I’ve always dealt with some level of stress and anxiety in my life. When I was too young to remember I would sit and stare off into space and when asked what I was doing I would say “looking at the trees, it helps my stress”. When I was 8 the doctor even told my mom that I had extremely high stress levels which is why I kept getting sick. She refused to believe an 8 year old in my position could experience stress and nothing was done about it. I don’t blame my mom for this at all, I did have a fairly good home life and was admittedly spoiled rotten and given whatever I wanted. However, I do believe there was something to what the doctor said. I had no idea where the feelings of stress and anxiety came from or even what they were, but they were definitely there.

As I got older, I learned to mask everything I was feeling through constant smiles and an upbeat attitude. I was the person that everyone commented on, I must be so happy they never saw me when I wasn’t smiling and happy. Underneath it all though I was an absolute mess. I kept a bottle of pills in my bedroom and would often sit with the bottle in my hands for hours trying to work up the nerve to take them and just be done with everything. I eventually did work up the nerve to do it which resulted in a horrible experience at the emergency room. Between my mom telling me that they were going to take me away because she’s an unfit mother and the emergency room attendants telling me to really focus and remember all of the pain they were putting me through so that I never did this again.

I will say that the experience made me never want to attempt suicide via an overdose again. But I can’t say that the ER attendants did anything to quash my desire to kill myself. I lied my way out of counseling by “confessing” to my mom that I had done it all for attention and didn’t really want to die. She bought it and things continued on as they had always been.

After getting through puberty (which is when this attempted suicide happened) I learned to deal with everything better and was able to just live my life for a while. Cut to 23 years old when things really started going down hill.

I found out when I was 23 that I had Grave’s Disease and had to have radiation treatments to destroy my thyroid. This was after living with the disease undiagnosed for the past 3 years. I was studied by med students because I had the most acute case of the disease they had ever seen. This disruption of the natural balance of hormones in my body made my mental illness so much worse.

I was married at this time and we were both working in a restaurant making $2.13/hour + tips, had no medical insurance and no money for my thyroid meds. Things progressed from here and this is also where things start to get kind of fuzzy for me.

I developed a major sensitivity to noise. Any sudden or loud noises sent my heart racing and my body flooding with adrenaline. Any little noise would send my body into fight or flight mode so I was constantly on edge and feeling terrified. Add to that the fact that we were living in the middle of Memphis TN, the home of loud, booming bass at all hours of the day and night and I was a total wreck.

I would cry and scream, call the cops which never did anything. In a way, I could see myself from inside and knew that I had literally gone crazy, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. My husband was wonderful through these times, doing anything he could to try to make things easier on me. Neither of us really understood what was wrong with me, we just assumed it was because we couldn’t afford my thyroid meds.

This went on for years with us moving around to different places trying to find somewhere where I could gain some peace through quiet. However, when you have no money the chances of finding a quiet place to live is pretty much nil. Like I said before, this time is really hazy to me and I don’t remember a lot of what happened. I was terrified that I would end up institutionalized and might have had my husband not worked so hard to keep me grounded.

Luckily I’ve since found a great doctor who worked me out a combined dosage of Levothyroxine for my thyroid and Prozac for my anxiety and I’m now able to live a pretty normal life. Obviously I still have my ups and downs, and the anxiety comes back from time to time to a much lesser extent than before.

I have to admit that the times when the anxiety starts to creep back in terrify me. I suddenly think that I’m regressing or that my meds aren’t working like they should anymore and that I’m going to go back to the way I was before. But I try to get my logical brain through the fear and remember that it’s going to pass like it always does and I’ll be back to my old self in just a few days.

The Dangers of Abortion – A Catch 22 – My contribution talks about how anti-choice activism threatens women’s lives.

The Uterus Liability – A piece on the effect being a woman has on the lives of professionals and how our fertility works against us.

“Kill the Bill.” “Baby Killer.” Let’s Stop the Killing. – Thoughts on healthcare reform and ways that the radical right voice their opinions on abortion.

Do You Qualify for Full Freedom – Using the abortion ban as a means of reducing women to second class citizens.

Let me say it one more way just to make sure I get the point across. It takes women 1 year, 4 months and twenty days to earn the same amount of money that men make in only 1 year. This means that with each passing year, women fall further and further behind.

Women working full-time, year-round are paid only about 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. For women of color, the numbers are even more grim — African-American women earn 68 cents and Latinas 58 cents for every dollar paid to men. And for working mothers, the scales goes even lower.

So, what would it mean if there weren’t a $10,622 wage gap? I honestly can’t even begin to imagine the impact that this would have on equality for women overall. Think of the progress we could make if we didn’t have to struggle just to make a basic, modest living.

Please sign the petition to tell the senate to take action on the Paycheck Fairness Act (PDF).

I had a new article go up on The Abortion Gang this week. Here is an excerpt.

I’ve been noticing an often used argument from anti-choicers recently, which is to point out the dangers of abortion and highlight any case where a woman is harmed and/or dies during an abortion. I don’t think they realize what a catch 22 this is. The more that they fight to limit access to abortion and for laws requiring waiting periods, the more women they are forcing to resort to shady clinics and illegal and dangerous practices.

Continue reading The Dangers of Abortion – A Catch 22

I’m vegan for a number of reasons, the main one being that I don’t believe animals deserve to be held captive, tortured and/or killed anymore than I believe humans do. Animals are sentient beings who experience fear and feel pain just as real as any human. After all, humans are merely animals.

I feel that supporting animal rights is perfectly in line with my feminist beliefs for the following reasons.

