The Last Cookie

What is it like to be in an abusive relationship?

Thu, 31 May 2012 04:08:44 +0530

What is it like to be in an abusive relationship?: And talking about it feels like explaining how your dignity was lost to skeptical ears and minds… Like explaining to a parent that your prized possession was stolen while they assume that you’ve just been careless enough to lose it.

youmightfindyourself:

By: Anon on Quora

It is like not being able to breathe.

That is my best description of it. Metaphorically, it is suffocating, but even physically, it is literally suffocating. As I am writing this, I am literally feeling my air passage blocking off.

I was an in abusive relationship for two years towards the end of high school. I never lived with my abuser or had kids with him or married him. Beyond going to the same high school, I didn’t have any messy connections to him formally or informally. I know I’m luckier than many others in similar situations.

It creeps up on you. You realize some things are not quite right, but you’re willing to tolerate more and more. This can be for a variety of reasons. Maybe he rationalizes them away. Maybe he convinces you that you’re just overreacting, or worse, crazy. It took me several months before I had an epiphany that things were terrible and I had to get out; it took me over a year to actually do it.

One common occurrence pattern is instability. There’s a cycle of violence. There will be a honeymoon stage, where everything is awesome and you’re so in love. It’s intoxicating. Then it starts to build up; you feel like you’re walking on eggshells and you’re jumpy and afraid something is going to happen at any moment. Finally, he lashes out bigtime. And while this is scary, I always found that this caused some level of relief. Things are rocky for a little while, and then everyone apologizes and you’re super in love again. You might even break up and get back together a few times. And even if you realize that this ‘love’ thing is totally fake, you enjoy it while you can.

You feel like you’re on edge even for the smallest disagreements. And there will be disagreements, no matter how much you try to be perfect. No matter how much you try to give in to the ridiculous demands.

It’s extremely lonely. Your abuser will try to cut you off from anyone that can keep you sane. It will probably work. Some of your friends and family won’t believe that things are as bad as you say they are. If they were, wouldn’t you leave? They may accuse you of trying to get attention, or trying to ruin someone’s life, or of being a drama queen. They may just be in denial because they’re a friend of the abuser. Maybe they just don’t want to deal with that level of problem. Even the ones that do support you will get tired of your actions. They won’t understand how hard it is to cut things off. They won’t understand that doing what he says is for your own safety. And he’ll be telling you not to talk to this person or that group of friends, and eventually nobody will be left.

I developed physical symptoms that were difficult to deal with. Five years later, I still get nauseous if I’m triggered, and sometimes vomit. I’m also subject to panic attacks.

I’ve lost a lot of my guilt associated with lying. It’s taken a long time to re-learn that I shouldn’t lie for the hell of it. At some point I felt so strongly like needing to rebel that I started trying to hold a secret life. I started lying about the tiniest things, like what I had for breakfast (he was very curious and controlling about my eating habits; during one particularly bad month I lost 30 pounds).

One thing to realize is that being in an abusive relationship is just that - a state of being. Getting a beating doesn’t necessarily make things worse. In my experience, physical violence was often just an assertion of his power, an assertion of the status quo. Given the choice, I’d take physical violence over being forced to do anything sexual, and sexual abuse over a new rule to conform to, because he never hurt me badly enough that it stunted my day-to-day activities. The emotional damage I received from sexual abuse and rape would very strongly affect my ability to function. His demands would often directly influence my ability to function, and result in a huge loss of dignity.

There were highs and lows, but I always felt sick. I didn’t like being conscious, and I only liked being unconscious sometimes. Sometimes a particularly bad panic attack, or a particularly bad abuser attack would be completely debilitating, but for the most part I was extremely dysfunctional. Ironically, I was probably resourceful beyond what I thought I was able to in order to survive the experience. It feels like a strange haze, a spell. It’s the only thing you can think about. It’s a completely consuming state.

Children could be inncent. Toys, not so much. (although it is...

Sat, 26 May 2012 01:15:08 +0530

Children could be inncent. Toys, not so much. (although it is hard tp believe a child actually wrote that) p>nedhepburn:

We’ve raised a generation of mini-Michael Moore-s.

imwithkanye:

Nick takes on Life. This is the best letter from a child I’ve read all day.

think-progress: There are exactly three countries on Earth that...

