#parents sent me to a evangelical school for a few years | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

del3141 · 2 months

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This is... an experiment of sorts. I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with Tumblr when all is said and done; it's a friendly and fun site, but this isn't a place where I've felt like it's OK or welcome to post personal things. But I'm going to give it a shot.

CW: Growing-up trauma, parent-induced trauma, misanthropy. Heavy things. Long post.

This is something like automatic writing that I'm trying to do here, only the spirit I'm trying to channel is my subconscious. I don't know what its thesis is. But it needs to get some things out that have been troubling it for a long long time, and I'm going to do what I can to aid the process along in the only way I remember how, by writing it down. It's been a long time since I've done this.

I used to write things down a lot more. I wrote in a LiveJournal back when that was a thing. I had a small core of people I knew online, and I wrote for them, but I also wrote a lot for myself. I never liked having a journal just for myself, but I liked being able to write in a place where other people I knew and liked could share their thoughts on the things that I thought about.

Unfortunately, what happened to that was my father found the journal, well after I moved out and cut off contact with him, and he used it to try to get back in contact with me. I friends-only locked my posts after that, every single one, manually, that was how much I did not want him to be part of my life anymore. I also left a comment on my journal explaining that I did this because I didn't want family reading my journal. For a while, things were okay. A few posts of mine I got some comments from folks asking to unlock them so they could share - simple stuff, the one I remember was about what I thought of 4th ed D&D, because apparently I described it pretty well - so I unlocked a few for sharing. My father jumped on those. After that, I ended the journal. It's still out there on LJ, but it hasn't been posted to, and it won't be posted to again.

That, plus seeing what some of the truly evil shit done to people I know online, by places that openly celebrate harming people for who or what they are, got me to close off my online presence for over a decade. It seemed better to be invisible than to be vulnerable.

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A year or so ago, I sent one last email to my mother, in response to her latest of many, many attempts to convert me back into evangelical Christianity and sell me on being a Republican because schools are grooming children and because she fears for my soul and also because tired party-of-lincoln bullshit. This is after they very honestly told me about their running interference for my stepbrother, who is now convicted of the kind of crimes my parents think LGBTQ+ people are committing. I told her not to contact me again. She has respected my wishes.

I've not sent the one last email to my father, because I am concerned that any contact with him whatsoever will be used as a means to get more information on how to *continue* contact. The best approach I have devised involving him is to be a black box - no information goes to him from me. He continues to attempt to reach me, either through new email addresses or through social media invites from any direction he can manage. He's made actionable threats to others, and he'd do the same to me.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I've severed contact with my family. It doesn't last. Mostly what I feel is anger towards them, for being what they were and are. So much of the cruelty in the world that I see is so tightly wrapped up with the culture of my parents that, when I see things in the world that are hateful and cruel, the reaction in the back of my mind is: These are the things that my parents are putting into the world, eagerly, enthusiastically, with the confidence that God is on their side, and there are millions upon millions more just like them, eager to see the world carved bloody until it fits their expectations.

What I feel more than anything is... surrounded. I've separated myself from the shitty place I came from, but that place is just a microcosm of the species. There are things that this species does that are profoundly alien to me, sometimes even hostile, things it does to others of its own kind that it's deemed "not like us". The best you can get from a relationship like that is polite, tense tolerance; if things go badly, you can expect violence, of one kind or another. It feels like there is no in-road to be part of these communities - you can be tolerated among them, but you won't be accepted, if your mind and your ideals don't conform to theirs. You are here, and they will let you be here, but you are not welcome, and they are keeping an eye on you for behaviour that they will scorn.

I've now spent nearly forty years in a world where I am not welcome. I've learned to put on a very convincing mask, and that's kept me relatively safe for a very long time. It also helps that I'm a cis white male previously in the USA and now in Canada, I've had a lot of easy coasting on that because it makes the mask more acceptable. It takes a lot out of me to keep the mask up. It still feels safer to be invisible, but you can't be in the world without being a part of it.

It's a bit like being a mouse, living in the walls, nibbling at the edges of the world and just trying not to get caught or trapped.

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aita-blorbos · 19 days

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(Long story, au so far removed from canon it might as well be ocs at this point)

AITA for cheating on my wife?

(TW child abuse, religious trauma/abuse, homophobia, death of a child, cancer)

I (34M) have been married to my wife, L (35F) for 15 years. We got married shortly after I turned 18, because that is the norm in the church we both grew up in. L has been my best friend since I was very young, we have always been part of a group within our church of people around our ages (currently 30-36, three other men and two other women). Our church is extremely conservative and restrictive, best described as a fundamentalist evangelical Christian church, and extremely tight-knit and small. I was born into it, as were most members of the church, and because of how close everyone is, there's very much an attitude of "us vs the outside world."

The home I grew up in was worse than miserable. My mother joined the church as a teenager, which is not very common, and married my father barely a few years later, as soon as she turned 18. My father is nine years older than her, and a piece of shit. Neither of them are good parents, but my father was extremely abusive to her and to his children for as long as I can remember. My mother was also abusive to myself and my little sister, but never to the physical extent that my father was, she tended much more towards emotional abuse. This is relevant because one of the reasons L became my best friend, and one of the reasons our whole group means so much to me, is that they listened to me when I said the way my parents treated us was far beyond the norm, even for other families that believed in the idea of "spare the rod, spoil the child." Every child in our church was spanked or sent to bed hungry, but not every child was held home "sick" from school for a week to hide the evidence of how bad things got when their father had a bad day at work. Whenever I tried to tell anybody who had actual power about the way my sister and I were being treated, I was brushed off as a kid who didn't understand consequences. L never did that, and neither did anybody else in our group.

My sister was born when I was eight. Her name was Kayla. When I was fifteen and she was seven, she was diagnosed with leukemia. When I was sixteen and she was eight, she passed away. L and our other friends were my rocks during that time, as my home life only got worse as my parents fed off the sympathy of others and took out their financial stress from the medical bills on me. This was when L and I first discussed the possibility of marriage once we were both eighteen and sort of started seeing each other. I say sort of because it wasn't like we dated, exactly, as boys and girls were pretty heavily discouraged from spending one-on-one time together, and things didn't really change that much between us, or in the dynamic of our group, which at that time was much smaller because a four year age gap is much larger at 12 and 16 than it is now, when the youngest of our friend group is 30 and the oldest is 36. We just knew that we were planning on getting married, and a few months before my eighteenth birthday, we talked to her parents, my parents, and the pastor of our church, and everybody agreed that we would get married once I graduated high school, a few months after I turned 18. Then I would go to college, law school, everything I had always planned to do to start a career to support my eventual family, and once I had settled into a career, she would be the housewife she had always expected to be.

Before I get to the next part of the story, let me make something extremely clear. I love L. I have loved her since we were children, and I will love her until the day I die, no matter what happens. It's a fact about me that I will never escape because she was there for me and made sure I knew that I was loved in the worst times and moments of my life, and that means everything to me.

However, that love has never been romantic.

I realized that I was gay when I was 12 years old. It was an extremely traumatic realization for me; I was physically sick to my stomach for days and experienced some of the only true panic attacks I've ever had in the days after that. I didn't tell anybody because, as you might imagine, the attitude towards gay people in our church is not exactly friendly. Quite the opposite, in fact. I knew that if I told anybody, even my best friends or the pastor of our church, that I would be an outcast and treated like garbage. I hated myself, and I was convinced that if I was a good enough Christian, God would take the burden of homosexuality away from me and make me straight like I knew I should be. I prayed for so long that my knees bled from kneeling, and I threw myself into the church like never before. I led youth groups and bible studies, volunteered to teach Sunday school, I went to both Sunday services and the mid-week service every week, I was in my pastor's office asking questions and discussing theology constantly, and still, I never had any interest in any girls and couldn't stop the random thoughts about boys from popping into my head. Puberty only made things worse.

By the time my sister died, I had convinced myself that if I found the right woman, I would eventually love her the way I was supposed to. Something in me shattered when Kayla died, and as L supported me through it, I decided that she would be the woman I loved and married.

It didn't work like that. Obviously. A few years ago, after more than a decade of marriage and still the constant prayers and begging God to "fix" me, my faith slowly died. Looking back, I almost can't believe how long it took for me to realize that if God couldn't protect me from my parents, and couldn't heal my sister, and couldn't "fix" my sexuality, then why was I spending so much of my time and effort worshipping him? Once the resentment took hold, I slowly stopped believing in everything I had been taught since I was a kid. I had always been very good at compartmentalizing, keeping the church and my faith and beliefs completely separate from the "worldly" knowledge I needed as a lawyer and to get through school. Even when I was in college and law school, there was this constant caveat of "I need to know this (ie evolution) to get a passing grade, but I know the Truth as it's found in God's word." As I very slowly started questioning things, that dichotomy started to break down in my head. If I believed in DNA, which had been proven by science, why shouldn't I believe in evolution, which was also supported by science? If I can trust archeological and geological dating on things like ancient structures in the Middle East and artifacts that support bible stories, why can't I trust those same geologists who say the Earth is billions of years old? The logic started eating away at the things I believed, and what started as resentment towards God turned into apathy, turned into agnosticism, turned into atheism. At this point in time, I would consider myself an atheist.

I didn't know how to talk about any of this with anybody. I didn't have any friends who weren't also in the church, not even at work, where I rarely talked to anybody about anything not directly work-related. I knew if I tried to talk to L about it, especially the part where one of the things it stemmed from was my being gay and lying to her about my feelings and attraction to her for years, at best, she would try to convince me to talk to the pastor about it and at worst, she would tell everyone, and I would lose every important person in my life. So I didn't. I kept acting like everything was the same, going to church and work and bible study, leading worship music on Sunday mornings. It was eating me alive, but I didn't know what else to do.

I'm not usually an impulsive person. I love planning and knowing exactly what is about to happen. It's not like me at all to do something on impulse. But one night, after work, and after months of trying to figure out what to do about my whole life being a miserable lie, I texted my wife that I had to stay late to finish some work for a case and not to wait up for me, and I went to a gay bar. It was my first time in any bar, actually, and very much my first time acting on anything when it came to my sexuality.

There was a guy there. I mean, there were many men there, but there was one I couldn't look away from. It wasn't just that he was physically attractive, though he was beautiful, it was how free he was. He was dancing and wearing makeup and had his fingernails painted, and it made my chest hurt to look at him and wonder who I would have been if I could have been so free. And he clearly liked the look of me, too, because he came up to me when I'd been inside for a few minutes and asked me to dance, and one thing led to another and I went home with him. It was the first time I had sex with somebody other than my wife, obviously, and it was also the first time I ever felt like I understood what sex was supposed to be about, because I was actually attracted to the person I was having sex with. Was it perfect? No. I had no idea what I was doing because I've never done it before, but it was fun. I smiled without faking it for the first time in a long time, and he even made me laugh.

He gave me his number before I left. I started texting him at work the next day, and never stopped. It's been around five months, and I'm a little bit scared to admit that I think I might be falling in love with him.

As far as I know, he doesn't know that I'm married. My wife obviously doesn't know, and I don't know how I would even begin to tell her. I know I have to tell him that I'm married and that I've already waited too long. He deserves better than I've given him. But I'm scared that if I tell my wife, she'll tell everyone at church, and I'll lose every semblance of a support system that I've ever had.

So, AITA for cheating on my wife with a man and having no idea how to move forward?

#aita #am i the asshole #unreality #religious abuse #cults #child abuse #abuse #partner abuse #child death

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sangthael · 4 months

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doomsday o clock…. can i know more about jay and / or tyler :) i like their designs (also “straight (gay)” made me laugh)

YAYYY DOOMSDAY OCLOCK neither jay nor tyler are as fleshed out as adrian and sparks are BUT they do have stories ❤️

jay was born in 1996 in america after his grandparents + parents immigrated from siberia in the 60s. he was born in california, in which his parents (and grandparents, who lived with him) relatively neglected him. his family held a conservative lifestyle, where his mother was a housewife who tended to jay and her husbands (judgmental) parents (jays grandparents) and his father was the money maker in control of most of the house’s food, money, status, etc. his father was an Unkind man, who would get loud and start arguments when he felt his place was being challenged. and since jay was the unwanted son, his father felt his status as man of the house was challenged regularly for the smallest things. jay, neglected by his mother (who really had no choice in the matter, she tried to placate her husband more than anything to take the focus off of jay) and abused by his father, started sneaking out in middle school, finding a small friend group at school to bring with him to shoplift as a scapegoat, and disregarding his own safety. this worsened the older he got, misdemeanors turning into criminal activity such as selling and doing drugs, underage drinking, breaking and entering, even fighting with police the few times he was caught. jay had landed in juvinele quite a few times, even spending several months alone in the detention center before (unwillingly) returning to his family. this pattern of behavior has led to his development and diagnosis of ASPD. his parents sent him off to psychiatric wards quite a few times, which resulted in his diagnosis when he was 19. he moved out of his parents house soon after and fled to the midwest (florence, kentucky) so his parents could no longer find him, and decided to spend his free time pursuing making indie/electronic music after consulting with a therapist to find healthy outlets, even going to a nearby community college and holding a job at a guitar center. (on that note his theme song is summertime! by jojomber :3)

when the apocalypse started, jay was relatively ruthless at 24 years old. full of energy and pent up anger and repressed trauma, he was a threat to everyone around him, infected or otherwise, especially since running out of his prescribed medication. soon enough, though, his episode ended, and he retreated into the corners of his now abandoned town. eventually, he’d found the local radio station, long since abandoned as well, and used scattered around manuals around the building to put the radio station back into use and into a functional home for himself. currently, jay uses it to play music, both recommendations and his own original songs, and tell surrounding communities or individuals with radios about the weather, incoming shipments of fresh food or supplies from out of the local area, the movement of zombie hordes, etc. because of his usefulness to the surrounding people, he’s been generally deemed useful and a neutral party to both sides, uninvolved in fights or battles or other disputes. bexley (adrian) even supplies him with ssri’s when possible, while both communities give him food and other supplies to keep him alive. he houses people in his station sometimes as well, making the acquaintance of sophie and lance quite a few times :)

ANDDD TYLER TIME i dont own tyler but this is what i got from his creator :D

tyler was raised by your typical evangelical christian family who seemed relatively normal on the outside, but his parents were in truth relatively controlling. while not entirely strict, they liked to control what tyler did in terms of identity and career path, which led to tyler playing football for a lot of his life in high school (with parker). tyler trailed parker for a lot of their high school years, hiding his true feelings and sticking to his side as a side-kick in parker’s endeavors. when the apocalypse started, tyler fled the city of chicago. guilt eventually drove him back to search for parker, but parker was long since gone, deeper in the south by then. tyler spent a lot of his time searching for parker in the apocalypse, usually isolated and avoiding others, until he found himself in sophie’s cabin. he was not above eating human meat by then, which sophie warned him some meals she makes may include some, since animal meat was scarce in the apocalypse, and he’d agreed to it. and, after this delicious meal tyler had eaten, whose corpse does he find dismembered in sophie’s tool shed but parker’s?

the realization tyler had eaten parts of his longtime friend (crush?) ruins him inside and out. sophie realizes what must have happened and apologizes to tyler and tries her best to comfort him, but tyler, obviously freaking the fuck out, flinches away from her and runs. he doesn’t touch meat again after that, traumatized by night terrors and overwhelmingnausea upon even thinking about it.

tyler survives the rest of the apocalypse (somehow), entirely in a fugue state, and lands himself in the same government facility as sparks. sparks comforts him, spends sleepless nights with him, takes care of him, and helps tyler accept himself and what had happened so long ago. they get together and love each other very much :)

#sorrt for the late answer i am sick 💔#doomsday #anon #asks #i love sparks and tyler theyre some of my favorites #i like jay too he’s silly #he does announcer style type things for fights he sees between people

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riverdamien · 28 days

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From Darkness to Light!

Holy Saturday

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? - Mark 15:34

I was raised in the Church, and I knew about Christ for as long as I can remember; I knew Jesus, and at the age of twelve felt my call to the ministry. I experienced the heavy hand of discrimination in the Church, but my relationship to Christ saved me.

The Church has done so much damage to the lives of people through the years--the Crusades, supporting war, and its war against LGBTQ+ people; I have heard many homeless youth and adults speak of the Church, even if they knew of its existence and the LGBTQ+ with so much anger, anger that will take years to overcome.

I have a young friend, who is 24 now, but have known since he was 13 ask me "What is this God thing about?" And in talking to him he had no understanding. Religion had never been in his circle of orbit. One young man on Haight was given a pamphlet by a woman who was "evangelizing", and resulting from his previous experience of being kicked out and rejected by family and church, he tried to commit suicide.

I spend most of my time with street youth, and almost everyone feels lonely and abandoned, rejected. They feel very much alone as I do, and I can identify with them.

For me, the precious center of the Passion is our Lord’s cry from the Cross. A few moments later, His heart gives out and darkness descends upon the earth. But in His despondent cry, Christ has entered our inner darkness. He takes on one of the most fragile aspects of our condition – the sense that we are alone, abandoned, and unwanted – and redeems it from within. And my aloneness is redeemed in Christ, and I try to live out that redeeming joy giving myself away to these guys!

Fr. Henri Nouwen experienced loneliness and isolation as a result of being in the closet, and he writes about our journey:

We are on a Journey

Where are we going? After a very short visit to earth the time comes for each of us to pass from this world to the next. We have been sent into the world as God’s beloved children, and in our passages and our losses we learn to love each other as spouse, parent, brother, or sister. We support one another through the passages of life, and together we grow in love. Finally, we ourselves are called to exodus, and we leave the world for full communion with God. It is possible for us, like Jesus, to send our spirit of love to our friends when we leave them. Our spirit, the love we leave behind, is deeply in God’s Spirit. It is our greatest gift to those we love.

We, like Jesus, are on a journey, living to make our lives abundantly fruitful through our leaving. When we leave, we will say the words that Jesus said: “It is good for you that I leave, because unless I pass away, I cannot send you my spirit to help you and inspire you.”

Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God!

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Prayer of St. Brendan!

"Help me to journey beyond the familiar

and into the unknown.

Give me the faith to leave old ways and break fresh ground with You. Christ of the mysteries I trust in You to be stronger than each storm within me.

I will trust in the darkness and know that my times, even now, are in Your hands.

Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,

and somehow, make my obedience count for You"

------------------------------------------------

(Temenos and Fr. River seek to remain accessible to everyone. We do not endorse particular causes, political parties, or candidates, or take part in public controversies, whether religious, political or social--Our pastoral ministry is to everyone!

Day of (No) Silence 2024: Rise Up. Take Action.

History of Day of (No) Silence: Started in the mid 90’s by two college students, Day of Silence has expanded to reach hundreds of thousands of students each year. Every April, students would go through the school day without speaking, ending the day with Breaking the Silence rallies to bring attention to ways their schools and communities can become more inclusive.

2024 Day of (No) Silence: With more than 800 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced last year, we must Rise Up and Take Action. GLSEN’s Day of NO Silence is a nationally recognized student-led demonstration where LGBTQ+ students and allies all around the country—and the world— protest the harmful effects of harassment and discrimination of LGBTQ+ people in schools.

Fr. River Sims, D.Min., D.S.T.

