Today has just been one of those days. I've been getting steadily more depressed as the time goes by but today has just been a haze of sadness. And then I tend to get angry at the littlest things when I'm depressed, which makes me feel guilty, which makes me more depressed...it's a cycle that never stops spiraling down.

Hyanda Ar' Agar

It has been a long time since i blogged here. But right now no other place is the right home for my words. Now indeed i feel the darkness everpressing. Now indeed i find myself trapped again on a downward spiral with no way and increasingly no desire to escape.

Hyanda ar' agar, i once called this blog. Few cared what it meant. Fewer asked. But one does not stop having favorite things when one sinks into depression (though perhaps the enjoyment of those things dims), and when i sought a name for my writings, i chose one that said much about me, i thought: Tolkien's Elvish for the language, "Blade and Blood" for the words.

It is Blade and Blood that i long for once more. It is that release, that feeling, that fierce second of joy that i crave, that i need. And how or why should i deny myself?

Excuses, Excuses

I feel like I've dropped a big bomb shell on my blog readers and then walked away. Sorry about that. I've been busy. We're preparing to move shortly, and I've been busy packing and stuff. Or more honestly, I ought to have been busy doing that but I've really been busy getting distracted by various things. The result is that I haven't done much packing and I haven't done any blogging. Sorry.
I'll try to get something up soonish, because I know how much you all look forward to reading my posts. </sarcasm> Peace out.

Lies: The Biggest Mask

Before I take off this mask, I'd like to point out a few things. I grew up Baptist. Honestly that is probably all that is needed to emphasize what a huge deal removing this mask is. But there is more. I am married to a wonderful man that I am still madly, spectacularly in love with. We have an adorable son. I wouldn't give either of them up for the world.
And now you are wondering, what do those things have to do with a mask I am wearing? I was a Baptist forever (it seems), I've been married for over two years, and I've been a mother for nearly that long. What recent mask could have anything to do with that? Well, I will tell you. Slowly. And with backstory.
I didn't exactly have a normal adolescence. At the age when most girls were discovering that boys were kind of cute, I had already been having direct contact with male genitalia for years. Indeed, it was during that time of early adolescence that I vowed I would never date or get married. So when my peers were talking about boys or makeup or dating I had zero interest. Occasionally I would find my eyes caught by a naked woman or too-tight clothing, but I always marked it down as being over-sensitive to sexual things as a result of being abused (though I did not, then or for many years, call it abuse). Being Baptist, of course, tends to heighten that sensitivity - bare shoulders can be as risque as cleavage for a normal person or ankles for a Muslim.
Much later, in college, when I finally found a counselor I trusted, that assumption was reinforced. I struggled with porn (etc) because I had become "sexualized" at too young an age. Eventually my then-fiance and I got kicked out of Maranatha because we couldn't keep our hands off of each other. Between then and when we got married over a year later, we had sex nearly every time we were together. In fact, our son was born just over six months after our marriage. It was pretty obvious that we both greatly enjoyed sex.
Except that we didn't. Or to be more accurate, I didn't. I enjoyed the intimacy of it. I enjoyed making my beloved happy, hearing the catch of his breath when I did something especially pleasurable. I enjoyed being pleasured, sometimes. But as time passed I became less and less involved in the act of lovemaking, more and more passive, more and more just waiting for it to be over. At first I put it down to memories of abuse, and to be sure those memories did pop up and ruin many an intimate moment. But I put those memories behind me and still I did not enjoy sex with my husband. Then I thought that perhaps this was just the way things turned out; after all, it was pretty commonly taught growing up that girls just weren't that interested in sex. And of course a lot of guys tend to joke about how hard it is to get their wives to have sex with them. But I knew that wasn't really that accurate for me at least because I was still incredibly horny all the time. I still visited porn/erotica sites almost daily. It wasn't sex itself that I wasn't interested in, it was sex with my husband for some reason.
I began toying with the idea of bisexuality. I knew of course by then that being gay or straight wasn't a choice, although I thought maybe it was sometimes. I thought of having sex with a woman and the idea was not repulsive to me. On the contrary, I found the idea quite arousing. Not being one to hide things from my husband, I talked to him about it. (I also had a blog post up about it briefly. I took it down pending further thought.) A few days later he sent me an email that has changed our lives completely.
It wasn't a very  long email, just a few words and a link. The link was to an article by a truly sweet lady ( I emailed her a few days later) about her journey of sexual discovery. Her story was eerily similar to my own. She had married her husband several years ago, enjoying for a time a thriving sex life. They even had one child as we do, a boy. Eventually, after working through massive amounts of depressions (sound familiar) and other issues, she became less and less thrilled about sex with her husband. Long story short, she came to the realization that she was not bisexual, as she'd identified herself for years, but lesbian. I couldn't ignore the similarities in our stories, not after all the other thinking I'd been doing. They were too striking, from our opinions on penises (fun to play with on our husbands but overall pretty meh, could do without) to our thoughts on sperm (yucky yucky yucky bleh).
Perhaps I should have realized it sooner. But then, our minds have an impressive ability to lie to us, as we've discussed already. But here is the big moment. I'm about to take off this mask I've been wearing only a few months and yet my whole life...
I am gay.

