bdreamwalker's August 14 entry prompts me to post what I have learned about self-esteem.

For many, many years friends told me that I was treating myself badly and that I had to learn to "love myself." I thought I did love myself. A lot of what they saw as self-destructive behavior was the confusion of bipolar disorder. A lot of it was because I grew up as the eldest of four children with two alcoholic parents, my mother bipolar and my father emotionally frozen, and I was the poster child for co-dependence. Everybody else's problems were more important than mine and I was always striving for perfection and doing pratfalls.

Eventually the bipolar ebbs and flows totally eroded my life. October 1995 I walked up and down Capitol Hill, Seattle, looking for one last miracle, a sign in a window saying "Room and board for one manic-depressive writer and computer programmer, right now!" Finally I stood halfway up the hill and said, "I’m 46 years old, broke, homeless, out of work, sick, manic-depressive, with bad teeth, I weigh 185 pounds and my tits hang down to my navel. I have no place to go." 46 years of defense systems fell off and crashed on the sidewalk.

I began gaining in self-esteem from that day on.

One of the blessings in the months to come was the Church of Mary Magdalene, a local Seattle ministry for homeless women. One day at church Rev. Jean Kim asked, "How do you get self-esteem?" Lots of answers were offered, from "accomplishments" to "doing what's right" or "being true to yourself." Then she stumped us with, "So where does a six-month-old baby's self-esteem come from?"

As Rev. Kim pointed out, a six-month-old baby's self-esteem comes from being loved, unconditionally. What I had learned about self-esteem was that it means you don't have to defend anything about yourself. And then you can move forward.

Self-esteem isn't a result. It's a foundation.

By the way: Within the next month I found shelter, treatment, an income, lots of work to do with homeless empowerment groups. I stood up and talked to City Councils in three week old clothes and three day old hair. They listened, and apparently didn’t think about what I looked like any more than I did, even though they hardly ever did exactly what I told them.

Out of Limbo
I come
to find
myself
scattered
across the pavement
I search
creating
with found objects
a life.

Aargh! I haven't logged in a week!

I used one of the Xanga Premium options to add some links down on the left about "What I Do While Not Logging." I didn't do all that much this last week, though. I do NOT function well in the heat, and as far as I know there are no meds I can take for that. I'm not quite incapacitated enough to get a doctor's prescription for air conditioning, I'm just incapacitated enough to be FRUSTRATED.

Fortunately, most of what was most important to me happended either in the evening or early in the day. (Avoiding hot weather being the only legitimate excuse I can think of for scheduling anything before 10AM.) Most of it had to do with opening new shelters or keeping current ones going.

I also got started as Poetry Editor of Real Change. If you write poetry, folks, take a look at ours and consider sending us some of yours. All we "pay" is ten copies of the paper, street value $10, but we have a reputation on the local poetry scene for high-quality poetry, each issue sells about 15,000 copies and each copy gets circulated to 3 or 4 people (according to our surveys) and we get about 3,000 hits a day on our website.

You don't have to write about homelessness or poverty. We already know that homelessness sucks and that people should be kinder to one another and Jesus was homeless too. Thanks. One of the things we're trying to do is to break stereotypes. I love the tinkling sound of crashing stereotypes. Write about anything, but do it well. I just manage entries: logging them in, getting them to the editorial committee, telling you the results, etc. They will be reviewed for publication by a committee of homeless and low-income writers who are talented and tough.

I went to a sea-chantey sing on the Wawona Friday night -- that's a wooden schooner being restored down at the Maritime Museum on South Lake Union here in Seattle. I found the words to "Bound for Valparaiso in a Rowboat"! I have updated my sea-chantey page accordingly.

This weekend I pulled two all-nighters to make room on the Real Change domain so that I could get the writers' program and artists' program sites back up and have space for future updates. (We haven't posted a current issue since June, for space reasons and because the volunteer who did the updates for a year went and volunteered someplace else, God bless her.) I used Dreamweaver to identify all the "orphans" (files taking up space but not in use, not linked to anything) and pulled them out; used NetMechanic and its GifBot to identify overlarge graphics and compress them; and used MacTidy to clean up the HTML, which often makes smaller HTML files. End result was 50MB of new space. StreetWrites and StreetLife Gallery are now back up! (And I'm actually getting paid for this!)

Today is cooler. Long may it last!

I just signed up for the Xanga Premium Free Trial, so that I could use the "search" option. Let's see how this goes.

It also comes with a Spell Checker, which can be useful. The "smileys" link still doesn't work. Anyone want to tell me how to insert those emoticon-images without memorizing all the image addresses?

I have got to update the links page at my home site. In the meantime, I'll post one of the latest additions here: Talespinner. That site links to others worth checking out too!

For more about the Poetry Slams in Dallas, see an interview in artsDFW -- Clebo Rainey by Tim Wood.

Still sluggish. Wrote a log entry yesterday but lost it before finishing; my system crashed, probably because I had too many windows open. I like to cross-check info, look up references, include links — I get greedy.

