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This morning I’m listening for a second time to a podcast I’d downloaded weeks ago, and hadn’t gotten around to playing the first time around until just yesterday. This is the broadcast for the habitually brilliant This American Life’s episode #354, “Mistakes Were Made,” which originally aired on April 18th of this year. You can hear the episode in full by selecting the above link. (Your options are to play it for free through streaming audio at the website, download as an mp3 for $.95, or purchase the episode on CD for, gulp, $13.00.)

There’s a prologue, just under eight minutes, that’s interesting enough, but if you’re pressed for time and you want to get to the utterly amazing story at the heart of this broadcast (Act One: You’re as Cold as Ice¹), you should feel free to skip ahead; you’ll want to be at about the seven minute, 50 second point. (It’s hard to do this in an exact way with streaming audio, so if you’re doing that, just sit tight.)

This is the story of a man named Bob Nelson, a perhaps unlikely historic figure in the science-fictionesque would-be “field” of cryonics. His story makes for quite the parable on “unintended consequences” and “getting in over one’s head,” and one to which, curiously, I can relate, based on my own past failings (for example, my brief, hilarious-and-yet-truly-awful tenure as the acting President² of Richmond, Virginia’s chapter of NOW), and the failings I’ve witnessed in others, both strangers and loved ones (although, to be fair, the failings I reference here were, generally speaking, on a far less spectacular and shocking scale than are evident in Nelson’s tale).

But more than exploring the “unintended consequences” and “getting in over one’s head” motifs, Nelson’s story exposes some very fascinating truths about the very nature of truth. In the trainwreck course of Nelson’s involvement in cyronics, this man became a master of the art of rationalization. Soon, his rationalizations had metastasized into a pattern of deceit so profound that, even now, in his attempts to reconcile everything that happened, he seems authentically unclear as to what actually happened. In short, he lied enough that he came to believe his own lies.

This is different, it seems to me, from the variety of deceit that is inherently malicious. In the interviews which comprise this broadcast, Nelson left himself utterly open to having his narrative challenged - and indeed, disproved. Had he been maliciously deceitful, he would have been far more artful in his deceit. He would not have, for example, granted such open interviews. (A wise attorney will not place a defendant she or he knows to be guilty on a witness stand for cross-examination; so too, a liar who means to cause harm with his untruths will be far more dodgy with his or her approaches to narrative.)

I have known a great many otherwise innocent people who have lied themselves into corners from which they could not, subsequently, extricate themselves in any meaningful way. For example: a severely traumatized rape, battering, trafficking, torture, and stalking survivor, who was so afraid of her past abusers that she was willing to file false police reports about continued stalking episodes, on the basis that doing so would give her documentation needed to obtain a current and enforceable protection order, should the need arise. But when I found her an FBI agent who was, without qualification or hesitation, willing to pursue a serious investigation of the criminal organization to which her most dangerous of all her previous abusers had belonged? (Her cooperation with which could have garnered her entrance into the federal Witness Protection program.) She completely shut down, was not at all willing to testify. Needless to say, there were unintended consequences she (and I) faced because of these decisions. (And soon, the window of opportunity, during which the agent in question had promised to be available to her, had shut; he was pulled out of state to investigate the Montana Militia.)

What is more? In the course of trying to advocate for this woman (who was my partner at the time; “Lee,” as discussed tangentially elsewhere, it became clear to me that, even when she changed her story - or her rationalizations for the various versions of her story - she genuinely believed what she was saying, each time she spoke. The traumas she had experienced, both in the past and while I had lived with her, were all too authentic; I became painfully well acquainted with the evidence from same (for example: letters, phone calls, having our apartment broken into, receiving hate literature from the same organization to which one of her abusers had belonged). But she coped with this (continuing) trauma through extremes of dissociation - which is, most plainly, one form of “lying.”

And in my own secondary traumatization³, I coped through my own acts of dissociation, accepting as literal truth whatever my partner said, no matter how frequently her story changed. Further, I did my damnedest to convince others of the veracity of each of Lee’s constantly morphing claims. Sometimes this meant exaggerating a situation, but more frequently, it actually meant minimizing it - because nothing, it turned out, made it more impossible to secure necessary, life-saving services (for example, police protection to go back into our broken-into apartment, so we could get ID and other essentials before leaving the state in the dead of the subsequent night) than conveying, to the fullest extent possible, how much danger she was actually in.

