Virtuality

BlogHer in Chicago 2009!






I'm so psyched!   Can't wait.   I love being around women who write who are also techno divas! And Chicago is one of my favorite cities!  Chicago here I come! 

Woot! Woot!


BlogHer -- The Morning After....

Sitting in the lobby bar & sandwich shop of the Westin St. Francis -- Caruso's.

It's sort of sad and I am no longer mistaken for a woman of negotiable virtue when sitting by myself in hotel lobbies. High priced of course!

Why the heck it is called Caruso's is beyond me. It serves generic sandwiches and basic drinks at prices that seem to harken back to other times of devalued dollars being carted around in wheelbarrows. Maybe I've become jaded. Moi? Yes, simply little Amish descendant farm girl me? The last trip I made was to San Diego and I stayed at ------- a very sheeshee trendy chic place that was a bit higher on the luxurious scale than here -- and this is a rather nice place. As my old friends at Brazen Hussies would say.... you can bet your Lancome I would come back.

Thanks to my attendance at BlogHer '08 I've decided I will blog a bit more personally here than I have recently been doing on my other blogs. After all my best writing shows off my absolutely fabulous personality. Truly. All allusions intended.

I'm so please to have been here at BlogHer again -- the balance between social blogging and professional blogging is so fuzzily amorphous as to be non-existant at this event.... and this is good. Women writers. Nothing more, nothing less.

Children and parents were everywhere this year -- babies and elders and everyone in between. Mothers brought their babies, Daughters brought mothers.

These women behind BlogHer are amazing. They've grown this thing smoothly and quite rapidly. Attendees bitch about all sorts of inconsequential things, even me--can you imagine that? I met all sorts of wonderful women and if I were pitching for the home team I'd have been absolutely agog. Every conceivable type of female was represented here. Really. The Mommy Bloggers were out in full force. All this rather misleading moniker means is that you are a blogger with a child. Hellfire and damnation, I could be a Mommy Blogger -- I still have a child at home -- although my absolutely stunningly premature silver hair might mislead at first. The majority of adult women are mothers.....so just what is a Mommy Blogger anyway? If anyone has a clear understanding of the nomenclature, please do fill me in!

I primarily wore two hats at this conference (and both looked smashing, thanks for asking, almost as smashing as that lamp I barely bumped that has the audacity to topple and disintegrate on Macy's floor at a stage party. (Yeah, let's have a couple thousand women crowd into purse, shoe, lingerie and furniture sections of a store and serve them copious amounts of alcohol.... well like duh, of course stuff is gonna get smashed.) Do remind me to talk about the swank KY counter there later. Ut oh, I've digressed. The hats were political blogger and virtual world blogger.

Letter To My Body

BlogHer started this thing called A Letter To My Body.  I've been thinking about writing one, a letter, and linking it to the others on BlogHer from this site.  I haven't done it already as I've been heavily into constructive change for the last couple months.   The couple months before that I was numb.  The months before that I was working in a job that took all my physical and emotional energy so that I wouldn't think about the previous six months when I cared for my mother in her home,  1893 miles from my  home and family,  as she passed from this life, and then lived in her house as we cleared almost 70 years of accumulated memories from the house after her death.

For those of us who have abused and watched our bodies be abused, well at least for me, writing a letter to that part of myself is beyond difficult if we do it honestly and with the real intention of communicating something to ourselves and all our parts.   

My dear faithful physical self, I love you, never doubt that, ever again, and please hear me as I say, I am sorry for all things I've done to you and all the things I have allowed to happen to you.   I've been learning to make peace with the past for the last couple of years... it started two years ago on my birthday when I called Donald Rumsfeld a liar and was escorted from the Senate meeting room.  At that point I knew that I was strong that you were strong and that we had arrived.  Finally we were whole, we were together, and everything was alright.   You were so calm and steady.  I was so proud of you.

