Mermaid Writing for William Mistele Kate LoMedico Marriott, On Being a Mermaid. For William Mistele: Mermaid Women First Nature. One of my earliest memories is being a cheese-ball-eating toddler on the beach in 1992 Westerly, Rhode Island. We lived about an hour, maybe ninety minutes up I-95 from it, and I remember going there every time my mother could take us. My whole family liked it there, it was before tourism from Newport overflowed into Westerly, Misquamicut, and, dare I say, Watch Hill, so the beaches were still relatively virginal and desolate. It was a time when a piece of garbage was a rare find on that shoreline I reference as my hometown, but a fully intact whelk shell or sun dried starfish was not. This slowly reversed between the time I was born and the time I was twenty, but it’s still my favorite place on Earth. I’d flip through my father’s copy of “McClane’s Field Guide to Saltwater Fishes of North America” on the way, and get there and just come alive. And I could walk you out to the exact ten-foot stretch of sand where I stood, a baby in a floppy white beach hat, learning, for the first time in my life, that this was not just my favorite place to jump in the car and visit with my parents, but it was who I was. It was exactly me. I remember an overcast sunset on the beach; my mother and father were packing up the chairs and coolers to leave, and my sister didn’t want to come out into the breaker with me. (Given how carefully sheltered I was, it’s incredible to me that I even had moments where I could go out into the waves alone). For some reason I had an instinct to learn not to fall over in the waves, to master them, make them a part of my scope. And I was doing just that, and someone said: “This is where you belong. You are mine. Life will get hard, but only if you forget that you are one of my mermaids. You are here to fight for the oceans. We need you to do this.” The voice was not accompanied by a physical body, but an image in my mind of a woman speaking. She was African looking and draped in turquoise. She had a maternal energy about her and she told me she was the ocean. I carried the message through my entire childhood and adolescence, but it would be almost two decades before learned of and put two and two together with the Yoruba figure of Yemaja. And, as someone who had only just begun to read, I really had no way of knowing that the oceans were in any way in trouble. I had yet to learn of overfishing, plastic pollution or my life’s current fixation, acidification. I was not yet aware that my birth was almost exactly thirteen years after the discovery of hydrothermal vents. All I knew was that I loved the sea more than anything, and that the sea both included and needed me in a way that did not easily relate me to other people. I’m in school studying to be an oceanographer right now, and I think it may be important to relate my scientific familiarity with the sea to my personal ocean relationship: for me, I always knew I was a part of the ocean, it spelled that out to me directly, and I felt wholly me in it. I didn’t need to be made aware of all the life the sea contains, but I am on a mission to prevent suffering to animals great and small, including the alleviation of the suffering brought to humanity as a result of the state of the ocean. While environmental/marine geochemistry could be called a “hard major”, my motives are not nearly as intellectual or activist as they are an act of profound love, and loath to see the suffering of both my piscine and human brothers and sisters. I’m from New England, I’ve only been to the Pacific once, and it did not feel quite the same, although I felt Yemaja on Oahu, especially, as well. The oceans are all different, yet, simultaneously, all the same. The world ocean is multifaceted, just like humans and other beings. My strongest resonance is with the Atlantic, especially the North Atlantic, where I hail from. I like to look at satellite images of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge: they look like a spine to me: not just the texture, but the curvature, the shape and length, and how they go right down the middle of the tectonic ocean plate. The Atlantic feels more like someone I know than most people I am close to, and, for me, science only makes me more of a believer in its mysticism and my mission to save it, for some reason, never less. As a child, my ideas, thoughts and feelings always left me the oddball out. I was very artistic and, though, I was often praised for that, it was even more frequently that I found myself completely misunderstood by teachers and students alike. I would always reassure myself: “It’s okay. I’m a mermaid.” Somehow being a mermaid justified being vastly different from non-mer people. It meant that I was essentially in a foreign land, and that the culture shock was not my fault, but something mutual. In college I became involved with queer and feminist groups on campus. They were run and attended by nearly all my friends, and the message of love and acceptance extending to oneself was one I needed as a person who just never fit in. I think those meetings were the first time in my life that I actually felt valid in the face of other people: the idea of self-identification resonates with me especially because I had been self-identifying my entire life, and my friends and classmates made it even more comfortable to do that. The Feeling of Home. The last time I went to that beach, I felt a little bit sad. Usually going there gives me heart palps from joy, but this time I was just really missing someone who died a few years ago. I miss him all the time, but in this moment it seemed so cruel to me that he could not be there with me, that we weren’t swimming together. But Yemaja is always there to put things into perspective, especially when you’re in the sea. “Kate, Poseidon is always with you. You loved him, but he loves you, too.” I had recently realized I didn’t know how to define love, and I wanted to know what she meant. “Love is the feeling of home.” Love is the feeling of home. That was simple. That made sense. Love is oneness, it is a feeling of part of you being part of someone else, and part of them becoming a part of you. It doesn’t have an agenda, it gives and it offers unity, compassion, understanding, and validity. I had loved so many times without being loved in return that I forgot that, but it’s really so simple. When it feels like home, it’s love. I think that’s important. I think it breaks down the boundaries that human beings seem to rank in necessity somewhere near breathing. I never saw faeries like a lot of elementals do growing up. I just had this internal connection with Yemaja; she would tell me every time I was near water that I belonged to her, and that, no matter what, I had a job to do. If you saw my