Trying Progress

It's been a rough year for me in 2018 but there's been a lot of good things too. I think that's something that all of us forget. That even though things are tough, that people suck, and that we might also have a long way to go, we should still acknowledge the progress we've made. Yes I do have a point and I'll get there eventually but just take a walk with me.

This is just as true when we discuss societal changes. There's a lot of groups pushing some very radical changes in America today. When I was a kid we were just getting over the largest changes in civil rights in history. Getting over is maybe a term that many would take issue with but I will submit that it might be le mot juste. Even when all of these changes are right and correct there's a huge amount of existential exhaustion that takes some time. Remember that the Civil Rights movement from the second World War to 1970 was at best only halfway a success. Sure there were huge inroads, and many outright triumphs, but people still sometimes ended up “strange fruit” here in the south.

That kind of change takes a lot out of the society. It also takes a generation for the society to integrate those changes. This might be even more true when things are sorely needed. When everyone knows that the fight is coming and they just want to get it over with. I think that this is part of the problems with our society today. Even if liberals are right, and I'm sure they are about many things, our society is exhausted and we need to take a generation to rest and recover. Let's face that our children are going to do what they want anyway, and trying to enforce our will upon the future is probably as futile a struggle as we've ever seen. That's a larger issue and probably the subject of a different essay so we should leave that alone.

Anyway by about 1972 things were going so well in the Civil Rights movement that everyone decided that Women's Liberation should be handled next. By the way, the previous statement was irony and extreme sarcasm. Any other interpretation is completely facetious. The Civil Rights movement was eclipsed by the “dumpster fire” that was the end of the Vietnam War. Watergate came soon after and America was shaken to its very foundation. It's hard to explain to anyone who wasn't alive back then just how scared a lot of people were. I think we were much closer to a violent insurrection in America than anyone talks about now. Had there been anything like social media in those days there probably would have been. It was a scary time for America.

In the late 60s and early 70s we went from the Civil Rights movement to Women's Liberation with only a crisis to separate them. I think that's why so many people think so fondly of Ronald Reagan. Ronnie was safe and paternal. He wasn't going to let women and brown people take anything from decent white guys. So we created the global drug trade and simultaneously continued Nixon's egregious anti-drug policies in order to incarcerate an entire generation of black men. This gutted the Civil Rights movement and left only the Women's Liberation movement for people to deal with. The women’s movement took a break, but not consciously and not for no reason. A legion of women were attending colleges and building careers they couldn't before, so their daughters could do even better. America was getting over the idea of women as second class citizens. Women were running for office and even if they didn't win as much as they should, people got used to the idea that candidates weren't always men. Women eventually started again and “Women's Liberation” became “Equality”. That word was a lot easier to deal with and progress continued. Not at a pace many women felt was quick enough, but progress was made.

Brown people and Women were competing for space in the public consciousness. I'm not sure how black women felt, but it's probably not as good as the others did. So while there was progress it wasn't something that anyone was happy with. I'm just some guy but I thought any progress was greater than none. Even though we might not all hold hands and sing “Kum ba Yah” some change is still better than none. Gradual improvement works. About the time that things started to move again the LGBT community jumped in and started their quest for equality. Now America has a huge problem with gay people, probably even a bigger problem than they have with brown people or women people, no doubt because of our Puritan roots. Everybody tells you in school that the pilgrims came to America fleeing religious oppression. What they don't tell you is that the pilgrims were the oppressors. Most of Europe threw them out rather than deal with their petty exclusionary views on everything. The whole myth about Thanksgiving was actually a metaphor for putting America back together during Reconstruction. Anyway I'm digressing again so let me get back to my point.

The playing field got really crowded and there were a lot of groups moving in different directions. All of them wanted equality but most of them weren't interested in sharing the stage with anybody else. Now I get that women deserve to have women's issues, and that brown people deserve to have their issues, and that LGBT people get to have their issues too, but I don't understand why they can't all have the same issues. Every single person that you know deserves to be treated equally. There are no exceptions to this. Even though we might feel differently about certain issues, we all need to realize that we have more in common than any supposed differences that separate us.

Oh, by the way, before anybody decides to burn me in effigy, the reason I say brown people is because what I'm talking about is “not white people” and all of the myriad issues surrounding them. There's a whole lot of those issues and almost all of them are valid. That's hard to swallow for many people but I don't think that makes it any less true.