I still want to officially apologize for trauma you've suffered when I starved myself, when I gorged myself, when I would scratch you until you bled, when I smoked and drank and did everything I could to hurt you, when I stayed in relationships that brought you no pleasure out of fear, when I was not aware enough to warn you to get up an leave before an assault happened, when I stayed vigilant for years at a time and worked our adrenal glands to exhaustion, when I allowed young foolish vanity to tempt fate and got us into a situation where rape occurred, when you had to suffer through needless surgery and countless tests, x-rays, injections, medications, scans, and years of inactivity when I played sick to please a mother who wanted me to be sick because of her own sickness.    I am so sorry you experienced all these things.  But you know what?  It wasn't your fault, and it wasn't my fault.   We were young, practically babies when the brutalization began and we learned to think that self-sacrifice, in a literal sense, was the norm and what we had to do and what we should do. 

I want to thank you for being so resilient,  for all the pleasures you have allowed me to experience.   Thank you for the perfect timing of the ovulation that allowed me to become mother to the most wonderful baby in the world now grown to most wonderful young woman in the world.  Thank you for becoming strong enough for me to lift my mother during her last days as I cared for her, that ability allowed me  to have the time with her to truly understand forgiveness and experience love for and from her. 

Thank you for coordinating fingers and developing neural paths that allow me to blog and write for hours on end without strain or tiring.   Thank you for naturally guiding me away from wanting to eat things that have faces. Thank you for enjoying it when I work out.  Thank you for hating being directly in the sun.   Thank you for giving me that great white streak in my dark hair while I got used to graying. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you.   I will continue to take better care of you with each passing day in these second fifty years.   

Namaste my dear old friend.   Namaste.

Nancy

Unfolding Another Level of the Onion

Once I conceptualized healing as the closing of a wound.   Then I was told to visualize healing as the opening of a bud to expose new layers of petals on a blossom.   I now use the peeling away of layers of an onion as my visual model for conceptualizing the process of healing. 

I find the model self-explanatory, but then I am using the schema.  LOL.  So a bit of an examination of this model follows.   

Others have used the onion analogy for problem solving.    Even narrative text parsings have used the onion example.

Aroma

Onion models at first might seem to be framed as a negative experience.  They stink.  They make you cry.   No, no, no, no, no. 

They do not stink.  Walk into a house where onions are softening and browning in olive oil.  Ten to one someone will say, "Something smells good."   They are powerful, they are aromatic.

Aromas carry particles that perfuse the air and land on and travel with things that pass through the air carrying the aroma.   

Oils

The little beads of oil that transfer to and bond with the skin of anyone coming in direct contact with the raw, injured, onion are impossible to ignore and difficult to remove unless you interact with lemons.   

Layers

Aren't as simple as they seem.  There are membranes and layers of layers.  Some of these are very closely paired to the point where they seem to be one or at least inseparable.

You peel one away and another even more densely compressed layer is underneath. 

I post this as I will be referring to this analogy in posts throughout the next few weeks as I embark on a journey into a new phase of my life that I have been trying to enter for the past year.   I think I have found the door.    

BlogHer Business

A couple of weeks ago I spent a lot of time at a REAL conference in Second Life.   Today I'm popping in and out of the live blogging coverage of BlogHer Business, another REAL event but I don't feel as much of a part of this one as my avatar isn't sitting in the audience.   

But it is good.   Check it out.   Business savvy women ,  women savvy businesses.   What a great pairing!  I'm learning from the live blogging posts that are being posted asap after the session.   Sounds like there will be video too.

Here's the link to main page that will have links to the individual sessions that  are being live blogged.  The first link to the opening session is already live.

I love the new wave of integration that conferences are taking on.  The near instantaneous feedback makes these conferences more a part of a process and less a distinct "event."   The conference as node in information flow is much more engaging and engaged than a simple ol' point in a linear system.   

Attempting to build new blog linkages to my integrated business site (this blog) is not easy, but I feel I have to keep the integrity of my old blog while developing this business.   Perhaps someday I will bring them together, but they serve very different functions.  Honesty is so important.   I don't want to mislead people.   Without honesty there is nothing to motivate a reader to come back .   

