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All posts by Nan Mykel

April 11 is My Little Sister’s Bithday

Published April 11, 2017 by Nan Mykel

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(Nikki, short for Nickname, named by Nan)

                                                 Allison Buckman Bassett Manning

                                        My little Sister  April 11, 1942 –   April, 1983

 s9                                                      Gone but never forgotten…

HELP! NO FOOLING!

Published April 8, 2017 by Nan Mykel

No stranger has been in my condo today but I find my screen on a horizontal, not vertical plain.  I recall long ago having posted a recipe for correcting an upside down screen but it kind of presupposed that a mischief maker had done the trick.  If you know how I can get upright again please tell me 

PSYCHIC READING 1972

Published April 8, 2017 by Nan Mykel

My aura is muddy with fear

the psychic said, three years ago,

as I sat hesitant before him

searching out dim forces of my destiny.

A two-fold karmic mission

lies in wait for me, he said.

mine to scale the heights of consciousness

and mine to loosen ancient passive bonds.

Through action shall I free the captive

soul of eons whose receptive mold has

fashioned the aura which I wear.

Passive becoming active, opening up

my third eye and our third world

in a consciousness both higher and raised.

Today is Monday, June 30, 1975 AD.

Three years hence where shall I be?

____________

(Today is Saturday, April 8, 2017,  I be 81,  living in Appalachia alone, preparing the landing strip for death,  with only two eyes and Trump for my president.  Today at lunch my friend Cathy told me that 51% of white women voted for Trump.)

 

Little Old LDY IN tENNIS sHOES

Published April 8, 2017 by Nan Mykel

Boy, I just thought I’d leave that heading just as I wrote it at 5 a.m., after waking early. There’s a story there. I’m not sure I’m a lady, but I know I’m little because I’ve lost 5 inches in my lifetime, though I guess overall I gained more–initially, of course.  And the thing about tennis shoes may be cute, but they hurt my feet–come to think of it, almost any shoes hurt my feet after awhile. That’s why I have so many shoes–I wear one  pair a few days til they hurt my feet, then buy another cheap pair that rubs a different place..

Just thought you’d like to know it looks like I’m making progress on cleaning out my junk. I can see my rug in the middle of the room now–of course I’ve also spread to a second room, which isn’t too good.  After a low period with my pinched nerve I got from lifting a    huge giraffe in my kitchen (I know it shouldn’t have been up on my kitchen counter–that’s why I had to lift it off), I’m getting ideas again.  Now if this plateau just lasts awhile until I get my stroke from afib, I’ll be sitting pretty.  After that, good luck with chortling from reading my blog.  (I know you’re not chortling–just liked that word.)

I’d better go run now and try to find my middle daughter’s address, because I finally got a letter, an envelope, my return address sticker and stamp together (whew!); just needing a street address and zip code. I still know the city and her name.  Talk to you later, the good lord willing, as Athur Godfrey used to say–oh yes, did you know, I have his autograph from back when I wrote  something nice about him in my Miami Journal radio column.

Wise Words of Roland C. Summit

Published April 6, 2017 by Nan Mykel

From”Hidden Victims, Hidden Pain: Societal Avoidance of Child Sexual Abuse,” in Lasting Effects of  Child Sexual Abuse,” p. 57,  Gail Wyatt and Gloria Powell eds.

There is a sad, self-preserving irony about a world that cannot see its own cruelty filled with victims who can’t give voice to their pain. After 125 years of discarded enlightenment, we still act as if victims are freaks and as if it is a virtue to be ignorant of sexual victimization. We pretend nobody is involved, even though the veterans may outnumber the recruits. Projections of any of the prevalence surveys to include elective and dissociative denials would insist that childhood sexual abuse is a normative experience, yet we ignore the implications of a society populated with the walking wounded.

Any gathering of our associates and friends contains people who were molested as children. Every extended family, every neighborhood, every church congregation, every medical society, every class in law school, and most every football team, legislative caucus and jury, conceals people who are hiding unspeakable memories of “unusual” childhood sexual experiences.  Those experiences may have been agonizing or ecstatic or a confusing mixture of both, but the fact that they can’t be shared says something about our collective fear of finding out.

PLEASE REMIND ME…

Published April 6, 2017 by Nan Mykel

They say, and I believe, that no  one is all good or all bad.  But I’ve forgotten what our president’s good points are.

On Forgiving (?)

Published April 6, 2017 by Nan Mykel

The Trouble with Blame — Sharon Lamb | Harvard University Press

Because of the scripted nature of apologies, they can also serve to manipulate the wounded to turn the tables. The scriptedness of the apology/forgiveness interaction is not only about social expectations but about power relations. When the victim is wounded (and her wounds are documented, believed, acknowledged, and validated) she is in a powerful position vis a vis the offender. Her wounds not only mark her as a victim but also give her a certain power because of the associations with the position of victimhood–in particular the innocence but also the protection one affords and special considerations.

Victimhood affords one a sort of instant purity and sympathy, if not martyrdom.  And all too often the public has trouble with victims when they do not live up to this idealized standard. The victim-offender dyad is set as a dichotomy–that one is evil, the other pure in exaggerated form. So when a perpetrator apologizes and does an excellent sincere j0b at such, our natural expectations are to expect and require forgiveness from a victim. Apologies can thus be power plays used to pull at victims’ notions of themselves as good. To maintain their role in the dichotomy as the “good one” the victim will need to apologize, or to prove in some way that their wounds are just too immense and they have suffered too long. Rarely is anger considered an appropriate response to a sincere apology….

The power relations between the offended and the offender are always important to keep in mind, for an apology offered by an offender who ultimately has power over the injured party brings with it even more pressure for forgiveness.

The demands on individual victims to forgive are bound up with traditional notions of what it means to be a “good girl” or “good woman”  it is entirely possible to have compassion for an offender, even your own offender if you have been abused, and not be willing to forgive. Whatever happened to the older psychoanalytic notions of  ambivalence?  While it may be difficult to live with ambivalent feelings, this is the human condition.

 

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