Nimue Brown's Blog, page 103

Michaelmas Daisies Are Confusing

Apparently Michaelmas daisies aren’t native to the UK, but were introduced from America in the 1700s! They grow enthusiastically at this time of year, and the bees and butterflies like them.

To further confuse matters, this isn’t Michaelmas – that’s in September.

But here they are anyway, cheerfully flowering in a green space near the centre of town. I see them a lot on roadsides. They are an iconic summer plant for me.

Although for further confusion, since I first posted this blog it’s been pointed out to me that these may not be Michaelmas daises at all, but Oxeye daisies, and I still have no idea (having looked at the internet) how you would tell them apart! It’s quite possibly the case that some of the other images for Michaelmas daisies online were actually oxeye daises and that there are different schools of daisy naming and that it isn’t just me!

Being High Maintenance

I’ve spent most of my life thinking of myself as a difficult person and trying not to be too much trouble for the people around me. It’s a way of living that has involved a lot of masking, and muting, ignoring my own feelings and generally being uncomfortable. In recent weeks I’ve done a lot of deliberate re-thinking around all of this.

One of the things that led me to the rethink was recognising how I feel about the high maintenance people in my life. There have been people I’ve stepped away from because I found them exhausting – people who seemed invested in drama for the sake of it, and/or who were relentlessly wallowing in misery over relatively small problems. That may be judgemental on my part, but I took my time coming to those conclusions.

I have high maintenance people who need a lot of input – usually emotional and intellectual input. I’m not so good at the tactile stuff so the people in my life with significant tactile needs tend not to bring that to me. I’ve spent years figuring out the warning signs for people I care about needing more than they are getting emotionally and mentally. I’ve developed strategies for helping people be a bit more comfortable around this. I enjoy doing it. I enjoy the challenge, the figuring out and the getting things right. The people in my life who need a lot from me are not a problem to me.

This got me thinking that perhaps it is ok to be high maintenance. If I don’t find it an issue in others, why should I consider it a problem in myself? It is definitely true that I will be an issue for some people. I get bored with trivial, superficial things. I need a steady supply of ideas and creativity to engage with. I crave intensity. There have been people for whom all of that was a problem, but that simply means we were not well suited to each other – there should be no value judgement involved. That I was judged over it and found problematic is not a measure of me.

There’s a relief in saying yes, I am high maintenance in some ways. Yes, that’s fine, that’s part of who I am. I am not going to be ideal for everyone. Some people are going to find me far too much trouble and that’s also fine, they are allowed. I do not have to be smaller and tidier to make them comfortable. I don’t have to stay around placating people who do not meet my needs and who do not like how I actually am. It’s turning out to be a liberating, affirming sort of process.

Age Gap Romance

This week there has been talk on Twitter about the age gap relationship in Jurassic Park. Laura Dern was in her twenties and Sam Neil was in his forties for the first film. The way in which age gap romances are portrayed in films is all kinds of problematic. I come to this as a person who tends to be more attracted to people who are older than me, and who is married to someone seventeen years my senior.

There is often an assumption in films that pairing older male stars with much younger women as romantic interests is fine. We don’t see as many older women in films and we certainly don’t see older women as romantic partners for men of the same age. It’s very rare indeed to see older women paired with younger men.

This kind of film pairing serves to erase older women and focus on younger women as pretty prizes for wealthy and powerful male characters. I’ve never seen an age-gap romance in a film tackle the kinds of issues that can come up in actual age gap relationships. I’m going to list a few.

Differences of expectation and experience. Issues around having children – an older woman with a younger man may not be able to start a family even if they want to. The realities of being a senior citizen with a young family. You probably aren’t going to get to grow old together. The younger partner is going to have a massive life upheaval at some point because being bereaved early is almost inevitable for them. Differences in energy levels, career stage, ambitions, desires.

There is an impact on how people perceive you and on what they think the age gap means. MILFs and gold diggers, dirty old men, cougars, predators, sugar daddies, toy boys – a lot of the thought forms around age gap relationships are less than complimentary. 

Age gap relationships can be exploitative. But then, any relationship can be exploitative, it’s not inherent in this. There may be reasons to be suspicious of someone whose ‘type’ is young and inexperienced and who keeps replacing their partners with younger people. It’s also well worth being suspicious of men who repeatedly leave ill, pregnant or menopausal women.

We need to think about the way in which young bodies are treated as toys and as prizes, in real life and in fictional depictions. It’s never ok to objectify people, to reduce them to their sexual attractiveness, to treat them as disposable, interchangeable or otherwise diminish their humanity. 

