Other Realities

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

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.   

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."

Writing what is read.

I do not intend for these posts to be therapeutic journaling written mainly to fill some need I might have.   I write about what captures my attention, makes me think thoughts that have some novel component, and what readers want to read.   I look at statistics from my websites to gauge what I should be writing.   I give topics that fill some sort of a need in the informational milieu of the world have a higher priority than personally favorite topics that no one reads. 

Munchausen by Proxy Abuse is what has received the most traffic so far on this site.   This lends supports my impression that there is a dearth of real information for the survivors of this type of abuse.   I will set up a page on Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome Abuse.   (Pages are static and function more like traditional website pages while blog entries like this one roll over into archives and are replaced as front page featured posts with newer entries as they are published.)  You will also be able to pull up all of the MSBPA pages under the category "medical abuse."   

I prefer the term "medical abuse" as it parallels the term sexual abuse, a term fairly well understood by the population at large.  Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is not only a mouth full, it also begins to set up a favorable context for framing the behavior it is supposed to identify or describe.    MSBP put the focus on the abuser.   Munchausen sets it up to be thought of as a big word with a fanciful connection.   The phrase "by proxy" maintains the focus of the phrase on the active "doer" of the behavior, although it does acknowledge an anonymous person who was acted upon.   Medical  abuse is a far more terse and far less romantic term.   Of course the people who harm others through needless medical procedures or induced illness need help.   But the exhibitors of this syndrome do not deserve attention.   The vicitms of this syndrome need the therapy and assistance in healing those wounds that can heal.   

There are survivors of MSBP.   The "famous" cases of medical abuse tend to be ones in which the abuser (most often the mother of the victim) is caught in an attempt to seriously harm or kill her young child.    I am steadfast in my belief that many if not most cases of this bizarre violation of a dependent's body, and spirit,  are never brought to light because the victim hasn't been killed and grows up to eventually participate in a world where criticism of "the mother"  is not acceptable, and quite often able to be perceived by members of the culture that has ruled out such behavior as even possible.  This is an invisible form of abuse if the victim survives as family members and the victim him or herself will most likely be unable to even understand that abuse has happened.   

It was once culturally unacceptable to expose or acknowledge sexual abuse.  Medical abuse for the most part still wears a cultural cloak of invisibility.   

How do I know all this?   What makes me qualified to discuss and analyze such behavior? 
Briefly, for now, I survived unnecessary medical procedures initiated by my mother.   I at first studied psychology but found semiotic anthropology to be a fascinating area of study and research.  I have an MS in Anthropology and specialized in biosemiotic analysis specifically focused on "the body."    I did not fully come to understand that this MSBP thing  was what I had experienced until five years ago.   I began to venture toward the mental and emotional place where I could  accept and integrate that experience  into  myself about 15 years ago.  The uncanny thing  that still amazes me is that  I  had equipped myself with a nearly perfect theoretical toolkit for making the cultural denial visible and then for parsing and reframing the behaviors into discrete acts of meaning. 

We're out there, we adult survivors of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy abuse, even though society for the most part does not want to know we are there,  and in some small way I hope that my discussion and dissection of medical abuse under my self-ground lens provides some illumination along the path to understanding how to eradicate this particular cycle of abuse.      

Why do this?

I'm at a major turning point in my life.   My mother died this past June.   My daughter graduated from High School a year early in July.   I turned 50 last May.  I am starting into the official (officious?) work force again.   By the time I turn 51 I will have a company formed, an LLC under who's rubric I can jam all the things I do.  This LLC will sort of be like this blog/site. 

This blog site has been created as a place to collect, expand, and continue on from all the online writings I've done in the last 10 years be it about Late-Boomers or CODEPINK.  It will also connect to if not house thoughts and musings and even some of the writings themselves per books I have begun the process of pulling out of myself.  One is a biography of Gene Stratton-Porter I have been working on for years as time permitted.  The other is my  recollections and research about a disorder or syndrome from which I believe my mother suffered and through which as a consequence I was also hurt, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. 

I also have joys and new experiences I want to crow about.   I have always loved the technology behind visual communication.  While I've never been a good photographer, I've played in the graphic and written arenas of communication for decades.  I loved my first typewriter that I bought instead of a car when I turned 16.   I've been having an affair with one or another of a myriad Apple & Macintosh computers and products since the early 1980s.  These dalliances provided the base from which I could jump into what is now termed, "Social Networking" platforms as they developed in the '90s and on into this decade. 

Email lists  seem so primitive now, but... they were so high tech when I started using, posting to, and forming them.   Bulletin Boards, Websites, Publishing Networks, MuDDs, MMRPGs, Blogs and Wikis are other types of online communication tools I have played with and that have lead up to a point where I personally feel the first really integrated attempt at the creation of a real virtual (LOL) reality has been achieved with Second Life®.  It too will be soon be passe unless it evolves into the next mash up.   

All of these things have lead me here to creating a TypePad site and I will wax philosophic about many of the picnic spots upon that path as I fill out all the information I have to exchange with others (probably women) who can stand the stream of consciousness writing I use when I am at my most creative and connected.   

I so often quote Whitman, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.  I am large.  I contain multitudes."  I suspect he was talking about the American character but, I also think the term was biographical.   It is in that sense that I borrow the phrase to describe myself and in a larger sense the 21st Century Woman.  I speak of the time period in between the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression, and the Iraq Occupation.  It hasn't been all that friendly to complex people who refused to jam themselves into boxes so as to facilitate the cultural conveyor belts of the Industrial Revolution.

I was fortunate enough to study with a woman at Purdue University who was and is a seminal thinker.   Myrdene Anderson.     Both she and her mind alive colleagues and friends that she shared with her students and unsuspecting passers by knew by the 1970s that the next real paradigm shift had already happened .   Lots of folks are just catching on now that  this has happened.   It is exactly like Al Gore's knowing about massive change in our bio- and geo-climatic systems, per An Inconvenient Truth,  but not being able to really get through to others until recently.     We are seeing the evidence of a shift to processual, inter-connected, and personal understanding and away from linear, Cartesian,  and impersonal logic.   

This is what I write about, this is what I consult in, and that is how and why I write.