So yes, I’m still here. I haven’t been posting, or on Twitter, because, well, I’ve been having a rough few weeks health- and injury-wise, and general complaining is something I don’t want to write and I doubt you want to read.

The one good thing that’s come out of the crap, though, is a new coping tactic. I’m a long-time fan of art as therapy, but it is a thing that must be separated clearly from art with intent, for me at least. Art as therapy is not about the result, but the process, and if you are constantly making decisions about how best to communicate your intent, that can foul the process, at least from a therapeutic point of view.

When my pain levels are high, I can’t draw very well. My hand is unsteady, my eye unfocused. I don’t think through all the possibilities before making decisions. So if I have a particular piece in mind that I want to be good, that I want to communicate a certain idea, I can’t do it when my pain levels are jacked up, or I will get into the horrific downward spiral of making mistakes and blaming myself for them and I’m such a failure and how could I ever think I was a real artist and and and STOP.

But art is also one of the most effective pain-fighting tools I’ve got. When I’m doing art, I flow, become the process, and can block out the cacophony of misfiring nerves and aching joints. (I have to be careful that I don’t get so deep that I forget to stretch every once in a while!) This in turn offers an essential mental break from the sheer effort of managing the pain. For a while, a little while, it becomes automatic, almost easy.

How then to reconcile these two? For I am not happy doing art just for the sake of the process, as useful as it is. I have too many ideas, want too badly to communicate my worldview and change the world. And if I limit myself to art with intent, I prevent myself from using my best tool when I need it most.

So I now have two art projects going at any one time. (More than that, and the decision of what to work on becomes overwhelming.) My “intent” work, to keep my brain active and my hope of a revived career alive; and my therapy work, which is anything from just doodling to an intent piece without much technique to it, so I can lay down the initial sketch and then just turn my brain off, filling in the lines.

Amusingly, my current therapy piece started as an intent piece gone wrong, and is looking like it may turn into an intent piece again in the end. But the process is different, and that’s the important part.

Anyway, it seems to be helping. I’ve been able to do at least a few minutes of art on all but the absolute worst days, and that ties me back to myself when the pain threatens to shatter what’s left of me.

What a difference it makes to have adequate pain medication.

Saw a new doctor yesterday, who among other things did something I’ve been trying to find someone to do for over a year now: talk openly about the narcotic medication I’m on (hydrocodone). I discovered that the dosage I’d been on (which is no longer working) is actually incredibly low, that developing a tolerance is completely normal and that needing more over time is not a sign of addiction. She said it was obvious that I was not addicted (which I knew, but it was so refreshing to hear an MD say it), and wrote me a prescription for a much higher dosage, allowing me the flexibility to figure out what works for me.

I came home, took the higher dosage, and my pain went down to a 2. Or, as my husband kept saying throughout the afternoon, “TWO?!??” To put this in perspective, the last time I was at a 2 was when I was in the ER with food poisoning and they had me on IV morphine. The last time before that…. might have been before the accident. My “normal” is a 6-7.

Today it’s more like a 4-6, but, you know, I’ll take it. Have a bit of a sedation effect (annoying as hell but easier to ignore than pain!) but I expect that to wear off within a week or two.

On the downside for this new doctor, she poked me painfully hard and it took several outbursts from me to really register how sensitive I am. She also claims she can cure fibromyalgia, and I’m incredibly skeptical about that. But a lot of what she says and wants to do makes sense, and I don’t have to believe in her overall view in order to make use of her treatment.

The treatment (in addition to better pain meds) is basically injections of anaesthetic to calm my nerves down enough to do some deep bodywork. My structural alignment is all kinds of out of whack – unsurprising – and I have trigger points galore. While I have strong doubts that my alignment is the root cause of my neurological issues, I do believe it’s part of the vicious cycle making things worse. So it’s worth a shot. Literally in this case.

Edited to add: Ok, upping the meds isn’t going completely smoothly. Headaches and spaciness not fun. But again, I have the flexibility now to find what will work best.

Good grief I’ve got too many projects. I’ve even gotten to the point where I have to have a projects page on our internal wiki to keep up with them all!

I’ve gotten (I think, crossing fingers) stable enough health- and emotion-wise to start trying to build my life up again, and the best way for me to keep from being miserable is to keep busy. The hard thing is that my health is variable and unpredictable enough that I’m very wary of committing to much of anything that has to be done in an absolute timeframe.

As I set up my business again, it has to be something that will pretty much run without me once I’ve got it running (or more accurately, will run with periodic, unscheduled bursts of activity when I can manage it).

Two other projects are in the ideation stage, with no deadlines other than when we run out of money and time to continue working on them.

