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In Support of a Good Friend

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Perhaps the best thing one can feel about one’s friends is the desire to tell everyone you meet, “You ought to know so-and-so,” or “I hope you can meet …,” about them. Even better than that, I suppose, is telling your friends that you think of them in this way. I am grateful that this is a familiar feeling in my life.

I would like all of you to meet my good friend Kat. She is one of the more remarkable people I have met: 20 years old but with many more years than that in life experience, honest up to the point just before it becomes “honest to a fault,” curious, and funny. A good beginning songwriter and keyboard player. She has many ambitions, and one is to study in England; because no one would have given her a chance to attend college at all but she is a student at The New School through her own initiative and work anyway, I think that she will be attending school in England. She needs help with this, however.

She is pursuing her own fundraising this month at this site: Help Kat Study Abroad.

Kat has some details for us:

Attending college was a huge first step into making a better life for myself than the one I had come from. After spending some time in foster care as a kid and constantly feeling the need to fight to be heard, I am adamant about helping others find and share their voice.

Being in college has helped me to start on this journey, but I feel it is important to take my goals a step further. My goal is to study abroad at the University of Sussex next semester, and I need your help!

The University of Sussex is located in Brighton, which is known for its effective role in a variety of social movements. Attending the University of Sussex would develop yet provide opportunities to learn through real life experiences. Some examples of opportunities I plan on getting involved in include an organization called Mind Out, which is a mental health service targeted towards LGBTQ people. As someone who is a member of the LGBTQ community, I feel it needs to be incorporated in my activism.

What follows is an autobiographical essay that Kat wrote earlier this year. It is reprinted with permission.

“In My Skin” by Kat McCauley
Nothing felt real. The words that were coming out of my mouth were not my own. I was watching life around me happen, and had no say in the outcome of any of it. If anything was felt, it was discomfort, but even that felt far away. Everything felt far. I was floating further and further away from what was supposed to be my body. It was like going in and out of consciousness. I was told my mind was playing tricks on me. I wanted so badly to feel, but there was nothing gradual about who I was at the time, and any feeling that became present overcame me like a tornado. Before I knew it I was unmanageable and going down a long dark hill at a rapid pace. I was fourteen years old, and had never felt more alone. I was so good at pretending to be social, that no one knew how truly antisocial I had become. I was a chameleon, and could pick up on anyone’s personality. I could be anybody’s best friend. But nobody knew me.

I had been struggling with severe depression and feelings of dissociation for a few years, and had tried to keep it together.

Having just gotten out of foster care, I was learning quickly that suppressing my feelings was not going to work for me anymore. I had tried so hard for so long to be the perfect image. I wanted to control how people saw me, but eventually the truth caught up with me, and I had to learn to feel things as they were happening. It was a huge challenge, for I had never, until being in foster care, had the chance to experience my feelings in a safe environment. Feeling was something I viewed as dangerous and weak. I wanted to persevere. I wanted to be the one who did it all alone. Feelings became completely overwhelming and unintelligible for me. I had spent so long suppressing them, that if a feeling came up, I would go numb. The number I was, the further away I felt from myself.

It was at fourteen years old that I realized I could no longer persevere alone. I showed up to school one morning, something I hadn’t been doing very often, and ended up being sent away to a mental hospital by a guidance counselor who had become aware of how much I had been struggling. Terrified, I was forced back into my own skin, a place unfamiliar and lonely. While this was not the last time I would be sent away, being in the hospital taught me a lot about true bravery and strength. While being away in a safe space I began to face some of the demons that had brought me there in the first place. It gave me breathing room to begin to process some of the trauma I had faced growing up. It gave me the chance to learn how to take care of myself.

