#personal stories

-One thing I was surprised by was the pain, I have chronic pain and it's a similar type of pain to what I experience so maybe that why but, it doesn't hurt as much as I thought it would! And it's not just your shoulder, it's a whole arm experience, especially you hand. And it's kinda like a painful fuzzy feeling, almost numb but not quite. What I'm getting at is, it hurts, a lot. But for me it's not sheer and total agony like I thought it would be

-Another thing I was surprised by was I can totally still move my arm, and function more or less (one time when moving I looked at a house with a dislocated shoulder, the people showing the house had no idea.) sure it hurts a lot to move it but it is possible. And again when my shoulder is dislocated or subluxed my hand hurts so much and my fingers feel stiffer and harder to move, which makes sense I just didn't expect it

-Your body wants your shoulder back it place, it knows something is wrong, it's just not great at doing something about it. When my shoulder is dislocated I instinctively want to hold my arm close to my body. Another thing I get is wanting to shove my arm into a wall, or like lean down on my dislocated arm! This is because it's an effective way of trying to get it back, like I said your body doesn't want to have a dislocated shoulder! I want to see more Whumpee's who lean on and shove their dislocated arms into walls

- there's this anxiety that comes with a dislocated shoulder, but your brain is able to kind of block the anxiety while your shoulder is out. Which means once your shoulder is back in all the anxiety comes flooding with it. I want to see Whumpee's having a panic attack after their shoulder have been put back! The first time I dislocated my shoulder I was kinda chilling, it hurt a lot, but I imagine there was some adrenaline happening, but once it was back in I didn't know, and I had a panic attack, because holy shit i dislocated my shoulder do I need to go to the hospital

-^ speaking of, in my experience there is little instant relief after it being put back. It hurts just as much, and will probably hurt a lot for the next 24 hours at least. I will say it doesn't hurt as much for the next 24 ish hours, but you can definitely tell

-also brain fog! Makes sense but not someone you immediately think of. When I've had dislocated shoulders I'm barely able to think one sentence

-^other symptoms I guess, nausea, lightheadedness, and sometimes it's harder to breathe, cause of the pain. Imagine a whumpee who's not used do dislocations or chronic pain!

I work part time at a science museum in the cafe, and this particular museum is directed towards kids and families so we get tons of younger kiddos coming into the cafe every day. But one of my favorite things to do when a kid wants ice cream (or some other sweet treat) but its clear their parents or grandparents or whatever adult they're with doesn't want them to have sweets at 11 in the morning is to tell the kid "Nooo you don't want that, it's got Dinosaur Cooties on it". And I get one of two responses from this

One being "D: !!!!!!!" utter horror, "what do you MEAN dinosaur cooties exist??? I have to worry about THAT now???" and it is the funniest thing. Bonus points if the adult they're with plays along. Works best on younger kids, they're ALWAYS shocked that there's this New Cootie they have to worry about and suddenly the sweet treat is not at the forefront of their mind.

Response two being "No way >:(" to which I go "Yeah, you've seen Night at the Museum, right? The dinosaurs come to life every night! The big one in the lobby, her name is Rexie, she comes in here and *licks* all the ice cream, gets slobber *everywhere*, it's suuuuuper gross :(" That usually gets them LOL. Again bonus points if the adult plays along (most do, funnily enough!)

I've also had several kids come up to me throughout their meal and ask "Are you SURE there's dinosaur cooties on the ice cream???? D:" or something along those lines, and when I tell you I keep the bit going as long as I can.... It is so funny. I am nothing if not a man for the bit.

☀︎ My healing of the concept of 'home' ☀︎

With many of my gods, my integration of them into my life and practice was very gradual and studious. While certainly not unemotional by any means, there’s always been a degree of pragmatism to who I pursue, and when, and why. A relationship with Zeus built on wanting to honor his traditional household protector functions, a relationship with Hekate built on the desire to find a culturally cohesive outlet for a very confusing lifelong relationship with the departed. Even my relationships with Aphrodite and her retinue, the most expressive and ecstatic part of my practice, could be explained by the need to combat struggles with depression and pervasive anhedonia; to foster a light in the darkness.

