful explanation for me came from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s book The Myth of Freedom: a chapter called “Working With Negativity.” I don’t have the book on me, but this online excerpt gets at the essence:

“We all experience negativity–the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are. We cling, we defend, we attack, and throughout there is a sense of one’s own wretchedness, and so we blame the world for our pain. This is negativity. We experience it as terribly unpleasant, foul smelling, something we want to get rid of. But if we look into it more deeply, it has a very juicy smell and is very alive. Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality.

Negativity breeds tension, friction, gossip, discontentment, but it is also very accurate, deliberate and profound. Unfortunately, the heavy handed interpretations and judgments we lay on these experiences obscure this fact. These interpretations are negative negativity, watching ourselves being negative and then deciding that the negativity is justified in being there. This negativity seems good-natured, with all sorts of good qualities in it, so we pat its back, guard it and justify it. Or, if we are blamed or attacked by others, we interpret their negativity as being good for us. In either case, the watcher, by commenting, interpreting and judging, is camouflaging and hardening the basic negativity.

. . . . . The basic honesty and simplicity of negativity can be creative in community as well as in personal relationships. Basic negativity is very revealing sharp and accurate. If we leave it as basic negativity rather than overlaying it with conceptualizations, then we see the nature of its intelligence. Negativity breeds a great deal of energy, which clearly seen becomes intelligence. When we leave the energies as they are with their natural qualities, they are living rather than conceptualized. They strengthen our daily lives….”

You’d think Lorde had been reading up on this guy. “Anger is loaded with information and energy,” she says. “Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” Negativity clearly seen.

So here we have an alternative. Rather than making anger comprise our actions toward an enemy, we let it inform and energize our actions.

Instead of directing venom toward “the pigs,” we might use this precise negative mind to observe, The forces that are supposed to be keeping our communities safe — serving us — are making us less safe. Killing us. These forces control the people, but they’re not of the people. They have little to no accountability to the majority of the human beings whose lives are in their hands.

I don’t want a racist patriarch “protecting” me. This serves neither of us.

Safety and community rule enforcement groups need to protect the welfare of ordinary, working-class people, not just wealthy people. The welfare of people of all genders, not just men; of all races, not just white; of all birthplaces, not just US; of all religions, not just Christian or secular; of all mental and physical conditions, not just the ones considered “normal.”

“Community policing” — collaboration between existing law enforcement agencies and the groups they serve — doesn’t go far enough. I want people from my own community protecting me — people I know and trust. People I’ve elected to a community safety body; reflecting the genders, races, class, and national and ethnic origins of the community; not sadistic or prone to power-trips; militant but not militaristic; who can perform equally well the work of confrontation and of de-escalation, healing, and peacebuilding — who won’t just selectively enforce the laws and rules that favor the powerful. Who won’t use handcuffs and tasers loaded guns to break up young Black men’s non-fights on New Year’s Eve.

This is what my anger over Oscar Grant’s death tells me. That we’re fit to govern and protect ourselves. In fact, we’re better at it.

If Mehserle and the cops are my enemies, I know this: they and I equally deserve real safety. We all deserve to provide it and receive it, to the best of our abilities and to the extent of our needs, in the context of our own communities. We’re all worthy of that.

And if I need to disobey some existing laws in order to build toward that real, true safety, then I’m breaking those laws with love for my enemies as well as for myself.

Because, as we know, our enemies are often our very closest neighbors. And there’s that other famous phrase:

Love thy neighbor as thyself.

We love ourselves – protect ourselves – and protect our neighbors and enemies, too – as we question and challenge the state’s idea of what ’safety,’ ‘order,’ and ‘protection’ really are.

Oakland itself, hardly a stranger to up-ending conventional ideas of protection, has one of the strongest recent histories of community self-defense in the US. Imperfect and unromantic, yes, but game-changing nonetheless.

And feminists, womanists, and gender-oppressed people are among the most inspiring leaders in this kind of loving action. We create our own protective forces based on analysis of intimate violence, community violence, and state violence — preventing, healing from, and transforming all three.

