Oh, What A Sticky Web We Weave

WARNING: This post contains semi-clothed pictures and references to sexual acts.

No life-changing news or pseudoprofundities for you at the moment, but I don't feel right abandoning the blog entirely, so I shall tell you a story.

So when I bought my iPhone, I lent my old phone to a friend - who shall remain nameless, so as not to incriminate her or land me in shit - because hers was on the blink and she had a couple months left till she was due an upgrade. It didn't occur to me to delete the data on it because - well - privacy is something I'm still learning.

So she's chatting with one of her guy friends (this is a girl who has several dozen male friends who are mostly platonic but not averse to flirting or sending naughty pics sometimes) and the boy asks her for a sexy picture. So she looks through the phone, and accidentally or otherwise sends him this picture of me:

(I should mention for anyone who doesn't know, I was raised in the Mediterranean and spent half my waking hours on topless and nude beaches, and worked as a life model and occasional underwear model in college. Nudity is not taboo in my immediate family. The chemise covers more of me than my bathing suit; the pose itself is a little risqué, but was actually just me experimenting to see if bending over could give me a waist. No biggie.)

Now, this could have been an honest mistake, since we're of a similar body type. I'm an inch or two taller, she's a bit bigger in the bust, a bit smaller in the waist and hip. (She also has a tattoo on her breast, but that could just be hiding, right?) Either way, honest mistake or not, she's expecting nothing more than some appreciative words.

But no. Instead, her guy friend says, "That's not you! I've seen that picture around on the Internet, on Facebook. I've cracked one off to that picture a few times. Why are you sending me photos of some random girl?"

So my friend goes on the offensive, as she often does: "ExCUSE me? That's my friend you're talking about. I'm borrowing her phone and got the photos mixed up. Are you telling me you've been masturbating to pictures of peeps on my friends list? What the hell is up with that?"

He gets embarrassed. Doesn't know what to say, bless him. She comes and shares the story with me a bit later, and although I should probably be annoyed, I find the whole thing totally, brilliantly hilarious. She did something silly, he did something pervy, and it backfired oh-so-sweetly leaving gloriously amusing carnage.

Do I care that some guy I've never met or talked to was wanking over a picture of me in a chemise? Not really. As long as people don't actually approach me - because I DO value my personal space - privacy of photos / blogs / thoughts (basically anything other than contact details) is not a big concern for me. Once photos are put on Facebook or dating sites, I consider them fair game. At least for, uh, personal use.

So that's the story behind the first (mildly) saucy photo I ever blogged or Facebooked. I can't guarantee that it's 100% true, but I've given it to you just as I heard it, and any embellishments were not made by me.

Goodreads

After nine months of being half-dead, unable to even carry on a basic conversation half the time let alone think about blogging or participating in online discussions the way I used to - this month has, at least in part, brought me back to life. Sort of.

So I'm writing occasional blogs again, as you may have noticed. And I joined Goodreads. Which is something I'd been meaning to do for months if not years.

My profile's a bit bare at the moment, because I'm not entirely sure how I want to use the site yet. Put on all the books I've ever read? All the books I've read in the last few months? My initial urge is to go around scanning all the thousands of books in my home and marking them "read" or "to-read", but that seems like a pretty mad idea, so at this point I'm just scanning in the books I'm reading. The problem with this, of course, is that most Mills & Boons aren't on there - the scanner just doesn't accept the barcodes - and a large chunk of the books I read fall into this category. And another large chunk fall into the arcane, doesn't-have-an-ISBN category. Like, there's a fabulous 1937 book I'm reading called "Leaves From A Surgeon's Case Book" by James Harpole (a pseudonym for James Johnston Abraham) that I'm absolutely loving - but I have no way of putting it on my list, at least not until I can apply for librarian status, and maybe not even then.

Nitpicking aside, though, I'm enjoying the site a lot. I only have two friends on there, though - I am shocked at how few of my many book-loving friends are there! - so I'm looking for more.

Go on, add me. Sati Marie Frost - sati_the_girl@hotmail.com . You know you wanna.

Coping With PTSD - Part 1

WARNING: This post contains things that may be triggery for some people. Read with caution.

I was asked a while back to write an article about my experiences with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I dragged my heels for quite a while, at least in part because about half the time I don't believe I have it and the rest of the time I feel guilty about it, but eventually I started writing, almost against my will. I can't seem to sit down and write the whole article, though, so I'm posting in pieces.

This is not intended in any way to be an exclusive list of things that people with PTSD think or feel - merely my own experiences.

The Pop Psychologists

When you've gone through a traumatic experience, whatever it was, people always want to know how it felt. I don't know if it's empathy or a need to reach out or if it's something darker, some need to dig at you for entertainment, but you can see it in any piece of journalism. The first question anyone gets from the media is, "So how did you FEEL about that?" Armchair psych, times a thousand.