The disability paper, again, no deadline. When I get it done is when I submit it for publication.

I have just signed up to teach next month’s Samadhi class on Thelemic ethics – so I have to put that together and teach it on a deadline, but the physical expenditures for that are pretty low. Work on my computer through the month, then sit in my living room in front of a bunch of friends on a particular evening and talk at them. And there are others who can jump in as backup if it turns out to be a really really bad day/week/month.

And, of course, doing art and blogging. Both “do when I can” things. Parenting and keeping the house running, both of which never stop but I have my husband for backup.

The most depression-inducing thing about all this has been feeling useless – like there’s nothing I can do that Makes a Difference because of my unreliable and resource-hogging nervous system. I’m hoping to establish enough variety in my ongoing projects that if I have a brain cell to spare past drooling on the couch there will be something that I feel like working on that does more than just kill time. Finding projects like this that don’t have deadlines has been a challenge, but I think I’ve finally got a pretty full slate. Hopefully not too full, but only time will tell.

Let us say that I want a salad for lunch. For various reasons having to do with the way my body and brain work, I want a make-your-own salad from a grocery store.

There are three grocery stores with salad bars in my area. Schnucks, Dierbergs, and Whole Foods.

Schnucks has limited variety, mediocre quality, and the containers for the salad are made of styrofoam. (I’m no Beth Terry, but I do try to reduce pointless and wasteful use of plastic when I can.)

Dierbergs has better variety, but gave me food poisoning a few months ago. The quality is variable, ranging from delicious to, well, food poisoning. And more styrofoam.

Whole Foods has wonderful variety, good quality, and paper packaging. The chain also has atrocious policies, practices greenwashing, drives smaller organic stores out of business, and the CEO is a wingnut jackass.

Capitalism, the holy grail of market forces and competition which in theory grants me the ability to get the best quality at the lowest price, instead has given me a handful of crappy choices. I must compromise my ethics somewhere, and in some cases my health as well. (Or I could just not eat salads, compromising my health further.)

Salads. A burning, pressing issue, I know; I’ve got my finger on the pulse of the world’s anger!

Except this way that choices are framed, the idea that there is always a best or even good choice, pollutes our decision process in everything. Choosing a job. Parenting methods. Electing representatives. Too often, the plethora of choices creates a logjam as you try to figure out which choice will go the longest before stabbing you in the back.

There are stereotypes in the world of disability just like there are everywhere else. Much of disability activism is devoted to fighting these stereotypes, not because they are necessarily wrong, but because they are unusual examples presented as a norm to which all disabled people must aspire.

Enter the supercrip. Zie has struggled against all odds, never complaining, surmounting every obstacle and refusing to let their tragedy get hir down or use their disability as an “excuse”. An inspiration to able-bodied people everywhere, and a whip poised over the back of any PwD who dares to let out a sigh of frustration or point out the inequities in the system.

Compare this to the imagery we are all being showered with in the midst of the Vancouver Olympics. Amazing people at the pinnacles of their sports. Give up everything, practice every waking hour, and you too can stand atop the podium, goes the message. Little is ever said of the countless athletes who do everything they’re “supposed” to and still don’t make it, or who are discouraged from fulfilling their potential because they don’t look like the preconception of a world-class athlete. It’s actually a pretty damaging message, but it is mitigated by the world of other representations of “normal” people out there, average janes and joes doing their best to make it in a world that doesn’t make sense a whole lot of the time. Even as overwhelmed with Superman imagery as we are right now, there is still perspective.

But when it comes to people with disabilities, the representations are few. You can be the Lazy Bum, the Sleeping Angel (blond white children only, please), or the Supercrip. The Lazy Bum could be a Supercrip if zie just tried hard enough, and the Sleeping Angel is a helpless, pitiable tragedy who somehow never grows up or needs anything other than “lifesaving research”. Nowhere is there a representation of a “normal” person with disabilities, just doing their best to make it in a world that not only doesn’t make sense a whole lot of the time, but is structured to ignore people like hir.

The idea is ludicrous on its very face! If every person in a given class is extraordinary, no one is! Using the supercrip as the default for people with disabilities not only diminishes the supercrip’s accomplishments, but it holds every PwD to a bar higher than the able-bodied one. Because for all the posturing around the Olympics, the onslaught of average-joe imagery says “It’s okay, most people will never get there and it’s okay. You can kick back with a beer and bitch about the system every once in a while, and no one will get down on you for complaining or slacking.”

People with disabilities, rather, get the insistent, clear message that that kick-back-with-a-beer club is not for them. Instead they are supposed to buckle down, work night and day to the limits and beyond of their endurance, and they are supposed to be grateful for the experience! Build character. Be an inspiration. God never gives you what you can’t handle.