415-305-2124

[email protected]

www.temenos.org

www.paypal.com

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lengeman-temp · 1 year

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Essay

*It was a central tenet of my family’s religion that I deserved to die. *

There. Is that the sentence that starts my story? Certainly, no sentence can better describe my life. But perhaps there are other sentences that explain more.

* My father beat me half to death, then sent me out into the world to finish the job on my own.*

There’s another sentence. A bit of a one-liner. A zinger. Try to be clever. A bit of a joke. That was the way my memories handled the awfulness. Could I squeeze my entire childhood into a sentence? Less than twenty-five words? That’d be nice. Then I’d only have to think about it for about ten seconds. Find some humor in it. Bookends. A sentence that has a better beginning and end than my own life.

The end. Of life. That’s what I fear every day. But I couldn’t see the beginning any better than the end. My brain wouldn’t allow that. It let me have a few one-liners. That was it. My childhood. My family.

* In my father’s defense, Evangelical Christians in the 90s were obsessed with horror. *

Another good one. No. I told myself I’d stop defending him. Stop working so hard to figure out how I might think about it, so he’s not a monster. How it was something other than endless, aggressive cruelty. I tried so hard. For years. Decades. To have a family. To have a father. A mother.

Who didn’t want me dead.

Logically, at some point, I could be pretty sure they weren’t going to kill me.

But it wasn’t about logic. It was about belief. Faith.

There was death in my bones. There was fear, squeezing my lungs, every day.

I deserved to die, and it was only a matter of time before everyone saw it. And the world would take whatever steps necessary to expose me to ridicule, punishment, suffering, and inevitably, death.

How do you convince a child so completely that he deserves to die?

So completely, that once he is an adult, logical and educated, he wakes up terrified almost every day? So that the days he is merely scared, he rejoices that he is not terrified?

You start with a verse. “The wages of sin is death.” That won’t do. So tame. Merely a precursor to the Good News of forgiveness.

You must go further back.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21.

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:

Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.

And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

That was the verse my father quoted to me so many times.

At 8 years old I didn’t know what a drunkard was. I had never tasted alcohol. I couldn’t be called a glutton. I ate what my mom served at dinner.

But rebellious? She used that word a lot. So did he.

Since I deserved death, the most vicious beating was a mercy. Less than I deserved. I tried to imagine so many times what it would feel like to be killed with stones. The beatings helped me know.

It can drive a person mad, trying to remember why they deserved such cruelty. It would be better if I had deserved it. Then I wouldn’t have cruel parents. I’d have just and appropriate parents. Parents who simply tried to beat the evil out of an evil child. But it’s hard to remember what made me so evil.

I remember telling jokes in class. I was the class clown. That was disruptive. And rebellious.

I remember erasing part of a bible verse on the blackboard in Sunday school. I wrote something about pizza. I was proud that I could make the “z” in cursive. I learned cursive in third grade. That’s how I know I was 8. Maybe nine at the oldest. That one time. I can’t date most memories.

But no, the punishment, it happened every day, all week, all summer. The reports from teachers came only every few months. It’d be nice if it was someone else’s fault. Someone outside of my family. Like a teacher. I’ve tried so hard to remember what I did at home to deserve it. I can’t remember.

Sorry. I’ve strayed from the recipe that made me.

Ingredient one: The verse about stoning a child.

Is that enough? Oh no. That verse is cast aside easily, onto the heap of verses inconvenient in our modern times. Few can remain troubled by it for long.

Ingredient two is essential:

A two by four.

A two by four is a piece of wood that is four inches wide and two inches thick.

Get a two by four that is about 18 inches long.

Cut off the corners at one end to make a handle that is about two by two. You can angle up at the end of the handle for aesthetic purposes, if you’d like.

Amateurs may round the top corners, even the side corners.

I was there to observe my father grow into an expert from his amateur days. You don’t want it rounded like an oar, though you may call it a paddle.

The corners are good. Effective.

Rough edges, splintered wood, these can assist. Sharp corners are superb.

You can drill holes in it. For speed, like a fly swatter. This isn’t really an effective aerodynamic move, but it’s a good psychological move. A reminder that it is designed for maximum speed, and should never fall slowly.

While I was directly involved in observing my father’s growing expertise, I can’t claim to know all possible variations of this recipe. But I do know one variation that works quite well. To the above recipe, insert a large man, over six feet tall.

Then add a small child, no older than six. To be most effective, the two by four really must be introduced by then.

The beating starts with a lecture. It should be derisive. Mocking, almost jovial. The two by four, cut into a paddle, should be tossed into the air, flipped, and caught. Over and over again. If the paddle is dropped, perhaps even on the foot of the parent, don’t despair. Simply channel that additional anger toward the child.

When the child is sufficiently confused and frightened and embarrassed, make the child lean against something. A bed will do. The child should be partially laying down. Face down.

Then the large man should bring the paddle down with all his might onto the child. Again, and again.

This should be repeated daily, or multiple times a day, for the next five or six years, before other methods must be employed.

The child shouldn’t know what to expect. Sometimes the paddle falls two, three, or five times. Those are welcome and rare days, seemingly dropped in only to serve as a contrast to the true days. The real days.

On these true days, which must come frequently, the father must abandon himself to the two by four, and let it fall and fall and fall.

He must use muscle strength. The board must fall swiftly, to strike the child with great force.

The general target may be the child’s bottom, but the force will drive the child in every direction, as much from the force of the blows as from the child’s involuntary shudders to escape the pain.

The mind-numbing, overwhelming pain.

As the board strikes the child on his back, legs, and sides, you must yell at the child to keep still, then tell the child that you have increased the duration of the beating as punishment for the child’s movement. In order for this to make sense, the father must pretend he has some idea how long it will take for the beating to last, for his rage to subside.

The only restraint a parent need exercise is when the board begins to strike the head and neck, or the arms and hands as the child tries to shield himself.

Bruises can’t be visible. The community supports the two by four, as long as they don’t have to think about the details. They’ll make up excuses for angry welts if they have to, but they’d rather not bother more often then necessary.

When the child runs to the corner, trying to hide, return to the mockery, the yelling.

Laugh at the child. It will reinforce how helpless they are. How much control you have over them. Use the board to point back at the bed where they must lay.

Laugh when they ask how many. How many more blows will come? You can’t know, if you are doing it right. Until your arm tires. Until the board breaks. Until the void eating your insides has been sated for the moment.

The board will break, if you do it right. You will make more. You can brag to your friends about how many you’ve broken, and discuss which wood is hard enough to withstand the small body of your child.

Don’t allow the child to reveal the effects of the beatings. Don’t allow them to lean off the edge of a chair, keeping pressure off of their worst bruises. Don’t allow them to limp.

This is practical, to avoid the judgment of others. Others outside of the community might get particularly meddlesome.

But it’s also part of it. You control the child. You force them back into the pain. You don’t allow them any release.

Not for years and years and years. And by then the torture has become part of them. Part of their essence. By the time you cut the last handle in the last two by four, that older child doesn’t even need the beating to feel pain. And as they grow even older, they would gladly return for a beating, daily again, if it would take away the terror that engulfs them every day.

So, there it is. That’s the recipe, as far as I can tell. Two main ingredients, but the process is important. It can’t be rushed.

It’s better as a one-liner, huh? No one likes it stretched out.

* Like many boys, I followed in my father’s footsteps. He liked to convince me I deserved to die. I picked up the hobby when I was on my own. *

See- much nicer as a dark joke. No one wants the details.

There are some optional elements. It helps if the father is a leader in a religious community. And if he teaches that the world is a frightening, wicked place that is full of danger.

And what do you get? If the recipe is followed?

A man, if it can be called that, with the terror of a child. A terror that never leaves. A grown child, who fears the night, because nightmares come.

A man who fears the morning, because the moment he leaves his bed he will unwittingly begin to commit terrible infractions that will lead to a terrible beating. Or, worse, he will spend his days trying to figure out the trick to avoid the inevitable consequences of existing, and then berate himself when he fails yet again to save himself from the terror.

If the child had realized sooner that there was no way to avoid a beating, maybe he could have realized it wasn’t his fault. That the father needed to beat. To strike a child. To hear a child’s screams. And the father wouldn’t be denied, no matter what the child did.

You get a guy that starts to relax around lunch, but then begins to tense up again in the afternoon. The time when school would end, and the boy and the father would cross paths.

A boy who fears dinnertime, that limbo that occurs either before or after a beating or, sometimes, in between two beatings.

You get a man who collapses into bed with an ounce of relief that a day has passed, that the beatings are over, but nervous that another day will come.

You couldn’t go to bed early, as a child. That was tried before. That gets more mockery, being dragged out of bed, laughed at for thinking it would save you from a late beating. Better to leave bed as a safe place and not attempt to hide there too early.

And what of religion?

That was the point of it all, right? To instill in the boy the preeminence and essentiality of religion? Evangelical Christian religion.

Well, back to that terror fetish. Yes, there were the weird movies. Before the popular and tame Left Behindseries, there were the older movies with demons and guillotines and the mark of the beast.

And the horror plays in churches.

You did not grow up in my evangelical tradition if you never saw demons drag a screaming mother into hell while her terrified daughter cried and begged for her. Very dark and very loud plays.

Satan mocked the girl. Much like my dad mocked me.

“Mommy! Mommy! HAHAHAHA!”

But then Jesus came and the girl forgot about her mom.

Jesus did me no such favors with my dad. Or my mom.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. My dad liked that verse too. Maybe it was as important as the stoning verse. He mocked those modern theologians who tried to equate fear with reverence or mere respect.

My dad mocked a lot of people.

My dad wanted us to know the verse meant terror.

Terror of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

And God was a father. Think of him like your own father.

God subjected Jesus to torture and death.

Just like Abraham was willing to kill his own son.

Just like my dad was willing to kill me.

*A central theme in Christianity is that a parent must be willing to kill their child if God so orders. The devout remain ready to plunge knives into their children at a nod from the Lord. They may even begin the process in advance of any instruction, just to show their devotion. *

That’s better.

My father was everywhere in religion. The pastor of our church. A chapel speaker at my Christian schools, the years I wasn’t homeschooled.

And my father heard from God. Maybe God spoke only to him.

He admitted that there were some good prophets in the world, who wrote some pretty good things in his magazines and newsletters, but no one in his life, that he met in person, could hear the instructions of God.

Not like he could.

This is likely why he tended to drive away everyone in his life.

And taught me to do the same.

My memories tried hard to delete my mother.

To find good memories to keep, to string them together as a whole.

To pretend she didn’t have a role in the recipe that made me.

I almost believed it. For a long time. Decades. Despite my siblings telling me otherwise. But we could only talk about it sometimes. We couldn’t really face it all. Just bits and pieces.

One liners.

Nine kids, half always in some form of shunning or ostracism. Blacklisted in the community. The others desperate to bow and scrape. To remain in good graces to the angry one who could hear from God and his trusted advisor, Mom.

There were summers, and there was homeschool. Fifth grade, ten years old to eleven.

For these times at least, it was my mom’s reports from the day that led to the beatings.

And she created my real self-doubt. The sense that maybe the thoughts in my head were what made me evil, regardless of what I did.

The self-doubt she sowed when she tried to convince me that good people choose not to do anything labeled “bad” by the church and also don’t even want to do those things in the first place.

My real theological questions, sincere, and aimed at learning, were classified as rebellious.

In hindsight, after an education in philosophy, psychology, and law, I can see that she really wanted to live in a world that was simple. Without nuance, everything right or wrong, no middle ground.

All theological questions answered, and social issues established for all time.

An inquisitive child was a danger to that world.

She employed my father to beat it out of me.

In our modern internet age, we are aware of the prevalence of conspiracy theories. Very strange and horrible beliefs that spread through some communities. Before the internet, many of these types of beliefs spread through churches, via books and newsletters and gossip. These beliefs were largely hidden from mainstream society, however such a thing is defined, until they burst through and involved the state, such as in the case of satanic ritual abuse prosecutions.

My mother believed that there were real witches who had real contact with Satan and who were among us in our towns and cities. A strange visitor who came once or twice to church was potentially a witch or warlock trying to curse the congregation. My mother believed that there was a direct connection between Harry Potter and actual witches who actually existed and actually fought against us for the devil.

Supplemental to these beliefs were a host of medical and financial beliefs. Multiple times, my parents were scammed out of money through some scheme based on these fringe beliefs.

And I can look back and see that I was beat and beat and beat so that I would stop questioning a worldview that was riddled with dangerous nonsense. Not a Christian worldview, but a specific rural Pennsylvanian Germanic Republicanish superstitious judgmental folk religion based largely on Christianity.

So, did it work?

Well, I wanted to be good. So badly, I wanted to be good. I returned to church over and over. And though I had terror throughout my world, it was never so strong and overwhelming as in church. It was as if I had returned to the dungeon of torture that was my childhood. To the grand courtroom that sentenced me to humiliating and painful death.

I tried different denominations, different formats.

I didn’t have the language of trauma and panic attacks back then. I just knew there was a terror, a burning in my chest as I sat in church, a command in my body to run, to run until a safe place could be found.

But I kept coming back. I wanted to be good.

I wanted to pray. To worship.

Even to a God that was a father.

Who demanded fear first, as a precursor to wisdom.

But my body recoiled in terror at the church door. And no wisdom seemed to blossom from it.

Rather, there were a wealth of tales to describe the beings that cringe as the church draws near. A whole mythology defining those who shrink from a view of the cross.

This is the defining characteristic of the wicked.

Or of wicked beings and creatures.

The vampires and devil spawn of myth.

I had exhibited a defining characteristic of wickedness: fear of the church. And I could not rid it from my body.

The fear wasn’t an excuse. It couldn’t save me from the judgment of friends and family, as I shrunk away from the church. The rich tradition of shunning and ostracism was available for anyone who began to exhibit the traits of an unbeliever. By not showing up when they were required.

I still snuck in to empty churches to pray and meditate, sitting alone in a pew. It was easier if there was no one to judge me. I missed prayer. I missed a community of like-minded people.

I missed my parents. Love and fear all mixed together.

I wanted to be good.

But good works, volunteering and helping others, can be an endless burden, if relied upon to prove one’s goodness. It’s never enough. Any moment not doing good is proof that you can’t do enough. A goal to be good always requires just 25 hours a day of good work.

Did I say I missed my parents? I did, didn’t I.

Fear and love all mixed up together. Intentionally.

Is that why I went back to them? Crossed back 3,000 miles across the country, gave up my geographical buffer against them, and returned to them?

When the pain of death wouldn’t leave my bones, when the fear was with me every day when I woke, I felt myself breaking.

Maybe the mandate of the fear in me would only be sated if I did its bidding.

I never got a guardian angel, just an evangelical minder to point out my dangerous shortcomings.

Is that a one-liner? Should I put it in quotes?

I came back to make peace with my parents, to see if that would make the mind-numbing pain and confusion in my mind and body to just stop. Even if they had been cruel and wrong, I needed an alternative to death. They had created my death mandate. Maybe they could help me make it stop.

But redemption doesn’t come that way. The wicked must repent.

For all my repentance and proclamations of forgiveness, I couldn’t change them.

And I could see it, finally. Their wickedness.

My parents were wicked.

The cruelty. It wasn’t from God; it was from them. Themselves.

Selfishness and anger and jealousy and greed. All of these things.

It is a weird thing to realize your parents are wicked, and will not repent.

Especially when your dad was supposed to be the most righteous man alive.

Particularly when he repeatedly resists attempts to repent and find forgiveness.

And once I admitted their wickedness, I saw that their brand of Christianity was not monolithic, as they had led me to believe. It was a collection of localized superstitions and conspiracy theories, not endorsed with any coherence in the greater Christian tradition.

The closer I got to my parents, the more my body reminded me that I was destined for death, and only death. That I deserved to die immediately, though the universe would accept pain and humiliation as a temporary substitute to a sentence of death.

And when a person’s entire being believes- knows- that that person deserves to die, the only sensible action is to fulfill that mandate.

To die.

It hurts, every day.

The sentence of death.

The fear, the pain. Terror.

The minutes are so long, filling hours of unbelievable duration, and then days beyond.

I didn’t have the words before. But now I do. I don’t like to say then, but I must.

My parents make me suicidal. I like to think I’d never kill myself, but who can know such a thing? The closer I get to them the more convinced I am that I must die. That I do a favor to those in my life by removing myself from it.

I wanted a big extended family so badly. But now I know that without my family in my life, I am not suicidal. That those beliefs are false. Nonsense. That I’m Ok, I think. That I can live, and deserve to live.

I miss my siblings. It’s not totally their fault, not all of them. But I can’t see them. They are powerful conduits for the worldview trying to kill me. And my parents have not tried to grow, or change, or abandon that worldview.

I won’t go back again. I’ve felt so foolish coming back to them once. I might not survive another return. There are more efficient weapons than two by fours in this world.

More efficient killing devices than stones.

I don’t want my body to command me to look for these weapons.

I don’t want my body to be an agent for a worldview that wants to kill me.

There’s hope, but in a new direction. A direction I tried to take. But I never stopped looking back, and so I never made it down the new path before, but now I will.

I’m surprised to find that God may be there, ahead, more than he ever was when viewed through the lens of my father’s vanities.

That I don’t need to recoil in fear at the door of the church. That my body isn’t broken.

It was doing its job to identify danger, to send me in another direction.

I don’t deserve to die.

*I don’t deserve to die. *

I’m starting to believe that. It took four decades. But I’ll take it. And move forward.

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lumini-317 · 3 years

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Hello!

This will be my official “introductory” post!

My real name is Erica, but I go by many names. My nickname repertoire includes but is not limited to: Lumi, Lumini, Cricket (I have a habit of rubbing my feet together, lmao), Jinx, Eri, Er, EriJoy, Sunbaeby, and Aceir (my real name but in alphabetical order).

This is my first ever Tumblr blog. I’ve had it for a while but have rarely posted anything, that along with the fact that I’m on mobile is kind of a mess so I apologize for mistakes and all that.

I have 3 older brothers, an older sister, and a younger brother.

I’m an ambivert. Sometimes I love hanging out with bigger groups of people, other times I dread it.

I’ve taken the “16personalities” test 4 times and all 4 put me in the “Diplomat” category, however I got “Advocate” (INFJ) 2 times, and “Protagonist” (ENFJ) and “Mediator” (INFP) 1 time each.

I am LGBTQ+. I’m asexual, aro+panromantic flux, and while I feel like I’m genderfluid, the changes are very subtle and so I sometimes just go with agender, gendervoid, or neutrois. It’s a lot less complicated that way. I’m ambiamorous, and also pronoun apathetic!

I love whump. I’ve loved it for as long as I can remember but only found the whump community maybe 3(?) years ago.

I also love K-Pop, C-Pop, J-Pop, and Asian dramas, mainly K-Pop and K-Dramas, though.

