To which I call bullshit

You've probably already heard about the US hate-group styling itself "One Million Moms" (OMM, for this post). It's an off-shoot of the American Family Association (AFA) that pits Real Mothers against The Homosexualists.  They recently got upset that lesbians had invaded JC Penney. Known lesbian and JC Penney spokesperson, Ellen Degeneres, later laid the verbal smackdown on OMM on her show. She is badass in an adorable and non-confrontational way.

Lately, OMM have targetted the much-loved Archie comics because two of their male characters recently married and the comic featuring the wedding would be sold openly at Toys'R'Us. 

Apparently:

This is the last place a parent would expect to be confronted with questions from their children on topics that are too complicated for them to understand. Issues of this nature are being introduced too early and too soon, which is becoming extremely common and unnecessary.

At this point, I call bullshit. Children are certainly introduced to topics of sexuality at young ages. My younger cousins had "boyfriends" in pre-school. Any time my brother mentioned even talking to a girl in primary school, our father would grin and make teasing comments. Every goddamn fucking fairytale I heard as a child ended with the boy getting the girl. Is this not introducing "issues of this nature"?

Of course not, silly! We're talking about teh gayz, here. Exposing young children to overtly heterosexual narratives is so prevalent because all children are straight, right? We can't let them think being anything other than straight and cis-gendered is normal until they're old enough to decide that being straight and cis-gendered is exactly what they want to be!

The main problem that vexes the pro-queer community is that groups like OMM tend to focus the discussion on what I like to call "gay man buttsex". They hear the word "gay" and immediately think of scandalously immoral acts that take place in the dead of night in a back alley and no one brought a condom*. The entire discussion is drowned out by the very real fear that we want to expose children to sexual acts.


Well, no. Again, bullshit. We don't want to talk about sex. We want to talk about love. We want children to know that if you love someone, it doesn't matter what gender they are. It doesn't matter what they have on their outsides, it doesn't matter what they have on their insides. All that matters is that you love them.


Can we get love on a front page?



*If you like barebacking in dark alleys, more power to you!
 

Disappointment

A revelation occurred yesterday. I’ve recently been operating based on the belief that my dips into depression have definite triggers. That one incident is enough to make the bottom fall out of my stomach, and that all I need to do is work on being mindful of my thoughts and feelings and reinforce the notion that I’m allowed to get things wrong. It’s nice to know that I can falter, I can make mistakes and the walls won’t come a-tumbling down.

Two beans, or not two beans? That is indigestion!*

Things invariably come down to one question when I'm feeling low: do I eat?

I get hungry and then wonder if it's a good idea to eat something. Aside from the effort required to procure food, there's always the niggling sensation in the back of my mind that it's not a good idea. I'm perfectly capable of eating mindlessly, and have often found myself on the other side of a bag of chips regretting everything past the first few mouthfuls. As difficult as it was to get up and get food, it's just as difficult to put it down and wipe my hands clean. So you can imagine that adding the shame of mindless eating to a low point, or even a full-blown deppressive I-don't-want-to-get-out-of-bed day, might not be a good idea.

The obvious solution is to exercise portion control. I only usually eat this much, so I will only eat this much. But when my rational mind has already given way to thoughts such as, "I could eat something, or I could keep sitting here doing nothing," that plan doesn't always get put into action. Sometimes it's easy. I feel like eating a biscuit, so I will get one biscuit and that's it. I use my inertia against myself. "Ugh, I've already gone and gotten one biscuit, I can't be bothered getting up and going all the way into the kitchen for another." That usually works. Other times it's not so easy, and I just keep adding things because I "feel like" I want them.


Which leads to the next problem. If I go over all of that in my mind, I'm likely to consider that the safest option is to not eat at all. Which is just as bad, because then I'm not eating. At which point I'm even hungrier, but I don't want to eat something because I'm even more likely to let go my rational mind and binge. So I don't eat. And then we fall into a spiral of hunger.


Dilemmas!


The best thing I can do in these situations is to throw myself into rational autopilot. If I'm able to manage it, I can ensure that I eat only what I need to, that I don't wait to go to the bathroom until I can barely stand, that I make it to class (and take notes), not get run over while crossing the street, and not remember a single thing that happened. Which, I suppose, is the best I can hope for on those days.


*Title inspiration: Babbage, from Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego for PC; my favourite quote of the game

Honours - an experience to last a lifetime?

Because the best way to introduce yourself to the internet is with an intense overshare. This year I had the joy of completing honours as a part of my bachelor of science degree, and it appears I have been gifted with this continuing, but maybe fading (we’ll see), anxiety as a result. For those not versed in academic lingo, honours is like a testing ground to see if you should go onto further research. In my case it consisted of a year long project with a thesis produced by the end of it. I’ve heard it compared to something like doing a PhD, but worse. Honours is roundly acknowledged as being difficult, tiring and stressful.

However, all of this assumes that, at the very least, your supervisors will be there to support you. Allow me to tell you that when the best thing you can say about your primary supervisor is that they happened to find you a fantastic secondary supervisor that it was an incredibly tough year. There were changes to my project, caused by my main supervisor, that made no sense, dodgy scientific and ethical practice and an unwillingness to actually give a damn. A particular highlight was my main supervisor’s attempt to bail on my entire project about a month before my thesis was due through a two line email sent only to my second and third supervisors.

Still, I managed to drag myself over the line, encouraged by my other two supervisors, with the expectation that the fear and anxiety would go away. That afterwards I would be able to forget about all the rotten things that had happened and move on to doing better things. Gaming, cooking, bludging in general. But the relief never really came. The lasting waves of anxiety that have dogged me since I gave in my thesis were totally unexpected. It’s been over a month since I submitted my thesis and I still find myself spontaneously bursting into tears for no known reason. Literally yesterday I felt panic shoot through me at the thought of doing the dishes, the fucking dishes. I need to do a last bit of Christmas shopping and the thought of all the things I need to do to get to the city and back has thus far been overwhelming me.

A large part of me is so fucking angry that my main supervisor managed to get at me so severely. Given that we’re not even on speaking terms and I could probably never talk to them ever again for fear that I would say something that I would regret later (though I’m beginning to think that there are no words strong enough), they can’t actually know that they’ve screwed me over this badly. Ultimately, after all the additional anguish, my mark was fine, and I could do a PhD if I wanted to, so this isn’t some attempt at a strike back for a bad mark.

All of this adds together to make me realise how much of a prick I’ve probably been in the past. Having had no experience with anything remotely bordering on mental illness I’ve typically shut down when exposed to it. Why exactly? I don’t know, most likely out of fear, why is a jerk a jerk to anyone? But even now as I sit here and type this, I can feel tension rolling through me for no reason. I’m safe, I’m loved, nothing that I need to do in the near future is what I would previously have described as stressful or difficult, and yet everything feels slightly shifted. It’s as if someone moved the furniture in my absence but I can’t quite figure out how or as soon as I pin down what the difference is, I lose it again. About the only time I don’t ever feel it is when I’m sucked into playing Skyrim or the like.

I’m not claiming to have any great knowledge of mental illnesses or what they’re genuinely like. But I do know that after a month of completely unexpected anxiety that I really wish would just go away, that they are clearly more complex than I imagined. I’m trying to suck it up and move on, but it’s just not working.