room, you might actually guess that I’m a mermaid. It’s covered in shells that range from microscopy to larger than your head, starfish and coral. I’ve collected thousands of sea things over the years, and I use them as inspiration for art, reference material for science or academia, and to channel ocean energy into my life. Sometimes it feels like my bedroom has an aura all its own. The flag of Rhode Island, an anchor emblazoned with the word, “HOPE”, hangs over my pillow. The walls and floor are almost completely plastered by my art of sea creatures, handmade swimmable mermaid tails, mandolins, ukuleles. Most of my many books have blue covers because they’re about ocean science, maritime history, and sea spirituality. I have relatively few close friends, and they’re all fairly watery. Some I believe are also mermaids. Others have watery astrological influences or auras. Some just really love the sea. We all relate on a level that we just can’t with other people. Still, I’m on my own a little, between my sort of psychic experiences, and just in that I think I take my mermaidness to another level. Strangers come up to me and tell me I look like a mermaid; my aura seems to be analogous with the feeling of Westerly in the 90s: that feeling has been consistently me since day one. It defines my entire life, and I feel a different vibration cover my native aura whenever I interact with other people, even water people. I also keep a ton of fish as pets, I just really need to be around fish to not feel lonely or used up. All other animals are wonderful, and there isn’t an animal I don’t love, but for me, fish are family, and having a shoal of my own to return to every day is vital to my well being. I very often feel that if I went to Hogwarts, the source of my Patronus would be a memory of the Rhode Island shoreline, when it could at least as easily be looking into the round and abundantly expressive eyes of a fish. “Fish make me happy” is an understatement. Currently I have a half dozen bettas, in individual tanks and bowls depending on their needs, and four adopted silver feeder minnows. I am in the process of setting up saltwater aquaria as well, one for lookdowns and one for live cnidaria. I know all of my fish and they all know me. Some of them know their name, play games with me, and I know all of their individual likes and requirements. I even know most of their sun signs. They are my friends. They make me feel at home. Taking care of them is happier for me than my greatest ambitions in life, and there is no one more reliable when you’re down and out than a fish, who will just swim up to you and stay with you until it’s over. It wasn’t always this way. I used to be a one-fish kind of girl during my freshman year of college. And Enter the Earth-Shaker. When I was eighteen, I fantasized about having a very close relationship with an animal named Poseidon, and when I moved into my dorm room, I felt like something was missing. I had plenty of ocean stuff to bring in the right energies for my college career, but I didn’t have an actual fish. My roommate had one, and I could talk to him in the rare moment I had the room to myself, but I felt like I really needed one. What I did have was a sheltered, introverted world view, my virginity, and an insane roommate who insisted that her thirty-something boyfriend be allowed to sleep over two days into living together. She screamed at me nonstop that it was unfair and unreasonable that a strange older man couldn’t sleep over until I finally found a new place to live a month into the semester. On Thursday, October 3rd, 2009, I was starting to lose it from not having a private place to go without being verbally attacked by my roommate. The girls three doors down were having similar disagreements, and one of them was my friend, the other was my roommate’s friend, who was comfortable with the older boyfriend. Switching was a perfect solution, but it took a lot to arrive at it. I was walking around the campus bookstore just trying to clear my head, and a couple of girls walked in. The girl in the middle was beaming down at a tiny glass bowl with a baby betta fish in it. They were talking about it excitedly, so I approached them. “We got him from the guy out by the science buildings. He’s got a bunch of them, they’re five dollars cash.” I’m not one to use animals as an impromptu pick-me-up, but I made a beeline for the science buildings. There were always white tents set up between the buildings, and several old hippies would make the rounds, selling their wares a few times each semester. A long tent was positioned outside the Social Sciences façade, and an older hippie-dippie man was running a sale of tropical plants. This has to be it, I thought to myself. Under that tent, I felt like I was no longer in Westchester, NY, but somewhere I didn’t have homework and crazy roommate issues. Amidst the hibiscus and bonsais I considered getting a plant instead, but I made my way to the back of the tent; there were betta fish in little glass bowls, stacked four-five bowls high. There must have been a few hundred of them, all very young, and every color of the rainbow. There was even a brown one grouped in with the reds. The red ones were vibrant, and the blue ones on the other end were very animated and virile. A purple one blew my doors off. The little brown one just clung to its neon rainbow gravel bowl bottom, and I felt a little bad for it. My eyes darted to two screaming red fish fighting through the glass, but the blue ones were beyond stunning . I walked back and forth between the reds and blues so many times I lost count--but something kept calling me back to the little unhealthy looking one, some energy or inner voice kept saying, “This is it. He’s it”--not for the day, not for the school year--for life. I walked to the opposite end of the bowls, to the blue ones, one more time--and an influx of other students stampeded in. A single thought paralyzed me: no one but me would be leaving with that little brown fish. Every fiber of my being said that we must never be separated again. My heart leapt into my chest as about a half dozen hipsters encircled the end of the fish display with the reds--and the brown one. I shoved through them, as nothing was ever so important. Poseidon was still there. I grabbed him as fast as I could, my entire coronary system exploding, and, still in defense mode, rushed to the vendor. “Fresh off the plane from Thailand,” the man said. “Have you named him yet?” “No,” I lied. I was doubting the name Poseidon a little. “Here’s a bag of food. Don’t feed him too much but make sure you’re feeding him enough, every day. And don’t put him in direct sunlight or you’ll get an algae problem.” “I know,” I said, amazed for lack of ever having met a human being so vehement about the rights of a pet