I’m a HUGE multistan. ATEEZ, SKZ, TBZ, EXO, BTS, Red Velvet, SHINee, iKON, MONSTA X, TWICE, TO1, WANNA ONE, SuperM, X1, MIRAE, Ciipher, Golden Child, Purple Kiss, BAE173, SF9, IU, ONEUS, ONEWE, The Rose, PIXY, LUCY, STAYC, WEi (which I pronounced as “way” for an embarrassingly long time), Dreamcatcher, Brave Girls, TXT, ENHYPEN, SNSD, KARD, AKMU, SHAUN, Gaho, NCT, GHOST9, 1team, SE7EN, Cross Gene, D1ce, AB6IX, CRAVITY, BLACKPINK, CIX, VIXX, f(x), 4Minute, CLC, YEZI, B.I, Wonho, (G)I-DLE, EVERGLOW, SEVENTEEN, BROOKLYN, Ha Hyunsang, DAY6, GOT7, Teen Top, BAP, TREASURE, UNIQ, etc! It goes on, far longer than I can list. I am also very much against fanwars, they disgust me.

I’m also a HUGE animal lover, and a big softie. I can’t even squish insects. I don’t care that they can’t feel pain and don’t experience emotions, I just can’t bring myself to. I make it my mission to save any type of animal I come across. I find toads in our koi pond and immediately pick them out and take them to a safe place. I help turtles across the road. I got a mouse out of a puddle and revived it, releasing it when it was healthy enough. I saw a snail on a piece of wood that was going to be thrown on a fire and carefully pulled it off and put it somewhere else. So far I’ve found 5 stray cats (Piper, Toothless, Felix, Kai, and Kit Kat—all were found as skinny, sickly kittens) and took them in, raising them as my own. I rescued a chipmunk from certain death-by-cat. I’ve even saved a few baby raccoons, ducklings, lizards, spiders, and snakes in my time. And I’ll keep doing so for as long as I live.

I love writing, drawing/sketching, and painting, however I’m not confident that I’m good at any of those things, lmao. I mean, I don’t think I’m the worst, but my finished “works” often leave me unsatisfied with my “skills”. But of course, that won’t stop me from trying to improve!

I’m a maladaptive daydreamer. This can cause issues in some places while helping me out in others. On one hand, it makes doing chores and such kind of difficult. Like one time I had to take care of my dad’s pigeons while he was fixing our shed and one time he pointed out how slow I was with the chores. His words were something along the lines of, “I’m already almost done with what I have to do and you’re still working with the pigeons.” Also, it (and maybe ADHD if I do have it?) made school a nightmare for me. But it’s also helpful because then during church it’s really easy to keep myself occupied while the pastors go on about their Magical Sky Daddy™’s son throwing a tantrum and killing a figtree because it didn’t have any figs and how that story should “challenge” us or something.

The characters in my daydreams are weird, though. They merge and separate with each other to make different characters depending on the situation. Most of them don’t have definite genders. Only a handful of them have names because they’re always merging and separating like some kind of Shadow Clone Masters or something. Stuff like that.

One of my characters is for sure a demi-boy, though, and his name is Kyler.

I brought this up because I was watching The Andy Griffith Show and Andy was giving Opie a lecture on how many poor kids there are in the world and used the ratio “one and a half boys per square mile”. Opie then says that he’s “never seen a half a boy before”. Kyler just sort of pops into (fake) existence, jumps off the couch, and throws his arms in the air while saying, “Half a boy, right here!” I burst out laughing. Thankfully it didn’t seem weird, since my parents started laughing at Opie and thought that I was just laughing at it, too.

Any-who.

If I daydream while I’m standing, I’ll often pace and gesture with my arms while moving my lips. Sometimes I’ll even whisper. If I’m sitting down, I usually fidget a lot (such as pick at my shirt and rub my feet together), stare into space, and move my lips or whisper. My family sometimes ask me, “Why are you whispering?” Or, “What are you grinning about?” And I just shrug because I don’t know how to explain it to them without risking them calling someone to pray over me, lmao. I mean, I wasn’t even allowed to have imaginary friends because that was “evil”. When I was about 7, I told my parents about my imaginary unicorn friend and they gave me a lecture and “prayed over me”. It was embarrassing and awkward for me.

I’m suspicious that I might have ADHD, but don’t have the money to actually get a professional diagnosis. I’m also too scared to ask my parents about it.

Speaking of which, my family and I don’t see eye-to-eye. I mean, they don’t know it because I’m good at hiding it, and they think I agree with mostly everything they do but boy, is it a mess.

You see, they’re evangelical conservative Christians. “LGBTQ+ people are going to hell”, “ThE LeFt ARe eViL AnD ARe TrYiNg To BrAiNwAsh OuR ChiLdrEn”, “Trump was sent by God”, “Intersex is fake”, “Women must submit to men”, “You should get married no later than in a year or ‘the temptation’ to have sex might become too much”, the whole bit.

Meanwhile I’m over here with my (imaginary) pride flags, just existing as an agnostic leftist who wants everyone to have equal rights, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, and would rather redo my horrifically atrocious kindergarten closing program role than pray to a god who (if they/he/she/it/whatever exists) gives cancer to kids and killed millions of innocent animals and people in the Bible.

But they have no idea that this is how I feel and now expect me to be baptized within the next month to show that I have “accepted Jesus Christ as my savior”. Yeah...that’s gonna be an awkward discussion...

Anyway, that’s just some things about me. Sorry that I got sidetracked a few times, lmao!

I look forward to posting more and maybe even making friends!

Thank you for reading (:

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“Girls’ schools promoted an intense female peer culture which contrasted with the disciplines of moralistic home environments. Evidence from the accounts of girls attending the myriad female seminaries and girls’ boarding schools throughout the Northeast suggests that their academic programs were relatively gentle, and that their peer culture was powerful and often fun. Despite the best efforts of outnumbered teachers, relations with friends tended to overshadow lessons learned. Overwhelmingly when girls wrote home to their parents, they described the girls they had met, and the antics they had shared; in diaries they noted the romantic intimacies they had formed, with academic work generating only occasional mention.

Girls’ peer life at school was high-spirited, collective, and ritualized all at once. Teachers themselves often participated. At Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1860, teachers organized a costume party, suggested characters for everyone, and helped sew costumes—perhaps in part a sewing lesson. (For Lily Dana, suggestions included an elf, Mischief, or a witch.) At a Prospect Hill School party in 1882, townspeople came, the girls wore flowers and white dresses, and Margaret Tileston reported that she had done the quadrille with Miss Clarke and the gallop with Miss Tuxbury—concluding that she had had ‘‘a very nice time.’’

Girls remembering their days at convent schools report similar good times. Julia Sloane Spalding recalled elegiacally her years at Nazareth Academy, a school run by the Sisters of Charity in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1850s. ‘‘The sisters allowed us to romp and play, dance and sing as we pleased and our stage performances were amusing, if they had no greater merit. Musical soirees, concerts, serenades and minstrelsy kept our spirits attuned to gladness. Varied by picnics, lawn parties, hayrides, phantom parties, nutting parties in summer and candy pullings and fancy balls with Nazareth’s colored band to fiddle.’’

Exclaimed Spalding, ‘‘O what fun!’’ in fond reflection on the good times among the sisters who served ‘‘good substantial sandwiches, cakes and fruit’’ from ‘‘great big baskets.’’ She concluded, ‘‘and so, the spice of life conduced to our health and happiness.’’ Mary Anne Murphy arrived at Nazareth Academy with her sister in 1859 during a quadrille, the slave musicians calling out the figures. She and her sister stood in ��‘wonderment that such fun was tolerated in a convent.’’ Whatever the nostalgia of middle age, certainly these reflections suggest that elite Catholic and Protestant girls’ academies left some of their richest memories in collective fun.

If teachers sponsored some activities, they implicitly sanctioned many more. Wilfrida Hogan attended the Sisters of St. Joseph convent school in St. Paul in the 1870s and remembers fondly her class, which was known for its lively irreverence: ‘‘Each girl seemed to view the other as to who could play the biggest pranks, or have the most fun.’’

Ellen Emerson overflowed with delight in a letter to her mother (significantly, not her father) while at Miss Sedgwick’s School in Lenox, Massachusetts: ‘‘Every night we do things which it seems to me I can never remember without laughing if I should live to be a hundred. The most absurd concerts, ludicrous charades, peculiar battles etc. etc. Then the wildest frolics, the loudest shrieks, the most boisterous rolling and tumbling that eye ever saw, ear ever heard or heart ever imagined. I consider myself greatly privileged that every night I can see and join such delightful romps.’’

When teachers were around, the pranks were more likely to occur upstairs in student bedrooms. Lily Dana and friends joined together to victimize two other girls by putting crumbs in their bed, and cutting off candle wicks. Another evening Dana noted that she ‘‘Had some fun throwing pillows and nightgowns,’’ and though Miss Porter caught her, it did not seem to dampen much her spirits. Teachers at girls’ schools were occasion- ally disciplinarians, clearly.

One teacher told Lily Dana that ‘‘she supposed my mother let me do everything,’’ and the sisters at St. Mary’s Academy in South Bend, Indiana, turned the piano to the wall in order to keep girls from waltzing with each other. Yet students often emerged victorious; at St. Mary’s they played combs for dance music instead. (One participant reported that ‘‘the Sisters had to give up, for they knew not what to do.’’) The ideology of nurture combined with the shared exuberance of age mates overpowered much teacherly remonstrance.

It is sometimes hard to read such tales of schoolgirl exuberance without wondering whether the inmates had taken over the asylum, however, so a corrective is in order. One such account which requires a second look is the spirited account of Agnes Repplier, In Our Convent Days (1906), about her time in the late 1860s at a Pennsylvania school run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Repplier writes of the pranks and passions of her band of seven partners in crime, in an ebulliant account designed to appeal to a readership newly attracted to childhood naughtiness in revolt against Victorian propriety. It is clear in retrospect, though, that she must have concealed or minimized an- other side to her experiences. For the denouement of her story is her expulsion and removal from a school she adored.

Peer cultures could also be cruel and hurtful beyond the control of evangelical teachers, as the practices of hazing in British public schools testify. Some of the most painful memories of inclusion and exclusion in girls’ schools centered around that most primal of media, the sharing of food. Food boxes, customarily sent from home, were the occasion for impromptu parties, a demonstration of wealth and taste, or an opportunity to play favorites.

The elation which greeted such arrivals might well prove a commentary on the regular fare at boarding schools, which sometimes undoubtedly was very poor. (The advice giver Mary Virginia Terhune’s critique of girls’ boarding schools included the accusation that they fed their students from a ‘‘common vat’’ which supplied breakfast, dinner, and supper all together, a practice partially confirmed by one account of eating the same stew at least twice a day at an Ursuline academy in San Antonio in the 1890s.)

At any rate, the arrival of food from home occasioned select gatherings and provided opportunities for discrimination among friends. When one friend’s mother brought good things to eat, Josie Tilton noted that ‘‘we’’ had a feast tonight, explaining for the future who she would always mean when she said ‘‘we’’—‘‘Lizzie, Emma, May and I’’— the groupness secured by inclusion in this select group of diners.

Lily Dana suspected a friend of being miserly and so snuck into her room to inspect. ‘‘There was a box which had been filled with cake, part of a pie and several other things filling her trunk nearly half full. . . . If I had a box sent to me I think I should give my friend more than ‘five or six cookies.’’’ If girls could feel short-changed by each other, relations with parents could also strain over the sending of food boxes, which represented extremely conspicuous con- sumption for girls attempting to ‘‘belong.’’

In an unusually direct letter home in the 1840s, Maria Nellis passed on to her parents her unmediated hurt and sense of disadvantage in the competition for food—and the status that came with it. Elizabeth got her box yesterday and was favoured with six times more things than I was. Her box was so large and heavy the master found it his match to carry it upstairs. She has 4 kinds of cake, nuts, apples, candy, clothing and every thing else, but after all, Dear Poppy, I am not jealous. . . . When you sent that box you did not send half what I asked. I was very disappointed. You said it would be eatables, but it wasn’t. You sent only a few apples, one cake and some clothes. Why didn’t you send me some nuts? I haven’t had a nut yet this winter, and indeed I expected nuts above all things. E. Fox had a box worth speaking of. Now that shows that you don’t care enough for me to even send me a few nuts.

Intermittently, Nellis regained control, but her grievance was palpable. Finally at the end, she acknowledged to her parents that she might be hurting their feelings, reassured them that she loved them all with ‘‘a deep and fervent love,’’ and promised better behavior in the future. Clearly at stake for her was both status in the school world and a primitive sense of deprivation in her own family.

As the correspondence suggests, the emotional atmosphere in girls’ boarding schools was not only intense but more expressive and enacted than that within moralistic, Victorian households. Within private, female, boarding academies, duty-bound Victorian daughters learned languages of sentiment, desire, and emotional excess censored from other parts of their lives. The elaborate conventions accompanying the expression and affirmation of affection among boarding-school girls, sometimes involving teachers as well, was indeed a separate ‘‘female world of love and ritual,’’ as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg affirmed in a classic article about nineteenth-century women’s culture.

In recent years, Smith-Rosenberg’s ‘‘Female World of Love and Ritual’’ has been attacked for its overgeneralizing characterization of an exclusively female emotional sphere in the nineteenth century, but her strongest evidence confirms the significance, the power, and the longevity of girls’ boarding school friendships, which were enacted through elaborate rituals in a range of schools.

The rituals of boarding school life centered around the making and breaking of special friendships, known variously as ‘‘affinities,’’ ‘‘specials,’’ or ‘‘darlings’’ and increasingly as either ‘‘smashes’’ or ‘‘crushes.’’ One way of expressing interest was to ‘‘filipine’’ with someone, to leave her a surprise gift outside her door. (When Lily Dana was caught, she needed to give her gift, a large apple, outright.) Such relationships played out in diaries, letters, and the poetry of autograph books. Girls expected to pair up for many school activities and entertained a variety of ‘‘dates’’ with different girls for walking, going to church, and sleeping.

Sally Dana wrote home to her mother explaining that she was following her father’s advice not to form special friendships too soon, and so had ‘‘slept in eight different beds.’’ During these private moments, girls would share secrets about their own likes and dislikes, each other, their teachers, families, and their school lives. The intricacy of such social calendars opened ample opportunities for misunderstanding and frayed feelings.

These peer relationships characterized elite female seminaries in the North- east, but they also appeared in a range of schools, including the African American Scotia Seminary, founded by the American Missionary Association in Concord, North Carolina, following the Civil War. Scotia had northern roots, which may have influenced its student culture. Glenda Gilmore tells us it was modeled on Mount Holyoke, and was ‘‘calculated to give students the knowledge, social consciousness, and sensibilities of New England ladies, with a strong dose of Boston egalitarianism sprinkled in.’’

Roberta Fitzgerald went to Scotia in the early twentieth century and kept a composition book, likely in 1902, which was filled with the talismans of schoolgirl crushes. A note inside addressed to ‘‘Dear Roberta’’ asked, ‘‘Will you please exchang rings with me today and you may ware mine again,’’ and Roberta herself wrote a sad poem to a friend ‘‘Lu’’ who had thrown her over.

And so you see as I am deemed

Most silently to wait

I cannot but be womanlike

And meekly await my fate.

Ah! sweet it is to love a girl

But truly oh! how bitter

To love a girl with all your heart

And then to hear ‘‘Cant get her.’’

And Lulu dear as I must here

Relinquish with a moan

May your joys be as deep as the ocean

And your sorrow as light as its foam.

On the back of the notebook, which also contained class assignments, was a confidence exchanged with a seatmate. ‘‘I was teasing Bess Hoover about you and she told me she loved you dearly.’’

For those much in demand, this charged atmosphere of flirtation and intimacy in the North and South represented an exhilarating round of fun and sport. For those less secure, diaries and letters presented an obvious outlet for the anguish of the neglected. Agnes Hamilton, a member of a Fort Wayne clan which sent several daughters to boarding school on their way to prominent careers in progressive America, experienced some of both. Sometimes she basked in the glow of family reputation; often she worried over her own inability to keep up with her illustrious cousins. Her unusually detailed accounts document an entire school culture rather than just an individual emotional life.

Hamilton’s first impressions of school social life at Miss Porter’s School were favorable, but even these revealed insecurities to come. In an entry from November 1886, when she was seventeen, Hamilton noted that ‘‘Farmington is just as perfect as they all said it would be, the girls, Miss Porter, and all.’’ Her reservation had to do with her own imperfections: ‘‘But I don’t think I am the right sort of a Farmington girl.’’ Even so, Agnes was in demand, describing a flurry of close attentions from numerous girls. A week later, in her cousin’s absence, she received displaced attentions:

Yesterday Mannie was very nice to me. I suppose she thinks I am lonely without Alice. We walked past the fill around by the river to the graveyard. Then she came in and we talked for an hour. All evening we were together. This afternoon we walked together too for Tuesday is her day with Alice. We went down to the green house where Mannie gave me some lovely roses. I would give anything to know what she thinks of me. . . . Will I ever be able to talk and be jolly as other girls? Some girls are frightfully stupid and yet they can make themselves somewhat agreeable. I have struck up a sudden friendship with Lena Farnam. We were together Saturday afternoon and evening and Sunday I asked her to be my church girl in Alice’s place.

Agnes was still in a position to be picky, noting one drawback: Lena ‘‘seems very nice indeed but I wish she were not only fifteen.’’ Lena was far from the only prospect. Agnes noted another new friend: ‘‘I have seen a great deal lately of Edith Trowbridge too. When she overcomes her shyness she will be exceedingly nice.’’ Not surprisingly, with all the intensity of the socializing, Agnes mentioned with no comment that only three out of thirteen in the class were prepared for their lessons that Tuesday. In those early weeks, Agnes Hamilton’s enthusiasm for this exciting life of emotional intrigue was palpable. The next week (she seems to have written on Tuesdays), Agnes announced to her diary ‘‘the jolliest crush in school’’ involving one of her very own intimates of the week before.

‘‘I walked with Edith Trowbridge this afternoon, on purpose to have her tell me about Lena. I hinted and hinted in vain. I told her about every other crush in school but she never said a word about Lena’s, so at last I told her that I knew all about it but even then she would not say a word about the subject. I hope she will tell Lena so that she will speak to me about it next Saturday when we are driving.’’ The triangulation of such relationships increased the possibilities for intrigue. Agnes wearied a bit of the uncooperative Edith, though, observing that though ‘‘very nice . . . she did not get over her stiffness.’’

Agnes Hamilton seemed to be trying to do her schoolwork, but her roller- coaster social life intervened. One day when she was preparing for class, a friend came by to teach her a dance step, from which she was interrupted by the arrival of a buggy she had rented to take another friend for a ride, the same girl whose ‘‘jolly’’ crush had amused her the week before. (‘‘The more I see of her the better I like,’’ she now reported. ‘‘Her face is rather attractive at first and then it grows on one.’’) When she returned, she found another visitor who stayed till it was time for tea.

The result: ‘‘I have not looked at my Mental since Thursday.’’ By the end of the same day, yet a new ‘‘crush’’ had taken over when Agnes got word of someone’s interest in her, and Agnes wondered ‘‘if I have ever been as actively happy.’’ The frenzy had settled down a week later, when Agnes announced that she had all her walking days ‘‘just as I want them.’’ Each day of the week was assigned a different companion, with whom Agnes would exchange intimacies and gossip, using the rituals of girls’ school life to structure its emotional extravagance.

