I guess I find it interesting when people who live their lives online and put themselves in a bubble of public eyes suddenly feel they have a right to privacy when things go to shit between you, yet you lived a lot of the good parts of your relationship(s) on a public blog. People, including myself, worry about their reputation, perceptions, pretend they don’t care at all, yet we all exhibit emotionally driven behavior to the contrary. Most of us today, because we so rarely actually speak to one another, would rather fire off a passive aggressive comment around on open forums instead of actually dealing with interpersonal problems.

There is a line in one of my favourite songs by Terry Reid, the song is called To be Treated, where he sings:

we are what we are when in danger and we are as we stand head in hand

The whole thing speaks to a place in me that just wants to be peaceful, doesn’t want to resent, to feel anger so strong sometimes it feels like my blood may boil over from my mouth, nose, eyes and ears covering me in my mistakes, disintegrating everything good I’ve managed to accomplish in its midst. The fight or flight feeling when I perceive myself to be in danger or feel I’ve been burned is normal but it doesn’t have to control me. I can’t control what other people do all I can do is continue to work on how I react to it.

In the big picture, when big problems happen in my life I don’t want to lash out, overreact, hold onto unhealthy thoughts, or allow myself to sit in the victim chair. I’ve been working on the big picture for coming on a year and it is still some of the hardest work I have ever taken on. It is up there with coming to terms and dealing with my relationship with my parents. It strikes me as incredibly odd and painful that I can forgive the man who came into my home in 2002 and sexually assaulted me and I can’t forgive two women who have wronged me from behind their computers. Why can I let go of so many other things in my life, why can I come so far with forgiving some yet have no love for a few?

I know that I like resolutions to things, I like to work things out, I can admit when I’m wrong, where I don’t think a lot of people can, it’s very freeing, like learning to laugh at yourself. I wish I could feel more compassion instead of anger, at times I do, but moving on is a struggle here. I think because I’ve been able to get my life on track regardless of how hard my depression gets in almost every other area I don’t understand why I can’t have a resolution to these two problems, I feel helpless and misunderstood, ignored, taken advantage of. I know I am NOT a victim, I’m not the only one at fault. I would assume I have to forgive myself as well, but if I had my relationship with myself listed on Facebook it would be complicated.

We all live in this technologically advanced world, even Adam and I who have only ONE computer (the horror!). Things move so fast the average person can not keep up. Yet we seem to be taking steps backwards in dealing with people and with the relationships that ensue. We act like adolescents when someone says or writes something mean about us, threaten to sue over the thought of a reputation. For real? By feeding into the trend of everyone living their lives online we don’t seem to be gaining any lasting enlightenment, we are limiting ourselves psychologically, I don’t need to even read a book or be a doctor to see that. A society where people don’t have to wear pants is doomed from the get go.

There was a time I thought that I would write extensively about the Vancouver 2010 Olympics while they were here, but when they arrived I found myself uninterested in writing anything on the actual games, anything positive I had to say I could have turned around and written from the opposite stand point. I’m always up for good clean sports though I was never what you would call an Olympic supporter, but I wasn’t a bitcher either. I did however vote NO for the games. I’ll never forget it it because it turned the vast majority of people in the office I worked in against me, I was one of the only people who lived downtown (small office), I was also the youngest in this particular place and I ran competitively at the time and due to being an athlete people were appalled that I would vote NO. The fact has always remained the same, I voted from a political standpoint, the part of my mind that believed and still believes that it was a joke that only Vancouver got to vote on something that our children’s children’s children will still be paying for was the appalling thing. Granted, not MY children. My debt is payed off when I die.

I spent most of the games feeling depressed and creatively blocked. I considered doing a wrap up post of 17 photos for 17 days but I didn’t take photos every day of the games, and even the photos I did take were pretty lacklustre, there aren’t many that I consider to be good photos. I did Tweet a lot, it went over pretty well for someone who doesn’t make a point to live Tweet a trip to the bathroom.

