Monthly Archives: November 2009

Sobriety, gratitude, and ambition

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I was talking with an old friend of mine recently, a fellow with whom I got sober many years ago. He and I both have double-digit years clean from drugs and alcohol. We spoke of how far we’d come, and shared memories of the “bad old days”. There’s an old maxim (perhaps from Cicero) about the delight one takes in remembering past sufferings, and addicts who have a long time clean and sober live the adage more fully than most. We’re not wistful for a painful past, mind you, merely keenly aware of how far it is that we’ve come. The swapping of old “war stories” serves to remind us of the miracle of recovery.

In the first few years of transformation after hitting rock bottom in 1998, I considered it a miracle that I was even alive and well, not in prison or confined to some other sort of institution. That I had kept my teaching job and even acquired tenure while leading such a dishonest and self-destructive existence seemed evidence of a huge portion of unmerited grace. I was overwhelmed by gratitude, and in case I got complacent or self-congratulatory, was surrounded by friends and family who reminded me of my past at every opportunity. As a result, I set modest goals for myself: keep my job, stay sober, “suit up and show up” for life. Eventually, the goals expanded to include the pursuit of an enduring and successful marriage. And in time, the goal grew further: to bring a child into this world. Everything I’ve wanted has come, though not without prayer and effort and disappointment along the way. For someone with my track record, with my history of mental illness and addiction, these are extraordinary blessings — and it would be unmitigated gall to ask for anything more.

But I also recognize that contentment is close cousin to complacency, and complacency doesn’t serve me (or most other addicts) well. I’ve got a job I love which provides income and fulfillment (a combination that eludes many). I’ve got a marriage and a healthy child and a community of friends. My extended family loves me and trusts me, and I them. But particularly since HCRS was born, I’ve felt within me this gnawing sense that there is more to be done, that I am in danger of not fully living up to my potential. It isn’t just about making more money, though that is perhaps part of it — it’s about the danger of not achieving all it is that I’m called to be. The as-yet unwritten books are clamoring to be composed, the more public life that I’ve alternately shunned and longed for urges me to think beyond the rhythms of the academic calendar and domestic duty, to put myself “out there” in new ways.

This growing ambition contends with another voice in my head. This voice reminds me, over and over again, of my troubled past. It doesn’t shame me; rather, it warns me not to overreach, not to push too hard, not to want too much. It asks: Where is your gratitude for all that you’ve accomplished? Where is your humility? Isn’t it enough to be healthy, employed at a job you still love, needed by family, adored by the miracle that is your daughter? It asks: What sort of hubris is it that says “I still want more”?

I don’t ever want to lose sight of how far it is I’ve come. Most people who’ve been handed the diagnoses I’ve been handed, who’ve struggled with the addictions I’ve struggled with, are not as blessed. Some of my old friends are dead; others are still in the grip of a disease that will not let them go. But I do not honor them by adopting a false modesty, a distorted humility. There is more to be done, much more to be done, and I am aware as I’ve never been before of the tragedy of unmet potential. I’m choosing now to push for “more” in every sense, even as I give fervent thanks for how far I’ve come. Gratitude is good, but not when it becomes an excuse to ignore the hunger to push on, to go further. For me, the hunger is to reach a wider audience and to be ever more creative in finding ways to do so. And I’m determined to silence the voice that says an addict like me has no right to ask for more.

“If I were better, he would never leave”: reprinting a post about romantic illusions

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Reprint of a post from April 2008.

It’s a crazy midterm-y type of day, and I don’t have much time in which to post. Yesterday’s post about having “so much love to give” struck a nerve with some folks. Hilary writes in response:

I’ve been reminiscing about what I could have done better as a girlfriend in my previous relationship, what I would change if I could go back, etc. My list of changes includes more sex, more time/work/reciprocity invested, more communication, less arguments, less jealousy, more love. Shit, that’s a lot of changes. I’ve learned a lot about myself and I feel I’ve vastly matured as a feminist, an independent, single woman, and a girlfriend. But I’m a bit nervous about my feelings of seeking to be the perfect girlfriend. I guess what I’m afraid of is being left, being cheated on, being criticized, because I know what all of that feels like and if only I could be the perfect girlfriend, that wouldn’t happen…right? What also scares me is that I’m not wondering to myself what I’ll get out of the relationship. Rather, I’ve been wondering what I can give to the relationship.

