Month: May 2017

No One Else Can Save You: Saving Yourself

Posted on by Kai Raine

So, having recognized that I do, in small ways in daily life, need to be saved, and having acknowledged that I am, in fact, worth saving, how does one go about it?

I started small. It started with acknowledging that I am, in fact, human and as such, do have limitations.

I learned that most of my guilt is pointless.

I have excessive amounts of guilt. I don’t know if it’s a born or a learned trait, but if left to my own devices, I could easily feel guilty for virtually everything that’s gone wrong anywhere near me. I had to learn to counteract this. Largely it helped to acknowledge I am not special, and that every adult in my life is also in possession of a brain and agency. Therefore, most of what I feel guilty for cannot be my fault unless I also blame everyone else around me. Which I generally find ridiculous to consider. Therefore, I can argue to myself, it’s not worth blaming myself either.

I learned to say no.

The guilt over saying no was, of course, inevitable. I learned to coax myself out of it by repeatedly reminding myself that I am of far more use to everyone if I am happy, functional, and capable of generating enthusiasm.

I learned to set more realistic expectations of myself.

There was guilt over this too, but I learned to manage that. It did, in fact, help that I had pushed myself to the limit so often in the past that I had a sense of where my limits truly lay and what would happen if I pushed myself beyond them.

I learned to push back.

One of the cornerstones of my former way of life involved caving to any and all needs of those I cared about. I thought this was what caring and loving was all about. But the fact was, the more I caved the higher expectations became until I could no longer fulfill them despite my best efforts, and ultimately it almost always headed into a nasty terrain filled with anger and tears.

Since it was a change, there was a lot of resistance when I first started pushing back. But once I overcame that bit, it turned out that a lot of things were a lot better when I defended myself. I respected myself in a way that I hadn’t been able to envision before, and it seemed that other people grew to respect me more as well.

I learned not to take other people’s emotions or words personally.

Once I respected myself more, it became patently obvious to me that I’d been largely concerned with the opinions of people who most likely didn’t think much about what they said to me, or how I felt. And it became easier to overcome any criticism tossed my way. Even when it is something intended personally, even when I can empathize that I did in some way unintentionally hurt a person emotionally, it helps to be able to take a step back and recognize that I am not entirely at fault, because emotions tend to be a function of a variety of circumstances, rather than one solitary event. Obviously this isn’t always so clear, but it helps me to keep it in mind.

I learned to find courage.

Saving myself still takes courage. It sometimes requires conflict, and it always requires me to face something unpleasant head-on and keep going. When I feel intimidated, I remind myself that ultimately, I am one tiny person in a gigantic, unimaginably huge universe. I am one of six billion people on the planet. My mistakes and failures are not the end of the world, and I am not alone.

It’s all about finding the right angle to manipulate myself, to put it cynically. But so far, it’s worked to keep me moving from day to day.

Falling Face-First into Gender Norms: The Books

Posted on by Kai Raine

My mother often railed at the “happily ever after” mentality and the mindset that it teaches children. She told me how there is no happily ever after, because the wedding is only the beginning and it’s hard.

By the time that she thought to tell me this, I didn’t believe her one bit. She’d already read me fairy tales, and I’d seen all sorts of Disney movies that ended with a wedding. Sure, the wedding is the beginning: the beginning of happily ever after.

As a young child, I subconsciously saw marriage as my ultimate goal in life. This mentality goes as far back as I can remember, when I already had decided on the boy that I was going to marry. I don’t know what led to such a warped idea of reality, so I can only surmise.

But all of my books were either about children, or if they were about older people, it was a fairy tale or a similar sort of story that ended in marriage. I dreamed of doing things with my life, yes: of being a farmer on a ranch or a horse trainer or an archaeologist. Yet in all those visions of the future, there was always a vague figure of a man who would be my husband, because of course I had to have one.

Looking back, I lament that despite my mother railing at Disney and fairy tales for creating this mentality, she bought us Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, 101 Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone, Aladdin and the Lion King. Absent were movies such as the Fox and the Hound, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book or Peter Pan. Furthermore, I picked up on my mother’s not-subtle-enough distaste for Aladdin and the Lion King, and she was not at all subtle in her dislike of 101 Dalmatians. I would feel a vague sort of guilt (and in fact, I still do) at enjoying those movies and stopped watching them. When Lilo and Stitch came out and my friends were talking about it at school, my mother would not take me to see it because the trailer gave her the impression that it was too violent. She bought Ever After, and that became her comfort movie, and by extension, mine.

When I was about eleven or twelve, I discovered that I rather enjoyed romances more than the rest of books. Sometimes, I would entirely ignore a plot, reading a book only for the romantic subplot. I was a talker, and no doubt tired of hearing me read a mystery only to come out gushing about the love story, my mother gave me two romance novels for teenagers.

