Creative flow

Oh my god, I feel so excited right now! As I've said in past updates, I'm going to college in the fall.

Now, since my first round of 12th grade, I've wanted to do a campaign on sexual assault that opens it's arms to both male and female victims as well as informs people who have never experienced this crime what their survivor friends are experiencing, and what they can do. I'd emphasize on resources for survivors, abolishing myths, and highlighting the aftereffects of sexual assault. Somehow, all this would be done in a safe setting and obviously triggers would still be there.. but I'd really want to create a space for those affected by it to express themselves while secondary survivors get a better understanding. With those three areas to hit on, maybe that might be accomplished.

I've chosen those three main areas to hit because of what I've noticed just from the people I've interacted with in high school and being sexually harassed. Firstly, I didn't even know what had happened counted as sexual harassment, and I didn't know where to go or who to talk to.
Secondly, for my friends and family members, I wanted to help them understand what was going on in my head.
Thirdly, I did my senior project which talked about sexual assault with freshmen and a friendship almost got ruined from a really hurtful thing a friend said to me. We worked it out, but it was a brutal reminder that rape culture is alive even in high school.

Now, with what I'm planning, it's going to be at my college but I want to contact the high schools in this area so they can tell their students. That way, the college gets promotion and RAINN gets promotion.. other sources get promotion, and people get informed or help--even both.

The idea is still in the sketching stages, but what I hope to achieve is a campus-wide event (or at least spread out in a contained area) with different sections that represent a stage in the emotional aftereffect of sexual assault. At the anger section, maybe I can get old dishes or pillows to be broken or punched so they can take their anger out.
In the saddness/grief/depression sort of area, I want to have flyers with a big candle printed on them and lots of coloring tools so people can color in their own candle and have it posted on a wall. The candle can be "lit" to grieve the person they used to be or a vigil for someone they knew, or even just for all survivors. Affirmations and hopes for the future can be written on them.

For other sections, I'm not sure yet. I need to brush up on my research.

Meanwhile, inbetween all the sections will be informative posters that show statistics that affect both men and women plus abolishing the myths.

It'd be even better if I can have a timer that runs through the whole event that marks a tally for each time someone is sexually assaulted in the United States (every 2.5 minutes).

Speeches can be made throughout the day by speakers, maybe with an open mic time for survivors to come up on the stage to say what they want to say. At the end of the rally, the tally will be counted and the number of people sexually assaulted during that time span could be said out loud. Maybe we can have a moment of silence.

I'd have hotlines for victims posted EVERYWHERE, as well as URLS and organizations that also work to raise awareness.

Oh man, this is getting to be a huge idea but I really want to do this. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and the 2010 theme is campus-orientated, and that is so perfect I can just explode.

But I must get organized first.

500% Increase

Just a moment ago, I typed in http://www.rainn.org since I want to organize a RAINN Day event at my college in April (yes, I registered! I'll be signing up for classes soon :] )

Then I saw this article on their site: http://rainn.org/news-room/news/degrassi-debut and I'm both... horrified and strangely relieved.

I watched this episode when it aired and thought it was awesome that the producers were tackling childhood sexual abuse, especially with how Jane could not remember it until certain triggers pushed the memories out. I've had a close family member go through the same when I was three--I was, unintentionally, triggering her because that was the age that she was molested. I didn't know about this until many years later. A couple years ago, though, I was reading about people who had repressed memories of CSA because it is such a controversial subject, but I didn't get much of an understanding of it until very recently when I bought Trauma and Recovery.

Thanks a lot Freud for contributing to the many doubts about sex abuse victims :[ The more cases he heard from women and children, the less he actually believed because he was completely shocked that sexual abuse was so widespread.

I think this article from RAINN paints a disturbing picture about how widespread it still is--and that is just with the audience that watched the premiere of that episode. How many more victims are out there that haven't come forward yet?

I'm relieved about this statistic because RAINN managed to get their hotline out to a very big audience, and I am happy for the people that came forward about their stories. Talking about it is a very important step in healing.

