Nimue Brown's Blog, page 130

Reinventing Herself – a review

Reinventing Herself, by DJ Martin is an excellent comfort read. This is a modest peril sort of story in that people whose names you never even know are killed in the background, and there’s a killer to track down, and there is some drama at the end. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the peril level for the named characters never seems high and that you can safely read this story when you want something warm and reassuring.

Main character El has recently lost her husband, and has moved to a smaller home in the woods. She discovers that for women in her family, the menopause tends to bring magical powers in the form of being able to communicate with animals. This is a glorious idea, and as someone frequently drowning in the great menopausal hormone sea, I found it delightful to have this notion  of magical transformation instead.

This is a story full of talking animals. I really enjoyed that – I was the sort of child who really loved talking animal stories, and apparently that hasn’t gone away. If your inner child wants something a bit more grownup that still has talking animals, this is for you. There’s a lot of whimsy and cuteness, and some of the animals are really funny.

There’s a lot of humour in the book. It’s a warm and charming sort of humour, based on surprise, humorous situations, and charm. There’s also a lot of content around people having and developing really good relationships – friends, family members, romance – it’s really nice seeing a book in which all kinds of healthy and functional relationships are explored and you see a lot of people being thoughtful and caring towards each other. There’s also enough complexity in the relationships to stop that feeling implausibly sweet. It’s also about people figuring out who they are and becoming more themselves, and making choices to support their own growth and wellbeing.

If you’re in the mood to grab a blanket and snuggle up with something cheering, this is an ideal book. Take it to your pillow fort, bring snacks, have fun with the modest peril and the magical take on reality this book is set in.

Find out more on the author’s website – http://www.authordjmartin.com/fiction-books/blue-ridge-series/

Not a self made man

I wonder about all the advice to be independent. A certain amount of self-reliance is good, but too often what happens is that those with privilege fail to see the ways in which they rely on others. The workers growing, delivering and selling their food. The people who built and maintain the roads. The education system that helped them get where they are… no one is really alone. No one is successful on their own, and hiding the support can really distort the story. Billionaires are not self made, they’ve crapped into the same sewage systems as everyone else their whole lives.

Behind allegedly lone, successful people, there are usually a host of invisible people doing the work. That might be their mum, or their wife – self made men often have invisible women enabling and supporting them. There may well be funding. The rags to riches story is popular, and people like to present themselves as having made a lot of money by dint of their own efforts. Dig a little deeper and there often turns out to be inherited wealth, opportunities and open doors that most of us would not have been able to access.

We achieve more when we cooperate. The myth of the lone successful, self made person encourages the rest of us away from the approaches that would do most good. Competition gets less done, and by trying to be individually successful, a person might cut themselves off from the very resources that would benefit them most. 

When we buy into the myths of the independently successful person, we can end up not noticing all the resources and invisible helpers they depended on. We can end up perpetuating class and gender based oppression where the unpaid work of women, and the underpaid work of working class people disappears from the story of the self made man. We need new stories that better recognise who is doing the work, and that no one is successful on their own.

It’s important with any success to recognise who was part of it. Who made it possible? Who picked up the slack somewhere else and created the space that gave you opportunities? Who did the work that your work builds on? We all get opportunities to acknowledge this kind of thing in our own lives, to give recognition, and to resist the temptation to make our successes seem like entirely solitary activities.

When you can’t reboot

Healing – whether we’re talking about the body or the mind – is often framed as getting back to how things were before. This assumes that there was a before, and that you can return to it. There can be a lot of ableism tied up in the idea of getting people back to how they were. Where experience has been impactful, it’s often a lot more useful to embrace the change and focus on how to move forward to best effect.

A return to normal as a proposed goal can distract you from coming to terms with things as they now are. Even if your body can be put back pretty much as it was, a dramatic experience of injury or illness will change you. I think it’s really unhealthy not to give people room to be changed by that. How you feel and what you want to do with your life may be very different after the event, and it may have you questioning you previous ‘normal’ choices and priorities.

You can’t un-know trauma. You can’t re-wind and re-set to become the person who did not have that experience. Traumatic experiences change your perspective. You become more aware of the dangers, of the potential for loss. You can’t have that innocence back. You will need to form a new relationship with the world that includes what the trauma showed you, but holds it in a way that allows you to function.

There may be nowhere to go back to. If the damage – bodily or psychological – happened early, you will have no memories of what other people think of as normal. If you’ve never felt safe you don’t have the knowledge to draw on to overcome your difficulties. A lot of the available support material depends on the assumption that you can reconnect with your pre-trauma self and use that as at least a point of reference for a reboot. Not everyone has a pre-trauma self.