While I enjoyed them, something felt inherently off about these books: the plots too contrived, the antagonists too mean, and nothing really happening. I went back to reading non-romance books for the romances. So my mother tried a different approach. When I would read a book and come out of it talking about the romance, she would not-so-subtly tell me that she didn’t think that part was that important, because “picking your boyfriend is something people do everyday.”

Which further engrained in me this idea that I would have to eventually pick a boyfriend (and therefore husband).

It wasn’t only the happily ever after mentality. It was also the contrast between what my mother said and what others told me. For instance, my mother bought me both Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. I was immediately drawn to the Hardy Boys, and picked up the book and started reading. One of my aunts saw me and asked me why I didn’t read Nancy Drew.

“Hardy Boys is for boys,” she said to me. “Nancy Drew is for girls.”

I felt stupid and ashamed and even after I ran out of Nancy Drew books to read, I didn’t dare touch the Hardy Boys book, because I was a girl. It was four years later that I realized what nonsensical logic that was, and in a bed and breakfast in Australia, picked up a Hardy Boys book for the second time. But it was too late. The tone was too childish and simple to be enjoyable to me. I closed the book and turned off my reading light and stared at the bunk above me where my sisters were sleeping, wondering why I’d ever listened.

Such instances happened a lot. I would do something that subverted someone else’s gender norm, that someone else would tell me I was wrong, and I would feel ashamed and try to comply with these rules that I didn’t understand. So I grew up in a confused array of mixed messages, understanding that my life was about my femininity, which put me on a track headed toward marriage to a man, with certain roles I had to fulfill as a woman, but that I wasn’t supposed to talk about any of it. I was supposed to pretend.

By the time I was in my late teens, I reached the point where I could hold my own against people who felt that I wasn’t fulfilling the gender role that they expected me to fill: but by that point, it was a rarity. I neatly slotted into what most societies relevant to me expected of females. It took years for me to dig deeper into my own assumptions.

My mother continued to rail at fairy tales and Disney and the happily ever mentality, but it took decades for me to at last open my ears to the alarm bells as she ranted about this subject. At last I came to realize that even as she complained, she had  accidentally indoctrinated me. And then I gradually realized that everything was optional: not just for other people, but for me, too. I didn’t necessarily have to get married. I didn’t have to learn to clean and cook to take care of people. I didn’t even have to date.

So maybe my mother failed in my childhood to raise a child free of the gender-based shackles that society places on one. But by accidentally indoctrinating me and trying so hard to break me out of it, she taught me an even more valuable lesson about the forces of society and the ridiculousness of neat little gender-based boxes.

The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 1)

Posted on by Kai Raine

I stayed in a hostel in Paris for a few nights. On the day that I arrived, I checked in and paid for my stay, and was assigned to bed 3 in a 14-bed dorm. I was given sheets, so I made my bed and headed off to meet some friends.

When I returned past 1 in the morning, exhausted and ready to crash, I entered the dark, silent room and found a girl in my bed. She was on her phone, so I told her that that was my bed. She assured me that it was hers and suggested that perhaps I had the wrong room.

“Room 4, bed 3?” I said.

“Huh. But they gave us these beds,” her friend in the upper bunk chimed in. “Beds 3 and 4.”

I showed her my key card with my bed and room number.

“I believe you,” she said. “But these were the beds they gave us.”

“Was the bed made, when you arrived?” I asked the girl.

“No,” she said with a small smile.

Resigned, I went back down to the reception desk and explained my situation.

“Bed 3,” said the man at the desk. “Are you Elizabeth?”

“No,” I said. I gave him my name.

“But you haven’t checked in?” he asked.

“No, I have.”

“But you didn’t pay?”

“I did.”

He went through the book of receipts and eventually found mine. He assigned me bed 13, gave me new sheets and exchanged my key card, and I returned upstairs.

Making my new bed in the dark, I discovered that I was missing my blanket. The person in the bunk beneath mine seemed to have appropriated it, presumably having assumed that no one would be taking that bunk that night.

I went back to the reception desk and was informed that there were no extra blankets.

Returning to the room, I turned on the reading light on the bunk and started making the bed, postponing the inevitable waking of the person in the lower bunk. In my irritation, however, I wasn’t as quiet as I could have been while making my bed. Just as I was finishing fitting the sheet on the mattress, an arm emerged from below, offering me a handful of the blanket.

With a “Merci,” I took the blanket and curled up. Just as I was getting ready to sleep, another small commotion began on the opposite corner of the room. It was past 4 by the time I got to sleep.