Archive of ‘personal’ category

15
Sep
2020

I haven’t ever really mentioned this here, but…

categories: personal; word count: 632 words

Some religions I dislike more than others, even though it can be said that I dislike all organized religion equally. The ones that I dislike the most are ones that aggressively try to indoctrinate children, attempting to “make them members” from as early of ages as they possibly can with the intent to raise them to be “faithful members” from infancy or early childhood on up (so religions that actively practice infant baptism and childhood communion are two examples of religions that I do not like and can not stand… I am a bit more lenient when it comes to religions that do not practice these things, especially when they allow the child in question to make the free and fully formed choice to become a practicing member, and I’m not talking about Catholicism’s practice of infant baptism followed by the confirmation that is usually undertaken at or around adolescence, because it is generally almost outright coerced even if they’ll never actually admit to doing it).

Another thing that I dislike about the most… cult-like, or preachy of religions, is the ones that expect the individual’s significant other or prospective spouse to convert alongside them to “make it easier to get married in the church”. It seems like Catholicism and Mormonism, for all the things that they do not have in common with each other, are the worst at this, because they do this the most. In relationships like these — even simply relationships — the Catholic or Mormon individual wants their significant other to convert. They aggressively evangelize their faith to their significant other with the goal of converting them and marrying them in the church, and that sort of courtship has never sat well with me. Bub’s father’s family began coercing me into attending Masses with them against my will when they found out that I was pregnant with his child (or, shall I say, his mother did… after telling him each time that I did not want to attend these things, his response was that “his mother said that I had to come”, which quickly culminated in me bringing my PSP to Masses when I was relegated to their church’s cry room to keep me away from incense used due to my asthma, where I would ignore everything that went on around me and silently play video games with it hidden in the arm of my sweater until I finally got to stop attending everything with them). As mentioned in previous posts, I was eventually rushed into signing up for religious conversion classes intentionally not even allowed to read the forms that I was filling out, and wound up outing myself as a non-believer after the first, last, and only class that I sat through so that I could be dropped from the class, ending me having anything to do with their church since it had become clear that I would never convert or consent to our child’s baptism.

To be honest, I felt used that entire time. I felt like the expectation was “if I attended enough Masses and church functions” (never minding the fact that I intentionally did not fraternize with any parishioners and, through my own conscious actions, did not make a single friend out of any of them) “I would see that this was the one true church, believe in it, and want to convert”. I just wanted to stop attending everything and go home at the end of the day. Looking back on it, I should have felt used longer than I actually did though.

If you have to push your religion on children from infancy or childhood on up, you need to rethink how strong your religious doctrines are if you can’t even give children a chance to form their very own opinions on them.

13
Sep
2020

Expecting people to “act less disabled” in spaces.

categories: personal; word count: 487 words

This is the closest that I have come thus far in this entire blog, aside from writing about… various experiences that I have had with attempted religious indoctrination as they relate to Bub’s father’s family, in writing about specific experiences with people, but I felt like they had to be addressed in the way of disability advocacy: the expectation that non-disabled, or sometimes even other disabled, people have in expecting disabled individuals to “tone down the disabled parts of themselves” in general, to “act less disabled” in mixed spaces, and not to talk about the parts of their lives that have to do with their disabilities, even if being disabled “takes up a large part of their lives” and they are proud of being disabled. Like I’ve said, this seems to be something that society does in general, whether it is being done by non-disabled members of society or even disabled members of society who do not feel that they are “as disabled”, who have better passing privilege (the ability to be seen as non-disabled by society if and when they want to be, or simply to “turn off” being seen as disabled to their advantage), or who are not as proud of being disabled as the disabled person in question. I’ve noticed that this intersection can also sometimes occur when the disabled person in question is a member of the disability advocacy community, or “disabled community”, in general.