Sat, 26 May 2012 01:08:43 +0530

think-progress:

There are exactly three countries on Earth that do not provide guarantees for paid maternity leave. Papua New Guinea and Swaziland are two of them. Care to guess the third?

Read the article here.

Fancy Book Learning: So much love for Will Smith right now

Sat, 26 May 2012 01:01:43 +0530

Fancy Book Learning: So much love for Will Smith right now:

aminatou:

“We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my…

"The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 23:46:45 +0530

“

The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.

But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.

”

- Jonathan Gottschall, author of the excellent The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, on why fiction is good for you. (via explore-blog)

What i learn from this chart is that assuming the strangers you...

Tue, 08 May 2012 02:57:03 +0530

What i learn from this chart is that assuming the strangers you meet in college are not virgins regardless of majors is the most unprejudiced assumption you can make about peoples personal lives.

ilovecharts:

Virginity by Major (At Wellesley)

-appliedmathemagics

The first person to spark off the pens-are-cooler-than-pencils...

Wed, 02 May 2012 03:54:11 +0530

The first person to spark off the pens-are-cooler-than-pencils religion was probably the inventor of ink. Bah.

j-p-g:

Bouquet | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

How many rapes you got?

Wed, 02 May 2012 03:42:23 +0530

How many rapes you got? :

That rape has more to do with power than uncontrollable (and lets never forget! provoked) urges, is illustrated best by this clip drawing on its intersectionality with nation. It’s a simple enough question, “why are so many media conservatives obsessed with rape?” as seen from their eager and frequent employment of rape metaphors in a bid to deliver earthshattering political commentary and debate, and the answer is almost literally contained in the question. The answer is not about sexism (well it is but not in the sense that sexism is normally understood) or political incorrectness gone out of hand as much as it is about protecting a certain kind of power and control (whatever it might be in appropriation with the political ideologies and agenda which you can find out if you look these people up), it is about masculinity as defined by tradition. And no that is not tosay that people of a certain political ideology are supporters of rape (please lets not make this about women just because you can see my picture on the thumbnail). Rape here is another cognitive metaphor in a larger metaphorical system - Masculinity. The intersectionality of nationalism and masculinity (or anything with masculinity may it be race, religion, sexuality, class etc) is powerful and intoxicating for the people who get to and choose to embody it. Nonetheless, for the uninitiated (who might take up arms reading rape and masculinity and other words that are all sufficiently complex terms) here masculinity is not to be thought of as a descriptor of “men” but a certain desirable (for some/many) system of power representing a party/ideology’s aggressive (and often violent) aspiration of what a nation should be/do. But the reason i wrote this is, it’s amusing that the ease and frequency with which rape is used as a metaphor for say, abuse of power, doesn’t enlighten and habituate representatives and media to locate ACTUAL rape in the context of power, control, aggression and hegemony!!! Clearly you understand the concept to joke about it and use it in everyday parlance and then go ahead and inject it into national tv too. So why does real rape become about, well we know what it becomes about. So then I think maybe they only imagine violence or violation and use it. But then, you never hear “sodomy” being used to describe what’s happening to the nation. Nope, bad word.

Parity Poo

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:20:08 +0530

Parity Poo:

