Nimue Brown's Blog, page 78

Emotional Manipulation

People get into emotional manipulation because they don’t feel they have options. It can start with it not being safe to ask for things or to express need. It may come about when other people don’t respond to simple requests. If you learn as a child that you will be ignored unless you have a massive screaming fit, you are likely going to be willing to manufacture a massive screaming fit any time you need to get something done.

In ideal situations, people are able to talk about their needs and feelings without having to put pressure on each other. If you don’t believe that kind, honest and fair relationships are even possible, then this is not an easy thing to do.

However, we all have times when what we want isn’t fair on anyone else. We might not want to have to deal with our mistakes and shortcomings. We may crave attention but aren’t inclined to earn it in any way. We might want respect without having to be respectful in return. Jealousy, insecurity, and believing everything revolves around us can have us wanting all kinds of things from other people that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to want in the first place.

When wanting something you know isn’t fair, or reasonable or appropriate, it can be tempting to create emotional pressure so that the other person feels obliged to cooperate. Alongside this, not wanting to deal with fair and reasonable requests can make it tempting to view the person making you uncomfortable as being emotionally manipulative. If you feel bad, and it’s their fault then you can believe you are the victim deserving of kindness and they are the bad guy and deserve nothing.

None of us are perfect. We all have needs and feelings that aren’t perfectly compatible with the needs and feelings of the people around us. Being human in relationships with other humans is always going to be messy, and it’s important to be ok with that. What we shouldn’t be ok with is situations that create massive power imbalances. No one should be using their own feelings to hold power over someone else. Expressing emotions in a way that’s designed to cause shame, guilt and feelings of responsibility so as to pressure someone into doing something they do not want to do, really isn’t ok. Equally, ignoring someone else’s feelings as a way of holding power over them isn’t alright either.

If someone is in distress, that should always matter. What we should be doing is working out collaboratively how to fix things – not with blame or demands, but with a focus on what everyone in the situation can do to change things. 

Many of us may need to deal with our inner children around how we learned to express need, or whether we were allowed to do that. What patterns have we learned about how to get attention and how best to get our needs met? Do those patterns serve us well as adults, or are they harmful? Are we carrying old resentment around issues of attention? Do we trust other people to care for us and respond appropriately to reasonable requests? Do we feel entitled to more than our fair share?

Love as a verb

One of the ideas that Pagan author Halo Quin has brought into my life recently is the notion of love as a verb. She’s been talking about this around self care especially. Many of us find the idea of self-love disconcerting at best. If it feels really alien as an idea it can be impossible to work with. However, when the focus is on what you can do rather than how you feel, it becomes easier to think about.

It’s worth asking what we can do to take better care of ourselves. What do I need right now? What would help me? What does my body need? What would help my heart? What does my soul require? It’s good to check in with yourself regularly and to think about these things and then act on them. Self care as something we do, rather than as an idea, is a good deal more effective. 

‘Love’ as a word is easy to bandy about. I’ve had a few people in my life who liked to say extravagant things but never really followed through on it. When love is a feeling that lives inside you, that can be lovely, but if it isn’t expressed through actions, it’s of limited use to anyone else.

This is definitely also an issue around religions. The idea of the love of God is something quite a lot of people like to talk about – especially right wing politicians. Without the actuality of putting that love into the world, it isn’t of any use to anyone. It may in fact be more about self delusion and hypocrisy.

For Pagans, I think the most important question around spiritual love is whether we love nature as an idea, or whether we’re doing anything with that love.

When you love actively, you build through action. In any context, turning love into deeds has the impact of putting your love into the world in ways that will make a difference. If the love that lives in your heart doesn’t inspire you into action, that’s worth thinking about. It may be a consequence of a worldview that divides soul things from the physical world. We exist as physical beings, and if love does not flow from us to inform what we do, then what are we doing with our lives?

Inking for Wessex

This is me, working on a piece for The Wessex Mysteries – the series I’m doing with David Bridger.

