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Biddy is a woman of some years: a GenX'er, Riot Grrrl, survivor, traveler, tattoo collector, senior pet owner, music lover, former public school embattled public school retiree and amatuer vegan chef. Biddy Sounds Off is a thinking woman's bildungsroman and pirate radio station some thirty years in the making: featuring episodic writings and eclectic musical selections.
Welcome to Biddy Sounds Off, a place for episodic writing and music I love. I'm Biddy. As the awkward retelling of personal stories continues, revisions and edits are ongoing, and as the writing persists, so flows the music. I've always been able to find a safe escape in music and for me that means a nonverbal state of being, sometimes movement, an impromptu old lady stretching and head banging dance yoga session. Movement my anyone who anyone who tried to converse with me prior to this podcast will attest.
Biddy:There used to be these email surveys. You could fill them out, share them with your friends, think BuzzFeed type surveys, and I hated filling those out. I ascribed too much self conscious weight to each pithy response before becoming existentially paralyzed and just not fill it out at all. My friend asked me about 1. Oh, we got a snoring baby.
Biddy:Sweet babies. Good boy. My friend asked me about one they'd shared with me, which had gone so rudely unreturned, and I told them it felt contrived. Like, people who take the time to fill these things out, they imagine an applause sound effect going off in their heads, and meanwhile, it's just their stupid opinion. What about the people who spend even more time staring at blank surveys, which never get sent at all?
Biddy:It's the same way I've struggled with filling out an online dating profile. In the about you section, the only thing I can ever think to write is fuck off. A lot of us struggle to speak up for ourselves, let alone promote ourselves. I know you can relate if you've ever struggled to advocate for yourself before. There may have been a time when your silence was a means of survival.
Biddy:Look at babies. Now, on the other side of survival, that trait isn't a defect, I'm realizing. It was another useful coping mechanism at the time when you were not able to control your own life circumstances and attend to your own needs. Maybe this isn't something anyone modeled for you. In the way modeling and listening are the best teaching tools, we may need to see healthy behaviors explicitly demonstrated, hear what it sounds like to receive consideration and respect in order to learn it ourselves.
Biddy:Teachers learn to help others by studying and employing these skills. Many of us are caretakers by nature or by necessity. We become accustomed to putting the needs of others before our own. We need that reminder to put our oxygen mask on ourselves first. Outside of teaching though, many of us just learn to cope by silencing ourselves, suppressing our own needs for the sake of peace within whatever chaotic dynamic trampled over your feelings of self worth, whether it was a familial obligation or a relationship of whatever kind, in which we attend to the refining of someone else's sharply maintained edges.
Biddy:Either sharp enough to cut or simply sharply defined, so much that your own edges start to blur. Identity fades into a watercolor, and then we either have the healthy, sustainable relationships in place that will help fill out our portraits again with color and life, or we go on to create them, recreating ourselves as we go, making forward progress, forward facing, preferably. Going about the work of using our precious life force to reinvigorate ourselves, redefine our own edges. I didn't used to know anything about what therapy could offer me, but I did know what I expected as an end result. I thought that made me smart.
Biddy:Back when I first started getting real interested in therapy, I already knew I shouldn't be having these toxic relationships with men. So where's the fast forward button, I thought. I started there, perhaps at the outermost ring of my consciousness at the time. My unconscious had to wait a while. Mostly due to the fact of my own generalized drunken unconsciousness.
Biddy:There are some good stories to mine for you there, gentle listener, and this is where I'd like to announce a new forthcoming series called Bitty's Men. There was alcohol abuse, yes, but also sex, glamour, and plenty of self delusion. See, I didn't know what I had to learn yet or what that could even mean, but I did know I wasn't finding myself in the successful relationships I wanted. Starting with myself, There was a me beginning to surface and I wanted to reach out. I knew I needed to help myself, but I couldn't get near enough to reach her, that me, bobbing in and out of distant waves of white wine, surfacing and then being thrown out deeper again, resurfacing briefly.
Biddy:I spent a lot of those years bobbing in and out of a stupor, consciousness, unconsciousness. Both were painful. I was focused and laser sharp by day, so I told myself, for my working life, my burgeoning career as a teacher, which was steadily uplifting me, buoying me. It was in time of new learning and new successes and making new positive relationships. My personal life, though, continued devolving.