At the time, I had not heard of the phenomenon of folie à deux. One of the most painful aspects of my recovery from that traumatizing experience (in the course of which we led a substantively dangerous existence, the details of which are well beyond what I can address here) has been the effort to comb through everything that happened, and attempt to assess, with both the benefits and hindrances of hindsight, to separate the real from the unreal; what I’d feared - or hoped - was true versus what actually had been true. (What may be the truest fact of all from that time? That I may never be entirely certain of which things were unambiguously true, and which weren’t.)

Whereas folie à deux may be described as “a rare psychiatric syndrome in which a symptom of psychosis (particularly a paranoid or delusional belief) is transmitted from one individual to another,” and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) describes how a person, traumatized in the past, emotionally re-experiences past trauma, and Secondary Traumatic Stress is a kind of “PTSD by proxy,” typically affecting persons in the helping professions, and Acute Traumatic Stress is construed to be PTSD’s precursor (in which the traumatized person is dealing with the events in the present, rather than exclusively past tense), what I was dealing with was the combined elements of all these disorders. As you might imagine, literal, objective truth in all matters (particularly those which were causing my partner and I such profound, visceral, and immediate distress) wasn’t easy to come by. (Although, paradoxically, my basic functioning required that I accept as “literal, objective truth” any number of things I subsequently understood could not have been true.)

Mistakes Were Made. The Women’s Studies scholar, anti-Klan activist and author Mab Segrest, with whom I corresponded in the mid-nineties, and who subsequently met with my partner and me, may have some understanding, looking back, of the “mistakes” to which I refer. (Even when, years later, I met with her again, and still could not articulate the dissonance between some of what I’d said to her in correspondence, and what I subsequently understood could not have been the complete truth.) As might Vednita Carter, who was my advocate when Lee and I were clients of the now-defunct organization WHISPER (she went on to form Breaking Free). As might Claudine O’Leary, whom I did not know at the time (although I’d read some of her underground zines on feminism, poverty, and related issues, published and distributed pseudonymously), but who has, since the late nineties, worked with many severely traumatized youth, from situations not unlike my partner’s in the immediate period before we met (she was nineteen then; I had just turned twenty-two). As might many of my friends and family members with whom I was sometimes in touch between 1993 and 1997. (I remain estranged from many of these loved ones, as a direct consequence of communications I had with them during periods of particularly acute crisis, which they, understandably, found traumatizing; perhaps we might call that “Tertiary Traumatic Stress”?)

The bottom line here is: traumatized people, who may still be in profoundly dangerous situations, develop creative, often dissociative, and thus often fundamentally dishonest ways of surviving on a day-to-day (sometimes on a minute-to-minute) basis, expressed alternately through extremes of passivity and hostility. However, this particular variety of “dishonesty,” in which so many untenable truths may be embedded, is one fundamentally is lacking in malice.

Hearing the broadcast about Bob Nelson a second time around, I remain appalled by the actions of this man, and their consequences for those who became embroiled in his (unintentionally?) twisted narrative. He has, to use the somewhat tired⁴ analogy, “Drunk the Kool-Aid.” (And to abuse the dubious analogy further, one could say his organs have accommodated themselves to Kool-Aid’s poisons, such that he is now pathologically convinced of his own lies, and his consciousness could not survive attempts toward integration - which is to say, a substantive reckoning with real truth.)

It’s horrible, and it’s tragic, and it’s shameful.

But I doubt it’s all that unique. There are, I suspect, many more “Bob Nelsons” among us.

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¹ The subsequent and final segment, Act Two: You’re Willing to Sacrifice Our Love, concerning spoofed versions of the William Carlos Williams poem, This is Just to Say, is also brilliant.

² Emphasis on the “acting.” (As my friend Kimmy Certa can, I am afraid, attest.) (And yes, Kimmy, I really will write the whole story of that debacle… at some point.)

