This is a shot from the very successful Burning of the Box! More pictures still to come, this is the first thing I burnt, a commitment order. It took half an hour to burn everything, holy crap! But I feel much better, weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
Reading circa 1980
This is me when I was two, looking at words and pictures. That silly monkey in the back is my sister being terribly cute and sitting on my mum’s lap. I’m wearing ducks.
Growing Up Gifted
When I went crazy, later on my mom criticized one psychiatrist for thinking I was “some kind of mad genius.” This hurt, because in fact I am a mad genius. Long before any psychological issues emerged, I had already been handpicked by the elementary school system to go into a smaller program for gifted students. There are two classes in the city for gifted students, and the program lasts approximately as long as an undergraduate degree, four years. I got some flak for deciding to accept the invitation from friends who thought I was going to “nerd school.” Yes, the only fistfight in our classroom over a four year period was over theories of aerodynamics, but really we were just a group of terribly smart kids who were getting bored in regular schooling.
We were half of the 60 kids in Saskatoon in our grade level with the highest I.Q. scores, about 140 and upwards. I know there’s lots of debate about how I.Q. tests work and what intelligence is valued over others, but there you have it. That’s how the program selected us. It wasn’t a program you could apply to either, or even knew that it existed, the school board just sent my mom a letter of invitation for me at the end of grade 4. And it was good because I was getting really bored in my schooling. Phonetics class was the most useless, by the time I got to kindergarten I had already been reading for some time. I still remember the first book I read on my own, when the marks actually had meaning. I remember reading it and thinking “Is that all there is?” It was a boring book! So boring. Dolphins, bleh! But phoenetics was the worst because it taught you to read in a way that made adults laugh at you, and I didn’t like that. Even the word for phonetics isn’t fonetic.
Luckily I kept reading after the first boring book. My mom didn’t know I could read until she found me one day sitting in my room with a book and she asked me what I was doing. “Reading.” She didn’t really believe me until I started reading the whole book aloud to her. I was about four.
It was my Gramma who helped me learn to read. I was frustrated by the inaccessability of the written language, I knew there was a pattern and I knew it had a meaning but I didn’t know HOW that worked yet. She was a kindergarten teacher a long time before, so she started doing reading exercises with me. Recognizing letters mostly, someone got some workbooks from a teacher store and that’s what I did with my Gramma when we visited. Because in a large extent it was self directed learning, I think I also learned how to learn from a very very young age. So I learned how to read, and it just continued on.
My mom was often busy with my sister, so I also became really self reliant because I was so impatient. I remember when I got my first two wheel bicycle my mom was going to teach me how to ride it after she put my sister to bed. That took an hour, and an hour was like, oh my god, an eternity. So I went into the back alley, jumped on my bicycle, put two feet on the pedals, and fell over immediately. This continued on for about an hour, until my mom finally came out to teach me only to see me riding up and down the alley saying “Look what I can do!” with totally bloody gory knees dripping blood and embedded with bits of gravel.
Thinking back on it, while my class was fairly diverse, a majority of the students could be considered disabled in the various ways students are currently being labeled. In hindsight most students had what would be labeled now as attention deficit disorder, at least one person had autism, there were wide ranging emotional problems, and when all was said and done we could have been a really rowdy problematic group of kids to teach. Pretty much everyone was an independent thinker in their own ways, nothing happened in class that wasn’t challenged in some way. So the teachers had to literally teach us in a different way than the majority of students were being taught. They knew that for us to learn and be happy we had to work with whatever we were interested in at the time. We did research projects all the time. And I can’t say that we were all geniuses in the same way. I was the writer/artist genius among several others, some people were really strong in math, some people were athletes, some people were good computer programmers, some were musicians, and so on. Yes, we still had the “popular kids” and the “nerds” and other social aspects common to most educational environments. But we were also respected by the people who were our authorities, which was a very different way of learning than I experienced in other learning environments. It changed the way I thought of authority.
It was probably also one of the places I got bullied so much, because it started becoming obvious to my classmates that I wasn’t heterosexual and that the tomboy thing wasn’t going away. But one thing they couldn’t bully me about was being stupid. The only snide comment they could make about my intelligence was that I wasn’t good at math, because I wasn’t doing algebra while most of them were. That hurt, but even then they couldn’t call me worse than average in mathematics, because I wasn’t in remedial, I just had to go to the regular class for math and then come back.
