no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Hey! (hey!) Uterus! (uterus!) get off of my cloud...

I'm so sorry. Good luck with the operation.

I'm totally down with uterus lyrics! Thanks for the good wishes.

This time last year I was being worked up as a potential kidney donor, which turns out to have been good mental preparation. I seem destined to lose an organ some way or another.

Q, all the best with this! Is the Da Vinci robot a go?

quincie <3 thinking of you!

roxy & ENBB, i have been going through exactly this myself in the past couple of years, the reprocessing, also post-age-35 and after my friends started having kids. gradually came to understand that my mother is abusive and my father is an alcoholic (functioning, but nevertheless). i grew up in a terrible home environment with a lot of yelling, a lot of stress and chaos, where i wasn't really allowed to have a normal range of emotions, i mostly learned that I had to keep to myself and not draw too much attention and pretend that things were ok, to get by. i didn't grasp until recently how damaging it was. it's not for lack of trying but i wasn't diagnosed properly until i went to someone who specializes in ptsd/trauma, so for many years i thought i was the problem

once my friends started having kids i started to think, wait, i could never, ever imagine any of them *ever* yelling hateful things at their children or hitting them. i could never imagine any of them making it their priority to hang out in a bar just about every night and being emotionally absent in all the ways that go along with that. i also feel pretty bad at times about being behind my friends/peers on this or that major life milestone, but on the other hand.. if i hadn't been stubborn enough to go away to college and get out of that town, i'd probably have wound up married to an abusive drunk and stuck in a dead end job and thinking i didn't deserve anything else. i really went through a lot & things are slowly getting better but it certainly has taken me a lot of time and money and a good therapist.

i do not think my parents did the best they could. i can't change it now, but.. imo the bar should be set higher than that, and their behavior is the problem. it seems that in order to really move on, i have to keep reminding myself of that and not diminish/hide the past or go along with family pressure to pretend everything's fine.

daria-g, so good to see you back 'round these parts! Let's do it in person soon--I'll e-mail you :)

I found gobs of fault in my parent while I an adolescent, but I can now look back and see how lucky I was to have very good and decent people--people who placed family and being good spouses/parents above all else--as my folks. It wasn't perfect, but it was very supportive and real and man, I sure did get lucky. I think about what Roxy, ENBB, daria, VG, and others here had to contend with IN ADDITION to growing up as girls/women in this world. . . ugh. That's all I can think of to say. Ugh.

I'm not talking about diminishing the past, or handwaving away the past, I'm talking about looking the horrors of the past full in the face in order to understand them, and understand one's own place in them.

I don't need - or want - to rehearse or list the terrors of my childhood here. You've got the lot: long-term emotional abuse; physical abuse and beatings inside and outside the family; sexual abuse and rape outside. All of which was denied. The first rape denied in a way that was particularly destructive to my sense of bodily autonomy, for a long time, which lead to further assaults.

I was lucky, in that when I first started sprouting behavioural problems at school, aged 12 or 13, the therapist I was sent to sent me back to school and took my Mum in for counselling. There followed 10, 15 years of my Mother in therapy. Things didn't become great overnight. Things got a lot worse before they got better.

But in the course of that therapy, I eventually discovered things about my Mother's childhood. Abuse doesn't come out of nowhere. She was abandoned by her parents, who left her in the care of a relative who raped her repeatedly as she was growing up. For her to acknowledge the fact that I was raped would mean acknowledging her own rape, which she wasn't ready to do yet. She spent her entire life dealing with massive undiagnosed PTSD. She was hospitalised at least twice (that I know of) for "major mood disorders". I did not know that while she was raising us, she was wrestling with major mental illness - she later told me she would get up, feed us, take us to school, then go home and collapse straight back into bed with depression. I have dealt with depression, and been hospitalised myself, for mood disorders. I got into substance abuse to cope, which she never did. I have since learned about PTSD, because I've had to, because of my own abuse and assaults. She didn't have those resources when raising me. I have struggled with this shit my whole life. I cannot imagine dealing with this, and trying to raise children at the same time. *I* would not have coped. I am not surprised that she failed to.

