(And why, if I am very productive, you might want to let me know to stop it. :-P )

I was in the hospital recently.

[Photo description: Me in a hospital gown in a hospital bed, with a hospital-green wall behind me, and a bunch of assorted cables and stuff behind me.]

Yet another intestinal blockage. Will not give excessive details on that area, since most people have no real desire to hear about crap and lack thereof. May also have had some kind of infection, as my white count was high.

The problem with communicating largely by typing (and using the Internet rather than the phone) is that Skype keeps logs of things you say when you’re delirious, and your friends can torture you with it later. Apparently, among other things, I start randomly advertising for Turpenoid (which I haven’t seen or used since I was about 8 years old). And that’s after I was well enough to start typing things to friends (I’ve got three days before that that have gone almost completely missing, no memory at all other than an all-too-vivid memory of an over-the-top medical procedure, and another of something that had to be a hallucination, and I sent no emails or Skype chats in that time).

Also — hospitals have to be one of the worst places to be delirious. There are too many weird sounds, sights, and smells that don’t exist practically anywhere else, and there’s an overall intensity to the place due to the amount of intense things that happen there. Once I do start remembering things, I start remembering these things:

[Photo shows a blue plastic robot-like thing with red numbers on the front, next to a table.]

Which I could swear are alive. And which make the most unearthly series of bleeping noises — and when you can hear them going off all over the ward, it’s just not a great way to get a grip on reality. (Even the nurses have problems hearing it over and over.)

For the most part, the care I got was excellent, which is good because I really wasn’t in much state to fight them. (Although in the one instance when they did something I didn’t approve of — a nasogastric tube — I was apparently very adamant that they stop it no later than NOW. Which doesn’t surprise me, I have such a strong objection to things going into various orifices that I can barely give myself treatment for yeast infections, and am shocked — but glad — that I didn’t just yank the tube out. It wasn’t necessary anyway, they managed to clear the blockage through much less invasive means that I won’t go into detail about. The tube is also the only clear memory I have of the first few days, so apparently it made a strong impression.)

So I pretty much couldn’t wait to get home, was even willing to put up with a drive home without a headrest:

[Photo description: Me in a wheelchair van, with my chin resting on my chest because I’d been sitting up too long waiting for discharge.]

When I got in the door, I heard something a lot like this (this was actually taken later, after going out for something and then coming back in again, so her reaction was much stronger than this initially):

Fey meowing when I got home. from Amanda Baggs on Vimeo.

[I don’t have the video captioned, but basically the only sound in the video is my cat making a rather intense and raspy meowing noise over and over, and me doing a mrrrrr? sound back sometimes. The video part is basically just me coming in a door and then it getting really dark.]

This, too, is not right after I got home, but is the first time I got on the bed:

Fey welcoming me home from the hospital from Amanda Baggs on Vimeo.

[The only real sound in the video is me yelling “EYYY!” when she bites me. The video itself involves Fey walking back and forth over my lap and rubbing my arms and face over and over. And then eventually biting, because she does the rub-purr-rub-purr-CHOMP maneuver when she’s glad I’m home but mad I left in the first place.]

She didn’t take her eyes off me for days:

[Photo description: Fey staring at me. There’s an air conditioner duct that she’s got her head poking over the top of, and her paws on either side of her face, Kilroy-style.]

So… basically, my bowels are doing much better. But I’m experiencing alarmingly similar symptoms to the ones I did last time I got out of the hospital for something like this. Which involve painful lymph glands, a mild sore throat, and total exhaustion. Which is why it’s taken me so long to write anything. And now I’m mostly writing it so that I have a way to explain the fact that I might not be up to a whole lot lately. Last time this happened, I paid no attention to what my body needed, proceeded to wear myself out several times over, and ended up with a health crash I’ve never fully gotten over since then (and which during the actual crash itself, involved the inability to turn over in bed without help). Needless to say, while I could survive such a thing again, I’m not anxious to try, so I’m obeying all my worried friends and resting.