fish. The guy lectured me for a few more minutes, detailing very specific instructions for how to care for Poseidon. Either this is the most special fish ever and he’s magic, I thought, or this guy is ‘special’! I didn’t have very much money, but so great was my relief that I had overcome my superficial stupidity and was securely reunited with this inexplicably important little creature that I probably would have paid the guy whatever he could have possibly asked. Poseidon only cost five dollars, and the bowl he was in cost another five--I would grab a bigger fish bowl the next time I went home, but for now this one was fine--we were together, and somehow that was the only thing that mattered. I got him back to the room, and I had never been so excited about a fish in my entire life. I couldn’t explain it, and I think I was almost afraid; the feeling was so sensationally that he was so much more than a creature of this world. The month of October flew by and Poseidon’s dull brown color, which proved to be jetlag, disappeared beneath a rich purpley crimson. When he was in an especially chipper mood, there were spots and stripes of iridescent lavender. And, over time, his bright fins grew longer and more cascadey than those of any betta I had ever seen. From an aesthetic point of view, I realized I had made a sound investment. When I first had him, it only felt like a reunion, like meeting up with your sister at the mall. It felt like a part of me always knew we were on to meet up. It felt like I had been waiting forever, and, finally, he was here. I couldn’t explain to myself or to anyone else why or how much I loved him. And I couldn’t wait to introduce him to everyone else I knew. Poseidon and I had a better understanding of one another’s body language and emotional vibes than you would ever attribute to a fish-person relationship. I often felt like my mood rubbed off on him, and his on me. I would play my ukulele right near his bowl so he’d feel the repetitive vibrations. He’d swim right up and dance, he really loved it. Other times, I would cry, and he would swim up to the glass, not asking for food, and just hover by my head, the pet fish way of holding you when you’re falling apart. We slept with our faces close to the glass boundary between us, and we’d wake up with our faces together. I had always been something of a loner, and even my closest relationships have probably been very distant by the standards of other people, but the level of unity between Poseidon and me was something that was always on, never off, even when we weren’t together. And it always will be. Poseidon was also very opinionated about everyone I knew. Some people he liked, others, he did not. It was strange because the people he didn’t like were actually very bad for me. I had two boyfriends at that school, and the first one was for only a few months of freshman year. Poseidon hated him. When the guy would leave for the night, I’d look over, and Poseidon would look half-dead, pale, and very sluggish. It makes sense in hindsight because the guy almost always did something really terrible, often sexually coercing me, humiliating and making fun of me, and telling me I’m not good enough, boring for being introvert, or crazy and wrong if I dared disagree with him over anything. Sometimes Posi would float on his side. And sometimes I would cry, and Poseidon would practically hold my hand. He loved my roommate Emily. Despite my inexplicable excitement and relief to finally have Poseidon in my life, Emily was the first one who really actually got just how special he was. She talked to him, and it was from her that he learned his name (If you stand over the tank and say their name in a loving, almost singsongy voice that makes a very slight ripple, the fish will learn that vibration as their name and come to you). This was before I started playing music for him, so I thought she was a little nuts, but after a while I went with it. I was shocked, and suddenly I realized that Poseidon had been trying to be my friend for a few months, and, though I really loved him, I thought of him as “just a fish”. I felt an unbelievable need to make up for lost time. My second semester, Spring 2010, Poseidon and I had a new roommate again. By the spring semester, Poseidon and I were so close that I would run back to my dorm room from class, over black ice, carrying huge supplies, because I couldn’t wait to be near him. I would be at the grocery store with friends, a party, or class, and suddenly become very happy, so happy that I would cry with ecstasy over how much I just loved him. There were doodles of him, and his many expressions, all over my school notes. Other times I would become spontaneously and unconsolably sad. I wasn’t aware of it, I’d just forget my surroundings, and people would all of a sudden be asking if I was okay. “Yes, I’m fine,” I’d say. I had remembered that a betta fish has a relatively short lifespan, and I wasn’t sure what I would do when that day came. But I suspected it would be that summer, during a month that began with a J--June, July if I was lucky. The new girl in our room didn’t know this, but I’d rush back from class and her friends would say, “That’s a crazy fish you got there” or “I couldn’t believe what your fish did! He’s got such a personality!” or “The fish loves ____ but not ____. But he’ll breach like a whale if ____ comes into the room.” At night, Poseidon would rearrange the contents of his tank. We never had to worry about decorating his bowl, because it was very personal to him, and he even got upset if we interfered with his belongings--but we also had trouble sleeping because he made so much noise that we’d often wake up thinking someone had broken in! We’d look at each other, “Poseidon, quit it!” and lay right back down into REM sleep like nothing happened. My second boyfriend, let’s call him Joe, came into the picture at the end of my freshman year. It was love at first sight with this guy, and we had so much in common. We love filmmaking. We’re both half-Southern Italian. We were born straight across the Long Island Sound from each other. We both have the sun in Sagittarius. We’d go for late night drives and lose track of what state we were in. I know he felt it, too, because he was pumping gas once, and when he went in to pay, he was walking like he was drunk or seasick, and he almost got hit by a car--at the gas island! Poseidon met Joe on the last night of school. “This is Poseidon, and if anything ever happens to him, I will not be okay!” I remember saying. Posi loved him, maybe he sensed how happy I was with someone for once. Poseidon and I had a game where I’d dangle my finger an inch or two above the water, and he’d leap out and gently bite it. I asked Joe to see if he’d do it for him, and he did. We watched TV and Poseidon swam