Yet my relationship with Hestia was always limited to little more than acknowledgements at the beginnings and ends of my prayers and offerings. Respect for her status, sure, but nothing personal, nothing truly meaningful. She felt far away, closed off to me in a way I’ve never experienced with the other Theoi, save some of the Chthonoi.

This, too, I explained as nothing more than a side-effect of a pragmatic, situational problem. Is my world of landlord-white walls in rental apartments really a place one can find the goddess of home? Forget lacking a hearth, most of my places of residence have been without a gas stove, without a garden, without anywhere to put an outdoor altar. I convinced myself that this was a perfectly good reason to be distant from her. I think, on some level, I even rationalized it as almost disrespectful to invite her into such an environment meaningfully.

It was only in the Fall of last year that I found myself sitting on the floor in front of my altar, staring up at the handful of candles I had lit as they wavered against the unadorned wall behind them, that I realized I was making excuses. Because the problem was, at the end of the day, that not only had I not developed any sense of ‘home’, I was terrified that I might be incapable of it all together.

Looking back now I realize that, at that point, the very idea of my own house felt hostile to me purely on the grounds of its impermanence. It was a place to live, sure, it was safe, but it never felt mine. Nothing felt mine.

Suddenly I was made to recognize that all my life I had been aimlessly running nowhere in particular, always trying to just keep moving lest I be caught standing when the ground ‘inevitably’ dropped out from under my feet again. That I had taken the sense of transience, of almost dreamlike uncertainty that pervades my childhood memories, and balled it up and kept it inside me and spread it onto the very concept that I might belong somewhere. That I might have anything that wouldn’t be taken from me. Left all at once terrified that I would never really have a home, and terrified that I had become so accustomed to not having one that even if presented with the opportunity I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

For a moment then I considered that I might, just as pragmatic, begin to foster a relationship with Hestia for the sake of addressing this part of myself. I thought that I might approach her cautiously, read about her, pray to her more directly from time to time until I found some spark of her warmth blooming in me. The experience I got has felt far more like that of a child sobbing at the foot of a parent that they’d broken something and hidden it, only to be laughed at and held and told it was only an accident and that it was silly to be scared at all. The moment I was ready to accept her presence, her teachings, what she represents, she was here. I asked and she answered. As if no time had passed, as if nothing was lacking, as if my hesitance towards her had had no bearing on our relationship, on the kharis of it all. And so, as was always intended of me, I loved her immediately and madly.

In hindsight, it makes sense to me why historic writings on her are so (comparatively) scarce. Plenty has been said of the academic tendency to neglect household worship, but I think perhaps there’s much to it. A large part of HelPol is drawing the gods to you, begging and earning their attention. There’s a bridging that has to happen, the gradual laying of stones and crossing. But Hestia is near, always. In every house, in every kitchen, in every altar of every believer, whether we acknowledge her or not. Because that is her right, her place, and even our ignorance or fear does not have the power to remove her from the honor earned by her nature and granted by Zeus, her position as first and last and all-lauded.

The knowing of her is, in that way, a sort of inevitable thing. A thing that in the grand scheme of things takes comparatively very little external effort, and much more internal. And I think at one point in an era and culture of multi-generational homes, surrounded by community participation, oral tradition and technology and food production that centered heavily on the accessibility of fire, there would have been no need whatsoever to pursue Hestia. One might realize they have a vested interest in theater and pursue Dionysos or grow older and begin to build a relationship with Aphrodite. But Hestia would be there from birth, in every meal and every holiday and every tradition that raised you.

That, I think, is still her way, though the cultural context may be missing.

I feel of her, every time I speak to her, the same way I feel of Aphrodite when I stand at the edge of the ocean or set time aside for ritual to her. She is here, full and beautiful and present in a way that seems to press into my chest and make the air thick with her. Present in this way so frequently and with so little pursuit that the consistency itself feels like the outstretching of arms, the welcoming I didn’t expect to find. I light my candles to her, I sit and I pray and I ask her only to give me what would please her to, to inspire her virtue into me, to give me her patience and piety and generosity, and without fail I find a peace in it that seems somehow of a slightly different kind than what I’ve previously found through my religious experiences. I asked at first, often, that she show me how to ‘do this’. Show me how to make my house a home, show me how to be someone who can have one at all. I asked enough that I began to feel inspired to answer myself, each time, ‘I already am’, until I realized it was true and stopped asking.

