New Reproductive Justice Book

As a Lefty, I want to talk about a new 2018 book Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice by Rebecca Todd Peters.

This will be a 3-part blog carnival. To start here I’ll tell readers that I have always understood and aligned with people viewed as The Other.

My own life narrative is atypical. A woman I hired told me my story was “unusual.”

I don’t think and act like a lot of people of my race and gender do. I’ve always gone Left when everyone else goes Right.

First I’ll give an overview of this minister-author’s rationale. Then I’ll quote statistics. Lastly, I’ll talk about my own life.

I quote from Trust Women to encourage readers to go out and buy the book.

Rebecca Todd Peters asserts:

“The public rhetoric that insists women must justify their abortions represents a thinly veiled racial and class bias that does two things: It attempts to impose white, middle-class values about marriage, sexual activity, and childbearing on everyone. And it focuses on individual women’s behavior while effectively obfuscating the complexity of their day-to-day lives and the viability of their various choices.”

Instead the Christian minister proposes:

“Public policy ought to focus on addressing systemic social problems rather than attempting to police and control the behavior of women and their bodies.”

In her view the real issue is that women who have abortions are told they need to take responsibility. The truth is that “difficult real-life moral decisions stand in contrast” with the prevailing white, middle-class politicians and anti-choice crusaders perception that women who terminate pregnancies need to take responsibility.

In the next blog entry I’m going to quote statistics that reveal the real issues facing ordinary women tasked with deciding whether or not to give birth.

People Have the Power

“People Have the Power” is my favorite Patti Smith song.

Yes I believe it’s true people in America have the power to change the the direction our country has been going in.

This starts when we challenge the hateful rhetoric in the media. It continues when we speak out against the drastic policies being enacted. The dialog can’t end it can only change its focus.

Why just fight for our rights? Why not figure out new rights we haven’t had that we can champion for everyone?

Instead of merely reacting to what goes on. We can be proactive in helping each other. We can treat each other with dignity.

Responding to hate with hate solves nothing. To love bomb the haters is the solution.

I read somewhere that if America wanted to convert other nations to our democratic ideals we shouldn’t bomb them. We should drop TVs on them.

I doubt anyone who needs to read what I’m writing will chance upon this blog. Yet here goes for those of you aren’t loyal readers. Here goes too for the ones who tune in every week. Here goes for everyone:

See who a person is not who you think they are. Labeling other people and judging them and stereotyping them is not the way to go.

I’ve listed in here the names of the over 30 people cops killed as well as written about Kate Spade.

Having been bullied early in life and having a diagnosis I’m no stranger to being viewed as the Other.

Yet it seems that before a person meets me or you or someone else that person sees fit to judge us and stereotype us and label us with a name.

Those of us with this kind of psychic ability to figure out a person’s life story just by looking at them: should set up a table on Venice Beach telling fortunes.

This aim might not be accurate so then again that would be a lousy way to make money.

Only our elected officials are making hundreds of thousands of dollars by daring to judge the needs of ordinary Americans as subservient to corporate greed.

Our elected officials are daring to think that the lives of ordinary Americans–lost to poverty, disability, lack of education, imprisonment, etc.–aren’t worth saving.

Sadly, I have given up on our government as being an agent of change.

The latest measure I’ve heard coming from Mr. Toupee is to stop funding public libraries.

No kidding.

Bombs away? I think not.

Let’s band together to treat each other with the respect, dignity, and compassion that seems to be lacking in media editorials and congressional fiats.

This blog will always be a hate-free and stigma-free forum.

 

Kate Spade – A Tragedy

Today Kate Spade–the designer of iconic handbags–took her own life.

She had everything going for her in terms of external success.

It’s a tragedy that inside at her core she wasn’t doing very well.

A year or two ago in my Flourish blog I wrote about the phenomenon of “smiling depression.”

Women are suffering all alone because no one takes them seriously.

“How could you be depressed when you have a great life?”

“Just pray and go to church and you’ll be fine.”

“Get married and have babies and raise a family.”

That last sentence contains actual words a young woman was told years ago.

The other two sentences are oft-repeated ill advice that women are given too.

I remember vividly when I was going on a job interview in the 1990s.

I rode the elevator up to the office with another woman. She held a Kate Spade tote against her shoulder. I coveted that Kate Spade pocketbook.