One must conclude that the intensity of the social life was seen to serve some purpose, for evidence suggests that it was allowed to flourish until the turn of the century. (Lily Dana noted that Miss Porter’s permission had been sought for at least one and probably more sleeping dates.) At that time, new sexualized interpretations of girls’ and women’s friendships brought a crackdown on such friendships. At the time, though, they appear to have received official sanction. In fact, one of the first of Ladies’ Home Journal ’s ‘‘Side Talks with Girls’’ took up the question of ‘‘School Girl Friendships.’’ The Journal endorsed such girlish relationships for their innocence and energy and their precious brevity, saluting ‘‘the giddy, gushing period’’ as one which ‘‘never comes to some and to most it soon passes.’’

In particular, it contrasted this girlish spontaneity with the superficiality of the jaded young lady. Its contrast of ‘‘young girls, lively, radiant, energetic, spirited, loving girls’’ with ‘‘young ladies who talk of their beaux, dresses and the surface shows of society’’ represented another version of a conventional warning against precociousness. Girls’ crushes on other girls were still perceived as innocent and healthy—and would be well after doctors first began to cast suspicion over such relationships in the 1880s and 1890s.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Competitive Practices: Sentiment and Scholarship in Secondary Schools.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

#victorian #history #education #sexuality #american #jane h. hunter #how young ladies became girls

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silent-era-of-cinema · 3 years

Text

Hans Walter Conrad Veidt (22 January 1893 – 3 April 1943) was a German actor best remembered for his roles in the films Different from the Others (1919), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and The Man Who Laughs (1928). After a successful career in German silent films, where he was one of the best-paid stars of UFA, he and his new Jewish wife Ilona Prager were forced to leave Germany in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. The couple settled in Britain, where he took British citizenship in 1939. He appeared in many British films, including The Thief of Bagdad (1940), before emigrating to the United States around 1941, which led to his being cast as Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942).

Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was born in his parents' home at Tieckstraße 39 in Berlin to Amalie Marie (née Gohtz) and Philipp Heinrich Veidt, a former military man turned civil servant. Veidt would later recall, “Like many fathers, he was affectionately autocratic in his home life, strict, idealistic. He was almost fanatically conservative.” By contrast, Amalie was sensitive and nurturing. Veidt was nicknamed 'Connie' by his family and friends. His family was Lutheran, and Veidt was confirmed in a ceremony at the Protestant Evangelical Church in Alt-Schöneberg, Berlin on 5 March 1908. Veidt's only sibling, an older brother named Karl, died in 1900 of scarlet fever at the age of 9. The family spent their summers in Potsdam.

Two years after Karl's death, Veidt's father fell ill and required heart surgery. Knowing that the family could not afford to pay the lofty fee that accompanied the surgery, the doctor charged only what the family could comfortably pay. Impressed by the surgeon's skill and kindness, Veidt vowed to "model my life on the man that saved my father's life" and he wished to become a surgeon. His hopes for a medical career were thwarted, though, when in 1912 he graduated without a diploma and ranked 13th out of 13 pupils and became discouraged over the amount of study necessary for him to qualify for medical school.

A new career path for Veidt opened up in 1911 during a school Christmas play in which he delivered a long prologue before the curtain rose. The play was badly received, and the audience was heard to mutter, "Too bad the others didn't do as well as Veidt." Veidt began to study all of the actors he could and wanted to pursue a career in acting, much to the disappointment of his father, who called actors 'gypsys' and 'outcasts'.

With the money he raised from odd jobs and the allowance his mother gave him, Veidt began attending Berlin's many theaters. He loitered outside of the Deutsches Theater after every performance, waiting for the actors and hoping to be mistaken for one. In the late summer of 1912 he met a theater porter who introduced him to actor Albert Blumenreich, who agreed to give Veidt acting lessons for six marks. He took ten lessons from him before auditioning for Max Reinhardt, reciting Goethe's Faust. During Veidt's audition, Reinhardt looked out of the window the entire time. He offered Veidt a contract as an extra for one season's work, from September 1913 to August 1914 with a pay of 50 marks a month. During this time, he played bit parts as spear carriers and soldiers. His mother attended almost every performance. His contract with the Deutsches Theater was renewed for a second season, but by this time World War I had begun, and on 28 December 1914, Veidt enlisted in the army.

In 1915, he was sent to the Eastern Front as a non-commissioned officer and took part in the Battle of Warsaw. He contracted jaundice and pneumonia, and had to be evacuated to a hospital on the Baltic Sea. While recuperating, he received a letter from his girlfriend Lucie Mannheim, telling him that she had found work at the Front Theatre in Libau. Intrigued, Veidt applied for the theatre as well. As his condition had not improved, the army allowed him to join the theatre so that he could entertain the troops. While performing at the theatre, his relationship with Mannheim ended. In late 1916, he was re-examined by the Army and deemed unfit for service; he was given a full discharge on 10 January 1917. Veidt returned to Berlin where he was readmitted to the Deutsches Theater. There, he played a small part as a priest that got him his first rave review, the reviewer hoping that "God would keep Veidt from the films." or "God save him from the cinema!"

From 1917 until his death, Veidt appeared in more than 100 films. One of his earliest performances was as the murderous somnambulist Cesare in director Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), a classic of German Expressionist cinema, with Werner Krauss and Lil Dagover. His starring role in The Man Who Laughs (1928), as a disfigured circus performer whose face is cut into a permanent grin, provided the (visual) inspiration for the Batman villain the Joker. Veidt starred in other silent horror films such as The Hands of Orlac (1924), also directed by Robert Wiene, The Student of Prague (1926) and Waxworks (1924), in which he played Ivan the Terrible. Veidt also appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919), one of the earliest films to sympathetically portray homosexuality, although the characters in it do not end up happily. He had a leading role in Germany's first talking picture, Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women, 1929).

He moved to Hollywood in the late 1920s and made a few films there, but the advent of talking pictures and his difficulty with speaking English led him to return to Germany. During this period, he lent his expertise to tutoring aspiring performers, one of whom was the later American character actress Lisa Golm.

Veidt fervently opposed the Nazi regime and later donated a major portion of his personal fortune to Britain to assist in the war effort. Soon after the Nazi Party took power in Germany, by March 1933, Joseph Goebbels was purging the film industry of anti-Nazi sympathizers and Jews, and so in April 1933, a week after Veidt's marriage to Ilona Prager, a Jewish woman, the couple emigrated to Britain before any action could be taken against either of them.

Goebbels had imposed a "racial questionnaire" in which everyone employed in the German film industry had to declare their "race" to continue to work. When Veidt was filling in the questionnaire, he answered the question about what his Rasse (race) was by writing that he was a Jude (Jew). Veidt was not Jewish, but his wife was Jewish, and Veidt would not renounce the woman he loved. Additionally, Veidt, who was opposed to antisemitism, wanted to show solidarity with the German Jewish community, who were in the process of being stripped of their rights as German citizens in the spring of 1933. As one of Germany's most prominent actors, Veidt had been informed that if he were prepared to divorce his wife and declare his support for the new regime, he could continue to act in Germany. Several other leading actors who had been opposed to the Nazis before 1933 switched allegiances. In answering the questionnaire by stating he was a Jew, Veidt rendered himself unemployable in Germany, but stated this sacrifice was worth it as there was nothing in the world that would compel him to break with his wife. Upon hearing about what Veidt had done, Goebbels remarked that he would never act in Germany again.

After arriving in Britain, Veidt perfected his English and starred in the title roles of the original anti-Nazi versions of The Wandering Jew (1933) and Jew Süss (1934), the latter film was directed by the exiled German-born director Lothar Mendes and produced by Michael Balcon for Gaumont-British. He naturalised as a British subject on 25 February 1939. By this point multi-lingual, Veidt made films both in French with expatriate French directors and in English, including three of his best-known roles for British director Michael Powell in The Spy in Black (1939), Contraband (1940) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940).

By 1941, he and Ilona had settled in Hollywood to assist in the British effort in making American films that might persuade the then-neutral and still isolationist US to join the war against the Nazis, who at that time controlled all of continental Europe and were bombing the United Kingdom. Before leaving the United Kingdom, Veidt gave his life savings to the British government to help finance the war effort. Realizing that Hollywood would most likely typecast him in Nazi roles, he had his contract mandate that they must always be villains.

He starred in a few films, such as George Cukor's A Woman's Face (1941) where he received billing under Joan Crawford's and Nazi Agent (1942), in which he had a dual role as both an aristocratic German Nazi spy and the man's twin brother, an anti-Nazi American. His best-known Hollywood role was as the sinister Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca (1942), a film which began pre-production before the United States entered World War II. Commenting about this well-received role, Veidt noted that it was an ironical twist of that that he was praised "for portraying the kind of character who had forced him to leave his homeland".

Veidt enjoyed sports, gardening, swimming, golfing, classical music, and reading fiction and nonfiction (including occultism; Veidt once considered himself a powerful medium). He was afraid of heights and flying, and disliked interviews and wearing ties.

In a September 1941 interview with Silver Screen, Veidt said,

I see a man who was once for years studying occult things. The science of occult things. I had the feeling there must be – something else. There are things in our world we cannot trace. I wanted to trace them. The power we have to think, to move, to speak, to feel – is it electricity, I wanted to know? Is it magnetism? Is it the heart? Is it the blood? When the body dies, where is all that? Where is the power that made the body live? No one can tell me it is not somewhere. If you believe in waves, which you must believe after you have the radio, why couldn't human beings contact the wave lengths of someone who is dead? ... this is the kind of thing with which I was, for many years, preoccupied. This is what I tried to find, the answer. I did not find it. But in looking for it there was etched, perhaps, on my face, some hint of the strange cabals I kept with unseen and unknown powers. I did not find it, I say. But I found something else. Something better. I found –faith. I found the ability, very peaceful, to accept that which I could neither see, nor hear nor touch. I am a religious man. My belief is that if we could help to make all people a little more religious, we would do a great lot. If we would pray more ... we forget to pray except when we are in a mess. That is too bad. I believe in prayer. Because when we pray, we always pray for something good.

He went on:

I must tell you something that will disappoint you ... far from being one engaged in strangle rituals of thought or action, what I like best to do is sit in this small garden, on this terrace, and – just sit. Sometimes, I confess, I think a lot; about my past. About my parents who are dead. I like to dream, to go away ... At other times, I sit and read. I read, often, a whole day through. I play golf. I used to be a golf fiend. Now I am not a fiend even on the links. Now I play because it is relaxation. I like the beach very much, the sea. I go to the films often, to the neighborhood theater, my wife and I. Sometimes we go to the Palladium, where there is dancing. It is an amazing sight to me to see young people, how they are like they were thirty years ago, how they hold hands, how they enjoy their lives. To me, the most beautiful thing in California is the Hollywood Bowl, the Concerts Under the Stars. For me, it is a terrific experience. I have never seen an audience in my life like that. 30,000 people, simple people, most of them, listening to music under the stars. I have never seen 30,000 people, simple people, so quiet. I like to think of them as a symbol that one day there may be that oneness for all mankind....

On 18 June 1918, Veidt married Gussy Holl, a cabaret entertainer. They had first met at a party in March 1918, and Conrad described her to friends as "very lovely, tall, dignified and somewhat aloof". They separated in 1919 but attempted to reconcile multiple times. Holl and Veidt divorced in 1922.

Veidt said of Holl, "She was as perfect as any wife could be. But I had not learnt how to be a proper husband." and, "I was elated by my success in my work, but shattered over my mother's death, and miserable about the way my marriage seemed to be foundering. And one day when my wife was away, I walked out of the house, and out of her life, trying to escape from something I could put no name to."

After his separation and eventual divorce from Holl, Veidt allegedly dated his co-star Anita Berber.

Veidt's second wife Felizitas Radke was from an aristocratic Austrian family. They met at a party in December 1922 or at a Charleston dance competition in 1923. Radke divorced her husband for him, and they married in April 1923. Their daughter, Vera Viola Maria, nicknamed "Kiki", was born on 10 August 1925. He was not present at her birth due to being in Italy working on The Fiddler of Florence, but upon hearing of her birth, he took the first train to Berlin and flailed and wept as he first met mother and child at the hospital; he was so hysterical from joy they had to sedate him and keep him in the hospital overnight.

Emil Jannings was Viola's godfather and Elisabeth Bergner was her godmother. She was named after one of Bergner's signature characters, Shakespeare's Viola. The birth of his daughter helped Veidt move on from the death of his dearly loved mother, who had died of a heart condition in January 1922.

From September 1926 to 1929 Veidt lived with his wife and daughter in a Spanish-style house in Beverly Hills.

Veidt enjoyed relaxing and playing with his daughter in their home, and enjoyed the company of the immigrant community, including F. W. Murnau, Carl Laemmle, and Greta Garbo, as well as the American Gary Cooper. The family returned to Germany in 1929, and moved several times afterwards, including a temporary relocation to Vienna, Austria, while Veidt participated in a theatrical tour of the continent.

Radke and Veidt divorced in 1932, with Radke citing that the frequent relocations and the separations necessitated by Veidt's acting schedule frayed their marriage. Radke at first granted custody of their daughter to Veidt, but after further consideration he decided that their daughter needed the full-time parent that his work would not allow him to be. Conrad received generous visitation rights, and Viola called her summer vacations with her father "The Happy Times". She stayed with him three or four months of the year until the outbreak of World War II.

He last married Ilona "Lilli" Barta Prager (or Preger), a Hungarian Jew, in Berlin on 30 March 1933; they remained together until his death. The two had met at a club in Berlin. Veidt said of Lilli in an October 1934 interview with The Sunday Dispatch,

Lilli was the woman I had been seeking all my life. For her I was the man. In Lilli I found the miracle of a woman who had all to give that I sought, the perfect crystallisation in one lovely human being, of all my years of searching. Lilli had the mother complex too. But in the reverse ratio to mine. In her, the mother instinct was so powerful that she poured it out, indiscriminately almost, on everyone she knew. She mothers her own mother. Meeting Lilli was like coming home to an enchanted place one had always dreamed of, but never thought to reach. For her it was the same. Our marriage is not only flawless, it is a complete and logical union, as inevitable as daybreak after night, as harmonious and right as the words that exactly fit the music. My search is finished. The picture in my mind of my mother is of a woman great and holy. But it is a picture clear and. distinct, a deep and humble memory of a woman no one could replace; but now it is not blurred by the complex which before had harassed my mind.

Veidt and Lilli arrived from London at Los Angeles on 13 June 1940 and resided in Beverly Hills, where they lived at 617 North Camden Drive.

Even after leaving England, Veidt was concerned over the plight of children cooped up in London air raid shelters, and he decided to try to cheer up their holiday. Through his attorneys in London, Veidt donated enough money to purchase 2,000 one-pound tins of candy, 2,000 large packets of chocolate, and 1,000 wrapped envelopes containing presents of British currency. The gifts went to children of needy families in various air raid shelters in the London area during Christmas 1940. The air raid shelter marshal wrote back to Veidt thanking him for the gifts. Noting Veidt's unusual kindness, he stated in his letter to him, "It is significant to note that, as far as is known to me, you are the only member of the Theatrical Profession who had the thought to send Christmas presents to the London children."

Veidt smuggled his parents-in-law from Austria to neutral Switzerland, and in 1935 he managed to get the Nazi government to let his ex-wife Radke and their daughter move to Switzerland. He also offered to help Felizita's mother, Frau Radke, of whom he was fond, leave Germany. However, she declined. A proud, strong-willed woman who was attached to her home country, she declared that "no damned little Austrian Nazi corporal" was going to make her leave her home. She reportedly survived the war, but none of the Veidts ever saw her again.

Veidt was bisexual and a feminist. In a 1941 interview he said,

There are two different kinds of men. There are the men men, what do you call them, the man's man, who likes men around, who prefers to talk with men, who says the female can never be impersonal, who takes the female lightly, as playthings. I do not see a man like that in my mirror. Perhaps, it is because I think the female and the male attract better than two men, that I prefer to talk with females. I do. I find it quite as stimulating and distinctly more comfortable. I have a theory about this – it all goes back to the mother complex. In every woman, the man who looks may find – his mother. The primary source of all his comfort. I think also that females have become too important just to play with. When men say the female cannot discuss impersonally, that is no longer so. When it is said that females cannot be geniuses, that is no longer so, either. The female is different from the male. Because she was born to be a mother. There is no doubt about that. But that does not mean that, in some cases, she is not also born a genius. Not all males are geniuses either. And among females today there are some very fine actresses, very fine; fine doctors, lawyers, even scientists and industrialists. I see no fault in any female when she wears slacks, smokes (unless it is on the street, one thing, the only thing, which I don't like), when she drives a car ... when men say things like "I bet it is a woman driving" if something is wrong with the car ahead – no, no. These are old, worn out prejudices, they do not belong in today.

In the 1930s, Veidt discovered that he had the same heart condition that his mother had died from. The condition was further aggravated by chain smoking, and Veidt took nitroglycerin tablets.

Veidt died of a massive heart attack on 3 April 1943 while playing golf at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles with singer Arthur Fields and his personal physician, Dr. Bergman, who pronounced him dead at the scene. He had suddenly gasped and fallen over after getting to the eighth hole. He was 50 years old. His ex-wife Felizitas and his daughter Viola found out about his death via a radio broadcast in Switzerland.

In 1998, his ashes, along with his wife Lilli's, were placed in a niche of the columbarium at the Golders Green Crematorium in north London.

#conrad veidt #silent era #silent hollywood #silent movie stars #classic hollywood #classic movie stars #golden age of hollywood #1910s movies #1920s hollywood #1930s hollywood #1940s hollywood

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oh-mother-of-darkness · 4 years

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hello this isnt abt batfam or batman but i saw your age and was wondering how do i survive till 23? i am 18 now and 5 more years is very hard to survive please help

Interesting question. I turn 24 in ten days, and sometimes even I’m not sure. I guess I’ll talk about how I personally stayed alive this long before I try to give advice.

The very first thing I would say is that I am religious, and that worldview makes a difference. I don’t mean that in a “everything happens for a reason” kind of way, and as a matter of fact, I very much dislike that line of thinking. It does a lot of damage, and I’m aware that it rightly puts a lot of people off from religion in general.

I hold two beliefs that I think are helpful in terms of survival. First, I believe that humans are by nature bad. Counterintuitive in this conversation? Stick with me. Every day, but especially at my lowest moments, I hate the things that I am. In a metaphorical sense, my mind whispers to me that I am selfish, that I am cowardly, that I think bad things and I am capable of worse. I’m hateful, I’m terrifying, and I am absolutely broken. At my core, there is something fundamentally wrong, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t fix it.

I am disgusting. I’m several thousand evil things in a trench-coat pretending to be anything but myself, and I’m not fooling anyone.

Well, yeah. Yeah, I’m all those things and more: manipulative, lying, self-obsessed, angry, unforgiving, and judgmental. I could, of course, go on.

Here’s the thing-- everybody is. I am no better and no worse than any other person in the universe, and though I am ever abhorrent thing, I am. I have the same dignity, the same worth, and the same life as any human anywhere. The dark things are part and parcel of my humanity, but although I am not good, I do good.

I will never be perfect because that just isn’t possible, but I can be kind. I can be loving, I can be strong, and I can be wise.

Shit, doesn’t that set me free?