Biddy:The brain needs to disassociate, and this is totally a normal response to overwhelm. We find our way to land however we get there, when we get there, on our own timeline. And in the meantime, we survive. I found it particularly difficult to express myself in my new work world. It was full of light and air and people who were bubbly and knew how to make small talk and socially interact.
Biddy:I hated those fucking training days where we would have to go around and break the ice and introduce ourselves and go to different workstations and play games with each other. Blindfolds were used at one of these teacher days. Are you fucking kidding me? I didn't even use to close my eyes in yoga class. It makes me feel like a sitting duck for an attack.
Biddy:You don't know what people have been through. Even so, my coworkers became became my friends, patient with my quirks, generous with their compassion and support. I never met better people in my life than teachers, paraprofessionals, classified staff, who made the schools I worked in clean and safe. Not just safe enough from gunfire, but safe enough for smiles, hugs, academic and personal growth. It's time now for a song.
Biddy:This one is Refill It by Betty Sevier from 19 ninety five's Lamprey release. Nothing's up that won't come down. Welcome back. Before we left off, I was speaking of making new friends at school, which follows a bit of a script sometimes, and there are requisite get to know you questions that left me in a stunned silence because I hadn't quite figured out how to put my trauma into words yet, how to rephrase things politely. I didn't fit in necessarily, but I was respected as a fellow teacher.
Biddy:There is a camaraderie among teachers in my experience that made me think of nurses or police even, so I imagine, anyway, the things we've seen, some of them are ineffable, informing us in their own way of moral and societal decay, rot. We are there, the majority of us, teachers and related staff, because we have a genuine love of children, of learning. We share the delusion of hope. It's a heavy lift most days. We share in the cognitive dissonance required to make it through the day, the school year.
Biddy:I love my students and they made me laugh every day. No matter what else might have been going on, someone else crossed my path on a given day offering a different and often surprising perspective, shifting or even lifting my own. All of us, the community at the elementary school where I worked, we helped each other. And although I never managed to get into the pretty blonde teacher click there, we were aligned for the most part in our goals and we were effective. It started to dawn on me that there could be another path around the time when the only hope I could conjure grew dim, too dim to sustain another long school year.
Biddy:Another path rather than the downward circular path I've been chasing down the drain, some of the teachers I love the most got used to my awkward silence and just waited them out as teachers are trained to do. We're trained to listen. The most profound respect we can offer each other is to listen. I've been swallowing my voice for so long, but just because a thing is difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. Far too far too long, spinning far off in the waves somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness.
Biddy:My ego plucked up when I drank. It wasn't real strength, but it fortified me for years. I became mouth, but this wasn't self expression. For me, it was a shortcut, but this wasn't self expression. For me, it was a shortcut.
Biddy:Fast forward button. My anger would speak first and if the consequences weren't humiliating enough, I would seek further self punishment. This kept me in a tight and persistent shame cycle fueled by unhealthy misunderstandings of my worth, perpetuating said misunderstandings of my worth, a cycle of self abuse. Once my mom passed, I felt the desire to drink evaporate from my body. I still can't write a dating profile though.
Biddy:Not can't, won't, might be more accurate. I tried, here in San Miguel, actually. I even met someone out for dinner in a noisy American style eatery, blasting Bob Seger, probably. It was an unfulfilling conversation, And when I returned to my car in a rush for home, I discovered that I had parked in a bus lane. In Mexico, you get a pulled ranch.
Biddy:I hold the ranch. I stood there waiting for the officer to finish writing my ticket and unscrewing the license plate from my car. My date had told me he was on his way to meet his fiancee, a local woman many, many years younger than either of us. I wondered if they might come strolling up these cobblestones and kept a self conscious eye out. A bus passed very slowly, what with all the tourists and neighborhood gawkers threading the streets.
Biddy:As the bus made its way past me, the door hung open and a man leaned out of the doorway frame and held my gaze while gesturing broadly with one arm from his heart towards the sky while shaking his head sadly and singing out, porque. It was mellow drama, bordering on romanticism, which I'd been lacking in my online date, as he floated by just inches above the road. Por que. Indeed. One quick song to pivot now.
Biddy:The song is Tom Courtney by Yola Tango. Recently, Jimmy Kimmel, and I'm not gonna act like I was aware of this at all, Jimmy Kimmel, and I'm not gonna act like I was aware of this at all that Amy Poehler is on the cover of You Can Have It All. But it is so cool to be reminded of them and how great they sound. So here's my favorite Yolotango song, Tom Courtney. And I hope you'll enjoy the lyrics, evocative of doctor Chivago, Billy Liar, and the 19 sixties era British cinema.
