Nimue Brown's Blog, page 122

Access and Anxiety

Anxiety and some kinds of neurodivergence can make the uncertainty inherent in an event a real barrier to participation. These sorts of issues can be easily overlooked and can result in excluding people who could have participated with the right support. Accessibility isn’t just about whether a person can physically get into the space, barriers are not just about bodies.

I’m no great expert on neurodivergence. My understanding is that unfamiliar things, changes to routines, and other kinds of uncertainty can be immensely stressful for some neurodivergent people. Knowing things in advance so as to be able to feel prepared can make a great deal of odds and reduces anxiety.

I do know a fair bit about anxiety. Given an empty space, the anxious brain will just go ahead and plug in disasters. The more you know, the less room there is to unleash the panic weasels, and the more manageable the situation becomes.

What kind of thing a person needs to know about is probably going to be quite variable. Based on what I’ve seen around event organising, the most important thing is not to be complacent around requests for information. Don’t assume people are being unreasonable or demanding if they need to know about something ahead of time. Also, they probably aren’t going to tell you if they have sensitivity issues caused by autism, or a hard time imagining unfamiliar things, or are checking to avoid trauma triggers, or need to stop their brain from coming up with a hundred potential disasters.

If you don’t know exactly how something is going to work, tell people what you do know – try and work out what the limits are. Consider asking if there’s any kind of information they need. Make it ok for people to step out if something turns out to be too much for them. Actively support people whose psychological needs are different from your own and don’t expect everyone to be the same.

It shouldn’t matter why people are asking for information and help – in that we should not have to be persuaded they have a specific need in order to act on requests like these.

In search of greener clothes

Clothing has a huge environmental impact. Throwaway fast fashion puts out a lot of carbon and adds a lot to landfill. Plastic fabrics put plastic particles into the environment. Cotton takes a lot of water to produce. Wool can be good, or can have land and animal welfare issues associated with it. Hemp and bamboo fabrics seem to be pretty good, but they’re also much more expensive.

Cheap clothing is made in awful conditions and there’s a huge social justice angle to changing how we buy and use clothing.

In terms of personal impact on the environment, we can make a lot of difference with our clothes choices. Never throw away clothes that could be given away and worn by someone else. Don’t buy clothes with the intention of wearing them once or twice. Try to buy the most durable clothes you can. Buy second hand if you are able to  – not everyone has time, energy or a conventional enough body-shape for this. Keeping fabric in use isn’t hard.

I’ve got into upcycling. The skirt I’m wearing in the photo is made from school shirts. The shirts in question were unusable as shirts – worn at the collars, marked, stained and otherwise damaged. I threw away the ruined fabric and made a skirt from the salvaged material. My knickerbockers were made from a pair of trousers that died.

The shirt I am wearing was salvaged from landfill by an innovative lad who is exploring more responsible approaches to fashion. A lot of stuff is thrown away before it even gets to the shops, but this can be salvaged and used, and in this case, has a steampunk weasel printed on it. (Weasel designed by Tom Brown). When I can point at a store for this, I will.

I have a lot of fun keeping cloth out of landfill. It creates interesting challenges and I end up with unique items of clothing. I have a horror of looking like the sort of person who has bought all their clothes from a supermarket, but I don’t have a huge clothing budget for fancy gear. This approach saves me money, which means when I buy new I have more scope to make more sustainable choices.

The Winter Queen – fiction

Are we lucky?
The Winter Queen smiled at me.
We have time to pray for…
I cannot hear the last word.
Then she cried and cried.

I love this image by Dr Abbey, and the text that goes with it suggests so much. So, I’m sharing this one without additional content from me.

Book news

I have a number of exciting thnigs going on with books currently – all around the Hopeless Maine project.

Hopeless Maine is now published in America by Outland Entertainment, they’ve just released some prose fiction set on the island.

They’re re-releasing the whole comics series in large, hardbound volumes, and copies of those have started turning up.

We now also have copies of the penultimate book in the graphic novel series – which comes out officially early next year. we’ve started work on the last book in this story, and we do know what happens afterwards…

For those of you not familiar with this project…. Hopeless Maine is a creepy island, lost in time, somewhere off the American coast. It started life as a graphic novel series and has since spawned a role play game, tarot, live performance, prose fiction, poetry, songs, and a film project. It’s a gothic, steampunk sort of a thing, originally the idea of Tom Brown (to whom I am married) but it’s become a large, sprawling international community with all sorts of lovely people getting involved. You can find out more about it over here – https://hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com/

Making personal changes to fight climate chaos

How much would you be personally willing to change your life in order to help avoid climate chaos? 

