Loving Better: Cancelling Stigmas

Summary: Reconsidering who is or isn't loveable as a part of personal, spiritual, and social growth. For those not already in the loop, our family has nine cats. You heard/read that correctly, nine. All of them are rescues and most days we wouldn’t trade any of them. They all have unique personality quirks that endear them to our family and they bring a lot of joy and comfort along with the dander and shed fur all over our clothes. Most days, they all get along beautifully. They have their tribes and their play partners based largely on age and size. They all sleep somewhere close to 22 hours a day, and they make sure playtime is coordinated so that they’re not all running through the house at exactly the same time. Still, there are moments when a couple of them don’t get along and one of those moments happened last Sunday morning. It was still dark so I didn’t get a chance to see who it was. I heard a hiss, and the next thing I knew there was a large cat stampeding across my face in panic. Immediately, I felt blood in two places, my left cheek and the corner of my right eye. My eye! Now I was the one panicking! I ran to the bathroom to see how bad the damage was. The reality was that the scratches were superficial, but if you’ve ever sustained any kind of eye injury you know it doesn’t take much for your eyelid and the skin around your eye to change color, making it look as though you’ve walked into the wrong side of a right hook. The injury may be insignificant, but the stigma that comes with an altered appearance isn’t, and since we’re all masked up for the moment, eyes are the only part of us anyone notices. If our eyes are messed up, people are going to question how bad the rest of our bodies might look! I can’t leave the house in a mask looking like this! Adding to the admittedly humorous-sounding event is an experience from a little over seven years ago when I had my first cataract surgery. As I was lying on the table wearing nothing but a surgical gown, waiting for the local anesthesia to kick in, one of the attending nurses noticed some bruising on my arms and legs. I knew the bruises came from my lifetime curse of being one of the most clumsy people on the planet, but she didn’t know that. With all concern and seriousness, she leans over and quietly asked, “Are you safe at home?” Ever since then, any time one of us has a clumsy moment that results in bruising, we tell the other, “I’m not safe at home!” and last week’s cat mauling definitely falls into that “cat”-egory. [Go ahead and moan at the pun. I’m a Dad. I’m used to it.] In this case, the nurse was showing legitimate concern about my health, but there have been other times people have looked at me and let certain stigmas take control. When I had really long hair was probably the most obvious. Dressed in black, especially in the winter, the whole look resulted in a stigma that kept a lot of people away. Being a photographer who shoots art nudes carries a stigma with it that we may not be trustworthy. And I’ve written before about the stigma my <a href="https://www.oldmantalking.xyz/does-my-relationship-give-you-the-creeps/">current relationship</a> has caused. Everyone I’ve ever met is subject to stigmas of different kinds and the response is universal: they suck. So, why do we tolerate them? *** Stigmas have been around almost from the beginning of humanity. Abrahamic traditions tell the story of Cain murdering his brother Abel and one of the punishments for Cain’s crime is that he is given an undescribed mark so that he will always be noticed no matter where he goes. Now,

Loving Better: Cancelling Stigmas

Directory

Click for all Categories