Interior Triologue

Little Susie:

I'm not feeling so great.  And it's hot.  Can we watch a movie?


Capable Susie:

Sure!  Movies are like luxurious in the middle of the day.  Okay.  Well, let's set up the TV so we can watch a movie through the laptop.


Learned Helplessness Susie:

Oh, but I don't know how to do that.  What do I do?  I'm too hungry to do this.  I need food, but I'm feeling too fatigued right now to make any.  I can't think straight.  What is food.  What can we eat?  I needed to go supermarket shopping three days ago.  And it's so hot!


Capable Susie:

Okay.  Well, let's eat this banana then for the moment, shall we?  And then we can think about this.


All three Susies eat one large banana.


Learned Helplessness Susie:

I don't know what to do.  What do we need to do?  There's all these cords.  It's so confusing!


Capable Susie:

Well, let's work this out methodically.


Learned Helplessness Susie:

But I don't knwo what to do!  Maybe we should wait till Anth comes home and then he can do it.


Capable Susie:

Why?  We are perfectly capable of doing it ourselves.  Anth has been at work, on a Saturday, in the heat.  Do you really reckon he wants to come home and do something you're quite capable of doing?


Learned Helplessness Susie/Little Susie:

But something bad might happen if people with vaginas act like it's not 1952!  We might break something!  Anth might yell at us for meddling in his cables!


Capable Susie:

Well, we live here too, don't we?  When was the last time he yelled at you for meddling?  That's right - never.


Learned Helplessness Susie/Little Susie:

Yeah, but even if he just gets annoyed, that's bad!  That means something bad is going to happen!  That means maybe we don't exist!  We can't deal with a person with a penis getting annoyed at us.

And anyway, we don't know what to dooooooo!


Capable Susie:

Well, imagine if Anth wasn't here.  Imagine if you were all by yourself in the world and you had to sort it out.  What would you do?  That's right, you'd look it up online and get someone else to tell you what to do!

And so we did, and so the S-video cable that we were already familiar with but had forgotten because sievememory was connected, and Little Susie and Learned Helplessness Susie did manage to find their way around hooking it all up and yea, it wasn't even that bloody hard, for crying out loud.  And though there was still an issue after that, that's not the point.  I would have been able to continue ironing out the issues but by this stage I was so bored with the whole bloody thing that I quit.  Voluntarily.

See, this is how women collapsing in the face of men's apparent greater knowledge threads down through the ages, way past the time when it's not actually scary for women to take charge in their own minds.  Or if not gender stuff, insert class stuff, or culture stuff, or whatever group of humans is disaffected by another so that it inserts itself into their limbic system, where it can stealth virus you undetected.

The first step is acknowledging those fears are there.  The second is accommodating them kindly.  They didn't show up just for the fun of it.  Healing needs a gentle place to land, and children need patient adults to guide them.  Even if those children and those adults happen to share the same body :)