There’s a lot more to this conversation, and the rest goes, in brief, like this: at the bottom of the darkness that is every soul, we have one great fear-- if I am truly evil, no one will ever love me. Good news on that front, there is a God who does. If that’s something you want to talk about, hey hit me up. I’ll evangelize on my own time.

Back to it. My second belief is a kind of understanding about the passage of time, and it’s sort of hard to boil down into a few sentences, but I’ll try my best. I believe in a grand struggle between good and evil. I know the beginning of that struggle. I know the end of that struggle: that good will win. I am a part of the middle.

I see my role in the universe as extraordinary small but absolutely necessary. I have a two-fold purpose-- love God, love humans. I interpret both as a call to help others in any way I can, and I think in the way my life has worked out so far, that’s really the most important thing keeping me alive.

I see all of this through the frame of my religion, but I would argue that everything I’ve said so far is applicable outside of that frame, because a lot of folks get to the same place from a fully secular point of view. I cannot be perfect. I should care about and fight for other people. That’s really all we’re working from here.

A few years back, when people asked me this question-- how do you stay alive?-- I used to answer “spite,” and that’s not untrue. I am a very angry person, and the grand majority of that anger is directed at what I perceive as unjust acts. I have a deep-seated hatred of establishments (including the established church), and you’d be shocked at how much of a motivator that can be.

I grew up in an environment that was very intentional in teaching me to identify injustice. Though I have radically departed from many of the teachings of my childhood, the part about fighting for others was something I learned at day one, and that bit has stuck around. For the most part, I grew up in an environment where everyone was on the same page about it.

And theeeeeeen I went to undergrad. Hello, Texas A&M. I hit campus as an 18 year old fully incapacitated by anxiety. I was the kind of person who didn’t-- in fact couldn’t-- speak in front of others. I had always lived my life in a way that minimized myself, because if I never spoke, if I never disagreed, if I never drew attention, I would never make anyone angry. I knew from experience that angry people hurt me, and I was afraid of pain.

Then I experienced the absolute shenaniganry of conservative Texans. The culture shock sent me to space and back, and on the return trip I decided that I couldn’t be quiet anymore.

I learned to speak my freshman year so that I could scream FUCK YOU. It was incredibly painful, and I can’t tell you exactly how I managed it other than I was angry, and I didn’t want to lose.

I fought a similar battle on my homefront against parents that didn’t know how to deal with a daughter that disagreed, or even worse, a daughter that wasn’t okay. I wasn’t a perfect child anymore. I knew I had anxiety, I knew I was depressed, and we all knew who I blamed for that. They hadn’t been the perfect parents they thought they were.

I found myself growing, little by little, into a person that could write and argue and hold her ground. That’s personal growth for sure, but it didn’t necessarily help my mental health. As a matter of fact, my health declined all through undergrad, and in my third and final year, I cracked.

I was desperate. I was isolated. I was flooded by fear and despair, and I was falling apart. I don’t remember huge chunks of undergrad because I was so depressed that the memories didn’t stick, but I do remember my tipping point.

It was something small. The ceiling fan in my bedroom was broken. The lighting chain worked fine, but if anyone pulled the fan chain, the whole thing would stop working. I mixed up which chain was which, pulled the wrong cord, and broke it for the fourth time.

For some reason, that was it. I lay down on my floor and cried for an hour, and while I did, my mind went to, as the kids say, a dark place. Finally, I called my mom and begged for psychiatric medication, something I had always been afraid to ask for. At the time, my parents believed that antidepressants were overprescribed, and they mocked parents that let their children take them.

At around the same time, I was deciding what to do with my life. I was about to graduate, and I had always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. Instead, everyone in my life pushed me towards law school. I didn’t know what to do, but I began fantasizing, not about going to law school exactly, but about being the kind of person that could go to law school.

I knew that law school would be entail public speaking and constant conflict and the kind of work that would be hard for a person who sometimes couldn’t leave her bed. I wanted to be someone who could do all of that, but I didn’t believe I was.

Enter Donald Trump. Post-November 2016, I struggled to understand how something like that could happen, and I watched everyone else deal with it too. I began confused, moved to distraught, then returned to what I always am: angry.

January 2017 was the inauguration and shortly afterwards, the “Muslim ban.” I read the news on my bedroom floor, and there was one specific part that stuck out to me. There were pictures of lawyers flooding the airports. There was a court case headed for SCOTUS.

I suddenly realized that one group-- one very select group-- was doing what I was powerless to accomplish. I hated establishments, and there was one group that could challenge and change them. Some people could fight in the way I wanted to, and those people were lawyers.

I have a very distinct memory of looking into the bathroom mirror of my third-year apartment and thinking, “I will be miserable for the rest of my life, no matter what I do or what career I pick. I might as well be a miserable lawyer.”

So I took my antidepressants and I went to law school. I’m not going to rehash everything that happened there in this particular post, because in this topic, I don’t think it matters. The relevant part is that I went, and I had my reason why.

Sure as hell can tell you that law school wasn’t good for my health. The last three years have been, in terms of sheer stress and despair, the worst of my life. I picked up a self-harm habit, endured consistent humiliation, cycled through six different antidepressants, had horrible relationships, and developed a psychotic disorder. Don’t get me wrong, there were good things too. I met people that are important me, and beyond that, I grew.

I know that 18 year old me would be absolutely flabbergasted by the woman I am now, cracks and flaws included. I wouldn’t say I’m healthy or okay, but I am more healthy and more okay. I’m coming out of this mess with the institutional power I wanted, and now I get to decide what to do with it.

I was wrong three years ago when I looked in that bathroom mirror. I know now that I won’t be miserable for the rest of my life. I’m going to be happy someday, and to the parts of me that say otherwise: fuck you. I’ve learned to say it now.

I graduated law school this week, and this month, I’ve felt better than I ever have before. I’m singing again, I dropped two medications, and suddenly, everything is so, so funny. I’ve been laughing so hard my face hurts the day after.

This is a huge turning point in my life, so I’ve been meditating on my past. I’ve come to the conclusion that in most of the ways that matter, I won. My family has been forced to accept what I am. I became the person I wanted to be, even though I thought I wasn’t capable of that.

I know for sure that there will be times in my life where I hit rock bottom again, and that’s not gonna be fun. It’s likely that with my mental health issues, I will always have to work harder than my peers to get the same results. That’s unfair.

I also know that high points exist, and I will have them. I am having them, and I will again.

I guess in recap, I know that I have deep flaws and ugly parts, but I am at peace with that. I know that I must help others, and in pursuit of that goal, I became a person I like more than the girl I used to be.

You have exactly the same potential. I want you to know that whatever you are now, that’s not your forever. Circumstances change, and you will change too. We’re human, you and I, and that’s an exciting thing to be.

Your worth comes from your humanity itself, both evil and good, not the things you do or the fights you win. You never have to compare yourself to others because you are exactly the same as everybody else-- no better, but certainly no worse. You’re a person. That’s enough.

I’m telling you all those things, and as advice, I’ll say this: get angry and fight. Fight for others. You can help them, and you should. Fight for yourself. You are worthy of respect, and everyone else should give it to you. Fight yourself. Any part of you that preaches despair is wrong.

Find the thing that makes you angry and use it. Things are fucked up! There’s a lot to be angry about. I put it this way to my classmates, now my attorney peers: you get one hill to die on. What’s your hill? Go and defend it.

Here’s an interesting thing, anon. Your hill can be yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re right. Five years is a lot, and all the years beyond that are more. Take your antidepressants and go.

#anyway here's a fucking autobiography I guess #let's see what to tag what to tag #religion #christianity #suicide #suicidal thoughts #suicidal ideation #asks #personal i guess #wait I thought of more #self harm #american politics #if the read more on this post doesn't work again I'm rioting #been having that glitch lately

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truecrimesposts · 4 years

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The Milwaukee Cannibal

Timeline of events

1960′s

May 21, 1960: Jeffery Lionel Dahmer was born in Milwaukee’s Evangelical Deaconess Hospital to his parents Lionel and Joyce after a very difficult pregnancy. According to Lionel, Joyce experienced random bouts of paralysis during the pregnancy, and doctors were unable to find any reason for this. To try and treat this and mostly to calm her during, she was given “injections of barbiturates and morphine, which would finally relax her.” She would apparently also be given phenobarbital.

We know now that the “Use of barbiturates during pregnancy has been associated with a higher incidence of fetal abnormalities. Neonatal barbiturate withdrawal symptoms have been reported in infants whose mothers took barbiturates during pregnancy,” but we don't know for sure if this applied to Jeffrey.

1962: The family made the decision to move to Ames, Iowa in 1962 so that Lionel could work on his Chemistry Ph.D.

1964: After their young son complained of extreme pain, Lionel and Joyce took Jeffrey to the hospital, were he was diagnosed with a brutal double hernia in his scrotum. Even after the surgery corrected the issue, Lionel would claim that this experience was what initially triggered the change in Jeffrey’s personality, apparently making him become much more shy and withdrawn. Psychologists believe that there is a possibility that this could actually have influenced his feelings of sexual inadequacy and insecurity in later life.

November 1966: When Joyce fell pregnant with her second child David, the family decided to move home in an attempt to find the perfect spot to raise their two children. This led to several moved throughout Ohio during the following year. This was not an easy time for the family, Joyce was struggling with another very difficult pregnancy, and young Jeffrey, who was now in the 1st grade, was starting to feel neglected, especially after David was born on December 18th.

Of course feeling neglected when a new baby comes along is a fairly common thing, but unlike most children, Jeffrey would not get over this feeling, instead it would get worse. Lionel describes his son at this time as extremely shy and withdrawn, even going as far as t say that he was terrified of new people and situations.

1968: After the family moved to Bath Ohio, Jeffrey experienced a new and particularly heinous kind of trauma. According to Lionel, Jeffrey was molested by a boy in the neighbourhood, however Jeffrey never once admitted to even remembering this.

It seems likely that Jeffrey repressed this memory, especially since his personality ticks pretty much every box when it comes to the traits that come with childhood memory repression:

Strong reactions to certain places people and situations.

Difficulty controlling emotions.

Difficulty keeping a job.

Struggling with a sense of abandonment.

Immaturity.

Tendency to self sabotage.

Impulsive.

Emotionally exhausted.

Anxiety.

Trouble with anger management.

1970′s

Late 1970: Over the last few years, Joyce had, according to Lionel, been taking drugs in order to try and deal with the extreme anxiety that she was facing on a near daily basis, but they didn't really work, and in the late 1970′s she was actually institutionalised twice for ‘psychiatric problems’. Since the family were so busy trying to take care of Joyce and raise their very young son, Jeffrey reportedly did not have a stabilising influence, or much emotional support.

This combined with the fact that he had grown tired of not fitting in led Jeffrey to build himself a reputation as somewhat of a clown, and a misfit. His behaviour at that time is very similar to that of fellow serial killer and cannibal Arthur Shawcross, he would drink heavily at just 10 years old and was always pulling ‘pranks’. Jeffreys pranks including randomly shouting, bleating like a sheep, and most memorably, faking epileptic fits.

June 4, 1978: By the time that Jeffrey had graduated from high school, his parents were going through a very difficult divorce and due to the fact that he was now legally an adult, he was actually living by himself in the home while his parents and brother lived elsewhere. Jeffrey had less emotional support than ever before and all the freedom in the world.

June 18, 1978: 19 year old Steven Mark Hicks was hitchhiking when Jeffrey drove by him and stopped, suggesting that he come back to his home for a few beers. Hicks agreed and the two went back to the house and began to drink, everything was going fine, until Hicks tried to leave. It is believed that Jeffreys crippling fears of abandonment kicked in and he flipped. He grabbed a barbell and began to club and then strangle Hicks with the weapon. According to Dahmer, over the next few weeks (!) Jeffrey stripped the flesh from the bones using acid (like he apparently had to a whole host of animals previously) smashed the bones and disposed of the remains in his back yard.

Dahmer would later claim that he had killed Hicks because he didn't wat him to leave. This reasoning would later be corroborated by at least one survivor of Jeffreys attack, claiming that Jeffreys entire personality changed when he mentioned wanting to leave. This reasoning isn't difficult to believe when you consider the lack of parental support, tendency to move, and I believe most noticeably his memory repression

After his high school graduation Dahmer enrolled in Ohio State University but he stayed only one term before dropping out.

December 24, 1978: Lionel remarried.

December 29, 1978: Jeffrey was trained as an army medic and shipped of to Baumholder Germany. This happened not long after the Vietnam war, and morale and discipline was at an all time low within the armed forces at the time, and drug and alcohol abuse amongst the soldiers was rife.

Dahmer’s reputation changed once he joined the army, he was no longer known as a clown an a prankster, but as an aggressive drunk.

(Interesting side note, after his arrest police actually looked into murders in the area were he was stationed to see if he was active while he was there, and there did appear to be a serial killer in Baumholder at the time, but it is not believed to be Jeffrey since it was young women being killed, and as far as is known, Jeffrey only killed men.)

1980′s

March 26, 1981: When Jeffreys drinking reached the level were he was no longer able to do his job, he was discharged from the army and sent back to the US. When he got back, he slept on the beach in Florida for a few months before returning to Ohio.

October 7, 1981: Dahmer was arrested for a drunk and disorderly and resisting arrest and paid a small fine.

August 7, 1982: Dahmer was arrested again for another drunk and disorderly. He dropped his pants in public. By this point in his life Jeffrey had moved in with his grandma, who was apparently the only person in his family who actually showed Jeffrey any affection.

September 8, 1986: By this time, Jeffrey had gone off the rails, and was getting himself into trouble pretty often. He was arrested once again for exposing himself to a group of children in Milwaukee. There are two different accounts of what happened at that time, (he was either urinating or masturbating).

Dahmer was also now frequenting gay bars and bath houses often, and actually got himself banned from one bath house, for drugging at least 4 men. No official charges were filed against him, but one of his victims was hospitalised for about a week.

September 15, 1987: According to Jeffrey, he woke up in a hotel room to find the dead body of 24 year old Steven W. Tuomi. He transported the corpse to his grandmothers home in a large suitcase, disposing of the body pretty much as he had Steven Hicks.

Nine years passed between the murders of Hicks and Tuomi, which is pretty unusual for a serial killer to do. He spent years before this second murder working his way up to it, learning how to pick up men, how to drug them, and how much. We still don't know for sure whether or not Jeffrey actually remembers the murder or not. It is possible that he was just too drunk to remember, or that, like he had for earlier trauma, he repressed the memory. I personally find it like likely that the latter is true to be honest, as it seems strange to me that he would admit to all his other crimes and not this one. Also, Jeffrey would later say that he didn't actually enjoy the killings, and that there were a necessary evil in order for him to get the bodies.

January 1988: Jeffrey offered 14 year old James Doxtator some money if he agreed to pose nude for some photos. After James agreed Jeffrey took the teenager back to his grandmothers house. After raping James (Dahmer described it as sex but James was still a child so it was actually rape) Dahmer drugged and then strangled the boy. By now his method of disposal, acid and crushing bones was well practiced.

March 24, 1988: 25 year old Richard Guerrero also came back to Jeffreys grandmothers house, once again for nude photos, and once again after sex, he drugged and strangled the young man.

September 25, 1988: Jeffrey finally moved into his own place, which is where the pace of his crimes really picked up, since he no longer felt he needed to be careful, he once again had all the freedom that he wanted.

Once he moved in, he met a 13 year old boy, who was once again offered money to pose nude for him. Jeffrey drugged the boy sing coffee and fondled him, but luckily the young boy escaped.

January 1989: Jeffrey was arrested and this time charged with 2nd degree sexual assault and enticing a child for immoral purposes.

March 25: Dahmer met Anthony Sears, 24, at a club, and like he had previously he drugged and murdered him after sex. After Dahmers arrest, Sear’s skull was recovered from Dahmer’s apartment. He had painted the skull.

May 23rd: Jeffrey was sentenced to 5 years and three years, for his attack on that 13 year old boy, but he only served 10 months before he was out on a probationary period of 5 years.

1990

May 29: Dahmer met 33 year old Ricky Beeks at a club, and used his usual MO of bribing, drugging and strangling. However this time Jeffrey had sex after he was dead, instead of before. Once again, Jeffrey had painted the mans skull, which was recovered after his arrest.

June 1990: 28 year old Edward W Smith was killed in the same way as Dahmer's previous victims, but this time Dahmer did one thing different. Jeffrey took photos of the dismemberment process.

September 2: Something changed before the murder of 24 year old Ernest Miller, causing Jeffrey to be even more gruesome than he had been previously. Instead of drugging and strangling Ernest like he had his previous victims, he drugged him and cut his throat. Once again taking pictures of the body, Jeffrey dismembered the body, putting the biceps in the freezer, and once again painting his skull.

September 24: David C Thomas was the first time that Jeffrey killed somebody without sex being involved. It is believed that David wanted to leave before having sex with Dahmer, since Dahmer was known to kill his victims in order to make sure that they couldn't leave.

1991

March 7: Curtis Straughter was 18 years old when he was murdered, with Jeffrey this time using a different sequence of events. Previously he had had sex with his victims then drugged and killed them, and at least once he had drugged and killed them and then had sex, but this time he drugged Curtis before raping and murdering him. It is likely that this change was due to the fact that Jeffreys last victim had wanted to leave prior to sex.

April 7: Errol Lindsey, 19, last seen alive. Dahmer met him on the street and offered him money to come home with him. He drugged Lindsey, strangled him and had sex with the body. The unpainted skull was recovered from Dahmer's apartment.

May 17: 14 year old Konerak Sinthasomphone was pickes up by Dahmer outside of the mall, he went with Jeffrey under the promise of money for nude pictures. After drugging the boy Jeffrey apparently felt pretty comfortable, ince he left the home to go out for a beer. The boy managed to escape, naked, and the neighbours called the police. Somehow however Jeffrey managed to convince the police that responded that he and the teenager were simply lovers who had had a fight (I don't know how they could be so stupid, this is a drugged child and a 30 year old with a pretty lengthy criminal record, including the sexual assault of a minor?! Like how do you just let that be?!) and the police actually RETURNED the poor boy to the sick serial killer. Dahmer strangled the 14 year old as soon as the police were gone, had sex with the body and then took pictures like he had previously. Konerak’s skull was also recovered from the apartment.

Once people actually discovered what had happened the officers involved received mild disciplinary action (which is nowhere near enough) and the department was sued.

May 24: Deaf and mute 31 year old Tony Hughes had reportedly known Dahmer for about 2 years when Dahmer, by writing on paper, offered the man $50 to come and pose nude for him. Hughes was drugged and murdered without sex. Once again Hughes skull was found in Jeffreys apartment.

June 30: Matt turner was killed by Jeffrey after a gay pride parade. After cutting the body up the head was put in the freezer and the rest was put into a barrel of acid.

July 6: 23 year old Jeremiah Weinberger travelled with Dahmer from Chicago to Milwaukee where he then stayed overnight. Like the previous cases, everything was fine until Jeremiah decided that he wanted to leave, at which point Dahmer drugged, killed and disposed of the young mans body.

July 15: Jeffrey was fired from the Ambrosia Chocolate Co. for bad attendance.