At the same time, no one should be stigmatised for getting into a relationship with a consenting adult.

Outrageousness and the bard

I spent the weekend at an excellent Steampunk event, where I got to see a number of extraordinary performers. It got me thinking about the importance of how you invest in your own work as a performer.

If you perform feeling self conscious, awkward, silly or afraid of being laughed at, this will show. If you walk onto a stage and treat what you’re doing like it’s perfectly reasonable, it’s amazing what an audience can be persuaded to go along with. Embracing the preposterous to make it your own is a really powerful choice, allowing you to do, embody, or vocalise things that more cautious people simply can’t.

This is fundamentally about your relationship with your own material. If you believe that people need what you’re doing, then it works very differently from getting out there with material you are suspicious about. People need to laugh, and there’s power in being comfortable with inviting the laughter. It’s good to invite any and all emotions. People also need to be surprised, unsettled and taken out of their everyday perceptions, and there are many ways of doing that. Sometimes people benefit from the comfort of familiarity, but too much of that just becomes banality. 

To be powerful as a bard, you have to be totally invested in whatever you’re doing. You have to be willing to take people with you. There’s a certain kind of magic that’s only available if you’re prepared to throw yourself wholeheartedly into whatever you’re doing.

I was utterly enchanted by Ash Mandrake’s set, he has a lot of youtube content for anyone who is curious, and you can start here for flavour –

The Perfect Criminal

Like a lot of people, I am attracted to stories about certain kinds of criminals. The Robin Hood model, robbing the rich to help the poor is always a thing – smugglers, highwaymen, pirates and the such tend to fall into that category. Anyone who was outlawed for political reasons. Also the vigilantes and people for whom there can otherwise be no justice unless they take matters into their own hands. It’s not ideal, but when the system itself kills and steals, what choice is there but to break the law?

In practice, these are not the criminals who routinely get away with it. Those who can bribe their way out of a situation and those who have friends in high places remain the ones most able to get away with criminal activity. 

Here in the UK there’s a lot of evidence of bribe taking in the highest places. Inappropriate and illegal foreign donations to political parties. Invitations to pay for luxuries suggest corruption. Massive contracts going to the friends of those in power, only for those friends not to be able to deliver in the slightest. What happened to the billions of pounds we invested in a track and trace system? And yet, despite this evidence, nothing seems to be changing. Many people don’t even seem to mind.

We’ve bought into a story that says a certain kind of person is entitled to have a great deal of wealth. The person who claims they can barely make ends meet on eighty grand a year, but who thinks poor people can reasonably feed themselves for 30p a meal. The people who are entitled to have their heating bills paid for them while they do nothing about the suffering of people who can no longer afford heating. 

Are they better than the rest of us? Is the man with multiple children by different partners but who went to Eton somehow intrinsically better than the man with multiple children by different partners who lives on a council estate? Why is the person who takes a few billion from the public purse to give to a family member somehow more acceptable than the person who steals someone’s purse for the few quid in it? Why do we allow ourselves to be persuaded that the criminal in the expensive (if ill fitting) suit somehow doesn’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else?

The perfect criminal takes more than they need. They feel no shame and no regret. If anyone dares to question it, the newspapers can be expected to justify the crime. The police will find there’s nothing to investigate, or that it isn’t in the public interest. The perfect criminal can steal and kill in plain sight with no consequences, because the system belongs to them. After all, if you have taken control of the electoral commission, it’s hardly likely that body is going to question any aspect of how you run an election. 

The perfect criminal is the one who can send you to prison for protesting against their crimes. Currently that doesn’t extend to writing blog posts.

The Perfect Victim

CW abuse

When we don’t believe someone who says they have been a victim, this may well be because they don’t fit our ideas of what a victim should look like. It’s worth taking the time to consider those ideas, because all too often they are immensely problematic and serve to support and enable abuse.

The victim is too calm when they talk about what happened. We feel they should show more emotion. The victim is too emotional when they talk about what happened, they seem unhinged and unconvincing. Everyone handles trauma differently, neurodivergence can inform this as well. Focusing on the manner of delivery and not the content being delivered isn’t a good choice.

The victim is not a perfect and blameless person so it was probably their fault. Most people, if you scrutinise them, turn out not to be perfect and blameless in all possible ways. Outside of self defence issues, if someone has been harmed it is because someone has chosen to harm them. Harm is the choice of the aggressor, it is not an inevitable consequence of the victim’s behaviour.