between Joe and me excitedly the whole time. All of this meant Poseidon approved. But some weeks into that summer, Poseidon caught ich. I researched it, but I could not find a definitive cure that ensured Poseidon would not be killed along with the parasite. And the stress resulted in very severe fin rot, in which huge masses of fin just melted off my poor darling. Poseidon’s suffering became my own, and there was no way out. I began to look into humane fish euthanasia. I did it with an herbal anesthetic overdose on June 24th, 2010, at around 10 30 in the morning. I knew and didn’t care that this would result in a major depressive episode, and some serious PTSD, the latter of which I still have. I relive it every day. Pouring that milky white liquid on my baby until his shining crimson went black a few seconds later, and his last instinctive fight to live. It is burnt on my soul. I have to remind myself that I’m not really there, that it’s not June 24th, 2010, that Poseidon is okay. I know Poseidon is okay because he is still with me. I think he knows how much pain I faced in order to alleviate his, because we could do anything for each other. I’ve physically seen him a few times since his death, but usually he swims through the air around me invisibly, or barely visibly. He holds me, wraps his fins around me, when I need someone. He also comes to me in dreams: a short while after he died, my relationship with Joe turned toxic. I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it was going to turn in a matter of days because Poseidon had warned me in a dream. He kept coming to me telling me to “Leave Joe! He’s going to hurt you.” Ultimately, he did. After two years on and off, we broke up for the last time eighteen months ago. I had been raped on campus, and Joe thought less of me for it. In the aftermath I realized that Joe had never been all that good to me: dictating that I dress more covered up, that I should get glasses because they were a turn-on for him, and he even tried to make me dye my hair from blonde to red, shorten it, and wear it up more. I have a mermaid friend who gives into these kinds of demands, but I never will. I was learning animation at school a couple of months after Posi’s death, which was also around the time that I began making videos of myself swimming with my mermaid tail. It’s funny, I feel like he’s there with me when I swim. It’s really not my best work but I made this short film about the loss of him: http://vimeo.com/17625412 I also wrote a eulogy for my mermaid/ocean science and art blog, as Posi was frequently referenced there: If you don’t know me and you’re reading my blog, I have had a betta fish named Poseidon for almost a year. I bought him in October and he proved to be one of the friendliest pets I have ever had. Poseidon suddenly came down with a horrible case of ich that I tried and failed to cure, and the stress of it resulted in the most grotesque case of fin rot I have ever seen. I have made the decision to put him down. I find it strange that people think that fish can’t be real pets, because Poseidon absolutely goes down as one of my favorites. He knew me personally. I knew him personally. He knew quite a few other people personally and had despite his unwavering friendliness, I swear he had a different approach to each. I should probably explain that I’m not flushing him alive, or even at all. In fact, we recently had to put a dog down and this is somewhat a similar—humane—procedure. He is being overdosed on a fish anesthetic and will go out peacefully, and I will bury him. I got Poseidon relatively early into my freshman year of college, and he was with me through a lot of “firsts”. He was my first pet living on my own, and I bought him with my first paycheck from my first away-from-home job. He was present through friendship, romance, conflict, art school all-nighters (he didn’t whine for me to turn the lights off, either :P), the publication of my second and third books, the day I found my books available from Barnes & Noble, at the finishing stages of my tail and beginning stages of production on “Maid of Water”. I joked that I should change his name to Wilson. He was there through big stuff, good and bad. My faithful companion is and was a fish and I feel no shame in crying over the loss of him. I love you Poseidon! <3 The eulogy was, I think, written in a state of denial about the gravity of the situation I was in. I had no one in my life who understood that Poseidon was the person I loved more than anyone. He was not “just a fish”, whatever that means. And he was the only one who ever knew me well enough to “love me anyway”, which, they say, is the true test of love. He was like being in love times a million million million: there was never a point at which we became one; our oneness has always been there and will always be. Poseidon still visits me in dreams as well as waking hours. My third ex got tired of my guardedness and we took a break, but in a dream this past January, Poseidon led us to the location of our amazing first date, and the very next day, the phone rang and it was the guy I love. The heads-up dreams from Posi are usually about men, as, for whatever reason, Poseidon is as protective over me in the love arena now as he was in life, but last week he gave me a dream that my long-lost favorite starfish earring would resurface, one that I had looked everywhere and turned everything upside-down for but had given up on finding months ago. In the morning, the earring was sitting on the middle of a shelf I had emptied months ago, and since then, nothing had been moved. It was just out in the open. Poseidon was giving it to me. It was a sign he’s always with me. The Poseidon in Greek myths is sometimes referred to as the “Earth Shaker” because earthquakes were attributed to him, but the term applies to my Poseidon because he completely altered my world view on so many levels. Obviously my grief over his loss was a disaster, but when he came along, I was suddenly not just loving, but very much loved for who I am. I was suddenly not alone, suddenly someone understood me. I sense that humans want to be told “you are understood”; mermaids amongst humans crave the more basal “you are understandable”. My mom recently pointed out, “That must have been the happiest time of your life [when you lived with Poseidon].” That’s true, but what no one gets is that it always will be. And I’m the luckiest person in the galaxy for having someone who loved me so much, that not even death could keep him away. He’s never given up on me, even and maybe most especially when I have. Venus and Mars. I rarely get serious about guys. I’ve really only had the two serious boyfriends from my first college, plus a third shortly after. The first two wanted to control and dominate and change me. The last one