"...followed by a brisk mauling."

You’ve been on my mind a lot lately. I suppose that’s perfectly natural, given the sort of year it’s been. It’s been six years now; I’ve grown, I’ve moved on, and I’ve let some things go. But not you. Never you. 

I never got to hold you. Never got to see you smile, feel you grasp my thumb, hold you against my heart and soothe your tears. I never got a chance to know you as anything less—or more—than my daughter. 

Because you never had a chance, you remain in my heart and head as perfect. The doctor told me over and over you wouldn’t be; that if you lived at all it would be as a sickly, malformed thing. But how could you be anything but perfect? You were the one good thing to come from that time in my life; conceived on Valentine’s Day, the one day when our relationship wasn’t abusive or coercive. You were my one perfect thing, from my one perfect day. No matter what happened, you were mine and you were perfect.

I’m holding on to you, Nyamh. Daughter. Mine own. My precious, perfect baby. I’m holding on to you because how can I possibly let go? You are a part of me. You are a part of me and I don’t want to let you go. I want to hold on to you, daughter. 

I love you, Nyamh. I miss you every day. 

A friend recently asked me the following: 

 How do you calmly debate with people who shove atheism down your throat & personally insult you for believing in something above yourself?

I thought about my response for a long time, and it’s something I want to put here, too, because I think it’s something that all of us with faith struggle with (being one of three Muslims in my community, I know it’s something I’ve struggled with). Before I begin, though, I want to acknowledge what it is I believe in. 

As a Muslim, I believe there is one true god, Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet. But further than that, I believe that Allah, the Highest Power, the Creator, is simply the collective will of humanity to do and create good. I believe that Mohammed, as with other prophets before him, practiced and preached a life spent serving this force.  

Now that I’ve more clearly stated what it is I believe, I want to answer my friend’s question

******

Faith and science are not contradictory. They are not mutually exclusive. Neither is faith and critical thought; history is filled with people who both had faith and thought critically. Some of the most intelligent people in the world today are theists or deists. What many atheists do not understand is that, unlike atheism (which at its core is based on the absence of something else), faith is not exclusionary of doubt. Faith, true faith, I believe, is an acknowledgement of doubt. All theists have doubts; doubt is part of belief. But faith does not, I believe, call for us to discard our doubts (and here, let’s be clear that faith is not the same thing as any organized religious system). Faith allows us to question and criticize our systems of belief, to have doubts and to acknowledge them. Faith allows us to seek answers; in my mind, this is the core of what faith is—a way to find answers to otherwise unanswerable questions.

Many atheists deny faith because they believe it is or has done evil. Yes, evil acts have been done in the name of faith. But good has also been done in the name of faith, and evil has been done in the name of things other than faith (patriarchy, nationalism, fascism, etc). To accept one of these facts while denying either of the other two is, in my mind, both illogical and unreasonable. Perhaps, then, faith is not the issue. Perhaps what matters is not why you act, but how. If you have faith in something that requires you to act in a way which is charitable and compassionate, that’s good. If you have no faith, but a moral system which requires you to act in a way that is charitable and compassionate, that’s just as good. I don’t know that it matters what the motive force is, and I’m not sure why anyone should think it does.

I think, honestly, the only way to truly debate people who refuse to accept that other people have faith is to do exactly what you’re doing already. The only way to combat militant atheism is to live as a compassionate and intelligent person who believes in a higher power. To act with empathy and reason. To be capable of charity and critical thinking. And to continue to believe in something greater than yourself. 

*****

EDIT: When I say atheist here, I’m not being fair to atheists. Most atheists I know are great and wonderful people, who don’t judge me or others as somehow defective simply for believing in something. Many of my closest friends are atheists, as are members of my family. They don’t hate or harm theists for being theists, and I should have been much more clear that here, when I speak of atheists, I mean the small portion of atheists who are militantly against any religious belief—people like Bill Maher, who truly believe that believing in God makes you a bad person. This is not a statement against atheism, and if it comes off that way, I’m truly sorry, as I never meant it to. Rather, it’s meant to communicate how I deal with certain atheists who truly think less of me once they realize I believe in Allah.

