Parrot Performance
I didn’t know how to connect. I only knew what I was taught, and I was taught badly. Like a parrot in a cage, I learned the language of my captors. My parents kept...
speech
Daughters of Patriarchy, Part 2: Denial
Content note: this post briefly mentions rape but does not go into detail. Patriarchy has layers of subtlety. Our society, culture, and world are all patriarchal. Men don’t have to understand the word “patriarchy” to benefit from it. In a patriarchal setting, sons are of more worth than daughters, because sons carry on their...
Heartlessness and Hate, Part 2
In Christian homeschool speech and debate, we were told that we were learning logic and critical thinking. What we learned was a kind of feigned intellectualism, one that behaves under the pretense that the most reasonable reaction to anything is no reaction at all. Almost without fail, the winning competitors were charismatic and attractive, smooth...
Heartlessness and Hate, Part 1
Many people have asked me about speech and debate and whether it helped me with my communication and critical thinking skills. Now that a decade has passed, I can say with certainty that it did not. Years of frustration with speech and debate eventually led to some relative competitive success, but I had to sacrifice...