There was one thing I quit, a few other students did too. Band. I just never liked band. I think it was the group thing that annoyed me, if I had been able to play an instrument on my own with music I chose I probably would have stuck with it, but as it was I was practicing Ode to Joy and the William Tell Overture without any back up and feeling dumb. So I spent two years wiggling my fingers on the keys. I don’t know if anyone noticed, because I kept passing. Then one day I turned to the second saxaphonist and confessed my fraudulent finger wiggling and she said “That’s what I’ve been doing too!” There was only one other alto sax in the band, and I have no idea what the heck she was doing, I never asked. I decided to quit, even though I only had one more year of band. I didn’t want to live a lie! And I remember the band teacher huffed and said “I hope you don’t quit EVERYTHING you do in life!” Which was weird because it was the one thing I ever quit as a kid.
Oh, except for fencing, but that’s because I was a girl and got no play.
It’s not like I twiddled around with my life by leaving band, instead I wrote more essays and read more books, so it was all good.
I have to say though, for a society which prides itself on valuing intelligence, it really doesn’t. That’s bunk. Our society values conformity, someone who follows orders well, someone who is the same as most of the other somebodies. I think it’s been my intellect which has frustrated myself and almost everyone else the most. I’ve been told I think too much, too fast, feel too deeply, everything has been about slowing me down until I am at the same pace as everyone else. Do you know what it’s like being on an antipsychotic for three and a half years as a gifted person? God, it fuckin’ SUCKS! You can’t think, or feel. I mean, people seem to think you can, and I’m sure I wasn’t stupid, but I wasn’t thinking at a comfortable pace, I couldn’t have extreme emotional responses to life so it took me longer to process things which happened. It was agony.
There was this Twilight Zone I watched once when I was a kid about this kid who’s studying for a big test coming up that all the kids have to take at that age. It’s administered by the government and he wants to do really well on it. People are like “Oh, don’t worry about it,” trying to dissuade him from studying and so on, trying to get him to act like a regular kid and not worry about academics so much. But he studies anyway and does really well and it turns out the government has a policy to kill the really smart people of it’s population.
I talk about all of my identities a lot in my art practice and here obviously, but I have never before talked openly about my gifted identity. It’s considered “elitist” to acknowledge being highly intelligent. Like what right do I have to say I’m smart, that’s for someone else to judge. But I got judged early and often and sent to a special class for four years to avoid being crushed by the system.
And yet I never really went looking for information on what that identity really means. Being gifted often comes with a deep abiding existential depression and loneliness. I don’t talk to people often because often they make conversation about limited things. I’ll want to talk about deep subjects at length and often notice myself getting shut down by people who consistently prefer lighter fare. It makes me really hard to get to know. I’m emotionally sensitive to a higher degree than others, and sensually more sensitive than others too. I often prefer more varieties of stimulation all at the same time, like playing music while writing with reading breaks and maybe, oh, masturbating somewhere in there.
It turns out gifted people often get diagnosed with pathologies simply because people in the mental health field are woefully uneducated about our population. I recently found a theory which seems to apply more to my psychological issues compared to the bipolar label. It’s called Positive Disintegration, and it’s common amongst the gifted population, who often have overexcitabilities. Besides being intellectually smart, we also have vastly different developmental issues than the general population. Age Appropriate for a gifted child is completely useless. And typically existential depression, suicides, and psychosis can accompany the moral development of a gifted person. Rather than being a negative aspect of life, it represents a struggle between higher and lower functioning. Lower functioning is where educators and psychiatrists try to push us back to, because those are the people who fit in with society the best. That would be someone who hasn’t developed to a morally advanced stage of deep empathy for humanity at large. Dabrowski, who developed this theory, states that the health of a society can be measured by how many people within it suffer from psychoneurosis, the more the better. Primary Integration, the 1st stage, is where most average people stay at. Incidentally, it is also the domain of individuals defined as psychopaths. Psychopathy is a label given to people who are deficient in empathy and conscience, who often do very well in society as it operates today and can be found in occupations like law, politics, business, and CEO’s. Secondary Integration is the ideal outcome of positive disintegration, but on the way there all hell breaks loose. Because we live in a society which devalues independent thought, moral development, and emotional reactions, we’ve also demonized some really healthy and natural personal growth processes in the name of mental hygiene.