The recovery community is like that as well. A great many of us feel like we're different than others. Many of us feel like the “Recovery Police” are going to show up any minute and tell everyone that we're frauds. That we don't belong in the real community, with the real addicts. At the end of the day, once we really surrender, we realize that all of the differences we saw are actually the things that bind us together. Each of us had or has our own addiction and our own issues and each of us can use tools to deal with those stresses and situations. Many if not most will use a 12 step program. Others may use a program like Rational Recovery or SmartRecovery. Some might need a fellowship, others might need a therapist, and a few might even be able to do it alone. No, I've never met anyone who's gone solo, but I'm sure it's happened at some point in the past. Still, all of us humans need to stop trying so damnedably hard to be so sensitive and hurt all the time.

To paraphrase some other people; none of us are beautiful or unique snowflakes. Even if we were snowflakes guess what, we still have more in common with each other than we do separately. If you think you are one in a million that's awesome, but there's still about 7,000 idiots on this planet just like you. Stop overreacting. Yes we all have a long way to go separately and as a society, but we can't forget how far we've come. Yes it's probably going to take a generation or two for racial equality. Maybe a little more for gender equality. Even longer than that for gender identity and issues of sexuality but damn it, we've come a long way. We went from Selma to the White House in a little more than 40 years. That's amazing. Women have come as far but not as fast. Hell, gay people were institutionalised as recently as twenty years ago. We've come too far and worked too hard to let some people (who think we possibly haven't tried hard enough) to ignore everything.

I'm going to spend the next month or two celebrating just how far we've come.  For the next two months I’ll also focus on being inclusive. Who knows, it may become  a habit and maybe I'll just do it for the rest of my life.

After all, we’re all in this together, and nobody gets out of here alive!

Navel Gazing

So the title of this is "Navel Gazing" and I understand if that's not your cup of coffee. Actually after the time I spent in jail I understand a lot about coffee. The only coffee they have in jail is freeze-dried. The water is never warm and so the coffee is never hot. I've even seen a grown man snort a line of freeze-dried coffee off his bunk. That was freakish, of course this was the same idiot that used to drink cups full of soap. I'm sure his colon was extremely clean, but that's disturbing enough as it is. There were a lot of things about jail that were really weird. However it's hard to talk about jail and not talk about why I was there.

I'm not going to sugar-coat anything and I'm not going to hold back, so if you don't want to read this that's okay. I'm not scared of the truth anymore and that's pretty cool because I was scared of everything and a big fan of secrets for a long time. I hated myself for a long time. Not because of my family or any other outside influences. I just hated myself because I wasn't capable of thinking and doing right. There are reasons, people and other triggers that I could point to and try to blame but that's not helping anyone. So the simplest explanation is this: I couldn't process my pain and grief like most other people do. So in order to numb myself I was drinking, getting loaded, and harming myself for several years.

I decided to stop. You know that sentence is deceptively short. Like it was easy. That sentence took me ten days to say out loud. That was after seven days in suicide watch and 14 days in a psychiatric cell. I decided to stop. I decided that I didn't want to harm myself anymore. I decided that I wanted to live. I decided that I had let drugs destroy my life. Nobody else decided this but me. All those crimes they accused me of, yeah I committed them all. Every single one. I know better, and I knew better the whole time. Still I decided consciously not to give a fuck for a long time. When I got sober I realized that I had made mistakes. I also realized that I needed to change for myself and I decided on recovery.

Why I'm guilty is a big question I get a lot. I'm guilty because I was a drug dealer. I'm guilty because I knew it was illegal. I am guilty because I didn't care who I hurt or who I sold to. although I did lie to myself and say “hey at least I didn't sell to any kids”. It doesn't matter I made bad decisions and that made me a bad person but I also decided to change. I will not be defined by those mistakes any more than I will be defined by other mistakes that I have made in my past. Instead I'm going to find myself by the choices I make in the future.

My story isn't unique. Actually everything I did reads like a bad story in a bad movie about a bad guy. I am not unique nor am I special, I am just taking ownership for my damage. Feeling like a fraud isn't unique either. I was convinced that for my first week of NA meetings that the “NA Police” were going to come through me out because I was a fraud. Then someone else brought that up in a meeting and everyone laughed. That was when I realized that I wasn't different, or unique, even in feeling like that. It might sound silly to you but this was a profound discovery for me.

