What feeling are those?  Well, I struggle, like most survivors of rape and domestic violence, with a lot of shame.  It's all my fault, every bad thing in the world - which was conveniently backed up by NuAge karma people.  And how the hippie values I grew up with did not teach me anything about protecting myself or putting myself first, it's a mess of shame.  Yehaw!

But the worst shame I think I struggle with is thinking that nature hates me.  How can I go talk to trees and feel their concern for me, and laugh with a river, and form deep friendships - and then have my species kill them all?  I feel like I have no right to enjoy the emotional connection to the natural world that is my birthright because of what other humans are doing.

I spend a lot of time sobbing on the floor about how if I buy vegan shoes, I am using petroleum - tell me that didn't kill a bunch of animals? Plus on top of that I have cerebral palsy and very few shoes don't harm my feet, so I cannot even be ethical.  Since I was a very small child I have been angered by competition and unfairness - I am getting another MRI next week, and each time I do I think of all the people who need MRIs and cannot get them.  Unlike some NuAge bitches, I don't think I "deserve" an MRI more than someone else, nor do I think I deserved being raped, that "deserve" affirmation makes no sense to me.  And, no, I don't think everyone deserves an MRI - what an ecological nightmare it would be if everyone had every medical contraption in their 'hood.  I have to remember that the world is random.  It's all that saves me when I am so ethically distraught.

Luck of the draw.

Last night, in sugar withdrawal crying about how there is no way to live that is ethical by my standards especially if you have any health problems, I was hit with an intense realization.  I did NOT create this reality.  And I cannot stop it.  Not only that, I am a victim of it.  I might be benefiting by MRIs and central heat, but it has caused me immense depression and anxiety to live in a world that is run by corporate socialism (governments that only exist to serve the corporate interests) whose goal is profit for them.  It isn't me doing this, I am not killing the trees or the waters.  But I am so aware of how everything I do makes me a murderer, it is painful existing for me.  Turn on the light - what nuclear waste or mountaintop removal did I participate in? Get veggies at the grocery store - what people lost their lands to the evil agribuiness' monocrops?  Who worked at crap wages to get me this food? What awful poisons are in the world of my friends and relatives - the air, the fish, the trees - due to this food?

My dream lately is to hear from American white people who knew that slavery was wrong, could not end it in their life time, and knew they were unable to stop benefiting from racism and slavery.  Maybe I need to call some Quakers - How do they do it generation after generation of seeing people be their very worse?

I am really not someone who should read the news.  My exhusband was very angry with how I cannot watch horror movies, movies with violence, or endless CNN, like a moral defect.  He made me feel terrible about how I was wired and about trying to honor what I need.  For some reason, people want to "toughen up" sensitive people and in the process nearly break us, but they never seem to want to toughen up their finely-tuned work tools, since they know what will happen.

Here, anyway, is the trick I am using to stop the shame - The truth.  It is not my fault.  Before I was born, progress was decided upon as the prevailing myth to live by, generations with good intentions destroyed much of the world, and boom, hi, I am born.  I did not choose to be born into this time, contrary to what Buddhists and NuAgers say.  This is not an easy time.  I hate that I want to tell black and brown and red and yellow people that I am scared of white people and am constantly working on shedding my cultural racism (while knowing that is highly inappropriate).  I hate that I cannot be happy for friends who have their second child, when I think that breeding is the most criminal thing someone can do right now as we hover on the brink of more wars for natural resources and famines and plagues.  I hate how selfish I see them, wondering why they get to have a baby just because they want one, when they tell people not to drive SUVs.  I hate that I cannot go to Pine Ridge Rez and hand over a cheque for a billion dollars, money made from crappy New Agers selling Lakota sacred beliefs.  I hate that I cannot have all animal abusers killed, all rapists murdered, and just get rid of the people preying on the vulnerable.  Because being vulnerable is a dangerous thing, when it ought to be a neutral thing that can lead to wonderful experiences. 