For me the only real highlight other than so many top ten finishes and fourteen gold medals for Canada was getting to go see the Canadian Men’s Curling team plus seven other countries. When the information on how the Olympic tickets were going to be sold and the prices were announced it became clear pretty quickly we wouldn’t be seeing any events. We didn’t even entertain the idea of getting to see anything anywhere but on a T.V., let alone see one live that both my parents and myself have played in the past and one that Adam and me watch. One that Adam is developing an odd obsession with, comparable only to when he discovered Tennis. (long story) So, when the opportunity arose from a friend who most graciously gave us, yes gave us Olympic curling tickets came to pass there was nothing else to do but go and to go wearing matching sweaters, something that we both agree is only acceptable on this one occasion. Adam wore my dad’s old curling sweater that I started to let him wear years ago because even though I love it, it is way too big for me. Oddly enough one of my closest girlfriends has the same sweater and lent me hers! Awesome. Getting to see Canada’s undefeated mens team second row right over the button is up there with best memories ever. Thanks again Steve!!

Adam went out exploring and people watching more than I did. There was also a time I didn’t think I would stay in the city for the games, and although I am glad I did, I think Adam would have had a better time had a I left. I hate that about depression, I’d been feeling so well and bam it just hit like a load of bricks almost a week in. I’m not in break down mode but I’m feeling really shitty.

It is nice that the helicopters are gone. I don’t miss the games at all, we watch golf. It’s over. We just changed the channel, there is curling on this weekend. But they left us with the cheque and the feeling remains that we are the province the country doesn’t care about. They came, they went, and now we pay.

Prologue

Back on February 8, 2006 when I came out with the secret that I had been a chronic hemorrhoid sufferer from the ripe old age of 19 I never imagined it would turn into an epic saga filling my life with enough material that I could write a book on What to Expect When You’re Expecting Rhoids. Nor did I realize how much support I would receive, granted my archives for 2006 are a disaster and ALL of the comments from the whole year are gone, but at the time when I realized just how many people were suffering with ass issues of their own, or for whatever reason wanted to be kept posted on my ass, I decided I would blog the entire adventure including the surgery.

I welcome you to read the posts I’m linking to in this Prologue, I will only include the main highlights here to either welcome you to the saga or refresh your memories. I particularly love the guest post that Adam did I think he captured my fear quite well.

My first bowel movement took over an hour. I chugged glass after glass of water to take my mind off the fact it was happening fresh out of bed at 7 something in the morning with absolutely no pain killers in the system. Everyone knows that I Corinna Liscumb have a mild tendency to exaggerate but this is different and I would never do that in regards to something like this, Adam sat on a stool [haha I said stool] the whole time and basically held my hand. Although I would give anything to see my facial expressions there was no fucking way I was busting out the camera even for something as memorable as that was. In case anyone is DYING to know my second pooh was much shorter but just as painful and involved yelling and the word ‘fuck’ at times.

Even years later I often think how when I woke up all the nurses were talking about my tattoos instead of say mentioning that not only was there a lot of gauze on the outside of the area BUT that there was a piece of gauze UP inside my anus that was about the size of my thumb. I was actually told about that there piece of gauze in my comments by one of my loyal readers [isn't enough to call Sarah a loyal reader, she's a friend as well, we've both been there for each other through some heavy shit over the years, she's the bomb].

Sarah knew an ass surgeon, I can’t remember exactly what she told me but it included and was not limited to a part about how *most people* when crapping out that piece of gauze pass out cold. Not like I didn’t already know it, but that confirmed to me that I’m one tough bitch.

___________________________________________________

Although I still mention my ass surgery on here I’ve never felt the need to give an update.

Until now.

