Epictetus said that ‘Suffering arises from trying to control what is uncontrollable, or from neglecting what is within our power.’
Dude. Right on. And, sometimes, it just ain’t as simple as that. Sometimes we go through shit and it not only stinks, it clings, inhabiting and haunting our sinuses, clothes, and the fragile cloud of witness we all individually are to our daily lives and actions, hovering so long it seems we will never be free of it. A haunting is a haunting, and all the positive thinking and affirmations in the wide world, all the best wishes and psychedelics on this planet can’t make a dent in that ghostly reality.
It is easy, is what I am saying, to ignore or minimize other people’s suffering when we’re sitting pretty and feeling good about ourselves. It is easy to ascribe other people’s pain to bad luck, weakness of character or of spirit, to prescribe religion or drugs or more time in nature when it is not our road that is broken, not our road to figure out.
“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.” – Roland Barthes
A dear friend of mine is suffering, and has asked that she be allowed to isolate and withdraw. I will respect her wishes, even while it scared and scares me, hearing that. Still, she has asked, and it’s the least I can do, meet this moment with a ‘Yes, I will leave you alone to walk your present road’. She tells me that knowing I am checking in, that I am concerned, makes her even more anxious, requires her to step off the road she is on to reassure me, place a bandaid, play a role she does not wish to attempt just now because she cannot do it, cannot take care of others, must concentrate on placing one foot in front of the other.
I have had enough dark days of my own to know that there is no easy out, only through. I want to do more for my friend, but I cannot; accepting that is essential. It’s not about me – it’s her suffering, and she needs to do this alone. For now.
Thinking about the amount of suffering in the world – especially that which is man-made (war, for one example, exploitative greed for another), we all have more than one good excuse to stay in bed, refusing to rise with the sun. Yin and Yang. Light and Dark. For me, right now, life is good. I will go outside and sit in the autumn rays, saying little prayers made up from my well of joy, hope, and nothingness, sending silent, unspoken love to my friend, for my friend, for this world, for us all.
“At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.” – John Green, Looking for Alaska
The light lengthens on the carpet, a sure symptom of afternoon. I haven’t left the house today because there’s only one reason to do that, and I’ve already got goat cheese. A half moon is only a quarter of the moon. This sky should win trophies. I look at other people, their energy, and think they must have been raised by marmots. I know for the sake of social cohesion we must try to live togetherly, like Bronze Age women and men, but it’s been a long week, and, anyway, petrol prices have gone up again.
*Erik Kennedy is a poet who (& yes, I’d never heard of him either) lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand. He co-edited No Other Place to Stand, an anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poetry chapbook Twenty-Six Factitions was published with Cold Hub Press in 2017, and his first full collection, There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime, was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in 2019.His latest collection – published this year – is entitled Sick Power Trip.
Not writing. Writing. People reading their stories. People not reading their stories. Editing. Nor editing. Not having any good ideas. Having too many ideas and not being able to decide which to write. Having one really good idea and worrying they’re not good enough to write it. Nor having time to write. Having time to write. No reviews. 999 good reviews and that one fucker who thought the title was too long.
I hate that one fucker we all do. let’s not let them ruin our creative hours, or days.
“Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.” ~ Audre Lorde
*if you’ve been following this blog for a lil or a lot o’bit, you know I just love me some good quotes from smart people. D.L. Sayers said in one of her mystery novels that a facility for apt quotation shows no mean intelligence, to which my beloved Peter Whimsey said the only true intelligence is the ability to recognize ones own limitations. I just love that, and am very aware of my limitations, thus – my lifelong appreciation of the brilliance of others! We are in this together, and no one knows it all, or even most of it. I love when a line or two or three stops me in my tracks, and makes me think. Thank you for being here, and knock wood sharing my love for the word…words! For beautiful, imperfect, precise, imprecise, language…
Margaret Atwood: Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
Anonymous person on the Interweb: One time someone told me I was intimidating and my friend looked at them and said “Is she intimidating or are you intimidated”? and from that moment on I refused to take responsibility for how others react to my presence.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.” This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.) The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a per- son needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.” My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.
bell hooks: Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power – not because they don’t see it but because they see it and don’t want it to exist.
Rasheeda Mustafa: I had a guy tell me to smile once. I was walking on the sidewalk and he was sitting on a park bench. I stopped, looked at him and told him to tell a joke. He said, well I can’t just tell a joke on command. And I said well I don’t just smile on command. You want to command someone? Command your dog.