Is it a disability? I don’t know. I know that it comes with things that make life in this world very difficult. I remember when I was ten and read Vasari’s Lives of the Artists I was so fascinated with descriptions of Leonardo Da Vinci, who reminded me in many ways of myself. On Star Trek Voyager Captain Janeway was always going to Da Vinci’s studio to commune with great intellect, but in real life she probably would have run screaming from it. This was a man who’s fixation on anatomy would lead him to endlessly draw cadavers and not notice the stench of being around rotting bodies. His studio was a mess, he developed a reputation for starting projects and abandoning them when something else came up. For fun he attached intestines to bellows and expanded them so much that he would push people out of the room. He caused one mentor to stop painting when as a child he painted an angel holding clothes with so much more attention to the use of colour that his mentor became embarassed of his own lack of abilities. Today he would probably be put on ritalin.
It’s been stated that 40% to 60% of gifted children have neurological disabilities. So few people know how to deal with gifted thought processes and development that we often DO have a hard time in the world. In that respect I would say we are disabled, since we have a lack of resources to live in this world. One might assume that we can just trot off to higher education and excell, and sometimes that’s true, but often post secondary education fails gifted people as well.
All very interesting I say.
Pan’s Labyrinth
I just came back from seeing Pan’s Labyrinth and my muscles hurt from being tensed up that whole time! And I haven’t cried that hard at the end of a movie in forever and ever. Jesus Christ. Ow. My body hurts! It was such a good movie though, between him and his friend Curaron, jesus they’re intense!
Filmmakers are brutal. It’s the most extreme amount of power you have, to have people spend two hours listening and watching an entire story you’ve created and responding in certain ways. I think if you can make someone laugh and you can make someone cry on demand in response to a film you’ve made, you have the potential to be an amazing filmmaker. I seem to have mastered those two things in my filmmaking, I’m trying to incorporate other things. I REALLY want to make a film that will make everyone in the audience have an orgasm on demand, but I’m not sure how to do that, and I’m not talking porn or where they actually start masturbating, I just think there must be some way to make someone come without doing anything to them. I told a friend about my idea to do that and she said “Oh, that’s a very kind film you’re making.” So yes, emotions are complex. And when people get mad about films manipulating people, uh, well yeah, that’s what we do. That’s a very simplistic explanation of filmmaking, but at the same time I don’t want to deny that filmmaking is one of the biggest power trips ever, it’s the uber apex of domination.
I’m working on one film which won’t come out for another decade at least, but the ending is so intense that it makes ME cry every time I think about it.
Anyway, Pan’s Labyrinth, wow, anti-war movies starring children seem to be the most effective. Cripes!!
Culture Clash
Last night I went out with my friend Laurel, who’s been my best friend since daycare. She’s Saulteaux, which because of geographical proximity is pretty close to Cree. We were talking about the current problems in the aboriginal communities, like the fact that we treat our children really horribly when before colonialism they were afforded the same respect and reverence as elders. But then European thought was imposed on our cultures, and children were treated terribly of course, they weren’t even considered persons of value until they reached adult hood. And so we have learned that from Europe, to disregard children and abuse them in all the ways that they can be abused. Not everyone, but child abuse is epidemic in our communities today. Dickens had the Blacking Factory and too many aboriginal children are working the streets.
But I was extending it to something else. In Cree culture, and many other aboriginal cultures, people with disabilities were also honoured. I know people, usually white people, try to say that we would have just left them on an ice floe or in the bush to die, I don’t know about other tribes but Crees did not do that. If someone like my sister was born they would be a good omen for the community because they were seen as being spiritually advanced. The parents lucky enough to have such a child would also be honoured. People like me were recognized for having abilities to speak to spirits and see the future, and would have been trained to control their mind powers (not stifle, just be more in control).