³ While there is a growing field of literature on what is called “Secondary Traumatic Stress” (see, for example, this book), it is geared almost entirely to persons in the helping professions, rather than, for example, family members and partners of the directly traumatized individual. In my own situation, my role bridged that of “partner” and “advocate” for reasons of necessity and, unfortunately, isolation. While we did, in fact, consult a range of social service, medical, and law enforcement entities in several states in an effort to get competent help for my partner, none of them were prepared to address the breadth of her situation. (For example, I consulted extensively at one point with The Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, but they finally determined they could not have her as a client, as - I am not kidding - she had been tortured on American rather than on foreign soil, which was beyond the scope of their mission.) In lieu of any of the competent, comprehensive services my partner so desperately needed, from social service organizations, medical services (due to injuries as well as malnutrition related to her past abuse), and law enforcement, we were on our own. And since she was still in some measure of danger from her past abusers, we were both in a constant state of terror, in ways that challenged our ability to so much as function - and left us with profound emotional scars. (I addressed these in my poem, “How the Fugitives - Two Women Lovers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive,” published in the November 2000 issue of Violence Against Women.)

⁴ The reference is also problematic for reasons RadGeek (Charles Johnson) has, quite compellingly, explored.

…in the lyrics to this song, and you have some sense of how my early-to-mid twenties went. (Lyrics are after the jump.) Also, please know that for the benefit of this post, I spent hours searching for some representative photographs of myself in the classic buzzcut of the era, which I would have happily scanned and reproduced here, but they are apparently buried in the detritus of more than fifteen years’ accumulated papers and pictures, scattered hither and yon. When I finally do track them down, I’ll gladly share.

Also, this post should not be construed as a condemnation of any among the varieties of feminism, nor is it a disavowal of my own experiences which are indirectly mirrored in the motif of this song. Rather, it’s just a glimpse back in time, and a gentle pondering of what (at 37) I can now credibly refer to as “my youth.”

(click on triangle to play song - hopefully it will work!)

[special thanks to Nat for the plugin recommendation.]

Did you enjoy that? Go here to buy the all-around brilliant album from the artist’s own site. Alternatively, you can buy just the song from Amazon or iTunes.

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Dar Williams: “The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co-Ed”

I’m not a leader, I’m not a left-wing rhetoric mobilizing force of one,
But there was a time way back, many years ago in college (don’t laugh),
But I thought I was a radical, I ran the hemp liberation group with my boyfriend,
It was true love, with a common cause, and besides that, he was a Sagittarius.

We used to say that our love was like hemp rope, three times as strong as the rope that
You buy domestically,
And we would bond in the face of oppression from big business and the deans,
But I knew there was a problem, every time the group would meet everyone would light up,
That made it difficult to discuss glaucoma and human rights, not to mention chemotherapy.

Well sometimes, life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging,
And so I found him in the arms of a student against the treacherous use of fur,
And he gave no apology, he just turned to me, stoned out to the edge of oblivion,
He didn’t pull up the sheets and I think he even smiled as he said to me,
’well, I guess our dreams went up in smoke.’
And I said, no, our dreams went up in dreams, you stupid pothead,
And another thing, what kind of a name is Students Against the Treacherous Use of Fur?
Fur is already dead, and besides, a name like that doesn’t make a good acronym.

I am older now, I know the rise and gradual fall of a daily victory.
And I still write to my senators, saying they should legalize cannabis,
And I should know, cause I am a horticulturist, I have a husband and two children out in
Lexington, Mass.
And my ex-boyfriend can’t tell me I’ve sold out, because he’s in a cult.
And he’s not allowed to talk to me.

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* Which is not to say these are mutually exclusive categories. Goodness knows I’ve encountered a fair number of women who could be described both ways.

