New Strategy: Don't Alienate the Women

I had a disturbing incident at work today. First, the voices were saying that my blog was no longer somebody's in somebody's favorites, that they were no longer reading it. Then a lady came into the store and looked directly into my eyes, in a very long-lasting way, with a not at all happy look. I looked away for a moment because I was talking to somebody else, and looked back, and she was still looking directly at me. So I asked, 'Can I help you find something?' She said, 'No, but thank you.' Her tone of voice was very hurt, very offended, and she seemed to have been personally insulted by me, even though I had never seen her before. Then she went on. I could not help noticing something about her physical appearance, which I had recently talked about in an insulting way.

This disturbed me. Let me write a couple of assumptions I have about my blog.

1. Nobody's reading it.
2. If they are, they're just the people who knew me at MySpace.
3. If anybody else is, they're people who know me at work.
4. If anyone from work is reading it, they're probably male, not female.
5. If any non-work, non-MySpace people are reading it, they're not female either.

I assume some things about people, about my relationships with them, about what I have to offer them and what they have to offer me. With men, I always feel that there's something negotiable, because, there is no nice way to say this, I assume that I can offer sex. With women, I usually have nothing at all to offer them. I assume that nobody values the existing knowledge I have in my head right now, since I haven't been able to finish learning and studying in such a way that I can build or create anything useful. I assume women aren't interested in me at all, in the knowledge I have, in me as a person, in any relationship with me.

I had some thoughts at work, but I didn't write them down, and they're not as orderly now as they were then. It was a list of assumptions I have about women.

First, there should be a difference between what I think of 'higher class' women, versus ordinary women. Female celebrities won't be reading my blog. It's obscure and there's hardly any reason why any of them would find it. However, it's possible that there are other middle-class females who are suffering the same kind of thing I am. They would be ordinary people, non-celebrities, people who aren't in a powerful position in society. They, too, would feel like they are the victim of a mysterious crime they don't understand, something they can't stop, something nobody can fix for them.

There has been this idea, coming from someplace, that there are evil women who are in the role of competitors or controllers, and those are the ones who have absolutely nothing to gain from me, at least nothing that people can gain through mutual cooperation - they see me as a threat, a competitor, and a slave. It's been said that female judges, in court, are particularly harsh towards female criminals, harsher than a male judge tends to be. I usually see women as competitors and threats, not cooperators, and insulting their physical appearance is different from talking about men's physical appearance. If I talk about men, I talk about them sympathetically. If I talk about women, I talk about them ruthlessly, without sympathy.

However, the woman I saw today made me wonder about being sympathetic towards women. If I imagined that, for instance, that woman and I had both experienced the same kind of events in psychotherapy with Judith Swack, then the other woman and I would be cooperators and fellow sufferers, and Judith Swack would be the one in the role of controller/attacker. It would be strange to see a woman as a fellow sufferer. It would be strange to imagine that that woman respected me, respected my knowledge, respected my writing, understood my experiences, and actually felt that she had something to gain by reading what I write.

I have gone a long time believing 'females don't exist,' the same way that I blanked out the existence of attractive young men. In other words, if I discovered 'females exist,' it would be just as much of a big deal.

It's hard to explain this whole idea without looking back at my friendships with women. MaryAnn, in my young childhood - she was bossy, and whenever we played any kind of 'pretend,' her particular game of pretend was that she was the teacher and I was the student, and she gave me boring work assignments while I sat at the desk and did them. Meanwhile, I envied my brother and his friends because they rode their bicycles out in the vacant lot, and I wanted a bicycle that had treads on the tires so I could go there too. (I'm thinking of a 'dirtbike' except I think that actually is a type of motorcycle.) I had female friends as classmates at school but they weren't at-home friends; they were just people I talked to at school. I played with my brother or by myself, and we did video games and that kind of thing, and I read books. Then, when I moved to West Virginia, my neighbor was a boy slightly younger than I was, and we played outdoor Dungeons and Dragons. I had a couple female friends but they were nowhere near as much fun as the guy friends. I just felt better with 'boy friends' than 'girl friends.' I could be tough and act like a 'tomboy' and do outdoor things.

Girls were too wimpy. They got hurt too easily. I accidentally hurt their feelings by saying the wrong things, without meaning to. Somehow I didn't ever hurt guys' feelings, or it didn't seem like it. The female friends also got physically hurt too easily, not just emotionally hurt, and they were less likely to climb trees or ride bikes or that kind of thing.

When I got into middle school though I met Rachael, and no, she didn't ride bikes at all - she had cerebral palsy and couldn't do anything that required physical coordination. But she was a genius at certain things, and she was my best friend from 1986 to perhaps 1997. But then there was the incident where Rachael decided that I'm just another lizard-beneath-a-human-skin, like all the other evil people, as her husband would have her believe. So talking to me was forbidden, for all eternity. Since then, I haven't had any female friends. And I didn't keep in touch with my female friends from college, because they didn't understand or respect me, as I've written before - they had contempt for me.

Don't alienate the women - it's strange to think that people read what I write, or that a total stranger might read it, and that the total stranger might be female. I can imagine that this hypothetical female is a fellow sufferer and not a competitor and not a 'bossy teacher.'

I have to mention something that happened with Judith Swack. During the therapy, she did a thing where she started sentences and then I was supposed to do muscle tests to see if I agreed or disagreed with the statements. Well, one of the things she was testing was 'I'm crazy.' She was focused on the 'secrecy pattern.' She made it sound like she was sure I was hiding a secret. I had told her that people were following me around and watching everything I did. But back then, I was saying it was hackers, not 'mind control.' I didn't believe in mind control yet. She told me that I sounded very articulate and coherent, for somebody who was experiencing that, and that usually they were incoherent and rambling. She started getting bound and determined to reveal that I was hiding a secret, that I knew something but that I was refusing to tell her. She said that, in the secrecy pattern, there can be a family secret so terrible that they threaten to kill you if you tell about it. But I didn't know what kind of thing in particular she would be referring to, and I didn't have any secret like that.

I remember she got very excited whenever I told her I had had a dream. We were working on something about Satan - all of her patterns, or most of them anyhow, included Satan. I had a dream after one of the therapy sessions, in which I heard the sound of a large, terrifying monster crawling through the crawlspace next to my bed. She began asking questions: did it have hooves or claws? She wanted to know which particular demon it was. I sometimes think that she herself was using the technology, but that she was curious to know about other users, and which fantasy-demons they called themselves, since they always give themselves a persona.

This is at the 'rambling' phase now because I'm just writing down stuff randomly that I happened to muse about at work today. I was thinking in general about my relationships with women and why it is that I would see them as enemies instead of cooperators and fellow sufferers. Usually I assume that other women have nothing to gain from me, and that they have no respect for my interests, my way of doing things, my beliefs, and whatever else I like and value about myself. So I assumed that there could be no females reading my blog, and that it wouldn't even matter if I insulted them.

Well, if there are any, then I apologize and I will try to watch what I say from now on. The problem was simply my not knowing they were there.