We also employ whatever tools best suit us — therapy, prayer, meditation — to heal our internal selves from cancerous hatred; to patiently harvest the honey of insight from the beehive of anger; and to cultivate the quality — socially awkward and spiritually indispensable — that Che Guevara so aptly described:

Let me say at the risk of sounding ridiculous that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love.

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Please keep in mind the comment guidelines as we come to the end of our experiment!

Yesterday I talked a bit about how sexism prevents us from taking journal blogging seriously. Today, 5 reasons I see the medium as terrifically compatible with dhamma, with particular strengths as a new form of spiritual autobiography.

Please remember, this is my own, evolving understanding of dhamma (in the Theravāda/Vipassana/Insight Meditation tradition). I don’t speak on behalf of everyone who practices, even though we might agree on some of the main ideas. And lots of people have been practicing for twice as long as I’ve been alive, so there’s that.

Also, the blogging isn’t a substitute for the more formal techniques of dhamma — the stuff that brings us face-to-face with the hard lessons, and what keeps the practice from becoming a useless feel-good affair (or as I once heard Mary Ann Brussat call it, “salad bar spirituality”). At the same time, with any spiritual tradition it’s easy to get too caught up in formalism and literalism. We shouldn’t forget to engage creatively with the mundane — the materials already here for us. Whether that’s blogging or boxing or BDSM roleplaying.

One more thing — and this seems simple, but maybe it’s not. If you’re not a fan of spirituality in general, you don’t have to read this. The Internet’s a big place. Spend your time in the ways you see fit!

Cool? Cool. Here we go.

1. The highest wisdom comes from experience. In the dhamma, there is value in both wisdom heard from others and wisdom reasoned out for oneself, but ultimate wisdom comes only through direct experience. We can understand the texts and lectures, we can meditate, but unless we apply the dhamma in life, we won’t be able to realize and internalize its benefits. Memoir blogging can help put the focus squarely on the stuff of everyday existence, a rich and often underestimated field of dhamma. As Chökyi Nyima says,

[H]onestly, it’s not that one has to go to some other place and close the door and be quiet in order to practice. That’s not the only way. It’s definitely the case that we can practice at any given moment. We can always try a little more to be kind, to be compassionate and be careful about what we do and say and so forth.

2. Dialectical praxis. Theory makes practice makes theory makes practice. A basic understanding of journal blogging might be: harvesting raw material from real life, then fashioning them into stories for online distribution and discussion. Something like this:

But blogging isn’t just for communication. It can also be for reflection. We can establish a dialectical relationship between online and offline activity: particularly when mindfulness and reflexivity are applied in both contexts.

Imagine a journal blogger who witnesses magnificent sunrise. With mindfulness and presence, they allows the experience to unfold as it is. Later, composing a post, the blogger reflects on the sunrise, sharing the awe, calm, and insight into the brevity of human existence that the experience inspired. Through the writing process, responses from commenters, or both, the blogger’s own insight deepens, matures, and evolves: the lesson of the sunrise expands for both blogger and readers, assuming new forms and nuances. In the future, when the blogger or readers witness a sunrise or a breathtaking sky, the insights developed online may return: not just analysis, but a reminder to remain present, and a sense of connectedness with others in this brief, precious human existence.

This model is more complex than the harvesting idea because it demonstrates the circuitry connecting online and offline experience. Personally, I’ve found it super useful. Taking the time to reflect, to photograph, and to compose blog posts has benefited my relationship to my home-cooked food (plating it nicely, appreciating it, not wolfing it down at the kitchen counter); my neighborhood; my elusive and beautiful cat — lots of everyday things that are easy to take for granted, but actually hold great nourishment and dhammic quality when we engage them with mindfulness.

Still, so far there’s not much distinguishing such a praxis (mutually constituting practice and theory) as particular to the art of blogging. A traditional memoirist writing a book may very well pass through the same phases: experiencing life directly; communicating these experiences in a discursive medium; teasing out and developing lessons from these renderings; and applying these lessons to future life experiences.

3. Temporal location. The “now-ness” of blogging can prove particularly auspicious for ongoing mindfulness and dhammic practice. While autobiographers typically reflect on the distant past of their lives, carefully condensing and constructing the messy life-events of decades or quarter-centuries into digestible, contiguous narratives, blogging’s structural focus is on the present.