David went through the text for all of the geographical content in the book. While the setting is based on actual Dorset, we’ve made a lot up. I then took his notes and worked that into a fairly basic sort of map. Tom took the map and turned it into a view of the landscape – it’s not a realistic perspective, more a kind of illustrative, narrative approach to map making, which I rather like. I then came back in to ink the whole thing. 

I don’t have a designated art space, so I usually work on a board wherever is most comfortable – usually with my knees up like this. I live in a small space with two other people and a cat, so there has to be a lot of flexibility around how work gets done.

One of the things visible here is how I hold a pen – I’ve always held it this way, despite many people trying to ‘correct’ me as a child. I have hypermobile hands, and a ‘proper’ hold is prohibitively painful for me. When I was a child, no one ever asked why I was refusing to hold the pen properly, the focus was all on trying to normalise me. I think we’ve come a long way since those days and there seems to be considerably more willingness to make room for difference. If you look at my left hand you can see my joints bending the wrong way. This is something that affects my whole body.

Having the space to do things on my own terms is incredibly important to me. If I can’t sit in the way my body needs to sit, or hold a pen in the way that works for me, I can’t really function. There are a great many people who have comparable issues and needs and who can’t thrive if forced to conform to other people’s ideas about what a body should be able to do.

There’s a kind of mono-thinking that permeates a lot of white, western culture. One God, one truth, one true way. One right way of holding your pen – I think of all the people who are older than me who were put through all kinds of needless distress for being left handed. People are diverse in all kinds of ways, and anything that insists on only having a solitary ‘right way’ of engaging is bound to needlessly exclude. 

This is part of why I was so attracted to Druidry in the first place. It’s not a path, as such, it’s an approach that allows people to make their own journey on their own terms. There’s no one right way of being a Druid, and no demands intrinsic to Druidry that casually dismiss people or deny their existence. There’s always scope to tinker things to make them work for you, and I think that’s incredibly important.

Building a Community

There is more to a community than a bunch of people doing a thing. Workplaces are not usually also communities. These days, where you happen to live might well not give you any sense of community either. I think the key thing that gives us a feeling of community is the experience of being involved in each other’s lives. It doesn’t mean we have to live under scrutiny or in intense proximity or do all of our things with just the one group of people. However, when we do an array of things with the same people, and when there’s a feeling of connectedness, that can be really powerful.

I think I’m starting to see that happen around The Folk of Gloucester. There are people who are involved for love of history and the building. The desire to do something good for Gloucester as a place, and for the people of Gloucester, the desire to volunteer and to help in some way is a factor for many. There are a lot of folk drawn in by the steampunk events and the space to do steampunk stuff. There are other people drawn in by the folk side and the opportunity to do folk stuff. A number of us are looking at how to grow and expand all of that. There are a number of people connecting with each other in multiple ways.

More venues are becoming involved – in Gloucester and further afield, and the whole thing overlaps with Stroud steampunk shenanigans and also has connections into the wider steampunk community. There are a lot of Gloucester-connected folk involved with my online event at the weekend and there are all kinds of creative collaborations springing up because of our shared connections with the venue.

One of the reasons I think this is going to turn into something remarkable, is that so many people are moving towards this space with the clear intention of making something. Building connections, relating to each other in a range of ways, supporting each other in making good stuff happen… Something truly special is going on and I look forward to seeing what strange eggs it will hatch in the months (and maybe years) to come.

What some people think I do

Ah, the arts life, just swanning about doing nothing while people give me vast sums of money to support my decadent lifestyle.

I find it really curious how some people think the arts work, and all the recent commentary around AI has made it obvious just how many people out there think that creative people are elitist and lazy and don’t deserve to be paid for their work, or even allowed to work.

I wish with all my heart that the people who feel this way would sit down and write a novel, or an opera, or paint someone’s portrait, or go on stage and perform a play. It would be obvious to them fairly quickly at that point that there would be effort, skills and knowledge involved.

