Elitist 1st Worlder

I want a t-shirt says that, for each and every one of us.

I got called called that today for calling into question Starbuck's motives for suddenly being soooo interested fair trade (despite still serving a very small percentage of it at their stores) and making a nice little feel good movie clip of their top exec flying to coffee co-ops because he cares so darn much. Of course, Starbucks was boycotted and protested in front of for years because they would *not* make any serious commitment for supporting fair trade and even promoted lies like they did not need to buy fair trade because they were already paying fair trade prices - they were paying prices similar to fair trade prices per pound, but they were paying them to a middleman broker who gave 2/3rds of that price back to the farmers at best. Plus, do any research at all and you'll find out that fair trade co-ops formed because these very middle men were exploiting the coffee farmer's dependence on them and paying them so little they could not feed their families. So, what does that make Starbucks supposed reason for not supporting fair trade? That's right, a big fat lie promoted to keep from having to pay a fair price.

For putting these facts out there (with more concrete data, I might add) I was told I was being negative and participating in making the world a darker place. I could go on and on, but I will just say this:

Corporations have given the entire world every reason to doubt their motives, and no one more than the people of developing nations who have seen their resources raped and pillaged in the name of "first world" profits. The minute we begin to trust corporations is the minute that we've gone insane. The horror stories are endless about what corporations do to nations, resources, land and people. Check out the source of the term "banana republic" if you'd like to start educating yourself and look at the story they were giving their buying public while doing it about how happy those plantation workers were and lucky to have the work. Boycotts and demonstrations are what has gotten Starbucks to change their tune (and I'll believe its really changed when I see more than a nice promo video on it), as well as Taco Bell on the price of tomatoes, and on and on. Its not negativity, its reality, and one might say our duty if we are going to partake of the wares of these corporations. And is it really so great that Starbucks get on board to buy more fair trade coffee? It may seem that way at first, but talk to organic farmers and fair trade organizations that have been in the trenches for decades about Walmart suddenly being all into organic food and fair trade products . . . and how much money they are putting in to lobbying to weaken organic and fair trade standards until they won't mean much of anything at all.

Personally, I am going to take my elitist 1st world ass over to the local coffee shop that serves fair trade coffee and always has, no matter what the price.

Moving Through

I guess it is about acquiescing, something I have never been good at. About yielding. I am doing it, despite myself. I love this, but miss my husband and my spiritual life. Miss being something other than the face of the co-op and a mommy even while passionately happy filling these shoes. Its a very old story, told by more parents that can be counted. Then he comes over and puts little kisses all over my arm and smiles up at me with such tender emotion.

last time I saw you

I've struggled with depression on and off, more on that off, since I was a pre-teen. Me and depression, we've been serious "on" since Eli's birth. The extreme stress of that time was a trigger and while I've dealt with the semi-breakdown that followed, sorted out that I am bipolar, for which I am grateful, I find something lurking underneath. Something that keeps me pinned to my couch, doing nothing, feeling incapable of doing anything, often utterly unresponsive to my family. Depression was lurking under all that wreckage, quiet, unnoticed under the drama of all the fires that needed putting out.

So here we are again, face to face, me and the depression I've spent decades trying to process, heal, avoid, and wish away. I've done all the spelunking of my childhood, I've cried out my history, I've written letters of forgiveness, and I've tried working with my inner child. I am tired of it all, tired of going over that history, tired of traipsing through the past to no effect. I complain, I cry it out, I write it out and nothing changes. I thought that's how you were suppose to go about it and while it wasn't working, I was a one trick pony that didn't know what else to do and so tried it again and again.

I've been attracted to a phrase for a while, "cognitive behavioral therapy." I read a blurb about it somewhere years back now and its stuck in my brain. A therapy that's about finding solutions, about dealing with the hear and now and getting to happy and functionality not through dredging but learning new ways to think and do things and then thinking and doing. Radical, it just sounded utterly radical, a different way. But I left it at that, I didn't know how to find someone who did this "cognitive behavioral" thing, didn't know where to find books on it that weren't dry things for professionals, so I left it in a back corner of my mind and went on hammering at the past.