This is the final part, Part Four, of the series "Lies."

Lies: My Lies

I have told a lot of lies. I have lied to strangers, loved ones, enemies, and myself. I am a very good liar. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? It is hard to say. I have survived when I might have died. But I have scars (in and out) that I did not need to gain.
For many years I told myself I was guilty of being abused. I told myself I had not been abused, that it had not been violent so it must have been consensual. These were lies, and I should have known better, but I was willing, for whatever reason, to believe that I was a horrible pervert. I believed that for some reason I deserved to be abused.
For many years I lied to everyone around me. I made a persona of a perfect little Baptist girl, one who participated in ministry extensively, who counseled her peers, who was strong and confident in her faith. My persona won Christian character awards, She was held up as a standard of Christian excellence. She never doubted, never struggled with her salvation, never spent the night in tears of agony. But she was a mask, nothing more. The real me was nearly her opposite. I was a Christian, to be sure, but I was by no means as confident or assured or good in that Christianity as outward Threnody let on. I struggled with depression. I had no real friends, no one I could even think of confiding in. By turns I hated and adored my God; by turns I served him and turned my back on him. Yet outwardly, my persona was a friendly, perfect, somewhat introverted Christian girl.
When I went to college I made a new mask, but I wore it just as well as the last one. College Threnody was no longer introverted; she had realized introverts are very lonely. So she became a bubbly person. She became the joker, the class clown, the prankster, always good for a laugh. And college Threnody gathered to herself friends. For the first time she was part of a group of friends, and that felt spectacular. Except...college Threnody was just as much a mask as high school Threnody, and the friends that college Threnody had gathered were friends with a lie, with someone who didn't exist. Meanwhile, I was still lonely, I still had no one to confide in. But who could I trust? And who would trust me? Confiding in someone was essentially the same as admitting I had been lying to everyone for a very long time. I tried counseling, but as I was unable or unwilling to ever completely drop the masks I wore, it didn't really go anywhere. I never lied to a counselor (save once) overtly, yet they did not see beyond the mask of passive lies I always wore. Sometime in there I began accumulating scars. College Threnody of course gave no sign of these; she could sit and joke and laugh and hold punching wars with her friends and never let on that I had been bleeding minutes before. If she wore boots and long sleeves long past what would have been normal, well, no one remarked on it or found it strange.
I talk much of masks, for that is how I have always referred to the myriad lies I told and acted. I am proud of my masks; they held up to the scrutiny of many people for many years. Of course that is not hard to do; people see what they wish to see. I need only set their minds on the track I wish them to take and their own preconceived ideas do most of the work. A few people saw through my masks, or at least parts of them. And yet, given a glimpse of the troubled, hurting soul inside, it was still easy to weave a new mask of their discovered truth and new lies. People do not know what to do with other people's pain, and so if given a chance, they are more than willing to ignore or discount that pain.
I fear I have drifted off track a little. I apologize. The point is that I am very familiar with lies and lying. Nowadays I try to do less of it, but sometimes I still must, both for my own sake and the sake of those I love. Even now I am wearing a mask. I have told very few people what is is. It is a fairly recent mask, in some ways. In others, it is as old as I am. Thankfully I will not be wearing it much longer. For all its brevity, it is probably the biggest mask I have ever worn. Deciding to take it off is perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done. That is saying something, as those of you who know even a little of my life should know. What is it? I will tell you soon.