Whether a book is fiction or non-fiction there’s usually research involved, as well as planning and structuring. I prefer to make novels up as I go, but I do a lot of world building ahead of that, and I spend time on themes. I prefer character-driven stories, and it takes a while to create complex characters who can make that work. Then there’s the writing, the redrafting, the editing and the promoting. These days even big publishing houses expect authors to do most of the marketing. 

If all I did on this blog was try and sell people books, many of you would not show up to read anything – and rightly so. Relentless sales pitches aren’t interesting, and this is also true for social media. And so, in order to engage people, I end up creating and giving away a lot of content. This has worked as a strategy for me, but it does take time and energy, and not everyone can afford that. My fabulous co-writer David has massive health problems, leaving him with the option of writing or promoting, but no scope to do both. For those many creative people working full or part time jobs, the way marketing your own work also needs to be a full time job makes this whole industry really challenging.

We (The Hopeless, Maine team) do a lot of events because selling books directly works for us and because it’s a way of raising the profile of what we’re doing. Events are also work, performing at events requires rehearsing, being at events means promoting the event. I wish I could spend more time at events just being glamorous and floating about, but in practice, you’ll also find the better known musicians at events working their merch tables when they aren’t on stage, and putting in a lot of effort engaging with people.

Developing ideas takes time. I don’t want to write the kind of obvious, derivative fiction that could easily be replaced by an AI. So there are limits on how fast I can churn things out (5k words a day is my upper limit) , and how much time I need to spend just thinking about things. Unfortunately we have a culture that prizes looking busy, and is much less keen on people thinking about things. What you can do by rushing around trying very hard to look busy as a kind of performance art is not the same as what you can do with focused thought, but one of these things looks more convincing than the other, for a lot of people.

Music takes time, too. It takes hours of work to learn a piece and get it up to performance standards. It takes a lot of time to learn a script and to be able to perform it on stage. Art also takes time and isn’t created in a brief flurry of being magically talented. The image I’ve put at the top of this post is a Hopeless, Maine take on The Death of Chatterton. Drawing that image took Tom at least a day – which he can only do because he’s spent years honing his skills as a visual artist. Colouring it will have taken at least four hours, and that’s four hours of intense focus. 

Being creative is an excellent thing, and I want everyone to have time and resources to create whatever they want. Being a professional creator is actually quite a lot of work, and has a lot of the same work aspects of other jobs – we have admin, and tedious stuff that just has to be slogged through, and all the rest of it. The vast majority of people working in creative industries are paid poorly, no matter what their economic approach to the work is.

Honouring The Wild – review

Honouring The Wild explores the relationship between the Reclaiming witchcraft tradition, and activism. In this small book we hear from a range of voices and perspectives from around the world.

My guess is that if you’re on the Reclaiming path, this is going to be a valuable book for connecting with the wider movement and seeing how you might develop your own approaches.

As someone outside of that tradition, I found it first and foremost to be an interesting read. I like getting an insight into what other people are doing. I wasn’t previously aware of the role of activism within Reclaiming – it’s not a path or a community I know very much about.

There were things I learned about the ways in which people struggle, and ways of approaching that. These are relevant to me on my Druid path, and I’ll be taking those insights onboard and seeing how best to work with them. I think anyone interested in activism is similarly likely to find things here that will enrich what they do.

Most importantly this is a book in which people tell stories about what they’ve done. Reading other people’s stories, it’s easier to imagine how we might act, and to see that as possible. The actions of others show the many ways forward. It’s easy to feel too small, too insignificant, too powerless for it to matter what you do, and this book offers many antidotes to those feelings. These are good stories, likely to inspire and encourage. It’s also not all about high risk front line activism, because not everyone can do that. It’s an inclusive book, with room for people whose resources are limited, whose bodies are not able to withstand police aggression, and people whose souls are not shaped for the front lines. There are many ways to be an activist, and all of those ways are valid.