Are girls less equal than boys, asks this article which casually raises this disturbing and fully consequential question in the context of number parity between the genders in well, the IITs. While the speculations do arrive at accurate insights presented eloquently at the least (and the comments are thoroughly enjoyable too), the article does not even attempt to describe the reality outside of academic and intellectual reasoning which makes it that much more cryptic a message for people who really need to read it - those who are aspiring for this kind of education - for themselves, or for their children. First of all, that only IIT’s are considered premier institutes is a problem. There is no representation of diversity in education in our minds let alone students. Why aren’t there articles wondering what’s up with guys not making it to certain DU/JNU places in more numbers? Not-technical equaling to stupid and second-rate is so passe. Are you really going to pit one thing as easy/difficult against another in times when the ground reality is too few admirable opportunities for too many seekers? In fact, why aren’t their articles wondering how many men and women areappearingfor diverse exams and the lopsided hegemony thriving in these myopic, jingoism-fueled ambitions? Or if it’s to be about IITs, how many women appear or from those that appear, the % that feels confident of not just the exam but of the career that lies beyond it compared to the same with young boys? Oh well. To go back to the point at hand, the age at which we make our first significant education choices, pressure from family and convention makes all the difference because our system really does not empower us to figure out much for ourselves. It’s amazing that it still sees sense in making kids choose between science and humanities instead of allowing them to study a gamut of subjects. Now limiting the scope of this argument to fit the original premise and taking our role-model-y “science” students, a lot of guys are unnecessarily pressured to crack IIT (even if they don’t wanna do engineering in the first place) and a lot of girls are pressured to get into medicine ( a field for girls they say cuz they’re ‘natural’ caregivers, zzzzz). I’ve studied in a modern, ambitious school in a metro that had compulsory technical skills classes for guys and compulsory cooking and home classes for girls in 12th grade (which included critical training on raising babies during the first 3 years AND we had different exams to be graded on these)- in this day and age, and the parents (mine and some of yours) saw nothing wrong with it. Now, taking IIT in particular, the average Indian parent is going to get an anxiety attack at a girl that age wanting to go to say, Kota for a year or two (at the idea of doing that if not so much the purpose behind the idea and some themselves relocate to Kota if girls really insist and refuse to consider alternatives). The average parent of a girl would also not care to listen to her if she ignores her boards for iit-prep no matter how focused she is. the same thing from a boy is often given in as “his own decision” and from a girl is “misplaced ambition that will result in neither” because if you ever wanna see parents being apprehensive of their children’s ambitions - must meet parents of Indian girls. Of course they’d like it if she cracks the exam, but these day-to-day negotiations are taxing and stressful for everyone that age regardless of gender and the average girl is not freed from them even at the post-grad stage which is wayyy into the future. Also, while taking a drop to prepare is not an option for a *lot* of kids across the country, for girls it’s an even bigger problem. Even supposedly “modern” parents can’t handle girls taking sabbaticals because in their heads she’s getting wrinkles and screwing her wedding prospects with a kota-trained, 3rd attempt IIT cracking, IIMA tshirt sporting ibanker. And this is the ugliest threat that girls deal with. So many of them are consumed in strategizing their plans around the looming possibility that they’ll be married off before they even get to work for themselves (or get pressured during the sabbatical cuz for many folks a woman sitting at home is a shipment waiting to be dispatched and are often married in the interim period with the promise that post-marriage it’ll all happen) that they never consider anything a second attempt and run with whatever comes there way ‘cuz that ‘shortage of time’ is hammered in their heads. If the reader (if any) is imagining “small town girls” as I say this, think again. This could be your own house or neighbourhood in whatever upscale town you belong to. In fact I wish entrance exams and the likes really did have something to do with inherent gender strengths and genetic make-up so that at least “scientifically” speaking, we could justify our stupidities and pin the hopes for parity on mutant genes and sit back and nurture the status quo. But sadly it’s neither’s capabilities and just a load of lame cultural conditioning that does not empower the imagination with too much to be independent and aggressive in many regards more critical to living a fruitful life than just a handful of undergrad colleges. If anyone’s stayed this far, thank you for reading. I personally hid my JEE form under a flower pot. I wanted to study Genetics at the time… I was like, totally air-headed like that.

"Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were..."

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 18:02:46 +0530

““Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What — suddenly you’ve magically turned into Noam Chomsky?””

- Douglas Coupland

JPOD

"In 2012, it’s still astoundingly easy to conflate mere parity with female domination."

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:37:49 +0530

“In 2012, it’s still astoundingly easy to conflate mere parity with female domination.”

- A Byline Count for the Next Generation: How Diverse Are the Blogs, Magazines most millenials Read?

"It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine, but..."

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:24:00 +0530

“It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine, but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good…..He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions and their sufferings, in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community. These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not—or at least not in the main—through text books. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the “humanities” as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy. Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included.”

- Einstein on the only debate in education that matters - the Importance of Humanities

(Quoted in an interview by Benjamin Fine of the New York Times)

"I swear to god I will lose my mind if I hear the “sex sells” fallacy one more time. Sex does not..."

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 01:12:44 +0530

“I swear to god I will lose my mind if I hear the “sex sells” fallacy one more time. Sex does not sell. If sex sold, we would see penises where we see boobs. Naked men would be on everything that naked women are on. Sex isn’t what they’re selling you. They’re selling you an impossible, pornographically fueled misogynistic idea of the perfect woman.”

- (via littlelightx)

"When the language of emancipation reflects servitude, it becomes an ode to the greatness of the..."

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 21:03:43 +0530

“When the language of emancipation reflects servitude, it becomes an ode to the greatness of the emancipator.”