I can now see that strength comes in many forms. For me today, strength and courage come in the form allowing myself to be raw and to be seen. This is where the growth happens. This is where I can begin to heal. Through the love of the people who see me, I have been able to reclaim the love I’ve always wanted to have for myself. For a long time, my biggest hope was to want to want to feel safe. I realize now that I wanted to be okay the entire time; I just didn’t think it was possible. I didn’t think that someone like me, someone who came from dysfunction, someone who didn’t even feel connected to a body, could ever even consider the possibility of being safe. Today, I know it is possible to be safe in my skin. I am able to love and be loved in an authentic way. I am able to feel and to process the experiences of everyday life. I am able to live comfortably in my skin. Always Remember: YOU are LOVED. You are important! Most urgent of all, YOU ARE WORTH BEING SEEN.

I did not know Kat in that difficult period of her life, but all the work she has put into pursuing her truth over these years has given my friends and me one of the most authentic human beings we have been lucky enough to know. You ought to know her. I hope you get to meet her. I hope you can help her.

Two Awards in One Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Two fellow bloggers separately named “The Gad About Town” as a winner of the “Lovely Blog” award today. That is as cool as it gets.

Both are blogs that I enjoy reading regularly, by two very different writers in different parts of the world: Tidlidim and The Reluctant Baptist. Thank you both. Both writers have strong personal voices in their work and sometimes include their own photos.

In the blogging world, there are some rules of etiquette in the form of paying forward the “lovely” attention. Here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you for the award.
2. Add the “One Lovely Blog” logo to your post. Display the award on your blog—by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget.”
3. Share 7 facts/or things about yourself.
4. Nominate 15 bloggers you admire and inform nominees by commenting on their blog.

The last one first. I have been participating for the last 10 weeks in responding to our WordPress service’s Daily Prompt, which has helped spur my most prolific period of writing since graduate school. (This prolific-ness is a good thing, too, because I am working on a terrific project, due out soon, with another blogger.) Most of the writers with whom I have been communicating regularly, several of whom ask me questions and give me applause every single day, I met via that service. My subscribers have doubled and so has the number of blogs that I subscribe to. Go to the Daily Prompt any day and you will see the several dozen blogs that I read and often like every day.

I fear I will leave someone out, is all I am confessing.

Several random facts about me:

1. The number four is my lifelong “secret lucky number.” (Anyone who has gambled with me knows about this. Read: The Gad About Town: Against NYS Proposition 1.) Now, I know that in most of the world’s luck traditions, if one declares out loud that something is secret and lucky, one has immediately kiboshed all secrecy and luck out of that thing’s existence, but that is the beautiful thing about my “secret lucky number 4”: It remains lucky and maybe even grows in power every time I speak of my special relationship with it. Maybe.

2. I left New Paltz in 1995 to work in Narrowsburg, NY, and moved back to New Paltz in 1997. I left New Paltz again in 2000 to work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and returned to New Paltz in 2006. (There are legends about New Paltz and eternal return and gazing upon the nearby Wallkill River—I am legend, I suppose.) And then I had to move again, this time to Goshen, NY.

3. Depending on my relative levels of optimism or pessimism, I may refer to my spinal muscular atrophy as an “illness” versus a “condition.”

4. I pretended to write before I knew how to write. There may even now be pieces of furniture at my family’s house with my crayon scribblings on them and in them—I did not draw, I wrote, wavy lines that I would then inform my parents was a story. I’ll guess I was about three or … four. See? It must have been a lucky number.

5. I am very audiologically sensitive (I do not know if that is even a term). I can identify voiceover actors, even when famous ones are used anonymously. The downside of this is a sensitivity to certain noises … if the faucet in your kitchen sink is dripping, I will excuse myself from your living room to see if the tap can be tightened or if the faucet swung away from any container under it. Bloop bloop bloop. Sadly, this sensitivity does not translate to any musical ability. I have none, just an appreciation for music and performance.