This means that for some of us, healing cannot be a reboot, because there’s nothing to reboot from. Healing means building from scratch things that other people take for granted. Trust. Self esteem. Confidence in the world, in people, in your right not to be hurt… these are hard things to develop later in life if you’ve grown up in an unsafe or inadequate environment. If you’ve never felt good enough or worthy of love, it’s a hard thing to grow that from scratch. Running into self help material around this can feel a lot like having it suggested that you’d be fine if you just grew a tail. And it doesn’t matter how obvious it is to anyone else that growing a tail should be easy and simple, if you’ve never had a tail, it’s intimidating and may well seem impossible.

Helping your suicidal friend survive

The most important thing to know is that if one of your friends is suicidal, you probably won’t know. You might even have no idea that they were depressed. People hide their issues and often suicide comes as a massive shock to everyone who knew the person. Encouraging people to reach out when they need help isn’t that useful.

If you know that someone has suicidal feelings, the single best thing you can do in the short term is keep them talking. Any topic will do. A person who is talking isn’t dead. Don’t judge, undermine or belittle anything they tell you. Don’t make light of things. Don’t argue with them by telling them they have so much to live for. Don’t make it about other people – being told to endure unbearable pain for someone else’s comfort doesn’t actually make people feel better. Don’t make it about you. 

Most of the time you won’t know if someone else is struggling. What this means is that helping your suicidal friend survive actually depends on what you do all the time. How would you speak and act if you thought anything you said or did might be a life or death issue for someone else? With this in mind, perhaps we’d see fewer people on social media telling others to delete themselves or get in the sea. Perhaps we’d see less violence in language. Perhaps we’d cut back on the mockery, ridicule, shaming, put downs and other casual forms of cruelty.

When we make nasty comments about celebrities for being fat, or depressed, or not looking pretty enough – they will probably never know, but your suicidal friend might think this is what you think of them. 

It may sound like a lot of work to have to pay attention to everything you say and to act like someone’s life could depend on it. One of the contributing factors to people being suicidal can often be that maintaining the comfort of comfortable people is treated as more important than taking care of the person in crisis. I’ve seen this kind of shut-down many times. When people tell you they are tired of your gloom, bored of you talking about your issues… depressed people often hear that someone else’s comfort is more important than keeping them alive. It’s done so casually, carelessly and off the cuff, often, that I’m not even sure most of the people doing it have any idea that they might be pushing someone towards the edge. And some of them do know, and fat shame and disability shame people they know under the banner of ‘only trying to help’.

Saving lives means being as actively kind as you can manage. All the time. It means thinking about how your words and actions might impact on other people. Paying lip service to mental health does nothing. Caring for people actually takes effort and attention. Finding out how to support people takes effort. Finding out what allegedly normal speech can do to vulnerable people is uncomfortable. Damage isn’t all about big drama, it can be the cumulative effect of countless small woundings.

You probably won’t get a cinematic moment when you grab your friend and bodily prevent them from jumping off a bridge and thus heal their pain and make them want to live again. You probably won’t ever know if what you said or did made a difference, either to save someone, or to push them closer to death. What you do, matters.

And they all lived…

Authors often have particular kinds of stories they tell. That often relates to genre. Back in my twenties, I wrote a lot of erotic fiction, back in the days of Myspace, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Amazon didn’t sell ebooks…

I had one story that I told more than any other. There would be some people – two or more. They would be odd, outsiders, set apart in some way. Perhaps they would be paranormal creatures, or magical, or otherworldly. They might be monstrous. They would be lonely, and that loneliness would have hurt them and it was not obvious to them where in the world they might fit. 

Then chance would throw two (or more) of these people together. There would follow a process of finding out that they made sense to each other. Past wounding might be overcome. Impossible-seeming situations might start to resolve. They might save each other, or figure out how to save themselves. Instead of being lonely, impossible heartbroken things, they would become people who belonged together.

It’s a story that can be played out in many ways, so I never got bored with it and I don’t think my work became too samey. 

I wrote variations on that theme because I wanted it to be true. I note that this is pretty much the story Chuck Tingle tells, over and over, with higher levels of weirdness and less angst. I’m glad it’s not just me.  

It’s not the story I’m going to tell moving forward. It’s not the story in Hopeless Maine, and it isn’t how the project I’ve been posting from here is going to work. These will be stories to at least some degree about people who have already found their people. Stories of cooperation and working together to overcome challenges. 

In many ways what I’m working on now are sequels to the stories I used to tell. This is about what happens to the outsiders when they’ve had some time feeling secure and now know where they fit and who their people are. Stories that twenty-something year old me could not have told, because at that point I’d never seen it, and even the romances were based on hope, not experience.

A changeling story

The changelings of folklore are not long lived. They are only bundles of leaves and twigs, rocks and mud lumped together and enchanted to resemble a child. Their job is to distract the family for a day or two after the baby has been stolen. The changeling is supposed to die, the family is supposed to mourn the death in all innocence. 

