Walking on eggshells.
May. 29th, 2011 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI hate that this is my first and very possibly only mid-con post, because it's about something so awful and the con has not, by and large, been made up of the awful. But this happened to me last night and I have to get it out, to process it.
Last night, in the middle of the launch party for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, Jack and I wandered downstairs to get some air. We hung out with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
popelizbet and company (one thing in this life you can be sure of is that the Pope will never be far from her and company). Eventually much of the company went back upstairs, and Jack and I remained. I was catching up with a friend, and then another friend came out to smoke... I had their names here but I think I'll leave it up to them to decide if they want to have their names attached to this fuckery. I don't know how anyone else was affected by it, and whether it's something that was deeply upsetting or something they were able to shrug off or anything in between, there are reasons they might not want folks coming up to them to ask them if they're okay and so on for the rest of the con.
So the four of us are all clustered around the bench in the smoking area, and suddenly something hits right next to where I'm sitting on the pavement and splatters all over my skirt and another person's feet. A car drives past. It takes a moment for my brain to connect those facts, by which point the car is long gone. Then I have a moment of blind panic of knowing I've been hit with something and not knowing what it is, but then I see a bit white chunk of shell and suddenly I can process the rest of the mess and my first thought is, "Oh, it's okay. It's just an egg." Eggs are, after all, essentially harmless.
And then a few moments later it hits me: someone threw an egg at me from a moving car. At us, of course. I think I got hit the worst but I can't say it was aimed at me. I just happened to be the one sitting on the ground and thus most within the splatter radius. Rationally I am sure it was just completely random asshattery. There are many reasons we may have been targeted... as a group we're pretty transgressive of gender roles, there was one visible POC among us, but it seems unlikely that even the assiest of hats carries an egg around "for just such an occasion". I'd guess it's high schoolers (or the emotional development equivalent thereof) who were cruising around on a holiday weekend looking for targets, and their definition of target may have been no more specific than "out on the street at 1 in the morning." There's an outside chance that it was somebody who knew about a feminist science fiction/fantasy con and wanted to register their disapproval, but the chance that there was anything about it personal to me or any of us is vanishingly small.
That's what's in my head today. Last night, I was also thinking of high schoolers, but to be specific I was thinking of the high schoolers who used to hurl insults and other things out of their car windows as I walked home from school when I was in high school myself. They were mostly younger kids... i.e., younger than me and in theory below me in the social pecking order as it's laid out in pop culture cliches. But they were athletic and able-bodied at the time and at the very least presented as straight cis young men, and they had cars. I was weak and queer and weird and walked the mile or so between the school and my house every day, dreading the sound of a low bass thump and the roar of certain engines.
I never talked to anyone about this abuse because it didn't seem like there was anyone to talk to. It wasn't something that happened on school grounds or during school hours, and it wasn't as though the teachers and school officials did much or cared much about the bullying that happened in their homes and classrooms. The grown-up answer to people who do things like stalk a walking kid in their car and shout threats is to say the equivalent of "sticks and stones may break my bones", and if it's pointed out that the verbal harassment is occasionally accompanied with a stick or stone or bottle or whatever they pretend not to understand that this is physical violence and entreat the victim not to let it "get to them", as though the weird kids come equipped with a natural forcefield or telekinesis.
The attackers don't mean anything by it, after all. They're good kids. On the track team. On the wrestling team. And aren't they a year or two behind me? Sophomores are constitutionally incapable of hurting Seniors. It's a law of nature.
That's the sort of space my head often lived in when I was growing up, and it's the space I retreated to last night. No, what happened to me wasn't so bad, objectively. I just had to change my skirt, which suffered no permanent damage. But I couldn't stop thinking about all the other places the egg could have hit (my head, for instance... all over my face and/or hair), the other things that could have been launched from a car window... a high school-grade prank is a pretty sorry memento mori, but there you go.
So I spent the rest of the night... the rest of Cat's wonderful book launch party, where wonderfully talented people were taking advantage of an open mic... kind of in a daze, never too terribly far from tears and with somewhat intermittent control over my body and voice. Stress and anxiety lessen my muscle control and make years of speech therapy retreat from my uncooperative mouth. When I get really upset, I have trouble talking. Some sounds come out slurred or half-formed. Some... the ones that were most stubborn and I spent the most time learning... I can't get out at all, because I know they're coming out wrong.
When we went upstairs, I wanted to tell Pope Lizbet because I knew she probably hadn't taken her last smoke break of the night and I felt the need to warn her (and through her, the whole merry and company). She felt I should make a report to con security, and because she is the Pope I went with her. My voice failed me worse in the presence of a near stranger, a man I had seen around and maybe heard on a panel but never talked to.