Conventional relationship advice to someone in Hilary’s position would applaud her focus on what she will do differently in her next relationship. After all, it seems mature and commonsensical to focus on self-improvement, on learning from past mistakes, and so forth. I’ve said a time or nine that one of the chief purposes of relationship — particularly an intimate and enduring one –is to serve as a vehicle for our personal growth. Given that we all know the dangerous old axiom “‘Tis better to give than to receive”, Hilary — and those like her — have nothing to worry about, right?

The problem, of course, is that as Hilary herself recognizes, her desire to be the “perfect girlfriend” is rooted in a fantasy that her perfection will ensure she will never be disappointed, betrayed, or left. Many of us, men and women alike, imagine that if we could just do things a little bit better, we could control how everyone else reacts to us. As anyone who has struggled with people-pleasing knows, the great dream of every people-pleaser is to be able to orchestrate everyone else’s emotional responses. “If I say things in just the right way”, the people pleaser imagines, “my boyfriend (girlfriend, spouse, mother, etc.) will follow the script I’ve written for them.” Continue reading →

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Flaming coals amidst the ashes: more reasons for optimism in the aftermath of Maine

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I’ve taught gay and lesbian American history at Pasadena City College since 2001. When I started offering the course, the big issue on campus was winning domestic partnership benefits for faculty and staff; marriage equality was seen as something decades off. By 2005, California had awarded those benefits to all public employees, and what we had seen as our most vital local struggle had been won.

I mention this because it’s so important, in the aftermath of the Great Disappointment of Maine’s vote to repeal a same-sex marriage law this past Tuesday, to reflect on how far we have come. Barely ten years ago, the Maine legislature passed an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting gays and lesbians. In November 2000, the Christian right in Maine successfully led a “people’s veto” drive to repeal those protections. This November, just nine years on, the Christian conservatives who won the fight to keep a limited vision of marriage emphasized that they weren’t opposed to civil unions or to anti-discrimination ordinances. If you look at the campaign literature this fall of the anti-equality folks in Maine, you see that they’ve completely reversed themselves in less than a decade. Indeed, they now recognize that support for civil unions was critical to winning the fight to keep marriage itself exclusively heterosexual.

That means, obviously, that we in the movement for justice have “moved the ball” well down the field. Those who want a discriminatory marriage franchise are struggling to win a small majority of voters; measures like those in Maine or California’s Prop 8 are being decided by five or six percentage points, not more. And in order to get those slim majorities, the religious right have been forced to take the tactical position of support for every right short of marriage itself. Those who want gays and lesbians to have no rights at all have gone from a clear majority a decade ago to a (thankfully) dwindling minority in most states. The victory Tuesday for Referendum 71, a Washington state initiative that granted gay and lesbian citizens every right save the label “marriage” itself, drives home the point that only one thing is holding back progress for queer folks in this country: a sentimental attachment on the part of a narrow majority of Americans to the heterosexual marriage idea. Exit polls show that those most attached to that traditional ideal are, not surpisingly, the oldest of voters — while those most interested in expanding the franchise are the youngest. Even if we were to sit on our hands (which we won’t), the Grim Reaper will win the fight for us within a decade; to paraphrase Dan Savage, we’ll outlast, outlove, and outlive those who want stand in the way.

This is cold comfort for those who want and deserve equality now. Justice delayed is, as everyone knows, justice denied. But at times like these, it is the job of the progressive historian to temper the lamentations at a temporary setback by pointing to the progress made. We ain’t in the Promised Land, but the view from the mountaintop is getting clearer, the fog is lifting, and despite their bravado, our enemies are in retreat. We’ll be crossing that final river soon.

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Thursday Short Poem: Nemerov’s “Learning by Doing”

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I’m not very handy with most tools, but growing up spending summers on my family’s ranch, I was taught to use a chain saw at a relatively early age, and assisted in cutting down and cutting up a diseased tree or two. I’m happy to cut up firewood now from fallen limbs, but hope to never need to bring down a living tree ever again. I’m fond of this Nemerov poem on the subject. I’ve learned enough and need do no more.

Learning by Doing

They’re taking down a tree at the front door,
The power saw is snarling at some nerves,
Whining at others. Now and then it grunts,
And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds.
Rotten, they tell us, at the fork, and one
Big wind would bring it down. So what they do
They do, as usual, to do us good.
Whatever cannot carry its own weight
Has got to go, and so on; you expect
To hear them talking next about survival
And the values of a free society.
For in the explanations people give
On these occasions there is generally some
Mean-spirited moral point, and everyone
Privately wonders if his neighbors plan
To saw him up before he falls on them.