Biddy:Welcome back. Acclimating myself to the idea of following through on Biddy's men, where to begin? My mind is not naturally inclined to recall things chronologically. Of course, that idea to retrain my brain to become more efficient in today's ever changing world is where these stories started in the first place. Putting things in order allows me to make sense of the clutter there, the boxes and boxes of compartmentalization.
Biddy:All of those times, I didn't speak up or I took shortcuts. The shame lives in there, in those boxes. To open that up again, file and resort it, reintegrate it, involves addressing the coiled snakes that spring out of the boxes that have been put away, ignored, varying degrees of seepage from some of these boxes and internal cord. Some of the lighter things can come through now, like these stories of men I've known. And I may have mentioned having taken 2 trips to Mexico previously in days gone by, Cabo San Lucas once.
Biddy:It was a spur of the moment trip. I took a 3 day weekend off work saying I went to Breckenridge instead of Mexico. I wonder why I didn't just say Mexico. It would have made more sense when I showed up the following Tuesday with the last worst sunburn I ever had, complete with a string bikini tie outline around my neck. He had a timeshare.
Biddy:He was a doctor. He was a psychiatrist. He was a singer. Nobody ever asked him to sing as far as I could tell, but he and his friends had a group, not exactly barbershop because they covered eighties ballads. If you can imagine, that Winger tune, Headed for a Heartbreak, Heartbreak, was one of theirs.
Biddy:So we went out to Larkburger in Denver one evening, and the doctor and his buddies launched into a full voice medley. I'm sure it included More Than Words by Extreme. He and his buddies sang over each other, annoying all the patrons in the place, including myself, and when he tried to maintain eye contact with me as they verge dangerously towards Bohemian Rhapsody, I excused myself. Luckily, I'd noticed a group of girl scouts selling cookies on the way in and wondered if they still had Thin Mints. They did.
Biddy:By the time the cookies made it to the table, the singing stopped as soon as I opened them. Probably the only time I've been happy to share my cookies, Thin Mints anyway. The doctor worked in a hospital and told me that some of his coworkers had said his shirt was salmon colored. He disagreed and the next day brought in a cut of fresh salmon to work with him, large enough that he mimed hauling it over his shoulder. He marched in and slapped it down on whatever work surface was in front of them at the time, proclaiming proudly, this is salmon.
Biddy:He'd also brought the shirt from yesterday to demonstrate the negligible difference in color. His retelling didn't include reactions from his coworkers, but I can guess that the rockest round of high fives he probably anticipated wasn't forthcoming. We didn't have sex because he said it fucked with his Tourette syndrome somehow, and I was totally fine with that. The timeshare was in a luxury hotel in Cabo San Lucas. It was a paradise.
Biddy:I got wasted on the 1st day and fell asleep by the pool, woke up to a sunburn that blistered, and as I made my way quickly inside to seek relief and aloe, some bitch I passed in the bar looked at me and sang out a reminder to her giddy friends, don't forget the sunscreen. She had a point. The rest of the time, I was only in pain while sober and determined to wear out every one of the skimpy outfits I brought. I was probably so preoccupied with the sunburn that I didn't take enough time to wonder why I'd gotten so sloshed and sleepy in the first place. It was because I was lying there doing my best to look delectable alone.
Biddy:The doctor was in another pool. Infinity pools opened into infinity pools until your gaze reached the ocean. There were only 2 occupants in the water, the doctor and a young woman who might have been underage. I only made the trip once as we probably didn't date more than 3 months. He broke up with me, I remember.
Biddy:Although I don't know why I put in the effort now, looking back. He also totaled his car driving directly from the hospital one night, several hours to Breckenridge from Denver to go skiing, a spur of the moment trip I skipped, fortunately. He was fine and wasn't circle of further installments of Biddy's men. Oh, that's right. Get ready, gentle listener, for introductions into the winner's circle of further installments of Biddy's Men.
Biddy:Our last song today comes from Shudder to Think from 1994's Pony Express record. If you'd like to get in touch, look for Biddy Bops on Instagram or email me at biddybiddybops@gmail.com. That's 2 Biddy's and bops with an s. This has been Biddy Sounds Off. Thank you for