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

As in the Olympics, you never hear about the countless people with disabilities who don’t make it. Who invisibly struggle day by day to have any kind of a life. Who die on the streets for lack of support. Who get abandoned in institutions and hospitals. Who all are told that if they don’t transcend their every limitation, it’s their own damned fault.

I can already hear an able-bodied person out there protesting that that’s not what it means, I’m taking it the wrong way, they don’t see that message.

Of course you don’t see it. The message isn’t meant for you.

Holy crap, what is this, a series?!? I never do series. At least, not deliberately. But here it is, Parting the Veil II (to follow the first iteration, Parting the Veil).

Parting the Veil II by Heather Keith Freeman
12″x14″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Is the figure a man or a woman? What makes you think so? If you were told that it was “really” not the gender you thought, what would be your reaction? Why? Are you uncomfortable when you see someone that you cannot ID as male or female? Why?

The figure is as deliberately androgynous as I could make it, in an effort to highlight how gender is socially constructed. Given that my husband thinks it’s a woman, and our housemate thinks it’s a man, I’m tentatively confident that I succeeded.

It was also an interesting exercise for me as an artist. Every line got tweaked to find that precise grey area between reading as man and reading as woman. Breadth of the shoulders, curve of the hips, musculature of the legs, size of the hands, hairstyle, carriage and attitude; all of these things go into our perception of gender, usually subconsciously.

(And yes, the feet are hidden because I didn’t want to deal with them. I hate drawing feet. They never look right.)

This falls naturally into the concept started by the first Parting the Veil; that one was about examining beauty standards and the dissonance caused by seeing a woman presenting as sexy and confident who doesn’t align with those standards. This one examines the social construction of gender and the dissonance caused by any disruption in that construction.

Where do I go from here? Can I continue a series now that it’s conscious and deliberate? Only time will tell.

It is a great irony that as I have become more aware of and invested in the need for social justice activism, I am less able than ever to participate in it.

Think of every “call to action” email you’ve received. “Call your representative,” they urge. “Don’t email, emails get ignored. Call today!”

Well, I can’t call. Hard of hearing, dont’cha know, with the resultant anxiety surrounding any situation where I might actually have to talk to someone without being sure of what they’re saying. (Interesting side factoid: I can usually handle the interaction in a drive-through fast food place because it’s so heavily scripted. Go off that script even a little, and I’m lost.) And no, TTY phones do not help in my case.

There are other things I’d love to do, but can’t because of my chronic pain. In-person lobbying. Escorting at Planned Parenthood clinics. Even the online stuff that just requires spoons that I don’t have most of the time – networking, posting, retweeting, emailing.

And, of course, the most common request I get is for donations. Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Courage Campaign, Kiva, Doctors Without Borders. We’re cash-strapped not only by my husband’s layoff, but my disability-based inability to work a regular job and the hundreds of dollars per month of medical insurance and copays that we cannot go without. And that doesn’t even get into the issue of the opportunity cost (see the Paradox of Choice for more on that.)

In short, I am irked that right when I am most willing to Do Something, I am drowned in ableist pleas to Do Something that I cannot do. I am doing what I can – my art, blogging, participating in discussions when and where my spoons permit – but in the face of those endless pleas for phone calls, personal appearances, and donations, my best attempts are framed as pathetic excuses for avoiding “real” activism.

The kid has no school tomorrow, so today is effectively my Friday. If I want anything on the ‘ol blog this week, it’s gotta be today.

I’m working on another piece. It’s going well, but I don’t know if I’ll get it up today.

I’m also doing the early stages of investigation into getting my business up and running again, thanks to brainstorm dropped by a commenter on how I could do it with minimal impact on my limited spoons. Navigating the local bureaucracy to find out what licenses I need is the worst headache, but fortunately my currently-unemployed husband is taking care of most of that crap for me. Don’t really have a timeline for that, but I’m hoping by the end of February you’ll at least be able to buy prints of NOT YOURS online, probably through Zazzle.

Contemplating a name change for the business, too. “Fire Sea Studios” is very evocative of color, and, well, everything I do now is black and white. It’s also less philosophy/occult oriented and more social-justice oriented. No specific ideas have jumped out yet, though. I’ll probably just work under my legal name until that brainstorm happens.

Feeling pretty socially isolated. My local meatspace friends all have Stuff going on, it seems. At least we only have about three inches of snow and ice here in Missouri, unlike the East Coast!

Off to the next layer of ink….

Fair warning: I’m going to talk about religion now.

I follow a number of pro-choice people on Twitter (shocking, I know). They frequently RT comments from pro-lifers, pointing out how they’re full of crap. It makes for entertaining reading and shields me from the direct debate which I rarely have the spoons to deal with.