Tori Amos concert

jesus, I am so tired but I gotta write this down before I forget a lot of it~

TORI AMOS

She opened her Sinful Attraction tour in Seattle today and daaamn.

We got lost on the way to the theater but managed to make it inside after the opening act was already done playing. We sat and chatted with the fellow next to us (who drove down from Vancouver) and it was great fun--especially when the lights went down and everyone started screaming as the band got up on the stage.

Tori was dressed in green with gold leggings since "we're in the Emerald City" (as she said :D) and opened with "Give" off of her new album.

I don't really know the names of a lot of the really new songs that she played so I'll put in the songs that I DID know that she played (not in the right order though, I am so out of it): Cornflake Girl, Icicle, Crucify, Bells for Her (mom started sobbing when she played this), Landslide (and dad started in when this came on), Sugar, Precious Things, Baker Baker, Space Dog, Bliss, Carbon, China, Digital Ghost, Strong Black Vine, Curtain Call, and Past the Mission.

HOLY
SHIT

I think she was trying to kill us, seriously.

First of all, it was funny near the beginning she said that she was gonna take requests (mom yelled out "Marianne" and I yelled "Code Red") but I don't think she really did from anyone in the *audience*. My parents and I suspect that Nicole was floating around up by the stage and giving Tori hints as to what to play. That's why mom started crying when she started playing Bells for Her since that is one of Nicole's songs.

RIGHT AFTER that, she started talking about her brother (who died around 2004 I think) and this made me sad since I can relate to the loss of a sibling, and then she started with this piano melody that sounded reaaalllyyy familiar and I thought "Oh my god, is she going to play "Toast"?" but as soon as she sang "I took my love and I took it down", this really.....

this really indescribable feeling just stabbed me right in the gut and I looked over at my parents and they both started just crying. This was also one of the songs we tend to associate with Nicole made even more intense by it being completely unexpected.

BUT

It was just damn awesome.

This was my first Tori concert and it was definitely killer. I hope to meet her someday :B

Torimania

My mom's birthday is in three days. That is also the start of Tori Amos's new tour, and she is starting in Seattle.

We got tickets to go the day that they were on sale :D

Dad brought mom a copy of Little Earthquakes in 1993. I was three years old and unintentionally acting as a trigger for lots of bad things, so mom was in a really bad spot mentally at the time. Dad brought her this tape and said "You need to listen to this." So she did, and the music of this woman helped pull mom through this dark period.

Mom has also said that listening to Tori with Nicole (older sis, RIP), helped mend their relationship because they weren't as close for a long time. Thus, Nicole was also a Tori fan.

The first song I can remember hearing is "Crucify" (which is unfortunate that I have a really difficult time listening to it now, but that is a different story for a different day)

Now, 16 years after first hearing Tori as a child, I am finally going with mom and dad to see her live. Holy shit!

Her music has also pulled me through some tough times. "1000 Oceans", for example, was played at Nicole's memorial.

In some sense, I can relate to almost everything on the album "Little Earthquakes". "Me and a Gun" is a bit hard to chew through purely because it is completely haunting. I have never been raped, but this song can still effect me.
Lately, "China" has been on my mind because of odd feelings about a friend buuut I really don't want to get into that right now...

I remember constantly listening to "Under The Pink" throughout 8th grade, especially the song "Bells for Her". The line "You have her face and her eyes but you are not her" reminds me A LOT of Nicole because I look (and apparently sound) a lot like her. What is really creepy is that a few years after focusing on that one line in the song, I read Nicole's rants and found that she wrote a poem about me, to me, and opened it by using that same exact quote. Fucking creepy.

I dove into "Boys for Pele" after the breakup of my last relationship (way back in 2007, oh jeez). Don't get me wrong--the breakup was really easy. I had wanted to break up with him but he ended up beating me to the punch. There was a time after where I felt fine, but then I began to realize the depths of how I felt about him in regards to how he felt about me, and suddenly I was in a very bad place. For some reason, I felt used and really whorish. That is when "Blood Roses" was played constantly on WMP. At the same time, I also listened to "Caught A Lite Sneeze"and "Doughnut Song" because of how I felt about someone else, and "Putting The Damage On" because of a friendship heading in a destructive pathway.