There are those of us who never fit, never belong. The changeling story is a comforting fiction. The real baby, the one they wanted and could have loved, was kidnapped by fairies. You are what was left instead. You are a fairy child, and you belong somewhere else. The ache in your heart is a longing for that more magical place and one day, they will come for you, one day you will go back. There is a way for your heart to be whole and for your life to make sense. It’s not authentic folklore, but it is the kind of story that can keep a person alive.

Then there are the people like me. The ones who should not have lived and yet somehow did. Gazing anxiously at every reflection, certain that other people must surely be able to see the mud and twigs under the surface. This human-seeming skin has stretched too far and is so thin, one day the sticks will poke through it. Perhaps it will be a relief when it finally breaks open and everyone else can see that I was never a real person.

We were never supposed to live this long. We aren’t actual people. Nor are we fabulous magical fairy children waiting to go home. We are mud and sticks, conjured to pass as a baby, and somehow we are not dead yet. This isn’t folklore either. There are no traditional stories about changelings who do not die. But, we know what we are. 

Forgive me if I am terrible. I was not made to be anything good. There is only rot and death on the inside, only broken things. I was not supposed to exist like this. I cannot help it.

(Art by Dr Abbey. This one is a standalone and does not relate to any specific project).

Weep, Woman, Weep – a review

Weep, Woman, Weep is a gothic fairytale by Maria DeBlassie, and I loved it. It’s a novella set in New Mexico, written in a first person voice with a narrator who is clear that you’re going to hear her version of events. It’s a really strong narration voice, and I identified to a considerable degree with the main character. Mercy is an outsider, her life is full of magic and much of that magic is dangerous to her. She’s not someone who performs femininity, and it meant a lot to me because it’s so rare to see that.

At the same time there are many things in this story that are outside of my experience. I know something about generational trauma, but I have no experience of dealing with it in the context of racism. It was a really educational read for me on that score.

You can read this as a fairytale metaphor, about overcoming trauma and claiming your own power. I read it as magical realism and that also entirely works, you can step into the reality of this story on whatever terms make sense to you. It is steeped in La Llorona folklore. You could stand outside of that as a reader and see it as the beliefs of the main character, or you can enter into it as the reality she is in.

Happily the story taps into one of my current obsessions – how we tackle desertification and bring life back to damaged landscapes. I love stories where there’s a strong sense of place, and I love reading about characters who are deeply involved with their landscapes and this story is great on that score. The relationship between healing people and healing the land is explicit. It’s also a story about healing and change within a community – exploring the collective and how that relates to the individual. Part of what’s damaging Mercy is what’s damaging her community as a whole – she can’t heal unless her community also heals.

This is a beautifully written, affirming and emotionally rich sort of story. I know some reviewers have found it to be a bit of a weepy but I found it uplifting – your mileage may vary. There’s a lot of emotional truth here, and I think anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world will find it a resonant read.

Heartily recommended.

You can find the book on Amazon – https://www.amazon.com/Weep-Woman-Fairytale-Ancestral-Hauntings-ebook/dp/B09CV9P9SH

Therapy isn’t always the answer

Following on from my post about helping your depressed friends, I think it might be helpful to talk about therapy. Encouraging your depressed and anxious friends to get therapy or counselling may seem like a kind and helpful thing to do, but it isn’t. Trust me, they’ve already thought about it, and if they aren’t heading that way, there are reasons.

Free therapy and counselling are hard to come by and tend to take many months, if not years to access. That’s no use to a person who is in crisis right now. Chasing support that won’t manifest for ages may not strike them as a good use of their time and energy when they are already in trouble.

Counselling and therapy can be accessed much faster if you can pay for it. However, many of us don’t have a spare £50 a week to spend on an hour of professional support. To be effective, you need to spend a lot of time and money, and for many people that just isn’t possible. Therapy is a long term solution not the answer to an immediate crisis. There are almost no resources available to deal with immediate mental health crisis.

Most trauma therapy resources start from the assumption that you’ve had one bad experience and need to reboot. This is as true of online free resources as it is therapists. If you have experienced complex trauma, this whole approach can be unhelpful through to harmful. If your trauma was in childhood, you may have no normal to go back to. Complex trauma is complicated and specialists are few and far between.

Distress can be complicated by many factors – poverty being one of them. Not everyone will admit to you that they can’t afford a therapist. Depression and anxiety often have their roots in real and intractable problems that a therapist can’t deal with. Yes, tools to help you handle it better might be nice, but they aren’t worth much when you’re dealing with abuse, workplace bullying, insecure accommodation, systemic racism, gender identity crises etc. Sometimes you just have to deal with or live with the problems and a therapist might not actually be able to help with that. And sometimes they can, but that’s a really personal decision about whether you think you have the kinds of problems that can be helped with in this way.

