The demon who´ll introduce us to the Third Weapon out of the Fourteen in the Armory Against an Unfulfilling Life is Amon, ”a Marquis great in power, and most stern”, as per the Ars Goetia. As you can see, dove, at this point many of my original sketches have ended in the bin, and I´ll allow demons of any rank to handle the Weapons. I just can´t handle fourteen Presidents in succession, however academically inclined and intellectually helpful they may be. I don´t know if there are canonical explanations to the ranks within the demonic hierarchy. The seals for each rank are supposed to be made out of different metals, which may be alchemical code rather than referring to actual material, or both, or neither. Marquises correspond to silver, which corresponds to the Moon, femininity, receptivity, and transitory states. This feels auspicious as I´m delving further into volunteering and learning as I go…. Speaking of which, I really hate learning as I go; in my ideal world everything would come with clear, written instructions with no room for human error. Perhaps this is exactly why coincidence gave me Amon to work with for the upcoming week. I need to be able to handle uncertainty and imperfection. This fits in well with the Weapon of the week, Contending Disadvantageous Credences. Life throws us all kinds of curveballs, we don´t need to let those ping-pong around our skulls on top of that. Healthy, adaptive thinking exists somewhere between extremes, and this is what it´s all about.
But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate. – Mark 10:6-9, NIV
I´ve already made some pretty pedestrian, although not devastating mistakes in my volunteering. Old me would have been crestfallen and overcompensated like crazy to make sure nothing of the like will ever happen again. Current me is able to correct course and find a sense of joy in being able to recognize and report my own mistakes before the trainer needs to do that for me. The expectation for perfection has lessened to a workable with degree. While the stress of a new situation and the mental strain of learning burden my brain to the point I can feel it getting laggy, I can nowadays appreciate my own resilience: this is very hard, this is very new, this is a big responsibility, but the discomfort of it all doesn´t mean I couldn´t do this. There´s no need to notice a mistake and make it worse by calling it a fuck-up. And there´s no reason to think that my struggles with concentration and memory would make me unable to do this thing. I don´t feel very good at times when I notice that I made a mistake, because at some point in time I had no access to the knowledge I would normally have due to dissociative blips still happening. They come and go like weather patterns, and that´s why I´m outside the workforce and the daily grind. But a weekly responsibility is something I´ll probably be able to adjust to. I´ve adjusted to strength training, for example, and while social stress is way worse for me than physical stress, testosterone is clearly helping me handle it, even if it can´t exactly help me wind down for sleep after an intense day.
When I´m staring at the official, IP-guarded version of the disadvantageous thought patterns to be wary of, a realization emerges. These five harmful patterns aren´t only something people can fall into when struggling internally: these are all also things that abusers use to keep their victims under their thumb. Ultimatums strain the brain and create emotional insecurity. Oversimplifications that leave no room for the grey allow for no adaptations in real life situations, setting people up for failure. Setback insensitivity allows no room for growth if no attempts are made after the first signs of discomfort. Demonizing human errors and imperfections makes normal difficulties seem insurmountable. And finally, attacks towards the self or another person that paint them as unworthy or messy or prone to fail prevent them from becoming more than the negative idea projected onto them. I look at the word salad I´ve created, and I´m not very happy with it. But it´s not an IP infringement, and I should view it as a part of my personal learning curve. It doesn´t have to be great in order to not be awful. Context matters: less is expected of me in the privacy of my own blog than what would be expected of me in a volunteer role. Perhaps this Weapon is best described as a mood rather than a thing to slay gods and men with, at least it feels that way to me. I know all there is to know about questioning my own thought processes considering the fact that I live with a dissociative disorder. The self-doubt and general murkiness can be reigned in by understanding what kinds of self-doubts are hindering me from moving on with my life and realizing my own potential. Not that the goal is to develop an inflated sense of one´s own capabilities either, as this inevitably leads to failure! But that´s what abusers do as well – dishing out praise and punishment one after the other, haphazardly, so that in the end it gets impossible to know what kinds of actions lead to whichever reaction, and in the end the victim does nothing unprompted… Or at least that´s how it worked for me, but I don´t think I´m alone in this pattern. After all, abusers wouldn´t abuse others if they didn´t get the end results they want with their actions.
Oh dang, dove. Amon ”procureth feuds and reconcileth controversies between friends”. What I´m starting to really, really dislike about doing the volunteer training is that I´m also starting to understand the weight of the ethical errors I´ve witnessed the Elder make over the years. I was present when the Elder procured an outside resource for someone using his professional role when he should have stuck to his volunteer role: a good thing, but the wrong time and place and context for it. I got that uncomfortable, dissociated, loopy feeling then: ”what I am seeing can´t be real, as it´s in violation of the values we are intended to uphold”. There´s a pulsating abscess of ethical misdemeanor sitting in the heart of the community I love so much, and unfortunately the responsibilities I´m growing into do not absolve me from doing something about it – quite the contrary. Fuck this, dove… This is going to take years off my lifespan from all the stress it´s going to cause, and I´m afraid things could still be twisted around so it all ends up being used against me. Or this is what my experience tells me about going against behemoths. This is my thought process. But is it true?
Is it true?
It was true once.
Is it true today?
What if I don´t rush into it? What if I sit tight, and observe, and keep score, and write things down, and process it all, and remember that I am becoming strangely protected by my status as a vulnerable individual? Perhaps the Elders´ reluctance to recognize autism spectrum disorders and some other diagnosable conditions is because this way he can circumvent the regulations that are intended to protect people living with them. He is misusing the scripture by preaching people to bootstrap themselves out of disadvantaged situations, and certain choices he´s made regarding the mother organization could be construed as signs of controlling access to information and creating what is essentially becoming a splinter group. When I first joined, and he asked me one-on-one why I feel such a need to bring down behemoths, he framed it as a sickly thing, but it´s not. He was protecting his own interests. His reign requires people to turn the Third Weapon onto themselves. He´s just a little king in his sandbox of human suffering, and I do not appreciate that in the slightest. Of course, some kings should be left to their own devices. The question is whether or not harm is being done. Who decides that? Difficult. What if I give it a minute and grow more confident in my sense of reality and wait for the right time to be in a position where I can help other vulnerable people without getting pulled into the rapids and drowning myself? That´s not an unrealistically positive belief. It seems workable with.
”He appeareth like a wolf with a serpent´s tail, vomiting out of his mouth flames of fire; but at the command of the M*ster” – fuck that noise, dove! – ”he putteth on the shape of a man with dog´s teeth beset in a head like a raven; or else a man with a raven´s head only”. Not all of the demons in Ars Goetia are shape-shifters, but a good lot of them are. Why? Because form precedes perception, which is influenced by belief, but as we both know, all three can be changed with the right intent and the right interventions. At this point in time I´m still a fledgling of a man, and even my voice is still underway. But as long as I focus on the steps immediately ahead of me, don´t belittle my strengths and don´t let my weaknesses define me… I don´t need to be there today, but I´ll get to a vantage point where I can see clearly again.
Restless, changing, shifting dreams to you, my dove.
I wonder if I´m losing it again?
Lähiönoita 