In case you were wondering about why I was writing about the weirdos in jail at the beginning of this here it comes. There are a lot of crazy people in jail. People so damaged by the system and so institutionalized by their constant incarceration that they are incapable of helping themselves. Many of those employees to help them within the system are themselves so institutionalized that they are incapable of helping as well. I was appalled watching this. It was only because there were some good people who wanted to help me inside and a few of my friends and family willing to help outside that I wasn't lost in the system.

Let me make this clear as well. I made the mistakes that put me there. I'm also making the positive choices to get better. I'm more whole today than I have been in years. So if you want to put me down, joke about me having sex in jail, talk down to me, or anything else just keep on walking because I don't have time for you. I've got work to do and I'm not going to carry your negativity with me.

Rejection

So, in the last column, we talked about dating in the era of #metoo, and so basically about personal choice and responsibility as a man towards women. Now I think we need to talk about rejection because nobody likes it.

First, some people have asked, where have I been? Honestly I've been in jail. I was arrested in October of last year and have spent most of the last eleven months in a “correctional setting” both in the county jail and in residential drug treatment. It has been a long and painful process. There were a few bumps along the way but somehow I got out of this without dying and without spending the rest of my life in prison.

The reason I'm writing these things down is because when I was in jail I realized that I was a mess in a few different ways. One of those ways was that I wasn't treating the women in my life well. I was a fairly toxic man in a fairly toxic patriarchy. One of the major goals in my treatment is to rebuild my moral compass. One of to the best ways to do this is to improve the way I treat women. There's a lot of detail missing from these sentences because I think that might be tedious and banal for the reader. If you want to hear more about me and my recovery plan, please send me an email to ross.winn@gmail.com. If I get enough responses, I'll write more about my recovery and how it has worked for me.

So hey, back to the point of this. You may have managed to approach a woman in a respectful and polite manner. She laughed at your jokes, you laughed at hers, and you thought you might have made a connection. You ask for her number and she says no. She's not overtly rude about it. She might even tell you she's flattered but she's not interested. So what do you do now?

Well I'd thank her for her time and walk away smiling. However many people aren't as enlightened. Here's what you shouldn't do. You definitely should not try to play the sympathy card. You shouldn't try to guilt her into going out with you. Don't talk disparagingly about that person or their choices in life. Most especially, don't get angry or violent. Yes, I know this seems to go without saying, but there are many extremely insecure men who are so self centered that they feel every rejection is completely about them. Some of these unfortunates can't conceive that this rejection doesn't even take them or their feelings into consideration.

As hard as it is for some men, and many women, to believe and understand much of the rejection that each of us will face in life has nothing to do with us. There's no reason that it should be about anything except that another person made a different decision than we were hoping. Maybe they really dislike guys who wear skinny jeans or green shirts or maybe they aren't interested in your gender or maybe there is no reason at all.

When we don't respect the decisions of others what does that say about us? If we whine to our friends that she's a little tease or whisper that she must be a lesbian that diminishes us. When we diminish ourselves we make our next bad decision into a habit. All of these things are incredibly disrespectful of women, but also of ourselves. If we can't respect all women why should any of them want us? 20 years ago this was a completely unthinkable chain of logic, women should be glad we gave them any attention at all, or so we thought. 35 years ago when I graduated from high school nobody thought this way. That's why I have a lot of problems with this stuff and I do carry a lot of cultural baggage with me.

It can be difficult for older people to wrap their heads around these ideas because they're so alien to the way that we were raised. I was taught many antiquated views about women and about holding doors and protecting them. Even when I was in treatment 6 months ago a counselor said that women's addictions were more difficult because they were prostituting themselves to get high. One of my male friends stood up and said “women aren't the only ones who prostitute themselves”. This is true, lots of men do as well, but the commonality and the experience isn't analogous with men. So just as it's wrong to think that only women can prostitute themselves, it's also wrong to assume that everyone does and this can be a double blind.

I think this cultural baggage is permeated through our society. Well maybe not as much in the Northwest but especially here in the south. People over 40 think differently. We are in many ways, culturally disconnected from the more modern world. Many of us who are middle-aged realize that we are disconnected or are becoming disconnected and take steps to remain culturally fluent in the mores of the time. However we struggle because the things that we learned as children are difficult to overcome because those patterns are deep and worn.