My childhood heartaches did not magically vanish, neither did my resentment at not being allowed to paint my walls or have a garden. But however much those facts remain true and however much they might still pain me the power in them has been greatly diminished. Because what I found in her was a set of truths that I think lies in many of the religion’s fundamental virtues – that you can’t control what happens to you but you can control how much power you allow it to have, and that if you turn to the gods earnestly and rightly seek their help where they can give it, they will help you whether you feel like you deserve it or not.

As I finish writing this (my 5th attempt over the course of a couple of months to get these thoughts out of my head) I’m on the cusp of moving again. Rather than feeling counterproductive in my attempts to build a real home for myself, or even productive in the sense of having a fresh start, it feels completely and mercifully irrelevant.

Because really her aspects show us clearly what home is, even in the absence of family or permanence. It’s food, it’s warmth, it’s worship; ritual and routine and the place that you find yourself. It’s the breathing of spirit into the walls around you, putting smoke and music into the air, the love in making food for yourself that you enjoy, washing the windows to let the light come in.

It is, for those of my faith, the place where we host our gods as revered guests interminable. A bastion in the aeon sea, against chaos and meaninglessness, where we foster order and conviction for the sake of our own excellence.

And that can be anywhere, can be anything, can look any which way. Because she is here, always. Because she partakes of all that we give, always. Because she, in a way perhaps more uncomplicated and profound than most if not all of her perfect kin, loves humanity and the things of our make. And I am happy, now, to love her also.

When I was in high school, my Junior Year, during the Spring semester, someone called in a bomb threat to the school. This was pretty soon after one school shooting or another or maybe the OK City Bombing (the '90s, when they were less common and everyone was scared) and this was taken very seriously by school staff. The entire school was evacuated to a local park to wait out the rest of the day while everything was checked and the busses and parking lot were checked, so students couldn't even go home. We did have a nice day in the park, though.

Then, about a week or two later, there was another one. I remember one of these pretty clearly because my biology class was supposed to finish a frog-dissection and I already felt pretty horrible about the half-alive zombie-frog I had being kept fresh with wet paper towels in the biology-lab fridge (no matter how many assurances that we got that the frogs were lobotomized into insensateness, I was never sure and prayed that it really was unconscious...). Darn dead thing had to wait an entire weekend before being finished out in study. But, yeah, one of these threats interrupted a dissection-course for me and that's how I remember it.

And these things happened a few more times. And then it became a weekly event, day at random, Fridays most often, iirc.

It got to the point where we all knew that it was just someone playing felonious pranks and not getting caught, and probably people trying to get out of tests. Still, legally, everything had to be checked over by local police.

Teachers started holding classes in the park instead of just letting us hang out. As in, to deter the idea that one can get out of class by faking a voice and calling in a bomb threat. It's like "No vacation from class, we're just taking everything, including our tests, out to designated places in the park."

Like water off a duck's back, because everyone knew they were hoaxes and we just went with "life goes on" to our weekly bomb threat.

A few were called in the next year, in the Fall. We started meeting, then, in the football field's bleachers. Classes still gathered, although Art Class couldn't be done that way (interrupted Art for me one morning during Senior Year), but most classes could.

The point is - after a few of these events, these hoaxes, everyone just treated it as a boring thing, nothing to get excited about, just another hoax that we had to treat with protocol. Life went on as normal, with classes just held in a different place and they no longer distracted from that which their originators wanted to distract from: classes and tests. They were no longer heroes to the students, because everyone just got ANNOYED. No one was ever caught doing the threats, but we thought they were losers, whoever they were.

Anyway, I just thought about this because of certain political events that feel like a lot of stagecraft and crying wolf. People will just get tired of them, treat them as a matter of course, and fail to be distracted.