Even though everything looked fine on my initial follow up visit two weeks after, by six months I knew I had a problem.  Around this time I phoned the surgeon’s office back and explained that something wasn’t right, I was told that it could take up to a year to properly heal but to call back and come in if I had any pressing concerns. On the year anniversary, nothing had changed. By this time we’d done some research and discovered that having the hemorrhoidectomy did not mean that I would never get the rhoids again. OK FUCK WHAT? It explained a lot but I was livid, I should have been told that when making the decision to have this invasive and painful surgery in the consultation. My rhoids had not actually returned but I had noticed a piece of skin wasn’t tucking up inside like the rest were and it was easily irritated by say a thong.

I made an announcement on Twitter that I was returning to work. The day Adam walked in and said he had been laid off, I was on the phone to my girlfriend before he stepped out of his boots; she has gotten me all of my previous work in film, my schedule was shifted around a bit but I did get hours. Last Monday was my first day. Sometime during that 16.5 hours it felt like my ass had popped out a rhoid. I wasn’t surprised, I assumed this day was coming and I was working on location outside for that entire day, it almost made sense with my luck that this would be the time that they would return.

On Monday night when I got in the shower with what can only be described as despair I pushed that piece of swollen skin as far up my asshole as I could. I didn’t even have any Vaseline to help soothe the area, I recently hucked our container because it was from 2005. And sure maybe expiry dates aren’t completely accurate but I thought that 2005 warranted being thrown out. I returned to work on Tuesday and worked all 16 hours of it in a lot of pain but being the only female PA who was I going to tell? It was day TWO I was scheduled in till the following Monday. I OF COURSE didn’t want to let my girlfriend OR my husband down. But I had no choice I woke up Wednesday morning with the added thrill of a plugged nose and my cough had returned. I texted my on location contact/boss and my girlfriend/boss, but I only mentioned the onset of the cold out of no where. As I mentioned to her later I didn’t feel comfortable talking about rhoids over text message at whatever hour it was in the morning. THANKFULLY I was not fired, but I was taken off the rest of schedule for that episode. I thought for sure I was toast but I must have horseshoes in that dysfunctional ass of mine too.

I wasn’t able to see my family doctor until Saturday morning which was half my fault because my brain was set on I DON’T WANT TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF THIS – LA LA LA my ass doesn’t hurt so bad I can hardly sit.

I gave the doctor a quick rundown on the surgery, and my hospitalization at 19 (with a very serious case of thrombosed hemorrhoids) which began my ten year hot streak of internal and external rhoids before they were removed. I explained to him that I knew something had gone wrong with the leftover skin and prepared myself for the worst.

“What you have there is actually a yeast infection about this big [forefinger touching thumb around] causing the swelling, itching, redness”. Everything led this veteran rhoids suffer to believe they had them again. He did also confirm that the piece of skin was not a good thing and could cause me further problems down the road but that this was different. I was like “WHAT, I totally wash my ass man”, not to mention I have NEVER heard of an asshole yeast infection. He explained to me it has nothing to do with that, only not to wash my genitals with soap, I told him I hadn’t for years, I use hypoallergenic Vagisil wash. I know I have sensitive genitals, Vagisil wash is my friend. Taking this in was interesting because I don’t know the exact number of vaginal yeast infections I’ve had in my life, honestly WHO keeps track of that. It’s under five, and I’m almost 33.

This new development with my ass is both good news and bad. Good news no rhoids. Bad news FEELS like I have rhoids and right now I can’t work, I need a couple days, this stuff is supposed to work fast, which begged me to ask Adam the question(s) of “when a doctor tells you something like an ass cream works fast do you ever wonder why, like does he use it, has his wife used it, is he suffering from a yeast infected ass right now?” I guess now I’ll just keep my asshole yeast infection cream in my work bag and if it starts to act up again, take that, I have ASS CREAM.

The rage I feel right now is nothing new. But the difference between what happened then and now is me, I am new, in a healthy head space. I am no longer suffering a clinical semi functional breakdown and the problem with being in a healthy head space and feeling this way is that I have to find new ways to deal with it. I can’t freak out and start throwing stuff or threatening to harm myself, I can’t just take a handful of prescription drugs and head to bed and forget about it because as I’ve stated over the past few months, I’ve been out of the year plus long breakdown and my head is finally above water. So all I feel right now is pain, and hurt, and anger. I feel betrayed, used, screwed over. I’ve been feeling like this since March and despite my best efforts I can’t hold it in any longer, even at the threat of charges being filed against me for alleged harassment.