However those of us who are more mature also have an advantage. We have seen 40, 50, or more years of change in America and many of our attitudes have changed over time as well. So while it may be difficult to change we know that it can be done it just takes more time, awareness, and effort now that we're older. At least it does in my life, in my recovery, and in my morality. Maybe some of you will even make this a part of your own journey too. Please share in the comments if you have used these ideas to make positive change.

Treat Her Like A Lesbian

I'm really not sure about anything anymore. One of the most confusing things in the world is dating. Frankly, it seems like as men and women we just can't do anything right. I hear women complain all the time that some man isn't decisive enough and the next day I read about some other man being accused of sexual misconduct. Men don't know what they want, and neither do women. It seems like we have reached an impasse as men but I think I have a solution. Well okay, I have a solution that works for me and you can decide if it works for you too.

Sometimes the strangest thing in your past come back to be useful. There was a time after my second divorce that I was single and trying to date.  Truthfully, I was horrible at it. I've always mingled with lots of non-traditional people. Goths, gays, nerds, and intellectuals were just some of the flavors that were regularly in my retinue. They were far from the only kinds of people but I think this may have made me aware of the challenges men now face early.

My daughter noticed this almost immediately, even before I did, and made fun of me all the time. You see I was misreading so many signals, and it turned out that every woman I made a pass at, for nearly six months, was a lesbian. There was a lot of laughter and much learned understanding when I realized what was going on. I met some fantastic women and some remained friends for a long time, and I learned, the hard way, not to assume. Maybe even more importantly I learned not to take the answers I received personally. Maybe it was easy for me because I've never been everyone's cup of tea. It's an important point that we'll come back to later.

As the LGBT community became more mainstream there is even more chance that all of us, men and women, will encounter people whose sexual and gender identity isn't compatible with our desires and we need to have respect for that and them.

Lately I go to NA meetings on a regular basis and I've found that their insistence on hugging everyone really sets my teeth on edge. I don't mind hugging people I know and I have friendships with lots of people, no matter their orientation. However, the immediate insistence that we hug total strangers, who don't even know my name, is off putting in the extreme. I think it is especially disturbing when it is men and women. Really, who are they to insist that I hug them when they don't know me?  And how presumptuous is it of me, or any man, to try and hug a woman I don't know, regardless of her orientation or identity?

What I guess I'm trying to say is that in 2018, I need to see some pretty clear body language, and preferably some actual spoken language before I initiate any physical intimacy with anyone I've recently met. No, it isn't always necessary they say “please kiss me” but in this day and age, it certainly helps. I know it isn't what we're taught to expect in the movies. As a result, all of the expectations set by the media are horribly and completely inappropriate. This means that women need to be aware of this too. I've heard many women frustrated because there's no magic and no romance. I think that what many are looking for is a psychic connection that they see in the movies and television, and is a complete fiction. As men in this post-#metoo society are painfully aware the line is very easy to cross. What was considered by many to be acceptable twenty years ago isn't okay today.

As men, I think we need to be aware of some important ideas. Nobody owes us thanks for our sexual attraction. As a matter of fact, the very idea that a woman should be flattered that we notice them is ugly and misogynistic. I'm reminded of an old picture on the web of a woman walking in the street and scrawled across her midriff is the statement “still not asking for it”. The fact that we find a woman attractive, whether she's in a housedress or a bandeau really has nothing to do with her and everything to do with us. We need to find ways to meaningfully communicate our attraction and accept polite rejection.

This is the hardest thing in my opinion for many men to process, especially men who are self-involved like me. We have a tendency to assume that all women we see are available, uncoupled, interested, and aware. Not only is this not the case, it is exactly these things that make women feel so threatened and uncomfortable. Instead, I had believed that it is best to assume that any woman who I meet isn't just not interested in me, but not interested in men at all. Approaching women as simply people seems to go a long way towards making them feel positive, unthreatened, and paradoxically more open to social contact. Not that I'm suggesting that you do this in some insane quid pro quo. On the contrary, what I'm saying is that as the current generation of young women mature using previous paradigms of communication will result in less and less success. This, in turn, will breed more contempt and less success thus creating a vicious cycle.  This is in direct opposition to our need to be seen as attractive and desirable to others, be they male, female, other, straight, gay, whatever.

So, my suggestion is to treat each woman who you meet as a person. Assume she's a lesbian and that she doesn't like you. Speak to them as an equal and a person. Don't assume that their gender defines them or their desires. Ask them if they might want to be pursued, and if they say no don't ever insult them for being of a different opinion. Just thank them for their honesty and walk away.