Music, please!

This page used to host the exclusive video from this site: http://www.out.com/entertainment/music/2012/04/20/out-exclusive-adam-cohen-live-our-studio, but it disappeared, so I'm turning to the official video: 

Let's Fall in... The "Decent Human Being" Category

I just caught this about some uncontacted Awà: Let's help them.

That Unmentionable Summer Event This Year

a.k.a: *MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*

a.k.a: We are not amused.

We were first made aware of the issue on Twitter, and then on telly (Cf: Have I Got News for You?), and we find the limitations on what can be typed, shared and shown about the Olympic Games utterly barmy (and quite frankly on the verge of bullying).

Believe us, we do understand the importance of copyrights and trademarks and protections, but when someone - and someone who pretends that they want everybody to enjoy the whole thing and participate! - forbids things that were allowed until now, we're sorry, but we think this smells like bullying at its worse.

Back in 2008, when the Olympic flame was carried through Paris, we found ourself almost stuck on a bridge on our way to work because the Chinese Security bullies were bossing everyone around.

By the way, we still haven't recovered from the fact that the flame was extinguished several times while there.

And to accompany this video, we recommend this page:  http://montagne-protection.org/ariege-pyrenees_0000c9.html

Well, after we managed to cross our bridge, we saw a great banner, and we're very happy to have taken a picture of it:

Today, we made this - because we're really not amused:

First Play...

... written. Finished. Completed. Done.
The last scene was hell to write, and the characters had to be wrestled on stage.

I'll edit it (will need a spot of time) and I'll format it in a nice treatre-y way.
Then, I'll show you the first page...

The Black Hole That's Eating My Soul

It’s astounding how one can resist the pull of the Void (yea, capital v, of course).

In a long list of odd incidents, there are two major slaps that I’ll never forget.

To make things short, let’s say that the ending of my teen years wasn’t exactly nice, and one day I stole sleeping pills. Unfortunately, I had no clue about the appropriate dosage to not wake up again, and after long hours, I woke up to find a relative surprised to see me in bed in late afternoon. I was hiding the pills’ bottle under the cover, which must have looked somewhat suspicious, and my relative investigated. When she saw the bottle, she only said that I ‘should take some if it can make me nicer and less grumpy’. That was around the time when a neighbour (someone I hardly knew) caught me as I’d planned to run away; she invited me to her home, made me talk and convinced me that leaving wasn’t the answer.

My first missed attempt at silencing the Void still feels bitter because it taught me that my feelings are an embarrassment to the bipeds who are DNA-related to me, and as long as I’m silent, they don’t care if I’m fine or not.

The second slap is more recent, and due to complete strangers. One night, as one of my jobs was turning my life into a living hell, and my life at home was awful, and my health was in really bad shape, and I’d just lost two people who’d lost their fight against the Void, I took to surfing the Internet, looking for either the recipe for cyanide or a reason to go on. Believe it or not, but chemistry recipes are somewhat hard to find, and so I clicked a link to a so-called helpline.

Mind you, it worked but because the first thing on their webpage (I can’t remember which group it was) was basically saying something like “Thinking of suicide? Well, stop and think of the people you’d leave behind”. It was in the middle of the night, but I wanted to yell at the screen that I didn’t give a damn about the “people I’d leave behind” because it was about me. I wanted to stop being invisible, ignored and drowning in the Void.

When you’re thinking about putting an end to the pain, what you’d like to hear is something like “Talk to me, I’m ready to listen to you” (like that kind neighbour who probably saved me the day she stopped me in the street). Back then, I honestly didn’t give a fig about the rest of the world.

I was in so much pain that I wanted it to end. It felt like standing on the edge of a steep cliff with something as heavy as a planet crushing my back.

I live with the Void.

I have ups and downs.

I’ve tried chemical treatment (that makes life dull and worthless).

Therapy doesn’t work for me – at all.

I’m trying plants, and my writing is my therapy.

I know that I can snap and surrender to the Void; that’s somehow a form of sword of Damocles for me (I know it’s there, and I live with it). It’s having your feet already in a quicksand, knowing it, and hoping that the blades of grass that you’re holding in your hands aren’t going to break and make you sink into the cold sand.

By the way, a few recent events have made me realize that, except if I kick the bucket before my mother (and provided that she does bother to send the police over to my place to check on me), it’s probably the smell of decomp that’s going to tell my neighbours that there’s something wrong with me (though I wouldn’t be surprised to end up mummified – no, wait! The owner of the building would react within three months of my failing to pay the rent, that’s not long enough to be mummified).

It’s astounding how lonely one can be on a rock with seven billion people. I’m not even talking about actual human contact; the Internet has become so normal that disappearing from it with no warning generates, in most cases, silence.

In Maurice, E. M. Forster wrote “understanding nothing except that man has been created to feel pain and loneliness without help from heaven”.

I’ll go a step farther. In some cases, one can be dreadfully alone among people and then the toll of that emptiness in the heart and soul can drive anyone to wish to put an end to the pain.

If you know the Void, you know what I’m talking about.

If you’ve never been there, count your blessings.

The Void is like anti-matter for what makes one human. And it hurts so much.