I feel strongly that we really need government action. We need the fossil fuel industry brought to heel and the voices of its lobbyists rejected by those in power. We need rules that hold those with most influence to account – rules about built in obsolescence, single use plastics, and what goes to landfill, for example. We need the right to repair. Those kinds of things have to be organised by governments. We need governments to tackle pollution and infrastructure. Banning massive cruise ships and private jets would be a good idea.

Every one of the 100 companies that most pollute the planet does so because people buy its products. So long as they feel like they can get away with it, they will. 

Making it the job of ordinary individuals to fix things is a cop-out from politicians, and totally unfair. But at the same time, if we aren’t prepared to change things in our own lives, how can we expect change to happen?

For us regular folk, there are four areas of life to particularly consider. These are only going to be an issue if you aren’t living at the margins.

Transport – including luxury journeys, holidays, flights. If you’re stuck with a commute, can you liftshare sometimes, or work from home one day a week? How much travel do you feel entitled to? 

Food – how much food do you waste? How overpackaged is your food?  How far has your food travelled? What are the carbon and water costs of your food? Are you eating unsustainable animal products? If you don’t really know where your meat came from, then the odds of it being a massive driver of climate change are really high. 

Heating – is your home insulated? (not a question for renters, obviously). How are you sourcing your energy? How much energy do you use on luxury things? 

Clothes – fast fashion is a terrible industry with massive impact on the planet. Too many people throw clothes away after wearing items once or twice. Overwashing has a huge environmental impact. Clothes production requires a lot of resources. We urgently need to use less and throw less away and really all this takes is care and effort and those who can afford to buy disposable clothing not doing so. This is the easiest area for change to occur, and the one where there are no real excuses. 

Changing your life requires effort. Often, in my experience that effort brings its own benefits and you can end up improving your quality of life by making better choices.

Staying Alive

CW suicide

I can’t remember when I first had the experience of wanting to die, but I was young. It wasn’t so much an urge to kill myself, more the desire to have never existed. By the time I was 11, I was trying to figure out how to justify my existence day to day. At that point I was fighting to work out how to live, but that’s changed over the years. 

If I could simply stop breathing by choice, then I would. That’s part of my everyday experience. It has to do with living with pain and always being tired and feeling so worn down most of the time that I have no idea how to keep going. There’s also too often nothing much I’m excited about and moving towards that makes me actively feel like I want to live. This is not the same as wanting to commit suicide.

I’ve never actually experienced it as wanting to kill myself. Sometimes what I have is an intense and overwhelming desire to not be in pain anymore – physical or emotional. Sometimes it is a thing that rises up within me and seems intent on killing me – and thus far I’ve managed to fight that, although what it brings up for me is violent, terrifying and close to overwhelming. I don’t know how to describe it except to say that it feels separate from me.

I’ve reached out for help many, many times. As it happens I’ve had years of asking people for things that would give me a better chance of not being in so much distress. What this has taught me is that help mostly isn’t available. On days when I’m struggling with self-harming impulses and the thing in my head that wants to kill me is menacing me, it’s hard to imagine who I could take that to who could actually help me. I’m not an easy person to comfort – this seems to be a brain chemistry issue. I’ve reached out for medical help, and it wasn’t there and I don’t have it in me to keep fighting – be that people or systems. I’ve been fighting myself for a long time. At this point I think I’ve worked out who would be both willing and able to step up in an emergency, but its taken a while.

Sometimes, the only thing I can do is to keep doing something. To put some kind of action between me and my death. To go one breath at a time in trying to figure out what there is to live for and how to keep going. I mostly don’t know how to keep going. But if I’m typing, I’m not doing anything else and there have been times when writing blog posts has got me through.

I did not write this blog today, it is not an urgent issue so no one needs to feel like they have to come and rescue me right now. Part of the point of writing is to try and explain so that other people are better equipped for their own experiences and the suffering of people in their own lives. Part of the point is to flag up that people won’t always tell you when the help they ask for is a matter of life and death for them. It’s not always easy to tell what might get someone through an otherwise impossible day and how much good you can do without knowing it.

And sometimes the answer is to write, because writing isn’t dying. Today (the day when I wrote this), not existing is an attractive idea – more so than it usually is. I can see no way forward, no way of doing anything good enough, no way of making my existence bearable. I’ve been here many times and I know things won’t get better but that I may learn how to make do with less and how to keep moving despite how much it all hurts.

Spiritual unease

The pandemic seems to have pushed rather a lot of New Age folk into the arms of the far right. At first glance this all seems very strange – what are the peace, love and light brigade doing cosying up with white supremacists, and people who seem to be all about conflict, hatred and control? And yet there they are, shoulder to shoulder at anti-vax protests and sharing the pages of publications.