Maybe a hundred years in sun and shower
Dismantled in a morning and let down
Out of itself a finger at a time
And then an arm, and so down to the trunk,
Until there’s nothing left to hold on to
Or snub the splintery holding rope around,
And where those big green divagations were
So loftily with shadows interleaved
The absent-minded blue rains in on us.
Now that they’ve got it sectioned on the ground

It looks as though somebody made a plain
Error in diagnosis, for the wood
Looks sweet and sound throughout. You couldn’t know,
Of course, until you took it down. That’s what
Experts are for, and these experts stand round
The giant pieces of tree as though expecting
An instruction booklet from the factory
Before they try to put it back together.

Anyhow, there it isn’t, on the ground.
Next come the tractor and the crowbar crew
To extirpate what’s left and fill the grave.
Maybe tomorrow grass seed will be sown.
There’s some mean-spirited moral point in that
As well: you learn to bury your mistakes,
Though for a while at dusk the darkening air
Will be with many shadows interleaved,
And pierced with a bewilderment of birds.

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“Penetrate” v. “Engulf” and the multiple meanings of the “f” word: a note on feminist language

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Years ago, I wrote a brief post about feminism and language, but it didn’t go into very much detail. Here’s a new version, with a bit more detail.

One of the first gender studies courses I ever took at Berkeley was an upper-division anthropology course taught by the great Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It was in a class discussion one day (I think in the spring of ’87) that I heard something that rocked my world. We were discussing Andrea Dworkin’s novel “Ice and Fire” and her (then still-forthcoming, but already publicized) “Intercourse”. I hadn’t read the books at the time (they were optional for the class). One classmate made the case that on a biological level, all heterosexual sex was, if not rape, dangerously close to it. “Look at the language”, my classmate said; “penetrate, enter, and screw make it clear what’s really happening; women are being invaded by men’s penises.” Another classmate responded, “But that’s the fault of the language, not of the biology itself; we could just as easily use words like ‘envelop’, ‘engulf’, ‘surround’ and everything would be different.” The discussion raged enthusiastically until the next class irritably barged in and chucked us all out. I was electrified.

My classmates were having, as I came to discover, a classic intra-feminist argument: to what extent is the sexual domination of women by men part and parcel of our biology, and to what extent is it a construction maintained by language that deliberately disempowers women? The consensus seems to weigh more heavily to the latter position, particularly within the contemporary (so-called “Third Wave”) feminism which was very much still in its incubation when I was discovering Women’s Studies in the Reagan years.

In every women’s studies class I’ve taught here at PCC, and in many guest lectures about feminism I’ve given elsewhere, I use the “penetrate” versus “engulf” image to illustrate a basic point about the way in which our language constructs and maintains male aggression and female passivity. Even those who haven’t had heterosexual intercourse can, with only a small degree of imagination required, see how “envelop” might be just as accurate as “enter”. “A woman’s vagina engulfs a man’s penis during intercourse” captures reality as well as “A man’s penis penetrates a woman’s vagina.” Of course, most het folks who have intercourse are well aware that power is fluid; each partner can temporarily assert a more active role (frequently by being on top) — as a result, the language used to describe what’s actually happening could shift. Continue reading →

A long way from the summit: some thoughts on feminism, women in politics, and the new Leslie Sanchez book

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It’s been a year since the most exciting election in my memory (and, according to my septuagenerian mother, a certified political junkie, of hers as well.) The books and documentaries about the 2008 presidential campaign have arrived full force in the market place. One focuses on the trio of women who helped define this extraordinary moment in very recent history: You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe by Leslie Sanchez, a Republican activist and CNN contributor. Sanchez looks at the way the media and the nation itself responded to Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Obama — and what those responses say about the state of feminism at the tail end of the first decade of the 21st century.

(Other feminist bloggers have already reviewed YCALWM, including Clarissa, Amelia at Equal Writes, and Stacyx.)

As a registered Republican and liberal feminist who longs to see a return to progressive values within the GOP (the party of Millicent Fenwick, a political hero of mine), I’ve admired Leslie Sanchez as a sensible voice for inclusion and moderation within a party that has far too few such voices. Hers is a welcome perspective, and the fairness with which she treats both Clinton and Palin is perhaps the book’s strongest suit.