It wasn’t until this spring that I dared splurge to buy myself a Kate Spade pocketbook.

I bought it at a reduced yet not cheap cost at an off-price discount retailer in New York City.

Kate and her husband sold their company years ago. Yet American women have coveted the Kate Spade handbags since their first creation.

Disability is no joke.

Mental health issues strike everyone from all walks of life.

It’s a tragedy that Kate Spade and hundreds possibly thousands of nameless faceless individuals feel the only way out of their pain is to end their life.

What if Kate Spade could’ve gotten treatment? What if she had bipolar or another mental health issue that wasn’t diagnosed?

A part of Kate Spade lives on in the pocketbook I bought this spring.

Yet that’s no consolation for the fact that another human being’s life ended in tragedy not recovery.

God bless you Kate Spade. God bless everyone living with a mental health issue who suffers. You are not alone.

The Suicide Prevention Helpline can be reached at (800) 273-TALK (8255).

You can use the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

Please. The pain you are in can be healed. People care about you. Help is available.

There is a way out of the pain that will enable you to live a better life.

There’s no shame. What you feel is real and true. What you feel can be healed

 

“Dignity is Valuable”

david bowie super CD

“Heroes” is my favorite David Bowie song. I bought a Heroes magnet at the David Bowie exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. I used to play this song all the time on my FM radio show in the 1980s.

Everyone gets a headset to listen to a documentary while viewing the items from start to end. It was just beautiful.

The words “Dignity is valuable” kept repeating in the headset. Soon after I was able to listen to Bowie’s “Major Tom.”

David Bowie had a career that lasted over 30 years. After the show I picked up in the gift shop his Scary Monsters CD.

That’s what it’s like to be a “super freak” in the eyes of others: You have to act true to yourself or you’ll wither.

Years ago I wrote in this blog “Conformity is repression.”

You can’t keep trying to be someone else to get others to like you and approve of you. That’s the quickest route to ill health.

I”m a Dilettante / Lover. These are actual archetypes.

If you’re an Artist or a Dilettante / Lover get yourself a ticket to the Bowie exhibit. Do this if you’re in NYC before July 15 when the show ends.

Adults cost $20. Senior citizens if I remember cost $12.

You will hopefully be so inspired by this experience. As it was I got turned on to live a freely creative life after seeing this homage to David Bowie’s work.

It was a beautiful experience. The rooms were crowded yet that was part of the fun:

To see a woman dancing while listening to a video on a screen.

To see a woman in a wheelchair view the exhibit.

The David Bowie exhibit was simply life-affirming.

I beg you if you are a Dilettante / Lover or an Artist that you dare commit to making art all the days of your life.

Even if it’s just changing the dining table decor at the start of each new season.

Or stirring up a pot of onion soup you created from a recipe in a cookbook.

Whatever you do that is artistic be it ordinary or big just keep doing it.

David Bowie continues to be a great inspiration to me long after he’s gone.

The Man Who Fell to Earth left this earth to soon. Luckily we have his music and his legacy to carry us on.

Another Year Older

2018 sephora

I’m 53 now and I’m still here.

Contrary to the myth that everyone with SZ dies 25 years earlier.

Do I look like I’m ready to kick the bucket?

Going to Sicily is on my bucket list of things to do before my hair turns totally silver.

I’ve decided to get a Sephora makeover once a year at this time.

I was told I have a heart-shape face. So if your face is like mine you might have a heart shape face too: wide forehead and prominent cheekbones and narrow chin.

The rocker chick bangs haircut is courtesy of my new hairdresser: an old school Italian lady. I stopped going to my old hair stylist I’d seen for about nine years.

One day last summer I woke up and couldn’t take how my hair had been cut. I tried to wear a hat to my job because it was August.

“No hat indoors. It’s a sign of disrespect.” The supervisor put an end to my bad hair day cover-up.

Every day was a bad hair day. I just refused to get it cut again until the fall.

On the day after Columbus Day I went to the new hairdresser a Sicilian woman told me about. Finally: a great haircut.

This isn’t a matter of world peace or any other kind of injustice in terms of the significance of having had a bad haircut.

Yet I think all women have been there really not liking how their hair stylist has been going cutting their hair at some point.

Plus my haircut is now thirty dollars cheaper.