I had a "manic" episode recently, one where I felt an uncontrollable rage that a part of me knew was illogical and out of control but that I felt unable to get a handle on. Manic. And the next time I went to the shrink, I wanted answers. She asks a few questions about my family, literally talks about the weather, pronounces the drug that has "cured" me a wonder, and give me another scrip. That's it. I research and find that bipolars who do drugs and therapy have more complete and lasting recoveries but when I bring this up to her, she poo poos and avoids. I try to tell her about symptoms I am struggling with and she points to my highly functional life for a bipolar and gives me a scrip and invites me out the door. This time I said I need new patterns, new ideas on how I could choose to react to things or think about things when my negative patterns come up and what about cognitive behavioral therapy? No, no, that's only for people with anxiety problems.
I point out the depression that has been revealed beneath the the illness and she agrees that it needs to be addressed, gives me a new drug and sends me out the door.

And then, mired down in the worst of the depression of the last year this past week, a month after that visit, Michael hands me a book that's been sitting on our shelves for years, something he owned before knowing me. I've never mentioned my interest in cognitive behavioral therapy to him, he just gets a feeling he should go dig out this book called, "Feeling Good" and hands it to me saying he's not sure why he's bringing it up, but he wondered if I might want to check out this book? Its been there for years, Michael has struggled up and down with me through this depression for years now. But now, this week, something moves him to hand me this book.

And after years of feeling there was no stone left to turn, that every attempt at processing or healing this depression was just really touching its core, I read the first two chapters of this little old self help book. I've read a lot of them, ever since I was 12. This one happens to be the first I've ever read by a doctor that practices cognitive behavioral therapy. And I laugh out loud reading, giddy - "that's me! Yes, exactly, that's what I do! That's what I feel!" and I see these oppressive thought patterns in a new way, a way that feels fresh, disarming, fog-lifting. I keep exclaiming out loud as I read, and there is no one awake to hear me. Yes! And he says, "thoughts lead to emotions, not the other way around" and I've heard this before but he shows examples of how it works that make me feel like he's been wandering around in my brain and for the first time *ever*, really truly *ever*, I am seeing how I think and most exhilarating of all, some other ways I might think. Oh gods, another way, thank you!

And in that one sitting, little tiny beginnings of clear sky begin to show, today. There's something filling me I haven't felt in so long, hope. I'd given up on ever finding a way to live without fighting through paralysis every day, through panic and certainty of my own worthlessness no matter what anyone else said. And he's one of the first signs of change - I am proud. I look at what I've made of my life despite having to brave terrible fear, anxiety, boulders of hopelessness and I hear myself saying, "wow, look what you have done."

I've said I have depression issues all along, but I didn't really know what that meant until something pointed out which parts of me I'd just given up as permanently defective and painful were actually the depression, not me. And that it is possible for me to find a new way to think? I am ready to give it my best shot, I just needed the tools. Spirit, thank you for bringing this screwdriver to my hands just when I was the time was right, I am ready to take down some cages.

Hearts on Fire

I am wildly comforted to read my words over tonight in this journal. I am all asunder and quietly working at turning it over to Spirit and not screaming, but I would scream if I had a place to. Then I read me screaming a few entries ago and know it for what it is and feel good. I do not shut up. I *can* scream when I need to. And I can move on. And most comforting of all are the rare times someone responds and I know these screams are not meaningless nor going unheard. Blessings.

solomon and the baby

Spirit, I am feeling so unbelievably lost tonight. How can I be surrounded with so much blessing and feel so lost? What do you want of me? For me? From me? Is this it? I would love to embrace this simple life, committed to my community, this little house with the growing vegetable garden, these particular sidewalks Eli has learned to walk and run on. But then you well up like a geyser I cannot contain, bursting open my chest, knocking out the walls of what I thought was my heart, stretching out my veins with the forceful coursing of light you pour through me and I am beyond myself then - I am your minister. But the moment passes and I go back to doubt and the empty sense that it was all me being a fool and imagining the blind joy and rightness that overtook me when I released my throat to your use.