All of this stuff is now puzzle pieces for me, trying to put together a picture of "why were things like that". The missing puzzle piece was my absent father. Absent emotionally through all of this stuff, absent physically as much as he could through overwork, just plain absent when he finally ran away. I've assembled pieces of his bizarre childhood from family history I inherited after that set of grandparents died. Another puzzle piece arrived after I was diagnosed with Asperger's; my Dad was all "oh hey a lot of my programmer friends have that, I'll go and take one of their tests... oh. That's an awfully high score, isn't it. And I was a lot worse before I found this community of people a lot like me." Another puzzle piece of so many things in my childhood that weren't him refusing to do things; just him being *unable* to. My Mum was raising children single-handedly because my father was just not there emotionally.

Things were fucked up. I'm not sweeping this stuff under the rug or denying it. But things like looking at my own freakouts (PTSD triggering + autistic meltdown = wow that is a person totally out of control to the point where I didn't even actually understand what was happening) and then looking at memories of my parents' behaviours, and seeing the same patterns has enabled me to say "wow, PTSD is a hell of a trip" with regards to out-of-control behaviour (even violent, abusive out-of-control behaviour) and trying-to-regain-control behaviour, rather than "what a vicious, controlling, abusive narcissist." Which it would be very easy, as an outsider, to think or dismiss.

I have a ton of friends with alcoholism and substance abuse disorders; I've done my own research on addiction because of my own struggles. When you read about the neurochemistry of those things, it does help to frame it as a disease, with both psychological and physiological aspects. Addiction is not a failure of will or a moral fault, it's something much closer to a mental illness. Mental illness is not a failure of will or a moral fault. It's a combination of misfiring brain function and environmental stress triggers.

Despite everything that happened in my childhood, I do not like "blame the mother" explanations. *Because* of everything in my childhood, perhaps. "A bipolar incest survivor with PTSD and a high-functioning Aspie get together to raise some children" sounds like the punchline of a joke. It's the hand my parents got dealt. They did with it what they could. I'm lucky that one of them got treatment, albeit after the damage was done. I am able to have a relationship with that parent now, because they walked out from behind the wall of denial. I understand why they did what they did, because they understand why they did what they did. When I say "deeply flawed human beings" I mean "deeply flawed" and I mean "human beings". Accepting both sides. In both of us, parent and child.

There's another option, though. My brother lives behind the wall of denial. My brother is a pretty awful fucking person in ways I've detailed on ILX before; he's swung over to the super-conformist, uber-conservative dark side. My brother is dedicated to being As Normal As Possible (tm). A ton of his behaviour is the kind of rudeness and brusqueness and not-giving-a-fuck-about-others and "Tell Me What I Did That Was Rude. I DEMAND that you tell me what, exactly, I did that was rude, or else you are a fucking liar and what I did was perfectly acceptable, you peasant" which could be read, if he ever actually sat down and admitted that something was wrong, as a lot of the same issues I face. Or it could just be HE. IS. AN. ASSHOLE. (I dunno. I lived a lot of my life with the terror that I was, actually, An Asshole because I could never figure out what I'd done wrong, until a very wise therapist figured out it was a "can't" not a "won't". A lot like my Dad.)

My brother's default explanation for everything is "My Childhood Was Terrible." This is not something he works on, this is his "get out of other people's emotions free" card. Our Mother was not a deeply ill person who needed a lot more help than she ever got, who did the best she could until she did, finally, get help. Our Mother is a SCREAMING EVIL VICIOUS DEMON-HARPIE HELL BITCH WHO RUINED HIS LIFE. He has cut off all contact with her - which, y'know, I support that decision if a family member is still causing abuse and chaos in your life. I no longer have any contact with my brother for pretty similar reasons. Except, well, he didn't just cut her off. Every now and then he'd go and yank at the chain, because the positions have been reversed and he figured out how to use psychology, not to heal himself, but to carry out abuse and psychological warfare against the mother that Ruined His Life. If I get hit as collateral damage in that war, well, that's Not His Fault.

Seeing my adult long-term-relationship smashed up meant that I discovered a new understanding of my parents' and what they went through. My brother's divorce just made him double down on hating our Mother and blaming her for his problems with women. Experiencing crippling mental health issues made me more understanding of my parents' problems. My brother? He doesn't have Mental Health Issues (never mind his own hospitalisations) he even has a note from a doctor that he likes to wave about saying he is Totally Normal Now. He just had a Bad Childhood, which excuses him from ever taking responsibility for his own behaviour, ever.