did not, but I was so afraid of the abuse I knew too well that I didn’t really let that go anywhere. I regret it and still really love my third ex. He was wonderful and he treated me like a person: mermaids may not be human, but we’re certainly people. I am only attracted to a new guy very rarely. The guys I don’t want all suffer from a common denominator: they want me way too much, so much, in fact, that I’m not even sure that it’s me that they want anymore. When I let them down, they get angry, sad, beg me to reconsider, or just blatantly ignore or do not accept that I am not interested. I don’t want them because they’re often not (yet) their own people, and I see signs of them wanting to merge with me on every level, whether I’m ready for a high level of commitment, willing to share certain parts of my life, or not. When I have someone like that in my life, they want to spend every minute together. They blow up my phone with multi-text essays about why they should be my boyfriend, or how it is so unacceptable that I am not letting them in (in more ways than one, I imagine?). One such example is a guy from my old job, let’s call him Will. He played with my hair out of the blue as if it were okay to touch me, especially in the workplace. He made an announcement to all my coworkers that he had something to ask me, like an engagement, but just for my number--in front of everyone, I didn’t know how to say no. He sent so many texts. After he left the job, he kept asking my coworkers when I would be around so he could make the 45-minute commute and be there waiting for me at the beginning of my shift. I had to alert all my family and friends that my phone would be off, maybe for a week, because the texts were non stop. Will spent hours writing essays, which I had the pleasure of receiving in the form of an inundated mailbox, as if people don’t have a right to say no. That job was in a store, one in which many of the regular customers are male. The men who came in refused to call me by my name, constantly telling me what actress or Playboy model I look most like. By the time I quit, I had been Marilyn Monroe, Kate Upton, “a prettier version of Laura Dern”, Brigitte Bardot, and a few others. One man in particular refused to call me by my name, but “Blondie” or “Marilyn”. It infuriated me. Men were following me home, coming into the store and saying things like, “Hey, baby, so I was just reading your inspection sticker...” as if they should know what car is mine; unzipping their flies, throwing their numbers at me, and even saying really scary things like, “I wonder what it sounds like when you scream.” I had left my college just a few months prior because I was raped by two different resident assistants and the school blamed me starting with the old standby “What were you wearing?”, so it was a sore spot that kept getting re-bruised. My coworkers were not helpful, either: some of the women acted like I was ridiculous for constantly asking for their support in disgusting situations, or thought that I was bringing it on for an ego stroke. The men made fun of me for it. I was afraid to go into work, and I had no support from my staff. Other times it would happen with total strangers. Stalkers are easy to come by if you stay in one place too long, but strangers are just as bad. If I stop to let a pedestrian pass, sometimes he’ll be so busy staring at me that I become wildly uncomfortable, and he’ll almost get hit by the oncoming traffic. Or I’ll get honked if I’m on foot twenty times in an hour, even if I don’t feel my most attractive. Or men will follow me around a grocery store or the village by school, even with their wives in tow. Some months ago I made a new friend. I’ll call him Andrew. Andrew was really nice, but he didn’t get it that I didn’t want him in any further capacity than friends. I didn’t want to date him, but a mutual friend said I needed to find a way to let him down gently, so that her friendship there would not be jeopardized, so I felt stuck and went out with him a couple of times. Our first date I was especially insistent on paying my share, I always offer, but insisted mostly because I wasn’t feeling him, and I put out a very generous tip. Instead of leaving the tip for the waitress, he did the math to find the difference between my tip and the minimum gratuity: he pocketed the difference right in front of me! He also asked if I was rich or had a rich family. He was older than me and much less independent, and he didn’t have a real job. He begged me to hang out the following day, and I caved just to get the texts to stop. He then decided things were going to get very physical and I left. The following day I got another text. I knew it would be Andrew, not my amazing ex I wanted back, not another friend who wanted to do something to take our minds off. He wanted a third date. Right now. Three days= three dates? I said no, I wouldn’t subject myself to this again, no matter how badly my girlfriend wanted to preserve her friendship with this guy. He begged. He offered to fill up my gas tank. I told him he had to stop and he agreed completely in the moment with everything I said, which honestly made it worse--but a few nights later, I got another text: “I got as much information as I could from your Facebook, but exactly where and when were you born? I think our charts are compatible, you’re a Sagittarius and I’m an Aquarius.” No, I thought, there is nothing in my birth chart that makes me want an obsessive stalker. Is there in anyone’s? I’ve known girls to do synastry at the start of a relationship, but at least they have the decency not to tell the guy how creepy they’re being! I wouldn’t give him any more information than I figured he already had. “I’m a double Scorpio,” I texted back. “Look at my chart, it’s very incompatible with yours. My moon and my ascendant, I’m way more Scorpio than Sagittarius. Scorpio and Aquarius don’t mix.” “Oh, I can handle a few stings, my mom’s a Scorpio.” No way out! It’s been a few months and I ignore him, but he still tries, completely doesn’t get it. It took a while to get Andrew out of my head. During the time that he had decided we were dating, I felt sick 24/7. Though, it wasn’t going to get anywhere, the relationship was parasitic in every sense of the word. I felt trapped and alone, like I had no help. I felt like I was being taken away from my life and private energy stores and being forced to give it all to him--and yet I was very distant to him, so I felt like he was just sucking me dry of all my energy, didn’t even care that he was hurting me--and I wasn’t sure how he couldn’t see that that is exactly what he was doing. And he made it impossible to think about anything else. All I thought about was him, but not how in love I was, just how depressed I was that I was no longer free, and