never again to laugh or sing
never again to hear bells ring
never again to hear drums roll
I'm not dead in life but dead in soul
cie, age 12
new notes now
This poem is a cheat. I didn't write it today. In fact, I have never written it down until now, although I composed it some 44 years ago.
The incident sparking the poem was me seeing the boy I was obsessively in love with walking along holding another girl's hand. This girl didn't know it, but she became my sworn enemy on that day. I hated her worse than every awful dictator who had ever fucked up millions of people's lives. I hated her worse than Satan himself, which is saying something because I was a devout Catholic at the time.
The moment when I saw "Jay" with "Abby," it was like a dark shroud descended over my life. I realize that this sounds melodramatic, and people have an awful habit of pooh-poohing the sometimes extreme emotions that teenagers display. My perspective of the situation may have been disproportionate, but the emotion I felt was very real, and it was indicative of something far deeper and more destructive than the loss of an unrequited crush to an imagined rival.
I first felt the black dog nipping at my heels in earnest when I was ten years old. When my birthday cake collapsed, I laughed hysterically. Later, I went to my room and burst into tears. I told myself that I was stupid for crying over a stupid collapsed cake and I needed to grow up.
When my father came in to say good night, he could see that I was upset. I tried to explain why, but I didn't have the words for what I was feeling. I hated growing up. I didn't want to grow up because somehow I knew that it meant that everything was going to fall apart. I hated the changes in my body. I hated the way men and boys leered at women and teenage girls and shouted obscene things at them. I didn't want to be looked at or treated in that way.
I was always a sensitive and anxious kid. The bullying that I endured in elementary school increased exponentially in junior high, and now there was a sexual component to it. Boys grabbed girls' breasts and behinds and never received more than mild admonishment. Walking to school now meant having construction workers and randos in cars holler obscenities at me. When I tried to tell my father that it made me feel disgusted and victimized, he told me that I should take it as a compliment.
There are some who may feel that I am being melodramatic again when I say that the day that dark shroud descended over my life I knew it was the beginning of the end. It was the beginning of lifelong "medication resistant" depression.
I put "medication resistant" in quotes because even though the medications in question help some people, the mind fuck that they do to others was swept under the rug for years. The documentary film Letters to Generation RX reveals the dark side of these medications.
I expressed concerns about these medications back when they first became popular and was sneered at for my thoughts. I felt vindicated after watching Letters to Generation RX, but I didn't feel smug or satisfied. I was horrified by the ways in which these "wonder drugs" destroyed the lives of the people featured in the documentary.
For my own part, the drugs I tried made me manic and psychotic, two things that I normally am not. I took a low dose of OTC Lithium for a number of years, and it was helpful in controlling the high end of what I thought were hypomanic episodes. In retrospect, what I was experiencing were effects of untreated complex PTSD, severe anxiety, and unmanaged ADHD.
I discovered that bipolar II was a misdiagnosis when I was unable to afford the Lithium for several months before I qualified for disability and experienced no "hypomanic" episodes. The fact that I was no longer working a J.O.B. (stands for Just Over Broke) and thus no longer forcing myself to do something that I really didn't want to do multiple days a week led to a lessening of my anxiety even though my financial situation was awful. I was also now living in a remote rural location as opposed to a townhouse in a busy suburb.
I do not take medications for any of my actual mental health conditions, and nor will I. I accept the fact that my baseline mood is moderately depressed. I was able to make some headway with the C-PTSD when I was finally able to examine certain incidents in my life and realize how they had impacted my thoughts and behavior.
I have also started learning strategies for understanding and managing my ADHD, which was the actual impetus behind my impulsiveness rather than an apparent "hypomanic" state. The fact that I was so badly misunderstood throughout school and admonished for being "lazy" and "flaky" still affects me, and I tend to take criticisms deeply and very personally.
I may never be one of those writers who "develops a thick skin" and "learns from their critics." Besides, would-be critics need to learn that there is a difference between critiquing someone's work and just being an asshole.
As a book reviewer, I find that most of the books I end up scoring low aren't bad in theory but the execution could use work and sometimes a lot of it. I try to express this kindly because the last thing that I want to do is discourage anyone from pursuing their dreams. I know how that feels and it doesn't feel good.
There was one book that literally gave me a headache while trying to read it. My theory is that it was the author's NaNoWriMo project and they published it without editing it. The manuscript was cover-to-cover dialogue with very little world-building or character expansion.
I stated that while the idea was compelling, the author needed to take some time to flesh out the characters and scenes and that the project could benefit from an editor. What I kept to myself was the fact that said editor would definitely have their work cut out for them.
Then there have been books that were technically proficient but contained severely problematic material, and I have said that very thing in my reasoning for giving the book a low rating. This is not to say that authors can't create horrible characters. In fact, I say the opposite of that in the following post.
The main point that I wish to reference is this one:
I don’t draw the line at any topic because I think it’s necessary to be able to talk about any topic. For instance, I had a story rejected because the main antagonist was a horrible racist. I personally don’t think it’s sufficient to just say “Mr. Smurkwhittle was a horrible racist who chased jailbait.”
The character was horrible, and the story is more effective if I can allow him to be despicable and offensive. The jailbait he was chasing turned out to be an ancient vampire from beyond the stars.
The technically proficient books that I've given one-star ratings include:
A detective story rife with sexist tropes and some good old-fashioned size shaming thrown in like bad icing on a lousy cake.
A "self-help" book with an entire chapter of size-shaming rhetoric including an insulting picture of a large gentleman licking a plate because fatties gonna fat, geddit?
A Catholic sci-fi thriller rife with homophobia.
A techno-thriller chock-a-block with xenophobic anti-Arab tropes with a side order of size shaming.
There was another "self-help" book for women that was filled with appearance shaming and size shaming, but it wasn't even technically proficient. It was difficult for me not to say "so you decided to publish this. Here's why you shouldn't have."
I've gotten a bit off track from my original subject. My own writing is a big reason why I'm still alive. I don't read reviews of my work because no matter how many good ones I get, the bad ones always throw me into a tailspin. For me, writing isn't just a hobby or even a craft. It is mental health therapy and life support.
There are those who have said that "turning to God" would help with my depression. As I mentioned previously, I was a devout Catholic into my teens. I prayed faithfully and studied the Bible obsessively.
I never received any reprieve from the bullying that my schoolmates heaped on me. I never received any reprieve from the constant criticism that the adults in my life heaped on me.
Along the way I started to see the cracks in the church's dogma, and by the time I turned eighteen, I was done. Either God hated me, God just wasn't very nice, or God didn't exist.
Unfortunately, this was not the end to my approval-seeking behavior or of falling victim to dogma and its adherents. I ended up seeking salvation in neopaganism and New Age doctrine for the next 30 years only to discover that the preachers, teachers, and devotees of these paths are just as judgmental, sanctimonious, and full of "my way or the highway" thinking as any conventional religious sect.
Despite being a spiritual agnostic, the philosophy I adhere to is Gnosis. This means that wisdom can spring from surprising sources and surprising people, not just decorated scholars or ordained priests. Thus, I wish to end this chapter with a morsel of wisdom from an unexpected source.
"God is not in some building. God is in nature, and God is in each of us."
--Gaahl, Gorgorath
Ornery Owl Has Been Prolific
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The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)
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