PTSD 1--Afraid to Do

I have spent a lifetime searching for the information I found today on the internet in a 20-minute search.

I don't mean I just wanted to know what I found; I was desperate to know, terrified there was something horribly, fatally damaged in my character that would always leave me a procrastinating wastrel.

So if it was vital to know why I do certain things, why did I never just enter those search terms into a Google screen before and find my solution?

I call him "Google Monster"

I'm about to explain. The answer lies within the question.

[WARNING: Diagnoses ahead. If you truly believe that these days, everyone has a label instead of just taking personal responsibility, then this post will infuriate you, and I can't help that. You may not wish to read it.]

Frequent visitors here know that I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and that it stems not from any military service or pattern of childhood abuse, but from the trauma of events such as surviving a flood at age 13, and living with two terminally ill parents, until their deaths in 2007 and 2011.

However, you may not be aware that from about the age of 8, I have experienced anxiety and occasional panic attacks when confronted with a new task about which I do not feel confident. For many years, life has felt as if it adds more and more demands upon me, and each one takes a toll. So what, right? It does that to everyone. Very true. But not everyone lives in terror of not doing it perfectly the first time, no matter the task. And not everyone fears going to hell if they don't accomplish that mission impossible.

My father was a Pentecostal pastor nearly my whole life, and at the age of 4, I really listened to one of his sermons promising heaven to the saved and hell to the unsaved, and believed that I would go to hell if I didn't go forward to the altar and pray "the Sinner's Prayer" with him.

This old-fashioned Pentecostal "altar" is housed at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.
Known in the early "Revival" days as a "Mourner's Bench,"
it was a place where penitents sat, and later more commonly knelt,
to pray for immediate conversion and forgiveness.
I said my initial prayers while kneeling at the single-railed "altar" in the
Church of God of Mountain Assembly, in Salem, Indiana, c. October 1981.

In the minds of everyone around me, this was an extraordinary and blessed event, a wonderful thing for me to do at such a young age. No one seemed to take into account the very real terror of going to hell, nestled in the mind of an impressionable 4-year-old, that inspired the move.

"Hell"
by Hans Memling

DIAGNOSIS #1--Hadephobia, aka Stygiophobia/Stigiophobia--a fear of hell, of being eternally damned to hell, so severe that it can debilitate the sufferer. At best, a person with hadephobia may spend most waking hours trying to decide how best to please God in order to avoid this eternal fate.

Even though I was so young, I do remember that before these events, I loved and respected God, just as I loved and respected my father/pastor, and I saw them as very similar in behaviors, motivations, and affections toward me. Now, God became a source of terror, even though my father certainly never was. If anything, the fear of God began to color my view of my father, making me afraid that failing to please one directly equated to being eternally judged by the other, a fear I had never envisioned before. Soon my mother, and then all authority figures, were swept up into the mental fray; any failure of any kind could lead me straight to hell.

DIAGNOSIS #2--Hagiophobia--fear of anything holy, including God, Saints, and sacred objects or buildings.

If God was willing to send me to hell for even small mistakes (again, the understanding of a child mind), then He was best prayed to daily (i.e. appeased), and then avoided as much as possible. Who knew when I might fatally disappoint Him? Churches were terrifying places, a truly debilitating state of affairs when your parents were full-time pastors. We were in the church house any time the doors were unlocked, even if only to clean it or mow the grass! There was no escaping the place!

However, this fear of churches didn't develop all at once. It built up over time, compounded by a growing awareness from a very young age of another issue God was supposedly willing to smite me over--bisexual orientation. I describe it for people this way: "I discovered both boys and girls when I was three, and Jesus when I was four." Along with surety of my family's love, the fact that I had a crush on another little girl was one of the few certainties in life that I experienced BEFORE I became a believer in Christ.

By the time I hit puberty, several things about my character were set in stone:

(1) I was a Christian, by choice, but also by fear.
(2) I lived with such terrible dread of hell that I was in constant fear that I would, or already had, "blaspheme[d] against the Holy Ghost" (Matthew 12:31, Mark 3:29, Luke 12:10) (KJV). My parents had to talk me through this issue many times, and long stretches of my teen years are a horrible blur of terror when I look back on them. I didn't even want to think about the Holy Ghost, and to this day, prefer the term "Holy Spirit," because it does not engender the old fear. It's hard to love someone who you think is constantly waiting for a reason to hate you.
(3) I was gay, by birth, and living in terrified denial. I had fallen in love with a girl, and was no longer young enough to dismiss it as just one little kid being fond of another. Through one awful summer, I burst into tears every time I stepped into a church building, because I was sure God couldn't love me any more, even though I was pushing down the feelings as hard as I could and had no intention of acting on them.
(4) After so many years of fear, I was terrified to make a mistake, which leads us to...