how it felt like there was no way out. He was taking all my energy, with or without being present, for himself, and replacing it with a feeling of being owned. I sometimes feel a tiny pang of this at the beginning of any relationship, because human men do like to be in control, but nothing like this. He invited himself on all my outings, even and most especially my alone-zen-outings, like the art supply store or the garden shop. He would sulk when I said I had to leave. This was like being Lucy Westenra in Dracula, and having no one to save me. Every time I think of that time, my heart pounds and I have to keep telling myself, “It’s over.” It’s very unfortunate when unwanted advances (or really, any advances) come from a teacher. My first experience with that was in high school. I was sixteen and the only thing I really had going for me was my art. A lot of it was about surviving high school when you feel like you’re really a mermaid, or dreams I had of underwater cities. My art teacher was a man, let’s call him Mr. Douglas. Every other day before art class, I had him for study hall in the studio. I had a lot of male friends, one of whom was in the art class, the other in the study hall. Even though I’m the quietest person in the world and the boys were nerds, we all sat on the opposite side of the room, and everyone else was talking--much louder than we were--Douglas would scream until he turned blue every time I talked to either of them. Then he’d walk over to his stereo and turn on the last track of the Beatles’ album Rubber Soul: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man...” Douglas would stare a hole through my forehead as that infernal song played. Funny thing is, this happened every time I conversed with a boy, and never when I talked to girls. I dropped the class but later in the year, when Douglas tried to get me to model for him outside of school, wearing a dress he just happened to have. I somehow was left the only student helping to set up the school’s spring Arts show. I was bent over a piece, trying to figure out how to hang it, and I straightened up abruptly, because my sixteen-year-old behind got felt up by him. I stared at him, he was more startled than I was, and he walked away mumbling indecipherably. And How Does That Make You Feel? I have been playing therapist to nearly everyone around me for longer than I can remember. For some reason, people in my life have decided I am a loading--unloading dock--where they can drop off their negativity and stress, and it doesn’t matter how it affects me because I “can take it”. Sometimes it gets to be too much, especially since essentially all of these people have no desire to council or listen to me when I need to talk, but usually even I am amazed at my own level of insight. I should not understand the problems of middle-aged women. I should not understand single moms, or my friends who are having problems with their boyfriends. I should not be able to feel what my grandparents did during the Great Depression, or the unbelievably alienating boat ride from Sicily to Ellis Island. I should not be able to sense every thought a lover has about me, good, bad, or otherwise. I should not be able to tell that people are talking about me behind my back if they’re masters of deceit. I should not know what worrying about your kids feels like. Sometimes I feel like I feel other people’s stuff more deeply than they do, I’m like a tool people can use to figure out what they feel. When other people aren’t being understanding of one another, I always find myself saying something like, “Put yourself in ___’s shoes. Imagine what they’re feeling.” They usually can’t easily do this. And then I offer all the insights I have into it. And just about everyone says, “You nailed me. I have chills” or “Whoa, you’re so right, I didn’t even realize I was feeling or thinking that” or even “You’re the only person who’s ever gotten me”. I also seem to be the authority on who people can and can not trust. That is not to say that I play loyalty-based ultimatums, but everyone comes up to me asking about a certain person’s motives, often even if I don’t know the person in question. And they tell me later how scary accurate I am. I’ve been described as an “old soul” for most of my life. Sometimes, growing up, adults would forget that I was a child they were talking to, and feel a little uncomfortable. One time, some friends and I were discussing astrology. One girl looked at my double-Scorpio placement and said, “I’m sorry you feel that much.” But I think it’ s beyond that. I know plenty of Scorpios, even plenty of Double Scorpios, and they don’t have this happen. I want to preface a controversial example of this by saying that I’m not a very political person, in that I feel most of the issues that are divided by Democrat or Republican seem more like basic rights that are universal rather than up for a bipartisan discussion. I respect everyone’s opinion, and have no desire to try and change it. I’ve supported politicians from all parties, and elected both Democrats and Republicans about equally. No matter how great someone is, no person is perfect, and, at the beginning of college, I was the only teenage Greenpeacer who could not support Obama for president. People asked me why, and I’d say, “This is going to be bad. I can feel it. He’s going to do something catastrophic to the environment.” What are you basing that on? they’d ask, and I didn’t know how to tell them: “I just know. Hearing him talk about conservation sets my teeth on edge.” They’d dismiss me as ridiculous and the conversation would be over. I did not want to be right, but Strike One was Cash for Clunkers. In 2009, one of Obama’s first moves was to enable about one million people to trade in their old cars for a new one. There are several ecological problems with this. The first is that the clunkers were not recycled, even though nearly every part of them could have been. In fact, their entire engines and most of their other parts were just discarded, and are still wasting away. Additionally, that’s about a million cars made from new materials coming into the picture. Essentially a landfill on steroids had been created by the Administration. Bad, but still not the catastrophe I had feared. That turned out to be because Cash for Clunkers only acted as a premonition for me that I had been eerily right. In spring of 2010, the Administration hit closer to home, when Obama granted a safety protocol override to BP to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. He and his administration disallowed the Interior Department from the inspection that would have determined in advance that the Deepwater Horizon was unfit for the voyage, and disaster is an understatement: the Deepwater Horizon tragedy is the largest offshore oil spill in history, about