Paying too much to look like a bald falcon? I think not. Get yourself to a new hairdresser right away if it’s time for a change.

 

Autism Acceptance Month

I’ve been schooled in how to refer to April: as Autism Acceptance Month not Awareness Month.

Self-advocates think having awareness of autism is only a halfway measure—almost there. Autism advocates prefer the term Acceptance. At first I didn’t understand this because not everyone with autism does well.

It comes down to seeing the glass as half full (not half empty) and wanting to drink up. Advocates attribute their strengths to their autism. These advocates don’t see their illness as a tragedy even though there are struggles. They choose to focus on the positive.

The term is neurodiversity with typical and atypical expressions of this.

Those of us with an MH diagnosis need to get over our self-stigma surrounding the medical terms used to describe our condition. You don’t see advocates lobbying to change the name autism to something else. They accept what happened to them and advocate for full inclusion in society—something I did decades ago in the 1990s for MH peers.

Hell yes though—I’d be the first in line if a cure for SZ was available. I’m not one of the “I love my disability” folk.

No—I wouldn’t wish SZ symptoms on anyone as a permanent lifelong mental state. Having been there, I understand what it’s like. Having lived through the worst I would rather be in remission than symptomatic.

Give me a cure—okay? Give me the term SZ any day. Are people still spooked to have a diagnosis? In the early 2000s I railed against this and lobbied for acceptance.

Readers—I urge you not to get twisted over having a diagnosis. Next month I will advocate for changing May’s theme to Mental Health Acceptance Month.

We need to do this because without acceptance full inclusion remains a hollow dream. It isn’t the end for outsiders to have awareness. Awareness is only the beginning. Acceptance is the goal.

We need to accept the role the MH condition plays in our lives. This doesn’t signal that we have to like having an illness. No–I don’t like having an illness.

Yet hey, I say take a tip from the autism self-advocates: lobby for acceptance and inclusion.

Focusing on how having an illness has given us strengths sure beats dwelling on the negative.

I might not like having a diagnosis. Yet I appreciate all the good things I’ve gotten and that I’ve done because of it.

 

Radical Chic

I’m fond of this sentence Kim Gordon wrote in her memoir:

“I believe the radical is more interesting when it appears ordinary and benign on the outside.”

This rock star/artist/author (the former Sonic Youth singer and bassist) wrote a great book, Girl in a Band. I urge you to buy this memoir.

Sonic Youth are my favorite band–I played them on my 1980s radio show.

Her words are prophetic, because you can’t judge a person. How we look on the outside ultimately tells others nothing about our character, our personality, and the things that matter.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s dressing in trendy clothes was my way of telling the mental health establishment: “Screw you, I’m not going to conform to how you think a person diagnosed with SZ should look and act and live.”

That’s the truth folks: I rebelled the role of mental patient. You should do the same–and the sooner the better.

I think of this now as 53 beckons in a couple of weeks. Not all of us are destined to get dressed every day like we’re Nicki Minaj performing on a concert tour.

There’s a benefit in only looking like we conform when in reality we’re rebels, dreamers, and free thinkers marching to a different drum on the inside.

It can be liberating to fool others with our persona. We don’t have to be who they want us to be. We can and should only be ourselves.

Acting true to yourself will always be in style. Act true to who you are today. Reserve the right to be who you want to be tomorrow.

You don’t have to dress like a Pop Diva to make a statement. You can be radical dressed in ordinary clothes like Kim Gordon admires.

I too admire everyone for having the courage to get up in the morning, choose clothes, and get dressed in a way that is true to who they are.

The older I get I’m less impressed by what passes for normal in society. The mundane–in thinking, acting, dressing, and living–isn’t something I covet having.

Thus the title of my own memoir: Left of the Dial.

So you could say I look ordinary–yet I’ll always be a Girl on the Left Side of the Dial.

You can be radical and chic.

A woman in her fifties should leave people guessing.

 

Be Brave and Be Yourself

At the end of April I turn 53. I’m devoting a blog entry to a hot topic that no one else has ever talked about before. What I write is for peers to read first of all. If outsiders chance to read it I hope you will be moved to understand and have compassion for us.

It’s a reflection on how a friend is in awe of a woman with a formal serious office job. Yes I understand how she could covet another person’s life: that’s exactly what fueled my desire to have an insurance broker career: when my first boss developed a career plan for me.