The majority of humans react to tragedy - after the initial crisis period - in one of two ways: they get very rude, or they get very polite. Either they ask inappropriately probing questions - "What exactly did he do to you?" "How many people did you kill?" "So you must be really messed up, right?" - or they ask inappropriately inane ones. On the whole, private citizens - especially the ones who know you - tend to react a little more subtly than journalists. Small talk abounds. Statements come couched as questions. "You're OK now, though (?)" "I bet it's good to be back, right (?)"

In some ways, the rude ones are easier to deal with. You don't have to be polite back. You can answer honestly, or you can ignore, or you can tell them to go sit on a pineapple. Polite queries tend to demand a polite reply, even when all that's expected is assent. Perhaps especially when all that's expected is assent. Yes, I'm OK. Yes, it's good to be back, to be home, to be safe.

Some days I wonder how people would react if you said no.

Because here's the thing: sometimes the answer, the real answer, is no. No, I'm not fine. No, I don't feel safe. No, it's not good to be back. It's that last one that would really kill people - figuratively - if you told them that sometimes it's not good to be home, that at times you almost wish you were back there in hell, where at least you've learned how to cope with whatever's thrown at you, where choice is nonexistent and you know the rules, where life is simple even if not easy, where you don't have to deal with incidentals that crop up because everything you do is streamlined towards that one basic goal of survival.

Sometimes being home safe doesn't feel better. Sometimes it feels better most of the time, until you have a breakdown and start crying on the phone because you don't know how to make the choice between paying your gas bill by check or direct debit. Or you end up wearing the same outfit until you start to smell, and then wash it, and wear it some more until the seams tear, because trying anything else on seems like an overwhelming task. Or you spend forty-five minutes in one aisle of your local shop, absolutely lost when it comes to picking out butter.

Or maybe, like some of us, you just don't answer the phone. Or go to the grocery store. Or get dressed.

There's just no good way to have that conversation with your loved ones.
 

A Glitch In The Matrix

I am a creature of habit. To some extent I was born that way, but with each new little tragedy my tendency to ritualise things increases a bit more - sometimes a little, sometimes exponentially. I do still strike out for the unknown (sometimes, occasionally, for a couple hours) but more often than not I find a thing I like and stick with it. For the first couple months after the memory loss, I listed everything that I tried: foods, books, movies, places. I made lists of what I liked and disliked. I made lists of every book I read for a year. Everything was new and overwhelming.

It's still overwhelming.

Know how long I've owned Mario 64 DS? Probably about nine months. Know how many times I've played it? I'd guess about thirty. Sometimes I finish the game and immediately start a new file. It's not even that I enjoy the game anymore, not really. I just know how to do it. I know there aren't any surprises. There are simple goals: collect the stars, free your friends, defeat Bowser. There's some variety in which level you play when, but aside from that it's always the same.

And no, that's not the only one. I could play New Super Mario Bros DS in my sleep. Or Urbz. Or Spyro the Dragon 1, 2 or 3 for PS1, or Spyro Season of Ice, Season of Flame, Adventure for GBA. Crash Bandicoot N-Tranced. Zelda Phantom Hourglass or Spirit Tracks. I don't even need to be fully awake to play them. And it's not unusual for me to finish and immediately start from the beginning.

I have a personal library of around 1500 - maybe 2000 - books, and another couple thousand that belong to mom and me communally. Half of which I have read in excess of a dozen times - some in excess of thirty times - and half of which I haven't read at all. Only a few have been read once or twice.

I eat the same foods. I buy from the same restaurants. Occasionally I'll go to a restaurant and they won't have what I usually order, and it'll take all my self-control not to get up and leave rather than try something new.

And then every so often my mother, or my ex, or a friend, asks me if I want chicken tikka takeaway from the local for dinner. And they know what my order is. And I suddenly bubble over with resentment and scorch the entire room with my anger because nobody but me appears to find anything wrong with the fact that life carries on the same, with the same books and foods and movies month after month, year after year; because nobody was around to tell me that it's not natural for a twenty-something to be incapable of change and exploration and growth.

Except that my choices to live a rerun are really nobody's fault but my own.

Velociraptor Mom

[Unfinished and only partly formed thoughts from a month ago, that I forgot to post. And I'm too tired of the subject to try and make a full post. Oh well.]

It's rare for me to get reprimanded at work, but when I do it almost always has to do with the way I relate to temporary co-workers. There aren't many of us permanent or even long-term employees - in addition to me there's Paul, my boss; Chris, the psychiatrist / counsellor who works two days a week pro bono (or whatever the social work equivalent is); Cindy, who does the same as me and who I rarely see as we never work the same shifts, and a handful of volunteers who've lasted a couple years. Summers are the busiest times of year at the center, so we get a bunch of temporary volunteers in from June through September.