It’s no wonder some people turn the light off

Is It Possible to Leave "Stockholm"?

I’m not talking about the actual city.

It’s not even going to be about actual abduction, or even battered-person syndrome… I want to talk about emotional manipulation and what happens when you’re the prey of a manipulator.

I was planning to write a text that’d be neutral, exposing the mechanism of manipulation, giving examples, and then I’d explain why I was writing about that particular topic, but I think you’ll read more closely if I say from the beginning that I can talk about it because it happened to me.

It’s so incredibly easy to fall into the trap of a manipulator. It’s so devastating, and you’re so incredibly lonely.

Allow me to make another confession: I’ve been planning to write this since I started this blog, in mid-November last year, but what’s making me finally write this is that my own mother, who’s in constant denial about anything that happens to me that doesn’t fit her view of who I should be according to her, has just disparaged people (women) who stay in abusive relationships and called them wimps.

I’m not a wimp, but I was emotionally abused for eight years.

And do you know what’s the cherry on the icing on the cake? He was so cunning that I have no proof and no witness of what he did to me. He always played with me whilst we were just the two of us.

I’m not stupid – though, in my defence, I’ll say that I’d been warned against physical violence, but until I met that bloke, I didn’t even know that you can torture someone psychologically.

Everything happened in the blink of an eye, and I found myself down inside an emotional pit so deep that I no longer could see the light.

I met him at a very critical moment in my life, and I never spotted the trap. Mind you, it took me a bit of time to notice once I was in it.

I guess I just want to say that it can happen to anyone, from any kind of background. It’s like having a knife in your heart – and I’m afraid this is a very apt image, because you know that you could die if you take the knife off your chest, even if there’s a gifted surgeon nearby to help you. When you’re abused, you need to get away from your abuser, but it’s not always as easy as people who’ve never experienced that usually think it is.

I had one friend who told me to run for my life the week I met him, but it was already too late and he’d found a way through all my defences and I was already completely in his power. He found all my buttons, and it didn’t take him a full day to turn me into his pet.

Apparently, Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological state that makes a hostage feel some sort of empathy for a captor.

In fact, some people link this phenomenon to something called “Capture-Bonding”; in pre-historic times, members of other clans (usually females) were abducted, and basically, rebellion meant death for them.

I’m not going to dig deeper into the psychological studies, but there might be something deep down in our brains that, when activated, brings us back to something that’s rooted into our deepest nature. Some kind of pre-historic Pavlovian-like twist that might explain why abusers can get away with torture.

My abuser was very gifted, and he always made sure to not push me too far in order to keep me under control. His usual pattern involved his criticizing me for the smallest, slightest, most insignificant things (I remember a day when he belittled me for not being strong enough to break a nut and asking for help because I didn’t want to crush it and make a mess in the kitchen), and then he’d feed me crumbs of pseudo-affection (it could be anything from being nice and kind in public to giving me a quick hug in private) to make sure I’d stay addicted to him, and under his spell – though curse would be more appropriate.

I learnt to live on emotional crumbs.

For months after he left because he’d found a newer pawn, I kept feeling guilty.

I’m not an idiot.

In spite of what my own mother thinks, I’m not a wimp.

I was unfortunate enough, in a moment of doubt and questioning, to meet someone who was utterly twisted, and who managed to turn me into a “mouse” for his inner sadistic “cat”.

For months, I guiltily wondered why I, and I quote myself, ‘let him do that to me’.

I started truly recovering from the abuse the day I thought: ‘He had no right to do that to me. It wasn’t my fault’.

Do you know what I wanted when he clawed my heart and soul with his pettiness? I was madly (perhaps Bedlamly would work better here) in love with him, and I would have jumped off a cliff if he’d said that that would make him love me back.

Victims of abuse are not wimps.

They’re not asking for it.

They’re all people who, because of their pasts or/and their current histories find themselves face to face with a monster who slithers like a parasite to their very core and threatens their souls.

Bit extreme?

If you think so, I’m going to make the bet that you’ve never been abused, which is very good for you, but if you’re a survivor and you escaped from the hungry clutches of your tormentor, you know that abuse is akin to torture.

My abuser never laid a finger on me, but I still have bruises on my heart. Years later, there are things that I still cannot do, and my level of trust is quite low (then again, when my own mother thinks that I was free to walk out and start a new life two minutes after leaving my abuser, you’ll excuse me for being cautious and still a bit wary with people).

I know that some people are probably going to blame me for being a wimp, an idiot and a silly girl who wasn’t strong enough to walk out, but I know that it can really happen to anyone with a heart and a soul.

Abuse is a question of circumstances. If you meet the one who can plunge an emotional blade into your heart, you won’t be able to escape.

Since it can happen to anyone, blaming the victims is quite despicable. Recently, I started wondering if it meant that the ones doing the blaming were afraid that they wouldn’t survive to such an ordeal – or if they just enjoyed piling up some more abuse on the victims. I’m afraid both are really equally possible and plausible.

To conclude, we may have wi-fi and shiny gadgets, but our brains are sometimes stuck in dark caves… oh, and stop blaming the victims and stand by them if you want to deserve being called “human”. Ta!