This is Part Three of the series "Lies." Part Four, "The Biggest Mask," can be found here.

Lies: Big Lies

Everyone tells lies; we've established this. White lies, we call them, the little lies that we tell each other that make society run smoothly. But there are other, bigger lies. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. We tell them not to easy our way, but to manipulate the way the world around us operates.
Institutions like the Baptist college I went to tell lies to both their students and their supporters. They seek to present an appearance of holiness and conformity and will tolerate nothing that might tarnish that appearance, or "testimony" as they like to call it. This would be an example of a bad big lie, not necessarily because of the lie itself but because of the lengths they will go to in order to protect the lie.
Politicians lie. It has become so prevalent that we expect our government officials to lie to us. A "campaign promise" is nothing more than a lie. Yet not only do we expect these lies, we demand them. A politician who told only the truth would never be elected, because we demand to hear what we want to hear, even when we know we are only being placated. Of course we would prefer to hear the truth, or so we say...but we too are lying, if only to ourselves.
Speaking of lying to ourselves, we often tell huge lies to ourselves, damaging our own lives and selves much more than any external influence could. And it doesn't even make any sense, half the time. We tell ourselves we are fat or ugly or stupid or clumsy or untalented...or we tell ourselves that we are skinny or beautiful or brilliant or graceful or artistic. Of course these things are not always lies, but sometimes they are. Often, too, we are merely repeating the lies that we believed when someone else told them to us. But why do we continue to lie to ourselves? Why do we seek to convince ourselves that we are one thing when we are truly another? Why do we believes ourselves so inherently invaluable that we must be something other than what we are?
Religions lie. Whether you call yourself Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or anything else, your religion has lied. Does that make your actual beliefs false? No, of course not. But religion, as an organized or semi-organized body of humans, is possibly one of the worst propagators of lies ever to exist. Religion's lies have been both good and bad. To some, they have granted peace and contentment in this life; others, they have sent forcibly out of this life altogether. Whichever, good or bad, I think we can all agree that religion's lies have had a tremendous impact on the lives of billions of people throughout history.
The point here is that lies, like all other words, have consequences. It is cause and effect, and you cannot always know exactly what the effect will be.

This is Part Two of the series "Lies." Part Three, "My Lies," can be found here.

Lies: Small Lies

We all lie. The reasons are many and varied, but we have all lied and continue to do so daily. I am not saying it is a bad thing, nor am I saying it is a good thing. But it is something we all do.
Now I would guess some of you don't believe me right now. Some of you probably think of yourselves as honest people. I dare say, however, that even you lie, and lie frequently. Have you ever said "I'm fine" when you weren't? I think that is the biggest and most frequent lie people tell. I know it is for me. Have you ever found yourself rushing around the house cleaning frantically before a guest arrives? I know that seems a little weird in this list but why do you do that? In general it is because you want your guest to think of you as a neat, clean person...even though in reality you're not. Have you ever given an insincere compliment? Have you ever told someone you're too busy to do something with or for them even when you have absolutely nothing planned? Online, have you ever said "afk" or "brb" when you aren't actually going anywhere or have no intention of coming back, you just don't feel like talking anymore? I am sure you have done one or more of these things, just as I have. We are all liars.
Are these bad things to say or do? I think it depends. Society or culture or maybe just human nature punishes us for telling the truth in many of those cases. Most people really couldn't care less how you're actually doing when they ask (a form of lying in itself), and telling them the truth only drives them away. Everyone knows that nobody keeps a clean house all the time, yet we make character judgments if we visit a messy house. Insincere compliments are in general your own fault, as you aren't punished for not giving them. However, you are sometimes rewarded if you do. The last two essentially go together. We would like to tell the truth sometimes in those cases...but we can't, not without causing pain or offense to the person we are interacting with (or trying not to interact with).
So essentially, you see, we are all liars. We all lie. Even without pressure from society in certain ways, we would still be liars, I think. It is part of our nature. We all want to be accepted by those around us, and we all do our best to fit in. Invariably that means telling at least a few lies.

This is Part One of the series "Lies." Part Two, "Big Lies," can be found here.