I've been booted out of work for the next fortnight while Paul trains them, since last year I chased off two in the space of a week.

Good volunteers are rare. I know there are some out there, because I meet them from other centres and community programs, but somehow most of the ones we end up with are crap. The majority are students who've just finished A-levels (although we get some uni, and a few post-GCSE) who either want a summer job or a gap year adventure. Most of these are white, middle-class, and looking for an exciting couple of months that will look good on uni applications. They tend to run to two types: type 1 are the do-gooders, suburban PC brigade who - either as a way to impress on UCAS forms, or out of a genuine wish to contribute to those less fortunate - have decided to donate some of their time and energy to help the poor little ghetto kids. Sometimes type 1s last and become good youth workers, if they can learn to view the kids as individual humans rather than charity cases. Their earnest and naive ways do grate on me a bit - although that could be jealousy; it's been a long time since I felt that innocent and unspoiled - but I try to be patient. They mean well. Sometimes.

Type 2s are mostly in it for the adventure. They want exciting stories to relate their friends at future parties, where they feature as the intrepid hero who faced down bullets and gangs, and they drive me crazy.

Paul and I disagree heavily on the use of volunteers. We come at the problem from entirely different perspectives. Paul's job is to organise things, to maximise services on a shoestring budget, and that means relying a great deal on unpaid workers. There isn't any other option for him, except for giving up a lot of the activities we offer. From Paul's point of view, any volunteers are better than no volunteers.

From my perspective, volunteers who look down on the kids are worse than nothing. And they do. Frequently. Young people from the poorer areas of London - Dagenham, Tottenham, Peckham, Brixton, several other places - are totally marginalised by the majority of our society. Britain shunts my kids to the sidelines, looks upon them as lower forms of life simply because of the circumstances of their birth / childhood / migration to England, creates these ludicrous self-fulfilling prophecies that say they'll all end up unemployed, scrounging benefits, addicted to drugs and alcohol, committing crimes and having babies indiscriminately - and then wonders why the kids don't automatically know how to, or want to, abide by the rules of a society that's treated them like they don't belong.

It makes me spit, it really does.

So we end up with a whole bunch volunteers who look down on my kids. Not all of them do, but most. At best it's a sort of benevolent condescension; at worst it's an overt sneering. And I don't tolerate that well, AT ALL. I don't respond well when I feel my children are threatened. When kids are beefing with other kids, I tend to let them get on with it unless I sense physical danger. Teenagers fight, and inner-city teenagers fight a lot - it's just a fact of life that I can't change. But when adults come in and patronise my children, when people who've been lucky enough to be born into affluence come and sneer at my kids because they think that the circumstances of their birth somehow make them better people, I see red. Although a generally kind, peaceful person by nature, I have a temper and a sharp tongue, and more than a few people over the years have sustained multiple cuts from it when I've turned into Velociraptor Mom.

There is some sense of poetic justice in the way that so many people come to my centre looking for excitement and danger, and the most frightening thing they end up facing is me.

I do feel bad about it, sometimes. I try to control my temper. I don't enjoy hurting people, even when it's to prevent then hurting my children. But for better or for worse, they are my kids, my heart and soul, and protect them I will. Even if that means turning into Velociraptor Mom and unleashing my fire breath on those who will stamp on them and put them down.

(Mixed metaphors, but you get the point.)

It's difficult to explain this to anyone who hasn't lived it. These kids face danger every day, from drugs, from gangs, from random crime, from their parents more often than you'd want to know. Why, you might ask, am I so worried about their self-esteem when they're facing a multitude of real physical dangers every day?

Well, because self-esteem is where it starts. All of those other dangers, they're all tied in with a person's feelings of self-worth, or lack of. I've said it a hundred times, and I'll probably say it another thousand in the years to come: happy people do not harm others. This is such a simple concept, and it seems to be so hard for so many people to grasp. With the exception of psychopaths and sociopaths - and true psychopathy is far rarer than the papers and TV shows would have you believe - people who beat up, shoot, stab, rape, burgle, mug, deal drugs, or any combination thereof, do so for a common reason: they're miserable.

I am not a bleeding-heart liberal who thinks that every bad choice should be forgiven because the perpetrator is a victim of society. I believe people should be held responsible for their actions, no matter the reasons behind them, and must always pay the debts they owe. My job is merely to prevent such actions from happening in the first place: not by locking up potential criminals - which is what my kids are viewed as by so much of society - but by helping to develop the qualities and values that allow them to become the best they can be.