I have fibromyalgia. For those of you who are unaware of what that is, let me break it down for you:

Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that manifests through pain, weakness, stiffness, and fatigue. It’s been linked with several secondary disorders such as obesity, depression, and sleep disturbances, but the research is cloudy as to whether these are causes of the condition or primary symptoms. Fibromyalgia pain may be present in any particular area of the body, but diagnostically MUST be present in several pressure points. The pain may migrate around the body, may vary in intensity, and may “act up” or “flare,” but chances are if you know someone diagnosed with fibromyalgia, that person has chronic, sometimes debilitating pain.

Until very recently, many doctors didn’t recognize fibromyalgia as a diagnostically significant syndrome. Most patients were eventually referred to psychiatrists for treatment. Fibro patients are used to hearing things like “psychosomatic” or “it’s all in your head.” But recent studies indicate that fibromyalgia may be linked to actual physiological changes in the brain structure after severe physical or psychiatric trauma—one of the reasons it’s prevalent in both war veterans and survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. MRIs of patients’ brains actually show the “demented” or “distorted” pain center in fibro patients compared with control groups. These changes seem to do two things: first, they affect HOW the nerves measure sensation—pressure, temperature, most any sensation you can think of, is most often translated into the brain as pain. A hug can be painful (really), as can wearing a seatbelt, or putting your hands in a warm bath, or brushing your teeth, or making love, or even lying down. Second, they affect HOW MUCH the nerves measure sensation. All this pain is intensified. Something which was mildly painful before your diagnosis—say, stubbing your toe—can now hurt enough to make you cry. And remember, all these other things you USED to feel differently? They now register as pain, too. Basically, you’re in a lot of pain a lot of the time.

There’s many treatments for fibro, with varying degrees of success (SSRI and SNRI anti-depressants like Cymbalta seem to help some, as do drugs that target peripheral nerves, like Lyrica. Many patients swear by holistic or alternative treatments such as massage and acupuncture. A steady, low-impact exercise regimen may cut the pain slightly, as can cognitive-behavioral therapies), but there is as of yet no cure. For many patients, this hodge-podge of therapies can make the pain manageable, but that’s not the case for all, and it certainly isn’t the case all the time. When patients are having a flare, for instance, it doesn’t matter how many pills they take or how active they are—the next few days (at least) are going to hurt. Often, the pain (and don’t forget the stiffness or fatigue) is SO intense that taking part in your normal routine is impossible. A lot of fibro patients are on disability, because holding down a regular job with scheduled hours just can’t happen. Those of us who aren’t often find ourselves sticking with a part-time gig, because full-time doesn’t leave us with enough time to rest and recuperate between shifts.

Pain, however, is a relative thing. It’s hard to measure or quantify. We have difficulty expressing our pain adequately to other people, and studies show that even our own brains are faulty when it comes to trying to remember how much pain we felt when x or y happened. Hospitals use a 1 to 10 scale to try to get some semblance of what a patient is feeling, but it’s still quite relative. If you’ve never gotten a paper cut before, a broken toe is going to be at least a 10. If you’ve suffered multiple serious injuries in your life, a broken toe may rate a 7, or even lower.

Today, for instance, is a bad pain day for me. A very, very bad pain day. It’s been a while since I’ve hurt this badly. But this is by no means an unheard-of amount of pain; even with my treatments, this amount of pain is uncommon, but not abnormal. All I want to do is lie down in a comfy bed, put a hot pack over all four extremities, shut off the lights, and sleep until it’s over. But to a lot of people, particularly people who can’t see into my head with MRI-vision, this seems like overkill, to say the least.

So let me try to quantify this for you:

My arms hurt. My legs hurt. My torso hurts. A deep, crawling, in-the-bone-type hurt. My toe joints ache, as does every other joint in my body (I’m writing this with speech-recognition software because typing hurts too much). Spreading my legs just wide enough to pull my pants up aches. When I breathe in deeply, my chest aches. My gums, sitting in my mouth, just chillin’, ache. My eye sockets ache, as do my inner ears. When I move my head from right to left to see something, it hurts. When I move my EYES from right to left to see something, it STILL hurts. It feels like I have a high fever, like I’ve got the flu (the real, scary, pneumonia-like one). I didn’t put on a bra until I left the house today, because it hurt too much to wear. I spent about twenty minutes shifting and crawling—literally crawling—out of bed because I was so stiff when I woke up, and then spent another fifteen trying to decide between fairly loose jeans and a pair of drawstring pyjama bottoms (I went with jeans, because I couldn’t loosen the drawstring enough to relieve the pain without the pants falling down). If I’d been scheduled for work, I’d have called out—despite the fact that I’ve already done so enough times that I’m liable to lose my job. Luckily, I still had some Tramadol left over from my spinal surgery, so I took a max dose of those, a max dose of Tylenol, and took it fairly easy for the day.