Posts are displayed in reverse-chronological order, showing the most current entry first — and updated far, far more frequently than books are able to be published. Attention shifts to ongoing influxes of new experience. This forward motion propels the praxis of mindful blogging in a manner different from autobiography. While the memoirist resides at the front end of the past, the blogger perches on the cusp of the future. Every day presents an opportunity to start again — with what Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi famously explained as “Beginner’s Mind.”

4. Greater room for, and emphasis on, reader participation. The participatory nature of blogging similarly illustrates the constant change and freshness that encourage and support mindful praxis. When a post is published, its life is just beginning! While reader consumption and response certainly reflect and influence the overall impact of a memoir, the author doesn’t turn right around to compose and publish another commentary in response!

Aware of the realness of online community, dhammic bloggers can treat reader/participants on their blogs with as much care and consideration as they would in real life, considering comments seriously and joyfully, and understanding them as a crucial component to the knowledge-making happening in the online/offline space. Blog threads with intensive back-and-forth replies resemble nothing so much as published correspondence: exchanges among equals, rather than footnotes to the main event of a post.

Journals, whether private or public, can be very useful tools for getting a handle on our experiences. But a participatory memoir helps remind us that we’re not the sole authors of our life stories.

5. Transferring focus from media to mindful engagement. On a blog like Feministe, this point probably deserves a whole conversation to itself! But briefly, I’ll just put it out there: it’s really, really hard to maintain mindful awareness (kind of the backbone of dhamma, in a way) while we’re consuming media. We get sucked into the article, or the radio spot, or the TV program, very much identified with it mentally, and our full-body awareness — the calm, receiving type of mind — typically doesn’t stand a chance.

Have you been trying out #3 in the dhamma comment guidelines, “honoring our bodies”? Shit is mad difficult online!

Now, I’m not here to tell anyone how to live their life, or to stop reading so much news and media, or anything like that. But I will say from my experience that

(a) I often feel more ‘productive’ or ’smarter’ when reading, especially reading political media, than when simply sitting and meditating, or paying attention to my life, moment by moment. But while the reading helps with the harm side of things (and with entertainment, too!), it’s the latter, the spiritual path specifically, that most affects my quality of living.

And (b) Reading creates a lot of noise in my head. A LOT of noise. I don’t notice it most of the time, but when I go on a silent 10-day meditation retreat, it becomes so clear. Amazing, how much reading agitates and excites the mind. And how addicted I become to that noise, that habitual thinking. I can’t turn it off, even when I want to.

Again, I’m not here to make judgments, but to encourage all of us to explore this for ourselves. What happens when we take some of the energy we spend consuming and digesting media, and apply it to cultivating awareness, internal focus, compassion and stability using the physical stuff of our everyday lives?

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Based on the Zen saying, “When walking, just walk. When sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble.”

This post is a part of the Feministe series on Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

Before I really get started, this is a piece about how you, a rape survivor, can regain a sense of wellness after the fact. This is neither a professionally nor universally designed plan of action to combat PTSD or heal one’s spiritual self after rape, though I have tried to gather as many ways and means as possible that you can have agency in your recovery regardless of whether you have access to Western clinical treatment practices. I also want to emphasize that these methods should in no way be used to pressure someone to “get over” the trauma of having one’s trust betrayed, one’s body violated, and one’s worth shamed by a culture set up to discredit victims. “Getting over it” is subjective, it’s a process, and it’s closure well-earned, and it’s not up to anyone other than the survivor to lead the way to emotional healing, if indeed “over it” is a benchmark that can ever truly be achieved. This is not a piece about how to end sexual violence. If I’m glib, this piece is how to get on with your life as best you can after you’ve experienced sexual violence.