How can I be against the exploitation and commodification of women if I support the exploitation and commodification of animals? Especially when it’s the females of the species who are most often tortured.

Female egg laying hens have their beaks seared off (even those labeled free range) and are put into tiny cages stacked on top of each other, forced to live in the waste of those above them. They are bred to lay many more eggs than are natural causing severe nutrient deficiencies, especially calcium.

Dairy cows are forcefully inseminated at a place that the factory farm workers have “playfully” nicknamed the “rape rack”. They give birth, only to have their baby taken away from them and the milk meant for those babies taken for human consumption. The baby animals will become future dairy cows if female or become veal if male. Female cows are then hooked up to machines which cause large and painful sores (mastitis) until her milk slows and the entire process is repeated.

When both chickens and cows are considered “used up”, meaning they’re too old to produce eggs or milk anymore, they’re killed. For these reason, among others, I believe that the animal industries are very much a patriarchal institution. I believe It’s all a part of our patriarchal society’s desire to control female reproduction.

I’ll be creating an Animal Rights category here where I’ll be going into this connection in more depth. If you would like to be notified of future articles, be sure to subscribe to the feed.

EDIT: Under the added sign is a small image that I can’t make out and the words Abortion Changes You.

The original ad claims “I thought life would be the way it was before.” with the caption at the bottom, abortionchangesyou.com.

The culture jammer added the sign which says “Now I can go to college & fulfill my dreams.”

I take issues with these ads because the insinuate that women are always changed by abortion which isn’t true. Some women are changed for the better by abortion, some women regret their abortions and are changed for the worse, some women aren’t changed at all.

I came across this post today featuring an awesome act of culture jamming, reclaiming these billboards.

Here is the original billboard

I participated in my first Feminist Blog Carnival last month at Beauty Schooled and loved it so much that I immediately decided to put my name in to host the next one.

If you would like to know more about what a blog carnival is, check out the Blog Carnival About Page. In a nutshell, you all write posts on the current topic on your own blogs, and all of the posts will be linked together here on April 14th. Check out the Beauty Schooled link above to see last months carnival roundup.

The topic for this carnival will be Reproductive Freedom with a deadline of April 30th.

I don’t want to limit which aspects of Reproductive Freedom you write about. But in case some need a prompt, here are some examples of topics you may want to write about.

• Problems getting a doctor to sterilize you because you’re too young or don’t have kids.
• Problems obtaining birth control or the morning after pill due to pharmacist refusals.
• Dealing with protesters while trying to obtain an abortion.
• Experience with vbac or being denied vbac.
• Personal thoughts, feelings and/or beliefs on pregnancy, contraception, abortion, vbac, or any other aspect of reproductive healthcare.
• Personal experiences with any of these topics.
• What reproductive freedom means to the feminist movement

The post must be published on your blog between now (April 1st) and the deadline (April 30th). Limit of one post per author.

You can submit your entry here. If the form fails for some reason you can also email me your entries at persephone AT angryhippie DOT info

I came across a very interesting post today with a title, Boys and Young Men: A New Cause for Liberals, that immediately caught my eye.

I come across posts by MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) all the time and usually simply roll my eyes at them. However, a post about boys and young men really drew me in. I’ve always felt that boys suffered as much from the patriarchy as girls do. Sure they’re going to end up benefiting from the institution but that doesn’t make the indoctrination any easier to live through.

The gist of the article is summed up in the quote below.

In case you haven’t noticed, America’s boys and young men are in trouble – not doing well in school, lacking ambition, often floundering. Not all of them, of course, but enough to take notice. There’s more and more in the news lately about the trouble America’s boys are in (“crisis” was the term used in a Newsweek cover story in 2006).

So I wanted to post my take on the crisis and pose some solutions from my point of view.

I think that what we really have is an education crises. Let’s face it, public schools pretty much suck in this country. Teachers barely make enough money to live on and often have to pay for the supplies they need themselves. They’re stretched too thin to show any student, regardless of gender, the personal attention that they need and deserve.

So why are girls doing better than boys in this environment? I would say that it’s probably their parents pushing them at home. I was taught all throughout my childhood that I had to study hard and make good grades if I wanted to compete with men. That because I was a girl, I would have to work twice as hard to even attempt to be on even ground with men.

Something I saw with my own parents was that the pushed me a lot harder than they did my brother. He got to slack off while I didn’t. I think that the parents of males, particularly white males, feel that they have ample opportunities so they don’t need to be pushed as hard.

So until we get the overhaul of our educational system that is so drastically needed, I think most of these issues lie with the parents.

As a side note, I had to reply to one of the comments to the post.

It is my hunch that when schools crush the freedom of boys, it is more detrimental to them than it is for girls, perhaps because they need to run around a lot?

I have to call bullshit on this. I was bursting with energy as a child and had so much trouble sitting still and not talking that I had a corner with my name literally written on it (do kids still have to stand in the corner in school when they get in trouble?). I could have ran all day long and never tired and been in total bliss. I don’t think there is a difference between girls and boys in this aspect, crushing the freedom of children is detrimental regardless of gender.

Right now I have a great doctor who works with me on cost so that I can afford the blood work & meds I need for a chronic condition. I’m terrified that if I have to pay for insurance that has a high deductible, I’ll end up losing the little health care I’m able to get now.

And to top it all off, since women were sold out to get the bill passed, not only will I have to purchase health insurance, as a woman, I won’t be getting full health coverage. It’s kind of hard to vocalize just how pissed off I am right now.