Now, I’ve said before, of course, that pain is relative. And it’s quite possible that I’m just a big ol’ crybaby. But let me be clear here for a second: I met Pain early in my life, and we’ve stayed in touch. I split my head open twice before the age of seven. I’ve been beaten more times than I can remember, and sometimes those beatings resulted in broken bones. I’ve been stabbed and worse, and done the first aid myself, without any IV drugs or even brandy to give me a hand. I’ve had my inside bits sucked out with a glorified vacuum cleaner (it’s a legitimate and legal medical procedure). I may be a whiny little wuss who complains constantly, but I KNOW pain.

And the rest of your fibro/chronic-pain-diagnosed friends do, too. We don’t sit on the couch or stay in bed all day because we’re lazy or want attention, we do it because we physically can NOT do anything else. We’re adults (for the most part) and we’ve lived with our pain for quite a while—we know our capabilities and our limits, and sometimes we have to make choices that don’t seem like the right ones. But we do it because it’s all we CAN do. We’re not fuddy-duddies or Negative Nancies (much), and we really do enjoy spending time outside the house, hanging out with friends, going to concerts or picnics or shopping or hiking or any number of fun and interesting things. But sometimes we just don’t have the energy or strength to do the things we enjoy.

So please, the next time you want to cajol us up out of the chair, or give us a little tough love in hopes that we’ll get out there and do things, DON’T. Offer us the chance, and let us know you understand if we can’t. Try, if you can, to imagine how you felt the last time you were really, terribly, super-de-dooper sick. Try to remember that when we say we hurt, we mean it. Remind yourself that just because you can’t see our disability (it is encased in a skull, after all), it’s still there regardless.

And for fuck’s sake, please, for the love of all that is good and holy, stop telling us “the pain’s all in your head.” We KNOW. That’s the problem.

I hate my body.

I make myself nauseous when I see myself. My body sickens me. My body disgusts me. I disgust me. 

I have internalized so much anger and shame and guilt and hatred that it’s become a part of me.

I am disgusting. 

I want to take pictures of my body and post them here. I want to scream as loud as I can that I am beautiful, that this fucked-up society that helped create me hasn’t broken me, that being beaten and raped hasn’t broken me, that being called a hippo, elephant, and cow hasn’t broken me, that you abusive misogynistic ex-boyfriends and lovers who have placed all of my worth solely on my body are wrong—I am and always will be more than how I look; my body is the least important part of me and I refuse to let you redefine me as simply an object. I want to shout until my voice is gone that you’re hurting me, Goddamnit, and by pointing out how fat and gross I am—well, maybe you’re trying to help, but it just hurts.

But I am disgusting. I have a double chin, a roll of fat on my neck. My torso is all fat: breasts, stomach, ass. I used to look pregnant. I don’t anymore; now it’s quite clear that I’m just fat. I’m cartoon-character, Harry-Potter’s-aunt, balloon fat.

While I was walking on the sidewalk today the wind was blowing blossoms off the trees. I want to be like that: lithe and graceful, thin and pretty. 

I’m not. I don’t think that I ever will be, but I certainly am not now.

And for fuck’s sake, I want to be one of those beautiful girls who really believes that her beauty comes from something other than the pure fetishization and objectification of her body. I want to be one of those wonderful women who truly understands how fucked our system of beauty is, that there is nothing wrong with looking the way she does, that she is gorgeous and has the right to be so.

But I’m not. I’m not. I base my worth on my body and my body is hideous.

I don’t want to feel like this. I want to have worth. I want to love myself. I want to practice what I preach, damnit. But I don’t and maybe I can’t. 