On this same day Oliver Lacy, 23, was killed by Dahmer. Jeffrey had sex with the body before dismembering it, at which point he put his head In the fridge and heart in the freezer “to eat later”.

July 16: Joseph Bradehoft, 25, met Jeffrey at a bus stop, where Dahmer offered him money to pose for nude pictures. After sex, Dahmer drugged him and strangled him with a strap. He dismembered the body and, as before, put the head in the freezer and the body in the acid barrel.

July 22, 1991: Shortly after midnight, Tracy Edwards, 32, escaped from Dahmer with one hand in a handcuff and flagged down a police car. He lead the cops back to Dahmer's apartment. They found photos of dismembered victims and body parts in the refrigerator and freezer. Shortly, the sight of crews in biohazard protection suits taking evidence out of Dahmer's apartment was televised all over the world. The suits were necessary because of the smell of decay in the apartment and because of the acid in the barrel.

Caught red-handed, with overwhelming physical evidence against him, it's not surprising that Jeffrey confessed. His dry, unemotional descriptions of murdering a dozen and a half young men belied the reality of brutality and sadism that was revealed in Tracy Edwards' testimony.

It's possible that the sameness of the descriptions (Offers of money to pose, drugs to knock them out) was not entirely accurate. Tracy Edwards claimed he was not offered money, that he only went to Dahmer's apartment for some beers before going out again. He may have been covering up his own indiscretion, or Dahmer may have lied about the ways he lured people back to his apartment in order to make them seem less like innocent victims.

Edwards was drugged, but did not lose consciousness. This raises the possibility that the sedatives Dahmer gave victims were intended only to weaken them, while leaving them aware of what was being done to them. Dahmer had certainly had enough practice by then to have a good idea what dose was needed to knock a man out. Dahmer may have enjoyed taunting the victims about their fate and killing them, slowly, much more than he let on later.

Dahmer also claimed that he needed to drink heavily in order to be able to face killing people, but we know that he was a hard-core alcoholic for much of his life. For him, making excuses for drinking was normal and can not be regarded as likely to be honest.

1992

January 14: Dahmer entered a plea of guilty but insane in 15 of the 17 murders he claimed to have committed.

February 15: By 10-2 majority vote, a jury found Dahmer to be sane in each murder. Testimony from defense and prosecution experts took weeks and was extremely gruesome. One expert testified that Dahmer periodically removed body parts of his victims from the freezer and ate them. Another testified that this was a lie Dahmer told to make himself seem insane. The jury deliberated slightly more than ten hours.

February 17: Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms. At the sentencing, Dahmer read a prepared statement in which he expressed sorrow for the pain he had caused.

"I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness and now I have some peace. I know now how much harm I have caused. I tried to do the best I could after the arrest to make amends."

"I now know I will be in prison the rest of my life. I know that I will have to turn to God to help me get through each day. I should have stayed with God. I tried and failed and created a holocaust. Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I believe that only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me from my sins."

He later pled guilty to aggravated murder in Ohio, in the death of his first victim, Steven Hicks. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

November 28, 1994: Dahmer murdered in prison. Dahmer and two other inmates were assigned to clean the staff bathroom of the Columbia Correctional Institute gymnasium in Portage, Wisconsin. Guards left them alone to do their work for about twenty minutes, starting at around 7:50 a.m. When Dahmer was discovered, he was unconscious and his head and face were bloody. He died on the way to the hospital from multiple skull fractures and brain trauma.

A bloody broom handle was found near Dahmer, but a broom is probably not sturdy enough to inflict the damage that killed him. Reports in December indicated that he was struck with a steel bar stolen from the prison weight room.

One of the other two inmates in the area with Dahmer was also attacked. Jesse Anderson, 37, was pronounced dead in the hospital at 10:04 a.m. on November 30. Anderson was convicted of stabbing and beating his wife to death in 1992. He was serving a life term.

The third inmate in the work party is twenty-five-year-old Christopher Scarver, a convicted murderer reportedly taking anti-psychotic medication. Scarver murdered a coworker when he was angry at his boss. The boss got away. Scarver claimed his boss was a racist and there has been speculation that Scarver, who is black, wanted revenge for the wrongs Dahmer and Anderson (both white) had done to black people. The majority of Dahmer's victims were black. Anderson tried to blame two fictitious black men for murdering his wife during a mugging. It's been pointed out that a desire for publicity or status may have also been a motive.

Dahmer was attacked the previous July, also. A convicted drug dealer tried to cut his throat with a razor blade attached to a toothbrush handle, making a crude straight razor, but the weapon fell apart. Dahmer, received minimal injuries.

Scarver is said to have delusions that he is Christ. He has been in psychiatrict observation and treatment several times, with diagnoses of bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. He was found guilty of the murder, though, and sent to prison. A jury apparently did not believe he was insane.

#true facts #true crime #true #crime / law / justice #major crimes #murder #murderer #Murderpedia #serial killer #killer #the milwaukee cannibal #milwaukee #cannibalism #jeffrey dahmer #dahmer #timeline #criminal justice

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tanyalovesreading · 4 years

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My Story

Hey guys!

I have thought about this quite some time, and I think there are more people like me out there. So, I decided I wanted to share my story with you of how I became a witch. It’s been quite some years and maybe I don’t remember certain wordings anymore. But I wanna tell you the honest truth. I think I’ve never actually talked about all of it in detail. And I am not sure yet how this will all play out with me and remembering everything. There are a few things that seem hard to believe, but trust me, this actually happened. So here we go :D

Let’s start with little me. I grew up in a pretty catholic family. In Bavaria. Where everything beside being catholic is not accepted. I went to church every Sunday and to all the big festivities like Easter and Christmas. When you’re in 3rd grade (so about 8/9 years old) you’ll have the Holy Communion. The first one. It basically initiates you into the church. At that time, we didn’t have a choice.

Maybe a few words about the German school system. You HAVE to take religious studies. When I still went to elementary school there was no other option. We had 3 hours a week and the whole year was separated for these 3 hours into 3 groups: Catholic, Evangelic and Ethic. As we had mainly Christians in our area, we got those options and then the Ethic kids. In there were all other religions and faithless people. That’s how it is.

So, if your whole class is attending the Holy Communion you also go. I can’t remember any year, as long as to the end of high school, where not everyone attended. At that age you don’t get it. Why you’re doing this. So, you just attend bible study and youth group and have a lot of fun with your classmates.

Obviously growing up in a catholic family like mine, it is only logical after being initiated to become an altar girl. By that time, we had a really great priest and we were quite many kids. We did a lot of afternoon activities together and went somewhere for the weekend. This took almost all my time. The rest of it I spent at karate. I liked it and it was a great sport that could easily be included with my daily activities.

But pretty soon after the holy communion I went and broke my arm. Bye bye karate… For some time this meant I had more time for church. I attended 5 times a week as an alter girl and it took a lot out of me. It took me about two years (when I attended a catholic middle school) that it was no fun for me anymore. I stopped going to church so much, and said I had to study a lot (which was kinda true). By that time a also joined a choire. I loved it. I mean we also sung at church some time, but most of it consisted of singing classical music, doing musicals and joining the theater for operas or theaters. The dynamic changed and I started to spend a lot of time there.

Until my family (and yes I don’t only mean my parents) got mad at me for not attending church as much. God would hate me. So they sent me off to boarding school. It wasn’t far away, but it was catholic and that would do. The boarding school system was kinda weird. I didn’t know any other boarding school who did this. We only slept there. Our schools where all around the city. The boarding house was mixed with girls and boys. The school I went to was girls only, the boy’s school just across the yard.

So what was our day like? We got up at 6 am, because we were expected at morning prayer at 6:45 am. After that we had breakfast and we went to school. Our walking time varied between 10 – 30 minutes, depending on which school we attended. Most of us (who had a further way back) came from school around 1:45 pm and then we had to hurry to lunch which started at 1:30 pm. After that we had a bit of break, and first study time would start at 2:30 pm. For one hour. Then we would have 15 minutes of break, another hour of study time, 30 minutes of break and then another 45 minutes. By then it would be 6 pm. The day pupils would leave and we had dinner. Don’t forget the praying. After that we actually had some free time until we had to be in bed at 9 pm. On Thursdays we also had to attend evening prayer. And that was our day.

By this time I actually hated praying and god and everything that had to do with it. It took too much out of me and I couldn’t be myself. Around that time (I must’ve been 12) I started reading up on other religions and finding paganism. I’ve only heard about it this far and what I’ve heard was what the church told us. Worshipping Satan, dancing around naked, yadayadayada… I started getting interested when I read and saw what paganism really was about. I started learning about different deities and religious paths even within paganism and decided that I really liked that. The individuality. How everyone wasn’t afraid of their gods and how everyone actually had fun being religious. But I also knew I could never tell my parents. My family. Because I knew what they would say. And this just couldn’t happen. After one year at boarding school I was allowed to come back home. I was happy, but also dreaded it. They expected me to have deepened my faith, which had not happened of course. So, what would I do?

I could hide it pretty well in the beginning. By the time I came home, I had to chose a (I don’t know what else to call it in English) educational path. I took languages. That meant a lot more studying. And my parents were content. I went to church on Sundays, but I couldn’t during the week. They saw me studying the whole time. Good thing, they never checked what I was studying because then they would’ve found herbology, crystals, deities and whatever else there beside my schoolwork. It actually took them 1,5 years to catch on. By then my father had become a real alcoholic. He not only mentally abused me, my sister and my mother but from time to time he would hit us. Well, me and my mum, because my sister was his little angle. In the beginning I was mad about that, but this meant she was safe. So there’s that. One evening I was out (I rejoined the choir when I came back home) and came home pretty late. I heard the yelling all across the street because they left the balcony door open. I dreaded going up to our apartment but I had to. When I entered I was bombarded with yelling. I didn’t even know why in the beginning. Both my parents just yelled at me and then my dad hit me. I tried getting to the room I shared with my sister. And when I looked in there I realized why they were mad. My dad found all my secret stashes. All of them. My pentacles, my papers, my books, my wand, … everything. Even now, 10 years later I can’t tell you what happened that night. I just … I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t know…

Anyway. A few weeks later I was called to the youth officers office. When I entered I was greeted by a child service worker. She told me a neighbor reported my dads yelling and overheard all the threats coming my way. One day they wanted to come to check, but they heard him. So there was their proof. They offered me to come with them, to get away from him. I immediately accepted. I spent time till Christmas in a foster family, after that they put me into a foster home. Long story short. I couldn’t have any faith. At that point it was not mentally possible. It took me finishing high school and leaving the country to find myself again.

I left to go study in the Netherlands when I was 19. And I absolutely loved it. I was finally free. It was then that I started to find my way back to witchcraft. Very slowly. But steady. There was no one telling me what to believe. It was fun to talk to my fellow students about everything and nothing, but faith never mattered.

I had to quit the study after a year, because of money issues and just moved across the border to Germany. Which was still at the other end of the country. Far away from my parents. I started working as an EMT (I already had the training from before I left Germany) and I was really happy being a witch, finally having a path that I loved and a job that wouldn’t clash with my believes.

About three months ago I had a crisis again. My parents came back into my life and I questioned a lot of life choices. I couldn’t remember why I became a witch in the first place. My life wasn’t so bad when I still believed in god, right? But I couldn’t and wouldn’t go back to church. I started taking bible studies with Jehovas Witnesses. And I liked it. I remembered a lot and their gatherings gave me what church never did: A sense of familiarity. Of belonging. But it didn’t take long for me to realize why I left church. It’s just not for me. A god that always wants you to follow his rules. If you don’t there’s not great life for you. And that’s not what I believe in. So last week I did some more meditation especially on that topic and I found my path. Myself. I had a beautiful encounter with a goddess who told me, whatever my path will be, it is the right one as long as I see myself in it. And that’s what I am doing now. Being myself. Caring about myself.

And this last week I have felt more like myself and more at peace, that I have … ever. Sometimes it’s hard to find your way and sometimes you have to leave your path to find the right one. But the only right one is the one where you can find yourself. Everything else is a lie.

________________________________________

So that’s it. That’s my story. I had to leave out some bits because I just couldn’t talk about them, even though I wanted to. I wanted to show how it doesn’t matter where you’re coming from or how many obstacles are in your way. If it is meant to be, then you will find your way through the world. Just be courageous. And don’t be mad if there’s a time when you can’t be.

This thing kinda stirred things up for me. And I really should work on them. But to all of you witches out there. Babies or not. Broom closeted or very open about your faith: If you ever need someone to talk to, write me. I always have an ear for everyone of you. I never had someone to talk to about any of this. So I want to give you the opportunity I never had.

I’d love if you shared this, show others they’re not alone out there. That there are others like you :D

So I wish all of you a great day and Blessed be :D

#witchcraft #witches #witch #pagan #paganism #pagan witch #witchblr #witches of tumblr #finding your way #christianity

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northofsomewhererp · 3 years

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Your Name, Age (18+), Pronouns & Timezone: H, 21, GMT

Kalel Corbyn turned 30 years old on April 27th. He’s a resident in Greensville. His face claim is Tom Ellis.

Admin note: I’m excited to see his face around town! You know the drill, send in his account and I’ll get his follow link up for you. Everyone else, make sure to check below the cut for Kalel’s bio and potential connections!

Bio (10+ sentences, include brief history, personality, potential plots):

Kalel Corbyn was born into his family as the eldest and only son, his parents having two girls, Carolyn and Lois, after him. He grew up in Reading, a small city in the UK not too far out from London. Though, it might as well have been - since Reading and London felt like two different worlds despite them being neighbouring cities. He had always viewed London as this multi-cultural place that you could go and be whatever you want. Where he lived however, it wasn’t the case. Everyone in the city knew each other and keeping up appearances meant a lot to his parents. Both of them die hard Evangelical Christians, his family were very involved within the religious community to the point they were attending every sermon and eventually, he and his sisters were put into Sunday school as well as public school. From the beginning, it seemed everything Kalel did was for his parents and their blessing - they were absolutely terrified that he would do something to make the family look bad. He wasn’t allowed to do most activities boys his age did, he wasn’t allowed to play sports, join clubs or go over to anyone’s house, in fear that he’d mix with a group of kids that would have a bad influence on him. He was barred from being friendly with any girls, his parents wanting him to stay “pure.” This, in turn, only made Kalel extremely isolated from kids his age and became the “weird” kid of his year. He actively struggled in school, the only release his parents allowed him to have was to take piano lessons. By the time he was ten, he was an intermediate piano player and composed his own songs to fill the loneliness he felt.

Once he finished primary school, he was made to join an all-boys faith school where they would start the process of him eventually becoming a priest after graduation. However, sending him to an all-boys school only seemed to push him more towards a “sinful” crowd, as his parents described it, since most of the boys were either into partying, drug abuse, hooking up with strangers, or were closeted gay. Because of this, Kalel was able to see a completely different side to life during his teen years. He was drinking and smoking constantly, dabbling in drugs and enjoying the company of any girl he met on nights out with the boys despite being a young teen. He managed to become quite a skilled liar, being able to hide it all from his parents for years until he was 16. He had gotten too drunk and high one night in town that he collapsed on the street. He was sent to hospital, waking up in a hospital bed with his horrified parents at his side. He remembered the rest of that day being the worst of his life, his parents withdrawing him from the school and sending him to a boarding school a couple towns over. It was a completely different atmosphere, it felt more to be a prison than a school. His teachers exercised punishments that would’ve been unheard of, breaking Kalel down bit by bit. By the time he was 17, Kalel was extremely miserable and stuck. He had felt completely stripped of everything, he was never able to make a decision for himself. He was to either commit his life to the church or to be outcasted by everyone. He couldn’t even consider being outcasted, since his family were the only people he really had - even if he didn’t trust his parents with anything. He would try his best to be the son they always wanted, following down the path they always wanted for him. He’d do two years at the boarding school before graduating, taking up as an altar server at the local church. He was happy to finally have approval from his parents but inside, he was depressed. He suffered with insomnia and was crippling with anxiety.

On his 21st birthday, he received a phone call from his father. That his sister, Lois, had taken her own life and that he needed to move back home for the funeral. It was a dark few days, having to put on a brave face in front of everyone and participate in his youngest sister’s funeral. It was only when he returned home that he had learned that Lois had wanted to stray from their family’s religious beliefs, that she had wanted to go out with a girl. He learned his parents had done the same thing to her as they did to him, sending her a strict girl boarding school leading her to take her own life to escape from the clutches of their family. Kalel was devastated, his sister’s death having an awful effect of him - realising that everything his parents had put them through was nothing but abuse. He knew this the moment his parents denounced his sister for having taken her own life and that she’d be in Hell for it. It was the breaking point for him. Within a few days, Kalel packed up everything he owned and left Reading - never looking back.

Coming to Greensville had been a mistake of sorts. Kalel had travelled all over England making money on odd jobs before he had eventually made his way over to the States. He had been in Raleigh originally, having gotten himself a shitty apartment and living off minimum wage jobs. It wasn’t until one of those jobs took him to Greensville that he really liked the small town, something about it gave him the peace he wanted. That and it was extremely cheap to get a decent place. He’d move from Raleigh to Greensville, getting a job as a freelance piano teacher after performing a few of his songs in the local bar. He felt quite happy for the first time in awhile since moving to Greensville, but deep down - he was harbouring so many problems he hadn’t addressed. His family, his sister’s death, the abuse he faced from the boarding school, the anger he felt against religion - it made him turn to alcohol and many other forms of dealing with the weight he carried. So had moving to Greensville been the start of a new life for him? Definitely. But it also raised the question on if Kalel would ever really be able to start over.

Have you read the rules?: removed

In the event that you leave, can we keep your biography for future use?: Sure x Any comments/questions?: Nope!

Potential/wanted connections:

I’d definitely like to have a friend connection for Kalel, boy or girl it doesn’t matter to me. With Kalel’s past, this friend was probably be one of the only people Kalel feels comfortable with and desperately needs in his life.

I’d also be interested in having a more-than-friends female connection for Kalel. Not necessarily romantic but casual lovers. Since Kalel had broken away from the constraints of his old life, he craves intimacy and sex. He’s definitely had the past and present of being someone who sleeps around but I’d be really interested in having a connection like this to explore that side of him more :)

#rp #roleplay #original character #submission #accepted #nosaccepted #tw: abuse #tw: religion #tw: death

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doug-lewars · 4 years

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Events

Professional writers or editors will tell you to make every word count towards the resolution of your plot. Whenever someone tells you something is absolutely necessary, pause and consider whether there are some instances where it is not. A scene not making a contribution to your plot is referred to as an event. It’s not a good idea to have to many events in your story or the reader will become confused and lose the thread of your plot, but, in my opinion, you can have a few. For example in one of my fantasy stories, my protagonist, Janet, needs to search a large city for one homeless person. She requests three of her companions, fairies, to fly around and locate places where homeless people congregate. Unfortunately the fairies don’t know much about human society and Janet’s description of what a homeless person might look like is pretty vague. As a result, they make a mistake but inadvertently direct Janet and the rest to an area where she stumbles across some useful information. The event, in this case, is what happens as the fairies are searching for one or more homeless people.I could have dropped 99% of the scene but it amused me so I left it in.

“There!” exclaimed Flicker suddenly, “There’s a homeless person!”

“Where?!” Rose and Holly asked together.

