Inspiration's Everywhere

This is the calmest time of year for me, when I take a break from a couple of my responsibilities and commitments and try to find time to relax and breathe.  Usually this means that I try to find time to read.  I read all the time, but the material is often instructional or directed in a manner of trying to understand myself and the world around me.  So, trying to remember that all work and no play can make Vanci a very dull, or crazy, girl, this is the season that I try to read for pleasure.  I burned through a couple of novels pretty quickly, re-read a favorite fiction series, and realized too late as I stood in line at the library last weekend that I was out of reading material.

I happened to be standing by the 'new' non-fiction display, so grazed it quickly and picked up two books that caught my eye.  On a quick pick, I ended up with:
The Rise and Fall of the Bible by Timothy Beal
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell

Both books concern subjects that I am intensely interested in in roundabout ways.  The Bible as it concerns spirituality and my own particular brand of non-organized religion endorsed connection to a higher power and video games as I have a daughter who would live and breathe by the Playstation game clock if I let her.

I didn't expect to find any questions or answers to my struggle with the NFOO, estrangement, growth or recovery.  Lo and behold.

I read fast.  Crazy fast.  It's a gift I've always possessed and it's served me well.  Typically, I can finish a 700 page novel in my spare time - which is sparse - over the course of a couple of days.  I picked up The Rise and Fall of the Bible  first, and in three days I've managed to make it to page 5.  Five pages in three days.  This is somewhat below my standard reading pace!
I kept having to put it down, I realized, because it is a book that seeks to understand the factual beginnings of the Bible and how it is or came to be perceived as the direct Word of God.  And just that idea of pursuing the course of trying to understand the reality of the book, rather than blindly accepting what I was taught, constricted my chest and made the words blur on the page.  What was I taught?

The.  Bible.  Is.  God's.  HOLY WORD.  Period.  NO questions are allowed, NO discussion is allowed, and in fact, anyone who even remotely thinks about daring to wonder if there might be the possibility of room for even the smallest seed of doubt as to this is going to die a painful death before being sent to the depths of hell to suffer for eternity.  The absolute crazymaking facts that this is what I was force-fed on a spiritual front while being abused on verbal, mental, emotional, physical and sexual bases by the Nparent espousees of such judgmental clop-trop is a sore subject indeed, but not truly my point in this post.  Free thinking, suffice it to say, was not encouraged.

Now, I consider myself to be an open minded, free thinking intellectual woman.  But still, those ingrained patterns of fear and retribution for putting even a toe outside of the controlled environment of the N's religious zealotry, no matter how short lived that phase was for them, is surprisingly strong.  I'm not too wounded by it, but I'm grateful that I was able to acknowledge the existence of the feeling.  Now I can begin the work to acknowledge it and change my patterns.  And I will read every word of the damned book, too, eventually.  The fascinating part is that I don't even know what the book is about at this point, but I do know that my fear reaction is very, very real!

I picked up Extra Lives... once I realized that the Bible book wasn't going to be an easy, pleasurable read due to my frantic emotional reaction, and it's been wholeheartedly enjoyable.  It's a great commentary on how video games are made, what drives the design and marketing and why we see video games as such a large waste of time... but continue to spend oodles and oodles of time and money playing them.  The author spends a lot of time in comparison of video games as a form of entertainment to other forms of entertainment, and on page 39 he says this:

"When I am being entertained, I am also being manipulated.  I am allowing myself to be manipulated.  I am, in other words, surrendering... When I watch a film, the most imperial form of popular entertainment - particularly when experienced in a proper movie theater - I am surrendering most humiliatingly, for the film begins at a time I cannot control, has nothing to sell me that I have not already purchased, and goes on whether I happen to be in my seat.  When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent."

He goes on into a detailed analysis of how these mediums compare to each other and others; video games, television, etc.  But what struck me about this passage are the parallels to my upbringing.  Both these descriptions of 'entertainment' are really descriptions of what it is to be held prisoner to something, or someone.

It strikes me as an apt metaphor that my early childhood was a film.  I was placed in the seat and had no control over any of the externals; the N's directed the course of the screening and I was helpless to do anything by try to keep up and follow the story.  I was, in effect, incidental.
It seems, then, that my late adolescence and early adulthood was more akin to the novel.  I willingly allowed my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent.


Eventually, I made a break from the colony, and I think that I was able to do this once I realized the colonizer(s) intent; malicious, evil, abusive and terrible manipulation and control of me.  I like the concept that the Narcs are colonizers because it seems to me that their true intention is to completely and wholly take over the world (of Vanci anyway.)

They've always been that way, you know, it's always been their goal.  I think what changed is that me, myself and I made a break from the authoritative colony's rule.

Long fucking live the revolution!

Love,
Vanci