After several false starts at telling him what happened, I borrowed his pen and notepad, but found that my brain wasn't cooperating in stringing together a sentence. I wrote the words "I think about" and had no idea where that sentence was supposed to be going. After I managed to express my frustration that I wasn't able to write any better than I could talk at the moment, he suggested, "Maybe you could draw better?" and... I burst out laughing. It wasn't hysterical laughter, exactly. It was genuine heartfelt mirth, tinged with hysteria. It broke the dam and I found my voice and explained better what had happened, then told the Pope and the Jack that I wanted to go back to the party.
The Pope asked me if I was okay and I told her that no, I wasn't, but I was going to a party. :P
The rest of the night had its good moments and its bad moments. The problem was that the bad moments lingered and stacked up on top of each other, so that by the time 2:00 rolled around and it was time to pack things up and leave I felt the need to fly from the room in full retreat lest someone talk to me and I burst into tears in front of them. I had been looking forward to helping with clean-up... I'm sure that sounds really disingenuous, like, "Oh, I was looking forward to helping clean-up the mess from the party, but darn it, I've got this post-traumatic anxiety going on," but I really was. I'd shown up early for the party to help set up but there's a limit to how much I can do so I mostly picked up a bunch of garbage on the floor from the previous event.
It was only about an hour of a pretty long night following a pretty packed day, but it felt like so much longer. I went to sleep wondering if I'd wake up feeling any different, if I would be able to sit on my panels this morning with any conviction. I'd had an experience on a panel earlier in the day where I'd needed the confidence to interrupt someone because it was the only way I was able to speak... one of my fellow panelists had seemed to think that he was the moderator and that any question not specifically addressed to another panelist by name was addressed to him and him only, and there was no chance anyone else might have anything to add that would be worth listening to, and unfortunately the moderator seemed disinclined to correct this misapprehension.
Ugh, now I've talked about two bad con experiences. I'm going to wrap this post up now. I just want to repeat that I'm having a great time overall, I've met some awesome people and renewed my acquaintance with other awesome people and people have responded really well to what I've said on panels. I just really needed to get this out of my head so I could get on with enjoying today and tomorrow.
Last night, in the middle of the launch party for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, Jack and I wandered downstairs to get some air. We hung out with
popelizbet and company (one thing in this life you can be sure of is that the Pope will never be far from her and company). Eventually much of the company went back upstairs, and Jack and I remained. I was catching up with a friend, and then another friend came out to smoke... I had their names here but I think I'll leave it up to them to decide if they want to have their names attached to this fuckery. I don't know how anyone else was affected by it, and whether it's something that was deeply upsetting or something they were able to shrug off or anything in between, there are reasons they might not want folks coming up to them to ask them if they're okay and so on for the rest of the con. So the four of us are all clustered around the bench in the smoking area, and suddenly something hits right next to where I'm sitting on the pavement and splatters all over my skirt and another person's feet. A car drives past. It takes a moment for my brain to connect those facts, by which point the car is long gone. Then I have a moment of blind panic of knowing I've been hit with something and not knowing what it is, but then I see a bit white chunk of shell and suddenly I can process the rest of the mess and my first thought is, "Oh, it's okay. It's just an egg." Eggs are, after all, essentially harmless.
And then a few moments later it hits me: someone threw an egg at me from a moving car. At us, of course. I think I got hit the worst but I can't say it was aimed at me. I just happened to be the one sitting on the ground and thus most within the splatter radius. Rationally I am sure it was just completely random asshattery. There are many reasons we may have been targeted... as a group we're pretty transgressive of gender roles, there was one visible POC among us, but it seems unlikely that even the assiest of hats carries an egg around "for just such an occasion". I'd guess it's high schoolers (or the emotional development equivalent thereof) who were cruising around on a holiday weekend looking for targets, and their definition of target may have been no more specific than "out on the street at 1 in the morning." There's an outside chance that it was somebody who knew about a feminist science fiction/fantasy con and wanted to register their disapproval, but the chance that there was anything about it personal to me or any of us is vanishingly small.
That's what's in my head today. Last night, I was also thinking of high schoolers, but to be specific I was thinking of the high schoolers who used to hurl insults and other things out of their car windows as I walked home from school when I was in high school myself. They were mostly younger kids... i.e., younger than me and in theory below me in the social pecking order as it's laid out in pop culture cliches. But they were athletic and able-bodied at the time and at the very least presented as straight cis young men, and they had cars. I was weak and queer and weird and walked the mile or so between the school and my house every day, dreading the sound of a low bass thump and the roar of certain engines.