Got to the National Slam Finals Saturday night. Maya del Valle from New York took first place in the individuals category, the first Latina to do so in the history of the National Slams. The team from Dallas won in the groups category. Seattle made it all the way to the Finals: Shawn V. of Seattle placed third in the individuals category and the Seattle team placed third in the groups category.

Got home well after midnight Saturday and was pretty well drained all Sunday, only activity computer work and reading. Should have been at a meeting this morning (Monday), I'm on the computer instead. Typical for this point in my cycle; not up to a lot physically, but I can get up to a lot mentally and I want to because then I don't feel the physical pain that goes along with this part of the cycle.

Yesterday I wrote my review of Planet of the Apes. Other work in progress, I started to list it and it sounded boring, I'll post links when it's done.

Saturday I found out what happened on the Real Change website; space problems. Unfortunately, the Imac crashed before I could get into Dreamweaver and see how many unused files we have. PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: DO NOT USE NORTON DISK DOCTOR ON AN IMAC. No, I wasn't the one who did it, I'm glad because dealing with all the folks in the computer workshop who were frustrated by not being able to get into Shared Files was bad enough.

Hopefully the Imac will be revived by tonight, and I'll be revived enough to work on it.

I'll close with thoughts stimulated by catana's refreshingly speculative musings.

Both the National Poetry Slams and Weblogs remind me of how important the drive for approval and recognition is in our lives.

This isn't a bad thing. The urge for approval and recognition is a species survival trait as well as an individual survival trait.
If we all really didn't care what anybody else thought of us, we'd all have been eaten by bears while we tried to knock each other's skulls in over who got the best bit of the mastodon.

My mother used to say that nature made babies so cute because otherwise parents would strangle all their offspring in infancy. Infancy is also where we learned to use the offer or withdrawal of approval to get what we want and punish people for ignoring us. Human infants had to compete for attention against things like finding the next mastodon, running away from the bear, and the attractions of mating.

If we had been able to monopolize Mama too effectively, we would have been the last child born, the bear would have eaten us, and it would have been a good thing 'cause we'd have starved to death anyway. If all we cared about was the attention and approval of others, all that the archaeologists of Beta Aptrix would have found of humanity would be a bunch of apes sitting around in a circle preening at each other.

It's all a matter of balance.

Today (this is really Friday the 3rd) I

1. Saw my psych nurse; just a regular touch-base visit folks, I have been lower than normal since I got back from S.F. but I picked up a bit of flu there, so it's to be expected.
2. Had enough energy after that to write some web updates. Haven't posted 'em yet, though.
3. Went out with my sweetie to see Planet of the Apes. We both enjoyed it. I want to write a review but I haven't had time yet.
4. Finally had enough energy to go to see some of the National Poetry Slams, the semi-finals between Dallas, San Francisco, Long Beach, and Winston-Salem. That's the order they finished in. Lots of dynamite poetry on all teams! Was inspired: poem follows.
5. Was disturbed to find that someone clueless has been messing with the Real Change domain; the StreetWrites and StreetLife sites have disappeared. I have to get up way too early tomorrow, go into the office and fix that. So I'll have to say good night. After posting poem.

Words

Your pain is not important.

You can't complain

because Mother's hands traced hourglasses

and she thrust her hips out

and made smacking noises

about your full breasted figure

when you were thirteen

and Daddy hid his magazines

but told you the jokes anyway

while his eyes traced your full breasted figure

when you were thirteen

and Mom dragged you out of bed

and took you to a neighbor's house

because Daddy was out drinking

and she expected anything of him

he was a bastard

he might kill her

he might rape you

when you were thirteen.

It was only words.

You can't complain.

Others were raped

beaten

bloody

by fathers, mothers, strangers,

cops.

You were only assaulted

with words.

You've been called crazy,

divorced, fired,

your son won't talk to his crazy Mom,

lots of friends won't talk to you again,

but you can't complain.

You haven't been

locked up, tied down, burned through with electricity,

shot up with so much thorazine

you bled from every opening from your ears

to your cunt.

You've been lost and cold and hungry

but never for long enough.

You've never been trespassed out of the welfare office,

arrested out of the hospital,

shot for stealing a loaf of bread;

you

can't complain.

You have to heal the world

because everybody else's pain

is more important than yours

is more real than yours

yours is only words.

But

dig underneath the words

and you find

a heart knotted like a trumpet.

You can sound that heart

in words

and the other wounded hearts

echo.

These words are blood,

chips of white bone.

These words have stripped the flesh from your back,

and they can rebuild it.

It is never

only words.

My list of Journalistic Ethics in Alternative Media is done and posted and open for discussion!

Discovery 7/26: Check out Dragon Valley Poetry.

Written 7/27 in a poetry workshop at the street newspaper conference:

Locked up in hungry concrete

muscles wrenched

stomach tight

nervous mind

can't light.

 

Officer Friendly

of the motorcycle drill corps

is shooting homeless black men.

 

I lie awake listening to 30 snores

& identifying every one

sleep at the airport

where only the black men are rousted

hope for a tent community

not locked down.