DIAGNOSIS #4--Atychiophobia--commonly just described as "fear of failure," it is really much deeper and more horrifying than that. It is a paralysis that comes on any time I am asked to perform a new task, one in which I am not 100% certain of my ability. What if I screw up? With all this background noise of panic going on, I see every potential slip-up as another way to fail an authority figure, and if that happens, we all know what the ultimate result will be.

This mosaic of Hell by Coppo di Marcovaldo was placed on the inner dome
of a building where new converts were baptized. What a welcome to Christianity.

Only now do we reach the era of my childhood where we must add...

DIAGNOSIS #5--PTSD, aka Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Psychiatrists place very strict criteria on diagnosing PTSD, and virtually all of them center around a fear of death, either one's own death, that of loved ones, or in cases of extremely traumatic events such as war, witnessing the deaths of a number of unknown people. Living through a flood, during which an entire town must flee uphill in the middle of the night before rising waters, naturally creates a certain fear of death. Being forced to watch the slow, wasting deaths of both parents also counts, for sure. All create a fear of someone else's death, and ultimately a fear of my own mortality. So, where does this leave us?

CONSEQUENCES:
I fear going to hell, therefore I fear the One who supposedly sends people there. Thus, I fear making a mistake, and naturally just freeze when something I've never done before, or something about which I don't feel totally confident, is required of me. (Imagine how much fun that makes it to try to hold down a job!) Finally, because I've seen death and people threatened by death, I fear that any medical issue could kill me, which would only send me to hell FASTER. So we start back at my fear of hell, and VOILA! One really mean vicious cycle.

"Vicious Cycle"
(courtesy of a site called, believe it or not,
Alligator Sunglasses)

Which may all leave you with one big question: Why on earth am I telling you all of this?

Honestly, I'm not. I'm thinking in print, telling myself, and finding new freedoms for the first time ever, by discovering why I'm afraid to do anything. Not just worried, or hesitant, or I just don't like doing lots of things, so I don't do them. Nope. It's so much more than that, and understanding it is the first step to overcoming it. I just put my discussion with myself here, in case any of you realize that you see some aspects of yourself here, as well.

Time for a Hodge-Podge

Yes, my faithful band of readers, another Hodge-Podge post is in order, as I have a few things about which to update you at the same time that are unconnected, except in the fact that they are all happening in my life. I admit this post is a long one, but I hope you will come with me for the whole adventure. As you will see shortly, the day I've had so far makes the title of this semi-regular feature particularly apt. But first, a writing update.

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A Finished Manuscript!

Ah, how those words roll trippingly off the tongue (or keyboard) of any aspiring author! The sense of pride, of accomplishment, increased self-worth, is boundless--for about 12 hours. Then the doubts set in. "These poems seem inexperienced. I sound childish and infantile! They're all too much alike, in both form and content. I KNOW that if they're combined into a single book, they should have a unifying theme, BUT..." and on and on it goes. So, I'm into the doubtful phase now, but ultimately, my opinion is no longer the one that matters; a publisher will accept it or not. My view of it is already set--I love my "little book" (nod to Louisa May Alcott, a heroine of mine), or I would not have bothered to keep going with it. I will always love it, for all the things it represents in my growth as a person and the memories it will always evoke for me. The only questions now are the subjective--Will anyone else be able to identify with my words and love them?--and the mundane--Will my efforts help me in the world of filthy lucre? I have no control over the answers to either, so I will simply send it out to see what, if anything, happens next.

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Even for a woman who owns a blog called The Beauty of Eclecticism, I have had a particularly diverse day. It started--as journeys down rabbit holes so often do these days--with a link that a friend posted on Facebook. NPR conducted an interview with the prioress and choir-mistress of a group on nuns who have been taken on a whirlwind tour of secular popularity with their sacred music in the past few years. The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, are a cloistered order, which means that they live their lives in community together but in near-total seclusion from the outside world. A common misconception about cloistered monastics is that they separate themselves from the rest of us because they fear we will contaminate them with our sinful ways. On the contrary, the best monastics gaze permanently and unflinchingly into the chasm of their own sinfulness, leaving no time to judge anyone else. They hide themselves away (as Christ instructed all of us to do during our prayer time) in order to devote as much time as they possibly can to praying for all of us, the entire rest of the world, as they know that not everyone can be cloistered, but we all need prayer, just the same. The sisters of Mary, Queen of Apostles, are dedicated to that mission.