- “My husband is great, he lets me do anything I want, I even learned driving” This is not emancipation, this is slavery. Worse, this is slavery being sold as emancipation. (via anandphilip)

cheatsheet: Backstage at Women in the World, Afghan elder Bibi...

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 15:35:27 +0530

cheatsheet:

Backstage at Women in the World, Afghan elder Bibi Hokmina asked U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to please stop the night raids in her country. U.S. and Afghan forces frequently drop from helicopters to search the homes of suspected Taliban fighters, a practice that’s tremendously unpopular in Afghanistan. Hokmina told Napolitano that the raids violate women and children, and Napolitano replied that she would take Hokmina’s message all the way to the top. Admiral William McRaven estimates 2,800 raids were carried out last year.

Backstage diplomacy.

Sahib bibi aur ghulam is yet another example from an entire...

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 13:46:53 +0530

Sahib bibi aur ghulam is yet another example from an entire evidential case that is historical Indian Cinema, that a humanist story complete with compelling critique on class, gender and caste is not mutually exclusive to commercial success in all it’s cinematic glory and “glamour quotient”

chitrarekha:

pyotra:

साहिब बीबी और गुलाम Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962)

One of my all time favorite movie. Classic!!

I wasn’t going for romance but I feel it in my room...

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:16:32 +0530

My room, Chinar 17, MICA

I wasn’t going for romance but I feel it in my room anyway. Hibernating here has been therapeutic beyond measure. It’s a cultural practice of sorts to decorate rooms in MICA and infuse walls with bits and pieces of us. My walls stand as empty and white-washed since the day I stepped in but the shelves remain full and spilling books all over on the desk, the bed, the floor. Some haven’t been touched, some have been unnecessarily leafed through too many times, some are picked up and left time and again at the same page and some are picked up time and again for the same page. Whichever it is, they’ve made this space home. And there’s that large tree, hugging the window, ensuring that the occupant remains caved in at all times. There’s only a little while left here now. The books will go with me. But no other space will be the same. Or feel the same - that feeling of feeling just right. It seems almost unfair and definitely unhealthy to feel this welcome somewhere, anywhere. But we know what they say about all good things and the implicit expiry. Sigh.

Photo

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 21:29:58 +0530

"Female authority is still associated with childhood, and the last time a lot of powerful guys saw a..."

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 23:24:52 +0530

“Female authority is still associated with childhood, and the last time a lot of powerful guys saw a powerful woman they were eight, and they feel regressed to childhood by a powerful woman in a way that they don’t feel with a man.”

- Gloria Steinem, on why there aren’t more women in power. (via cheatsheet)

hmmmm - makes total freudian sense. attitudes vs. behaviors…

(via joncrowley)

(1st March, 2012) A Walk to Remember

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:51:50 +0530

This post is about my best friend and my favourite place in the world, written by one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. It doesn’t get better than this! Thanks Disha!

comfortableawkwardness:

I dedicate this post to whose birthday happened to fall on this day- Neha Kulkarni. Neha is one of the people who make MICA what it is for me. She is probably the most understatedly awesome person I have ever met. I know the looks I’ll get when she reads this, but I know I’ll miss her like hell! I will avoid going on and on about her though (for fear of borrowing too much from that dreaded thing called the testimonial) but her birthday was definitely a good start to the end of our days at MICA.

But this post is also a dedication to the one MICA phenomenon that is associated with a lot of people (including Neha)- the walk. The MICA walk is many things. It is an indicator of relationships to be for, it is a gossip session in itself for others, it is a desperate, intermittent, and mostly unsuccessful attempt by some others to lose weight.

A very wise soul once said, that Facebook should have a relationship status exclusively for MICA called ‘is taking walks with’. The walk- a simple act of traversing the path from the cricket ground, past Chhota, around the football field, through the parking lot, all the way till Nescafe and back- has been the cause and location of many friendships that erupted in discreet corners of Palaash, Parijat and Silver Oak. It is also the cause of many a love that bloomed on campus (and sometimes met an early demise) and also of many, many discussions of everything under the sun. In the same breath, we talked about placement woes and whether they’ll make biryani in the mess tonight. It was where we fought over what-letter-of-the-alphabet school MICA is.

The walk in MICA, for whatever it means to all of us, will always be a special memory. We’ll remember those precise moments when we discovered each other and (for want of a better cliché), ourselves.