That said, these methods are also heavily informed by my experience as a het, cis, able, white, Western woman who has straddled the middle and lower class divide for the last decade. My healing process has been largely attempted as an adult, with short periods of access to clinical treatment and long periods without, and as such, I have provided suggestions for people who can get access to formal clinical therapy and suggestions for those who cannot. There is overlap in both groups, for sure. Unfortunately I have no expertise on methods to obtain healing services in the rest of the world, so if you come across or create resources, please share an we will link prominently. To help me close any gaps in my suggestions here, please, please, please share links and suggestions in the comments as others will certainly reference this post in a very real time of need.

If you need help immediately, please locate a rape crisis center that can help you in your area: 1.800.656.HOPE.

PTSD

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a clinical term for a group of symptoms experienced by people who have undergone trauma.  PTSD usually occurs within three months of a traumatic experience, but in some instances can present years after the fact. If you attempt to look up PTSD online, many of the websites you will find will detail treatment perspectives for combat veterans, including many resources from the Department of Veteran Affairs, because veterans have long been the largest organized advocacy group calling attention to the long-term effects of PTSD while calling for insurance companies and government agencies to treat PTSD like the illness it is. Women are four times more likely to experience PTSD than men, and most experts “believe this is because women are at increased risk of experiencing the kinds of interpersonal violence… most likely to lead to PTSD” such as molestation, rape, physical attack, intimate partner violence, and childhood physical abuse. This is further troublesome when gender is layered with intersecting oppressions. As the other contributors for this series have illustrated (time and time again — is everyone paying attention this round?), the more oppressed your social group the more likely you are to be targeted for sexual and other physical abuse. Your age, your gender presentation, your color, your ethnicity, your social class, your immigration status, your adherence to patriarchal culture, your physical ability, your emotional and intellectual ability — if any of these things are apart from the accepted social norm, the more likely you will be targeted for sexual abuse.  If you are institutionalized, you are ripe for sexual abuse, whether the institution is a nursing home, a hospital, or a prison.  Rape is a systematic assault, rapists are systematic abusers, and they target the victims of their abuse based on their perception of whether you have the agency to fight back, legally and physically and emotionally.

Some years ago I met a young woman who told me she was a graduate student in Trauma Studies, a whole method of study meant to examine how groups of people cope with trauma after a catastrophic event, and how to make them better.  That there even was such a thing!  I wondered then what it would look like if someone tried to heal women who’d been victimized, or sexual assault survivors, from this death by a thousand cuts.  I wondered what our “community” would look like. 

Regardless, all sexual assault survivors do not have PTSD.  Some people will have PTSD after a traumatic experience, and some will not experience anything at all.  Clinicians have posed some reasons why PTSD is present in some but not others, supposing that the way the body processes chemicals and hormones related to stress may be a factor, or perhaps a predisposition to major depression and anxiety, and/or the degree and frequency of trauma that a person experiences over the course of a lifetime.  It is likely that if you are genetically vulnerable to inherited emotional disorders, you are more likely to develop clinical PTSD than someone who is not.  PTSD frequently coexists with depression and anxiety disorders, with many of the symptoms diagnosed by clumsy clinicians as major depression and generalized anxiety disorders alone.

Symptoms of PTSD are lumped together as 1) unwanted, intrusive memories; 2) avoidance and emotional numbness; and 3) anxiety and increased emotional arousal.  These three groups can be expanded into a more detailed list. Some people have repeated scary dreams that relate to the assault, or have daytime flashbacks where they relive the trauma while awake.  Some people report that they have difficulty maintaining close relationships, or that they feel generally emotionally numb when presented even with unrelated emotional problems.  Others report feeling an overwhelming sense of shame, or guilt, or responsibility for their rape, and may engage in self-destructive behavior like drug and alcohol abuse in order to cope.  The symptoms can come and go, and are rarely felt at their worst at all hours of the day every day, but most resources will inform you to see a doctor if your symptoms are severe, or if you’ve experienced symptoms to a degree where you feel as though you are unable to get your life under control, or if you’ve experienced these symptoms with severity for over one month.

Triggers

We’ve had some controversy over triggers in the blogosphere recently on whether or not trigger warnings are patronizing or whether they are a reasonable effort to make in a community where we can basically be certain that we have more than our fair share of assault survivors in the audience who appreciate fair warning.  I’ll put myself out on a limb and say that I haven’t yet met a fellow rape survivor who doesn’t have triggers that she is better off trying to control.

