Will public libraries be targeted next for book banning?  Even the thought is reprehensible.

Mississippi mayor withholds library funds over LGBTQ books

Arts Jan 27, 2022 9:44 PM EST

 
NYT 1-29-22 Excerpt from Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of  the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer”: "....those who seek to ban books are wrong no matter how dangerous books can be. Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question. A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures."

10 ways I put myself back together after trauma

• gentlekindness  posted the original from:   Hummingbird Redemption

This is me at 17 years of age

I can’t tell you how much the response meant to me after I posted Til it Happens to you. The support was incredible! I was too overcome to respond for a while. People have asked how I got through it all. I suffered status epilepticus at 13, meaning I had continual seizures which couldn’t be controlled. I stopped breathing and was in a coma. It took a long time to recover from this event (it was predicted I wouldn’t). The next year, I met a monster, and was abused. The finale was being thrown off a building at fifteen. My healing has taken over twenty years. There are some things that have helped.

1. I can’t handle violence of any kind. I can’t discuss literature, nor movies, let alone view them, if they are violent. At first, I didn’t want people to think I was fragile. I didn’t want them to see the distress that talking about violence (parcelled as entertainment to the masses), conjured. I would pretend that it wasn’t hurting me. Nowadays, I don’t pretend. I gracefully bow out of conversations and invitations which would bring me into this sphere.

2. I couldn’t leave the house by myself, even to go to the letterbox. It has taken many years and many small trips to gather the strength to go farther afield. I plan ahead, and the apps I have on my phone make my preparations easier. If you are agoraphobic, be kind to yourself. Every little step is a triumph. My major incentive was that I had to get to the IVF clinic early in the morning, and simply had to do it. It made me braver than I actually felt! Now I take my daughter everywhere, and the freedom is liberating!

3. I have had to confront my deepest fears. The ones I was frightened of encountering, as I would surely fall apart. My fears included rejection, loneliness, being left alone and finding out that people weren’t as they appeared. Confronting these fears has been terrifying, and it has hurt. I have uncovered that people I looked up to were abusive behind closed doors. I have been let down and let go, but I have survived. I learnt not to leave myself behind in the process. Comforting myself became of premium importance.

4. People see a smiling, functional adult when you are out and about. They don’t recollect the child kept alive in Intensive Care on a respirator. They came into my life during a different chapter. I know what it took to get to here. The hundreds of hours of physiotherapy, the scores of surgeries… I have to remind myself of my achievements and give myself a quiet pat on the back.

5. Boundaries are a big one for a survivor. I felt as vulnerable as a newborn when I started to make a life for myself. I believed anything anyone said, and believed everyone was a friend. It has taken trial and many errors to come up with boundaries, and to trust my judgement above all else. It was a revelation, to give myself the space to honour my instincts. If a person or situation doesn’t sit right, and makes me uncomfortable, I walk away. It is imperative to do so, as I have a little girl watching me. I need to display good boundaries so she knows that its okay to be in touch with her own. It has sometimes taken me being struck mute in the company of somebody who is toxic, for me to comprehend that my body is trying to protect me by producing physical symptoms. I am free, and thus I get to decide who stays in my life. It may not be anything that anyone is doing. Rather,  they remind me of someone from the past. I still have to honour my discomfort.

6. Things will trigger me on a daily basis, and much of it is out of my control. It could be a song coming on in the supermarket, an aftershave I detect in passing. It might be a conversation, or visiting a friend in a hospital where I had prior surgery. Deep breaths are required, and sometimes a visit to the lady’s restroom to compose myself. I tell myself that my anxiety is a natural reaction, and I am doing fine. If I am with close friends, I will tell them that a memory has come up. If I am not, I will breath deeply, find a focal spot to concentrate on, and reassure myself quietly.

7. I will not drink to excess, nor take tablets to blot out a bad day. Sometimes, the memories hit hard, and along with the massive amount of pain I suffer, it becomes overwhelming. Alcohol is a depressant, and thus, is disastrous as an antidote. I will only have alcohol when in the company of friends at dinner, or as a toast of celebration. It only compounds the depression which inevitably comes after overworked adrenals have crashed. Instead, I go for a walk, swim or am otherwise active. It helps tremendously.

8. I will space out at times. When you hardly sleep, and are in pain, it happens naturally. When you put flashbacks or a panic attack into the mix, let’s say I am sometimes  away with the fairies! Writing (and preparing for a writing task), also lends itself to spacing out. If you holler at me on the street and I don’t respond, that’s why! I am escaping into my inner world, which is expansive and magical. I nearly jump out of my skin when I am walking along and a car beeps me. I remain jittery for the rest of the day. I am hyper vigilant; always scanning a crowd for danger, even when in my own world. It’s quite a combination!