This goes way back, in March 2008 I entered breakdown mode. I was hospitalized, it is all on the blog. I was also on the Bloggers Bowl for Big Brothers Team and was friends personally with all the bloggers on the team when it was formed; the main blogger running it, we’d been friends since new years 2006, off our blogs. The details are irrelevant except for the part where I threatened to throw down the gloves because things started to fall apart with this group right around this same time and I was upset, not even remotely in my own mind and made a stupid comment that has since that very day never ceased to be used against me when needed by the organizer and her husband. Having been friends for the amount of time we were, she and her husband knew full well the only person I had ever harmed with violence was myself. I apologized to everyone on the team even those who I had not insulted and took responsibility for what I said. I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed that my depression and my temper where getting away from me to that extent.

Enter me early last year, still trying to recover from the breakdown which had originally been brought on by my relationship with my parents falling apart. Take a that a step further, my parents were now in Indonesia and at the time all we knew was that my mother was having a breakdown and was in the hospital and completely terrified of my father. Here came the hardest time I have ever faced in my life. For people who weren’t reading at the time, there is no Canadian Consulate in Bali, you have to deal with Australia but you obviously have to deal with them through Indonesian laws. To say I was dealing with a lot would be an understatement: Three consulates, foreign affairs, the hospital, and all the while trying to keep my dad from finding out our plans, which consisted of Adam flying to the other side of the world in under 72 hours to rescue and bring my mother home not knowing how she really was or what my father was really capable of under these circumstances. I did this with no help except from my husband and the legal contacts and dealing with my mother completely out of her mind and in hysterics. I was a wreck and at the time although I had no idea how to feel about my father, I was still an only child at 31, about to watch my parents go through a divorce after 39 years of marriage and after they had already retired to Bali.

Just for the record, i am not trying to condone my actions, only to say that both parties would have had to avoided twitter for weeks to be unaware of my state of mind, because they were both following me and I wear my heart on my sleeve.

March is Earth Hour month, and I realize now that we were both playing the keep your enemies closer card but we had agreed to work together on Earth Hour. The organizers were following myself, her, and one other blogger as the main people highlighting the event in Vancouver. The year prior my post was the first one up on the event in the city but by the time March 2009 rolled around my blog was just an alley compared to her traffic. I still managed to get my post up, it wasn’t as good as I wanted, I hadn’t promoted the event to the degree I had wanted to but I did my best given the situation I was in and when her post came out there was no link to me and I was livid. Were this just a regular post I wouldn’t have cared, she had done this to me before where she knew I was doing something that someone had done a talk on, for example, and intentionally left me off the linking of bloggers participating in whatever. But I never saw it coming, having the carrot yanked back over a CHARITY while I am in family emergency mode and nothing makes sense anymore.

I flipped, at first I was sort of calm, but for me this was the final straw, I’m sure she saw this as payback for a nasty post I had written within a day or two of the part of my breakdown where I was taken to hospital via ambulance having overdosed on clonazepam, seroquel and a bottle of wine. I never took the post down because I wanted it left as an example of what not to do when you have a massive fallout with someone and to this day I’ve spoken to numerous people who still have no idea who I was talking about as I never did use names. It was for the most part the depressed ravings of a mind with a raw deal.