Plus, this recent hospitalization brought home exactly how much my own carelessness about my health (I got into this by forgetting laxative several days in a row when I already knew I was dealing with a potential blockage) affects other people, not just me. So I’m not willing to continue to be as careless as I used to be. I had a lot of people worried, and one friend seriously freaking out the whole time, and for good reason — the last hospitalization for a blockage was bad, but this one was nearly twice as long, and the amount of time I couldn’t remember this time is equal to the amount of time of my entire hospital stay last time. So I’m trying to be a hell of a lot more careful, for other people’s sake as much as my own. It’s weird how it’s easier to do something for other people than for oneself.

So anyway, if I am not doing as much, that’s why. I feel pretty much like every particle in my body is individually trying to lie down and go to sleep (or to get me to do the same). And this time I’m going to listen, instead of trying to get involved in fifty projects at once, which (I’m told) is apparently my usual reaction to situations like this. And that goes for whether this is my body’s response to getting seriously ill, or whether it’s some bug I picked up in the hospital. (My best guess is it’s a reaction to something about the blockage, since it’s so identical to last time, but I’m being tested for everything under the sun just in case, since it’d be bad to miss an infection or something, and I already had four kinds of infections this summer. Yeah it’s been one of those few months.)

Oh and since most people have trouble not confusing illness with unhappiness, I’m actually fairly happy, I’m just physically exhausted. So don’t worry about me on that count.

It’s kind of weird.

Throughout my adolescence, I heard a lot about trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling). In mental institutions staff tended liked to show off their knowledge of terminology by saying it in my presence a lot when I was yanking out hair. But I don’t have trichotillomania. It was more on the order of head-banging, a response to extreme emotional distress, not an irresistible compulsion.

I know this because I experience what’s called dermotillomania, which is just an unnecessarily long word for compulsive skin-picking. I’ve experienced it my whole life, people have made me feel about two inches tall for not being able to stop it, and I still can’t stop it 31 years on (or however long it’s been since I was old enough to do it). I almost don’t want to write this post because whenever someone actually notices what’s going on, they go to a lot of trouble to tell me how bad for me it is, or exactly how much I shouldn’t be doing it, as if I hadn’t noticed already. (It’s not always clear how much of that is actual concern for my well-being, how much is being grossed out by it, and how much is being embarrassed. It really depends on the person.)

I mostly stopped hair-pulling when my life stopped being unbearably stressful. Skin-picking is a totally different story. While it seems to increase during times of stress, it also happens at other times. I honestly suspect it’s a grooming instinct gone completely out of control — picking off bugs, except now “bugs” is anything that happens to stand out against my normal skin. Scabs, freckles, moles, pimples, whatever. Sometimes I even do it to totally normal skin.

This obviously can become a serious health problem. Besides the risk of infection, it takes things absolutely forever to heal (on top of the fact that I often have slow healing to begin with). And it’s not always just pulling off the top layer, I can dig entire crevasses in different parts of my body.

Weirdly enough, there’s a level on which it’s enjoyable. A friend reports the same thing about her parrot pulling feathers out — she’s always very interested in the feathers afterward and plays with them. The skin, scabs, whatever that I pull off create the same sort of interest for me. I stare at them, I line them up, I get especially happy about ones that are unusual sizes, colors, shapes, etc. and may keep them around for awhile. I rarely get grossed out by it, I just get very interested (interested may be a better word than happy, it’s like a form of out-of-control curiosity). The parrot also does a very similar motion to the way I run my fingers over the area of skin I’m going to pick, only she does it with her beak.

Sometimes I’m able to keep the results of this hidden, sometimes I’m not. Right now most of what I’m doing is in the parts of my ears that are either invisible to people or easily covered. (And it goes against a lot of my instincts to reveal any of that. I’ve spent way too long hiding it from people who would comment or get me in trouble or whatever. Mental institution staff welcomed the excuse to put me in restraints and get me out of the way. And weirdly, while they treated the hair-pulling as compulsive, they treated the skin-picking as akin to head-banging, or as a deliberate attempt to cause harm to my body. Two totally unrelated kinds of experiences and they got them exactly backwards. In a world where they can spin this sort of thing into “a danger to self or others” (the standards for involuntary commitment in many places) it’s dangerous to admit this kind of thing in public when you’re already prone to being locked up just because of the kind of person you are.) Keeping it hidden also helps keep other people from assuming any wound on your body is caused by this, which gets really irritating really fast, as does people insisting on sitting there watching me for it and then saying “You shouldn’t do that” every time they see it. None of these things are helpful in the least bit, they just cause unnecessary suffering.