Of course, if I get to decide who to kill, at some point someone will decide that I am bad in some way and kill me, too, so for the sake of democracy I guess we have to let evil people that in 99% of the cases don't benefit the world in any way still live.  (The man who raped me has a son who was molested and calls that son "faggot".  Gee, but we cannot murder him?)  But, man, I'd love to put them in a boat without a paddle.  Oh, wow is them with their bad childhoods and drug addictions - Guess what, I had both those things and they don't cut it as excuses with me.



I suppose between me and Sarah Palin's hit squad, everyone would be dead soon, her folks taking out all the people with hearts and my folks taking out all the people without hearts.  And I went to Quaker college, I know that being like Sarah Palin and running a militia of murderers would make me pretty damn evil, just like her and the nutjob racist corporate shills in Tea Party.

I have a lot shame for being sensitive too.  My whole childhood my Dad berated me with, "You're oversensitive."  You know what?  I didn't have any choice.  I was born with the sensitivities that I have.  I'd rather cry when I see a polar bear drown on the TV than feel nothing or go get another beer. If I wasn't do sensitive I couldn't help my clients as a psychic.  My Buddhist therapist today told me that I had an amazingly deep sensitivity to the human condition, but then when I said I felt bad that I was kind of a misanthrope due to being treated so crappy for so long - and seeing the worst that humans do everyday to the planet - he said, "You are so intensely aware of the suffering of not just all sentient beings, but all of life."  He is an awesome guy (it is very hard for me to find therapists as smart as I am), so I will forgive his humancentric Buddhist species-ism.

So I am sitting there in sugar withdrawal crying, saying, "There is no way for me to not be an accomplice to murder," waiting for him to be like all other therapists and say I am being overly dramatic and don't I want a tranquilizer, but he's smart, so he knows I am right. Which leads to an uncomfortable silence, which pours into room to breathe.  "You're right," he says, "You cannot untangle yourself from a culture of killing.  You cannot live a life that doesn't tie you to the cause of  the suffering of others.  And yet here you are, wired to be aware of the suffering, to not want to cause suffering."  I am looking at him hoping he can save me from this hell that I cannot think of any solution to besides suicide.

 

"Can you have some compassion for yourself for having to suffer this? Something that is not your fault?"  (He's good at throwing in "not my fault" a lot since I take far too much personal responsibility for things I am not responsible for.  It is not my fault I am sensitive, that I am a white American, that children are being sold in prostitution/constant rape by desperately poor families, that I have to get an MRI and some people cannot.)

I sat there for a long time, twisting in the wind.  Finally I said, "I can feel sorry for myself."

And he said, "I think for you that is a great start.  You are the last person in the world to run around feeling entitled to hurt others because you feel self pity.  Feel sorry for yourself and see if you can get to compassion."  I think he was relieved I had some ability to feel anything besides scorn for myself.

I know that I am putting myself in dangerous ground, being vulnerable in a society that gets great joy in hurting others who are hurt because hurting people remind everyone else that we all hurt, and no one wants that, so drink a beer, smoke a joint, drive fast, shoot something.  In spite of that nightmare I am worried about, I'm writing all this, because I think there must be people like me out there.  People who don't need more books about the ecological collapse, the corporate dictators, the human trafficking, the vivisection, the high DDT levels in American kids today years after DDT has been outlawed, etc etc etc x-freaking-ectera.  This stuff will destroy a sensitive instrument. I am not advocating a head in the sand approach like so many NuAge weirdos. But I am saying we must have skills for handing this awareness that is a gift and also hurts.

Being sensitive is not a bad thing or a good thing. It just is.  Most scientists and carpenters and mechanics and healers want highly sensitive tools so they can get accurate readings.  For those of us who are highly sensitive, it sucks because no one cares about our accurate readings.  This strikes me as very odd.  The father of a woman I knew came down with severe environmental allergies in the 1970s.  He calls himself the "canary in the mine".  For decades the doctors said he was crazy.  Who is crazy now?

But let me make it clear that I hate the HSP stuff and please do not call me an Indigo Child ever again.  I always felt so weird and alien due to the hatefully isolating treatment at school growing up, to now have people call me a "master spirit" or an "indigo child" and all the other nonsense people say to me only reinforces my strangeness.  I cannot drive due to panic attacks - too much information too fast - and I don't call people who can drive "driving masters" and treat them like scary supernatural saviors (not most of the time).  For my last birthday the woman who was supposed to be my best friend gave me a box of matches and votive candle, after weeks of telling me about expensive gifts she bought her exboyfriend, saying, "Someone as spiritual as you, I knew a material gift wouldn't matter to you."  I was on foodstamps getting constant MRIs. A material gift would have been freakin' awesome.