I never talked to anyone about this abuse because it didn't seem like there was anyone to talk to. It wasn't something that happened on school grounds or during school hours, and it wasn't as though the teachers and school officials did much or cared much about the bullying that happened in their homes and classrooms. The grown-up answer to people who do things like stalk a walking kid in their car and shout threats is to say the equivalent of "sticks and stones may break my bones", and if it's pointed out that the verbal harassment is occasionally accompanied with a stick or stone or bottle or whatever they pretend not to understand that this is physical violence and entreat the victim not to let it "get to them", as though the weird kids come equipped with a natural forcefield or telekinesis.
The attackers don't mean anything by it, after all. They're good kids. On the track team. On the wrestling team. And aren't they a year or two behind me? Sophomores are constitutionally incapable of hurting Seniors. It's a law of nature.
That's the sort of space my head often lived in when I was growing up, and it's the space I retreated to last night. No, what happened to me wasn't so bad, objectively. I just had to change my skirt, which suffered no permanent damage. But I couldn't stop thinking about all the other places the egg could have hit (my head, for instance... all over my face and/or hair), the other things that could have been launched from a car window... a high school-grade prank is a pretty sorry memento mori, but there you go.
So I spent the rest of the night... the rest of Cat's wonderful book launch party, where wonderfully talented people were taking advantage of an open mic... kind of in a daze, never too terribly far from tears and with somewhat intermittent control over my body and voice. Stress and anxiety lessen my muscle control and make years of speech therapy retreat from my uncooperative mouth. When I get really upset, I have trouble talking. Some sounds come out slurred or half-formed. Some... the ones that were most stubborn and I spent the most time learning... I can't get out at all, because I know they're coming out wrong.
When we went upstairs, I wanted to tell Pope Lizbet because I knew she probably hadn't taken her last smoke break of the night and I felt the need to warn her (and through her, the whole merry and company). She felt I should make a report to con security, and because she is the Pope I went with her. My voice failed me worse in the presence of a near stranger, a man I had seen around and maybe heard on a panel but never talked to.
After several false starts at telling him what happened, I borrowed his pen and notepad, but found that my brain wasn't cooperating in stringing together a sentence. I wrote the words "I think about" and had no idea where that sentence was supposed to be going. After I managed to express my frustration that I wasn't able to write any better than I could talk at the moment, he suggested, "Maybe you could draw better?" and... I burst out laughing. It wasn't hysterical laughter, exactly. It was genuine heartfelt mirth, tinged with hysteria. It broke the dam and I found my voice and explained better what had happened, then told the Pope and the Jack that I wanted to go back to the party.
The Pope asked me if I was okay and I told her that no, I wasn't, but I was going to a party. :P
The rest of the night had its good moments and its bad moments. The problem was that the bad moments lingered and stacked up on top of each other, so that by the time 2:00 rolled around and it was time to pack things up and leave I felt the need to fly from the room in full retreat lest someone talk to me and I burst into tears in front of them. I had been looking forward to helping with clean-up... I'm sure that sounds really disingenuous, like, "Oh, I was looking forward to helping clean-up the mess from the party, but darn it, I've got this post-traumatic anxiety going on," but I really was. I'd shown up early for the party to help set up but there's a limit to how much I can do so I mostly picked up a bunch of garbage on the floor from the previous event.
It was only about an hour of a pretty long night following a pretty packed day, but it felt like so much longer. I went to sleep wondering if I'd wake up feeling any different, if I would be able to sit on my panels this morning with any conviction. I'd had an experience on a panel earlier in the day where I'd needed the confidence to interrupt someone because it was the only way I was able to speak... one of my fellow panelists had seemed to think that he was the moderator and that any question not specifically addressed to another panelist by name was addressed to him and him only, and there was no chance anyone else might have anything to add that would be worth listening to, and unfortunately the moderator seemed disinclined to correct this misapprehension.
Ugh, now I've talked about two bad con experiences. I'm going to wrap this post up now. I just want to repeat that I'm having a great time overall, I've met some awesome people and renewed my acquaintance with other awesome people and people have responded really well to what I've said on panels. I just really needed to get this out of my head so I could get on with enjoying today and tomorrow.
no subject
on 2011-06-03 01:25 am (UTC)I had those same experiences walking home in high school. On top of the anxiety and confusion, there's also the "this is fucking annoying!" Why should the jerks then or now have this much power!