What does stopping entail? Constant concentration. Because the moment that I let my guard down, my hand will wander off somewhere and pick something without my even being aware of it half the time. It also can make the problem come back even worse. I’m still recovering from ripping toenails out yet again after an attempt to stop. When you’re doing to yourself things that are normally described as a form of torture, you know something’s very wrong.

But “very wrong” doesn’t translate into an ability to stop this. I’ve tried just about everything possible and the moment I let up my concentration I’m back to doing it again. This isn’t the thing where “just put something else on your skin and pull it off instead” works easily. It requires so much concentration that ability to do other things can suffer in ways where it can be better for a person just to go back to doing it. It takes every bit of willpower I have (combined with increased picking in other places) not to do really serious damage by doing things like picking surgical wounds, and I only manage that by picking still other things, not by stopping altogether. And no, there’s no medication that has ever helped, even a little, and I’ve been on a lot of different medications (not explicitly for this, but if they worked they’d work regardless of why I took them).

By the way, I know there are people who consider this (and all sorts of other things) an “illness”, but I don’t. While it can always be useful for something normally considered a moral issue to be considered a medical issue instead, I don’t find it useful in my life to treat an overactive instinct as if it’s a cold or the ever-present diabetes comparison. Clearly it’s something wrong, but the only way medicalizing it would ever help me would be if it helped me pay for some way to stop doing it. And that still wouldn’t mean I wanted to medicalize it in the rest of my life. I don’t find it remotely useful to treat picking my skin more as “getting sick”, it’s just not a useful analogy for me (and in some situations I’ve found it worse than useless).

So why am I writing about this? Because it’s a large part of my life and one that very few people seem to understand to any great degree (and then their lack of understanding only makes things worse when they try to “help” me). And it’d be nice to not experience their fumbling attempts at “help”. Plus, as usual, I write a lot of things because other people’s writing has been useful to me in self-understanding and I’ve often wanted to give that back to other people when I can.

Fey likes to hang out on the windowsill, behind a bedsheet, and cuddled up to the air conditioner duct. She was there today when I took out a pen and started swiping it along my side of the bedsheet. This is the result:

A pen, a window, a bedsheet, and a cat.

[Video shows Fey’s silhouette batting, grasping, and biting the pen through the sheet. All sounds are just the various scraping and other noises made by the activity, there’s no words.]

Here’s an article, I got the link from NOBODY PASSES, Darling.

The article itself is Rich Man’s War, Poor (Gay) Man’s Fight. An excerpt (a long one because my brain won’t let me figure out shorter ones):

The President of the United States, a former Constitutional law professor lately suffering amnesia about the presumption of innocence, declares publicly that “he broke the law.” The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union express grave concern about the conditions of his imprisonment, and the spokesman for the U.S. State Department is forced to resign after calling it “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” A letter signed by 295 noted legal scholars charges that his imprisonment violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment guarantee against punishment without trial, and that procedures used on Manning “calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality” amount to torture.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Human Rights Campaign, having invested millions lobbying for “gays in the military,” have no comment. Of course not. Bradley Manning is not that butch patriotic homosexual, so central to the gays-in-the-military campaign, who Defends Democracy and Fights Terrorism with a virility indistinguishable from that of his straight buddies. He is not that pillar of social and economic stability, only incidentally homosexual, who returns home from the front to a respectable profession and a faithful spouse and children.