I just look at my Mother and I look at my brother, and I see a lesson in How To Be; and How Not To Be. One involves looking at your own flaws, and using those to try to understand the flaws of others. The other is just denial and abnegation of responsibility. Accepting this stuff is hard. Changing it is even harder. Accepting that these things are not moral flaws or failures of will: Mental health. PTSD. Addiction. Autistic spectrum stuff. These things come in patterns, though I will leave it to scientists to determine whether that's genetic or environmental (or probably both). But that kind of tick of realising and accepting: if you are dealing with this crap; it's very likely your parents also dealt with this crap, but with less understanding and less help.

Sorry this is so long. Sorry if this is not-helpful. I'm trying, specifically, to talk about my own situation. Your situations will naturally differ. But I just wanted to shade in the detail of what, exactly, I meant, by things like "Understanding" and "did the best they could," For my parents to have "done better", they would have had to have been different people, with different brains and different upbringings. They weren't. They were who they were. And this is who I am, now, trying to puzzle it out.

Christ that took me 2 hours to write. I am sorry it's so long. I can't TL;DR it, but don't really blame anyone who can't face that wall-o-text.

I guess the TL;DR version is: we are usually raised a lot like the way our parents were raised. If our childhoods involved hideous things like abuse and mental illness and denial, chances are our parents' childhoods also involved those things. We, now, have access to resources to understand how wrong and how damaging those things are. Our parents' generations generally didn't.

What you choose to do with that knowledge, for better or worse, is up to you.

I think is great if someone can see a parent's shitty parenting decisions from a socio-historical context and come to the conclusion that they did the best they could under a certain set of circumstances but that's really not going to be the case for everybody. Sometimes parents really don't do the best they could and from a personal growth and emotional development perspective there's just as much value on being able to say "This person did not value my safety and well being as much as they should have" as there is in being able to say "This person really did the best they could."

I've got one parent in each camp. Mom did what she could in some tough circumstances. She still dropped the ball in some major ways but she knows and acknowledges this and that means a lot. My father knew better and prioritized any number of less important considerations over my general health and safety. He was raised by an abusive monster that everyone treated (still treats, posthumously) like the Best Dad Ever but he also was a clinical family therapist so he can gtfo with any did the best he could" shit.

I think in terms of my Mum, a lot of her problems stemmed from not coping

And instead of leaning on my Dad to pick up the slack, which she would never do why because weakness, or talking to someone anyone which she would never do why because weakness, the pressure she put on herself to be "Mum" just completely broke her & she spiralled into making worse and worse choices, reacting physically to stressors that in no way remotely deserved those reaction. to anyone outside it looked like it was ok but inside our house it was Beirut & she was holding us all hostage to her fear of failure

And Dad was scared of her, the way we all were. We were basically helpless & just had to do what we could to "dont make her mad" etc

What made it complicated with Mum was that the only person she was confiding in was me, I'm telling her to leave, to get help and doing all I can do at 16 to protect her from herself & protect the rest of the family from her flameouts

So I saw my parents as flailing adults from the time I was 16... it made me angry for a long time after, even when things got back to normal, even after Mum apologized for putting me in the position I was in

I got the anger & out of my system a few years ago, and I reckoned with the emotional abuse. And I am now (somewhat) at a place where I can think back to those experiences with a form of acceptance - those things happened, but here I am, and allow it to move back into the past where it belongs. That's not our relationship now & a great deal has changed just with the passing of time - the huge geographic distance helped maybe more than anything.

It's there and it won't go away or even diminish, but I'm not fighting the fact of it anymore. I have reached a point where I don't live in that visceral anger anymore.

Not everyone gets there, I don't think there is a right or a wrong way to go about it & I kind of think just being here is a fucking great accomplishment

Each of us ITT has become a unique & independent woman *in spite of* our past. They did what they could, or didn't, but WE filled in the blanks ourselves as best *we* could, and we deserve love & encouragement for that no matter where any of our heads are at, no matter where we are in the process of dealing with so much heartbreak & trauma & bullshit

<3

geographical distance OTM!