The funny thing is that this blog isn't yet listed in BlogHer because of the relative newness of it.   And BlogHer has high standards.    I will link to this blog and this series of posts from my Build Peace blog that is  a part of that network.   

Repost/cross-posted from my initial writings about acceptance of my abuse

My earliest writings about my acceptance of the fact that I was abused and neglected, rather than just from a weird family, still strike me as rather well written given the intensity of emotion I was experiencing at that point in time. I'm including them here as the helter skelter creation and update of blogs I set up to deal with individual topics doesn't work and, I now suspect, reflect some of the shattered or fragmented state of my psyche over the years. It is going on five years since I wrote these entries and I no longer feel as shattered or disjointed as I once did. I no longer feel the need to attempt to conceal my identity. So here is what I first wrote about Munchausen by Proxy Abuse. I still feel that medical abuse is a far better term than MSBP, MBP, and the many other clinical designations suggested for the type of abuse I suffered. I will elaborate the logic for this terminology in another post. And who knows, maybe I will even remember to link to it in this post when it is written.

In any case, here are the entries.

---------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

This is the first post here and I'm uncertain about this whole venture. But I am certain that I am not the only person searching the web in an attempt to figure out whether the horrible childhood I had can be said to include abuse that legitimately falls under the now trendy label of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

Believe it or not it is not always easy to figure out if you were an abused child. This can be especially true if the abuse did not involve beatings or sexual abuse, the most recognized types of child abuse.

Munchausen Syndrome, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, Factitious Disorders, malingering, faking, and a host of other terms all come into play here. I really don't give a hoot about what it is called and whether my mother suffered from a disorder, mental illness, or was just a weird, occasionally nasty woman... I just know that stuff she did, stuff she encouraged me to do stuff, and the stuff I did to get her attention harmed me and is a significant factor in the severe periodic depression I've experienced for decades.

This blog will hopefully help me, and perhaps others, figure out what MSBP is, whether it is a factor in the depression and post traumatic stress with which I, and others, live.

----------------------------

Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Read this Mary Oliver poem today and it sounded very familiar to me.

Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

----------------------------

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

I am beginning to think that my mother poisoned me on at least two occasions. Even if it isn't true, which I will never know, to be able to logically entertain the thought that my mother was capable of this speaks volumes.

On Mother's Day just one week before I turned 12 I became very ill with mono. I wasn't faking it, and as I now think back, the diagnosis of mono was because nothing else fit. That apparently served the purpose of my mother whatever that might have been. One weird thing I also remember in conjunction with this was that it allowed her to "have" to complete a show and tell for me at school, one I had never planned to do. And this meant leaving me home alone and "untended" which she never did. The whole thing just doesn't add up.

Also shortly after I was born, both my father and I -- no one else in the family -- came down with "the Asian flu." The things that are suspicious to me in this revolve around how my mom recounts the events of the time. Nothing is stated about being worried about us, but rather she focuses on the things she shared with other people about the illnesses... how others had to come in and help with the crops... and how my "little tee shirts" were discolored for months from sweating out the drugs given me. They aren't inappropriate recollections in and of themselves, but that they are the only things she recounts is somehow "off."

After I realized that she had fostered my participation in activities that could have easily harmed or killed me when I was a teen, I began thinking back to what was done before that time. That's when my stomach turned as I remembered the above two incidents.

The sadness that my own mother may have tried to kill me is a very heavy burden right now.

----------------------------

Wednesday, November 12, 2003
I'm waivering between belief this all happened to me and disbelief, hope that I somehow I got it wrong. I haven't had any revelations nor found memories. I'm simply putting together bits and pieces of well worn memories. I use the term integration. I'm allowing myself to remember A, B, and C simultaneously when previously, for whatever reason, I kept them discretely separated from each other.

I am, however, remembering them together with suspicion. The poisoning is certainly conjecture, but I wonder what a woman who likes to enhance stories to add status to herself, who to this day consistently turns the knife in me through little persistent but extremely meaningful digs, omissions, and such... who loves illness, who allowed much harm to come to me by fostering situations in which it was totally inappropriate for me to participate, and who didn't recognize any of my life's milestones appropriately or in a timely fashion.