A trigger is “an experience that triggers a traumatic memory in someone who has experienced trauma.”  Even though a trigger is upsetting to the person triggered, may not be an intrinsically violent or upsetting experience to an outsider, but it will exacerbate PTSD symptoms in the assault survivor.  Many folks will use language like “safe space” to indicate that triggers are acknowledged and that sexual assault survivors can participate in said space with a reasonable expectation that she will not be triggered.  Triggers can be represented by any number of things, but to give an example, my triggers are rape in visual media, violence against children and animals, and fast, violent movements near my face and head.  I have also discovered with reference to the Kobe Bryant and Roman Polanski cases that long-term media frenzies around celebrity rape trials are extremely triggering for me personally.  It is so, so important to be able to identify what triggers you so that you can use whatever favorite tool you have in your toolbox to cope once you have been triggered.  Initially, it will likely be best if you attempt to avoid your triggers altogether if they tend to trigger debilitating emotions, but you will find that they will not trigger as dramatically as you pursue treatment.

If you have identified your triggers, it is okay to ask your friends and confidantes to help you maintain boundaries that keep you emotionally safe.  People who ignore you aren’t looking out for your best interest anyway, so why keep them around so they can continue to trigger you?  It is okay to ask, for example, that you and your friends avoid watching the movie with the graphic rape scene.  It is okay to request that triggering language is posted below a jump-cut on your favorite blog.  It is okay to protest if someone avoids your request, and it is also, in many cases, if you feel safe, okay to explain why. 

I’ve been long-winded up to this point in part because I feel that it is important to lay out some of the basics of what people are dealing with when it comes to the aftermath of sexual assault.  Whether you have access to formal treatment or not, one of the biggest obstacles many rape survivors face is the rationalization for seeking treatment at all.  We minimize our need, we minimize the pain we feel and blame ourselves to being too weak to just deal with it.  There are other things to spend our time and money on, we think.  We decide that the physical aches and pains that resulted afterward aren’t related to the anxiety and depression we feel inside.  So it’s important to realize that you aren’t alone, that you’re not a freak for feeling as bad as you do, and for the inability to get it out from under your skin.  AND you’re not a bad person for feeling you can’t get past it. This is trauma.  The insidious power of rape is the ability for a rapist to create and maintain an underclass through the act of rape.  You were targeted.  It was unfair.  Hell yes, it fucking hurts.  It is no wonder at all that you feel the way you do. 

If You Have Access to Clinical Treatment

The first step is finding a clinician you trust.  If you have the luxury of clinical treatment, do yourself a favor a shop around until you find a progressive clinician that you trust.  This person may be a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a social worker, a licensed therapist, or grad student studying any of these things.  I have had exceptional luck finding good therapists, and I live in a small college town in the middle of Indiana.  My method probably won’t fit everyone’s criteria, but I invite you to glean what is useful and shed what isn’t and share your differences in the comments.

I am more comfortable with women therapists, so I start there in the phone book.  Look for unusual advertisements in print and online, where therapists use particular language to cue what kind of therapy they specialize in, and for this type of therapy you’ll be looking for therapists that use language specifying experience with trauma, women’s issues (and many therapists will use this exact phrase), and sexuality.  They will also often specify that they welcome and work with queer communities.  These people, in my experience, are the ones you want to work with because they tend to lack prescriptive Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus kinds of gender roles and POVs that can be actively harmful to someone dealing with sexual trauma.  At this point I start making phone calls to find out their office hours and payment criteria.  More on this in a minute.

Without getting too deep into my personal experience, I have seen some therapists whose personal interests and treatment models did not at all jive with mine, meaning that prayer at the end of the session was unwelcome and uncomfortable, or that when the subject of rape came up it was brushed under the table because the therapist did not have the tools to work with me.  Ethical therapists will suggest in similar situations that you switch therapists, and will probably suggest an alternative person — but not always, in which case you need to do so for your own sake.  If your therapist doesn’t seem equipped to help or understand you, don’t waste your time and emotional energy.