I think I just extricated myself (not particularly deftly however) from an unhealthy friendship. Growing up as a weirdo, I have tended to spend time/be friends with anyone who wanted to be my friend, because friends were hard to come by. Now, I'm realizing how the way I felt about myself as a young person (childhood through early 20s) is still structuring my thinking and behavior as a middle-aged person. I will be friends with people and participate in groups because they want me, regardless of whether I really want them. So I will find myself in situations where I am obligated to do things that I don't gain the pleasure that I should from them, and then develop a sense of resentment, rather than just politely say no.

The depression doesn't help, because I question whether I am unhappy because of the depression or from the activities/people that I am spending time with that I'm honestly not that into. Like this woman (the now former friend), who is kinda emotionally still in high school, where she will criticize other women based on their appearances (e.g. "why does she shave the side of her head? it's so unfeminine!" or "She looks fat in that dress!"). And she is also really self-absorbed and obsessive, so she rarely talks about anything other than a handful of topics, mostly boyfriends and pets, that just get really stale, oh and she has some weird rivalry (that isn't mutual) with another good female friend of mine, and will consistently make catty comments about her whenever she comes up in conversation. I eventually learned not to mention this other friend in her presence, which is just ... well, now no longer an issue!

Sounds like a positive change to me <3

Good luck Quincie!

Let us know if you want a special "Since Uterus Been Gone" playlist in your honour.

Awww thank you for remembering and thinking of me!

Yesterday was my last day of work pre-surgery (surgery is tomorrow, but I'm home today for BOWEL PREP, details of which are surely only appropriate for the TMI thread). My boss, a badass nurse whom I adore, called me into her office as I was headed out and said in grave tones: "be sure to poop the first day back!" Love working for a nurse!

I think an excellent point for this thread is how COMPLETELY BULLSHIT is that we still, in 2015, call the removal of a uterus a HYSTERECTOMY. It really chaps my ass. I've tried to take a stand by calling it a "uterus removal" instead of the accepted medical term. So hilarious substitute lyrics are welcome and really do make me LOL, but let's avoid the stupid "H" word!

I'll be thinking of you q. I had this surgery back in 2010 and as someone prone to depression anyway I pretty much spent the next year or so in a state of severe anger or severe depression. Not saying that will happen to you, of course. I'll be sending all my good thoughts and vibes your way.

good luck quincie!

Uterus B Gone!

Thanks VG! Sunny, I'm so sorry you had a shitty post-op time. Did you get to keep your ovaries? The plan is that I keep both, which hopefully will help ward off surgically-induced menopausal misery (I've read that the ovaries can be somewhat "sleepy" after the trauma, and some temporary menopausal symptoms may occur). My depression has been well managed on the same med for ages and ages, so my fingers are definitely crossed that uterus yank does not rock the boat on my mental health. I'm fortunate that I never wanted to have kids, so I'm not having to struggle with any loss of fertility issues. I know that is incredibly hard for some women, even those who have had kids and think they were done anyway.

I don't know if it's complete bullshit that we call the removal (-ectomy) or a uterus (hustera) a hysterectomy. We also call a kidney removal a nephrectomy, stomach removal a gastrectomy, etc. There's lotsa Greek used in medicine instead of the vernacular, which often aids in worldwide standardization of medical terminology.

BUT ANYWAY! Good luck tomorrow! Hope you've saved up The Wire or some other show to watch the shit out of in the coming days.

I thought q was referring to "hysteria", in the old sense of the word

no, "hysteria" is referring to the womb.

Good luck, Q!

I got just under two weeks of dry time before my period started again, so at this rate, I may be eventually cleared to join you (and Sunny) in a state of blissful womblessness.

Although, that doesn't sound too blissful, sunny. I'm sorry. <3

Awww, thanks, Carl. Now that I have a 6 year old who knocks his teeth out and throws himself through windows the tide of my feelings is definitely turning :D

Thanks VG! Sunny, I'm so sorry you had a shitty post-op time. Did you get to keep your ovaries? The plan is that I keep both, which hopefully will help ward off surgically-induced menopausal misery (I've read that the ovaries can be somewhat "sleepy" after the trauma, and some temporary menopausal symptoms may occur). My depression has been well managed on the same med for ages and ages, so my fingers are definitely crossed that uterus yank does not rock the boat on my mental health. I'm fortunate that I never wanted to have kids, so I'm not having to struggle with any loss of fertility issues. I know that is incredibly hard for some women, even those who have had kids and think they were done anyway.