I remember confronting her about "allowing" me to miss so much school. I was totally distraught when I did this. My memory focuses on saying, "How could you do this to me?" There was absolutely no concern for me in her reaction, she only expressed outrage that I could treat her so badly.

She has no empathy whatsoever and seemed to view everything in relationship to herself. She never asks, "How are you?" Of course we all view the world from our own perspective, but the extreme degree to which she carried this behavior clearly points to some sort of mental illness or criminal mindset.

Cultural conditioning is so strong. Even with all this, I still feel "guilt" over speaking badly of her.

The next question is, "where were my brothers and father as this was going on?"

----------------------------

Saturday, November 15, 2003
Not only kids blog.

(Yikes... blog is a verb...)

I'm a MATURE adult. But the source of what I'm blogging about happened to me as a kid.

Anonymous online journals can be very healing. Any writing can be.
// posted by nfh @ 12:14 PM
I responded to this question on an MSP site (AsherMeadow.com):"Since you have already been there I would like to know what type of treatment and counseling we are going to need after we prove that my step childrens mother is doing this to them. They are 7 and 9 years old and the eldest has started denying claims that the mother makes as to his sicknesses and abuse allegations against the childrens father but the youngest is still going along with the mother although there is documentation in her medical records, school records etc to prove what the mother is doing. Where did you go wrong in treatment (if you ever did)? Would you do anything different? Are there things we need to be aware of that they need that is not in medical research into msbp? Please let me know from experience what these babies need, I dont want them harmed more by me doing something wrong although it is to help them.
And how the heck can we explain what has happend without them hating her(we dont want that i believe that the mother is sick but that she can heal and be a good mom)?"

Here's my reply....

This is the heart of the matter for me. There is so much that needs to be understood and known about how to heal the wounds that this type of abuse inflicts. I'm only now, as a mature adult, coming to grips with what I experienced and what I can still do to heal and to learn to live a healthy and whole life even though I am covered with scars.

You are doing the right thing (IMHO) in being persistent, in focusing on healing the children and not on seeking retribution against the mother.

I can only speak from my experience but... here goes...

Find a therapist who understands this type of physical and psychological abuse probably one who specializes in non-sexual abuse.

These children need love and lots of it... follow their leads. The type of love they will comfortably and healthily accept will have been tainted. The love offered them or what they interpreted as love has been the perverse medical and nursemaiding behaviors and situations they experienced. They need to be brought back into healthy loving family relations and they may well need to have specific learned expressions of how love is expressed be overwritten, reframed and extinguished. Talk to the counselors about this.

The kids’ senses of trust have been shattered. They have probably learned not to trust their own feelings and/or assessments of situations -- and this self doubt about basic perceptions has been the most insidious remnant of the abuse.

Knowing that someone you love is capable of not only harming you, but wanting you dead, is Hell to deal with. I still find it extremely difficult to trust at the deepest levels.

Be careful of falling into religious justifications that “suffering is good” or “it was meant to be” or “you will be stronger for having being given these tests.” That kind of rationalization was extremely harmful to me. It feeds into the “I deserve the bad things that have happened to me” ideology. What was done to them was sick, wrong and perverted. A life long masochistic approach to interpersonal relationshps could develop from the foundations already built. Suffering is not good for children or other human beings.

I know you want to believe that the abuser can be “healed or “reformed” and that you want to be able to trust her again. You probably love her and want to see her healthy too. Your priority is the children. My own take on MSP abusers is that they are much like child sexual abusers and they may never be able to be entrusted to caring for a child again. Be very careful. The abuser may well find other victims when these children are removed from her care. The parallels with sexual predation are there.