I think the worst part is feeling shame for feeling shame. My entire political and philosophical mind recognizes that the way I feel about my body and self is unhealthy. Feminism teaches me to love myself the way I am, because everyone is beautiful. Islam teaches me to love myself the way I am, because Allah created me thus and anything created by Allah is holy, sacred, and worthy of love. 

So many counter-culture images tell me to love myself regardless of how I fit into the average female ideal. So I’m 255 lbs. So I’m a size 22. So I’m heavier than anyone in my entire family. I need to love myself.

One of the men who means the most to me, one of the men who is honest about me, took me aside the other day when it was quite clear that I was really loathing myself. He tried to insist there was nothing wrong with me. There was nothing wrong with the way I looked. Our ideal woman is based on some really fucked-up principles, and 100, 200, 300 years ago, I would basically be the ideal. That I’m beautiful, and it’s our society that’s fucked. 

But I’m still constantly turned down based on how I look. I’m still constantly judged based on my weight. The people who try and make me like myself are the same people who think sleeping with me—as I now look—would mean they’d be ridiculed by our friends (who are my friends too, supposedly).

So society tells me to hate the way I look And then society tells me that I should love myself no matter how I look. So then I feel guilt and shame and hatred based on how fat I am, and then I feel guilt and shame and hatred for feeling badly about how I look. It’s this spiral of self-loathing and I’m stuck in it and completely unsure of how to get out.

I hate myself, and I hate myself for hating myself. It’s pretty messed up

(And if someone drops the word “Rubenesque,” I will slap you. That word’s become a cop-out, at least in my life, to make me feel momentarily better for being ugly).

Watching North Woods Law with my parents. 

Last weekend, I could have been on North Woods Law.

Farmington, I miss your face (although not your black powder).

Trigger warning: sexual assault, domestic violence, PTSD, self-harm, ED

I’m feeling pretty lost. So many things feel futile or worthless or broken.

I no longer feel safe at home. Cars driving by start me panicking, but leaving the house feels so unsafe too; there’s so many more people when I leave. I have to go to work for 1 hour tomorrow, and I’ve been panicking to the point of regression just thinking about it. I need to get out of here, it feels like. Out of this house, this workplace. Out of this town. Somewhere I can’t be found. Somewhere KJS doesn’t exist. Somewhere where I’m not constantly looking over my shoulder in fear.

I have a place lined up. A possible apartment, a possible source of income. A place I know I will feel safe. But my Mum’s pretty insistent on having a car as well as a license. I don’t think I can afford rent, food, bills, and a car in this new place. So instead I feel not just triggered constantly but also stuck. Needless to say, I’m pretty much constantly on edge of crying, regression, and defensively striking out. I do not like this about myself. It is not an emotional place conducive to survival.

My body image and eating issues are pretty much out of control. I’m cycling between compulsive hoarding/bingeing (how the hell do you spell that?) and fasting worse than I can ever remember. And I hate my body. I hate it. If I could cut it apart without actually causing severe injury I’d do it in a heartbeat. I visited friends for the first time in 10 months. It was great and for the most part just what I needed. But some things got said that I just really didn’t need to hear, and got said multiple times, in public, and I’m having a really hard time NOT reacting to them. It’s tough when someone says “you’re not my type,” but it’s acceptable. I mean, blondes aren’t my type. Doesn’t mean they’re not pretty. It’s harder when you hear from the two people you’re attracted to that, “if you were thinner and prettier,” they’d date you or fuck you in a heartbeat. I mean, to someone with self-esteem and body image issues, that’s hard. Fuck, it’s hard no matter who you are. It’s worse when they continue, though. It’s worse when it becomes “if you were thinner and prettier” I’d be all over you, but as it stands now, I can’t sleep with you because “my friends would never let me live it down.” Fuck it. Your friends are (were?) my friends. And two people (my two best friends, the two men I love, the two people who matter so much out of all of my friends) both think that I’m so ugly that to be physically attracted to me would make them outcasts. I don’t care who you are. Even if you don’t have an EDNOS, that’s a pretty fucking damaging thing to hear. Five times. In public. It is not helpful that the only guy who has found me attractive was abusive. I don’t ever want to eat anymore. So I end up spending my time on pro-ANA sites and fasting.

I want to love myself and have forgotten how to.

“Don’t look back; the past is just that.”