Laurie Penny: Of all the female sins, hunger is the least forgivable; hunger for anything, for food, sex, power, education, even love. If we have desires, we are expected to conceal them, to control them, to keep ourselves in check. We are supposed to be objects of desire, not desiring beings.
A guy named Harry on X: If any of you pro lifers get tape worms you better suck it up and be a good host, because tape worms have a heartbeat and feel pain. It deserves a choice and it chose you to be its mother.
A.R. Moxon: It wasn’t “cancel culture” when women and people of color got used up, silenced, and dismissed before their careers even began. It only became “cancel culture” when powerful abusers started having established careers momentarily inconvenienced by revelations of what they’d done.
Jimmy Carter: The truth is that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.
Anonymous internet person: If submission were natural to women, there wouldn’t be thousands of sermons everyday reminding women to submit because nature doesn’t need reminders to run its course. These reminders exist because indoctrination depends on constant reinforcement to keep harmful ideologies alive.
Mohamad Safa: Overheard: Being a woman is kind of like being a cyclist in a city where all the cars represent men. You’re supposed to be able to share the road equally with cars, but that’s not how it works. The roads are built for cars and you spend a great deal of physical and mental energy being defensive and trying not to get hurt. Some of the cars want you to get hurt. They think you don’t have any place on the road at all. And if you do get hurt by a car, everyone makes excuses that it’s your fault.
Audre Lorde: For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition. And while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
“Girls learn to smile early, and many cultures teach girls explicitly to “put on a pretty face”. It is a way of soothing the people around us, a facial adaptation to the expectation that we put others first, preserve social connections and hide our disappointment, frustration, anger and fear. We are expected to be more accommodating and less assertive or dominant. As girls’ smiles become less authentic, so, too, does their understanding of themselves.”- Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her
It’s been a handful of years or more since I read Chemaly’s excellent book on female rage, but the feeling I have of continually dashing social expectations continues to this day. Dashing and disrupting people’s expectations is exhausting at times (Sisyphean, actually), but is – in its particulars – authentic to who I am. Authenticity matters. Pushing against expected behavioral norms that undermine my true self is not doable, not for long; it’s also not healthy. I tried it when I was a child, because what other choice did I have, and it did me actual, literal harm.
Going along to get along is dangerous, especially for young children, whatever their gender, but especially for female children. The National Center for Victims of Crime reports that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse; self-reporting studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident – and this is almost certainly an underreporting of actual abuse occurring in our home and communities. Teaching female children to be compliant, to smile and say yes, to make nice whatever their gut says, endangers them.
Girls and boys need to be able to enjoy the full range of human emotion without reference to their gender, because all humans should. It’s common sense, only not very common. Denying girls rage or boys hurt is inhumane, and leads to damage further down the line. Bottling up hurt and pain, fear and loss, has brought on more strokes and heart attacks in grown men than one could shake a stick at – the primary difference being that those harms are self-inflicted as a result of the patriarchal norms we live under; women die as a result of others – men – inflicting harm, but we all lose as a result of these outdated, idiotic, unnatural norms. Unnatural because not being able to cry when sad because ‘man’ is unnatural, full-stop.
When in social settings, the pressure to perform female pleasant-face/personality is real, including a palpable requirement to ‘be nice’ to people who I cannot stand because hey, c’mon, it’s a small-town, they’re fellow humans, they go to such and such church, etc., etc. No, no, and no. Often the folks I am being pressured into smiling pretty for have a long history of being dicks to me – particularly when I was in public office – so hell no. Hey, I think I’m doing great not telling them to their faces to fck off, because I am doing great, showing an amazing, admirable amount of self-control. This is possible because I have let go, trusting the universe to remind them in various ways what dicks they are.
(Actually, I assume they’re as miserable in their lives as they attempt to make other people with their shitty behavior, but I could be wrong!)
I could, I suppose, go the passive-aggressive route of smiling big and saying ‘Bless your heart,’ which I gather is southern for ‘fck off and die’, but being passive-aggressive isn’t really my style, once more emphasizing the inauthentic nature of performing niceness, anywhere, anytime, anyhow. My dad, whom I adored, said that if I couldn’t say something nice to another person, then I should shut up! He was a wise and good man, and, following his advice, I zip it. I gather my face, averted, and those tightly held lips say it all. Or so I’ve been told.