I think this book is particularly suited for people who do not see themselves as activists and who feel uncomfortable about that, and want to do more. 

More on the publisher’s website – https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/earth-spirit-honoring-wild

New musical adventures

With our first gig planned for May, I can now say with confidence, this is a thing that is happening!

Robin Burton is a bit of a one man folk industry locally. He started the Stroud Wassail, runs Swing Rioters – I’ve sung with them a few times, and an outfit called The Jovial Crew. He’s involved with The Folk of Gloucester – a space I’ve also been involved with as a steampunk. Last year he asked me to write a mumming play full of Gloucester characters and I had the pleasure of seeing that performed back in November.

In the autumn, I posted online some photos of me with the viola as I pushed my way back into playing. I find the accountability of sharing things helpful, often. Robin is not the reason I started playing again, but on seeing the photos he asked if I’d be interested in getting some folk music going with him. Since then we’ve been exploring that whenever time has permitted.

There’s been an interesting process of comparing repertoires, discussing what we’re interested in doing musically, and starting to pick songs and put arrangements together. The current set we’re developing is based on the traditional music we both already knew, as that seemed like a sensible way in. When collaborating, there are always processes around figuring out how to work with someone, and that’s been good and interesting, too.

This isn’t a priority project for either of us, and probably it’s going to be for local gigs or if we happen to both be further afield at the same time with our other projects. Swing Rioters is Robin’s first priority, and The Ominous Folk is mine. Nonetheless, it’s really nice to have someone to play with and to be able to get together with regularly for music, and that’s really important for me. I’ve missed being an instrumentalist, and it’s good to have more room for that in my life.

I am blessed in the people I get to work with, and play with and hang out with.

Druidry and quiet justice

Going in guns blazing to right wrongs can feel exciting. I’ve seen people doing this when it was obvious that they were getting a real thrill out of it, and quite an ego boost. There can also be a strong sense of involvement, group belonging and team affiliation that comes from going on a crusade against the ‘bad guy’. This can all be easily harnessed to enable bullying. 

Abusers don’t just work on their victims. Most abusers will groom all of the people around them, because this facilitates the abuse. It’s the half a dozen people you’ve been really nice to who are most likely to help you deal with the awful person in your life, after all. However nasty it gets, no one wants to believe they were duped into assisting a bully, so there are incentives to keep blaming the victim and keep asserting that everything is ok.

Justice often requires a quieter, more thoughtful approach. The invitation to go in and righteously smite someone is always worth questioning. I advocate for taking the time to look carefully at the power dynamics in a situation. Bullying depends on power imbalances. I don’t have much sympathy for people who write articles in national newspapers to complain about how they’ve been cancelled.

Perhaps the hardest thing to square up to, is how to act when you start to think you’ve been on the wrong side of something. This is a consideration around political allegiances, social movements, and personal relationships. If you’re interested in honour, then owning the mistake is an essential first move.

I think it’s incredibly important to give people the chance to do better at the point when they know better. If someone admits a mistake, there has to be room for them to move forwards. There has to be a willingness to fix things, and the focus here should be on restorative justice. 

If someone has been harmed, then it should not be on the harmed person to facilitate whatever is restorative. Forgiveness is a blessing, not a right and no one should feel under pressure to forgive someone who has harmed them. Sometimes, rehabilitation requires more of a community approach. There are times when justice means holding space and including someone who has previously messed up so that they have the scope to do better.

Anger shows us where the problems are – or it can. Anger can help us hold boundaries and to protect ourselves. It’s also an emotion that is easily manipulated, especially when you are to be angry as part of a group and affirm your group membership through the expression of anger. This can all too easily lead to bullying and violence. If being angry is making you feel good, it’s worth treating that with some suspicion.