Those qualities and values are not so much things like respect for law and order or a good work ethic or even respect for other people. Those come later. The basic building blocks that kids need, that so many of mine lack, are things like hope, and compassion, and self-forgiveness, and the ability to be honest with themselves (even when its not comfortable) and a sense that they're worth loving.

Self-worth is irreplaceable. If you don't have it, you have nothing. Without that, you can't develop any kind of real confidence, and then you go one of two ways: either you constantly doubt yourself and have no sense of self-esteem at all, or you develop a false bravado, a cockiness and arrogance that tells the world you think you're the bees' knees and that the whole world had damn well better respect you. After a while, you come to believe, at least on the top layers of your consciousness, that you're as great as you say you are, and then you end up treating others like shit - not because you're trying to make yourself feel better, but because you've become completely incapable of holding up a mirror to yourself and analysing your behaviour with any kind of moral lens.

Too many people - from all walks of society, but particularly those who have grown up poor - end up like this. I could have gone this way if fate hadn't intervened. Most high-level criminals have taken this route, and they can't be helped or rehabilitated, because they're incapable of seeing a problem with how they are. As I said, my job is to stop this before it happens.

We damage ourselves and each other so much with words, and the ways we say them. More than the drugs and the violence, I worry about the effects of derision, condescension, marginalization. My kids are smart. Most streetwise kids are, when it comes to human behaviour. They have reliable instincts. If someone looks down on them, they know. And they hurt. Even when they convince themselves they don't. People are like clay, in some ways, and the heat that my children have been under has been too hot, too fast, and instead of slowly toughening all the way through they've become hard but brittle, with shiny shells overlaying (mostly) invisible cracks. While some of them may keep those hard outer shells intact for their whole lives, the majority are not as tough as they think they are - nor even as tough as other people think they are.

I'm not sure that any teenagers are as tough as they think they are.

Never A Frown - The Act Of Succumbing

WARNING: This post contains details some readers may find disturbing.

Golden brown, finer temptress
Through the ages she's heading west
From far away
Stays for a day
Never a frown
With golden brown

- The Stranglers, Golden Brown



I have a terrible confession to make. I have become an addict.

Yes, you heard me. Girl Of Few Vices. She who doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, doesn't use drugs, doesn't eat chocolate or crisps, who is compulsive about limiting her exposure to processed food. Who doesn't read trashy magazines, and watches MAYBE five hours of TV a week. Who likes to shop but doesn't have a credit card or a bank loan or overdraft. Well, aside from ￡100 that I dip into about once every six months, when stuff like car tax and school fees and an unforeseen emergency align themselves, and then pay back with my next paycheck.

Who lists her vices as books, bathing and making snap judgements about celebrities.

But I guess anyone can become an addict if fate and poor choices intervene.

Oh, you glorious Eastern goldenness. How did I ever exist without you?

It's only been a matter of days, perhaps too soon to judge whether it is a true addiction or merely a passing affliction. Part of me wishes it were the latter, but only part. Part of me is reveling in the sensations; not falling into addiction but soaring, tumbling, spiralling ever faster into it. I had my first hit so recently that I can count the time in hours and days rather than months and years. Yet life without that sweet burn, that grating, itchy, delightfully tingly feeling, seems so far away. Like a world where everything has had the colour leached out of it.

How did I ever exist there?

Like many have discovered, my obsession may well be my destruction. Yet I cannot summon the strength to judge myself harshly for it, even though a week ago I lived in a state of smug self-satisfaction that I had never felt the need to even TRY it, let alone succumb.

There is a small bit of embarrassment, a dash of shame, but sooner or later that will go too.

She grates on me and soothes at the same time. Fills me with aggravation and jubilation.

My Golden Brown.

Yes, I have sold my soul for Jersey Shore.

Reads Almost Like A Simon Armitage Poem

One set of dog tags. Standard US issue. Black rubber silencers. Blank.

One silver St Jude pendant, the size of a five-penny piece, on a pale blue satin ribbon, darkened slightly by wear.

They tangle in my jewellery drawer every time. I don't know why these two, and none of my other necklaces. I would expect the satin sheen of the ribbon to repel any attempts to gnarl - none of the ribbons in my sewing box tangle, ever - but there is something, some strange attraction between soft, slightly worn satin and hard, durable ball chain that causes them to twist themselves together so that every time I want to wear my pendant I have to spend a minute or two unpicking strands.

In some weird, anthropomorphic way, it's like they want to entwine.

There is some symbolism there, I think, and more than a little irony.

Perhaps if I were smarter I'd have learned to keep them in different places. Some nights I do. Sometimes I remember for weeks, even months on end. And then I forget.

He is in my blood.