I wait, a desperate lover wanting you to return. I change the locks, to prove to myself that I have to get on with my "real" life and that you are not coming back, that you are not really calling to me to rise up in your service.

Spirit, what do you want of me? For me? Please show me how I can best serve as a minister of your grace. Whatever form that takes, take me there. All I ask is that you speak loud and clear to me, that I know that I have found where I am closest to you, in that moment.

I believe we are here for a reason. Am I to be your minister is some way that is more explicit than my current way? Why this pouring, cascading, bursting through me as words that fill up ears if not? And if not, can you then stop teasing me with these hints of what it would be to be your minister and leave me in peace? I don't know if you can, but I wish you could. I've felt like I am being torn in half for so long now.

not feeling pretty

my posts have not been very lovely lately. usually when I write, I am feeling a stirring in my spiritual gut and what pours out may be challenging to write, but is comfortable to read when I look back at it. what is coming out of me as of late is not comfortable stuff. I am playing with the possibility of letting go of comparing myself to others and just letting whatever is in their come out. there is this feeling that I shouldn't feel things if others don't, that I am not being "normal" or "appropriate" if I find all sorts of negative thoughts and emotions inside myself and don't hide or quash them. we are a society that equates the quashing down of negative emotions with ridding ourselves of them and maybe that is effective, but I have not yet experienced it that way. I've been accused of being an angry person before and that may be true. I've spent a lot of time in my life trying to evaluate if I seem angrier than the average person and trying to push my anger to fit only into the allowed boxes. lately I've speculated if maybe everyone is a lot more like me when it comes to anger, they are just better at the quashing than I am. and then, this morning, I wonder if it matters. it is hard to stop caring what others think and how we measure up to them. we talk all the time about how we shouldn't care but there is a human instinct to do so that is hard-wired into us. yet I think it can be overcome. I use to think it was overcome through becoming all spiritually detached. I now contemplate that it is reached through delving into and accepting who we are, which is not the poetry-ride self helpers try to make it sound like it is. my last post was angry, without a doubt. why? because I've been being lied to by society, myself, and a large number of people around me who are also lying to themselves, for years about something that has caused me a great deal of self-hate. there are layers to us, and a layer of me is now convinced that obesity is not a food issue and that it is not useful to think of it as an addiction issue, but perhaps it could be of greater use to think of it as a life deficient in connection to healthy community. while I am blessed to have a great deal of community around me, there are parts of me that still feel deeply isolated. these isolated parts, these parts that feel rejected and that they will make me unlikable or unlovable to others, I suspect they are at the root of my sense of hopelessness, and my eating a self-medication of the hopelessness and despair. and the despair may be far from logical, but it is very real and very there. living in me. eating me.

the straight truth and pass the ice cream

Time to talk about food.

It never ceases. Everyone you run into, doing what I do, want to talk about dieting, eating "healthy", new year's resolutions, etc. Not the customers, I mean the product reps, the ad reps, the people from other local orgs I network with. Even coworkers occasionally. They slip in comments in casual small talk conversations about watching what they eat or how we're all avoiding all that candy after the holidays and trying to eat only salads, ha ha, and they just say it inclusively out of habit. And then, they get a bit unsure of themselves, a little uncomfortable. Because all you need to do is to look at me to get a hint that I might not be avoiding that after holiday candy one little bit.

And the truth is, I am not. The reason behind that truth is more my point, though. The idea is, we are all trying to "eat healthy" and workout and lose weight to be "healthy." 95% of people in our culture think about it all the time, many of them completely obsessing, and most of them are disappointed in their own efforts. Its an on-going game - must eat healthy, must eat healthy, must keep weight down, must work out three times this week, ohps didn't do it I suck, must not eat yummy fatty food, must not eat . . .