“There!” said Flicker pointing.

The girls looked in the direction he indicated and saw a teenage girl, probably sixteen or seventeen walking along the street.

“How do you know she’s homeless?”

“I’ve been watching her. She goes to each house, knocks on the door and then she leaves. Obviously she’s looking for a home.”

Neither Rose nor Holly knew much about human behavior, so they didn’t argue. Instead they flew down and sat on the branch of a tree so they could have a better look. Sure enough the girl went to each house, knocked on the door, and after thirty seconds or a minute, moved on to the next.

Rose nodded, “It does seem she’s homeless.”

Michelle Telegen was far from homeless, but she was definitely having a bad day. While her high school teachers were in meetings for professional development and her friends were presumably lounging around their houses, she was out doing the work of The Lord. She was a member of Brother Matthew Ackerton’s Youth for Jesus outreach group, and Brother Matt as he liked to be called, had told his small flock to go forth and evangelize the gospel. Brother Matthew was the leader of an independent church occupying what had, in better days, been a store. It had been furnished with thirty folding chairs, a small table to serve as an altar and a piano. The piano needed tuning, but with a congregation of only twenty-five people, such expenditure was out of the question. In fact, just paying the rent was all he could manage, and Brother Ackerton was reduced to using a sleeping bag at the back and cooking his meals over an electric element when no-one was around. Such were the trials of the Lord.

Of the twenty-five parishioners, six were teenagers, three were young children and the remaining sixteen were adults. Although completely dedicated to Brother Matthew, none of the adults were wealthy, so although they gave as much as they could, there wasn’t a lot to give. Brother Ackerton had attempted to find a television show to spread the word on a larger scale, but for every available time slot there were fifty or more preachers vying for the position and poor Brother Matt hadn’t received so much as an interview. He also attempted to persuade numerous radio stations to put him on the air, but again there was a great deal of competition and although he’d received one audition he hadn’t been selected. In fact, the station manager who’d done it later commented to one of his colleagues that Brother Ackerton sounded like a constipated duck and would do little to capture any sort of audience. So the preacher was reduced to finding converts in whatever way he could and that meant going from door to door. Thousands of door knockings had not resulted in a single saved soul, but as far as he was concerned, that was no reason not to keep trying – particularly when the evangelizing was being done by his parishioners and not by himself.

In addition to Sunday and Wednesday services, Brother Matt had a Saturday afternoon bible school for the teenagers – a service coolly received. It might not have been well attended were it not for the parents making it clear their offspring were to follow paths leading directly to heaven. In the case of Michelle Telegen, she actually believed – or at least convinced herself she wanted to believe which was half the battle. She was impressed by the sacrifice of her Lord and Savior. She earnestly wanted to be among the angels when the final trumpet sounded. In short, she desperately wanted to measure up to her parents’ and Brother Matt’s ideal of what a good person and a Christian should be. Unfortunately, while her spirit was in a state of grace, her mind and body had a bad habit of turning traitor and allowing less than charitable thoughts to intrude. While she knew her body was a temple unto the Lord and that it should be kept in pristine condition; regrettably, she had a sweet-tooth and it seemed as if the temple was becoming shaped more like a mosque.

Brother Matt made things pretty clear. There were six teenagers in the bible-study group. If each of the six were to recruit three other people, that would be an additional eighteen members of the congregation. If then, each of those eighteen, brought in two more, they would add thirty-six new souls. Surely the Lord would rejoice at such salvation, and although he didn’t mention it, the increased revenue wouldn’t hurt either. He had known of the professional development day and had instructed all six of his flock to go forth and bring in young or old. Whether the other five paid any attention was unclear. Michelle noted they were vague on the subject when she asked them about their plans; nevertheless, she was out knocking on doors and spreading the Word – except she hadn’t had a great deal of success. She’d knocked on probably two hundred doors of which one hundred and ninety went unanswered and the other ten were quickly closed. While the Lord was known to work in mysterious ways, in Michelle’s estimation he wasn’t working at all on that particular day and the uncharitable thought snuck in that maybe he’d joined the teachers at their conference. She suppressed the thought but not before a pang of guilt made her resolve to brace up under her load and knock on as many doors as she could before having to return home for supper.

Whether or not it was the two-hundredth and first door or not she couldn’t say, but the house to which the door was attached belonged to Andrew Dewel, an elderly gentleman thought by his neighbors to be somewhere beyond senile and well on the way to batty.

Andrew was seventy-eight years old and had been retired for thirteen years. He had never married and had worked his entire life as a night watchman – not a profession geared towards a great deal of social interaction. Such few friends as he’d made during his younger years had drifted away or died leaving him entirely on his own; and, following retirement – forced – he’d become reclusive. The more isolated he became, the more eccentric were his habits. His neighbors were a pretty easy-going lot, and felt he was largely harmless, so they ignored his aberrations such as dancing with fairies in his backyard on a summer evening. While Andrew did have a slight ability to catch a glimpse of the Midworld, the fairies with whom he danced were entirely of his imagination. Some people believe talking to plants will facilitate growth. Andrew went one step further and sang to them. Whether the plants responded or not was a moot point. His neighbors generally closed all doors and windows when he started singing.

In order to compensate for being isolated, he constructed a rich fantasy world. It was populated by the aforementioned fairies, pixies, sprites, leprechauns, two vampires, three werewolves, a faun and a small troll. The latter was about a third the size of Glorb and much closer in size to Sren, but presumably imaginary trolls didn’t need to be big. Andrew knew all their names – who was dangerous, mischievous, or kind and how they lived their lives. He knew the vampires, although dangerous, didn’t need to feed more than once a month and generally did so well away from the neighborhood. He knew on nights of the full moon when the werewolves were on the prowl it was best to remain in the house, but if they happened to transform on other nights – and occasionally they could – they weren’t particularly dangerous; but liked to run wild through a nearby park. They were a bit hard on the neighborhood dogs, but Andrew wasn’t bothered because he was a little afraid of those dogs, so felt the werewolves were giving them a taste of their own medicine.

When he opened his front door to see who was knocking, his first thought was he’d died and gone to heaven, for here, surely was an angel sent to bear him upwards, but then he realized this was a living person – a sylvan enchanted seductress sent as an answer to his most fervent prayers – prayers he’d long abandoned following adolescence, but which came rushing to the fore in an instant. What Michelle saw was an old man wearing nothing but an undershirt, underpants, black socks and white running shoes, whose hair – what there was left of it – was white and whose teeth appeared to be missing. The latter was not entirely true. Andrew still had twenty teeth left but he didn’t have many in front. In horror she watched as his eyes lit up, something grew in his underwear and with an inarticulate gasp he lunged at her. Then she was running down the street as fast as she could with Andrew right behind displaying remarkably good speed for a man his age.

The two were well matched. Andrew was old but he’d spent his working life patrolling the perimeter of a large warehouse and had been fit when he’d retired. Not having a car, he walked everywhere, so he still had pretty good muscle strength. Michelle was much younger; but wasn’t good with physical exercise and much preferred to spend time in her room with a good book and some jelly donuts. Suddenly she found a sprinter’s speed and a marathon runner’s endurance, but, inspired by so much youthful seductiveness, Andrew was not giving up easily.

“What are they doing?” asked Rose.

“Running,” replied Flicker.

“Well we know that,” put in Holly with an emphasis on the word ‘that’, but why?”

Flicker watched as the two disappeared down the block. “A race?”

Rose considered, “It doesn’t seem likely. I think he’s chasing her for some reason.”

Holly nodded, “Let’s follow them and have a closer look.”

They caught up to the runners at the two hundred yard mark. Michelle was tiring but adrenaline kept her in the lead. Andrew was having more fun than he’d had in years and was convinced this vision of loveliness was the companion he’d longed for since he’d been thirteen years old. He was tired but not prepared to give up.

With Andrew gaining, Michelle decided it was time for evasive action, so turned left and ran up the next driveway, around the side of a house and into the backyard. Under normal circumstances this was something she would never do. Nice religious girls do not – repeat not – ever invade someone’s private space – unless formally invited. On the other hand, nice religious girls do not, under normal circumstances, expect to find themselves being pursued by raving lunatics intent on … well Michelle wasn’t exactly sure what he was intent upon, but it had to be something frowned upon in Bible-study Group.

There was a gate left open by mistake, so she didn’t have to break stride as she raced by. In the backyard was a pool, and while it was a bit early in the season for swimming, the homeowner had filled it in preparation for the summer ahead. She hurdled a lawn chair, cut around a chaise lounge and was running towards the fence at the bottom of the yard when her foot slipped on wet tile and with a whoop; she kept herself from falling and possibly injuring herself by doing a header into six feet of water. Although not an accomplished swimmer, she was in no danger of drowning, but charging up behind her and with a whoop of his own – this one in glee – Andrew launched himself into the air and into the only dive he remembered from his youth - a cannonball. With a great splash he hit the water and sent spray in all directions, but, when he came to the surface it took him a few seconds to orient himself and by that time she was up the stairs and racing toward the far fence. In his youth he had been a strong swimmer, so not the least dismayed by this apparent setback, he struck out for the same steps. By the time he was out of the pool, Michelle was half way over the fence.

“Uh oh,” said Flicker, “That wasn’t a good idea.”

From their vantage point some thirty feet above the contestants, Flicker had seen the sleeping Doberman in the yard beyond. With a roar the dog was on its feet, but for all her heaviness, Michelle was not lacking in reflexes, so before it could do more than take a single step in her direction she was back on the fence and crossing back into the pool yard just as Andrew, perhaps ten feet away, jumped up. For an instant their eyes met and then momentum carried each forward – Andrew to meet the Doberman and Michelle to backtrack towards the gate, the driveway and the street.

Things might have gone badly, but as Andrew cleared the fence and saw the dog, he imagined himself as one of the werewolves and bellowed his challenge. From the dog’s perspective he suddenly saw this huge roaring thing apparently dropping out of the sky. Dobermans may be fierce, but they also have a strong instinct towards self-preservation and this one decided discretion was the better part of valour and was half-way up the yard with its tail between its legs when Andrew landed. Before it could re-assess and attack, he was climbing back over the fence in hot pursuit of his loved one.

Back on the street, Michelle turned left for no other reason than it was the direction she’d been running in when she decided to take evasive action. She’d gained a bit of a lead; but knew she couldn’t sustain the pace for long. Admittedly her pursuer’s body was flagging, but he was so overjoyed such a wonderful magical being had entered his life, he was able to keep running on pure delight.

She passed two of the neighborhood women without even seeing them. Andrew saw them as he flew by but had no interest. He was after the fleeing nymphet who had stolen his heart.

“Well,” exclaimed one of the women, “I don’t know what the world is coming to when old man Dewel is running around the neighborhood in his underwear.”

“Oh, it’s no big deal,” said the second. “It happens every so often, but normally he just walks instead of runs. This is the first time I’ve seen him chase a young girl. The last time he ran was when Mrs. McNaughten from the Ladies Auxilliary was going around trying to raise funds for the orphans in Zaire and didn’t recognize his house. She was a much better runner than this one even though she was well into her late fifties at the time. I think young people today get far too little exercise.”

“True, I’ll swear my nephew Phillip is part elephant from the size of him – except elephants are strong and it’s about all he can do to lift a fork.”

“Did I ever tell you about my husband’s cousin’s son? Not the one that went to university – the other one. Anyway …”

Michelle came to an intersection and kept going. The light was green and she prayed it would turn red or at least yellow before her pursuer reached the crossing; but her prayer went unanswered and Andrew was able to cross. There was a store on the corner and Michelle raced through the front door hoping to be rescued. Unfortunately the store was manned that day by a petite Asian woman, who, thinking she was about to be robbed, screamed, threw her hands into the air and dove to the floor. Knowing she had only seconds, Michelle continued down the aisle, past a freezer and out the back door. Andrew, hot on her trail, came running through the front door just as the Asian woman stood up. This was worse - a lot worse! Not only was she about to be robbed, but it seemed likely this man intended to perform some terrible atrocity upon her, so she did the only thing she could think of. Picking up the first thing that came to hand, a triple pack of Juicy-Fruit gum, she threw it at his head. Had it connected, it wouldn’t have done any damage, but a glimpse of something flying through the air caused him to swerve into some shelves. Tins of fruits and vegetables crashed to the floor and went rolling in all directions. He jumped to his feet unhurt and ran through the backdoor only a few seconds behind Michelle.

When he emerged there was no sign of her. The alley extended some two hundred feet in one direction and it wasn’t possible for her to traverse so much distance in so few seconds, so he ran the other way. It brought him back to the main street, but he still didn’t see her and was sadly forced to concede she’d used magic to disappear. Turning he began the slow walk back home.

It was the better part of fifteen minutes before Michelle felt safe enough to leave her hiding place in the dumpster. When she emerged she was covered with chicken fat, orange peelings, rotten broccoli, bits of used tissue, three candy wrappers, an apple core, rotten cantaloupe, cookie and potato chip crumbs, and some sponge towel that had been used for … she didn’t want to even think what. She brushed off as best she could but she smelled like – well, a dumpster and her immediate prayer was not for salvation but getting home and into the shower. Although she couldn’t be positive, she was fairly certain the early Christian martyrs didn’t have rotten cantaloupe smeared down their fronts in such a way as to make it look like they’d peed their pants.

“Where’s she going now?” asked Rose.

“Not sure, but Janet said homeless people may look scruffy and I’m pretty sure that one meets the criteria. I think we should return and let the others know they should look around this neighborhood. If there’s one, there may be others.”

With that settled the fairies headed back to report their findings.

#doug lewars #writing #writer #writing tips #plot points #events

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snommelp · 5 years

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The Not-So-Prodigal Son

I mentioned that I might upload my sermon for this Sunday here. It’s written with a fairly specific context in mind, but here it is, with only light edits to remove identifying information.

Luke 15:11-32

Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he divided his property between them.

A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything.

But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ So he set off and went to his father.

But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate.

Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. He replied, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.’

Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, ‘Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’

Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”

Once upon a time, there was a man who had two sons. And one day, the younger son came to him and said “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” So the man divided his property between his two sons. The younger son took all that he had been given and left for a distant land.

The older son stayed behind.

The older son stayed behind, and while the younger son was off wasting all of his property on I-don’t-even-know-what, the older son was hard at work, caring for his father’s property, like the good, responsible son he was. For years, he worked hard, taking care of the fields and the flocks – up before the dawn, working the whole day through, finally stopping only after it’s gotten too dark to see. Sure, his father had servants to do a lot of the really hard work, but the older son wasn’t going to be idle; if you want a job done right you have to do it yourself. He never even partied, not really. He might have a couple of friends over for an evening or two, but with all the hard work they were all doing, all they ever really did when they got together was sit around and talk until somebody started yawning, then they all went home and went to sleep, because after all the morning comes early when you’ve got work to do.

One day, this responsible young man was returning home from a long day working in the fields, when he heard music coming from the house. Lively music, not the kind that you sit quietly to appreciate but the kind that you have to dance to. The young man was confused, but not unhappy. His father had been off for years now, ever since that ungrateful wretch had torn this family apart and disappeared to parts unknown, probably dead in a ditch somewhere and it would serve him right after he ripped this family apart like that. It’s good that his father was finally kicking back and enjoying himself, whatever it was that made him so happy must really be wonderful.

So the young man called a servant over and asked him what the occasion was. He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.”

Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!”

Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”

…

When Jesus tells the story of the Lost Son, he focuses his attention on the younger son who is seduced by worldly pleasures, sex drugs and rock and roll. But I confess, I have trouble relating to the younger son.

I was raised in the Church. Baptized as an infant by, if I’m remembering the story right, both our Methodist minister and my uncle who is a Lutheran minister. My parents took me to church every Sunday unless I was not only sick but contagious. In the sixth grade I went through Confirmation class and formally claimed my faith as my own. I attended youth group, sang in the youth choir, volunteered for Vacation Bible School when I was too old to attend. I was an amazing puppeteer and Bible storyteller.

Then I graduated high school. And if you’re familiar with people sharing their testimonies in church, you might have an idea of where the story goes from here. Whether it’s going off to college or simply moving away from the parents, this is the part in the testimony where we’ve been trained to expect the person to be tempted by sin.

I went away to college, and just a few days after having moved in to the dorm, I encountered a pretty girl.

She invited me to a campus ministry.

Yeah, bet you weren’t expecting that, were you?

She invited me to a campus ministry, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. And since I don’t like to leave any threads dangling when I tell a story, I’ll go ahead and let you know that after that invitation I barely even ever saw that girl again – I think she might have been in the women’s choir when I was in the men’s choir. But I continued attending that campus ministry, and others. Before my freshman year was over I already felt a certainty that I was called to ordained ministry, and I became more and more deeply involved in campus ministries all through my college career, until I graduated and went immediately to seminary. After seminary there was a period of maybe five months or so where life was uncertain, but then I was offered a job at a church; I was the Director of Christian Education, Youth, and Evangelism. And yes, for those who are curious, I did have a little trouble balancing all three aspects of that job title, but anyway. Since then I have continued to be an active leader in the church, in one way or another.

In my whole life, I’ve never had a moment where I “strayed away” like the younger son in the story Jesus tells. I’m not the prodigal; if I’m any character in this story, I’m the older brother. I am the Not-So-Prodigal Son.

But even though the older son never left home, that doesn’t mean that he’s guilt-free. As you listened to the story, you may have picked up on the older son’s sin, and it’s a sin that tempts everyone like me who never “fell from grace.” When the older son learns that his younger brother has returned home, he reacts with anger. That worthless wretch doesn’t deserve to even see their father’s face, let alone to be thrown a party, complete with fatted calf! The older son goes off to pout, refuses to see his brother, wouldn’t see their father either if not for the fact that the father comes looking for him.

And when the father does come to talk to the older son, what does the son say? That son of yours – notice that the older son refuses to claim the younger son as his brother – that son of yours shouldn’t be getting a party! I’ve worked like a slave for you and never got a party, but this son of yours goes and wastes your property, makes a fool of himself to the whole world, and the moment he comes back you kill the fatted calf for him! You don’t know what you’re doing, old man, just go sit down and watch your shows and let me take care of things from now on.

Okay, he doesn’t say that last bit, but you can hear it, can’t you?

And that, exactly that, is the sin that tempts Christians like me, who never “strayed away” from the church, who by at least as much luck as anything else never fell in with the wrong crowd. For a Christian like me, the temptation and the danger is to think that I know better than God does who deserves God’s love and God’s grace, as if God’s love was payment for a job well done rather than a free gift that no person no matter how good could ever hope to earn. The temptation is to pick and choose who is welcome in God’s Kingdom, not that person over there, he’s done some really bad things, no not her either you don’t even want to know the rumors about what she used to do. And the ones that I will let in, there are going to be conditions. Maybe, once the older brother has had a chance to calm down a little bit, he’ll let the younger brother work in the fields for him, but before that happens that kid is going to have to do a whole lot of apologizing and begging for forgiveness, then I’ll let him start at the bottom and try to work his way back up.

Because really, how dare the father let such a screw-up get off so easy?

It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? That precisely in focusing on how much better he is, on how blameless he is, the older brother commits his terrible sin. In focusing on how blameless he is, the older son elevates himself not only over his brother but even over their father; the blameless Christian is in deadly danger of elevating himself over even God. The older son is just as lost and just as in need of forgiveness as the younger son.