If your interest is in justice, rather than self protection, then it’s often better handled quietly and over time. Restorative justice isn’t usually achieved by quick fixes. I’m not even slightly convinced that punishment is a form of justice – except perhaps around poetic justice where people bring it upon themselves through their own actions. Punishment is all about power imbalance, and tends to entrench power imbalances, and it is more often the case that those imbalances are actually unjust of themselves.

Doing something, doing nothing

Sometimes, self care looks like getting stuff done. There’s relief in tackling challenges and getting problems under control. Sometimes, self care means doing the terrifying things, booking the appointment, squaring up to the problems.

At other times, doing nothing can be a really good choice. Bodies need time to rest and heal. Our minds need time to process complex experiences. When things are intense and emotional, we can need more rest and sometimes even more sleep just to deal with it. It’s important to note that this isn’t just about ‘negative’ feelings. Big happy feelings, especially ones leading to radical life changes, also need processing. Letting your body work through the excitement so that you can incorporate it rather than just jangling about, is a really good idea.

I find I often do my emotional processing more effectively if I’m also doing something with my body. I’ve used walking, dancing, crafting and cleaning this way. How much it helps to be doing something is really personal, and definitely worth exploring.

Sometimes the answer is to distract yourself. When it comes to massive emotional upheavals, it can be better to not try and focus on it too much, and let at least some of it happen in the background.

When you aren’t able to deal with your own emotions, sometimes it helps to dig in with a book or film that goes into similar territory. I’ve found this helpful around unprocessed grief, although it can be an invitation to sobbing. But, on the plus side, you do get to pick your timing with those rather than just being ambushed by it, and feeling more in control of things can also be a good self care choice.

On the day of writing this, self care for me looks like getting things done so that I can feel more in control, alongside throwing myself at things that aren’t the real issues, for reasons of distraction and comfort. On another day, faced with the same issues, I might make entirely different choices. It’s all good.

Celebrating childishness

“Supreme childishness in the name of “creativity”. The mind boggles.” I had this come in as a comment over on the Hopeless, Maine blog recently, and I’ve been reflecting both on the sorrowful nature of the remark, and what to do in face of it. Obviously I agreed, because silliness, playfulness and joy are very much what that site is for and I didn’t feel inclined to respond as though I was being criticised.

It grieves me that childishness is so often used as a criticism. To see the world through a child’s eyes is a wonderful thing. To want to play and explore, to feel curious and excited – these are qualities that enrich our lives. Often as adults, under pressure to be serious about everything all the time, we lose our sense of wonder. 

Then there’s the awful misunderstanding of what creativity means. What is creativity without play, without a spark of childish delight? Perhaps we should be thinking of the creativity of designing a more efficient production line or a better excuse to cover for political corruption? There are many ways of being creative, but where there is no childish innocence, no joy in the world, no desire to delight, what are we left with? Creative accounting, propaganda machines, marketing strategies… 

I’d like to be more childlike. Children can be incredibly trusting, and willing to think the best of others. Especially if they’re allowed to express themselves and feel secure and comfortable. Children are incredibly imaginative, and will be fearless about exploring ideas and expressing themselves right up until adults and older children start knocking that out of them. Childish creativity comes from places of joy and wonder, from heartfelt and unfiltered responses to the world. We can teach children and help them be wiser without having to turn them into joyless adults.

For those of us who have been pressured into sacrificing our silliness, joy and wonder… it’s not a one way ticket. Delight in the world is something we can create together, and we can support each other in doing that. Encourage people in their joy, even if what they do makes no sense to you – so long as it doesn’t harm anyone, why not? Don’t tear people down, don’t mock them for their delight – this stuff is all pretty obvious.

The more challenging question is what to do with people like the poor soul who left the comment. How do we give each other permission to put down the grim burden of having to act like a grown up all the time? How do we free each other from the idea that we have to give up on the things we used to love in order to be proper adults? One of the many good things about being silly, is that I can be silly enough to care about people who are intent on hurting themselves, rather than doing the sensible, self-protective thing of just shrugging and leaving them to it.