The victim cannot recall everything in perfect detail and their testimony is muddled and confused. Again, trauma does this to people, and human memories aren’t that clear. Tell me what you did on a Tuesday morning, three years ago. Include exact quotes from conversations and the precise time those conversations took place. 

The victim didn’t go straight to the police. This happens a lot, around bullying and domestic abuse. If someone jumps out at you unexpectedly with a knife you probably know that wasn’t ok. If the person you live with just pushed you too hard and didn’t mean to scare you and was only doing it for your own good and was drunk and was just upset about the thing you said… it can take a while to decide to go to the police.

If it was really that bad, they would have left. No. Controlling behaviour is all about manipulating people into staying. Abusers often isolate their victims. When the choice is between staying and homelessness, which one do you pick? Walking away isn’t easy if you have children, and the family courts have obliged many victims to be in regular contact with their abusers.

Often we judge a victim based on what we think we’d do in the same situation. We think we’d fight back, report quickly and recall things in clear detail. This is the kind of thing people believe when they’ve not been traumatised by violence and gaslighting. We think we’d be credible and that everyone would believe us – and let me tell you it’s a real system shock when that turns out not to be the case. You probably don’t think you’ve done things that would make you easy to blame – I was surprised by what was weaponised against me, people often are.

There’s a defensive aspect to it. No one wants to believe they are the sort of person who could become a victim. If the victim deserves it, or is responsible for it continuing then clearly it wouldn’t happen to you and that makes you feel safer and more comfortable. Victim blaming comforts the people who are not victims (yet) and does nothing to change or improve anything. Victim blaming enables abuse, and demanding that a person be the perfect victim in order to be taken seriously makes it difficult for anyone to be taken seriously.

Blaming the Poor

There’s nothing new about blaming the poor for poverty. To my knowledge, the same ideas have been doing the rounds in the UK for as long as anyone has been keeping notes on such things. It is (we are told) the fault of the poor for being lazy, careless, making bad decisions, drinking, smoking, having too many babies.

Somehow it is never the fault of the rich, who claim to be rich thanks to their own merits. The relationship between riches for some and destitution for others is something we have never talked about enough. Wealth is made by extracting profit. The choice to pay workers less, and charge them more is very much part of how capitalism works. Having the power to decide how much a person is worth, and how much they should be charged for essentials – food and shelter – is a decision that remains in the hands of the powerful. 

When there are more people than there are jobs, it is easier to keep wages down. Desperate people are more likely to accept appalling and dangerous work conditions. 

Lately I’ve seen the rich blaming the poor for food poverty on the basis that poor people don’t know how to cook. Never mind the cost of the resources you need to cook – a cooker, a fridge, utensils, saucepans… it’s no doubt also the fault of the poor for not knowing how to whittle their own spoons and make an oven out of clay. It is also, we’ve been told, the fault of the poor for not just getting better paying jobs in more lucrative careers. Yes, clearly that one’s on poor people too and I’m sure we can all see how we just need to try harder.

Making people responsible for things they have no power to change is a revolting thing to do. But then, admitting that hunger could be eased, that homelessness isn’t inevitable and that there is no moral virtue in working people to death would have all kinds of implications. The people with the power to make change are seldom inclined to give up their power for the sake of being nice to others, more’s the pity. 

Perhaps the biggest fight around all of this is convincing people that they should be better treated and that they do not deserve the ways in which they are made to suffer. The impact of blaming people for their own misery is that it makes it harder to push back and demand better. This is not an accident.

Learning to read the signs

Sign reading isn’t just a mystical art, although it often feels that way even when it’s largely pragmatic. Appearing to have magical insight can sometimes be about being better at reading the world than most people are. Knowing how to read the clouds when they move over your specific bit of landscape is a good example of this.

Many other animals are better than humans when it comes to spotting the early warning signs for earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. Observing and knowing how to read those reactions can be a life saver. Understanding how everyone else responds can provide you with a lot of information.

At the moment I’m trying to learn how to read the signs in my own body. The immediate future can be divined from the behaviour of my heart. I’m trying to outwit anaemia, and the earlier I can read the signs, the better chance I have of staying well. It’s all very of-this-world but compared to where I was a month ago, it looks truly supernatural.

We can tell a lot about what people might do by paying attention to body language, word choices, and the tells they have that indicate lies or bluffs. Good poker players are often good people-readers. I prefer not to have to infer things, but it is often necessary.