When Jesus tells the story of the Lost Son, he focuses his attention on the younger son who is seduced by worldly pleasures, but still Jesus tells us a story about two very different people who both need to be reconciled to God – and to one another. The older brother isn’t some insignificant side character, he’s an important part of the lesson that Jesus is teaching. If you still have your Bible open, you can look a few verses ahead from where we started this morning, to the very beginning of the fifteenth chapter in Luke: “Now all the tax-collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” It seems to me that Jesus told this story intending for religious insiders like the scribes, like the Pharisees, like me, to identify with him, to see our own sin, and to begin thinking through what we need to do to turn from that sin.

I wouldn’t want to speak for anyone but myself, but I will most certainly speak for myself. Knowing that I am the older son, I can hear Jesus calling me to repent of my sin against my younger brother. I need to repent of murdering him in my heart, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount anger does. I need to repent of assuming the absolute worst about him – you may have noticed, in the Scripture it only says that the younger brother squandered his property in “dissolute living,” it’s the older son who makes salacious assumptions about what exactly that might mean. And most of all, I need to repent and turn from my sin of seeking to exclude my younger brother, thinking myself better than him and wiser than God in seeking to turn him away.

The good news is that God welcomes all, God loves and forgives both the younger and the older son. The challenge is that God expects us to do the same.

And so, gracious God, we ask you to pour out your amazing grace, both on the wretch in need of salvation, and on the pious saint who thinks he doesn’t need it. Grant your forgiveness both to the sinner, and to the one who believes she is sinless. Turn our hearts, oh God, so that we may not only know your love, but show it, to all we meet, whether we believe them to be deserving or not.

Amen.

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automatismoateo · 3 years

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A friend's suicide when I was a teenager, caused by religion via /r/atheism

A friend's suicide when I was a teenager, caused by religion

I don't want this to come off as a "why I am not religious" story. I don't believe it because it's incredibly far fetched and there is no evidence to believe it.

This is part of why I hate religion. The most personal reason anyway, I believe the damage to the world is more far reaching.

I had a friend in a small town in Wyoming. Most of his family was Mormon some were evangelical. Most of his "friends" were Mormon too. We hung out in his or my garage after school. Played Sega Genesis. Tried to start a band. All that crap.

When I was 16 he got caught in his room making out, or maybe more, with his boyfriend. The other boys parents were also religious. He was sent away somewhere. My friend was isolated. I don't really know what they did. I couldn't get in touch with him. I guess they decided he had to avoid any of his old friends especially if they weren't Mormon.

I hadn't even known he was gay, he was deeply ashamed of it apparently. Enough so that even he bought into their telling him that he was bad and evil. I saw him a few month later. He didn't talk to me. Much later, after his death, I was told by my parents that they had called and said he wouldn't be allowed to hang out with me anymore. They claimed he had "severe psychological issues" that needed to be addressed and he was going to a different school.

I guess they think gay is some kind of a cult (like they are) and that all his old friends must be gay too. I'm not, not that it really would matter. It's not like you can convert someone to gay or straight.

Two years after he first got caught he shot himself. It must have been easy to get the gun. His parents were rich gun nuts also. Gave all their sons guns for most gift occasions. Odd thing to do when your kid has "psychological problems"

I wish I could share more detail about what they did to him, but they destroyed all his journals and drawing books. I heard about that from his older sister years later after she left the church. It almost sounds like it was some sort of official church book burning ceremony, but maybe they just threw it all in the trash. He liked to draw and had a shelf full of notebooks. If he left a note I never heard of it or saw it. Parents oddly didn't even seem to care that much. His mom didn't even miss more than a few days work as a teacher. Just a lot of talk about how he was lost and Jesus called him home or some shit. They probably payed the church to make sure he still goes to heaven.

His obituary didn't mention his drawing, or his suicide. It painted a picture of someone completely else. Someone entirely devoted to Mormonism and a few other interests I don't think he really had (basketball and camping?). It only mentioned his passion for music in saying he volunteered to play guitar for church events.

They killed him, and then they killed him again by erasing him. And they seemed to do both with no hesitation or remorse.

But you know what? When a missionary comes to my door and pesters me and asks what happened that made me not believe, I don't tell them about this. They would just say some religious bullshit that would piss me off even more.

The reason I don't believe is because it's obviously a structure designed to make people easier to rule, and there is no evidence. I don't need a traumatic event not to believe something that is totally obvious bullshit with no proof. And they don't deserve the chance to try to weave it into their stupid narrative. I was an atheist before this ever happened.

I have talked to a therapist about it, even as far back as 20 years ago. It took a while to find an atheist therapist. But she put it in the best light by acknowledging the horror of it, rather than acting like it's some kind of "this isn't your fault" approach. I know it isn't my fault. The feelings I couldn't shake were those of a friend of a murder victim. The rage, disgust and helplessness anyone would feel if a cult killed their friend and never faced justice.

Submitted October 05, 2021 at 07:07AM by anythingMuchShorter (From Reddit https://ift.tt/3a9aUxO)

#reddit

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ellie-writes-things · 6 years

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Movement

The Sunbeams, a Lutheran group similar to the Girl Scouts without selling cookies that operated within Apostles Lutheran Church and School--of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod branch of Lutheranism--on Santa Teresa Boulevard, went around neighborhoods in December to sing Christmas carols to well-kept homes in the affluent subdivisions of Santa Clara County. One instance, in the December of my second grade year, has always remained with me. My mother, the current Sunbeam leader at the time, decided that this year would we would travel to senior neighborhoods as well. Little girls, bundled in eclectic blends of green and red sweaters and hats, set out for the night sometime around sunset with a couple volunteer parents and Pastor Kronenbusch in tow. As we sang “The First Noel,” our breaths floated and curled around us, they rose with our voices to the inhabitants’ windows and beyond. One woman sent out her nurse to ask us to stay awhile longer. We sang several carols at her doorway, but never saw her. We only saw the light that shone through her curtains. My throat tingled and my eyes stung with the cold, and I remember my mother clutched my hand in hers before she turned to face me, her eyes bright and damp and her mouth still moving to the words of “Away in a Manger.”

Later that night, our final destination included the street I lived on; a quiet neighborhood that lay within a mobile home park with the lofty name of Chateau La Salle in San Jose off of Monterey Road and Esfahan Drive. The asphalt of Chateau La Salle Drive glittered with the runoff from sprinklers, reflecting the radiance of the strands of fairy lights that lined the houses and street, setting the park aglow. We sang at a few houses before my mother and her assistant, a woman named Becky and the mother of my best friend at that time, Laura, said that we needed to get ready to finish. They revealed that a surprise lay waiting for us before the night ended, and they shuffled us down the road in the direction of the house my mother and I shared with my grandparents and her two brothers. Instead of my home, we stepped up to our next-door neighbors’, a house that belonged to an elderly couple I affectionately called Mr. Bob and Ms. Marilyn, who--along with my youngeset uncle, Randy--set up television trays that held a combination of store-bought and homemade cookies, and I spied a few that my mother made the day before and scolded me not to nick any of them. Ms. Marilyn gave me a hug and pushed a paper cup of apple cider into my mitten. The room buzzed and I wandered to find either my mother or my uncle after the excited group of little girls swallowed me up. The walls twinkled and thrummed, shadows chased by Santas and reindeer upon their surface. I took a sip and the cider burned my tongue, and instead of whimpering I swallowed the liquid along with my discomfort. My uncle stood at the edge of the crowd as he watched the other adults converse with each other-Mr. Bob asked my mother about my grandmother’s health and how my grandfather fared through the ordeal-and I wrapped myself around my uncle’s leg like ivy. My mother nodded and I watched Ms. Marilyn hold her hand, while Becky kept her eyes on the other girls, ever vigilant. I remember my uncle rested his hand on the top of my head and pulled my hat off, before smacking me with it.

I laughed, and leaned my head on his hip while I watched as the other girls giggled and drank and stuffed themselves with cookies, their faces luminous in the radiance of the Christmas tree.

About a week or so later, my mother and I moved out of my grandparents’ home.

I lived, during my elementary school years, in what has turned into one of the most expensive mobile home parks in the country, back when you could still buy a space and home there for a relatively modest sum and not the inflated $200,000 that you would spend now on a smaller home. With three bedrooms and two bathrooms, it housed my grandparents in the master suite, two of my uncles-Dale, the oldest, and Randy, the youngest--in one room, and my mother and I in the last bedroom. It was, originally, a seniors-only park, but, according to my mother, San Jose passed a law that forbade the discrimination of children, which I benefited from as my mother and I would have had nowhere else to go had we not been allowed to live with my grandparents when my mother left the studio we rented after the finalization of her divorce from my father. The added benefit, of course, was the built-in daycare in the form of my grandmother as my mother worked 50-60 hour weeks at Xicor in Milpitas. A 15-minute drive until you take into account Bay Area rush-hour traffic and the nightmare that is U.S. Highway 101. Our neighbors, Mr. Bob and Ms. Marilyn--who threw the Christmas party my Sunbeam troop attended--and Mr. Marty and Ms. Dorothy, kept an eye out for my grandmother while she was at home with my Uncle Randy alone during work and school hours.

My grandfather avoided homeownership for around 30 years, he and his family living in a 8x45 trailer during my mother’s childhood and adolescence, and moved around the west coast often for his job with the government. My mother would say that his reluctance to purchase a permanent home was due to my grandmother’s tendency to threaten divorce whenever they fought.

This, too, was often.

The house my grandmother chose, when she--at last--was afforded the opportunity, sat at the address 201 Chateau La Salle Drive, San Jose 95111. The mint siding and white awning glared under the midday sunlight in the summer, but appeared far more subdued in the darker half of the year. It came with a crimson porch whose steps we sat on to watch the fireworks from the fairground across the street every Fourth of July and where my Uncle Randy showed me how snails sizzle when introduced to salt. The inside had the dark faux-wood paneling popularized in the 80s and 90s and the earth-toned carpet my grandmother preferred because it was easier to keep clean. Tobacco and nicotine dyed the ceiling in nearly every room but mine and my mother’s and old clothes from second grade that I’ve managed to retain after all these years still hold that stale scent of smoke that settled into the fibers of the upholstery from my grandparents lighting up their Marlboro Lights, often as they watched television and drank coffee well into the evening.

As one of the first families to live in the park, and being my mother’s only offspring, other children were a rarity. I spent my time with adults on weekends and after school, and one of my mother’s favorite things to do with me when she managed to claim a slice of free time was visit the Oak Hill Cemetery situated next to the park and tour the gardens and funeral home.

Established in 1847, Oak Hill Cemetery is the oldest secular graveyard in operation within California. My mother would drive us along the roadway-on the occasional Sunday after church-up to the main parking lot where we would abandon her Volvo and walk along the manicured lawns and flower arrangements left by dutiful loved ones on the more recent additions to the landscape. Oleanders, white and pink, blocked the humming of traffic from invading the atmosphere, letting it, instead, waft over the hillside. I remember the thin leaves swaying in the breeze created by passing cars that zipped along the busy roadway while we looked at the engravings on the headstones, taking note of the dates and deducing how old the residents were when they expired. My mother pointed out the more historical graves, such as James F. Reed’s from the infamous Donner party whose body was interned there. The light caught on my mother’s hair, the strands gleaming when I would gaze up at her, and she kept my hand grasped in hers.

I enjoyed being out of the home. And I think that, when she could spare the time, she did too.

Sundays often became my mother’s and my special day to spend together; we attempted to cram a week’s worth of quality time in less than twenty-four hours. The day began at 9:00 am, bathed in a wash of the prismatic light that filtered in through the large stained glass windows behind the altar at Apostles during a sermon delivered by either Pastor Kronenbusch or Pastor Mahnke, followed by fellowship in the narthex where fresh-brewed coffee and hot chocolate and store-brand sandwich cookies awaited the parishioners; the fragrance, of which, emanated throughout the hall. Sunday school in what was normally my second grade classroom--for me--and bible study somewhere in the smaller onsite chapel--for my mother--and then choir practice when I became old enough comprised the rest of the morning for my mother and I. On the way home, we stopped by Winchell’s Doughnuts just off of Santa Teresa and would pick out a baker’s dozen to bring home to the rest of the family who, besides my oldest uncle who went to Peace Lutheran, were not the church-going type. I insisted on three types of doughnuts: chocolate glaze, chocolate cake, and chocolate old-fashioned. My mother comments still that this is a predilection I inherited from my father. I believe my grandparents preferred maple bars, and my grandmother favored those with custard filling. The sweet perfume lingered in my mother’s car and our home for the rest of the day.

After school one day, after one of these Sundays, my Uncle Randy took me out around the neighborhood on my bicycle as my mother was unable, due to her work schedule, with him following along on his. Wet asphalt assaulted my lungs and tongue with its thick fog clinging to the air around us as the sunshine glinted off of the trails the water sprinklers left behind. My training wheels still attached, I wobbled back and forth, nervous of riding over cracks in the pavement, thinking they would crumble and I would fall into a pit, and he eventually dismounted his bike and walked along side with me. He also quipped “Step on a crack and break your mother’s back,” and added to my anxiety. Chateau La Salle maintained a uniform appearance, even to an oblivious seven-year-old with no knowledge of Homeowner's Associations and the grief my grandfather dealt with regarding landscaping and the property manager. Resident’s lawns cut the same length, similar color-schemes, and manicured flower beds. Most homes also had jasmine that climbed up the sides of the houses, much like ours. When it was warm out, like that day in September, the whole park filled with that fragrance and bit my nose. I sneezed, and my uncle handed me his handkerchief, which I hated to use since it could not be thrown away. We encountered a sign that read “Dead End” and I pleaded with my uncle to go back. He insisted we just ride to the sign, and then we could turn around, but I started sniffling and told him I was scared. I felt queasy and hot and I struggled to breath in the air around us. In my mind, I saw myself falling into a chasm that would open if we went on just a bit farther with no end, just a complete absence of light where I could not see the dangers that could be posed to a little girl. He laughed a little, but agreed that we could go back home, even as I looked back towards the sign.

That night, after my mother arrived back home and after dinner and as I was drawing in front of the television with him, he explained to me that a dead end was only a road that went nowhere. I believe on that same night, as we all settled in to watch a movie, he darted out of the house yelling at someone. I tried to follow, but my mother would not let me, saying that Uncle Randy must have thought he heard something. Uncle Dale did take off after him, however, and my mother took me to bed where I watched the play of shadows behind the Ariel the Little Mermaid curtains my mother made.

Convinced I saw a witch’s face or claw reaching out from behind the plumeria that grew in front of my window, I clamored into my mother’s bed.

The next morning he and my mother were in an altercation over the milk for cereal; he slugged her across the face with the gallon jug, and she almost choked him out. My grandmother cried while my grandfather separated them. Milk still soaked the carpet by the time I got out of the bedroom, too scared to make my appearance known any earlier and too scared to ask what was wrong. Someone drew the curtains in both the living room and dining room closed and patches of sun lay across the table and floor in discordant shapes and the front of my mother’s t-shirt remained drenched.

She grabbed her carpet steamer and worked on the floor for two hours as my grandmother berated her for the quarrel, but the scent of stale dairy never fully dissipated in that spot, though over time the ever-present odor of nicotine masked its presence.

Places have a scent, an aroma you will recognize the moment you are confronted with it. If you’ve ever noticed the way 7-11 stores smell the exact same no matter what location you are in, you’ll understand this. Olfactory memories are the easiest, and strongest, to trigger, and, as someone once told me--Randy, I believe--they are frequently said to be the most vivid.

On campus, I will, on occasion, catch a whiff of smoke and am taken back to my grandmother’s living room with the drapes drawn, sitting in my Mickey Mouse chair next to her favorite armchair and watching an episode of “Days of Our Lives” after school or during summer vacation, the cherry on her cigarette a beacon in the shrouded room, diminished only by the flashes from the television set. I still enjoy the company of smokers, despite not smoking myself; the scent of them causes my stomach to unclench and to take a breath that I realize trembles within my lungs. Coffee houses, too, take me back to early mornings with my grandfather in their honey-colored kitchen brewing coffee at 5:30 am before school or on Saturdays, and his timbre rumbling, “That’s not coffee, that’s syrup, granddaughter,” after I added my customary four-to-five teaspoons of white sugar to the cup he gave me while we sat and read the newspaper.

I mumble this to myself when I make my coffee at home, and miss the hiss and pop of the old Mr. Coffee coffee maker my family had as I pour hot water over the freshly ground beans that lay in the single-cup pour-over style brewer a partner of mine preferred.

Likewise, I cannot abide the acridity of burnt plastic or oil as that miasma clung to my Uncle Randy’s clothing and hair, and later took over his presence along with the room my mother and I vacated in ‘95 and seeped into the blankets he used to cover his windows and his bedding before he, too, moved out with Uncle Dale, later the following year. For my grandmother’s health, I think, as it had always been fragile, and began to decline with an alarming rate after my mother remarried in May of ‘96.

Waves of cinnamon and cloves and cardamom and cocoa filled our home when Christmas of 1995 arrived, and the day itself passed with little incident between our official “baking day” that my grandmother and mother coordinated with each other and the caroling that my mother and I participated in that year with my Sunbeam troop and the holiday shopping everyone says they hate but participate in.

To this day I love the Christmas music and decorations that overtake malls and shopping centers. Even when I get the chance to go back to Oakridge and Valley Fair they maintain their magic for me in the form of strands of incandescent bulbs wrapped around faux-pine garland that hang from the balconies and windows of the interior.

The day after Christmas, when the tree still stood upright and our nativity fully displayed atop my mother’s piano and my grandmother and I watched a holiday film on her television that rested on the broken set we used as a T.V. stand, the routine of our post-Christmas tradition disintegrated like those snails my uncle and I poured salt on earlier that summer. My mother said something--I don’t recall what--to my uncle. A response, I believe, to something he may or may not have said to my grandmother and she sent me to our bedroom and told me to play with the artbox that I received the day before. I stared at the closed door of my room, at the blue-and-magenta Lion King cover my mother crafted out of the larger sheet set I received at some point in the year before as shouts and thuds emanated down the short distance of the hall, my grandmother’s voice a tinny echo barely perceptible unless the ear strained to catch it. My stomach twisted around itself and coiled alongside my lungs and my fingers skimmed the tops of the grey keys of the touch-tone phone on my mother’s bedside table. I pulled my hand away when my mother came in and told me to keep the door locked before she left again.

The flash of blue-and-red from behind my bedroom curtains is my next memory as is the pleading of my grandmother’s voice and the image of my uncle--staring at his knees--in the back of a squad car that proclaimed to be a member of the San Jose Police Department. Officers spoke to my mother, and neighbors--including Mr. Bob and Ms. Marilyn and Mr. Marty and Ms. Dorothy--gathered on their matching front lawns that lined Chateau La Salle Drive, still studded with leftover fairy lights from the advent season, their breaths visible and curling in front of their moving mouths, rising into the charcoal sky.

#ellie writes #memoir #mental health #cw: past trauma #mention of violent behavior #this is still pretty rough #writing i mean #i'm gonna smooth this out one day

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