I and at least one other survivor I’ve spoken with also experienced a phenomena I haven’t seen mentioned in the literature. As teenagers, when we began rejecting the unhealthy and abusive behaviors both within ourselves and those carried out by our mothers against us, our mothers withdrew all care other than the most basic from us. In my case my mother allowed and enabled me leave the house with men much older than myself, didn’t impose a curfew, and effectively encouraged situations in which harm to me was likely to occur. It is difficult for me to say whether she wanted me to be declared mentally ill, be arrested and prosecuted as delinquent, or to die. She certainly didn’t want anything good for me. So I would caution you to be diligent in watching for other types of abuse supplanting the medical abuse when medical abuse no longer becomes an option for her.

I will try to expand this on my geocities asombpa site when I have time. I am searching all the MBP literature as time permits looking for mention of health, wellness, healing and successful therapeutic strategies. (So much of the literature focuses on the abuser and on people unjustly accused.) While these are real concerns, I have to believe that the focus of research should be on survivors and stopping the cycles of violence.)

I think the most important thing to remember is that this IS abuse. Get survivor counseling for the children. Be very sure the counselor is someone you truly trust and MONITOR it. I was victimized by a “helping” professional as a very young adult and consequently stopped seeking any real therapy until recently.

Thank you for helping these kids. The few people who extended helping hands to me as a child and teen made a world of difference. The will to survive is powerful. Kids will latch on to positive guidance and caring given them. Bless you.

Virtual Conference - Life 2.0

I'll occasionally be re-posting, with permission, bits of Ana Herzog's reports and her images from the in-world Second Life venue for the Life 2.0 conference over the next few days.   The conference sessions actually started Saturday so I won't waste too much time with repetition -- you can read about the sessions she attends at her "My Life as an Avatar" blog at http://secondana.blogspot.com.   

Many Blogs in One

I have too many identities.   I didn't intend to create different identities but at one point in my naive past I thought that the different subjects that intrigued me deserved distinct treatment via distinct blogs.  Most human beings worth their salt are so diverse that to maintain a compartment for each aspect of self would take up all of an individual's time.   I blog about peace, politics, and attitude.    I blog about  meaning, identity, reality and semiotics.   I blog about munchausen by proxy abuse & medical abuse, I blog about virtual worlds and the metaverse such as Second Life® and Open Life® grids.  I blog about human culture.  I blog about living happily with depression.  I blog about green and blue - ness, about environmental processes such as wetlands and arid lands.  I blog about blogging.  I blog about the original Generation X that is the latter portion of what is termed The Baby Boom Generation.  I blog about feminism and other "isms." I blog about Gene Stratton-Porter.   I blog about Indiana.   I blog about Arizona.   I blog about CODEPINK.   I blog about roles assigned to me by culture such as mother, daughter, sister, wife, woman and roles I have actively assumed such as iconoclast and activist.     And I blog about many other things.   

My favorite quote in the whole world is Walt Whitman's, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.  I am large.  I contain multitudes."

What to do about what is happening.

The Virtual Knowledge Group (VKG)  is a concept as much as a company.   Nancy, the founder and director, jokes that in the small mid-western town closest to the farm where she grew up she was described through statements such as, "Oh, her?  She's always been different." 

Different times require different thoughts and actions.   Friends, as I am sure you know, we are headed into very different times. Many say we are headed toward very difficult times as we face: global warming.  fundamentalist frictions,  a world wide health crisis,  over exploitation of dwindling resources, economic clashes between the very few rich and the massive numbers of the poor. 

Gregory Bateson a visionary thinker of the 20th Century defined information as "any difference that makes a difference."    

We are awash in difference.   How we handle the information embedded in those differences will determine whether these coming constraints limit or enable.

We are at a point of punctuation in the process understood as evolution.   All this means is that we are at a time of rapid change and can expect rapid expression of emergent properties activated by novel contextual triggers.   The concept is understood as punctuated equilibrium.   The gist of the theory was that "significant evolutionary change arises in coincidence with events of branching speciation, and not primarily through the transformation of lineages."

Blue is the New Green

Green has been subsumed by the dominant paradigm.  So in order to continue the subversion of the dominant paradigm, the new green is blue.  Welcome to water world.  Don't tell me you don't like post-apocalyptic tales.   We're living one.