I told my friend we should start a “F*ck You!” Club and dare to not conform to other people’s expectations. Who are either of us kidding thinking we would be happier being (or could even be) another person?

This I’m confident is the age-old dilemma of anyone with an MH diagnosis–going in the opposite direction to prove you’re normal–only to return to where you started as your original self.

I’m living proof that it all comes down to finding the job and workplace where you belong. I didn’t belong in insurance office jobs wearing “power-blue straitjackets” as I described that attire in my memoir.

The more I tried to prove I was normal, the more it backfired.

So it becomes imperative to find the place where you belong. That’s going to be a different environment for each of us. A good friend of mine rose up to be the CEO of corporations. He wore thousand-dollar suits and all that. More power to him for rising up. This is possible for some of us and not possible for others.

Either way it’s precisely when you turn 53 that it’s time to tell others: “F*ck You! I’m not buying what you’re selling about my worth. I’m NOT less than zero. I’m 24-Karat gold. Mess with me at your own peril.”

Or as a woman told me once: “You’re a diamond, not a rhinestone. Remember that.”

I’ll end here by telling readers:

Be brave and be yourself. There’s no other way to live.

Shine on.

The grass isn’t greener over there.

Spring Cleaning Outside of the Closet

The spring is the perfect time to start over.

Outside of the closet sometimes you have to cull your beliefs or your relationships as well as your clothes.

It’s not easy to let go of a friend or lover yet at times you must to reclaim your sanity.

It’s possible this person’s trash talk towards you has depleted you of energy.

I call such people “energy vampires” because they steal any good feeling you have about yourself.

Each of us deserves better. We deserve to be treated with kindness and empathy.

You can feel like you’re all alone after a breakup. Yet remember: their negativity is no longer seeping into you.

It comes down to what you’re comfortable with.

It might surprise readers yet a couple of years ago I decided to fade away from a person who made an objectionable racist comment out loud when we were in public together.

I felt it wasn’t right what they said. I won’t repeat the comment and this is because I don’t want to set off readers.

We need to lift each other up not bring each other down.

Our friends shouldn’t verbally attack us. They shouldn’t attack other people.

As hard as it can be to let go I’ll end here with this:

You can meet a new friend or lover in due season.

I’ll be 53 in April–I’ve been around this block for too long. The older I’ve gotten the less inclined I am to mollycoddle haters.

In coming blog entries I’ll talk about”The Change”–the M Word–menopause.

Living through “The Change” can be challenging yet it can bring on renewed happiness and a sense of new purpose.

I want to talk about “The Change” because no one else is doing this for mental health peers.

National Clean Out Your Closet Week

tie rack alternative use

The third week of March is National Clean Out Your Closet Week.

To free up space in your closet you can get creative with alternative uses for common storage items.

In the photo you’ll see a tie-and-belt rack has been re-purposed to store watches and a pocketbook as well as belts.

In the spirit of spring cleaning I recommend donating clothes and other items to the Salvation Army or the charity of your choice. You can get a receipt if you itemize deductions on your tax return.

Engaging in clutter control should bring a smile to your face. If you ask me organizing as you go along each week is the antidote to not doing it at all and facing a big pile-up down the road.

It’s harder to tackle a big mess so why not do a little every day to tidy up before things get out of hand?

I love the Container Store for a multitude of products.

The store even sells metal lunch compartment boxes instead of plastic ones. It sells reusable strong plastic bags so you don’t have to keep buying and using and throwing out the common plastic zip bags.

What did me in this time around? Counting up every pair of shoes I owned–37 pairs before I threw out a pair of booties with cracked heels.

Too I say the goal is to be able to keep your clothes long-term. Instead of buying things over and over and having to keep donating them because you don’t wear them anymore.

Buy what you love and will last for years. Keep your clothes in good condition.

As regards those shoes: an expert tailor can shine them so that they look like new after years of wear. I go to a shoe repair guy that is a miracle worker.

He’s going to waterproof two pairs of shoes. He can revive shoes. He can put taps on the heels. Absolutely–the shoe repair guy in your town is your best-kept secret.

Your shoes can make or break how you look. So can your clothes.

Now that National Clean Out Your Closet Week is here why not do a good-for-you spring clean?

In the coming blog entry I’ll talk about spring cleaning your life.