Sanchez, no supporter of Hillary, explores the pivotal question of why so many younger women saw a vote for Barack Obama as a far more revolutionary act than a vote for the first of their sex to have a serious shot at winning the presidency. She suggests that Clinton tied herself too closely to older white feminists, commonly identified with the Second Wave, and lost a generational connection with younger voters. Sanchez is right about this, I think; there’s no question that the gap between Second and Third Wavers (represented by women over and under 45) about Clinton was a significant one, much covered in the press and lamented in the feminist blogosphere. But Sanchez, whose feminist credentials are slight at best, is too dismissive when she talks about the “brashness and tired agendas of the women’s rights advocates (backing Clinton”. It wasn’t the agenda that was wrong — it was the generational disconnect that doomed the junior senator from New York. Continue reading →

“I adore you; you confound me”: of old friends, Facebook, and ideological differences

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When I first went on Facebook a few years ago, most of my friends were my students and “youth group kids”; I was the oldest person I knew on the site. Today, a third of my 1700-odd friends and contacts on FB are my age or older, and I’ve found it a particularly useful tool for connecting with old acquaintances from my childhood and adolescence. I suspect my 25th high school reunion, coming up next year, will be planned using Facebook.

On Facebook, I often post links to news stories and opinion pieces which reflect my views on gender, sexuality, faith, animal rights and so forth. My friends are able to comment on the stories. Since my friends — and I use that noun in its traditional sense — run the gamut politically, sexually, and religiously, the debates are quite heated. And things have gotten particularly intense since “Leigh” started commenting. Leigh is a conservative Republican through and through, and not afraid to “mix it up” with my many liberal buddies on Facebook. Some folks have written to me in wonder, expressing disbelief that someone like Leigh and I could be friends.

I’m well aware that the capacity to be friends with folks who hold radically divergent views is a virtue made possible by privilege. For example, I have friends who are strongly opposed to marriage equality for gays and lesbians; they fight against a cause I champion. But because I’m a man married to a woman, their views (while exasperating and troubling) don’t represent a direct threat to my happiness. If I were a man who longed to marry another man but couldn’t, I might be less cheerful about opening my Facebook page, my heart, and my home to folks whose views I consider a real threat to my happiness. My extended family has been one that has been fortunate enough to embrace civility, even cordiality, towards one’s ideological opponents as a virtue. White folks in the middle and upper-middle classes have the luxury of seeing political disagreements as fascinating topics for a rousing argument rather than life and death. That cheerful willingness not only to overlook, but even celebrate those disagreements was something I was raised to believe was a sign of wisdom, of a capacity to put friendship and family over partisanship or faith. I still believe that, but acknowledge that that capacity has as much to do with race and class as it does with virtue.

In any event, while I do moderate fairly heavily here on the blog, where folks I don’t know can and do comment, a more free-wheeling atmosphere prevails on my Facebook page, where Leigh has crossed verbal swords with more than one of my other friends.

Leigh (not her real name) and I went to high school together. We were particularly close our junior year, when we were lab partners in Richard Fletcher’s legendary Wildlfe and Ecology course. Leigh and I talked about everything together at 16, and did our best to stay in touch in the years that followed. Our lives, as it turned out, followed somewhat similar trajectories: we were both divorced multiple times, we both struggled early and often with addiction to alcohol and drugs. And we both were fortunate enough to get sober relatively young; Leigh and I each have “clean time” measured in double-digit years. In sobriety, we both became marathon runners and endurance athletes; unbeknownst to the other, we each ran our personal best times the same year and at more or less the same pace. And in our journey towards sobriety, we both became Christians, born again as adults.

Leigh now lives in the mountains, in a small and isolated — albeit very beautiful — community. She’s a first-rate outdoorswoman, single, still an athlete despite battles against rheumatoid arthritis. And she’s also become, in no small part as a result of her experiences as well as her upbringing, very right-wing. When we write to each other, as we do fairly regularly on Facebook, we enjoy our shared reminiscences immensely. It’s so good to have friends who’ve known you for so long, longer than spouses and colleagues and the like. Without the entangled intimacy of family, but with the perspective of decades, old acquaintances remind us of how far we’ve traveled, of obstacles overcome , and of our own impetuous, often foolish, but still loveable youthful selves. But Leigh and I also have spoken of faith, sobriety, running — and, at least since last year’s election, a great deal about politics. When it comes to the former things, we are of one mind; on the latter, we could not disagree more. Continue reading →