No, Bradley Manning is a poor, physically slight computer geek with an Oklahoma accent. He is, let us use the word, and not in a negative way, a sissy. Having grown up in a dysfunctional family in a small town in the South, he is that lonely, maladjusted outsider many gay people have been, or are, or recognize, whether we wish to admit it or not. He broke the law, the President says. And he did so–the liberal press implies, trying terribly hard to temper severity with compassion–because he wasn’t man enough to deal with the pressure. He did so because he’s a sissy and he couldn’t put up with the manly rough-and-tumble that is so important to unit cohesion, like that time three of his buddies assaulted him and instead of taking it like a good soldier he peed in his pants. And then of course he was so embarrassed he threw a hissy fit and sent Wikileaks our nation’s most closely guarded secrets, like some petulant teenage girl who gets her revenge by spreading gossip. This is, of course, the classic argument about gays and national security–they’ll get beat up or blackmailed and reveal our secrets. And NGLTF, Lambda, and HRC, with their impeccably professional media and lobbying campaign, based on the best branding and polls and focus groups that money could buy, have effectively demolished that insidious stereotype.

They have demolished it by abandoning Bradley Manning.

It took a lot of cognitive effort to cut and paste those links, and then choose, cut, and paste the excerpt, not to mention find the words to put in the title and introduction. Yeah, it’s one of those nights. (So far. You never know when the weather in my brain will change without warning, but right now it’s lousy writing weather.) I had wanted to do a post with several links to different articles I’ve found recently, but I realized I’d be lucky if I got this one post written.

Oh and I didn’t write this post to start a debate over whether what’s happening to this guy is justified, so if you feel the need to justify it, do it on your own blog (or on the blog of someone who doesn’t mind hosting such a debate). I wrote it because these sorts of power dynamics among “activist communities” (and indeed the whole structure of such communities) ruin real people’s lives. And so does the use of widget-based morality — something I’ve planned to write more about why it works that way but haven’t had the opportunity. And of course the power dynamics and the widgets are entangled in ways that more than guarantee this level of sheer tangled bassackwardsness.

It’s always “fun” to wake up to this kind of spider-smile leaning over your bed:

[Image description: From “Coraline”, a stop-motion movie. The main character, a girl named Coraline, is standing there as her “Other Mother” (a spider-like monster pretending to look like her mother, but with buttons for eyes) leans over her with a creepy smile.]

…and then have to let the person, among other things, wash your private parts. And to know you pretty much have to let them, because you don’t want to get a reputation for rejecting people for no reason (or “not good enough” reason).

And no, it’s not a sexual kind of creepiness. It’s more like a weird power dynamic, where the person thinks everyone loves her and that she can do no wrong, while running roughshod over everyone, human or otherwise, even above their vocal objections to her invasiveness. You can explain it to her calmly, or shout “No! Stop! Stop NOW!” and all she’ll do is giggle and keep doing whatever she’s doing, whether it’s barging into your bathroom while you’re on the toilet, trying to touch a pet who doesn’t want to be touched, or otherwise violating people in various ways. After awhile the giggling and smiling gets more and more creepy, and happens with more frequency the more you try to assert yourself. I think the spider-like component — which another client of hers has described as an “I’m gonna eat you” smile — comes from the tendency of people like this to “feed on” imaginary gratitude and the like (see My Contaminated Smile for something similar).

This kind of behavior is especially damaging to anyone who (like me) is so used to these boundaries being crossed that I often don’t think to defend them. As Dave Hingsburger explained in a video I saw once, that leaves us open to serious forms of abuse because abusers look for people who don’t push back the minute we experience invasion. It also erodes the boundaries between your own home and institutions. It’s a lot more damaging — especially after each “little instance” begins to pile up into something enormous — than any one instance would look on the surface to most people.

And I suspect a lot of people think it doesn’t matter when done to people who aren’t going to experience a whole lot of bodily privacy anyway. Wrong. I used to think it didn’t matter so much because I was used to lacking privacy and was very late to develop body modesty anyway, until I heard that explanation about how being “used to it” primes us for later abuse. Ever since then I’ve tried to create privacy in various ways when possible, even though I’m not used to it and don’t automatically “feel” some of those first levels of invasion the same way other people do. (I’m trying to build up to where I do feel them, with some success so far.)

One time she explained to me she was incapable of abusing power, because she was a Christian. I would love it if the world really worked that way (for any religion or lack thereof). It would be a much better place. But meanwhile she goes merrily on her way, dispensing really disturbing (but not technically against any rules) experiences with a big creepy smile and a chirpy sing-song voice.