I have all the emails exchanged between us but they are on another hard drive, and to be honest I only glanced over the response which unfortunately turned out to be the one that must have said something about me leaving her alone and not contacting her again, because when I sent her back her post with the exact line where my link should have been and she still refused to deal with me and honour our agreement, I made it a point to call her a cunt. But what I did read of her response was so insensitive and again, this is charity we were dealing with here, one that having been friends she KNEW meant A LOT to me. Where I completely fucked myself was when I couldn’t leave it at that. I could hardly see straight, Adam was watching this happen, he tried to get the computer away from me, but I was out of control, how does ANYONE do that to someone when they KNOW that their life is literally falling to pieces around them, for real not just blog drama bullshit, real life shit that my family is still dealing with; we are a family, but things are different. I couldn’t get control over the fact that she took advantage of me at a time where I was at my lowest, I didn’t get to be the person that Earth Hour dealt with because my blog wasn’t what it was back in 2006. I’d found Twitter and though I’ve always had a solid supportive reader base I’ve never wanted to be a social media maven, I just want to blog, I just want to write. That is all this is for me, and that is all it ever was, somewhere I could be myself and write, even prepare for a novel. But the small amount of popularity this blog brought me was so threatening to her that she had to shut me up for good, leaving me basically not allowed to even have opinions anymore and voice them. I just wanted to support a charity that I care about, I wasn’t trying to gain anything, I wanted to help spread the word. I couldn’t believe someone could be so cruel at a time of such disaster and I just couldn’t leave it at cunt, I was so distraught I do not remember exactly what I said but it was something to the effect of “don’t fucking fuck with me, I am so fucking sick of you fucking with me” or “if you fuck with me again… “. As a friend put it, “what did she think you were going to do, walk up three blocks and bang on her buzzer?”. I don’t know what she thought, but instead of calling my husband, or emergency medical services, or even just taking a step back and thinking of anyone but herself for two seconds, she missed the chance to realize that the Vancouver police may have other more pressing matters than breaking up a chick fight that never happened.

She wanted to charge me with harassment. If this same situation had happened in 1999 when people still talked face to face, it would have gone something like this:

me: so fuck you bitch you didn’t give me credit for that paper and you promised cunt face

her: don’t talk to me like that

me: i’ll talk to you however the fuck i want to talk to you, you fucked me over, did i mention yer a CUNT?

her: i’m leaving now you are scaring me

me: well then stop fucking me over

(no cops)

Cops didn’t arrest me, she just apparently didn’t exist after that.
I wasn’t charged with anything, but the officer’s suggestion to basically clam up was the real goal of her legal threat.
But see after she did this she continued to follow me on Twitter under other accounts she ran and for a while I let her, seeing if she’d come to her senses and we could talk like civilized people. I knew from the get go that she hadn’t unfollowed Adam, and still had him listed as a friend on Flickr, meaning he could see all of her photos, even ones blocked for friends and family only. I had taken her and her husband off my Flickr immediately. A few months went by and I realized that not only was she still following me on Twitter under a different account, my photos were appearing regularly on her husband’s Flickr homepage, and she still had my husband listed as a friend.

I messaged the mr, this problem was between the girls, and told him that what they were doing was malicious. Keeping me at bay while still accessing my life was having it both ways, I felt totally played but I cut contact as suggested all the while knowing that was what she wanted all along. I offered to drop the whole thing, and again, offered to act human. We both got dropped as requested, and they were out of our lives.

But you try living online and avoiding people.

This morning I woke up to find myself blocked from a contest that last year I won runner up in. If you read the comments on my Best of 604 post, the post by the blogger who finished behind me, and the comments made by the organizer herself, in most circles I am considered the winner. This in no way means that I can’t be nominated, but honestly I don’t feel I deserve to win, I didn’t blog for three months of last year, mostly due to this mind you, it was one of the most violating and cruelest things someone who actually knew me had ever done to me. But the fact remains I’m blocked. She is going to be interviewing past winners and well, I’d be one of those, the category I was in had the most blogs nominated and most votes cast and I didn’t even do one post on it, until after. I have never openly campaigned for anything I’ve been nominated for in my life.

If somebody nominates me this year, all I want is some maturity instead of the smoke show and tear gas. If we ladies can’t get along, how can we expect peace in the Middle East? We both got hurt, but it was a speedbump miles and miles ago, a dime on the horizon. It never should have come to this. And I am sickened by us both.