The rise of the digiverse has been a God-send (if you'll pardon the pun) for secluded religious orders, because it allows them to have limited contact with the outside world on their own terms. They communicate with the rest of us through e-mail, websites, and in the case of orders such as this one, recordings of their beautiful liturgical music, which they also use to support and maintain their priory in Missouri. Videos about the sisters and their work, as well as other similar religious orders who produce music for the wider world, are available on YouTube, and if you are in need of a moment of heavenly peace right now, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you check them out.

From the sublime to the earthy we go. Somehow, my Facebook wanderings then led me to the home of fellow bloggers Amy and Kate, a mother-daughter pairing who have produced the enormously popular Homestead Revival. This blog chronicles the on-going journey of a family who chose the periodically fashionable path of "self-sustained living," "returning to the land," that sort of thing, and they are staunchly traditional Christians, talking frequently about homemaking and the Apostle Paul's injunction that wives should be submissive to their husbands. I think you'll agree that such a blog would not be my obvious choice of hang-out spot; I recently came out as a lesbian and divorced my husband, after leaving the ultra-conservative Eastern Orthodox church for the markedly liberal Episcopal Church.

That has been the theme of my day, what has made it eclectic and interesting--in short, a hodge-podge. I have been reminded that I don't have to agree with those I encounter to enjoy our common humanity, to learn from them and be spiritually nourished by their wisdom, and hopefully to be able to offer something in return in that exchange when given the opportunity. Moreover, I am officially an author with a manuscript soon to be under consideration by publishers; I have added to the sum total of artistic and emotional expression in human history. My life is little short of terrifying right now in a number of aspects, and these are interludes of peace at the center of my storms.

Homeless 2

For this story to make sense, you need a bit of background information (a la Dickens' "Marley was dead, to begin with"). Item 1: Maronite Christians. For those who don't know or are unsure, the Maronites are Middle Eastern Christians who more closely follow the Eastern liturgical forms and traditions than those of Western Christianity, but unlike the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, they accept the Roman Catholic doctrine of the pope as the earthly head of the church. They are quite conservative on topics like homosexuality. Item 2: my bumper stickers. I have the following combination on the back bumper of my car.

The rainbow has become a standard symbol for the homosexual community, and the red background with lighter bars stands for marriage equality, i.e. gay marriage rights. I didn't put them on my car to rub people's noses in the fact that I'm a lesbian; rather, they are there to remind me that I can say this about myself out loud and God will still love me. After a lifetime of denying my homosexuality to myself for fear that God would hate me or doom me to hell, that constant reminder is important.

Now, on to our story. Today, I used the last pittance of gas in my car's tank to drive to the local office of the Social Security Administration, where I went through a lengthy and extensive interview, applying for benefits until I can complete some therapy, get my head screwed back on straight, and hopefully get a job. In order to get "low-income housing," one is required to have at least SOME income, and my SuperPreschooler and I cannot be reunited permanently until I have someplace for us to live. SSI would at least be an income.

After that rather humiliating experience, I pulled into the parking lots of several churches, looking for one where some member of the clergy hadn't yet left for the day. As a child, I watched my parents help countless people in myriad small ways, people who needed gas money, or food, or even a place to stay, even though we were often on food stamps ourselves and were more familiar than we ever wanted to be with government-issue cheese, powdered milk, and tinned fruit juice. I found myself reminding God of how often my family had given to others even when we had so little ourselves, and that I needed gas money urgently, and would be lucky to even make it home. The first two churches I visited were deserted for the day, and I finally pulled into the parking lot of a Maronite church. With two flaming gay bumper stickers on my car. Prominently visible.

Clergymen and women are often put in a difficult position when someone asks for financial help; they have to consider whether the person might use the money for alcohol, drugs, or some other vice they have no wish to support. As a "preacher's kid," I am familiar with the problem. The parish priest was just leaving the rectory--the house provided for him by the parish and sitting on the same property as the church--when I pulled in. I couldn't help it; I began to cry as I told him that I simply needed some gas, and assured him that I wasn't even asking for cash. Could someone please just drive with me to a gas station and pay to put a bit of gas in the tank? I pointed to my car, the bumper of which was facing directly toward us.

And that Eastern Catholic priest put enough gas in my car for me to go visit the SuperPreschooler on Monday, our usual day together, gave me some food, and blessed me with the sign of the Cross upon my forehead. I thanked him profusely, I asked him to remember my little girl in his prayers, as well, and I silently thanked God for honoring the good gifts my parents laid up in heaven for me by their ministry. As members of the Body of Christ, we don't have to agree with each other to love one another, but sometimes we forget that, or we fear that others will. I bless the shepherd's heart of a priest who did not forget it, and repent of suspecting that he might do so.

A Blessed Feast

Happy feast of St. Nicholas!  I hope your Christmas preparations are going well, and that the festive spirit is beginning to glow within you as we enjoy the Advent season.