This idea is starting to be lost in our communities since European values have been imposed on us. Disabled people are said to be a “white thing,” like we never showed up in aboriginal communities before contact. They try to say the same thing about gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people too. But we’ve all been showing up in our communities here forever. I should also note that it would never be just the immediate family who would act as caregivers to disabled people, the whole community would be involved in looking after that person. My sister would have been able to wander around the camp and everyone would keep an eye out to make sure she was safe.
It is strange to read things about people with disabilities that violates the values I was brought up with. Like when the Ashley X thing happened and some comments on various blogs were to the effect of her life being worthless because she can’t work or think in specific ways. That is such a European concept to me, and horrifying. How can someone’s life be considered worthless just because they can’t work? Ugh, so disgusting.
And I think about myself too, and my times of extreme poverty and starvation, and I wonder why that was allowed to happen, why I have to earn things like food and shelter, why anybody has to earn those things, when as a community we should just be ensuring everyone is being taken care of. I hate when I hear people tell panhandlers to get a job, like it’s such an easy thing. Or to get a house. People don’t think about what is involved in that, you need an address and phone to get jobs, you need references to get housing, you need money to get housing, and often you have to put down a damage deposit when you first move which can almost double your rent for that month. Sometimes you have to pay first and last months rent. And shelters and housing for street people often comes with conditions, like not being allowed to drink beer in your apartment because it’s a sober living arrangement. I know alcoholism sucks, but not all street people are alcoholics, and it’s not always a good idea to stop drinking. Take someone who has incest flashbacks that create suicidal episodes who’s drinking to forget. Yes, it’s a problematic thing to drink, but is someone going to be there looking after them when they start having those flashbacks? Some shelters require you take part in religious services, some require you meet with a psychiatrist and start taking medication. These aren’t conditions that will improve these peoples lives, these are just situations where poor people are being blackmailed.
I remember when I was in the hospital I got in there during a severe cold snap, so all the homeless people had been rounded up and sent to the psych wards. They weren’t really crazy, most of them, not more so than anyone else who’d been streeting it for a while. But it was a chance for them to get housing and three meals a day, so that people could think it was a good thing. They weren’t freezing to death, but on the other hand they were being exploited to prescribe heavy antipsychotics which were paid for by Quebec Healthcare.
My cultural values are so different from mainstream Canada’s. Take the concept of wealth. In white culture, wealth is demonstrated by how much you own. In Cree culture, wealth is demonstrated by how much you can give away. We still have give aways, ceremonies where a family will collect things like blankets and dishes and toys and so forth, and invite people and give it all away to them. In contemporary life, if we come into more money than usual, no matter how little we may have, it’s common practice to share it amongst friends. I’ve had periods of extended poverty where I suddenly get an artist fee windfall and take some friends out to dinner. Things like that. It means we can get taken advantage of by unscrupulous people, but it’s also just a nice thing to do.
So I am very interested in reviving some of these values which I don’t want to see us lose because of colonialism. Children should be served food at the same time as elders again. Disabled people should be respected members of the community. And we need to find a better way of distributing wealth.
Psychiatric Slipper toe
This damned smiley face was on my toes in the ward until my dad finally got me real slippers. Thanks Dad.
Fireworks!
These are the fireworks. The ones laying down are 12 roman candles, each spits out 8 balls. From right to left: Silver Palm Tree spits out a mortar that goes 50m and explodes into a huge silvery star. The box is a series of short roman candles which ignite sequentially and shoot off several fireworks, specifically it “vomits peonies”, it is called “Bewitched,” apparently another variation on this was “Anti Terorrism” but I didn’t want something so GW Bush-like. The tall one sends out about 70 balls altogether. The short one sends out stars and “goldfish” whatever the hell that means in pyrotechnic world. The Cluster Bomb is a large fountain which also sends out stars. The cone is a regular old cone fountain, not superspectacular but cool nonetheless. I was trying to find the Burning Schoolhouse, which was a favorite between Luke and I when we were kids, I was going to change it to the Burning Psych Ward, but yeah, it’s not around anymore. I gotta go, my mom’s yelling at me and we have to go buy hotdogs.