Human systems are complex and can be difficult to make sense of. Even so, the lines of cause and effect are often there to be read, even by someone who does not have a deep understanding of everything going on. I remain amazed by the people who seem unable to see what the impacts of the UK leaving the EU are. In pragmatic issues just as in mystical ones, it is all too easy to only see the signs you can interpret in the way you wanted to all along.

My hot take on that celebrity situation

Sometimes, the vitriol famous people endure online impacts their mental health. Sometimes people die as a direct consequence of this. However, most of the time, my hot take on the latest celebrity thing will have no impact whatsoever on the people involved. They won’t notice me judging them, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t care.

The people who will see my hot take are my friends, most of whom aren’t especially famous. If I body shame someone, it will be my friends with body shame issues who feel that. If I stigmatise someone for their disability or the state of their mental health, it will be my struggling friends who are impacted. If I am sexist about someone because I don’t like them, it is my female friends who will be hurt. If I mock someone for saying they feel suicidal, it is my suicidal friend who becomes less confident about asking for help.

I’ve talked before about why I think celebrity culture needs taking seriously. It is culture. In just the same way that what we do online is real and not magically hived off from the rest of existence. Wound someone emotionally via the internet and they are still wounded. How we talk about famous people can have a huge impact on the people around us.

It is important to call out people for the things they should not have done. I’m all for that. But all too often, the insults that come with it reveal a lot about the person making the comments. The kind of sexism hurled at women isn’t ok, no matter what they did. Call them out over their behaviour, but don’t link it to appearance, or desirability, or how appealing it seems to have something horrific happen to them. 

If your main focus is on taking down people you don’t like, then weaponising anything you can about them will seem like fair game. It’s a toxic way to behave. What we need to focus on is building something better and that means not hurling abuse for the pleasure of it. It means staying out of the personal attacks. It also means checking, and double checking your assumptions. If it feels ok to hurl sexist abuse at a woman because she’s on the other side of a political divide, that’s still hurling sexist abuse and it upholds sexism. 

Focus on what you want to build, not what you want to take down.

To be dependent is human

I write a lot about community because I think too much solitary individualism has harmed us all. There are too many things that cannot be done as an individual, and too many things that are really hard to do alone. There are also a lot of things that we do collectively and then try to ignore. This is especially true around harm we’re causing – climate change is a collective problem and yet we focus obsessively on individual solutions.

How dependent should we be on each other? At what point does dependence become unhealthy? Do we prioritise independence too much? How does ableism inform all of this? At the moment I have more questions than answers. What bothers me is the way in which dependence is pathologised, and treated as a problem to solve. Too needy, too clingy, codependent, enmeshed… at what point is it reasonable to be worried about how involved people are with each other?

I think the simple answer to this, is when it becomes controlling. When a person feels justified in controlling another person so that they feel secure, or needed or whatever it is they get out of it. If dependence turns into wanting to make people do things, a line needs to be drawn. There’s a great deal of needing people that is possible without having to take over their lives.

I’ve never been a very independent person. I’ve never lived on my own and I never want to do that. I would always choose to live communally. I’m very relationship oriented and by that I don’t just mean romance. I’ve tried living off-grid, and it’s exhausting. I don’t want to independently produce all my own food, for the same reasons. I want to live in a community. I want to share resources. I want to give, and borrow and lend and be part of an ecosystem.

My whole state of being in the world is people centred. I’ve only ever been interested in ritual as a community activity. Shared music spaces have always been really important to me. I’m in conversations about communal crafting. I’m happiest as a writer when I’m co-creating. I move towards community projects whenever I have the chance. Reading books is the only thing I’m really invested in doing on my own. Even that isn’t truly solitary, it’s an interaction with the author.

Unless you really are off grid, in a yurt of your own making, growing your own food from your saved seeds and wearing clothes spun from your own sheep, then your life is full of interactions. Even if you live alone, someone made your shelter, your food, your clothes. Someone touched your possessions before you did. People got sick and died so that you could have cheap things. Landscapes were impacted by your diet. We’re in constant relationship, and the idea of independence is a fantasy that insulates us from knowing what kind of impact we have.

We’re all participating in exploitation, in degradation of environments and in the destructive nonsense of capitalism. Individualism is just a way of ignoring this. We are all held by countless relationships, most of which are invisible to us. I’d rather be dependent on my relationships with my friends than, for example, getting my emotional viability by buying new clothes on a daily basis.