I do not like having to “tone down the disabled parts of myself”, as I feel that being disabled is an important and integral part of myself. I can not be myself without being disabled, and I should not have to expect to “be the non-disabled part of myself”, because that is a large part of my identity. If I were not disabled, I would not be the person that I am. If me being who I am makes you uncomfortable, that is something that you need to reconcile with yourself. That should not be something that I need to “tone down” in myself to make you more comfortable with me. I should not be expected to “act less disabled” in mixed spaces because there are non-disabled individuals present, because what sort of standard does that set in the era that claims to be all about social justice? Not a very good one, I’m afraid. Disability is not, and should not be, something that you can “turn on and off” to make other people’s lives easier. If that is something that I feel I have to do to make a group of people’s lives easier, maybe I need to consider how much time I spend around that group of people. Me being disabled is simply me being myself. If someone can’t tolerate that or doesn’t like that, then they need to tell me that they can’t tolerate me and that they don’t like me. It’s just that simple.

11
Sep
2020

Once upon a time, I made exceptions for men.

categories: personal; word count: 462 words

Remember that post where I said that I could write a post on making exceptions for men within the context of polyamorous relationships, dating monogamous men who were willing to “make exceptions for me”?

That post is here, and that time is now. I didn’t forget to make that post. I was always going to.

From the time that I began outing myself as polyamorous (or, initially, non-monogamous) all the way to my refusal to date monogamous men, there were times when I dated monogamous men who were willing to “make exceptions for me” within the context of a relationship where they were clearly monogamous and not willing to date or be in relationships with anyone else other than me, but were — or at least made it seem, because it never looked like it was any different from my point of view — perfectly alright with me dating and being in relationships with other men (although, for the record, my “comfortable limit” of relationships has always been two, although I would not be opposed to three if I were in two and the right person came along… I like to remind confused monogamous people that they tend to have more than two close friends).

At first, I was fine with this as long as the monogamous partner that I was with was fine with this.

However, as time went on, I became increasingly less fine with this, because I felt like the dynamic of each relationship where this happened was tilted toward me in a peculiar way, even though the monogamous man stated — and sometimes insisted — that they were fine with this. A lot of the time, I felt like they were making this exception because it was me who they were dating, not because they would normally make this exception or consider this carte blanche. Even though I would never refuse to give someone permission to date other people or be in relationships with other people if I wanted that same permission myself and so always extended that permission, making it clear, the men who “made these exceptions for me” obviously never took me up on that offer, and they insisted that they wouldn’t because they “were willing to be monogamous for me”. It just eventually got to the point that I decided not to date monogamous men any longer, men who were more comfortable being monogamous, or men who “were willing to be monogamous for the right person” (hello, Kat Blaque) because I didn’t want to have to deal with the unevenly skewed dynamic that would always be there in the relationship even though they insisted “that things were alright”.

I started refusing to date monogamous men eight years or so ago and am still glad that I have done so.

10
Sep
2020

I’ve started this habit, and I do not regret this.

categories: blog maintenance, personal; word count: 322 words

In between migraines and… living the slightly busy life that I do with my kids, I’ve started to queue up posts, and with very few exceptions, I do not regret getting into this habit. This means that if I am having a day where there is a lot of migraine activity (and to get the diagnosis of chronic migraine disorder, you have to have at least fifteen headache days per month with at least eight of those being migraine days, and I have that diagnosis… on top of that, mine are intractable, which means that medication does not easily “put them down”), or Bub and Monster are keeping me busy, I don’t have to worry about missing days posting on here. Having posts queued also helps in the event that my server actually does suffer the downtime that I mentioned last month, because when it does manage to come back up, the posts that I had queued will automatically publish… or, at least, that’s how they have so far, but the first, last, and only downtime that I actually saw my site have lasted over the course of one night, and then I had to fix the SSL that I have here.

I am continuing to titrate down on Trokendi, having been on topiramate in some form for awhile now.

Like I’ve probably already mentioned(, using social media so much that I have to ask myself “have I mentioned this here?”), if I am having migraines at the frequency and severity that I am, the medication that I’ve been on the longest… might not be the one that’s working. I did feel it when I dropped down from 300mg to 200mg, but once I got over that hurdle, I felt no difference. And it wasn’t even so much as more migraine activity than I felt the side effects — or lack of some, if you want to be technical — of dropping down 100mg.

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