Get Politicized Linkage
The uncle on whose land I am doing the box burning – fireworks ceremony/celebration called my mom to ask about me, wondering if I went off of my medication because people make plans when they go off their medication. Mom got mad at him, good for her. She told him I’ve been planning this for years, which is true. I just got the whole box together incidentally, and it wasn’t as horrible as I thought it would be. It did make me get a bit creeped out though, all of the other bipolar people in my family are very much into psychiatry in that they faithfully take their medication and don’t rock the boat too much. And I am not sure that they will respect the fact that I’m opting for alternatives and that I’m becoming politically active. I think there are some differences in our lives though, in some ways being a minority in so many ways made me learn a lot about civil rights from different groups besides native people, and different strategies, and interrogating assumptions within myself. I lived in extreme poverty in some extreme situations. I don’t know, I’ve gone in a very divergent path from them. So I don’t want to be “helped” by them, I don’t want them to think they have to intervene on me, I’m pretty aware of myself and my own condition. And sometimes I look and do bizarre things while being completely sane, just because I’m not a regular person.
Anyway, I’ve been reading more and more psych survivors blogs and sites, here are a few of my favorite posts.
Stir Crazy posted a Critique of the Icarus Project, which goes into some incredible detail on the issues psych survivors are facing, even from supposedly alternative/enlightened/anarchist/counterculture communities. This is one of my most favorite posts recently, especially since I also come out of a queer punk millieu, and not everyone is aware of their own use of oppression against other people even though they run around being proud of their being so non-oppressive.
This is a great article called Confessions of a Non-Compliant Patient, which is about this idea of compliance and being a good mental patient, when we know that good mental patients often do not get better, while a non-compliant patient has a better chance of not only surviving but thriving. This is her story of her journey towards non-compliance and eventual freedom through joyously “falling through the cracks.”
Amanda at Ballastexistenz wrote this great post about What Happens When You Ignore Power Relationships, referring to a review by someone working in the psych industry to Call Me Crazy, a book written by survivors, only the psych industry worker puts survivor in quotation marks. Anyway, yeah, worker gets professionally insulted by survivors talking about their lives and Amanda looks at what the real power relationship is going on here.
This is a whole site run by Safe Harbor and connected with Margot Kidder, a proponent of Alternative Mental Health. If you want to get off your drugs and find a new way of taking care of yourself, this is an excellent place to start. It includes a doctor database of openminded friendly folk who will support patients through med withdrawals and assist in developing different treatment strategies.
This article is a summary of the development of the chemical imbalance theory, which yes, is still a theory. No one has ever been able to prove it.
This article talks about the ideas which arose from the Soteria project, an experimental home for people in psychosis which had excellent recovery rates and used medication only if patients requested it.
You’re a nut! You’re crazy in the coconut! This is a video mash up of Gnarls Barkley and the Avalanches.
This is a preview from PharmedOut, an interview with an ex Zyprexa drug rep for Eli Lilly.
An ironic fact about me: when I was hospitalized, I had been working in pharmaceutical market research for many of the big companies, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb, Abbott, etc etc. We would ask physicians questions about if they knew how the drug worked, how it worked in their patients, and generally figure out how to sell the drug in better ways. For instance, we would ask if Geodon would be prescribed more often if it was called some different spectacular name, we would ask what images came to mind when they heard certain drug names, we would ask if the drug rep visited them and how many samples they got. Yes, life is full of peculiar ironies.
Men only space
I guess I can’t go to Dallas. I went with some trans friends to a mens leather bar in Vancouver and it was so creepy, the doorman id’ed all of us, even though we were so not underage and some of us were passing pretty damn well. This wouldn’t immediately seem like transphobia, except he spent a very very very long time looking at all our id’s for the gender on them, which obviously didn’t correspond to who we were. It wasn’t specifically men only space, but he still wanted to make damn sure we knew we weren’t welcome.
Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens
Remember my post way way back about being jealous of Cindy and Megan (of Lady Lady fame) going to Annie Sprinkle’s wedding in Calgary? She’s legally married now under Canadian law, and in Calgary, which is super cool. Anyway, this is from Megan’s flickr of one of the blushing brides. Man, still so jealous. They got to make the cake (with four breasts on it of course) and generally assist.
I always secrete ocular fluid at same sex weddings.