I honestly wish I was more surprised, but I’ve been aware for some years now of the many issues in peace-love-light culture. There’s the toxic positivity, which really crushes people who are struggling. There’s the mistaking privilege for having the magical power to manifest good fortune. There’s like-attracts-like thinking which is a brutal and unjust philosophy to apply to people who are poor, disabled and otherwise disadvantaged. The idea of pre-life contracts make it seem ok to ignore people in distress because hey, they chose these lessons. The New Age movement has always had a problem with appropriating from other cultures, treating the global majority with disrespect, feeling entitled to take anything from anyone… 

Perhaps the most problematic bit is the assumption that if you’re all about peace and love and light, the people around you are good. Feeling that you can afford to be uncritical of yourself and others, and that you can just assume that goodness is what’s around you. If you think like attracts like you’re hardly going to want to consider that you’ve become attracted to Nazis. 

To be genuinely spiritual, you have to be willing to keep an eye on yourself for smugness, self-importance and feelings of superiority. The spiritual life will only stop you turning into a total narcissist if you’re actually invested in the idea of not becoming a massive, self-serving ego. To be spiritual you have to be willing to be uncomfortable. Learning and growth are pretty much impossible if you aren’t able to be uncomfortable sometimes. If you only seek out things that make you feel good about yourself, you can end up with more of an ego trip than a spiritual journey.

It does matter who you associate with. The people we spend time with have a huge impact on us. Do the people we encounter really help us become our best selves, or are they making us feel like we’re above criticism? What does the freedom we demand cost other people? Who is hurt by what we do? If we aren’t willing to ask awkward questions sometimes, our desire to have everything pleasant and easy can turn us into monsters.

Tales from Tantamount

Tales from Tantamount is a project by Merry Debonnaire that frankly isn’t easy to describe. It’s made of words, and is charming and funny.

Tantamount is a town that doesn’t stay put, and during the book it goes on holiday, gets in the river and visits a swamp. The life of the town comes to us through found objects and ephemera, and while there are stories, they aren’t told in conventional ways. Tantamount has an array of supernatural beings, and a goat on the council. No one seems to know how the various local councils work.

Fans of Nightvale are going to find this is just their sort of thing. If you enjoyed my Wherefore series I rate the chances of you also enjoying this. It made me chortle a lot.

You can get Tales from Tantamount from Merry’s ko-fi store https://ko-fi.com/s/c8cbd9a609

Ableism and Empathy

I think one of the things that commonly underlies ableism is not being able to feel empathy with ill and disabled people. People with no experience of pain can find it hard to imagine what it might be like living with pain all the time. People who are not frustrated by their bodies, or unable to predict what they might be able to do can have trouble understanding how that works for someone else. Crippling anxiety that stops you from doing things, depression that leaves you unable to function – it can be hard to empathise if you don’t know what it’s like.

Many people do better at empathy when they can see something that makes sense to them. Visible illness or injury is self announcing. If we see an awful bodily injury, we can make sense of it. The vast majority of illness and even injury doesn’t look like much if you don’t know how to interpret it. 

This all leads to the able person imagining that the person in distress is over-reacting, not trying hard enough and so forth. This results in mistreatment, bullying and the denial of essential resources. 

One of the best ways to build empathy is through the sharing of stories. The more we know about other people’s experiences, the more likely we are to be able to feel compassion for people we encounter. Seeking out other people’s stories is a good thing to do, and the internet makes it very easy. None of us can learn everything about all the things everyone else might be up against, but the process of learning about people living with disability, mental illness, neurodivergence, and bodily illness can give us some useful points of reference.

Half Human – fiction

It is a half human.
Half female.
Perfect prayer to make balance.
No bad, No good, JUST exist.

Do you see me? Do you see my otherness, my difference, or is what speaks to you the parts of me that are resonant, similar? Can you forgive my non-human half in recognition of the ways in which we are akin? Only half human, only half female, can you make that be enough?

How generous of you!

And you wonder why I do not rejoice.

Where is the being who can look at me and see wholeness, not fragments? Who is the person for whom I too would seem fully a person? Can you look at my many parts and see perfection? For I am whole in myself, I am true and real, and not a creature of pieces. My facets are not brokenness, this is not contradiction, it is a completeness that your apparent humanness cannot embrace.

I do not want your pity.

Don’t bring me kindness and tell me you understand how hard it must be for me.

Bring me the wild wonder of recognising my existence.

(First text piece and art by Dr Abbey)