the equivalent of 15 Exxon Valdezes. A spill like that requires immediate attention. Taking action the same day or the morning after, at the latest, is the only microglimmer of hope against the piles of oil-covered creatures piled on the shore (And all those already-endangered sea turtles, olive ridleys? The Gulf is the only place they’re found on the planet). And where was Obama? Obama was on a golf trip in the midwest. Coming Full Circle. I think my relationship to people is not very different from my relationship to fish, although the latter is very often much deeper, and I am working to protect fish from people. But in that lies a very important lesson for humanity. If you know anything about the fishing industry, the treatment of fish absolutely carries over to the treatment of one another. Yes, I am more than concerned about the world my generation’s children will inherit if there are no fish, no large sea creatures, and no coral reefs left. But I am reminded of one of J.K. Rowling’s more inspiring quotes via Harry Potter: “If you want to see the true measure of a man, look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” I know merpeople who are content just to love, but for me, love is empty without kindness, without actions. For thousands of years, fish have been the low creatures on the empathy totem pole: in 2009, a definitive study determined that, yes, fish do feel physical pain, as well as fear, sadness, and other emotions, if provoked. Some of us have known that all along, though, and it doesn’t seem like such a milestone to me to figure out that any animal with a brain should be protected and granted certain rights. The bluefin pens in the Pacific are a great example. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, and yet the fish are miserable. Like sharks, they need to continuously swim in order to survive (although for tuna it’s more about body heat regulation than breathing), but there is no personal space in those cramped quarters, and the fish are forced to swim in tightly-packed circles for years, trapped with their own waste, which also leaks out into the ocean as very highly concentrated ammonia. If a storm hits at sea, the feces are stirred up, the fish are trapped, and sometimes are drowned by being forced to inhale their own bowels through their gills. Much of the world seafood supply actually comes from pirate slavery. In Africa and Southeast Asia, this practice is commonplace. Fishermen are promised a decent salary, but barely make any profit, if paid at all. Usually the payment is in the form of less desirable bycatch, which they are expected to sell to markets on land. Complaining gets you marooned. I think that if humanity can learn to support everyone, from the poor of their own race to my beloved friends, the fish, then not only will the oceans start to make the turnaround, and the people on the bottom will be freed, but we will live in a world where there is understanding for all, where there is consideration for our every action. People won’t be nasty to each other, there will be equality for everyone. Love and prosperity would be such global game-changers if fish had a voice. That is why I have volunteered as their One of my earliest memories is being a cheese-ball-eating toddler on the beach in 1992 Westerly, Rhode Island. We lived about an hour, maybe ninety minutes up I-95 from it, and I remember going there every time my mother could take us. My whole family liked it there, it was before tourism from Newport overflowed into Westerly, Misquamicut, and, dare I say, Watch Hill, so the beaches were still relatively virginal and desolate. It was a time when a piece of garbage was a rare find on that shoreline I reference as my hometown, but a fully intact whelk shell or sun dried starfish was not. This slowly reversed between the time I was born and the time I was twenty, but it’s still my favorite place on Earth. I’d flip through my father’s copy of “McClane’s Field Guide to Saltwater Fishes of North America” on the way, and get there and just come alive. And I could walk you out to the exact ten-foot stretch of sand where I stood, a baby in a floppy white beach hat, learning, for the first time in my life, that this was not just my favorite place to jump in the car and visit with my parents, but it was who I was. It was exactly me. I remember an overcast sunset on the beach; my mother and father were packing up the chairs and coolers to leave, and my sister didn’t want to come out into the breaker with me. (Given how carefully sheltered I was, it’s incredible to me that I even had moments where I could go out into the waves alone). For some reason I had an instinct to learn not to fall over in the waves, to master them, make them a part of my scope. And I was doing just that, and someone said: “This is where you belong. You are mine. Life will get hard, but only if you forget that you are one of my mermaids. You are here to fight for the oceans. We need you to do this.” The voice was not accompanied by a physical body, but an image in my mind of a woman speaking. She was African looking and draped in turquoise. She had a maternal energy about her and she told me she was the ocean. I carried the message through my entire childhood and adolescence, but it would be almost two decades before learned of and put two and two together with the Yoruba figure of Yemaja. And, as someone who had only just begun to read, I really had no way of knowing that the oceans were in any way in trouble. I had yet to learn of overfishing, plastic pollution or my life’s current fixation, acidification. I was not yet aware that my birth was almost exactly thirteen years after the discovery of hydrothermal vents. All I knew was that I loved the sea more than anything, and that the sea both included and needed me in a way that did not easily relate me to other people. And how Does That Make You Feel? I have been playing therapist to nearly everyone around me for longer than I can remember. For some reason, people in my life have decided I am a loading--unloading dock--where they can drop off their negativity and stress, and it doesn’t matter how it affects me because I “can take it”. Sometimes it gets to be too much, especially since essentially all of these people have no desire to council or listen to me when I need to talk, but usually even I am amazed at my own level of insight. I should not understand the problems of middle-aged women. I should not understand single moms, or my friends who are having problems with their boyfriends. I should not be able to feel what my grandparents did during the Great Depression, or the unbelievably alienating boat ride from Sicily to Ellis Island. I should not be able to sense every thought a lover has about me, good, bad, or otherwise. I should not be able to tell that