Today, a pro-lifer commented the following:
“When a woman decides when where & how she gives birth, she takes God out of the picture & makes herself her own god. #prochoice #prolife”

This was mocked by pro-choicers as being “anti-woman BS.” And I stared with amazement, because I agreed with the pro-lifer 99.9%. The final .1%, though, is that I believe making yourself your own god to be a GOOD thing.

Divinity, whatever you believe it to be, is found in each of us. Whether you believe the divine to be found in the miracle of the universe knowing itself, or God placing the spark of divinity in each of His creations, we are all divine, and recognizing that spark is how we recognize and connect to the divine.

Think of the feeling you have when having a religious experience. Whether in church, or in circle, or a really good orgasm, the key to it is that you feel at one with something greater than yourself. At peace, full of joy, recognizing the sheer beauty and wonder of existence. That’s called gnosis, and it is in search of that feeling, I believe, that all religion is constructed.

So yes, @aCandyTweet, you are correct. When a woman decides how, when, and where she gives birth, she makes Herself Her own God. And there is no greater miracle, no more wondrous thing, than for a human to recognize her own divinity.

Insulting, vitriolic, or otherwise disrespectful comments will be deleted. Honest, thoughtful discussion is welcomed.

Here it is, the piece that’s been eating my life for the last week and a half. I’m seeing cross-eyed from doing all that text. (35 lines, ~40 characters per line on average. Oy!)

I’ve been wanting to do a piece on this subject for quite some time, but it didn’t coalesce into a firm image until a couple of weeks ago. Obviously the message is centered on reproductive freedom, but many of the statements apply to gender identity and expression, religious freedom, disability rights, and gender equality as a whole. In short: my body is mine and mine alone. I and I alone have the right to control what happens within it, and to declare my own experience.

NOT YOURS by Heather Keith Freeman
12″x16″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

The text behind her reads:
MY BODY, MY RULES.
YOUR GOD IS NOT MY GOD.
THE STATE OF MY GENITALIA IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
MOTHERS ARE PRO-CHOICE TOO.
FORCED PREGNANCY IS SLAVERY.
TRUST WOMEN.
PRO-WOMAN MEANS ALL WOMEN, NOT JUST THE ONES WHO THINK OR LOOK LIKE YOU.
I AM NOT YOUR INCUBATOR.
I AM NOT YOUR SLAVE.
THE SHAPE OF MY GENITALS DOES NOT AFFECT THE WORTH OF MY SOUL.
THE VALIDITY OF MY WOMANHOOD IS NOT YOURS TO DETERMINE.
THE LIFE OF A FETUS IS NOT MORE VALUABLE THAN THE LIFE OF A WOMAN.
THE STATUS OF MY SOUL IS NOT YOURS TO DETERMINE.
MY GOD IS PRO-CHOICE.
FAMILY PLANNING MAKES HEALTHIER FAMILIES.
THERE IS NO ONE TRUE WAY.
FORCED STERILIZATION IS ASSAULT.
THE STATE OF MY UTERUS IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
MY PURPOSE IN LIFE IS NOT DETERMINED BY MY GENDER.
CHRISTIANS ARE PRO-CHOICE TOO.
MORALITY IS NOT ABSOLUTE.
INDEPENDENT LIFE BEGINS AT BIRTH; ALL ELSE IS RELIGIOUS MASTURBATION.
FREEDOM OF RELIGION MEANS ALL RELIGIONS.
CONTROL THE CONTENTS OF YOUR OWN UTERUS.
YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO MY BODY.
IF POTENTIAL FOR LIFE EQUALED LIFE, EVERY WET DREAM WOULD BE GENOCIDE.
THE VALIDITY OF MY RELATIONSHIPS IS NOT YOURS TO DETERMINE.
YOUR GOD HAS NO AUTHORITY HERE.
IF EVERYONE THINKS THEY ARE RIGHT, AND EVERYONE DISAGREES, THEN EVERYONE IS WRONG.
YOUR DISCOMFORT WITH MY LIFE IS NOT MY PROBLEM.
MY ROLE IN LIFE IS NOT YOURS TO DETERMINE.
I AM NOT YOUR VESSEL.
STOP PUTTING WORDS INTO YOUR GOD’S MOUTH.
YOU DON’T GET TO DECIDE IF I DESERVE A CHILD.
THE SHAPE OF MY BODY DOES NOT DETERMINE THE POWER OF MY MIND.
YOU DO NOT HAVE JURISDICTION OVER MY BODY.
YOUR DISCOMFORT IS NOT WORTH MY LIFE.