― mom tossed in kimchee (quincie), Wednesday, November 11, 2015 11:21 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes! I did keep my ovaries (side note: one of them is heart shaped lol) and believe me when it comes to period time you feel everything but without the blood or baby making. I don't remember any menopausal symptoms but I was so furious I wasn't really watching for them.

My hysterectomy came about because I developed Adenomyosis (this is where the uterine tissue grows into the muscle of the uterine wall and results in really sharp stabbing pains that never stop) after having a c-section after age 35. All of my anger was directed toward my obgyn because when I was in the hospital to have Henry the original plan was a natural birth but he kept pushing for a c-section because otherwise it would be a 30+ hour labor. After saying no a couple of times we finally said yes and he never warned me this could happen. The c-section at my age is what did it. So I was mad and him and myself for agreeing and sad because no more babbies. I remember being in pre-op before the hysterectomy and it was me and pp. I whispered to him in all serious - "now is our chance run!!" but we didn't. Turns out that of all my obgyn's patients since he started practicing in the early 80s i was only the second case he had ever encountered.

Anyway....thinking of you right now Q. The recovery is easy peasy, physically at least. Just don't exert yourself for a few weeks and you'll be golden.

ps: sorry for not avoiding the H word :)

Got 99 problems but a uterus ain't one!

uter-less!

hope you are feeling ok x

I'm feeling good! Only rough spot was PACU, where I proceed to get sick all over everything, multiple times. They ended up admitting me overnight so I could stay on the IV for pain and nausea meds. Came home in the evening, had a very decent night of sleep, and now I'm comfortable and bored. Haven't needed so much as a Tylenol. Can get up and down myself, even picked stuff up off the ground without too much discomfort.

Surgeon told spouse that "we got a LOT of stuff out" hahaha

glad to hear of your successfully evicted uterus & minimal discomfort!

must feel super great to have "a lot of stuff" out of your body

everybody out of the pool

<3 glad yr doing ok quincie!

Excellent, quincie!

some quality jokes here <3 <3 <3

Yay, Q! So glad it's went swimmingly.

Congrats, Q!

Cheers Q!
Last night I went to a dinner party at which my mr was the only man in attendance and we talked about (among varied other things) the contents of our pubescent diaries and student menstrual blood art (2 of them work at the art school) Not gonna lie, it felt good to be a member of the ruling party for one evening, esp compared with my typical social outings.

Those topics were discussed lightly, I might add, not like in hushed or reverent tones and not with looks of concern on everyone's face

glad you are doing OK q!!

Pretty sure no boys are allowed in here

thought this was worth posting here
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/41314/on-pandering.html

oh wow. i've read some of his personal writing in the past, and stephen elliott STRONGLY reminded me of someone i dated.

reading this account of him--that pushiness, that entitlement, ugh. so creepy, and disturbingly familiar.

(haven't read past that--need to breathe for a bit)

if you guys want a terrifying body horror/women's health long read, morcellation is a good keyword
http://maisonneuve.org/article/2015/11/10/worth-risk/

MORCELLATION IS A TECHNIQUE for removing large body parts through small incisions. In the past, morcellation was done manually with a scalpel. But now there are special tools for the job called morcellators. They look like dainty power drills, with small, rapidly rotating cylindrical blades tucked inside the tip. Once slipped in through the tiny porthole, the device grasps and then grinds up the parts that need to be extracted, right there inside the abdominal cavity, and sucks the fragments out. Doctors occasionally do this to kidneys, spleens and adrenal glands, but it is in gynecological surgery where morcellation has flourished.

....Morcellators are particularly handy for removing fibroids, those benign growths embedded in the uterine wall, as the growths can be as hard as coconuts and sometimes as large. While an ordinary uterus can usually be slipped out whole through the vagina, a fibroid-studded one often cannot. With the help of morcellators, though, doctors can remove the entire organ through holes the size of quarters.