So, yeah, I am trying to have compassion for myself.  I didn't choose to be born into a world where a few members of one species are murdering anyone and everyone that gets in the way of them having more numbers on computer screens.  And neither did you.  Recently I was talking to a woman who manages a solar energy store and volunteers 20 hours a week as the exec director of a local farm collective - and even she was complaining about not having "right livelihood"!  She hated selling more stuff to people and running a collective that did very little. It was comforting that the woman I call "the UTNE Reader's right livelihood poster child" also felt really crappy.

It's scary to write all this because in the online world people can be very mean since they have no awareness that they are talking to a real person.  In the face to face world, I have been hurt enough by men telling me to not be sensitive, something I have no control over and should not be ashamed for being, even had doctors want to pathologise my awareness of suffering, as if being a shopaholic getting plastic surgery would make me normal.  ("Can't you just have superficial relationships?"  No.)  But being sensitive is not the same as being weak.  I can handle crisis like a pro. I can sit with people who have suffered traumas so horrible that macho guys throw up and leave when they hear about them.  Only a sensitive person has my strengths.  The weak people have to live in denial. 

But for all of you who are aware, sensitive and really trying to live ethically, I want you to know you are not alone.  In my ancestor shrine I have the names of young environment activists that killed themselves in despair, and I understand that all too well.  I don't want anymore of us to kill ourselves.  If the sensitive people are gone, then only the criminally insane brutes with narcissistic personality disorder will be left and we cannot have that.  I imagine that the trees and waters don't want us to die.  We are all as oppressed by this monstrous evil of corporate dictatorship as the mountains and the fish - and humans are being murdered all the time, too, by the corporate socialist governments in overt and covert wars.  Let's not forget that - even a misantrhope like me is upset about that, because I bet most people are like those of us who care and want to live ethically!

We have a role to play.  We might not see it in our lifetime, as my wonderful indigenous rights activist Michael Eckhardt has told me when I hit rock bottom, we do this for the ones to come.  Hold fast to your values.  There is nothing wrong with those of us who suffer from the destruction of the super-organism we are a vital part of.  That is normal.  We are the sane ones and we play a very important role that isn't measured by dollar amounts or popularity contests, so our role is not going to be valued by the people who have been corrupted by Hollywood values.  Make sure to be gentle with yourself, do this for me, for the trees, for the other sensitive people, if you cannot do it for yourself, if they have brainwashed you that you are bad.  Stay away from razor blades and crystal meth, don't burn out, don't be ashamed of caring.  As Elvis Costello said, "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?"

And in the midst of your metta practice, include some compassion for yourself. Yeah, you might be a white, middle class, able-bodied college grad with health insurance, but if you are suffering because this is not the society you want to belong to, you're suffering as much as anyone else.  Don't do what I tend to do and think other people are more worthy of compassion and love.

The more-than-human world does not see it that way.  The human animals that love life and are trying to return to being a healthy part of this superorganism are loved, wanted and valued.  Trust me.  I am an indigo child.  LOL

PS What I forgot to mention is the sensitive people are strong!  It takes much more strength for someone who feels deeply the crisis the world is in to live in this world than it does for some clod.  Remember that if you're being bullied, shamed, or suicidal.  Honor your strength.  Strong people without sensitivity are abusive.  Senstive strong people have changed the world for good.  So hold tight to your strength.  You are probably much stronger than the people who make fun of you.

PPS When you share that you've been raped or beaten, there are always the brain dead women-hating clods who hopefully will be killed as fodder in a war who will say, "You wanted it bitch!" and stuff like that.  Please enlist now, we have two great wars going on to get rid of you.  And there are also the NuAge assholes who will write me and say, "You wanted it bitch!" with their law of attraction and karma nonsense.  All I can say to that is May the law of attraction attract cancer and poverty to your house.