The more complicated your issues, the harder it will be to find someone who knows how to help you. Your expert on supporting people with domestic abuse may know nothing at all about polyamoury. They may even have a really unkind attitude to that – as happened to me once. The expert on grief processing might not know anything much about how to help someone with an eating disorder and the two might be deeply intertwined for you. The person with great skills for tackling irrational anxiety might not have any idea how that intersects with your experience of racial abuse. And so it goes on.

How many therapists you could potentially access depends on where you live and what access to transport you have and how much time and money you can afford to spend travelling to people. Or it depends on your intent access, which might not be good enough or may not allow you the privacy for online conversations. A lot of free support has religious underpinnings. Pagans may not feel comfortable going to Christian counsellors, who may be entirely unable to help them. Even if therapy is a good idea, there are lots of reasons why it might not be available.

One thing I would particularly ask is not to tell people that healing is dependant on getting professional support. Healing is easier, often with the right support, but there are few things more depressing than being told your poverty or complexity means there’s no way out for you. Many of us have to heal without a professional guide in the mix. Books exist. Peer support exists. Working it out from scratch exist. Please don’t invalidate these solutions because for many people they are the only options available. And it is possible. I’ve unpicked and got under control a number of PTSD triggers over the years. It was bloody hard work, and I expect it’s easier with good support, but it is possible

Taking off a skin

Sometimes growing is a smooth and easy process. However, for some creatures, growing means shedding a skin. It means breaking your exterior and climbing out of it in a new, soft skin that can expand. Insects do this a lot. Snakes of course also shed in order to grow.

It can be a helpful metaphor for certain kinds of emotional experience. Growing isn’t always a sweet and comfortable process. Growth can be terrifying, and sometimes you have to shatter what’s on the outside in order to have the room to get bigger.

Sometimes the lives we make and the ways in which we present ourselves are designed to keep us safe, but really keep us small. To be authentic, to feel real, to live your truth you may need to be something less guarded, less like a fortified building. When the walls we build to protect ourselves are too constricting, breaking out is messy. 

Sometimes it becomes apparent that the outside layer isn’t a skin. It is not your skin. It’s more like having had your growth curtailed by getting wrapped up in plastic litter. Getting out of it may prove bloody and you may need help. You are not the plastic rope that got wrapped around your natural shell. You are not the things that dig painfully into your skin.

It may be the case that your real skin is in there somewhere, under a mess of ugliness that isn’t you. Like one of those films in which a rescue dog is bathed and combed and has all the crap removed from its battered outsides, you may need restoring. And like any rescued animal that needs help, you may be terrified and the process may make no sense to you. It may not be until things are fixed that you’ll be able to make sense of what happened.

There’s a certain amount of violence in breaking open an egg or a seed. Transformation means the death of something, and death is scary and full of uncertainties. Change is natural, but that doesn’t mean it is bound to be easy.

Love is not difficult

People are not hard to love. Children especially are really easy to love and in many ways we are biologically programmed to respond warmly to children. Humans find round faces with big eyes cute and appealing and this isn’t any sort of accident. Or at least, many of us do.

I’ve never met a person whose woundedness made them unloveable. I’ve never met someone who was too badly hurt to be worth caring for. Some of the people I love can be hard work, because of what they’ve been through and how difficult it is for them to trust, or open up, or accept help. There are quite a lot of people on this list, and they aren’t hard to love, they just don’t always know how to let anyone do that. 

Along the way I’ve also met the people who complain about how difficult other people are. How difficult I am. People who have told me I am hard to love, or too difficult in other ways. These were often people who wanted things from me – my love,  my work, my energy, my support… but were very clear about why it wasn’t reasonable of me to expect anything in return.

It took me a long time to stop thinking that the problem was me. 

The issue isn’t about whether a person is hard to love, the issue is more often about whether you are able to be open hearted. What is hard to love is coldness, selfishness and disinterest. I hit my limit when it comes to deliberate cruelty as a sport. I can stay in for people who do dysfunctional things because they are hurt and not handling it well. I can love people who find it necessary to test me, although that can be complicated and it isn’t ideal. 

If someone tells you that you are hard to love, consider that they have just confessed something important about their own insufficiencies. Ask them who they think it would be easy to love, if you’re feeling equal to challenging them. Deliberate cruelty is the only trait worth outright rejecting a person for. Anything else is just the messy consequence of being alive and dealing with the shit that brings. A person can be messy, complicated, challenging and difficult and still not actually be hard to love, because love is a very natural response between people who are involved in each other’s lives.

Love is also not the same thing as having the skills or resources to properly support someone who is struggling. You can love someone without being able to help them. You can love someone and need your own boundaries for your own reasons. The person who tells you that you are hard to love has some serious issues, and you may not be able to help them with that. If you love the person who cannot love you, don’t be persuaded that the problem in this is you, because it probably isn’t.