See, its all about the "must not." And I've watched you people, the 95%, and its clear that the only way to win this quest you are on is to be ever vigilant, to be ever worrying over it and attempting to do what's "good for you" when it comes to food rather than what is pleasurable or enjoyable. Now, don't get me wrong, I understand the pleasure and benefit that comes with being healthier, I've been there, I get what you are saying there. But if I get on that kick with you, it will never ever end. To play this game you have to work to deny yourself things you want pretty much all the time, for the rest of your life. If you get good at it, you might get the prizes of thinness and "health." I put that in quotes because the definition of that is not something I understand, I don't know how that is measurable. But I digress. If you don't play the game particularly well you will continue to deny yourself what you desire as often as you can and make yourself feel like shit when you fail to deny yourself, which piles more unpleasantness on your life.

And it is so assumed that we are all playing this game, that we all need to play this game to be decent people who are not lazy and gross people who can be judged lesser that we all talk about it as if it is a defacto truth, not just one way of looking at things. It is the only acceptable way.

I would like to shed some reality on this. 90% of people that made new year's resolutions to eat healthier or work out more or lose weight will be off the wagon within two months. Period. Maybe it is just our time and our culture, but I strongly suspect that humans suck at self-denial. It seems that whenever white people have been rich enough to have food on demand and lots of it they have gotten fat. I don't know too much about this in the cultures on ancient people of other races, but you can see it in the history of those of European ancestry pretty clearly. As I said, I can't prove it, but I reeeeeeeeally suspect it is true.

It is assumed, though, that we must all subscribe to this idea that will power will cure what ails us and that we all must apply it or are horrible slobs that just don't care about ourselves - how shameful, and embarrassing. But I have recently unsubscribed and I have not yet heard the argument to spur me on to renewing my subscription. Any program of self-denial has little chance of success. Also, I have tried that way of thinking and living before and never, never had success for more than four months. Never.

I suck with a big capital "S" at self-denial. My few attempts at it have born fruit, but they have been terribly short lived and the entire time I am dreaming of only two things that never happen - reaching some "goal weight" and reaching a point when eating and working out like this just feels like my life instead of regime I am on and only kind of enjoying. I cannot subscribe to a belief system that means I will be working hard to deny myself and/or guilt myself for the rest of my life. That's not going to work and I am old enough to know that. And its not just for me that it does not work - over 90% of those who lose weight on diet programs regain it and *more* within two years. Will power is not working, folks. As a nation we are getting fatter and "less healthy" all the time and the cult of will power only gets stronger as well. Does anyone besides me see a correlation?

I have not been able to buy into such an unpleasant belief system that gets me few results beyond feeling more like shit about myself than I already do. That's an awful sales pitch for anything at all. And while I know 99% of the rest of those in my culture are jumping off that cliff, I just can't swallow it any more.

People talk to me about denying themselves this that and the other food and I realize, not only am I not doing so, but I am sick of feeling guilty for not doing so just because everyone else things I should feel ashamed of my inability to do so. I am working hard on not being that lemming because, indeed, that's what it is starting to look like to me from over here. When everyone gets into group mentality and keeps following the leader over the cliff even when it has been proven that it is not producing positive results for the vast majority of people, that's just lemming behavior. And its damned hard to resist, but the alternative is terribly unacceptable to me.

I don't like being obese. I'd like to be thinner and "healthier." But the method is useless to me and its not just me. This way of going about it is fucked up. Its not working. I don't know what the alternative is, I don't have the answers, but until we admit what they are not we are not going to find answers.

So, since I am going to fail anyway, since simple willpower is generally useless in the long term on this issue and I don't yet know the alternative, I am done playing. Yes, I eat ice cream whenever I want. And yes, I did have half a pizza for dinner. Food addiction is a bitch, but I am working on knowing in my bones that it is less painful to allow the addiction we are all never suppose to admit we are powerless before to be seen by others for what it is than to torture and deny myself in an attempt that will only cause more self-loathing and unhappiness.

Doesn't mean I've stopped looking for the answer or wanting it, just means I am admitting that your answer is never going to get me there, its a false solution. Two plus two are just never going to equal five, no matter how many people are brainwashed to believe it is so.