Once you’ve found a therapist you like, there are a few different models for talk therapy your therapist might use, including Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Psychodynamic Therapy, and EMDR, among others.  Many therapists will use a mixture of methods specified to what works best for you as the patient. 

CBT helps you make sense of experiences that lead to negative symptoms, i.e. figuring out what triggers you, how and why.  CBT can help you break negatively biased narratives about yourself — that you, for example, are worthless or helpless or beyond help — and realign your thinking toward more affirmational narratives of self.  For people who experience traumatic symptoms after sexual assault, this can help you break the line of thinking that you somehow deserved the trauma or could have done something to change or prevent it or that you’re never going to get better so why try.  These negative feedback loops are thought to lengthen and worsen bouts of depression and anxiety, and having the tools to intervene can be immensely helpful to those with trauma.

Where CBT focuses on what is present, psychodynamic therapy focuses on the unconscious mind, “where upsetting feelings, urges and thoughts that are too painful for us to directly look at are housed.”  Before you dismiss this as so much Freudian woo-woo, this is a way of saying that the therapist identifies your defense mechanisms and helps you to identify, redefine, and let go of whatever fear or trauma is leading you to employ said defense mechanisms.  Psychodynamic therapy isn’t as widely used to treat PTSD symptoms in particular, but it can be helpful to work through some of the side effects of assault trauma, such as an inability to bond and attach with partners and children, or inappropriately defensive and hostile reactions to daily stimuli, all of which can be problematic for rape victims after the fact.

EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, intends to change the way you react to triggers.  Incidentally it’s one of the treatments that did me best while undergoing formal treatment, and it’s one that is gaining credibility in the Veteran PTSD treatment community.  It also makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.  Before I describe the process, I will note that it is procedurally very complicated and that although there is agreement that it is very successful for PTSD treatment, there is a lot of controversy about how and why it works.  I encourage anyone interested to do your research and be sure you do it with a therapist you truly trust.

The way my therapist explained it to me was that it was a way of changing a variety of assault experiences from “THE thing that happened to me” to “A thing that happened to me,” and this is exactly how it feels now.  She used a rotating LED light that went back and forth at a speed I could follow with my eyes, and while I followed the light, she led me through a series of Q&A sessions where I recounted my assault experiences in as much detail as I could handle.  At the end of each short session, she would stop and ask me whether I had any particular physical or emotional pain resulting from my recollections, and if I did the next short session would focus on that.  We did this over the course of several hour-long sessions, during which I recalled all kinds of details about the assault that I wouldn’t have normally recalled in my then-usual anxiety.  I was then able to process and redetermine the efficacy of some of the values and negative feedback loops I had attached to the events.  After this course of treatment was completed to our satisfaction, regular therapeutic treatment for anxiety and depression symptoms (i.e. stocking the toolbox with coping tools I could self-administer) was so effective that we reached a stopping point in our relationship.

If You Do Not Have Access to Clinical Treatment

Double-check to see if you do indeed have access to clinical treatment.  Many people, including myself, stop looking for a therapist before you start, either because you don’t have insurance or because your have really crappy insurance.  For those of us in the United States and in other similarly shitty countries that don’t care about their citizens’ well-being, finding mental health care can be really frustrating.  A lot of insurance companies will cover some mental health care, but it will be of the type that is court-mandated for incorrigible teenagers and habitual drunk drivers.  These facilities will accept you as a patient but they often aren’t equipped with the kind of tools and training necessary to help long-term, voluntary patients that are seeking help with the legacy of sexual trauma.  The good news is that there are some ways around this that are still applicable to low-income and uninsured people. 

Upthread I mentioned that you should talk to your potential therapist about payment methods when you meet with them.  A lot, A LOT, of smaller offices operate on sliding scale fees, fees that are adjusted based on what you can afford with your income and expenses.  Some therapists even ask you to NAME what you can afford and pay that each session.  Fees will vary wildly depending on the education level, demand, and philosophy of the therapist you choose, but I personally have paid between $0 and $90 a session with a professional, licensed therapist.