9. You are allowed to say “no” to a request. You are allowed to rest. I keep going until I can’t, and at that point, I retreat for a bit. I have to. It is a revelation, when you learn that you can keep free spaces in the calendar. Even thirty minutes to sip tea and daydream is heavenly. I need time alone to restore and reboot. Time is precious, and I try to use it wisely.

10. My survival has been an odyssey of epic proportions. I tried to run from the memories. I attempted to smother them, as one instinctively does a fire. The smoke streams from underneath the cloth, and then the flames explode forth in a cacophony of rage. It is like burning off disease, only to have damaging adhesions form underneath. Running doesn’t work, and it certainly doesn’t help. Over many years, I have visited my places of trauma. I have wept and I have released at each site. I only did so when I was ready. You have to be ready. My natural instinct is still to run when triggered, but now I have tools. They come in the form of a laptop, a paintbrush, a pastel. They come to me as bird song, my walking shoes, my friends and my music.

When I was a child, I had big dreams. I had a determined spirit and an acute awareness that what was being done to me was not only wrong, but evil. I felt as though a cannon had ripped through my psyche, smattering me into pieces. Over time, I have laid out all the pieces, and put them into place. I am glued, sewn, fused and grafted together. I was once a china doll. Now I am reinforced and can never be broken again. It takes time to heal. You will want to give up. You will consider yourself beyond repair. You will want to run and you will try to escape your own mind. You will want to give up. Please don’t. The joy of finally accessing the tools to help you cope are worth the fight.

BOOM

It’s funny how some memories persist while others are scarcely registered or maintained.  For example, I have almost no memory of my visit to the Louvre, but many memories of…maybe incidents?  What would it have taken for me to have remembered seeing Leonardo daVinci’s  Mona Lisa, for instance?   Things about the trip that I do remember, for instance, include:

The perpendicular chain on the window of our cabin on the  slow freighter Marengo appearing to move back and forth as it was tossed to and fro on the north Atlantic…(It was the porthole that was moving, not the chain)…

Being introduced to the taste of a drop of rum in morning tea at a campsite in Bulgaria…

Unexpectedly meeting some friendly gypsies with a dancing bear in the woods–but I can’t remember the country…

Being interrogated at the equivalent of a police station by an official who was reading our passports until he came to the photo which caused him to turn the passport rightside-up…

Eating so many plums from the Bazaar in Instanbul that I got a bad case of hives…

Mistaking the drain in a shower for the local version of a toilet at a youth hostel in the early days in France.

Upon returning to Manchester to catch a slow freighter ride back home, we were afforded a few nights free because a strike was going on.

Lice at an overnight inn at Brindisi.

While traveling deck passage, the first thing I saw and heard when I opened my eyes the next morning were cliffs either side of our ship and far overhead the sight and sound ot a distant tooting train crossing a bridge over us: the Straits of Corinth.

The one-legged communist who ran the campsite in St. Remy and bought our bicycles, prior to our purchasing one Vespa motor scooter.

The wonderful beaded doorways in St. Remy.

Surprise that there weren’t any mountains across the lake in Geneva, until the mist thinned and way up on top of the sky the setting sun moved a hair, revealing alps at our zenith.

The expression on my partner’s face when a dog peed on him alongside the Seine in Paris and I had a laughing fit.

The sound of firecrackers when we camped in the Pompeii campsite, momentarily causing alarm when wakened by them.

Learning the small cafe in Pompeii had a special cutrate menu for campers like us.

The sight of a fountain in the train station in Marseilles that read “Defense de uriner.”

On the Vespa, traversing sandy roads en route to the site of Schlieman’s Troy, in Turkey.

Sitting in dejection when the guard at a Turkey military base wouldn’t let us drive through the area on the way  back.  I said, “But we’re on the same side!” until they gave us a military escort through their base.

I think it was in downtown Bulgaria where we saw a billboard with a fat pig on it with the label USA.

Camping at Monaco and keeping a low profile when the Gary Powers’ U2 reconaissance plane was discussed.

Surprise at seeing all the stray cats near the Coliseum in Rome.

Collecting a few fossils in the white cliffs of Dover.

A free visit to an emergency room when I tried to get off the Vespa when left alone for  a few moments. An unimportant broken bone near the top of my foot was diagnosed.  Can’t remember which country, but the emergency visit was free, I do remember that!

Maybe it was having to crane my neck to view Michaelangelo’s ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Rome that left a memory with me.

Being stopped in Florence in the middle of a foot bridge across the Arno by a man who charged us for crossing on foot.  We had just been admiring works by Michangelo , after having camped in an olive grove overlooking the city.

On the same slow freighter we took both to and from Europe accidentally, (by serendipity), we were almost the only passengers, and so we always shared the same table as the captain.

When docked temporarily in New Brunswick  we were astonished to note that when we left the boat we had to walk down the gangplank, and when we returned we had to also walk down it, so great were the tides.

Learning to avoid looking at cars parked off-road in many of the countries.

Feeling ashamed of myself for getting so happy at the prospect of a hamburger, back in the U.S.