6. I see words as I speak them.

7. My favorite animals growing up were dinosaurs. My favorite dinosaur was the triceratops. In the children’s books about dinosaurs, the triceratops always seemed to get into a tangle with the fearsome T-Rex and walk away, unscathed.

http://thereluctantbaptist.com/2014/10/07/and-the-nominees-are/

http://tidlidim.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/grouping-two-lovely-blog-awards-into-one/

I, Toward a Metrics of Me

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In the interest of full self-disclosure, what follows will disclose nothing about me.

I am a Twitterer. I Tweet. Once a year or so, I will participate in the nightly cocktail party, the veritable Algonquin Round Table, of online wordplay and games that can be found on that social media outlet. Perhaps you’ve seen these games, in which people follow the instruction given in a catchy hashtag, like hashtag (which is this symbol: #) “Add A Word Ruin A Movie.” As in: #AddAWordRuinAMovie. And then a participant, me let us say, will snarkily add a word to a famous movie title to ironically change the entire complexion of the movie. “Midnight in the Olive Garden of Good and Evil” is one that I love but can not claim credit for.

One day last year, the wit-fest of hashtag joking, the hive mind of Twitter intellect, had come up with #DrabFilms, and this was my contribution, and it was met with universal silence:

Not one single re-Tweet on there. Not one “favorite.” Bupkiss.

There is little in the world sadder or lonelier than a one-liner delivered to no one in a crowded room crammed with people ignoring the joke-maker’s contributions. “If a Tweet falls in a forest,” someone philosophically minded might ask, “with no one to re-Tweet it, did it make a sound? Nay, did it even exist?” (There are a handful of congressmen who might have their own answers to this question.)

“I Tweet, therefore I know that I am doing what I told you I am doing once I tell you what I am doing because others tell me that they say that they approve.”

Do I know what I am doing, where I have been, where I am going, who I am with—who I am, even?—without social verification, approval, disapproval, a certain number of thumbs-ups or stars or re-Tweets?

The American corporate world introduced the idea of measuring everything many decades ago but in the late 1990s employees discovered that their continued employment was dependent on finding new ways to measure everything. I remember my revulsion upon hearing the word “metrics” used in a sentence the first time. (For months, I heard the ghost-word “system” every time I heard “metric.”) The precise sentence was, “We are using all available metrics,” and I quickly noticed that no one else at the meeting table was laughing and they were still scribbling notes more furiously than students in a freshman philosophy seminar. For a while, the number of documents I was actively working on was my key metric, I was told by my employer. Then it was the total number of pages. It changed, often, but the accumulated number of metrics used to measure my metrics was never itself added up and counted. For a year or two I was publishing the average number of pages per document completed. Then it was pages per document per day.

Some time after that one, I was let go. A bad attitude has no metrics.

The social media revolution was long in coming and I enjoy it very much, but metrics have infiltrated our lives, even our fun-filled social lives. “How many ‘likes’ did that get?” Does my employment hinge on it? No? Why does it feel like it does?

When a celebrity or otherwise important person finds him or herself in an online controversy, the number of re-Tweets of the news-worthy posting is supplied in news accounts about the contretemps. The fact that a number is available and can be reported does not make it a statistic, much less a statistic worth reporting.

Sadly, I find myself watching the likes and numbers of visits to this web site right here, the one in your hands, every night. “The Gad About Town” is not my employment, it is something I want to do and share. But the fine people at WordPress make the information so easy to find and digest. It is information after all and it looks like an impressive collection of live statistics and it makes me want to have a boss to report it to every night. (So I Tweet it out sometimes, to attract more readers.) “This number of visitors read my work last night, but it is a smaller number tonight. Whycome is that, world?” Sad face.

(Sigh.) Metrics.

Never before in my life have I known how many friends I have, but if I wanted to, I could look and see every morning if the number of my online friends is larger or smaller than yesterday’s. Metrics.

Am I my numbers? Am I my metrics of me? Everything in the world can be counted, and that number can be known and disclosed, but more often than not this one fact does not make it information.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 1 asks, “To be, to have, to think, to move—which of these verbs is the one you feel most connected to? Or is there another verb that characterizes you better?” I Tweet.