people are talking about me behind my back if they’re masters of deceit. I should not know what worrying about your kids feels like. Sometimes I feel like I feel other people’s stuff more deeply than they do, I’m like a tool people can use to figure out what they feel. When other people aren’t being understanding of one another, I always find myself saying something like, “Put yourself in ___’s shoes. Imagine what they’re feeling.” They usually can’t easily do this. And then I offer all the insights I have into it. And just about everyone says, “You nailed me. I have chills” or “Whoa, you’re so right, I didn’t even realize I was feeling or thinking that” or even “You’re the only person who’s ever gotten me”. I also seem to be the authority on who people can and can not trust. That is not to say that I play loyalty-based ultimatums, but everyone comes up to me asking about a certain person’s motives, often even if I don’t know the person in question. And they tell me later how scary accurate I am. I’ve been described as an “old soul” for most of my life. Sometimes, growing up, adults would forget that I was a child they were talking to, and feel a little uncomfortable. One time, some friends and I were discussing astrology. One girl looked at my double-Scorpio placement and said, “I’m sorry you feel that much.” But I think it’ s beyond that. I know plenty of Scorpios, even plenty of Double Scorpios, and they don’t have this happen. I want to preface a controversial example of this by saying that I’m not a very political person, in that I feel most of the issues that are divided by Democrat or Republican seem more like basic rights that are universal rather than up for a bipartisan discussion. I respect everyone’s opinion, and have no desire to try and change it. I’ve supported politicians from all parties, and elected both Democrats and Republicans about equally. No matter how great someone is, no person is perfect, and, at the beginning of college, I was the only teenage Greenpeacer who could not support Obama for president. People asked me why, and I’d say, “This is going to be bad. I can feel it. He’s going to do something catastrophic to the environment.” What are you basing that on? they’d ask, and I didn’t know how to tell them: “I just know. Hearing him talk about conservation sets my teeth on edge.” They’d dismiss me as ridiculous and the conversation would be over. I did not want to be right, but Strike One was Cash for Clunkers. In 2009, one of Obama’s first moves was to enable about one million people to trade in their old cars for a new one. There are several ecological problems with this. The first is that the clunkers were not recycled, even though nearly every part of them could have been. In fact, their entire engines and most of their other parts were just discarded, and are still wasting away. Additionally, that’s about a million cars made from new materials coming into the picture. Essentially a landfill on steroids had been created by the Administration. Bad, but still not the catastrophe I had feared. That turned out to be because Cash for Clunkers only acted as a premonition for me that I had been eerily right. In spring of 2010, the Administration hit closer to home, when Obama granted a safety protocol override to BP to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. He and his administration disallowed the Interior Department from the inspection that would have determined in advance that the Deepwater Horizon was unfit for the voyage, and disaster is an understatement: the Deepwater Horizon tragedy is the largest offshore oil spill in history, about the equivalent of 15 Exxon Valdezes. A spill like that requires immediate attention. Taking action the same day or the morning after, at the latest, is the only microglimmer of hope against the piles of oil-covered creatures piled on the shore (And all those already-endangered sea turtles, olive ridleys? The Gulf is the only place they’re found on the planet). And where was Obama? Obama was on a golf trip in the midwest Coming Full Circle. I think my relationship to people is not very different from my relationship to fish, although the latter is very often much deeper, and I am working to protect fish from people. But in that lies a very important lesson for humanity. If you know anything about the fishing industry, the treatment of fish absolutely carries over to the treatment of one another. Yes, I am more than concerned about the world my generation’s children will inherit if there are no fish, no large sea creatures, and no coral reefs left. But I am reminded of one of J.K. Rowling’s more inspiring quotes via Harry Potter: “If you want to see the true measure of a man, look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” I know merpeople who are content just to love, but for me, love is empty without kindness, without actions. For thousands of years, fish have been the low creatures on the empathy totem pole: in 2009, a definitive study determined that, yes, fish do feel physical pain, as well as fear, sadness, and other emotions, if provoked. Some of us have known that all along, though, and it doesn’t seem like such a milestone to me to figure out that any animal with a brain should be protected and granted certain rights. The bluefin pens in the Pacific are a great example. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, and yet the fish are miserable. Like sharks, they need to continuously swim in order to survive (although for tuna it’s more about body heat regulation than breathing), but there is no personal space in those cramped quarters, and the fish are forced to swim in tightly-packed circles for years, trapped with their own waste, which also leaks out into the ocean as very highly concentrated ammonia. If a storm hits at sea, the feces are stirred up, the fish are trapped, and sometimes are drowned by being forced to inhale their own bowels through their gills. Much of the world seafood supply actually comes from pirate slavery. In Africa and Southeast Asia, this practice is commonplace. Fishermen are promised a decent salary, but barely make any profit, if paid at all. Usually the payment is in the form of less desirable bycatch, which they are expected to sell to markets on land. Complaining gets you marooned. I think that if humanity can learn to support everyone, from the poor of their own race to my beloved friends, the fish, then not only will the oceans start to make the turnaround, and the people on the bottom will be freed, but we will live in a world where there is understanding for all, where there is consideration for our every action. People won’t be nasty to each other, there will be equality for everyone. Love and prosperity would be such global game-changers if fish had a voice. That is why I have volunteered as their voice