Earlier today I could not get enough of listening to Bikini Kill’s 1994 album, Pussy Whipped. Specifically, I had to hear Rebel Girl over and over (I even stopped to tweet this fact), as well as Alien She, which includes these lyrics:

…She wants me
To put the pretty, pretty lipstick on
She wants me to be like her…
I want to kill her
But I’m afraid it might kill me
Feminist
Dyke whore
Pretty, pretty
Alien
And all I really wanted to know
Who was me and who is she
I guess I’ll never know…

For reasons that will be evident to some of my longtime readers (though I can’t refer you to past explanatory blog posts, which is just as well because all that material has gone back into the proverbial cauldron for its eventual repurposing), these lyrics are searingly relevant to me. Due, I will simply say, to a woman named Lee whom I met late in 1992, shortly after I’d left Olympia for Seattle (with a New York art colony sojourn between), and following which the course of my life was violently and inexorably altered - as indicated, perhaps most clearly, by my official status, with law enforcement in Washington state, as a “missing person” in the summer and autumn of 1993 (although police in two additional states, plus the FBI, also wound up tangentially involved).

And even if those particular lyrics weren’t so immediately relevant to my history, there is also the touchstone fact that I had been in Olympia at the same time Bikini Kill was emerging. The riot grrrl scene was an alternate universe against which my own was being played out; many nights in late 1990 and early 1991 had found me standing guard for my sociopath girlfriend, Amy, who, without the slightest sense of irony, was spraying graffiti around town protesting violence against women¹. (Note: she was not only a serial batterer of her lesbian partners - see her hometown’s newspaper for crap she would still be doing more than a decade later - she also claimed to have a juvenile record for attempted murder.)

So, while I stood guard (the alternative to which was: trust me, you wouldn’t want to know), Amy would be spraying Dead Men Don’t Rape across the facade of the furniture store downtown. Then we’d go around a corner and she’d be hoping to attack another surface with her hilariously inappropriate sloganeering (which I came to regard as her preemptive strike against the credibility of the women she’d battered and raped; by attaining, under false pretenses, her “folk hero” status among the radical feminists and lesbians in town), out of nowhere there’d be some fresh new graffiti up, saying only Bikini Kill. And we had no idea what the fuck Bikini Kill meant (only later learned it was a new punk band, which would go on to define the riot grrrl genre), we only knew they were taking up precious wall space and really kind of pissing Amy off.

Despite the radical life-interruption that was Amy, though, it was, most substantively, the prelude to what would follow, in Seattle, with Lee.

Which is why, perhaps, this morning I struggled for what seemed an eternity to wake from a certain, apparently chaotic dream, the meaning of which I could not discern until I had physically written it out, on paper (as is often the case with me; it’s like, with the action of pen on paper, puzzles can be put together in very clear ways, even when, at first, I had not known there was anything besides chaotic and, most likely, meaningless fragments in play).

To read the full-sized journal entry, click here, otherwise you may be able to make out the words as they appear below².

Nope - the past still isn’t dead.

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¹ The Olympian ran something or another in some crime or public complaint column about Amy’s exploits (not that anyone outside the lesbian community knew who was behind the graffiti); ironically, she’d had been an employee of the same newspaper when I met her in October of 1990. (Hey Olympian: check your HR records, if you have ‘em that far back. I can also tell you about the security guard she met there, with whom she committed robberies - or at least, so she was given to boasting while drunk.)

² Re-reading the bit about Pearl Jam’s song, Jeremy, coming on the radio as I was writing it, I think, inevitably, of where I once lived, on Jeremy Street, in a San Diego suburb, when I was thirteen. Then I go read the Wikipedia entry on that song, and I learn that one of the song’s inspirations was a disturbed junior high school student in San Diego. Um, wow.

Between my husband getting laid off last week (with all of three weeks’ severance - Jesus God what are we going to do?), his aunt dying yesterday, and an increased severity of political disillusionment on my part, I’m not much inclined to blog right now.

Fortunately, my favorite living author, Augusten Burroughs, has a new book out: A Wolf at the Table. I’m debating between devouring it whole (as I was starting to do this morning; see below) and savoring it for as long as possible. Or perhaps both. (Devour, then start over. Lather, rinse, repeat.)

In any event, I now have a place in which to engage my consciousness that doesn’t make me want to scream bloody murder. Or it does, but in a productive, Jesus-what’s-wrong-with-me-I-need-to-be-writing-like-this way. Augusten Burroughs is nothing if not an existential shot of courage, an escape hatch that isn’t such a benign “escape” after all (considering some of my own history that requires a fair amount of confronting; Augusten’s most recent book, notably, concerns his father).

Meantime, you can (almost) always find me on Twitter.