Mission Statement :: The World's Longest Open Love Letter

If you're curious about what I'm up to, I've constructed a collection of posts that together constitute a Mission Statement HERE.

The current Mission Statement link will always be found as a 'Category' on the sidebar.

WORKFLOW: This 'documentary' - each frame another page of "The World's Longest Open Love Letter" - will be constructed piece-by-standalone-piece with a backwards time line dictated by the blog-form in which its public process lives. Read it last post first.

CONCEPT: I put 'documentary' in quotes because this project takes documentary-making into the digital age, using Web 3.0 digital tools for sharing, growing, healing, researching, community, communicating, and conversating. A grassroots-based documentary that grows up a beautiful flower and life-giving fruit or vegetable from the manure of violence.

SCOPE: Even though I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse - and its own kind of violence - there are tons of survivors of craploads of categories of abuse. I needn't name them all here. The common thread is this:

PREMISE: All survivors of violence have strategies for doing it - surviving - well.

Those strategies are what I'm most interested in talking about.

So that's where I propose to begin.

STATUS REPORT: As of today's date I've pre-interviewed four individuals. Those four point me to three more. Momentum gathers. Conception has happened, 1 has been iadded to 1 and that equals = 2 and those two subdivide, and subdivide again. The project has a life of its own.

CASTING IS EVERYTHING: Two men are survivors of s*xual and emotional violence. Three women are in grassroots social services, and one is the loving aunt of a 13-year-old girl m*lested by an officer of the law who sat faithfully through the trial and conviction of said officer. Brava.

We need some mental health professionals on board, too. Calling mental health professionals, yo. :)

So much courage.

So much collective wisdom.

Difficult as it is to say: I need you. We need each other.

We need to hear each other speak truths. Even the unspeakable truths.

We need to hear from state-of-the-art professionals the how, where and who of current work to dig this thing up from the root. The root includes looking at p*rps.

In the words of the amazing Ann Emmerling who's agreed to help where she's able:

"The Blackburn Center is a resource for understanding, but more than that, an instrument for the social transformation of patriarchy."

Ann Emmerling
Executive Director
Blackburn Center Against Domestic & Sexual Violence
P.O. Box 398

Greensburg, PA 15601
724-837-9540, x 115

Another Premise: survivors can influence future treatment modalities for the better.

To ask for help is as foreign to me as the idea of how radically quantum mechanics research may change our worldview in 5 years.

To live well is to win.


Tags: Self-Help Art Depression

Making the WLOLL Documentary a 'Safe Place' for Survivors

.:. Survivor .:.

WARNING: a couple of cuss words in here, and potentially squicky mention of p*rps.

I left the A.S.A.R. newsgroup because of s*x-related spam squicking me. it's ugly.

Tom. Whatta guy.

Appreciate Tom's insightful pointing out where I went a bit off message in an earlier invitation for survivors to participate.

His point: the invitation says something provocative if not incendiary to the survivor.

Yeah. Incendiary would be the correct word.

In the video I ask whether or not it would be appropriate to include interviews with p*d*ph*l*s in The World's Longest Open Love Letter.

For me, the answer is, "Yes." Convince me otherwise.

Yes because loving evil kills it.

My mis-step was in not warning survivors in advance of the content.

In survivor circles, words like perpetrator are couched in typographical euphemism thus:

p*rp
s*x
p**n

Furthermore, textual forays into difficult subjects are respectfully announced in subject lines, often in caps and surrounded by exclamation points.

Consciousness practice. To be ultra-conscious of others' feelings. A big first step in healing when you are yourself unable to feel.

Behavior Modification through the moral imperative of Political Correctness changes minds.

So, thank you, Tom, for your valuable reminders about survivor protocols.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: depression, strategies, childhood, sexual, abuse, survivor, documentary, grassroots, anger, rage, art, emotion, wloll

A Kind of Introduction RE: a Documentary on Surviving

Click To Play

Sorry for laughing as I say the words. Humor can cover up a lot of discomfort, can't it? :)

First responses to the invitation to participate in the documentary about strategies for surviving childhood sexual abuse begin to come in. Actually the responses came right away. Getting to actually speak with folks takes a little longer.

Survivors often have big-time trust issues. It seems trust things stretch to both ends of the spectrum. Some, like me, trust too much at first blush. Others never seem to trust, not without a lot of time and work. Even then it's fragile. but always when it gets to the nitty gritty of adult human relationships, survivors require a great lot of patience as they grow to trust anybody enough to let them 'in'.

It's the fragility that often makes me shake my head with frustration.

Anyway, spoke at length by phone with Tom, creator of A Sanctuary website for survivors. He's given me permission to use his first name and link to the website, a safe place where folks may find a lot of basic information on what this phenomenon looks like whether you're a survivor, suspect abuse, or just love one.

He offered valuable feedback to the WLOLL project which I've taken to heart. It's my hope that in due course he and I will come to a place where we feel comfortable enough to record an audio and/or video interview.

I don't honestly know what this documentary will turn out to be. It depends on the people who step up to speak, and what is most important to them on the day we speak as they make their ways along their healing paths.

Farther into the video, I speak to my qualifications for doing this thing if you wonder how / why / whether it might be done.


Tags: Self-Help Art Depression

An Invitation to Participate :: Documentary on Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse

.:. Survivor .:.

POST NOTE:

WARNING - mention of p*rps in the video.

Even to type the words 'Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse' in the title makes my stomach and brain go all fuzzy.

To make a documentary on the subject is the best way I can think of to confront the anxiety and fear. The best way to give back to the community of survivors.

Ow. Ow. Ow.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

Tags: documentary, childhood, sexual, abuse, invitation, participate

Documenting Depression :: CAUTION :: ONE S*XUAL IMAGE

Click to Play

CAUTION: about a minute in there's a kinda s*xual image. You might want to close your eyes if you're feeling raw.

I can usually pump out videos pretty darned quick. This one took a long time. It's not perfect. It feels dangerous.

Based on previous experience, seeing how whiney and pathetic I am when in the throes of depression will eventually help me understand its mechanics better.

I have a long-term documentary video project that I'm hoping this web site and the community that grows around it will help me finish. It's called "The World's Longest Open Love Letter" and was in its earliest states, a series of meditations on anger, then love, and now, on action.

Creating the "Anger" painting below opened me up to the possibility that art could help me heal.

Subscribers and visitors to this site as witnesses to the process of healing. Witnesses healed and grown by virtue of the gift of granting forgiveness to the innocent.

Lots of books, plays & films have been released in the last few years on the subject of the sexual exploitation of children by adults. I've already collected them and will share links to all of them here.

My "World's Longest Open Love Letter" project will be a day late and ten cents short, but the point is to make it. The point is the process of making it.

Wish me luck.

Quicktime Download

Strategies for Surviving Depression :: Mission Statement

Depression is no longer my enemy, though it certainly used to be.

I decided a few years back that depression and I were in fact very old friends.

The plan is to share here how depression was transformed from enemy to friend; to create a community around aharing our respective strategies for making it work for us rather than against us.

Oddly, I'm not comfortable attaching my profile and real name to this blog just yet. I'm afraid. Afraid of the consequences of coming out of the depression closet. It's my hope to one day 'come out' without fear. Perhaps this site will help in that endeavor.