Beyond that, I mish-mashed everything from all the other albums and drew inspiration from many songs for character development in stories and for getting a different perspective on situations.

I can admit that after Halloween 2007, there was a time when I hardly listened to Tori because I was completely infatuated with Nightwish due to the Seattle concert that year. Dark Passion Play was played over and over, and I found it hard to listen to the past albums for a little while. Tori got a long break.

Now, I look back on how I felt about her music in the past and I can see how much I've changed. I'm only 19, but so many events and changes have already happened in my life that it feels like "What more could really happen after this?"... I do hope to still keep listening to Tori as more happens in the future.

Finally.

As I am coming to terms with just the thought that yes, I was emotionally abused in middle school, I found this: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31596329/ns/health-behavior/ns/health-behavior/

and all I can think is "fucking duh!"

Here's a couple quick confessions: The first one is that I got a sense of forshortened future that is tied in with my sister's death 8 years ago. This started flaring up after I turned 18--the birthday that she fell short of reaching.
Secondly, the sense of a forshortened future got tied in more of feeling like I won't be successful rather than I will die young, and that sense came from when I began dealing with the aftereffects of emotional abuse. I felt like such a failure in those years that it carried over through high school and I began thinking "What is the point if I'm never going to be successful?". I lost my sense of motivation for a while last year and got it back eventually.. but sometimes it'd fluctuate. One week I'd feel completely optimistic, and the next I just wanted to completely give up. Game over.

Now, onto this article.

"The study, based on a survey of more than 20,000 kids, challenges conventional wisdom that says teens engage in risky behavior because they think they're invulnerable to harm. Instead, a sizable number of teens may take chances "because they feel hopeless and figure that not much is at stake," said study author Dr. Iris Borowsky, a researcher at the University of Minnesota."

Such risky behavior could be things like alcohol abuse and drug use.
Let's consider these statistics though:

Children who have been sexually abused are 2.5 times more likely develop alcohol abuse
Children who have been sexually abused are 3.8 times more likely develop drug addictions
Nearly 2/3’s of the people in treatment for drug abuse reported being abused as children These statistics are compiled from the National Institute on Drug Abuse 2000 Report & Child Abuse & Neglect Study by Arthur Becker-Weidman PhD
http://www.childhelp.org/resources/learning-center/statistics

Also, on that same site:
Abused children are 25% more likely to experience teen pregnancy
Abused teens are 3 times less likely to practice safe sex, putting them at greater risk for STDs

What does this have to do with my sense of forshortened future and this article?

First of all, the article is directly talking about that sense of forshortened future.

A sense of forshortened future is a very common result of abuse, and also considered in the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
"The individual may have a sense of a foreshortened future (e.g., not expecting to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span) (Criterion C7)."
http://www.mental-health-today.com/ptsd/dsm.htm

PTSD arises from traumatic situations, and abuse is pretty damn traumatic.
"Traumatic events that are experienced directly include, but are not limited to, military combat, violent personal assault (sexual assault, physical attack, robbery, mugging), being kidnapped, being taken hostage, terrorist attack, torture, incarceration as a prisoner of war or in a concentration camp, natural or manmade disasters, severe automobile accidents, or being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. "

Therefore, my hypothesis is that a lot of these teenagers that feel like they're going to die young also have backgrounds of abuse or a traumatic situation.

Therefore, what is the real problem here? A self-fufilling prophecy or why these teens feel this way?

I think a lot of the time (and this isn't research-based. Rather, this is just from my own experiences) people are a little off-mark when it comes to guessing what is wrong with someone and treating it. Often times, people only treat the symptom and not the disease. The more and more I read about abuse, the more this makes sense to me.

Why is it that we want to "protect the children" but we do not do more to protect them from abuse? Why can we not raise more awareness?

It is more common than people think, which is exactly why it shouldn't be a taboo subject.