Part of the key for finding a cheap but engaged and qualified therapist when you don’t have that benefit built into your health coverage is that shitty, unacknowledged work that the poor have to do to get shit done.  Part of that is the ability to, again, find a therapist whose philosophy matches yours, which is even more important if you don’t have the luxury of leisurely shopping around.  Try to find people who have background in community activist healing services that are meant exactly for people like you.  Look for people who may be politically aligned with activist communities, i.e. feminist therapists, queer therapists, therapists of color, people whose therapeutic philosophy includes the value of mental wellness for all and not only for the very wealthy and connected.  They are out there everywhere, and they are signaling you in their ads and other communications with potential clients.

If you can’t find or afford a therapist in the long-term, there are alternative treatments that will also help you in the healing process.

One of the biggest, most difficult steps in treatment for many sexual assault survivors is how to get reacquainted with your body.  Many suggest learning any type of progressive or deep relaxation therapy method, ways of relaxing major muscle groups to help aid concentration and break anxiety patterns.  Relaxation tapes, or meditation tapes, are commonly used by therapists to teach people with anxiety how to calm and self-soothe, and these are the same kinds of tapes people who aren’t in therapy use for personal meditation.  You can download tons of different types of podcasts for free that will play on a handheld or desktop mp3 player, or check out any number of these tapes and CDs from your library.  If your library doesn’t have any, check to see if your library is part of an inter-library loan system, in which case they will get your requested tape from a sister library and call you when it comes in.  It’s suggested that you listen to the tapes in a calm, relaxing place, while laying down or seated, and follow the instructions that lead you through the tensing and relaxation of major muscle groups, usually in a pattern from toe to head.

Another way to get reacquainted with your body after it’s been violated is to manipulate it.  Move it in a way that is free and happy for you, that is a reminder of how beautiful, functional, and strong your body is, and how resilient you are.  Take advantage of community health collectives that provide services like acupuncture, yoga, and massage, all of which can be enormously helpful with residual pain and the release of stress that occurs in assault survivors when they receive touch from another person, and all of which can be adjusted to help a range of different types and abilities of bodies.  I personally benefited from physical training and self-defense, all for free at the YWCA, not because I thought it would protect me from future assault, but because it helped to re-frame my body as a source of power instead of a place for another person’s abuse and desire.

Group Therapy is beneficial to rape victims for a lot of reasons:  it’s group-led, encourages support among peers, and often includes an educational phase that can be helpful in re-framing your circumstances and feelings around the rape.  Additionally it helps people who are isolated, or who fear isolation, create intimacy with others in an emotionally safe and structured way.  Many rape crisis centers use group therapy as a main mode of therapeutic activity because of its efficacy, and if you are able to find a group affiliated with a crisis center near you, it is almost always free. 

When BFP blogged here earlier this month with her excellent piece on the role of citizenship in sexual assault cases, she pointed to the role of testimonios as an organizing tool to both bring the issue to light and bring a sense of justice to the survivor.  And as BFP noted, all cultures do this to some degree, if perhaps without the documentary, because it’s important to most people to tell their stories, shape their own narratives, and feel as though their experiences are heard.  Therapy, if anything, is a guided telling of your story, a way for someone who is trained in the art of healing to bring perspective to the parts of the story you don’t understand, or pull you back when you’re unfair to yourself.  For most rape victims, justice is elusive.  Most rape cases go unreported, even fewer are investigated, and even fewer are prosecuted.  Many of us, if we dare to tell our stories, aren’t believed at all.  Part of healing, I believe, is refusing to be boxed in by the stigma and telling our stories regardless of our fear, and to make society accountable to us BECAUSE WE ALL MATTER. 

I don’t have any easy answers or poetic conclusions to end this piece with, other than to say that it does get better for you as an individual.  It may never be gone, but you will find peace sooner if you pursue it.  And again, please help me fill in the gaps or modify what I’ve written here by leaving suggestions in the comments.

A woman who was receiving extended sick leave benefits due to depression has had those benefits revoked by her insurance company. Why? Because they found photographs on her Facebook page in which she appeared to be enjoying herself:

Nathalie Blanchard, 29, has been on leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Que., for the last year and a half after she was diagnosed with major depression.