But there is a drawback to morcellation: because most gynecological surgeons were using the tools without anything around the tissue to contain it, the procedure could leave debris behind. “Small pieces fall into the abdomen,” said Camran Nezhat, a surgeon at Stanford University who helped pioneer minimally invasive and robotic surgery, but who, for exactly this reason, does not approve of open morcellation. To make matters worse, he said, during laparoscopic procedures, the abdomen is inflated with carbon dioxide. “That circulates the cells inside the abdomen,” he explained, making the spread of tissue fragments even more likely. Although doctors do their best to remove the bits left behind—plucking out individual chunks and rinsing the abdominal space thoroughly with a saline solution—there is no way for surgeons to be certain that they have removed every cell

Oh man LL I loved that read, esp the end:

Some ideas:

dd

Let’s punch up.

Let us not make people at the margins into scouts or spies for the mainstream. Let us stop asking people to speak for the entire cacophonic segment of humanity that shares their pigmentation, genitalia, or turn-ons.

Let us spend more time in those uncomfortable moments when our privilege is showing. Let us reflect there, let us linger, rather than recoil into the status quo.

Let us continue to count, and talk, and think about the numbers.

Let us name those things that are nameless, as Solnit describes, the way “mansplaining” or “rape culture” or “sexual harassment” were nameless before feminists named them. Let those names sing.

Let us hear the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. Let us remember that we become the stories we tell. An illustration: I was talking with the writer Elissa Schappell about how much we are both anticipating Carrie Brownstein’s new book. I asked Elissa what she made of this new trend of memoirs by badass women: Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon, Sally Mann, Amy Poehler. Was this trend the result of Patti Smith winning the National Book Award five years ago? Was the trend indicative of a new wave of feminism? Elissa interrupted me. “You keep using that word,” she said. “Trend. It’s not a trend. We are here now. We’re not going anywhere. We are here now.”

Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon, wherein we each make our own canon filled with what we love to read, what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up, wherein we can each determine our artistic lineages for ourselves, with curiosity and vigor, rather than trying to shoehorn ourselves into a canon ready made and gifted us by some white fucks at Oxford.

(I will start us off by spending no more of my living breath apologizing for the fact that no, actually, even though I write about the American West, Cormac McCarthy is not a major influence of mine.)

Let us use our words and our gazes to make the invisible visible. Let us tell the truth.

Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories.

Let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something better.

Can we share some stuff we've read l8ly that is in this vein, writerly wise

my favorite is carol tyler whose comics compendium LATE BLOOMER just killed me

also one of my kiddos [ok you're not supposed to have favorites but she's a favorite] handed me a copy of without tess and basically forced me to read it and it killed me
like i was yelling and gasping and laughing and crying at almost every page
i'm a loud reader and it made me THE LOUDEST

Wow, LL, that linked piece was such a stomach-gut-punch. I think I need to digest it a little, but I'm just kinda tired of digesting things.

(On many levels, I'm just kind of tired of a lot of things. But male entitlement is really kind of at the head of the list of things I'm tired of.)

Without my little notebook of Things I've Read this year (and since my commute changed, I've not read nearly as much, which saddens me) I'm bad at remembering the things I'm reading. I need a list of things I can read on my iPhone while waiting for delayed trains, TBH.

I am actually reading At Hawthorn Time by Melissa Harrison right now and there was this passage that just absolutely hit me. This character, a retired woman who moved to the country because she wants to be an artist, but she hates it, and she's having a bit of a crisis over what's it all for. And she thought to herself something like "art is the way that we actually know for certain that other people are real."

But it's that growling sense of ... annoyance / injustice / something ... how are you ever supposed to develop the sense that *you* are actually real, if the only art you ever encounter is all of that stuff made by (or for) the Serious White Men?

It feels like... Big Things have been happening in the world.

It's scary.

One wants to (well, really, I should use first person and say "I want to") connect with other people and talk about the Big Things and try to reach understanding and diminish fear. But every single space that is available to me, to talk about, or learn from, with regards to discussing the Big Things is dominated by this guy:

http://captainawkward.com/2015/11/05/786-trouble-dealing-with-male-grad-students-who-take-up-all-the-air/

Or more commonly, about 4 or 5 of This Guy, shouting at one another, and taking up all the air in the room, and no learning happens, and all I do is back out again more quickly than I came in, with this new annoyance compounding the already existent fear, and worry over my own ignorance. And also more detached and alone than before. Which is not a good place to be.

That speech/essay made me think about Exile in Guyville even more than I normally do (which is kind of a lot under my current circumstances)

Thanks for posting that link LL, gave me a lot to think about