Photo by Christophe Finot

A Review of "At Home in Mitford"

Another review from the files for you today, and one that was particularly satisfying when I was finally able to bury it in my Victory Garden.  Why, you may ask, was I so especially thrilled with myself when I actually finished this book?  First of all, it was the first (and thus far only) book I'd read for Book Dragon's Lair's Getting Lost in a Comfortable Book challenge.  But more importantly, this was my FOURTH ATTEMPT to get into and all the way through this book.  I don't know what stopped me the first three times; I'm just pleased that I finally managed it.

March 8, 2012

At Home in Mitford

by Jan Karon

I really LOVED this book.  I sort of have to laugh at myself for loving it, considering that it's a little meandering, that one of the main characters is a little annoying, and that the whole "town that time forgot" theme is MORE than a little improbable.  But I loved it all the same.  It's just so comfy and cozy and wholesome.  Reading it is kind of like spending an evening soaking in a bubble-laden bath, snuggling up in flannels and hand-knitted socks before a lovely fire, and then slipping away to sleep between cool, clean sheets.  In other words, it doesn't get much snugglier than this book.

Fr. Timothy is an Episcopal priest, the rector of Lord's Chapel in the hills of Mitford, North Carolina.  The tiny southern town has its requisite share of odd and quirky "characters," beautiful gardens and small shops.  "Where everybody knows your name" kind of thing.  There's a bit more Evangelicalism in the book than I would prefer, but I still enjoyed the discussions of liturgical Episcopalianism.  Like so many other things in Mitford, a visit to Lord's Chapel is like using a time machine, with its portrait of the Madonna and Child and its regular application of incense.  Really, that's one of the nicest things about the whole experience.

On a personal note, I found Fr. Tim's struggles to adjust to his diagnosis of diabetes heartening, as I'm still battling with that same adjustment myself.  He gave me some hope to keep trying.

Yarning and Yarning and Yarning Along!

OMG! Okay, people, after last week's slump, I got the push I needed to get back into yarning WITH A VENGEANCE!  I don't mean I got enthusiastic; I mean I crocheted for about 6 hours straight one night.  My hands...went numb.  Yeah.  Not even kidding.

So, why the big explosion of all things Yarn Craft?   Well, it was a confluence of several stimuli, actually.  First of all, remember I promised last week that I was now going to turn my attentions to my first true knitting project, my lovely scarf?  I actually did so early in the week, and though it may not look like much, I was almost giddy with excitement at my little beginner level of progress.

So much so, in fact, that I got ridiculously ambitious and tried to jump straight into the scarf that "started it all," the Harry Potter house scarf that I've been determined to make for almost 10 years.  Which has to be knit in the round.  Either on circular needles, or double-pointed needles.  And the only circular needles I had in the house were waaaaaaay too long.  And the only double-pointed ones I had in the house were my husband's bamboo ones.  Size 5.  And I already knit too tightly.  It was a very painful, evening-long fiasco.  (Yes, Michal tried knitting once.  Get this: he was great at it.  He just didn't like it that much.  Prefers spinning and weaving.  Don't men make you SICK with shit like that?!  It's like how they can't cough without losing 30 pounds off their gut, but I can't lose weight anywhere except in my breasts, the one place I would like to KEEP it.  Okay.  Deep breaths.  I feel better now.)

ANYWAY, obviously, that trauma was so great that I really did walk up to Good Man Michael and say, "This incident is dead to us.  We shall never speak of it again."  True story.  I swear.  Also obviously, I had to move on to some stellar crochet triumph with a ridiculously easy project IMMEDIATELY to re-boost my spirits and confidence.  This is where the second stimulus comes in.

My new church does yarn crafts to give to local charities--baby blankets for teenage mothers at the local high schools particularly caught my eye, so the poorly-taken picture above is a little granny square afghan.  It makes me go all dewy eyed every time I think about some sweet little bundle being wrapped in something I made for him or her.  Notice the sort of soft, garden-like colorway I chose; I figured, it's suitable for boy or girl, and it's as close to pastels as I'm ever going to get, because I hate most true pastels.  Anyway, nothing rebuilds your faith in your own crafting ability like a fall-off-a-log easy granny square.  Hurray!  I bought enough yarn to make four little blankets, and maybe enough left over for a matching hat to go with a couple of them.  I'm pretty excited, I must admit.  It feels good to be part of a community again, and I hope my little blankets will let someone who is going through a rough time know that someone out there cares about them.

P.S. I had to go with all acrylic, because it's cheapest, but if anyone wants to help me make blankets for these little ones out of softer, better quality yarn, all yarn donations will be gratefully accepted, and I'm sure the church will be happy to give you documentation for tax deductions and such.  If you're interested, let me know.  Either way, thanks for dropping by the blog today.  :)