The Eastern Townships woman was receiving monthly sick-leave benefits from Manulife, her insurance company, but the payments dried up this fall.

When Blanchard called Manulife, the company said that “I’m available to work, because of Facebook,” she told CBC News this week.

She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on the popular social networking site, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday — evidence that she is no longer depressed, Manulife said.

Blanchard said she notified Manulife that she was taking a trip, and she’s shocked the company would investigate her in such a manner and interpret her photos that way.

“In the moment I’m happy, but before and after I have the same problems” as before, she said.

Even better, it would seem that the insurance company didn’t only use Facebook photos as a diagnostic tool, they also may have hacked her account to obtain them:

She also doesn’t understand how Manulife accessed her photos because her Facebook profile is locked and only people she approves can look at what she posts.

Nice work, that is.

Now, Blanchard lives in Canada (and was receiving the benefits in question not through Medicare, but through her employer’s insurance). So while indeed another example of insurance companies being evil, I have no real intent on attempting to tie this into the current U.S. health care debate.

What I’m a lot more interested in at the moment is how stereotypes about disability/mental illness are constantly utilized in attempts to expose the “fakers” — and how the fact that they’re used in this way by people in positions of authority only reinforces the idea that the stereotypes must be true.

When it comes to disability, able-bodied people tend to have an idea of what disability “looks like.” This results in proclamations about who is really disabled and who is really faking it (presumably, for all of the awesome government benefits that are inadequate to live on, and the fun social stigma). And for the person being proclaimed a faker, that frequently means not only the hurt of having their identity and lived experience dismissed, but also the denial of accommodations that they need.

Mental illness is no exception to this rule: people think they know what it looks like, that they can spot a person with a mental illness a mile away, and that if a person doesn’t live up to those expectations, they’re either seeking benefits they “don’t deserve,” or seeking attention. And with regards to depression specifically (as it’s the topic of the original article, and my greatest knowledge base), they tend to think that if someone isn’t spending all of their time crying, frowning, or refusing to get out of bed, they can’t possibly have it.

This makes me exceedingly angry. As someone who has lived with depression to varying, waxing and waning degrees for over 10 years now, I know from firsthand experience that there are a whole lot of ways to be depressed. Logically, I can only assume that there are also many other ways that I have not personally experienced. And yes, the unable to stop crying, unable to smile, unable to get out of bed kind of depression is very, very real. But it’s not the only kind. Most of the times I have been depressed, I have been able to smile, under certain circumstances. I have been able to enjoy myself, laugh, and have fun, when my mental state and the situation are right. I’ve also learned that I can be really, really good at putting on a happy face and pretending that I’m not depressed for the benefit of other people, even if I’m particularly unwell — indeed, I’ve learned that doing as much is expected of me.

And the claim that the type of depression where these things are true is not real depression is denying people — who have significant trouble finding happiness to begin with — whatever happiness they can find, in order to be recognized. It’s saying that people with mental illnesses cannot ever have fun or enjoy life under any circumstances. And it’s also telling people that their options for being believed, acknowledged, and accommodated are to “get better” or to start acting more miserable.

In addition to the emotional costs, which I clearly think are very important in their own right, there can be other major costs, as well — whether they be a loss of financial assistance, as above, or a loss of ability to receive treatment, a loss of familial support, and so on. These can all have serious repercussions on a person’s mental health, on their quality of life, and in some cases can result in physical injury or death.

Financial savings, which are obviously going to be the insurance company’s motivation, are not all this is about, here. As we can see with people defending the insurance company in the article’s comments, it’s also about separating oneself from people with mental illnesses — again, with the belief that you can size up a person’s mental health status just by looking at them — and maintaining a prejudiced worldview. And the insurance company’s decision, made from a position of presumed expertise and authority, has only reinforced the ignorant and bigoted misconceptions that people already held.

Just like the people who claim that the woman using the word rape to describe what violence her boyfriend inflicted on her is “making a mockery of real rape,” people also claim that those like Blanchard are “minimizing the realities of people with real mental health issues.” But no, actually. In both cases, the society that supports those kinds of dismissive statements is doing a fine job of that all on its own.